Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following Members be permitted to speak prior to the scheduled vote: Senator Markey for up to 5 minutes, Senator Cassidy for up to 5 minutes, Senator Klobuchar for up to 5 minutes, Senator Schatz for up to 10 minutes, Senator Cruz for up to 5 minutes, Senator Blumenthal for up to 5 minutes, Senator Blackburn for up to 10 minutes, and Senator Schumer for up to 5 minutes.

Mr. President, I rise today in defense of the mental health of children and teenagers in the United States of America.

Our young people today are facing a devastating mental health crisis. I have said these statistics on the floor before, but they bear repeating because they come from the Centers for Disease Control in our country: One in three high school girls in the United States seriously considered suicide in 2021 and at least one in ten high school girls attempted suicide that year; among LGBTQ youth, the number is more like one in five attempted suicide. That is staggering, and it is unacceptable that Big Tech has knowingly contributed to these disturbing numbers.

And let's just move on. Take it from the U.S. Surgeon General who, just a few weeks ago, referred to the young mental health crisis as an ``emergency'' and identified social media as an ``important contributor'' to that crisis.

Over the next week, the U.S. Senate has a chance, finally, to do something about it, to stand up to Big Tech's lobbying machine and put an end to the invasive targeting and tracking of young people online.

Today we have a procedural vote to move ahead on the Kids Online Safety Act, which includes my legislation partnering with Senator Cassidy, the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA 2.0. Our legislation cuts to the heart of this emergency by addressing Big Tech's financial incentives to keep kids and teens addicted to social media and allows kids, parents, and teens to say no to the endless tracking and targeting of young people online in our country, because as long as Big Tech can profit off of young people's addiction, they will find ways to do so.

And our job is to change those incentives, to change Big Tech's business model so that addicting kids and teens does not lead to fatter wallets and larger bonuses for Big Tech executives. The core problem facing children and teens is Big Tech's relentless and unyielding drive to accumulate more and more data on its users.

This data may seem vague and uncertain, but it is anything but vague and uncertain. It is a child's name, a child's email address, a child's location, their height, their weight, their health conditions, their fingerprints and facial scan, their likes, their dislikes, even their sexual orientation and gender identity. Why? Targeted advertising by Big Tech companies.

With more data, the platforms can develop more effective targeted ads; ads that are chosen to match the user's specific age, location, and interests; ads that are displayed at a certain time of day when the algorithm knows a user is most likely to click them; and soon, with the advent of artificial intelligence, perhaps ads that are even generated just for the individual user. That is the promise of AI.

All of this hyperpersonalized advertising requires huge amounts of data on an individual user. Data is the fuel for Big Tech's profit machine, the raw material that sustains Big Tech's business model. The formula is simple: More time on social media means more data to fuel the targeted advertising machine, which means more profits for Big Tech. More addiction equals more data equals more money for Big Tech. Very simple. And they target teenagers and children in our country in the same way that the tobacco industry targeted teenagers and children.

And it is a lot of money.

In 2022, the major Big Tech platforms earned nearly $11 billion from U.S. users under the age of 18--$11 billion. That is 11 billion reasons to build ever more sophisticated data profiles on younger users; 11 billion reasons to develop new addictive features; 11 billion reasons to keep your young people clicking, swiping, and liking all day long.

With the growth of artificial intelligence, Big Tech's appetite for data has never been greater. And that means the privacy of our young people has never been more at risk. The question, then, is how to change Big Tech's incentives to develop platforms that benefit children and teens rather than addict them. And if Big Tech no longer has an incentive to maximize the data collected on a young person, it will lose the incentive to develop ever-changing methods to addict that child or teen in the first place.

May I ask for one additional minute?

Here is what the bill does. One, it will ban targeted advertising to children and teens. Two, it will create an eraser button to delete children and teens' data. And, three, stop the unnecessary data collection practices of online platforms.

With these updates, the Senate has an opportunity to pass the most comprehensive privacy law for young people in over 25 years and send a message to Big Tech that these days of invading and exploiting young people must come to an end.

We have to stop business as usual. That is what we are going to vote on today, to begin this process procedurally to get it out on the floor of the Senate substantively for an historic vote next week.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I rise today in support of the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act and in remembrance of the thousands of Native children who died and suffered in these schools.

Thousands of children were ripped from their families in the name of assimilation. Thousands of children were the victims of physical and sexual abuse. And thousands of children were forbidden from practicing their culture and speaking their Native languages.

The operation of Federal Indian boarding schools by the U.S. Department of the Interior is one of the darkest chapters of American history, a chapter whose consequences are still being felt deeply by boarding school survivors, their families, and Tribal communities.

The Federal Government funded more than 400 Indian boarding schools over the course of 150 years, one of the earliest being the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where Wampanoag children from my own home State of Massachusetts were stolen from their families, sent hundreds of miles away, and subjected to cruel and inhumane assimilation practices.

When Captain Richard Henry Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian School in 1879, he imbued it with this model:

Kill the Indian, save the man.

But we know all too well that these boarding schools did only the former. They acted as a violent means of assimilation and an essential tool in the U.S. Government's dispossession of Native people's aboriginal rights, land, and culture. Children as young as 4 years old were subjected to systemic, violent abuse.

The Department of the Interior's recent investigation found that children were renamed from Native names to English names; had their hair cut off; were discouraged or prevented from using their languages, religion, and cultural practices; and organized into units to perform military drills.

The Department of the Interior has since identified marked and unmarked burial sites at 53 schools. This is just the tip of the tragic, horrifying, unacceptable iceberg of our history.

In a confidential message to Congress, Thomas Jefferson said about Native people that ``when they withdraw themselves to the culture of a small piece of land, they will perceive how useless to them are their extensive forests, and will be willing to pare them off from time to time.''

He directed Congress--Thomas Jefferson--to ``encourage them to abandon hunting'' so that ``the extensive forests necessary in the hunting life, will then become useless.''

What was once a plot to take Native land also became the foundation of our Nation's century-long legacy of forced assimilation, displacement, and, ultimately, attempted eradication of Native language, culture, and the people themselves.

We have not simply a moral responsibility but a legal obligation to the welfare of Tribes across the country to uphold treaty rights and to recognize the dark history of our own country. And this obligation cannot be met without securing truth, justice, and healing for every Native person, family, and Tribe affected by these genocidal policies.

In Massachusetts, we have seen the healing process in action. After centuries of forced assimilation led to the extinction of the Wopanaak language, members of the Mashpee, Aquinnah, Assonet, and Herring Pond Wampanoag communities came together to widely reintroduce and reengage with their ancestral language.

Today, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe's school serves as a shining example of how Native students can thrive when they are surrounded by their language and their culture and not stripped of it.

But Tribes should not be left to fight alone to recover what was stolen from them by the American government. Passing the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act would be an essential step to turn the American government from an historic enemy to a future ally in righting these wrongs.

So I thank Senator Schatz. I thank him for his great leadership on these issues and for his excellent staff. I thank Senator Murkowski for organizing this floor time for us to bring attention to this part of American history that we must never forget; and Senator Warren for introducing this important legislation that begins to put us on a path of truth and healing.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I rise today to discuss S. 870. I am a passionately strong supporter of the effort to reauthorize the U.S. Fire Administration, the Assistance to Firefighters Grants Program, and the Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response Grant Program. It is essential.

I voted in favor of all of that legislation to reauthorize these key programs on April 20 of last year, and I remain strongly and staunchly in support of these efforts to support our first responders. Those who run into danger must know that we in Congress have their back. They keep our community safe, and we must keep their resources safe in return.

Unfortunately, the vote today is not just for the lifesaving programs that I am staunchly on record as supporting. On the coattails of this noncontroversial bill to protect our heroes, our colleagues in the House tacked on a dangerous additional 90-page package of provisions that merge the Senate's ADVANCE Act and the House's Atomic Energy Advancement Act.

Well, because of this airdropped provision into the fire bill, I will be opposing final passage of this bill.

So let me go now to what is the ADVANCE Act and why they would try to attach it to something that is absolutely essential. Why would they not just bring it out, try to have a big debate on it? Well, I will tell you why.

The original version of the ADVANCE Act, which I voted against in the committee, was weakened further and watered down further in negotiations with the House. The new language attempts to water down the duties of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; it puts communities on the back burner; and it dilutes existing protocols that keep our Nation safe from the threat of nuclear war. That is what we are talking about today, nuclear war.

It puts promotion over protection and corporate profits over community cleanup. Notably, the provisions from the Senate bill that would have provided a much needed $225 million for communities affected by nuclear closures and $100 million to clean up contaminated Tribal communities are not in the legislation anymore as it came back from the House of Representatives. But the provisions to prop up the nuclear industry, they remain.

I entered office just a year after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established in 1975. Why did we create a Nuclear Regulatory Commission? Very simple. Because there was an identification of a need for an independent oversight of nuclear domestic powerplants in the United States and nuclear activity, generally. And there was a decision, looking at the Atomic Energy Commission which existed, to say, That Agency is responsible for regulating nuclear power, but it is also responsible for promoting nuclear power here and around the world. And that was a fundamental conflict of interest. You promote something by minimizing the problems or ignoring the problems, and that was becoming a big problem--that they weren't dealing with the very real issues of safety that had been raised about nuclear power in our country.

This was before Three Mile Island. It was before Chernobyl. But it was anticipating the safety issues that were going to be growing and growing and growing.

So the NRC's current mission, before this bill passes, reflects this critical responsibility to the American public: regulation and licensing free from the influence of industry and that puts health and safety above all else.

So we have a separate Agency. It is called the Department of Commerce. They can go and promote anything they want. They can try to sell whatever they want, domestically or internationally. But the Agency in charge of safety is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They have got to make sure that anything that the Department of Commerce is pushing doesn't wind up being a danger.

So we create this dynamic tension inside of the government. Ultimately, that goal of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that puts health and safety above all else is what protects us against nuclear accidents here or overseas, wherever we are selling nuclear powerplants.

The ADVANCE ACT, as attached to the Fire Grants and Safety Act-- completely unrelated subject; one deals with the resources we are giving to firefighters, the resources we are giving to local fire departments in order to fight fires as they pop up in our local communities. That is something we all support. But what they did was they added to that bill language that would require--underline that-- require the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to rewrite its mission, to state that its regulation and oversight should--and this is a quote-- ``not unnecessarily limit'' civilian nuclear activity regardless of whether it is beneficial or detrimental to public safety and national security.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission shouldn't be the ``Nuclear Retail Commission.'' The Commission's duty is to regulate, not to facilitate. Their job is to ask all of the safety questions; to make sure the design is OK; to make sure that the waste is being stored properly; to make sure that an accident can't happen; to make sure that climate change, as the tides rise, doesn't swamp a nuclear powerplant near a river, near the ocean. That is their job; it is to protect all of the people who live in communities.

We have got other Agencies that are funded, able, and willing to fulfill the role of promoting nuclear power. But this legislation does nothing to assure communities at the frontline of nuclear infrastructure that nuclear expansion won't come at their expense in local communities. It compels the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to identify how it can improve efficiency in its oversight and inspection programs without asking it how it can also improve safety or public engagement so that the public can go in and ask questions about this nuclear powerplant in their neighborhood, force the CEO of the company to answer questions about concerns that people who live near a nuclear powerplant might have. It provides no redress for families living near abandoned uranium mines and unsafe nuclear waste sites.

At the very least, a rapid expansion of nuclear activity should be accompanied by rapid expansion of the resources and regulators that help protect community health and safety. If we do it, we should do it all together, one big package.

This new language also fails to ensure continued American leadership on nuclear nonproliferation overseas. It fails to do anything to strengthen our current regime, and export licenses for nuclear materials and technology could be issued to countries that do not meet our own standards for nuclear safety and cooperation. The only requirement--that is what this law now says--it will only require a notification to Congress after that nuclear license is issued in another country and exempting even this after-the-fact notification for exports of up to 20 percent enriched uranium.

And you are right. Whenever you hear the words ``uranium'' or ``plutonium,'' your ears should perk up.

Because in many countries they see a nuclear powerplant as a generator of electricity that has this side effect of uranium and plutonium, but in the eyes of some countries--and we saw that in Iran, in Iraq, in North Korea--as they got nuclear powerplants, they saw it as a place where they can get uranium and plutonium that has this wonderful byproduct of electricity that it also generates.

So we should be concerned because we have already been forewarned by our experiences over the last 20 or 30 years. We can see what happens if there isn't a proper recognition of how all of this material can, in fact, be diverted.

We shouldn't get a heads-up about the fact that Saudi Arabia now has American nuclear material. That shouldn't happen after the fact; that should happen before the fact. We

should know that this is going to happen.

The bill also pushes the Secretary of Energy to identify generally authorized countries for exports beyond those with existing 123 agreements.

So what are 123 agreements in the Atomic Energy Act? Well, 123 agreements lay the foundation for the responsible exchange of nuclear materials and technology with countries that share common guardrails for nuclear safety--that is the diversion of uranium or plutonium and other nuclear materials in a way that ultimately could wind up in a bomb-making program somewhere in the world. We should not be looking for ways to work around or weaken our export standards even further.

Throughout my career, I have seen nuclear safety and nonproliferation undermined in the interest of the short-term geopolitical concerns of a particular administration or industry at the expense of the longer term nuclear nonproliferation goals, which we say are our highest foreign policy objectives.

They get compromised in the short term because one administration or another just wants to use nuclear powerplants as a way of ingratiating the United States into the good favor of a particular country--it could be Saudi Arabia soon; it could be another country right after that--but without all the safeguards that should be there in order to protect against diversion of these materials.

So the United States is supposed to be the leader in the global arena, and as a nation with nuclear capabilities, we have a duty to set the strongest possible standards for domestic and international nuclear activities as an example to the rest of the world. We also have to clean up our existing messes--particularly in Tribal and environmental justice communities--before investing in anything that might make those messes worse.

As a result, despite my strong and continued support for the fire safety grants and my respect for my colleagues working on this issue, I must vote no.

In 1982, I wrote a book about nuclear proliferation and about domestic nuclear powerplants. The book was entitled ``Nuclear Peril: The Politics of Proliferation,'' and it is what happens when there is a shortchanging of the safety, the security measures which should be put in place. It also dealt with the issues domestically of a reduction in the generalized supervision of nuclear powerplants in terms of having the highest possible safety standards.

There are many in this institution who want to see a vast expansion of nuclear power using plutonium and uranium in the United States. They also support a vast expansion of nuclear powerplants around the world using uranium and plutonium. I appreciate the fact that they want to do that, and many want to see that happen in the name of climate change because it reduces greenhouse gases, but it has its own problems. It brings its own problems.

We still don't have a solution to where we are going to bury all the nuclear waste in the United States. The Yucca Mountain facility in Nevada still hasn't been completed, and in my opinion, it will never be complete. We are now up to 35 years working on it.

Similarly, overseas, if we get into a race with other countries-- Russia, China--in the export of nuclear power, we should not lower the standards; we should ensure that we are in as the responsible provider of nuclear power around the world so that we reduce dramatically the threat of proliferation.

So my book in 1982 is directly relevant to this subject right here, because whether it be North Korea that converted a civilian nuclear powerplant over to a bomb-making factory, whether it be in Iraq with Saddam Hussein, whether it be in Iran--you name it--the story is the same.

So we have to be very responsible and ensure we have the highest standards, and that is my goal in coming out here. I am going to vote no because I think if we are going to be encouraging a brandnew era of nuclear power here domestically and internationally, we should have that discussion. It shouldn't be attached to the fire safety bill to make sure that firefighters can put out the fire in the house that is next door to us. We all agree on that. On this issue, however--the issue of nuclear nonproliferation and the domestic safety of powerplants in our country--that is a different subject.

But, honestly, my great friend Chairman Carper, who is just such an incredible leader on clean energy, the chairman of the committee that produced the most important climate bill in 2022 in a generation, he is my friend, and I thank him for engaging in a colloquy with me to clarify in detail the legislative intent of some of these provisions. I look forward to continuing to work on efforts to protect communities, clean up toxic waste, and create a consent-based pathway to nuclear waste storage in our country.

The decision to put all of the nuclear waste in our country in Yucca Mountain was a political decision. I was in the room when it was made. The National Academy of Sciences said that the Yucca Mountain facility was at the bottom of the places in our country. It is near a river. It is near an earthquake fault. No wonder we haven't finished it. The safety questions were never answered at the beginning. And that is all I ask. If we are going to move into a new era of nuclear power here and around the world, let's ask the questions upfront. Let's make sure we put the safeguards in place. Let's make sure we avoid having to look back and say: How in the world did we ever allow something like that to ever occur again?

I thank you for the opportunity to be out here.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to enter into a colloquy with the senior Senator from Delaware, the chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, concerning two aspects of the ADVANCE Act before us today: nuclear regulation and nonproliferation.

First is the provision regarding the mission statement of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, referenced in section 501. The current mission statement of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission--the independent regulatory Agency responsible for the safe use of nuclear energy and nuclear materials--is based upon Congress' action in the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974. That landmark legislation recognized and addressed the need to separate nuclear regulatory and safety functions. In doing so, Congress strongly declared that this separation was in the public interest. Since then, the Commission has adopted Principles of Good Regulation and organizational values that underscore its responsibility towards evidence-based, independent regulation and licensing activities.

Today, I rise to discuss the implications of the language in the ADVANCE Act regarding the mission statement of the NRC. This language, which did not move through the Senate and was not debated in the Committee on Environment and Public Works, would require the NRC to ``update the mission statement of the Commission to include that licensing and regulation of the civilian use of radioactive materials and nuclear energy be conducted in a manner that is efficient and does not unnecessarily limit the civilian use of radioactive materials and deployment of nuclear energy, or the benefits of civilian use of radioactive materials and nuclear energy technology to society.''

As the chair of the Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Nuclear Safety, I see NRC's safety mission as the primary responsibility of the Agency--not the protection of its relationship to the nuclear industry.

Chairman Carper, can you confirm that it is not the intent, nor the direction, of the new section 501 to in any way change the Agency's safety focus?

I thank you, Chairman Carper, for your unequivocal statement that, under this bill, the NRC will still be required to implement a safety-first mission.

I would also like to note my concern over language directing that regulatory activities ``not unnecessarily limit'' civilian nuclear activity. We do not need to enable any new lines of argument for industry to protest necessary safety updates required by the NRC that may require additional investments for licensees to implement and thus ``unnecessarily limit'' their activity.

Chairman Carper, can you confirm that this language should not be interpreted to suggest that the NRC should adopt a new, cost-benefit approach to decisions affecting public safety?

Thank you, Chairman Carper. I will continue to hold the Commission accountable to its primary safety responsibilities as outlined in the Energy Reorganization Act.

Finally, before I yield the floor, I must raise my concerns in this bill concerning nonproliferation. Chairman Carper, section 103 under division B of the Fire Grants and Safety Act requires the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to notify the appropriate committees of Congress if an export license is issued for a covered country, defined as a country that has not ratified an Additional Protocol with the International Atomic Energy Agency or has not acceded to the amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material.

Chairman Carper, am I correct in my understanding that these notifications occur after an export license is already issued?

Chairman Carper, is the intent of requiring congressional notification to facilitate a better understanding of the extent and nature of export licensing activity?

Chairman Carper, how will a congressional notification requirement work to address proliferation concerns, if there is no explicit direction for the Commission to deny a license for nations that do not have the strongest possible nonproliferation standards?

I commend Chairman Carper for his efforts to maintain adequate guardrails against proliferation during negotiations with our House colleagues. But we must not export nuclear material and technology to countries that do not meet the same safety standards to which we hold ourselves, and we cannot afford to compromise decades of nonproliferation efforts to advance short-term geopolitical interests.

In addition to my concerns over the export license provision, I would like to raise my concerns over section 105 under division B of the Fire Grants and Safety Act. This section directs the Secretaries of Energy and State to assess factors beyond 123 agreements to determine a country's Generally Authorized Destination status under part 810 of title 10, Code of Federal Regulations, which facilitates the export and transfer of certain nuclear material and technology as ``general activities.'' 123 agreements refer to section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act, which sets out specific requirements for the United States to engage in significant civilian nuclear cooperation with another country. 123 agreements are critical to the nonproliferation apparatus. These agreements require congressional approval, include a list of nine safety criteria, and set out clear procedures governing cooperation under the agreement.

This provision provides no definition or guidance on what ``other factors'' qualify as adequate criteria for Generally Authorized Destination status.

Chairman Carper, is it the intent of this provision to allow the Secretaries of Energy and State to grant Generally Authorized Destination status to countries that do not meet our own standards for nuclear safety and proliferation?

I thank the Senator from Delaware for his comments on these issues and his leadership.

Mr. President, thank you to Senator Duckworth for her leadership today on the floor.

In February, the Alabama Supreme Court placed the medical procedure that has helped millions of Americans realize their dream of having children, in vitro fertilization, or IVF, at risk. The Alabama judges used the Supreme Court's decision in the Dobbs case to justify their argument.

These extremist judges showed the American people that the Dobbs case was never just about abortion. Dobbs was a preview of coming atrocities, and the Supreme Court majority declared open season on American reproductive freedom.

And Republicans got to work. States passed immediate and overbroad abortion bans; peeled back protections for access to birth control, IUDs, and Plan B; and put access to IVF at risk. They created confusing, restrictive, and punitive schemes across States and threatened to jail patients and providers.

And they aren't finished. Republicans don't have to pass a national ban on abortion, birth control, or IVF to effectively achieve that goal. Confusion, misinformation, and fear are the point. In some States, they make it so difficult and so terrifying to get reproductive care that it is like it is already banned.

But in creating this chaos, Republicans have made clear their intentions and their position: Republicans will not protect the right to an abortion; Republicans will not protect the right to birth control; and Republicans will not protect the right to start a family.

Republicans will try to hide their extremism and say they support contraception and IVF, but we are calling their bluff.

Given the chance to protect access to contraception, they voted no. And today, given the chance to vote to protect IVF, they will vote no.

Republicans will continue to pursue their anti-choice, anti-freedom, and show the American people what ``GOP'' really stands for: Gutting Our Protections. The GOP are so offended by bodily autonomy that they would rather follow the extremism of the few than the will of the majority of American people who want their reproductive rights protected.

We must meet the clarity of their extremism with the clarity of justice. We will fight for reproductive freedom. We will fight for national protections for abortion, birth control, and IVF. We will keep putting them on the record, and we will guarantee that they are held accountable to the American people who will not forget who tossed away their freedom in pursuit of radical rightwing extremism.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today to speak out against Azerbaijan's unlawful detention of Armenian prisoners of war and alarming record of rampant human rights violations.

On September 19, 2023, Azerbaijan launched a large-scale military attack against Nagorno-Karabakh to gain full control over the territory, causing a mass exodus of more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians--virtually all of the region's ethnic Armenians--as well as the regional government to capitulate.

Azerbaijan then falsely denied that it forced people to leave and insincerely promised that it will peacefully reintegrate the region and guarantee the rights of ethnic Armenians.

Instead, even after their surrender, Azerbaijan punitively arrested and detained leaders of the former Karabakh Government, including former State Minister Ruben Vardanyan, who is here as he is being arrested by Azerbaijan military officials.

Also, ex-Presidents Arkadi Ghukasyan, Bako Sahakyan, and Arayik Harutyunyan, Foreign Minister David Babayan, Parliament Speaker Davit Ishkhanyan, and former generals, Levon Mnatsakanyan and Davit Manukyan. These eight former officials have been held in pretrial detention for more than 8 months. And just last month, Azerbaijani authorities extended the detention with another 5 months--without a trial, without due process--and Azerbaijan has routinely resorted to hostage diplomacy, prolonging unlawful detention and using prisoners of war as bargaining chips to impose its demands on Armenia, in clear violation of international law.

In fact, Azerbaijan is still holding dozens of Armenian prisoners of war and civilian political prisoners that it took captive during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war. And, additionally, widespread reporting-- including from Human Rights Watch, the International Federation of Federal Rights, and the U.S. Department of State--calls attention to the terrible treatment of political prisoners by Azerbaijan.

Former State Minister Ruben Vardanyan alone has faced punitive extended stays in solitary confinement, poor prison conditions, denial of water and clean clothing, and orders that require him to stand for hours on end. He

was also cut off from his lawyer and family for several weeks. Others are subjected to physical abuse, humiliation, and cruel and inhumane treatment.

Despite its clear pattern of committing human rights violations, Azerbaijan has incurred few costs from the international community for its egregious abuses against ethnic Armenians and illegal detention of political prisoners. The Aliyev regime thinks it can continue acting in flagrant violation of international and U.S. law, which is why it is incumbent upon Congress to speak out and say no to Azerbaijan; no to hostage diplomacy and Azerbaijan's taking of political prisoners; no to subjecting political prisoners to cruel and inhumane punishment; no to denying the rights of ethnic Armenians in the region; and no to Azerbaijan delaying the release of the political prisoners even 1 more day.

Azerbaijan must cease all of its abuse of political prisoners. It must release all political prisoners and prisoners of war, and that is why I sent a letter to Secretary Anthony Blinken urging the State Department to prioritize the release of Armenian prisoners held by Azerbaijan and the right of Nagorno-Karabakh's Armenians to return to their homes in ongoing peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan says it wants peace, but what it really wants is to act with impunity and still be rewarded by the United States and the international community, including with the privilege of hosting the next United Nations International Climate Conference COP29 later on this year. You cannot, on the one hand, be saying you want to host the world and then simultaneously say but ignore our human rights violations. Ignore the fact that we just arrest the political leaders of another nation and pretend that somehow or another we are still worthy of hosting the climate summit for the planet.

I urge both Congress and the White House to insist, in all interactions with the Governments of Azerbaijan and Armenia, that the release of political prisoners must be a prerequisite to any concessions, awards, or peace deals reached. We must say no to Azerbaijan's violations of international law and human rights and ensure those responsible are held accountable.

This is the perfect time to be having this conversation. Azerbaijan is getting ready to host the climate summit of the world. We must ensure that we take this opportunity to put the spotlight on all of those political prisoners who are being held wrongly by the Azerbaijan Government. It is strictly a violation of international human rights, and I call upon our government and I call upon the world to put a spotlight on these political prisoners so that they are released before the climate summit is held at the end of this year.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, thank you to my partner Senator Hirono from Hawaii and to all of the Senators who today are going to lead on this issue of ensuring that people in the United States have access to contraception. I am joined by Senator Smith from Minnesota. But we will be joined by so many others out here on the floor because this Friday, June 7, will be 49 years since there was a decision made in the Roe v. Wade question before it got repealed in 2022--49 years, from 1973 to 2022.

And the Supreme Court, 59 years ago to this day, June 7--the Supreme Court recognized in Griswold v. Connecticut the right of Americans to use contraception. Just a few years later, in 1972, the Supreme Court expanded on that holding and wrote:

If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of

the individual, married or single, to be free from

unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so

fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to

bear or beget a child.

That was the Supreme Court in 1972.

In recognizing the fundamental right to contraception, the Supreme Court affirmed what we know: The right to contraception is essential to Americans' health and freedom. This decision was a step toward freedom and away from decades of reproductive coercion rooted in this Nation's history.

In 1927, the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell approved forced sterilization in a decision steeped in ableism. Federal funds were used to sterilize 100,000 to 150,000 women, half of whom were Black. Teaching hospitals in New York and Boston experimented on Black and Puerto Rican women as practice for medical students. In recent history, immigrant women in detention faced forced sterilization, and Black, Brown, immigrant, disabled, LGBTQ, low-income and rural Americans still face significant--and sometimes insurmountable--barriers to getting reproductive care.

Left up to the extremism of the far right, they would let this injustice grow deeper into the American soul. Just 2 years ago, the Supreme Court majority did so when they took settled precedent and placed it on shaky ground.

In Dobbs, the Supreme Court majority overturned decades of settled precedent to strip away the constitutional right to abortion. On June 24, 2022, Americans had one less right than they did on January 23, 2022.

In his concurring opinion in Dobbs, Justice Clarence Thomas distilled the threat to American freedom. He outlined a long-held rightwing reactionary belief that Americans had too many privacy rights under the Constitution, that the Supreme Court erred in recognizing those rights, and that the Court should take them away. The rights he was talking about? The right to marry whom you love and the right to contraception.

Justice Thomas put that in his concurring opinion, a preview of what he wanted the Supreme Court to take up in future years.

Emboldened by the Supreme Court, States across the country have limited or prohibited access to contraception. Texas Republicans gutted Medicaid coverage of emergency contraception. Idaho Republicans blocked health clinics in public schools from providing contraception. And Republican Governors are vetoing State efforts to protect the right to contraception.

The threat to contraception is not hypothetical; it is a real threat that requires a real response here on the Senate floor. We must guard against efforts to oppress, suppress, and repress reproductive freedom for people and their healthcare providers.

That is why I proudly introduced the Right to Contraception Act with my colleagues Mazie Hirono and Tammy Duckworth.

The Right to Contraception Act guarantees Americans have the freedom to get contraception and for health providers to give it; the right to contraception free from Federal and State government threats; and the dignity to choose what contraception works best for them and for their families.

Passing the Right to Contraception Act would provide clear and unequivocal safeguards for a right that Americans have relied upon for nearly 60 years. It would keep government intrusion out of the deeply personal decisions people make about their health and their families. It would mean moving toward reproductive justice and freedom for everyone in our country.

Now, my colleagues across the aisle are trying to argue that this legislation restricts parental rights and religious liberties. That is completely untrue. The only restrictions that are being debated today are the ones that Republicans and MAGA extremists want to place on access to contraception.

Democrats are here today to defend reproductive freedom. This bill is about ensuring liberty, the liberty that comes with having full access to healthcare options.

Today, we have an opportunity to pass the historic piece of legislation, the Right to Contraception Act. This vote asks a simple question of each Senator and each American: Do you support Americans' freedom to make their own decisions about their health and social and economic freedom or not? Which side of that question are you on in our Nation?

For many of my colleagues and for the vast majority of the American people, that answer is easy, and it should be easy. At its best, this institution has affirmed the rights of every American. On this floor, we have expanded access to healthcare, battled against racial segregation, and protected same-sex marriage.

And today, we have the opportunity to protect the right to contraception. We have the opportunity to show the American people that we will fight with them and for them for reproductive freedom.

I urge my colleagues to join me in voting yes to pass the Right to Contraception Act. Vote yes to ensuring that reproductive health freedom and justice is the law of our land.

We cannot allow our country to go into the ``Wayback Machine,'' to go back to 1965, to go back to before Griswold was decided. That is what MAGA rightwing Republicans want to have happen in our country, and it is just absolutely unacceptable.

So today is the day of reckoning. Today is the day we will have the vote out here on the Senate floor to show which direction you believe our country should be headed.

I thank Senator Schumer for making it possible for us to have this debate today. I think it is going to be a very meaningful one that will ultimately help to clarify for the American people whose side each of the Senators are on in terms of their families, their family planning, the decisions they have to make for themselves.

So I thank you. I thank Senator Hirono and Senator Duckworth for their leadership and Senator Murray, of course, historic leader on all of these issues. And I am looking forward to the discussion--the debate--today.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object.

Mr. President, this resolution threatens fundamental life sciences research. Research is medicine's field of dreams from which we harvest the findings that give hope to families.

Over 1 million people died from COVID-19, and tens of thousands of Americans die annually from the seasonal flu. It is scientific research that develops the vaccines and treatments that save lives.

It is clear that we need every tool at our disposal to combat viral illnesses and pandemics, and labs across the country are developing research that will create the vaccines and the therapeutics of tomorrow. But what this resolution does is create overbroad restrictions on scientific research in order to accomplish a goal which unfortunately is unrelated to what should be our highest goals.

Bans like those envisioned by this resolution would tie the hands of researchers who are doing lifesaving work. This resolution would send a dangerous signal that the U.S. Senate does not value lifesaving research

being conducted by our Federal research Agencies and at our world-class research universities.

We must be prepared for future pandemics, especially as climate change accelerates the transmission of deadly diseases.

In the last few months, we have seen H5N1 bird flu transmitted from dairy cattle to humans. This resolution could block researchers from understanding the mutations that allow bird flu to infect humans, effectively banning us from preventing outbreaks and protecting farm workers.

Medical research is an issue of national security. Stronger research means stronger security. This resolution would not prepare us for emerging disease threats, and it would not make our Nation safer. Bowing to political pressure to promote a research ban without understanding the implications on research, biosecurity, biosafety, or public health is dangerous, and it is reckless.

Investments in biomedical research are investments in hope and health and safety that serve our country today and into the future. For those reasons, I object.

Mr. President, I rise today to speak in opposition to the Congressional Review Act resolution, which would overturn the Department of Energy's furnace efficiency standard. A vote for this resolution is a vote for higher costs for American families, a vote for higher temperatures for future generations, and a vote for scaremongering over science.

What you have just said on the Senate floor, Senator Welch, is a complete reflection of my own views about this issue.

Families face high energy bills. They are afraid of climate chaos. But instead of tackling those problems head-on, we are instead burying our heads in the sand. By attacking a commonsense upgrade to energy efficiency standards, this resolution seems to have come straight from the American Gas Association's playbook: Use more natural gas. That is their plan: Send greenhouse gases up into the atmosphere to dangerously warm our planet. That is the plan of the American Gas Association.

I am the House author of the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act, which was passed in 1987 and authorized the Department of Energy to set binding standards for appliance energy efficiency. And so that set the minimum standard of energy efficiency for 13 types of appliances: air conditioners, refrigerators, freezers, washers, dryers, gas furnaces.

And that law has been updated many times over the years and now covers about 60 products. And it is estimated that my appliance efficiency act, which became law over 3\1/2\ decades ago, has done more to save energy than any other Federal policy in buildings in our country's history.

And what is the central premise? It is just working smarter, not harder; using less electricity, using less energy--working smarter, not harder.

My mother always said to me: Eddie, you have to learn how to work that way--that was before she would say that she was going to donate my brain to Harvard Medical School as a completely unused human organ-- because if you don't work smarter, you are going to work harder.

That is what the American Gas Association wants. It wants to ``drill, baby, drill.'' But it is drilling into the pockets of consumers. It is the result in greenhouse gases going up into the atmosphere, which, ultimately, are going to cause incredible storms, incredible climate consequences, when we could just reduce the amount of energy which we are consuming. How hard is that?

During the Trump era, the Department of Energy missed its 28 deadlines to update the appliance standards, as they are supposed to do by law every single 6-year period, and they left the backlog to President Biden. And the Biden administration has been making up for lost time, already completing 24 rules with about a dozen left in front of them this year, which, when finalized, will save consumers nearly $1 trillion and 2.5 billion metric tons of carbon emissions over 30 years.

That is working smarter, not harder. You save money, and you reduce greenhouse gases.

Gas furnaces, as the Senator from Vermont was mentioning, have an outsized impact on household bills, as residential heating is the largest source of energy consumption for most families. And when a furnace is installed in a household, it lasts a very long time.

This resolution is directly at odds with the welfare of working-class families and renters, who often spend a disproportionate amount of their income on energy bills. And renters don't even get to pick their furnace, just pay the bills for it.

Winter heating bills are a huge burden for families, with some forced to make impossible choices, nearly every month, between paying for food, medicine, and basic necessities like heat.

Before this new rule that the gas lobby--the natural gas lobby--would so desperately like to go up in smoke, we haven't seen any meaningful update on gas furnace efficiency standards since Congress first set them in my bill in 1987. That is the American Gas Association at work.

As much as it might be helpful for climate change, public health, and national security, the Department of Energy's standards do not phase out gas furnaces. The rule getting targeted by this resolution doesn't even address existing gas furnaces, nor is the rule effective immediately. Instead, this rule we are debating today will ensure that all new gas furnaces meet a 95-percent fuel efficiency threshold starting in 2028--plenty of running room for the industry, plenty of notice, but plenty of benefits, ultimately, for consumers in their home heating bills and a reduction in greenhouse gases for the next generation of Americans who are afraid that they are going to be left paying the bill for all of the consequences of out-of-control climate change, which these furnaces contribute to in a major way.

This provides for a slow phaseout of older, less efficient furnaces while leaving more efficient furnaces on the market that already make up nearly half of all current models. The furnace efficiency standards alone will cut 332 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions from furnaces over 30 years as well as other pollutants like methane and nitrous oxides. That is equal to taking 79 million gas-powered cars off the roads or cutting the annual emissions of 85 coal-fired powerplants. They won't be needed. The 85 coal-burning plants won't be needed because the electricity won't be needed because the furnaces will be so much more efficient.

Furnace manufacturers like this rule because it spurs innovation. Customers like this rule because it will save them money. Families like this rule because it would reduce the amount of toxic gas they are inhaling on a daily basis, reducing risks of asthma, heart disease, and premature deaths. The more you inhale, the more dangerous it is for the children in the house and for pregnant women in the house. Scientists like this rule because it will cut how much climate change-causing pollution we are sending up into the atmosphere.

The American Gas Association, which filed a legal challenge that is oddly similar to my colleague's CRA language, does not like this rule because it will cut how many customers are dependent on their product. It will eat into their already astronomical

profits. It is the wealthiest industry in the history of the world, but they want more even if consumers could save. They want the hot and toxic status quo to remain in place. They are afraid that our country will become ever more efficient or even decarbonized and continue on without them, so they are acting out of corporate fear to destroy our chance at a livable future. Repealing the standards would saddle millions of Americans with unnecessarily high heating bills for decades to come.

Let me be clear. Energy poverty is a racial justice issue. It is an economic justice issue. It is an environmental justice issue. We must take steps today to remedy this injustice.

Even though an efficient furnace may cost slightly more on the market today, costs will continue to fall, and households will be more than paid back in lower energy bills year after year after year. They will have much lower emissions that are being sent out. They will have more innovation. They will have more healthcare benefits. All of that will flow to ordinary Americans unless the American Gas Association has its way with this U.S. Senate.

So my colleagues will rant and rave about the need to constantly drill, baby, drill to get enough fossil fuels to keep our grid running. They love to fearmonger about reliability issues and how we can keep the lights on. But the cleanest, cheapest, and most reliable megawatt of energy is the one we never have to use. That is why everyone who supports a reliable grid should support energy efficiency standards-- working smarter and not harder.

We shouldn't sacrifice savings, our grid, our health, and our climate on the altar of the American Gas Association. A moderate increase in energy efficiency for furnaces just makes sense. This radical proposal to reverse this energy efficiency standard should be rejected, and I urge my colleagues to vote no.

This today will be a vote for the future. It will be a vote for future generations. It will be a vote to say that finally the Senate is serious about dealing with this crisis that is affecting our planet and the next generation of children in our country.

I thank the Presiding Officer for his leadership on this issue, and I urge a rejection of this proposal coming from the American Gas Association.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, the HALT Fentanyl Act would permanently classify fentanyl-related substances as schedule I substances under the Controlled Substances Act.

The fentanyl epidemic is ravaging communities across the United States. We are losing more than 80,000 Americans to overdose every year from opioid overdose. With deaths reaching this level, we do need every tool at our disposal to combat illicit fentanyl, but reclassification of fentanyl-related substances as schedule I substances would limit the government's ability to research overdose and addiction treatment medications, override critical public health considerations in scheduling decisions, and extend the policy approach of the failed War on Drugs.

Schedule I drugs are difficult for scientists to research. Fentanyl's potency and danger demand that we study it and its analogs to combat overdose and addiction. A permanent, blanket schedule I category for any fentanyl-related substance would create barriers to vital research.

This punishment-only categorization for fentanyl-related substances would eclipse the longstanding public health approach to Controlled Substances Act scheduling. The Controlled Substances Act authorizes the administration to consider concrete scientific factors when determining which scheduling category should apply to a drug, and that approach is absent here.

Finally, this bill would bring the United States back to the approach of the failed War on Drugs where we criminalized drug use while ignoring the underlying issues that animate abuse and addiction. Prosecutions under this expansion will continue to disproportionately target people of color. A punishment-only approach will not reduce drugs in our communities.

I have spoken to people on the frontlines of this epidemic: people with substance use disorder, families who have lost a loved one, and healthcare providers. They are the ones on the frontlines when people die from fentanyl. They are the ones who lose their lives or lose their patients,

friends, or family when we don't invest in the security and public health tools for communities. They are the ones who are frustrated every day by archaic laws that keep people from the prevention and treatment which they need.

We must do better. We must make sure people have access to tools to keep fentanyl out of their communities. We need to make sure people have access to treatment--like methadone medication--to keep people in recovery, and we need to save lives. But permanently categorizing fentanyl-related substances as schedule I substances would impede our response to the overdose epidemic and lead to overincarceration.

There has to be additional discussion and debate. Let us do that so that we can give this issue the attention which it needs and that it deserves so that any solution is effective and bipartisan.

As a result, at this point, I have to object.

Mr. President, I rise today not in defense of TikTok but in defense of TikTok's users, especially the 170 million American users. Congress is rapidly heading towards passing legislation that will likely result in the blocking of the most popular application among young people in this country--an app whose fundamental purpose is to facilitate and promote speech; an app that has revolutionized how people connect, share, do business, and communicate online; an app that is bringing competition to the heavily concentrated social media market.

It should be a serious flag that a bill with such significant implications for freedom of speech and online competition has gone from being an idea in the House of Representatives to all of a sudden being passed on the floor of the Senate in a matter of weeks, just weeks.

So when political elites who otherwise fiercely disagree with each other come together to pass legislation that may result in significant censorship--yes, censorship--often in the name of national security, we should be hypervigilant about the true intentions of this legislation.

Episodes in history of using national security as a pretext to crack down on dissenting or unpopular speech loom as warnings about the ease of compromising our values when national security is supposedly at stake.

I want to be clear. I rise today on this greatest of debate floors not to defend TikTok. I don't deny that TikTok poses some national security risks. Instead, I come here today with a plea to my colleagues to think carefully about the impact of this bill, the consequences of its implementation, and the tradeoff between supposed national security threats and freedom of expression and basic rights to free speech.

This legislation may address or at least mitigate a national security risk, but it could and likely will result in widespread censorship. This censorship would predominantly impact young people in our country, many of whom are just gaining their political consciousness and obtaining the right to vote. We should be clear-eyed about these stakes.

Censorship is not who we are as a people. We should not downplay or deny this tradeoff. Some say the legislation merely forces ByteDance to sell TikTok within a year. That is a sale that won't affect its users at all. The ownership will change, so bill supporters say, but the app will stay the same.

Realistically, the actual chances of divestment in a year, if ever, are very small. A TikTok sale would be one of the most complicated and expensive transactions in history, requiring months, if not years, of due diligence by both government and business actors.

We should be very clear about the likely outcome of this law: It is really just a TikTok ban. And once we properly acknowledge that this bill is a TikTok ban, we can better see its impact on free expression: 170 million users--170 million Americans use TikTok to watch videos, learn about the news, run a business, and keep up with the latest pop culture trends. They connect with friends and family, sell new products and build community. The culture and expression on TikTok are unique and unavailable anywhere else on the internet.

In fact, TikTok is a threat to business, a threat to Facebook and Instagram and other American companies precisely because of its unique style and community which cannot be replicated anywhere else.

And while many of my colleagues are sincere in their fears for U.S. national security, others appear to support this legislation for a far more dangerous reason: They want to ban TikTok because of its users' content, because of TikTok's viewpoints. They don't like that many TikTok users support progressive or liberal politics or perspectives that they simply don't agree with.

The bill's supporters dress up this censorship by arguing that the Chinese Government is manipulating TikTok's algorithm to promote certain viewpoints. In this view, a TikTok ban is about combating Chinese propaganda, not penalizing TikTok's content.

TikTok, from their perspective, is ``poison[ing] the minds of young Americans with pro-Communist China propaganda.'' This isn't just some hypothetical risk, critics say, but an actual ongoing operation by the Chinese Communist Party.

Don't be fooled by these arguments. Although the Chinese Government certainly censors online speech in China, there is no credible evidence that the CCP has done so in the United States through TikTok. In fact, when U.S. national security officials talk about the risk of China manipulating TikTok's algorithm, they refer to it as a ``hypothetical'' risk--a hypothetical risk. This is the real objection, an objection to the political content, the most valuable and protected speech in a democracy.

We should be very clear about the impact and intent of this legislation. This bill is, for all intents and purposes, a ban on TikTok, and it is intended to suppress disfavored speech on the platform, plain and simple. We could see that in the cross- examination--the questioning in the House of Representatives hearing-- on this subject.

For my colleagues who are awake to this reality, they may, nevertheless, believe that such speech suppression is a small cost to pay to keep Americans safe. To them, I urge a strong note of caution. The defense that a little speech suppression is necessary when our national security is at stake is ultimately un-American. This reasoning may seem convincing, but American history has too many examples of controversial laws that ultimately infringe on civil liberties in the name of national security. In the United States, we often look back on these episodes with regret. We should not add TikTok to that history.

Don't get me wrong. TikTok has its problems. No. 1, TikTok poses a serious risk to the privacy and mental health of our young people. In fact, TikTok paid a fine for violating my Children's Online Privacy Protection Act just 5 years ago. But that problem isn't unique to TikTok, and it certainly doesn't justify a TikTok ban, which is what we heard over and over again in the House of Representatives in their hearing on this issue. The reason is that YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are making our children sick, as well, and exploiting our children and teenagers and their information for profit. American companies are doing the same thing, too, to children and teenagers in our country, as is TikTok.

So why aren't we thinking of this as a common goal that we are going to have in order to protect those teenagers and children?

If the bill's supporters truly wanted to protect the well-being of our young people, they would broaden their lens and address the youth mental health crisis plaguing our children and teenagers that has, in part, been caused by Big Tech in the United States--in the United States--along with TikTok.

I want you to hear the statistics. To my colleagues, it is powerful. One in three high school girls in the United States just 2 years ago considered suicide. At least 1 in 10 American high school teenage girls attempted suicide that year--attempted suicide. Amongst LGBTQ youth, the number is more like 1 in 5 attempted suicides just 2 years ago.

Now, it is not exclusively because of social media, what TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Discord--all of them are doing it, but it plays a big role according to our own Centers for Disease Control. It plays a big role according to our own Surgeon General. It plays a big role, and we should be talking about that out here. That is a clear and present danger. That is not a hypothetical danger. That is not a hypothetical threat that may occur sometime in the long, distant future. It is happening right now. If we are talking about TikTok, we should be talking about all the other companies at the same time.

Instead of suppressing speech on a single application, we should be addressing the root causes of the mental health crisis by targeting Big Tech's pernicious privacy invasion business model of teenagers and children in our country. We could be passing our bipartisan Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act and banning targeted ads to kids and teens on TikTok and everywhere else.

My legislation with Senator Bill Cassidy has been intensely vetted, passed through Senate committee, and is supported by the chair and ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee. And unlike a TikTok ban, it addresses the problem that is universally recognized, the compromised health and well-being of all of our children and teenagers.

Today, if you hear out on the floor Senators talking about the impact TikTok is having upon young people in our country, it is a good question, and we should be dealing with it, but you can't deal with it just by talking about TikTok. You have to talk about every American company that actually created the model that has led to this mental health crisis, and we are not doing that today. That is something that is a clear and present danger right now, not a hypothetical threat in the future, which is what we are actually doing by passing this legislation.

Instead of protecting young people online, we are censoring their speech, and this is a grave mistake. We should be having a much bigger discussion about what the implications of this legislation are for the future. I thank the Presiding Officer for giving me the opportunity to come out here on the Senate floor to talk about this very important issue.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I am here today to defend the Environmental Protection Agency's vehicle emissions standards-- standards that will cut air pollution to tackle the climate crisis, protect public health, and save drivers money at the pump. These standards for passenger vehicles, cars, SUVs and light trucks will help us accelerate toward our climate targets and put the brakes on our dependence on fossil fuels.

Last year, we imported 8.5 million barrels of oil every single day, of petroleum products, including gasoline, while simultaneously exporting more than 10 million barrels a day.

But do you want to hear something? Do you know who we were importing oil from? Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman. And what does this proposal do that the Republicans want to propound here? It is to say: No, we are not going to move to an electric vehicle future. No, we don't want to, in any way, send a signal that we are a technological giant, as the United States, and we are going to back out that imported oil so that we are not contributing those petrodollars to those nations which are ultimately intent on undermining stability.

So this dependence on fossil fuels, traded on the global market and imported into our country, puts drivers at the whim of OPEC. It puts them at the whim of those who are driven by profiteering. It allows Big Oil CEOs to turn drivers upside down at the pump and shake money out of their pockets.

Why do we continue this? We are technological giants. We have an all- electric vehicle future, a hybrid future for our Nation and for the world. Are we going to lead on that or retreat, because that is what is being proposed here?

Gas guzzling cars aren't just bad for drivers; they are bad for all of us. According to the EPA, the transportation sector accounts for 29 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to global warming--actually, the largest single source of climate warming emissions in the United States. And the EPA has a legal, statutory responsibility to set strong clean power standards to help us put this crisis in the rearview mirror.

The final clean car rules are estimated to avoid more than 7 billion metric tons of carbon pollution, equivalent to four times the emissions from the entire transportation sector. This is the single most significant rule we have ever seen in our fight to tackle the climate crisis--more than any other rule in the history of the United States. That is a big deal. That is something to be proud of, and that is something that is worth protecting from political attacks.

In addition to building a livable future, this rule will also save lives right now, providing $13 billion in annual health benefits as a result of reduced air pollution. The clean cars rule isn't banning gas cars, but it is expected to help supercharge our already booming sales of hybrid and all-electric vehicles. These final rules are technically feasible, economically achievable, and technologically neutral, increasing vehicle choice for Americans. This means that families and individuals will still be able to choose from a wide range of vehicle options, including more than 100 different plug-in hybrid and battery electric vehicles here in the United States.

Automakers are innovating and driving us closer toward a clean energy future. That is why Big Oil hates these

vehicle emissions standards. The oil industry is scared to death that $46 billion in reduced annual fuel costs will stay stranded in drivers' pockets instead of in the padded company profits of Big Oil companies.

If you follow the money, it becomes pretty clear why Big Oil would want to attack these standards. All the Republicans have to do is wait outside and drive the getaway car.

That is why I am urging my colleagues to vote no on Senator Crapo's legislation, S. 4072, which would block the EPA from carrying out the final clean cars rule. This bill is irresponsible because it undoes and it undermines future regulations that would protect public health.

The clean cars rule will reduce particulate matter by 95 percent compared to current standards, prevent 2,500 premature deaths, and reduce heart attacks and respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses.

This bill coming up for a vote would, instead, prevent working families from saving money on gas and maintenance repairs. Over the lifetime of the standards, drivers will save $62 billion in fuel and repair costs or $6,000 over the lifetime of a model year 2032 car.

Rolling back these clean car standards is not an option. We have to protect this rule. We have to protect drivers' budgets. We have to protect public health. We have to protect our economy.

That is why a ``no'' vote on this is so important, and I want to thank everyone who is in this fight. I see Chairman Carper and Senator Whitehouse here. This is an absolutely critical rule.

I will say this. Every day, Donald Trump and Big Oil say: Drill, baby, drill.

But the younger generation says: Plug in, baby, plug in.

We are moving to the future. We are moving to an all-electric future, and that is what this vote is all about today. I urge a ``no'' vote on the floor of the Senate.

Mr. President, I rise today in support of the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act or, as it is known, COPPA 2.0., the Child Online Privacy Protection Act.

We stand at a truly consequential moment for protecting children online in our country. Our kids are suffering from an acute mental health crisis. The statistics are staggering: One in three high school girls in the United States seriously considered suicide in 2021--one in three teenage girls considered suicide. At least 1 in 10 high school girls attempted suicide in the United States in 2021--1 in 10 teenage girls in America attempted suicide in 2021. Amongst LGBTQ youth, the number is more like one in five LGBTQ youths attempted suicide in 2021.

We know that Big Tech's tracking, targeting, and traumatizing of our young people is contributing in a significant way to that crisis. As the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing just a few weeks ago demonstrated, Big Tech CEOs still don't understand the damage they have caused and remain unwilling to make the necessary changes to fix their platforms and protect children, to protect teenagers, because, without a doubt, self-regulation by the CEOs of the tech companies has failed and failed miserably. Otherwise, we would not be in this mental health crisis.

In the face of this defiance by the industry, policymakers at the Federal, State, and local levels have been introducing and passing new legislation to address the crisis. More notably, last week, the Florida Legislature felt compelled to pass a law to ban all kids under 16 from social media all together in the face of Big Tech inaction. Do you hear what I am saying? Florida is passing a law banning kids under 16 from being on at all.

I am glad that bipartisan lawmakers and regulators have mobilized across the country to address this problem, but we also must be careful because social media is not inherently bad. Many young people have found their voices online and organize there on issues such as the climate crisis and gun violence. Online platforms allow young people to connect with loved ones, share their own experiences, and learn from others in ways that are just unavailable to them offline. They need, in many instances, the online communities. If we shut down those spaces in our efforts to keep children and teenagers safe online, we may just trade one youth mental health crisis for another one.

For most of my career, I have worked to get this balance right--to protect kids from the dangers of new technologies without undermining the social, the political, and the economic benefits of those very same technologies. There is a Dickensian quality to these qualities. There are the best of technologies and the worst of technologies simultaneously. They can enable, they can ennoble, or they can degrade and debase.

We want the benefits but also have to protect our society--especially young people--against the degradation that has now overcome so many parts of the internet. We just have to find a balance with social media as we have done in many other areas of our country.

Fortunately, we are not writing on a blank slate. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, the original COPPA, laid the groundwork for protecting kids online by empowering parents and allowing corporate incentives with our policy goals. And unlike more draconian laws from that era, COPPA remains the law of the land. In fact, the only Federal privacy protection for kids online is my law, which passed 26 years ago, which protects kids under the age of 13.

But we can now see that it has expanded beyond anything that people actually thought about in 1998. And in the 26 years since COPPA's passage, much has changed, but at the same time the core principles of that bill still hold the key for protecting young people today. That is why I am fighting so hard to pass COPPA 2.0 and update those privacy policies. And it is why it is worth revisiting the passage of COPPA in 1998 and its successes over the past two decades.

As many of my colleagues remember, the late nineties were an exciting and scary period for technology. This spectacular growth in home internet access ushered in a digital and communications revolution, making it easier than ever to find information, discover new communities, and interact with friends, families, and strangers online. In fact, I am the author of the key three bills that moved America from analog to digital, from narrowband to broadband. I am very proud of that. Not one home had broadband in America in February of 1996, so I am proud of those bills I authored at the time.

We want the benefit of the information superhighway. We want the revolution. But in that early internet period, the possibilities appeared endless: online classrooms, remote work, telehealth services. The internet threatened to upend every aspect of society, and we lawmakers, the public, individuals across the globe--we were now trying to catch up with these changes that the laws that I authored were now ushering in, real changes in commerce, education, and healthcare.

Even in those heady days, however, the dark side of the digital revolution was already apparent, the sinister side of cyber space. Heads rose almost immediately. New personal computers and access to the internet created vast

opportunities for corporate surveillance, allowing the new online platforms to amass large quantities of our personal information and our data with every click, every typed word. Every website visited became another data point in the ever-expanding profiles that websites, web browsers, and other online companies built on their users. This was in the ``BF'' era, the before Facebook era. Before there ever was a Facebook, they were already doing it. As soon as we moved to broadband, as soon as the three laws passed, the initial companies all moved in that direction. And that is when the Big Tech titans just began to master the lucrative art of targeted advertising, using all of this collected data.

But they understood that our data had value, and they began building huge data collection apparatus. For those of us closely monitoring the digital revolution, online companies' voracious appetite for our data exposed extreme risk to our privacies. As our social, economic, and political lives increasingly took place online, Big Tech's near- constant surveillance threatened to expose every part of every life in America to eliminate personal privacy as we know it.

Back in the 1990s, I was deeply concerned about this risk, and I introduced legislation to enact an electronic privacy bill of rights across all technology platforms in our country. And, like today, lobbyists blanketed Capitol Hill, warning that limits on data practices would harm innovation, block the internet revolution, and threaten America's place as the world's economic leader.

So my comprehensive privacy bill, even though I got it passed in the House in 1995, which would be in place right now for all Americans, and other privacy legislation, ultimately, all fell victim to this lobbying firestorm. And, 26 years later, we still don't have a national comprehensive privacy law. We came so close in 1995 and 1996.

But on one aspect of this problem, reason prevailed: children's privacy. So what I did then, in October of 1998, is I went back to my Republican colleagues, and I said: Well, if we are not going to protect adults and we are not going to protect teenagers, at least let us protect kids in America under the age of 13. Let's have a child online privacy protection law for those kids. Can I get that from you?

So the law wasn't perfect, but COPPA fundamentally changed how websites and online services interacted with children. The law, No. 1, prohibited companies from collecting information data on children under the age of 13 without obtaining parental consent. No. 2, it required companies to give parents access to their children's personal information. And, No. 3, it required companies to post clear privacy policies describing their collection of children's personal information.

No longer could websites vacuum up children's data without any parental consent. No longer could they think of this as a hidden, vast surveillance apparatus without even a disclosure. No longer could they amass troves of data on our kids without parental oversight. All that ended with COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, but only for kids under the age of 13.

But, ultimately, the core problem facing our children, both in the 1990s and even more so today, is Big Tech's relentless and unyielding drive to accumulate more and more data on its users, including children. And this data may seem vague and uncertain, but it is anything but. It is a child's name, email address, location, their height, their weight, their health conditions, their fingerprints and facial scan, their likes and dislikes, even their sexual orientation and gender identity.

If you can identify a characteristic of a child, chances are that Big Tech wants to know about it and wants to use it to develop an ever more precise profile on that one specific child to target that child with information that advertisers and others will pay to talk to that child.

Why? Because of targeted advertising. More data means more effective, targeted ads at that child, at that teenager, which means more money for the Big Tech companies, bigger mansions, bigger yachts, bigger superjets for them. But it all comes at the expense of individual children and teenagers all across our country. And the more money they make, it allows the tech giants to invest in new ways to keep our young people glued to their screens.

So the hearings I had in the 1990s were on AI and how AI is going to be used in order to do all of this targeting. I had all of those hearings in the 1990s. It is not new. It is just now on steroids, even worse, even more dangerous.

So the giants are absolutely committed to keeping this continued because the media giants of today are really advertising giants. That is all they are. Data is the fuel for Big Tech's profit machine and the raw material that sustains Big Tech's business model.

This endless quest for more data incentivizes Big Tech to maximize user engagement and attention. The formula is very simple: More time on social media means more data to fuel the targeted advertising machine. That means more revenue for Big Tech, coming at the expense of the privacy of teenagers and children in our country.

Addiction equals data, equals money--simple formula. Addiction equals data, equals money. That is their business model. You can put it on a 3-by-5 card. It is not complicated, and it is a lot of money.

In 2022, according to a recent Harvard study, the major Big Tech platforms earned nearly $11 billion in advertising revenue from U.S. users under the age of 17. So $11 billion they made off of kids, targeting ads toward them. That is 11 billion reasons to build ever more sophisticated data profiles on younger users; 11 billion reasons to develop new addictive features; 11 billion reasons to keep our young people clicking, swiping, and liking.

The question then is how to break this self-fulfilling cycle, how to change Big Tech's incentives to modify their operations to benefit children rather than addict them. The answer is to address the underlying source of the problem: the data that fuels Big Tech's business model itself.

If Big Tech no longer has an incentive to maximize the data collected on a young person, it will lose the incentive to develop ever-changing methods to addict that child, that teenager to the product in the first place. By breaking the incentive to collect data, we can permanently change Big Tech's approach to children and to teenagers in our country.

So, back in 1998, my original child online protection bill took a first step to change those incentives. It put up barriers that limited websites' ability to collect endless data on children, putting parents in control, and, over the past 26 years, the Federal Trade Commission has used its authority under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act to hold all sorts of companies accountable for invading kids' privacy.

Using my law from 1998, by 2003--the Federal Trade Commission--it was Mrs. Fields Cookies and Hershey collecting children's information online without obtaining parental consent. In 2008, it was Sony. In 2019, Google agreed to pay $170 million for its YouTube channels' violation of COPPA. And, just last year, Epic Games, Microsoft, and Amazon all agreed to settlements for COPPA violations.

In total, the Federal Trade Commission has held 36 companies accountable thanks to its authority to protect kids online under COPPA, and COPPA's true impact is so much bigger because those 36 cases that the Federal Trade Commission won are a deterrent to hundreds of companies trying to do the same thing, because they can see how big the penalty will be if they violate the terms of the law.

And then, last year, 33 attorneys general filed claims under COPPA against Meta, against Facebook, for collecting personal data on millions of users that Facebook and Instagram knew were children. They knew they were children. Their algorithms could tell them they were children.

And Meta's willful blindness toward these users was breathtaking. One internal Meta report estimated that, in 2015, 4 million users on Instagram were under the age of 13, and they knew it. And it represented 30 percent of all 10- to 12-year-olds in the country, and they knew it. They knew what they were doing.

In other cases, Meta employees allegedly declined to conduct research on users that the company knew were

under age 13 because such research would reveal that children used its platforms. They didn't want to know what they knew. They didn't want the documentation to reinforce and prove that they were in violation of the law.

So if it looks like a duckling, swims like a duckling, quacks like a duckling, it is probably a duckling. And that is what these companies are doing. We know. They know. Everybody knows what they are doing.

So the States' complaint makes this clear: Meta knew that Facebook and Instagram were filled with ducklings but deliberately stuck their head in the sand. And, by the way, for people watching, Facebook just changed their name to Meta, but it is still the same. It is still Facebook. It is still Instagram. And they are both owned by Meta.

So thanks to COPPA, Meta is being held accountable for this brazen conduct, for collecting vast quantities of data for its targeted advertising machine without even trying to obtain parental consent at all.

Despite the valiant efforts of the Federal Trade Commission and State regulators, websites and online services have found ways to skirt these privacy protections to amass troves of data on young people and feed their data-fueled business model.

And, most notably, teenagers are unprotected by COPPA. Similarly, the law does not contain strict protections against excessive data collection or targeted advertising by Big Tech.

When I first pushed for COPPA in 1998, I summarized my plan in three words: disclosure, knowledge, and no--disclosure of privacy policies, knowledge of the information collected on our children being reused for other purposes, and the right to say no to the reuse or sale of that information.

Today, the same formula works, except the no. It is now more like a ``no, no, no, no; stop it; end this.''

We have a mental health teenage and child crisis in our country, and the Surgeon General of the United States has pointed the finger at social media: No. Stop it. End it.

And the companies must still disclose their privacy practices to users and still must ensure their parents can access the information collected on their kids and prohibit future use of that information. But we need to adapt. We need to adopt stronger and more aggressive protections to disrupt Big Tech's business model, to provide Big Tech with financial incentives to build healthy platforms for our young people and not these dangerous cesspools that have been created.

And that is why, for over a decade, I have been introducing legislation to crack open Big Tech's business model by prohibiting targeted advertising for kids and teens and to prohibit Big Tech from collecting data on young people beyond what is necessary to provide the service. These provisions--along with raising the COPPA age to cover teens up to age 17 and preventing online platforms like Meta from pretending their users aren't children or teens--target the perverse incentives with Big Tech's business model. They fix the rot under the floorboards of this whole system, rather than just applying a new layer of paint.

This is the ``no, no, no'' that this Senate, this country must say to Big Tech, and it is the foundation of my and Senator Cassidy's COPPA 2.0 legislation, which has now passed through the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee. The committee unanimously, last year, No. 1, said no targeted advertising toward teenagers and children; No. 2, no unnecessary data collection from children and teenagers in our country; No. 3, no deliberately ignoring young users and pretending you don't know that they are young because your algorithms tell you they are young. You know it. You know it, just because of all of the other sites these young people go to. You know who they are.

By addressing the business model, COPPA 2.0 also preserves the real benefits of social media. It allows young people to open accounts, converse with friends and family, find new communities, learn, grow, develop, and take part in rich online spaces.

I have heard from countless young people that these spaces are essential for their own development and growth. So, as policymakers at every level, but especially in this body, we consider different approaches to regulating social media and addressing the youth mental health crisis. We must remember the ultimate source of the whole problem is the data which they collect. We cannot allow them. We cannot permit them to continue to collect that data and then use it to go back and target kids with it.

And any effort to combat this crisis has to include effective reforms to minimize this data collection, enhance privacy protection for young people online, and ban targeted advertising for kids and teens. That is what COPPA 2.0 does. I am deeply proud to lead this legislation with my good friend from Louisiana, Senator Cassidy, a physician who knows that there is a mental health crisis in our country. And I am thankful for the thoughtful work of Chair Cantwell and Ranking Member Cruz on this bill, and I am delighted to say that both have agreed to cosponsor

Madam President, today is the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade. We should be standing here celebrating more than five decades' worth of access to essential reproductive health care--healthcare that is central to well-being, life, liberty, equality, and economic and social freedom for everyone; healthcare that is essential to equity for women, LGBTQ, Black, Brown, indigenous, rural, immigrant, low-income, and disabled Americans. But instead of celebrating, we are fighting-- fighting for Americans' freedom. We are fighting to protect the right to abortion.

Since the rightwing, extremist Supreme Court majority's Dobbs decision, women and millions of people across America have watched as States strip away their freedom to make decisions--decisions about their own bodies and their own families.

Taking Dobbs as a clarion call to rip away Americans' freedoms, rightwing Republicans across the country have marched forward to strip away the right to abortion State by State, with calls to expand that to a Federal ban on abortion. These politicians are more obsessed with interfering in the lives and decisions of the American people and their healthcare providers than actually fixing the healthcare system of our country to make sure that every American can get the care they need when and where they need that care. They are more obsessed with pretending they know more about the healthcare workers trained to support patient decision making than actually representing the American people who want to see their right to abortion being protected.

Americans across the country have suffered horrific pain and hardship, like Massachusetts resident Kate Dineen, who drove 500 miles to receive an abortion after her son experienced a catastrophic stroke in utero. This suffering especially affects those who do not have the means or the resources to travel across State lines. Tens of millions of Americans live in States where their reproductive health care is banned or restricted.

These rightwing extremists aren't finished. Dobbs was but a preview of coming atrocities by this Supreme Court and by rightwing Governors and State legislators all across our country. They have threatened the right to contraception. They have blocked access to birth control for teenagers at federally funded clinics. They have suspended emergency contraception payments for survivors of sexual assault. They will not stop at overturning Roe v. Wade.

On this anniversary of Roe, we must recommit to taking decisive action to protect millions of Americans' access to abortion care, remove unnecessary limits on reproductive freedom, and protect against coming attacks from rightwing Republicans and this extremist Supreme Court. We must abolish the filibuster, a Jim Crow-era relic impeding the will of the American people. We must pass the Women's Health Protection Act to restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land, protect patients' rights to an abortion, and protect healthcare workers providing these services. We must guard against coming attacks on our freedom by passing my Right to Contraception Act and pass the Judiciary Act to expand the Supreme Court and bring balance and fairness back to the Supreme Court before they make more and more decisions that overturn precedents that have been protecting the American people for generations.

We have a moral duty to act. There is no more time to waste. Supreme Court Justices may serve lifetime appointments, but we cannot wait a lifetime to right injustices. Congress can step in to protect the American people from the overreach of this radical Supreme Court majority. We must rise up and meet this moment with everything we have.

I ask my Senate colleagues what other rights Americans must lose before we act. What vulnerable communities in their States will be left without healthcare, without autonomy, without freedom? There can be no justice without healthcare justice in our country, and there can be no health justice without reproductive freedom in the United States of America being once again restored.

I yield the floor.

Thank you, Senator Cardin. Thank you for your leadership in bringing our delegation to COP28. And what a delegation with you as the chairman of Senate Foreign Relations; Senator Carper, the chairman of Environment and Public Works; and Senator Whitehouse, a historic leader on these issues--and even sitting out here on the floor right now, Senator Wyden, who was so instrumental in ensuring that the IRA passed and that it had the incentives to unleash a clean energy revolution that had been long overdue in terms of having a response. So we thank you.

And we thank the young people--the pages--who are here today because they are the true leaders of this movement.

Coming off the heels of this year's climate talks, it was clear that COP28--the international climate conference--was an opportunity to lift our gaze, to lift the planet's gaze to the constellation of possibilities for our ability to be able to respond to this crisis that is affecting our planet and to readjust the gravitational force of fossil-fueled interests that pull our countries away from climate action.

I have been to many international climate conferences over the years. I know how much it matters to give countries a space to convene, to give advocates a chance to hold governments accountable, and to give the public a direction for a livable future. COPs give us a chance to organize and not just agonize about the climate crisis.

I was encouraged to see the final COP28 deal include a call to transition away from fossil fuels, as well as an agreement on the fund for losses and damages due to climate change.

We have never had such a strong signal that it is time to close the chapter on the heyday of fossil fuels. But the science is clear: Weak agreement language will not keep our planet strong. We can't just agree to consider lifesaving actions; we must commit to those lifesaving actions.

COP28 came to a loophole-filled end, less an embrace of a fossil-free future and more a step in the right direction when we needed to be sprinting toward a fossil-fuel phaseout on the planet.

The climate crisis disproportionately impacts people who are least responsible, most affected, and, most often, left behind: poor, marginalized, and indigenous communities.

We can't build walls around the climate crisis so we have to build bridges. To be a leader, the United States must commit to phasing out fossil fuels and to putting our money where our mouth is. We have done it at home with the Inflation Reduction Act, which is already unleashing commitments of nearly $300 billion in private funding for clean energy in just the first year since it passed. And it has the potential of ultimately unleashing trillions of dollars of private sector investment over the next decade. And I think it will do that.

But now we need to do it internationally as well. We have to provide direct finance for clean energy and climate resilience. We must push the World Bank and we must push the International Monetary Fund to do more and to do better, and we must stop subsidizing, financing, and approving new fossil fuel plants around the world.

We cannot preach temperance from a barstool. And the United States right now is drunk on oil and natural gas production and exports from our country around the world. Plus, we continue to foot the bill for other countries' fossil-fueled binges.

In the face of these challenges, the answer is not to reverse course on our climate and clean energy commitments. It is to double down. It is to do more. It is to respond to this moral challenge to our country and to our planet, to the challenge which young people are given, to this body, and to the world to respond to a crisis that was not dealt with by preceding generations.

Trying to solve climate change without a phaseout of fossil fuels is like trying to end lung cancer without getting off cigarettes. Our prescription here is clear: Phase out fossil fuels and build clean economies here at home and abroad at the same time.

And I look forward to continuing to partner with my colleagues in Congress, members of Parliament around the world pushing for a fossil- free future, environmental and climate justice organizations led by young people, and all those who are working for a global Green New Deal. Young people are leading us, and we must respond to them.

They are right and the fossil fuel industry is wrong on every one of these issues, and we have to continue to respond to this challenge politically. We have taken important steps, and the Senators who are here today led that effort but without a single Republican vote. We cannot sprint toward the solutions if we do not have more support from the Republican Party. We will not have credibility with the rest of the world if we continue to build LNG export facilities to send natural gas around the world, to addict countries to natural gas while we should be helping them to deploy wind, solar, all-electric vehicles, battery storage technologies, and other clean energy technologies.

That is what we should be doing. We have to end this era where we are about to try to build dozens of LNG--liquefied natural gas--plants to addict the rest of the world.

Fossil fuel climate change is a threat to each and every one of us. So each and every one of us has a role to play in heeding the COP's call to action.

I thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank you for your leadership. Thank you for convening us here today.

Madam President, 2 weeks ago, our Nation surpassed 38 mass murders--the highest level since 2006. Since then, at least three additional mass murders have occurred. This harrowing record serves as another forceful call to action for Congress. We must act today to end gun violence. That is why I rise today in support of my 3D Printed Gun Safety Act.

I rise for those festival-goers in Las Vegas. I rise for patrons of Pulse nightclub and Club Q. I rise for the children in Sandy Hook, Uvalde, and Nashville. I rise for Mainers in Lewiston. I rise for all those victims whose names are not well known and whose stories do not dominate the airwaves. I rise, I rise, and I rise again.

There is no conceivable reason to further delay another gun violence prevention vote in the U.S. Senate. Senate Republicans are blocking the will of the American people and exposing Americans to unnecessary bloodshed.

This month, the Gun Violence Archive reported just under 40,000 gun- related deaths in the United States this year, including over 22,000 suicides. Additionally, over 1,500 minors under the age of 18 have been fatally shot.

I rise today for the 40,000 families whose lives are forever changed because Republicans refuse to take action on gun violence--40,000 families.

This Congress unfortunately has no shortage of brutally tragic stories to remind us that the most vulnerable among us will continue to suffer from firearm violence if we fail to act. We need to act now--and we should have acted a long time ago--to pass commonsense legislation that keeps guns out of dangerous hands.

There is a long list of commonsense bills that Democrats have introduced this Congress to prevent gun violence, but Republicans have not allowed a vote on a single bill. None of the bills have ever seen debate on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Just last week, Republicans blocked votes on a bill requiring safe storage of firearms and on a background checks bill, which is supported by 9 out of 10 Americans.

Experts continue to point to the availability of guns as the primary cause of the rise in gun violence in our country. It is unconscionable for my colleagues on the other side to continue to ignore this reality.

We are now faced with a terrifying new source of gun violence: 3D- printed firearms. 3D printing is an easy, quick, and inexpensive method for people to obtain a firearm who otherwise would be prohibited from doing so. Middle schoolers with access to their school's computer labs could print them. Convicted domestic abusers could print them.

It is not only 3D-printed guns but also gun components, 3D-printed components, including silencers, scopes, and braces, which increase lethality for those who are harmed by them, and 3D-

printed components can turn a semiautomatic firearm into an automatic firearm.

These guns present modern and unique challenges. Some 3D-printed guns are entirely plastic and evade metal detectors. This increases safety risks in public venues secured with metal detectors, such as airports, courts, concert halls, and government buildings. And 3D-printed guns are not typically serialized and therefore are not readily traceable. That increases the burden on local law enforcement as they work to solve cases across our country.

It is imperative that we put an end to the proliferation of these deadly weapons. So how can we do it? Well, we need to stop this problem at the source: readily available online blueprints.

Currently, the online sharing of blueprints is legal in all but two States in our country. My bill, the 3D Printed Gun Safety Act, would change that. My bill would make it unlawful to intentionally distribute 3D printer files that can produce firearms or any related parts. This change is common sense and constitutional, and it will save lives. A world where 3D printing instructions for firearms are freely accessible is a world where anyone can have a machine gun printed out in minutes.

I understand and appreciate that we do not all share the same views on gun violence prevention, but thousands of Americans have already died this year due to Republican obstructionism on sensible gun violence prevention reform.

We must end the stranglehold the National Rifle Association--the NRA--has on congressional Republicans. It is time to make NRA stand for ``not relevant anymore'' in American politics. That is what has to happen. That is the revolution we need in this country.

I thank Senator Menendez and Representative Moskowitz for their partnership. I thank Brady, Everytown, Giffords, and March for Our Lives for their advocacy. I thank the many organizations and organizers on the ground who are in every State helping families and communities to heal from the devastating impacts of gun violence. I thank my Democratic colleagues, who have staunchly supported every action that has come to this floor in an attempt to put an end to the scourge of gun violence.

Gun violence is tearing apart Republican and Democratic communities alike in this country. Stand with us on the right side of history. Today, we can start the long process that we are going to need of national healing right here in this Chamber.

I ask my colleagues for their support for my bill today.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged from further consideration of S. 1819, the 3D Printed Gun Safety Act of 2023, and that the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration. I further ask consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.