Floor Statements

Mr. President, I rise today to discuss the MERIT Act, the Minimum Experience Requirements for Intelligence Transition Act--a lot of words, but the bill is simple. It requires anyone serving as the Director of National Intelligence--even in a temporary capacity--to have extensive national security experience.

It is common sense. You don't hand the keys to America's intelligence community to someone who has no experience, regardless of party or political loyalty.

The Director of National Intelligence is a powerful job, and I know because I was there at the creation. I was one of the first people at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, when it was stood up. I was seconded there as a CIA officer. I helped stand it up after Congress created it so that we never again miss a terrorist attack, like we did on 9/11.

The Office uses powerful tools to gather secrets from our foreign adversaries, like China and Russia, from terrorist networks, and from threats to our homeland. But it is that power in the wrong hands that I want to talk about today.

America's national intelligence community can be used to gather information not just from our foreign adversaries but, if turned against us, against the American people, it can be used to monitor Americans, to target political opponents, to dig through records, to punish critics, to help any President relitigate an election.

Right now, that is where we are.

Mr. President, I rise today to address the events that took place exactly 4 years ago today when the Supreme Court ruled on Dobbs v. Jackson, overturning Roe v. Wade, stripping away reproductive rights for women that we have relied upon for generations.

That decision sent shock waves through the country. Something that many of us, women of my age, relied upon for our entire lives were certainly and suddenly not available to our kids and our grandkids. And as States like Michigan were looking into the reality of a full abortion ban, we had to get to work.

In Michigan, we had a 1931 abortion ban which banned abortions even in the cases of rape and incest. It criminalized nurses and doctors who provided such care, and it was slated to become law again in the wake of the Dobbs decision.

In the face of that, Michiganders went to work; that is what we do. We rally together. We got over 700,000 signatures in the better part of 10 weeks. We organized getting on to our ballot a vote on reproductive freedom including abortion care for our State; and we did this so that women and girls that come after us were in control of their reproductive lives, not politicians and certainly not anyone in this body.

Now, the examples of who this affected are legion, but let me just focus on one woman Sarah from Byron Center, MI. Sarah had already had four miscarriages but was filled with so much hope for her fifth pregnancy. Unfortunately, after 19 weeks she received a devastating call from her doctor that she had a baby dying inside of her. Thankfully, Sarah was able to get the abortion care she needed from her doctor so she wouldn't be exposed to life-threatening bacteria and infections which could have killed her.

Right now in States across the country when other women face this same reality, they are told to wait. They are told to hope they don't get an infection, and they hope they are not left to die.

Even worse, mothers are dying of preventable deaths, leaving their children without a parent, all because of politics and reversing Roe v. Wade 4 years ago today. Now just because the story is 4 years old doesn't mean it is over. Women continue to face a two-front war to get access to abortion care, even in a State like Michigan. Access to care and the cost of care is still inhibiting who has access to reproductive care.

More than a dozen States across the country have a total ban on abortion, and the people in this Chamber and around this town continue to chip away at women's access everywhere they turn. Women are struggling to get access to healthcare via telehealth. Families are struggling to access contraception and plan for their futures. Doctors are being criminalized for doing their jobs. Cuts to healthcare, cuts to Planned Parenthood have forced organizations to shut their doors, and politicians who can't outlaw abortion nationwide are trying to outlaw abortion medication, which is how a full half of women get their abortions.

All of this comes with a cost, expensive bills, traveling long distances, and adds risk to people's health. The Dobbs decision was a cautionary tale. Even though the Supreme Court allowed abortion over 50 years ago, this body decided not to act. We never legislated a woman's right to choose.

Our grandparents should have taken action on this issue, and we would have reproductive freedom now across the country if we had done so. I think it is an important tale for what this body can and cannot do, what it should and should not do.

It certainly has incredible consequences. So I just wanted to recognize on the 4-year anniversary of the reversal of Roe v. Wade where we are and that the fight continues.

Mr. President, I want to turn to one of my favorite things, honoring people back home in the State of Michigan. Michiganders deliver and show up for each other. We grow food for our families. We make the cars that power and drive America. We create products that brighten people's days. We achieve milestones that inspire our youngest minds. And when we see a problem or a neighbor in need, we step in to help.

So I want to focus today on a couple of stories from the State of Michigan that recognize the important contribution of some of our organizations and some of our companies.

Here on the Senate floor it is my honor to enter into the record these stories into the people's history of the United States. Today is officially our first ``Michigan History Makers'' in a series honoring Michiganders' contributions to our Nation. And by entering their names into the Congressional Record, their stories will be memorialized for good so that their great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren can see the contribution these organizations have made.

Today, I want to pay a tribute to Shenandoah Country Club. This is a country club owned and operated by the Chaldean community or Iraqi Christian community of Michigan. On March 12, it was a sunny, late winter day in Michigan at Temple Israel, a synagogue in West Bloomfield, MI. Young children were playing together and learning in a classroom painted orange and blue. A teacher had just placed babies as young as 15 months down for a nap and suddenly a gunman rammed his car through the temple.

His goal was to do massive harm on one of the largest synagogues in the country to target the youngest, most vulnerable of the Jewish community, innocent children. There were gunshots, crying babies, teachers running with children in their arms, and people fleeing for their lives.

The people of Temple Israel felt like they had nowhere to turn, but the Shenandoah Country Club is directly across the street, and that is where they went.

The staff and leadership at the country club did not hesitate to step up as a safe haven and open their doors as refuge for over 100 children and other Jewish community members.

It immediately became the reunification site where worried parents could hug their children again, and it became a place where everyone could sigh a breath of relief that no children or teachers were harmed.

The club provided shelter, blankets, and food for the families and then the next day transformed their ballroom to host a Shabbat gathering of over 1,000 Jewish worshippers, which I participated in.

What struck me most was the positivity in what was otherwise a very dark moment. The Chaldean community didn't ask whether the families arriving at their doors looked like them, prayed like them, or came from the same background; they saw their neighbors in need, and they answered the call. Their kindness and hospitality were the silver lining in an otherwise terrible attack.

With profound gratitude for their extraordinary contributions to the people of Michigan, it is my honor to recognize the Shenandoah Country Club and the Chaldean community here in the Senate of the United States.

Mr. President, today, I pay tribute to the National Cherry Festival volunteers. Michigan is proud to be the ``Cherry Capital of the World,'' and Traverse City is home to most of our cherry industry.

Every year, the city puts on the National Cherry Festival, which attracts visitors from across the country and celebrates Michigan's cherry growers, processors, and retailers.

This year, the National Cherry Festival celebrates 100 years, and I want to recognize the more than 2,800 volunteers who bring that festival to life.

Early next month, more than half a million people are going to descend on Traverse City for the festival. They will sing along with concerts. They will watch the ``Cherries Got Talent'' competition, where performers show off their talents. They will watch Michiganders race one another in creatively decorated beds on wheels. There will be a dog-jumping competition. They will watch teams launch handcrafted boats--built entirely from recycled milk cartons--into West Grand Traverse Bay. And they will, of course, have a parade and name their National Cherry Queen. And that is not the end of it.

All of this is possible because of the hard-working, committed volunteers that put this thing on. Because of their service, Northern Michigan's economy will be boosted by more than $40 million--money in the pockets of hard-working families. Hundreds of thousands of dollars will go to local charities that are working to build a better community for their neighbors.

With profound gratitude for the volunteers' extraordinary contributions to the people of Michigan, it is my honor to recognize their hard work here in the Senate of the United States.

Mr. President, I want to pay tribute to Vernors ginger ale. In other States, you may know Coke or Pepsi, but in Michigan, we know the answer is only a Vernors when we want to celebrate.

Vernors is an iconic ginger ale that Michiganders have enjoyed for generations. Created by pharmacist James Vernor in the 1860s, it is the oldest ginger ale brand in the United States. It is a proud Michigan original that was produced for more than 100 years in the city of Detroit.

Every Michigan family has a Vernors story. Some remember drinking it on a hot summer afternoon. Others--myself included--remember being handed a glass of Vernors when they had a stomachache or were home sick from school. My dad actually, in his one break from working in the meat industry, worked for Vernors and traveled every day down from Holly, MI, to downtown Detroit. We were so proud that he worked for such an important Michigan brand.

To me and to all Michigan families, Vernors is a reminder of the generations of Michiganders who put in the work and built the brands that keep our State on the map. And this year, Vernors celebrated 160 years as a Michigan staple. Here is to 160 more.

With profound gratitude for its contributions to the people of Michigan, it is my honor to recognize Vernors in the Senate of the United States.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, today it is my honor to recognize Nazamovia Adams-Phillips, known to many as Naz.

When Naz was deciding on a career, she knew she wanted to be a nurse: someone who cares for those who need it, nurtures the sick on their journey to better health, and helps people get more time to spend with their loved ones.

For 40 years, Naz led a distinguished career as a nurse. And as an African-American woman, she is a pioneer, paving the way for other female nurses that look like her.

Naz was born in Oxford, MS, in 1936. Her family later moved to Jackson, MI, where she attended Jackson High School and Jackson Community College. She studied at the Mercy School of Nursing of Detroit--Jackson Unit, where she was the program's first African- American graduate.

Naz then worked at Mercy Medical Center in Ohio, where she was the second African-American nurse hired. During her tenure at the hospital, Naz served across multiple departments, including the operating room, recovery room, medical/surgical, and IV services. At the hospital, she dedicated herself to caring for patients and was a leader among her colleagues. Soon, she became the director of utilization review and quality assurance, establishing her as the first African-American department director.

Naz's service extends to her faith and her family. Naz was also the first African American to chair the Mercy Medical Center's Mission and Philosophy Committee, meaning she also became the first African American to speak in the hospital chapel. Outside the hospital, Naz has been a steadfast member and leader at the Bethel CME Church for over 65 years.

Naz is also a devoted wife and mother to 7 children, including my dear friend Ernest. She also proudly cares for her 11 grandchildren and 7 great-grandchildren. She has served as a guiding light within her community, especially to her family and friends. In all she does, Naz is strong-willed, dedicated, loyal, giving, and deeply God-fearing.

This year, as we recognize Naz's 90th birthday, we also honor her decades of service to the people of Michigan, Ohio, and the entire Nation. It is my honor

to recognize Naz and her lifelong dedication to saving lives and taking action to make her community better.

Mr. President, today I acknowledge and congratulate the International Hearing Society, IHS, on their 75th anniversary. IHS is headquartered in Farmington Hills, MI, and is responsible for representing the Nation's 10,000 hearing aid specialists. IHS and its members have been serving the millions of Americans with hearing loss since 1951.

IHS's work has supported countless patients and providers, in Michigan and across the country, by empowering hearing healthcare professionals with education, specialized training, and professional development.

IHS's commitment to the hearing aid community is unmatched and their passionate work is appreciated in Michigan and beyond. Congratulations on 75 years of advocating for education, growth, and innovation in hearing healthcare.

Mr. President, I just want to start with reviewing the bidding and why we are here.

We are having an American cultural conversation about the role of ICE and law enforcement--Federal law enforcement--in our streets and in our cities and particularly because two Americans were killed in Minnesota because of ICE, CBP: Alex Pretti, 37 years old, a nurse in a VA hospital, shot multiple

times, killed while exercising his right to assemble.

Video shows it. So that no matter where you are in the political spectrum, your eyes do not lie.

Renee Good--shot and killed by ICE agents in her car on January 7-- and a third American citizen killed by Homeland Security agents, the first being Keith Porter, who was killed on New Year's Eve in L.A. That is not counting the 32 people who have been killed in ICE's custody in 2025, including one in Baldwin, MI--the most fatalities in 1 year than in more than two decades combined.

These three people should be alive, but their deaths are the culmination of something much bigger. The behavior of our Federal forces in our streets strikes at the heart of who we are as Americans. I am not going to list everything ICE is doing, but I want you to think about what would happen if these things happened to you, to your community, to your neighbors: being pulled over and asked for your papers as you shop at Target or drive on a highway off-ramp or stand in line for a flight; agents shooting tear gas at your kids' playground; being held at gunpoint inside your own home and taken to a police precinct, in your underwear, in subfreezing temperatures, and then being released, without apology, after being held for hours, even though you are an American citizen.

Imagine someone in a mask breaking your car window and pulling you and your 2-year-old daughter out of that car.

Imagine being shot with rubber bullets at a protest in America; masked men detaining your 5-year-old coming home from preschool; being pepper-sprayed while praying aloud; tear gas filling your car on your way home from a basketball game and then having to do CPR on your 6- month-old to help him breathe; then being beaten, shot repeatedly, and killed because you are exercising your Second Amendment right. Imagine being taken to a detention facility and not being able to communicate with your family.

All of these things happened in Minneapolis, and that is not my sense or, I think, the average American's sense of freedom. When people turned on the TV and saw these things happening with their own eyes, they understood it as something that ran completely contrary to who we are as a people, and it certainly spit in the face of how we became a nation in the first place--with the rebellion that our American forefathers launched not too far north of here because of an oppressive government--because of an oppressive regime--that was using brutal tactics in the streets and in people's homes.

So that is why we are here today--to have very commonsense reforms on Federal law enforcement because of what we all saw with our own eyes.

Now, these things that we are calling for are not radical, right? They are the things that we ask of our local police: Be clear on who you are and what law enforcement unit you are from, have some way of identifying that you are part of official law enforcement, don't wear a mask so that we understand who you are, have a judicial warrant if you want to go inside someone's house--you have to prove that there is a reason to go inside an American citizen's home.

These are things our law enforcement does every single day in our cities and in our towns, but the other side of the aisle refuses to have that conversation. What they would rather do is ignore that conversation altogether even though Kristi Noem got fired over it and local ICE agent Bovino got fired for all of that behavior, even though they themselves, from the White House, were willing to consider some sort of reform because they know they are on their heels because they know they got on the wrong side of history. We are here today because the other side of the aisle is refusing to have an even basic conversation on those reforms and wants to fully fund ICE with no changes.

I will close with this: We are here talking about this issue when, in fact, what the average person wants to talk about when I am out in Michigan or anywhere else are the things that this President said he was going to cover, which were tackling the fundamental costs of living, tackling the fundamental things that are keeping people up at night and making them feel like they can't achieve the American dream in America. The lists of things this President said he was going to do could fill up a ream of paper.

Certainly, the President won his election by talking about what he was going to do domestically, but I think we have to accept now, as we continue to see the war drag on with Iran, that this President has become fundamentally a foreign policy President. He has taken military action in 9 locations around the world in his first 15 months--more than any single President in history, Democrat or Republican.

He is focusing his energy and his administration's resources on issues abroad while the average thing that hurts Americans isn't being tackled at all. Think about housing, healthcare, the price of food, and now, certainly, the prices of gas and utilities. In Michigan, we are now at $4 a gallon, approximately, for gas and $5 a gallon for diesel. Healthcare premiums have gone up. Housing has only gotten more expensive in the past year. By any objective measure, things are more expensive than the day this President took office.

He can pretend and say what he wants about how costs have actually come down and that it is ``no big deal'' that gas prices are up, but we know that, in the United States of America, we have a shrinking middle class. That is an objective fact. That is not a political statement. It has gotten harder to stay in and be in the middle class, and it has gotten harder to save every month.

It is the issue that unites young people who are thinking about how they are going to afford college, whether they are ever going to be able to own a home the way their parents are, and the workers down at the GM plant who are wondering: Will I be able to have that fishing cabin up north? Will I be able to take a vacation the way my parents were able to do so with the same job?

On our economy, we know that we need, fundamentally, three big things in order to compete in the future as the future of work is changing. So, when we are distracted by things like wars and things like American cultural conversations on other issues, it means there is an opportunity cost for the things we are not talking about. What we need more than anything right now is a focus on three big things. For our economy, we need to focus on people, we need to focus on chips, and we need to focus on power.

On people, we know that, between artificial intelligence and a whole bunch of other things going on, we are going to have a changing economy. We need great public schools that are well-funded, and we need to get people comfortable with the fact that they are going to have to do more than just the K through 12. I call it K through 12 plus two. You have got to do something after high school to prepare yourself for this next new world that we are in. That can be an apprenticeship with a union. That can be an associate's degree. That can be a training program for one of our companies.

It means K through 12 plus two is upon us, and we need to start thinking about it that way. We need to centralize every single job training program. We have 17 job training programs in the Federal Government alone. They are all in different Departments and Agencies. We need a one-stop shop for our young people to be like: If I want a job for the future, how do I get trained or retrained for that?

On chips, every single one of you has chips in your pocket. You have a cell phone or you have some sort of piece of technology that depends on chips. They are in everything that we use and in everything we need to grow our economy.

Over the last decade or so, we have been, really, at the mercy of China when it comes to chips. I want to make chips here in America with American factories and American labor, and I want chips to put Americans to work. We made them and invented them in the first place, and I want to make them again so that we don't live under a veto from China.

On power, we can't do any of what we need to do unless we have the amount of power that we are going to need to power our economy; and without major changes to our electrical grid, we are in trouble on the issue of power. Our

grid is a national security asset. It powers our economy. We know we are going to have more and more companies trying to take more and more power out of the grid. It is old and outdated. Again, I think that is something this body could agree on and focus on, but we are not because we are busy fighting these kinds of cultural conversations that we are having.

So I wanted to put down, in front of everyone here, some of the opportunity costs and some of the things we are not doing here in the U.S. Senate because we are focusing on these terrible cultural conversations that are happening when things like Minneapolis erupt. We are not talking about the economy, and we are not attacking the problems that are plaguing most Americans. That is because we have a refusal to talk about just basic reforms, simple things we could do in an hour.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I object, and I think--look, all of us here understand, because we travel twice a week, what TSA is going through. That is why we should immediately, today, fully fund TSA. If you care about paying TSA, let's pay TSA today.

So I object. If we want to actually pay TSA, let's do it right now. My colleague from Ohio, we both know what it is like to go back and forth to the Midwest every single week. Want to fund TSA? Want to have humanity for the people who are securing us? Let's fully fund them today.

Will the Senator yield?

It is not hard to notice that, right now, our country is going through a pretty fundamental conversation about the role of ICE and law enforcement in our city streets. We know that it is a cultural conversation in the United States of America because the previous head--the previous Secretary--of Homeland Security got fired because of the disaster that went on in Minneapolis.

I sat, as you did, in the hearing with Markwayne Mullin yesterday because we need a new Secretary of Homeland Security. Every American in the world, Democrat and Republican, understands that is because ICE so deeply contradicted American values in our American cities.

So we are having a full-on cultural conversation about the role of law enforcement in our streets.

In the meantime, you and I can agree every day of the week on the role of Border Patrol; CBP; FEMA, which we desperately need; the Coast Guard, which no one has more Coast Guard, pretty much, than Michigan. So I am ready to fund those things now, but I don't think we can ignore the fact that ICE is, right now, an unsettled issue in the United States of America.

We are not settled. People are negotiating because we are not settled. And even this week, the President of the United States sent a letter down here to talk about the reforms he acknowledges we need in some form or fashion.

Now, some of those reforms, to me, are basic and don't go far enough--like we won't deport American citizens. But even the President acknowledges we have a problem with ICE. So let's excise that one part that we are having an American conversation on and then fully fund the other stuff here and now today. That is what I am proposing.

Of course.

Will you yield?

I am proposing today just the UC on TSA, but my colleagues, one after another, have proposed funding the Coast Guard, Border Patrol, FEMA. So whichever way we want to do the package-- individually or all but ICE--I am here for it.

I will do you one better on your proposal. I 100 percent agree.

When I first came to the Congress in 2019, we were in a government shutdown, in the first Trump administration, right? President Trump had a shutdown. That is how I came to the Congress. My very first bill as a Congressperson--bipartisan, by the way; the Problem Solvers Caucus; a bunch of us did it--was that if the government isn't fully funded, then Congresspeople, A, do not get paid, and B--I will go one further--are not allowed to have government pay for their travel back home, meaning they have to sit their butts down in Washington and negotiate and get it done then and there, without taking taxpayer dollars to go back home. So whether you want to add a $500 fee, whatever it is--this body is for appropriating money, so I am here for whatever you want to propose.

But I think you have to acknowledge and even the President acknowledges at this point that the American public--Democrat, Independent, and Republican--does not like American citizens being killed in our streets. They do not like going into a human being's home without a judicial warrant. They don't like children being taken and tear-gassed and caught in the crossfire; non-well-trained officers pulling people out of cars and getting into dangerous situations; people being targeted.

You should hate this. When you are walking into Target, they had ICE officers pulling people aside because they looked like they were immigrants and checking their papers. Do you know what that does to a Jew? Do you know what that means, to just check people's papers because of how they look? You should hate that.

So for me, whether we agree or disagree--and I would hope we would agree on the use of force in America--set that aside. Fund everything else today, now, here. Penalize Members of the Senate who want to go home and ignore the problem--I am with you on that.

But you are holding all of those Agencies hostage because of ICE. You are defending them and not allowing them to get their paychecks. You are holding them back from those three paychecks, not Democrats. We are here ready to pay. You are so protective of ICE, so protective of this President that you will not fund the other parts of DHS, and that is our homeland security. I know about that. That is my entire life. You know. You care about that. I know you do, Senator.

So, please, just excise the thing we are not agreeing on, fund the rest of it, let's get on with it, and understand that the American public has made their voice clear on this issue.

I am suggesting that we get everybody in a room on the ICE issue. Lock them in a room here in the Capitol--our negotiators. I need the President to send his envoy so we can actually make some decisions. It has been hard to negotiate with Senate Republicans on this issue because they need the blessing of the White House. Get all the players in a room. We will sit down. I will do it. I will be here all day and all night and all weekend.

But I have to tell you, you can't use one group of people as a shield to not fund all the other border missions, all the other funding, FEMA. You can't do it.

Please.

I am in.

I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 362, S. 4127; that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

I object.

Mr. President, I rise today against the so-called SAVE America Act.

I believe that our elections are the foundation of our democracy. Most Americans do. It is how we protect our country from tyranny and dictatorship. It is how we remain the greatest country in the world. But the SAVE Act does not safeguard our elections; it does the opposite.

My Republican colleagues like to repeat over and over that this is about voter ID at the polls, that showing ID at the polls is something we have to do, and that is what this bill is about.

That already happens. Most Americans--99.999 percent of Americans do what everyone else does: They walk into the polls on election day. They bring their ID. The volunteers and the clerks check your ID, they check it to the voter rolls, and they say: Come on in and go ahead and vote. That already happens across the country and certainly in the State of Michigan.

This bill is not about voter ID, which hopefully all Americans are in agreement about; it is about making it harder to vote so that more Americans are excluded from voting.

It requires that Americans have proof of citizenship in order to vote. Just by example, I brought my Michigan license, OK? Michigan license--it is the official State version. There is no proof of citizenship. It says my address. It says my eye color. It says all these things, but it does not have my citizenship. It is just not on the license. For most Americans, it is not on the license.

So how would I prove my citizenship? Well, I can do it, I guess, in two ways. You can either bring a passport with you or you can bring an original birth certificate in the name you want to vote with.

Passports--60 percent of Michiganders have no passport. They have never applied for one. They don't need one. They are not interested in one.

If you want to get a passport, it is nearly $200. So now we are charging a fee for people to do what I hope most people believe is a God-given right as an American--to vote. If not, you have to have an original copy of your birth certificate in the name you want to vote in. Well, as you can imagine, for millions and millions of women who took their married name, took their husband's name, their birth certificate doesn't show the name they plan to vote with. So it puts an unbelievably onerous requirement on those married women.

This bill also truly constrains mail-in voting. This is going to hurt senior citizens, military, folks in nursing homes, college students who don't live at home. This is intended simply to make it harder to vote.

I want to double-tap this because Michiganders weighed in on the ballot on this very issue. In 2018, Michiganders voted in a law that said that anyone could vote absentee for any reason, and it passed with 67 percent of the vote. And I will remind you that Donald Trump has won my State twice. In the years since, voter participation has gone up. I would hope that would be seen as a good thing.

Mail-in voting is safe, it is secure, it is the law in Michigan, and undoing it is simply to satisfy President Trump's very specific goals of making sure ``only the right people vote.''

As a nation, we have made a lot of strides in the past 50 years in getting more people to vote. The SAVE Act undoes that, and it represents a significant change--it gives the Federal Government enormous power over voting. That is exactly what the Founding Fathers wanted to avoid. They specifically wrote into the Constitution that the administration of elections is to be done by the States. In the commentary on it, they said that was because we never want a President and his supporters to have overwhelming power over the organs of democracy, over the foundation of our elections. So they give that administrative power to the States.

President Trump and my colleagues across the aisle have railed against Federal involvement in our elections. They have signed amicus briefs and talked about overreach by the Federal Government in our elections--when they thought it was going to hurt them. Now they have done a complete 180.

If you want to understand where my colleagues really stand on this issue, just look at their comments and President Trump's Statement of Administration Policy when the House in 2019 passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Act--literally in many ways a codification of the Voting Rights Act of the late sixties.

Many of my colleagues were happy to criticize the Federal Government telling States how to run their elections. They gave speeches about it. They went on the media about it and talked all about Democratic overreach.

But this is how you know they have lost the plot--because when it is their team that is in power, when it is their team that is in the White House, when it is their team that is giving them their orders, they are happy to federalize things.

Everybody knows that the Republican Party was always the party of smaller government and States' rights. That is like the brand.

So now here we are. Donald Trump says in the State of the Union that if his team doesn't win in November, the elections are rigged, and he only wants ``the right people voting.''

So here we have this bill that they don't have the votes for, and they are talking about what they are going to do to help ``save America.''

In Michigan, just to put the issue in perspective, because my colleagues like facts, we have about 6 million voters out of 10 million in our State. In 2024, in an election won by Donald Trump--wasn't contested by anyone on the other side of the aisle--15 individual voters were flagged as potentially being noncitizens--15 out of 6 million. Even one noncitizen voting is a bad thing, and they should be held accountable, and they were to the highest and utmost of the law in Michigan, including spending some time in jail for one guy. But 15 out of 6 million is 0.00025 percent. These 15 were flagged and even confirmed quickly as noncitizens.

This bill is like using a bazooka to go after a housefly. It is not smart. And in the process, it makes it harder for millions of Americans--particularly women--to vote in these elections. And make no mistake, that is the point.

We are only debating this bill because of one fact: Donald Trump doesn't like to lose elections, and his team wants to shield him from another embarrassing loss this coming fall. That is it.

He has shown us from the beginning how he feels about fraud. Seven months before the 2020 election, he got up in front of the United States and said: If I don't win in 2020, the election is rigged.

You know, people in this body wrote strongly worded letters. They pooh-poohed it. They said there is no way an American President will actually try to refute the results of a democratic election where clerks, Democrat and Republican, across the country are just doing their jobs.

Fast-forward to January 6, and people in this body are hightailing it off this floor, barricading themselves in their offices--as I did on the House side--looking for a weapon to protect themselves, as a mob instigated by the President crashed into this very floor. It sounds familiar to me.

In the State of the Union just a month ago, the President said:

The only way the Democrats can get elected is if they

cheat.

Is that what my colleagues on the other side of the aisle believe? Do you believe that the only way that I am here is because I cheated?

Donald Trump won on the top of my ballot. Did I cheat to get here? Did he win his last election or no?

Passing the SAVE Act will ``guarantee the midterms'' for Republicans--another thing he said.

We are only here because you are doing his bidding and trying to pass a bill that he says will help him guarantee the election.

He said:

We will never lose a race. . . . For 50 years [if this

passes], we won't lose a race.

Does that sound like someone who actually gives a flying fig about actual democracy or does that sound like someone who is asking his boys to rig elections for him in November?

Now, I was polite the last time the President of the United States did this. In 2020, I was one of those people who said: You know what, the President can't really mean this. Let's send letters. Let's talk about it politely on camera.

I spoke up at hearings. We asked the military what they were going to do if the President tried to steal the election.

Frankly, I and a lot of us on this floor had a failure of imagination for what this President would do, but I am not going to make that mistake again.

I will close with this: The President of the United States has laid out what he believes for everyone to see. We have to believe the words he is telling us.

That same President is now grinding the Senate to a halt by trying to pass a bill that doesn't do a single thing for your pocketbook, your house, your kids, your healthcare, or anything else he ran on. He is busy taking weeks at a time on this floor--time we could otherwise be working in a bipartisan manner to pass things that would help people with their cost of living--but he wants to do this because he wants to make sure he is not embarrassed in the fall.

All of those promises he said he was going to fulfill, that he has left open--he doesn't want the chickens to come home to roost for him in November.

So as Michiganders are waiting in line at the gas pumps right now, as the price of gas jumps 60 cents per day in some cases, as middle-class Americans are unable to buy a home, we are talking about making it harder for women and old people and the military to vote.

Instead of addressing the fundamental issues of Americans, we are doing the bidding of the President of the United States because he told us all that if he doesn't win, it is rigged, so we better cover down for him.

This is not what we should be spending our time on. Focus on the issues that the American public is calling all of us--asking us to address. It is not what we need.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today because of what is going on in Minneapolis. As we have all seen in realtime with our own eyes, Alex Pretti, 37 years old, nurse at the VA, shot multiple times and killed by Border Patrol while he was exercising his right to peacefully assemble.

The video shows us what happened. He was disarmed at the time that he was shot, defenseless, not a threat when he was shot and killed. Before him was Renee Good, shot and killed by ICE agents in her car on January 7.

Separate from those 2, we have 32 people who have died in ICE custody in 2025, including one in Baldwin, MI--more fatalities in 1 year than in more than two decades.

These folks shouldn't be going through this, but the deaths that we saw in Minneapolis are the culmination of something much bigger. We are experiencing a cultural moment in the United States of America that cuts to the heart of who we are as Americans, and it relates to the behavior of Federal forces in our streets. It strikes to the heart of who we are as Americans.

Now, this isn't about any one thing, but I do think that it is important for Americans to understand that despite some of the rolling back that the President has done over the last few days, ICE agents are still in Minnesota, still acting 3,000 strong in ways that I believe run against the American consciousness.

So I am going to list out some of the things that I have heard and we have seen, and I want Americans to think about how they would feel if these very things were going on in their own towns, in their own States, in their own communities.

Imagine being pulled over and asked for your papers as you pull into the parking lot at Target. Imagine Federal agents waiting at the top of off-ramps from the highway where you have to stop, determining by looking at you if you might be an illegal alien and asking you to pull over and show your papers.

Imagine you are at the airport trying to depart on a flight to go overseas and ICE agents are at the boarding area asking to see your papers, and when you ask them: Are you just indiscriminately pulling us aside and checking our status, they threaten you with a $10,000 fine for obstructing Federal agents.

Imagine, in your kid's elementary school on the playground, agents are shooting tear gas. Imagine being held at gunpoint in your own home, taken to a police precinct in your underwear in subfreezing temperatures and then released without an apology when they realize: Oops. You actually are an American citizen.

Imagine agents with full kit on, no identifying information, masks, breaking your car window when your 2-year-old is in the backseat. Imagine peacefully protesting and having rubber bullets shot at you.

Imagine masked men detaining a 5-year-old who is coming home from preschool. Imagine being pepper-sprayed as clergy while you are praying out loud. Imagine tear gas filling your car on your way home from a basketball game with your children in the backseat and doing CPR on a 6-month-old who stopped breathing.

Imagine being the family watching on video as your loved one is beaten and shot repeatedly and killed because they were exercising their Second Amendment right and being present in their First Amendment right with freedom of speech.

And then imagine being grabbed off the street and taken to a detention facility without your family or a lawyer knowing where you are.

Every one of these things has happened in Minneapolis in the past 30 days. If you have a problem with any of

those things happening to you, you should have a problem with those things happening in Minneapolis.

It doesn't matter if you are a Democrat or Republican. This is not about political party.

In my State, we have seen political protests over the last 5 years for all kinds of political persuasions. And I want people to imagine that if they will do this in Minneapolis, there is no stopping them--or some future administration--from doing this to you for what you care about.

Now, I think it is lucky that we grew up in this country, and we are taught over and over about the values of freedom of speech, freedom of peaceful protest. I think that it is important that young people are taught these things and that they come to live in a place very deep in all Americans that I know.

And because of that, I think Americans have kind of an internal redline for authoritarian behavior; there are just some things that look and smell and feel wrong, given our history and given our values.

I think what is most abhorrent about what is going on in Minneapolis is that it runs against the fundamental freedoms of who we are as Americans.

Now, the President, who ran, in many ways, on the issue of immigration, has managed to piss off everybody--left, right, and center. Whether you are Joe Rogan or Zach Bryan or everyone in-between, the tide has turned, and the President knows it. That is why he is slinking Bovino and other people out of town. That is why he is changing his tune.

But what he says publicly is still fundamentally different from what is going on today in Minneapolis. You still have 3,000 agents doing the same list of things that I am talking about. It has not changed. So until the actions change, words don't matter.

Now, Michiganders have been clear with me that there need to be consequences for this kind of anti-American behavior, and that starts with leadership. We have a cast of characters who are in charge of policy related to immigration.

Let's start with Secretary Kristi Noem. She should resign. If she doesn't resign, the President should do what he has done in the past and fire her. And if she doesn't get fired, she should be impeached, because while she is not the only one who is the brains behind these operations, she was the one who got the big job. She was the one who sat in front of many of us for Senate confirmation. And she has done nothing to defend the values that she claimed when she held her hand up and swore to protect them.

Now, I will tell you, back a year ago, I was one of those people who voted for Kristi Noem. I voted yes on her nomination. I come from the State of Michigan. We have major border crossings, some of the biggest border crossings in America, and we are about to open one of the largest new border bridges in the world, the Gordie Howe Bridge to Canada. We need her. We needed her to staff that new bridge, to pay attention when we had issues with CBP or Border Patrol, when we needed more resources. She sat in my office. I invited her in. And she told me how she was a former Governor. She had received Federal support through FEMA. She knew what it was like, and she was going to uphold those same things that she depended on as a Governor, when it came to being the Secretary of Homeland Security.

So I don't regret that I tried to have a relationship with her. I tried to say: Hey, as someone from a border State, we have got to make this work. I have got to have a relationship with this person.

But she has proved, over and over again, up until this weekend, that she does not deserve the title of Cabinet Secretary. This week, when Alex Pretti was killed on the ground, shot 10 times, she didn't say: We need an independent investigation.

She didn't say: We need to cool down and relax.

She didn't say: We need to put the DHS officers on administrative leave and have some sort of accountability.

She said: He was a domestic terrorist. A nurse who worked at the ICU for the Veterans' Administration was a domestic terrorist.

If you are a Cabinet-level Secretary and you jump to that, you don't understand our system. And, certainly, the one time she has come in front of our committee--one time since she was confirmed--she didn't seem to understand basic concepts, like habeas corpus.

Now, she is not the only one who is the mastermind of the President's border and immigration policy. If you want to understand the through line between Trump's first administration, where he literally put children in cages and purposely separated them from their parents as an immigration policy, and what you are seeing in Minneapolis today, that through line is Stephen Miller and his dark vision of America.

I do not understand this person. I do not understand how he could be educated in this country and then spew these dark visions of who we are as a people. You know, I think the thing that he said right after Alex Pretti was killed was that not only was he a domestic terrorist, but he was an assassin.

These people don't understand who we are, and they certainly don't understand that the American public does not tolerate this kind of authoritarianism.

So what do we need to do? We need accountability. We need the people who are the masterminds of these policies to leave their jobs. Either, again, Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem resign--that would be the respectful thing--are fired by the President--they are boat anchors around your neck--or impeach them, in the case of Kristi Noem.

But, certainly, for what this body needs to do this week, it seems abundantly clear that we need to separate out the budgets for a bunch of other Departments and Agencies from the Department of Homeland Security. We cannot trust this administration to handle the deployment of Federal forces in our streets without making some fundamental reforms of the Department of Homeland Security.

And I am glad to see that, like dominoes, my Republican colleagues are now saying: Yes, we should separate this out. Yes, I don't want to defend DHS and ICE and have the government shut down because I will just salute the President.

They understand, and I give them credit. I will take any millimeters of bravery that I can get from the other side of the aisle to say: This is not America.

And you better believe that my colleagues would be losing their ever- loving minds if a Democratic President were doing this in some Republican-run city--losing their minds.

So we need accountability for the people who are behind this. We also need fundamental reforms of ICE. We can't leave the administration to do it themselves.

So you separate the bill out, and then we can have a real conversation. And all we are asking for--it is not the moon--is that Federal agents who show up in these cities cannot play by different rules than police who live and work in our communities.

You need to wear a body camera. You should not be masked, unless it is for your health. You need to have insignia that shows you are actually real law enforcement. You need to have a judicial warrant to come into someone's house, not a warrant signed by some person at the Department of Homeland Security, who may or may not just have political dependencies on Kristi Noem and the President.

We are asking for the same things that the Michigan State Police or the Nevada police have to do on every single day. We want our Federal agents to abide by those same laws and rules because they fundamentally lost the trust of the American people. They don't have it.

So we don't trust that the President is just going to learn his lesson, slink out of Minneapolis, and not do this to another city. So we need prevention. We need reform. We need to separate out the DHS budget from the others so we can get to work and not shut down the government because the President won't admit fault in Minneapolis.

And we need to fundamentally remember who we are as Americans. We need to remember those values that literally we learned in the first grade. We have fundamental freedoms that make us different than almost every other country of the world, and we need to defend them vigorously.

And, in fact, those people who are standing up and exercising those rights

are doing the most patriotic thing they can do right now. Standing up and calling out authoritarianism when we see it is the most patriotic thing that we can do as Americans.

I urge my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to join us in calling a spade a spade when you see it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today as the new Senator from the State of Michigan and in particular to recognize the 10-year anniversary of the declaration of emergency in the city of Flint, MI, 10 years on.

In April of 2014, the city of Flint decided to switch the city's water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River. It was a decision made by State officials to save money at the time, but neither the city nor the State made sure to treat the new water before it came into Flint's taps.

Because of that, an American city was poisoned. In less than 2 years, 100,000 people were exposed to toxic levels of lead, bacteria, heavy metals like iron, and chemicals known to cause cancer. That includes about 10,000 children. Imagine the Big House at U of M packed on game day, and that is how many people were poisoned.

Ten years ago this week, President Barack Obama declared a Federal state of emergency for the city of Flint, and that declaration wasn't necessarily the beginning of the crisis, but it was supposed to be the beginning of the end, a turning point where Flint could begin to recover.

But let me be clear, the crisis in Flint has not ended--not in Flint, not in Michigan, and as a Michigander and Flint's Senator, not for me. Flint is a community still in pain, still seeking justice, still seeking accountability. As Flint's newest Senator, I wanted to be here on the 10-year anniversary to make sure Michiganders and Americans don't forget what happened.

Like I said, let's review the bidding. Flint is an apocalyptic poisoning of an American city, and it should be a warning to all Americans on what happens when there is not accountability. It is a story of government's failure to protect its citizens, and more than that, it is a human tragedy of ordinary people living ordinary lives, people like Brittney Thomas.

Brittney lives in Flint. She has two children, Jabari and Janiyah. Janiyah was just a year old when the city of Flint switched their water from the Flint River. Jabari was 4. Around her, Brittney's neighbors began seeing foam coming out of their taps. Their water was yellow or brown or rust-colored. It smelled metallic. Visible particles were floating around in the water.

Soon, Brittney and her children started developing unexplained rashes. Janiyah's soft baby skin was streaked with red, riddled with bumps. Concerned, Brittney, of course, reached out to her pediatrician. Then her children started having seizures. For months, they were in and out of the hospital. Brittney didn't know why. She could only watch in panic as her kids grew sicker.

To the parents watching this, imagine your 1-year-old baby, this tiny, helpless life that you are supposed to protect, seizing again and again, and you have no idea what is going on. There are no words to describe that terror.

Being in and out of the hospital had other consequences. Brittney lost multiple jobs. She began struggling with her bills. She was forced to borrow money from loved ones, and the effects of these unexplainable illnesses seeped into every aspect of their lives.

For the rest of 2014, more and more families in Flint began to experience sudden, strange symptoms: thinning hair, rashes, seizures, pain, and chronic conditions. Kids began developing speech impediments, seemingly out of nowhere. Students consistently getting As and Bs were suddenly having a hard time being able to read or think clearly. Their grades slipped. Some developed learning disabilities. Many kids started showing changes in their behavior, where once they were calm, sweet, and curious, they became extremely anxious, emotional, and aggressive.

Their parents had no idea why. There was no visible reasons, no obvious explanation. Water, even when it is poisoned, leaves very few visible scars.

It wasn't until doctors ran blood tests that Brittney discovered that her children had lead poisoning. Families across the city started to get the same diagnosis. But that wasn't enough of an explanation. Brittney knew it. So did other parents. And they suspected there was a link between their kids getting sick and the brown water coming out of their tap, so they began demanding answers. They raised issues with the city council, with county leadership, with State officials. Every time, they got the same response: Our tests are showing that the water is just fine.

Others waved off the signs. Flint is a poor city. Its residents are mostly African American. It was way too easy for leaders to just shrug and look away. Sometimes, people actually laughed.

Some parents were spending days at a time in the hospital. They were living a nightmare, and they were asking their leaders for help. Instead of getting answers and support, they were dismissed.

Brittney and other parents, including Melissa Mays and Leeanne Walters, wondered if the city's tests were actually accurate. They decided to test the water for themselves. So in January of 2015, they got boxes of test kits and instructions from a lab supervisor at Flint's water treatment plant. They paid for it with Melissa's tax refund.

The accepted limit for lead in drinking water is 15 parts per billion. One home, the home of Leanne Walters, showed a test reading 104 parts per billion. Leanne tested her water again a few weeks later. This time, it jumped to 400 parts per billion. The water her kids were drinking, bathing in, and brushing their teeth with contained more than 25 times the amount of lead that is safe for children.

Terrified and frustrated, she called the EPA to complain. She reached a researcher named Miguel Del Toral, who began investigating. Over the next few weeks, Miguel asked Michigan's Department of Environmental Quality over and over again whether Flint's water had been treated properly. First, they said it had been treated. Then they admitted it hadn't.

Miguel couldn't believe what he was hearing. Flint was an older city, which meant their plumbing was mostly lead pipes. In his field, it was common knowledge that corrosion control was needed to prevent exactly this type of crisis.

Brittney, Melissa, and other parents organized marches and protests almost every week. In July, over 500 people marched 70 miles from Detroit to Flint. Everyone, from local media, to international press, to Hollywood directors, started paying more attention. Yet, when Michigan outlets reached out to the State's environmental department, their spokesman said the following:

Anyone who is concerned about lead in the drinking water in

Flint can relax.

Doctors like Dr. Mona Hanna, a pediatrician, compared the results to her own patients' records from the last 2 years. The results matched exactly. Flint was being poisoned by its own drinking water. Dr. Mona and other doctors teamed up with parents to shine a light on these results, and they talked to anyone who would listen.

It is an important lesson in banging pots and pans until you get the help you need. But it took almost 2 full years of advocacy and fight from Flint's parents for their kids to get this declaration of an emergency.

During those 2 years and beyond, the scale of the government's deception started coming out. Detroit press reported that the city had known about the risk to the water before they even switched the source. A city report back in 2011 had identified the Flint River as corrosive, in need of special chemicals. Both city and State officials reported that as early as 2013--a year before the city water was switched.

But Michigan's own State environmental department had been doing exactly what they accused others of doing--manipulating data. They had changed city reports to make the lead levels look within acceptable levels. The State's tests, which they had cited for months to discredit the Flint parents, were revealed to have been cherry-picked.

Meanwhile, Federal reports of lead in Flint's water had been buried by senior officials at the Environmental Protection Agency until Miguel--that one researcher we spoke about--risked his job and leaked the reports to the press.

Starting things off, 12 people died from Legionnaire's disease alone.

In fact, Flint knew how to fix these problems before they even changed the water and did it anyway. Treating Flint's water would have cost approximately $60 a day. For $60 a day, officials could have prevented 100,000 people from getting poisoned.

Now, what has that led to? Flint's advocacy changed more than just the city's water source; it changed Michigan. Michigan is the Great Lakes State. Water is part of our core identity. We have always seen ourselves as protectors of our Nation's water.

Threats to our water are threats to our very identity as Michiganders. To be frightened of our water hits at the core of who we are. But Flint helped us realize that protecting water doesn't start and stop at the Great Lakes; it includes the water around us--in our rivers and in our taps. Because of Flint, Michigan is now a powerful voice speaking out on issues like PFAS, chemical contamination, and river pollution. Republican or Democrat, Michiganders see themselves as stewards of all of America's water no matter where it flows, and it is no exaggeration to say that Flint changed our country.

More than 10 years after the crisis in Flint, billions of dollars have been spent, going to American cities to swap out lead pipes, including hundreds of millions for Michigan secured by Senators Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters.

The issue of aging lead pipes drew national attention. Cities in New Jersey, Colorado, and Kentucky began replacing their aging pipes. In 2018, Michigan became the first State to require the removal of all lead pipes. And citizens were empowered to hold elected officials accountable for environmental negligence rather than just companies.

But all of that is, frankly, cold comfort to the people of Flint. In their community, the damage has been done. More than a decade later, it is still ongoing.

An entire generation of Flint's children still live with the long- term effects of lead poisoning. It never leaves the body. There are learning disabilities, ADHD, anxiety and depression, not to mention PTSD. Studies estimate that roughly 3,000 children have been diagnosed with these conditions and more. The actual number could be much higher.

Flint's schools paid a heavy price. Test scores dropped dramatically. Special needs requests spiked. Enrollment in Flint schools plummeted from 8,500 students in 2012 to less than 3,000 this year. More than 20 school buildings are sitting empty.

Both Brittney's kids still suffer from recurring seizures almost 12 years after the crisis began. Her son Jabari has extreme anxiety and issues with his memory. He began struggling in school.

Around her, Brittney's friends and loved ones now have chronic, incurable conditions. There are children whose kidneys are so damaged that they are in constant risk of severe dehydration; women with repeated and above-normal miscarriage rates; teenagers with hardened heavy metal deposits in their heels and in their knees, making it painful to sit or stand; parents with a slew of autoimmune disorders-- lupus, rheumatoid arthritis.

With every hospital stay, every specialist's visit, every missed day of school, Brittney and her loved ones are forced to relive that trauma--helplessness, panic, and confusion, not to mention pain in their everyday lives.

The story is not over yet even 10 years on. They are still fighting to be heard. Flint wants accountability. Who wouldn't? They deserve nothing less after an American city is poisoned. People died. Children lost their parents. People lost their siblings, neighbors, friends. So nearly 10 years later, Flint residents have brought charges, criminal and civil, against everyone involved in this catastrophe. They sued the city. They sued the county. They sued the engineering firms that switched Flint's water. They sued the State of Michigan, including Gov. Rick Snyder at the time, for their staggering lack of oversight. They sued the EPA, which was supposed to be the backstop for everything, which consistently buried reports of lead poisoning instead of holding officials accountable.

Most of these cases have been settled, with one notable exception: the EPA. More than a decade later, the EPA is denying, deflecting, and dragging out this cause in court. In fact, the Trump administration, just like the Biden administration, has the ability to settle this case without Congress or anyone else. They should either take their day in court or settle fairly.

But it was never really about money for Flint. People wanted someone to take responsibility.

Unfortunately, Flint residents have yet to see anything from a settlement over the last decade. Timeliness for the rest of their payouts are vague and always changing, and estimated amounts of initial payments are unacceptably small.

It is possible that Flint families will not see the dollars they are owed. No apology, no amount of assigning blame, and certainly no amount of money can make Flint whole, but even after all they have endured over the past decade, this community is being denied what little they were promised, and that should make every American furious.

Now, as Flint's newest Federal Senator, I see my responsibility to fight for Flint. It is not their job to push, prod, or hope a decade later. Flint deserves someone who actually is up for that fight. I am determined to follow in the footsteps of the leaders who have come before me--former Congressman Dan Kildee, former Senator Debbie Stabenow, Gary Peters, Jim Ananich, Mayor Sheldon Neeley, who is now still in office. These are people who have fought for Flint in Michigan and in this very building. I will take that torch proudly and strive to be worthy of the appreciation of Flint residents.

I know there will be more fights and setbacks for Flint. There will be consistent fights for dollars, to get over promises broken, for accountability and apologies. But I want to say here on the floor of the Senate directly to Flint:

No matter what is coming, I have your back, and it is my responsibility to fight for you.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today in support of the War Powers Resolution. As a Senator from Michigan, as a former CIA officer who served three tours alongside the military in Iraq, I saw conflict up close.

But I think it is important that we put this decision to go into Venezuela in context. It is confusing. President Trump campaigned for nearly 2 years on staying out of foreign wars. That was a huge signature part of his campaign. So why do we find ourselves now ``in charge,'' in his words, of Venezuela?

Let's put it in context. All fall, the White House has been attacking boats in the Caribbean Sea, in the Pacific, saying that we were at war against drugs and the flow of drugs, even though no fentanyl is produced in Venezuela. These drugs were cocaine headed towards places like Europe.

Fine, drugs were the reason we were talking about these strikes.

January 3 comes along. U.S. forces entered Venezuela, from what I can tell, in a truly amazing and heroic military operation, captured President Maduro and his wife, and brought them to New York City. Why? Why do we find ourselves doing this?

I think there are really two reasons, one unspoken, one spoken. First and foremost, President Trump is clearly deciding that he wants to distract the public from talking about his domestic failures. Donald Trump, as I said, campaigned on getting out of foreign entanglements. But let's just review. He has launched military action in nine different localities across the world: seven countries, two seas.

We went back and looked. That is the single greatest number of countries with military action that any President has taken in the history of the United States in their first year. So the man who said that he wasn't going to get us involved has done more strikes in more countries than any President and has taken more strikes in this first year than Joe Biden took in the entirety of his Presidency. So the idea that he is trying to keep us out of things is--I think--should be put to bed. He has made himself a foreign policy President.

Why? He doesn't want to talk about his domestic agenda. He doesn't want to talk about his lack of action on the things that actually matter to Americans. Most people did not wake up wondering when we could invade Venezuela, when we could take over Venezuela. Most Americans want him to be attacking--not other countries, but the things that are holding them back from living their best and most free life.

Think about what he promised. On healthcare, our premiums have gone up, for many Americans, doubling and tripling as of January 1; housing prices, up; energy costs, up; jobs, down with cuts, particularly in places like Michigan, in manufacturing. All the things he said he was going to attack, he has ignored. And all the things he has done abroad are for you to think he is a big tough guy, he is Presidential, he is in command of something.

I have three brothers. I grew up in a very active household. If you remember--those of you who got the crap beat out of you the way I did-- when your brothers say, ``Look over here,'' ``look over here'' and sucker punch you, that is purposeful to distract you. That is what Donald Trump is doing with military action in his first year: ``Look over here.'' We are talking about Venezuela today and talking about places like Greenland instead of talking about the housing emergency or healthcare emergency. So the unstated goal by the President is to distract you. And please, please, please don't let him do that.

Secondly, the stated goal. The President has been very open. This is not about drugs. It was never about drugs. This is about taking over Venezuela and particularly their oil fields. We used to make fun of the conspiracy theories of George Bush taking over Iraq because of the oil. Donald Trump just admitted it outright. He is happy to brag about the fact that he is taking over the oil fields of another country. The only problem is, if you talk to some of the oil executives, as of this past Saturday, they had zero plan, zero idea.

The administration had no plan for the day after this removal of Maduro. And I have to tell you, as someone who served in places like Iraq, haven't we learned the lesson over and over and over again? This country always tries to get into ``limited'' military engagements. That is what Kennedy said about Vietnam. That is what Bush said about Iraq and Afghanistan. We may go in with intentions of things being very limited, but the world has a vote on how things go in these other countries, and we do not know where Venezuela is going to go.

Oil companies, despite how they are portrayed in Hollywood, are very conservative. They have to think in 20-year time horizons. They can't make willy-nilly moves. They have to make a profit and think about that over 20 years. It is not a surprise that some of the early plans earlier this week about what the Trump administration was going to have the oil companies do have now fallen by the wayside.

The President has said we are going to throw money at this problem. Now, the President is saying and Marco Rubio is saying we are going to control the oil. ``Don't worry. The U.S. Government is going to move that oil into the United States, and we are going to help sell it, and we are going to hopefully make some profit off of that.''

The only problem is the oil companies are still extremely, extremely cautious and sort of suspicious of this plan. These plans to invest in Venezuela would involve them investing a ton of money upfront and just hoping that long after Donald Trump leaves, they are going to make a profit. So it is not a surprise that he had no plan and he has no idea where this is going to go.

You don't have to imagine instability in Venezuela. In 2017, we had protests on the ground. Back in the early 2000s, the then-government had to fire or ended up firing 18,000 people in the oil industry because there was a general strike. We have no idea and, certainly, this President has no idea where this is going to go. He had no plan going in, but we are all along for the ride.

I think it is just as important to understand the context as we talk about the legal authority to go into a place like Venezuela. I would say what we all need to be cautious of is this idea that whether you go in trying to do a limited military operation or not, at the end of the day, it is Americans' sons and daughters from places like Michigan that are called up to create calm, to create stability. You break it; you buy it.

This administration has been very open about the fact that they now believe they own Venezuela. I stand here as a Senator, yes, but also as someone who has seen this movie in other places. I call upon the administration to just be transparent. Just play it straight. Don't try to distract us. Don't try to sucker punch us. Tell us what you are doing in foreign countries, then get back to the work you said you were going to do. Attack healthcare, not Venezuela. Get to the domestic things you promised, and stop leading us around by our noses.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today in support of Ms. Baldwin's amendment on a clean 1-year extension on the healthcare.gov credits.

Since July, I have been really clear. If you want me to vote on a deal, it has got to do something to bring down the cost of healthcare because of the healthcare crisis that Republicans in this Chamber precipitated back in July.

Just to review the bidding, in July, the Big Beautiful Bill, which all of you voted for--most of you voted for--slashed Medicaid and slashed coverage for people on healthcare.gov. Now, all our hospitals, all our healthcare systems, all our nursing homes--everybody--accepted that and started to plan.

In response to that, the hospitals said: Well, look, people are still going to come. They are still going to get into car accidents. They are still going to have heart attacks. They are just not going to be covered by health insurance. So we are going to have to charge the people with insurance even more money.

So we are now at this point. This crisis that has been precipitated has led to the fact that every single American--everyone watching, everyone listening--is either facing losing their health insurance or paying more, and that includes people on private, employer-provided insurance.

When we take a step back and we look at all the people that are going to fall off healthcare, all the healthy young people that are not going to pay for healthcare anymore, it looks like--across, at least, my State--every single person is looking at their prices doubling, not just the people who are affected by the Big Beautiful Bill but the bill payers, the people on private health insurance.

No one in this room would say that we are paying too little for healthcare right now.

And I don't always agree with Senator Sanders, but I can say there is no more broken system in America than healthcare right now. It needs full rebuilding. We may disagree on some of the ways to do it, but the Republicans offered zero plan, zero ideas. Hell, Marjorie Taylor Greene is talking about how Republican don't have a plan. I never thought I would be agreeing with her.

So, today, all we are asking for is a clean 1-year extension. No one says ObamaCare is perfect. No one says a clean extension is perfect.

But you pushed people back into a corner. You have said we are going to pay for our tax cuts on the backs of everyday Americans by using their healthcare as the bill payer.

So can we do a 1-year extension, please, so that we can have some kind of conversation--a real conversation--that the American people expect people of our stature to be having? Can we have that conversation over the next year, but not, in some cases, have people's health insurance go up by 600 percent? That is what you have precipitated.

So to every American watching, whether you are on healthcare.gov or you are on private insurance, if you are getting those letters, if you are getting those notifications of an increase of your bill of $200, $500, $800 starting January 1, my peers on the other side of the aisle are the ones--you should lay it at their feet because they have put us in this place. And if they vote tonight against this, it is because they don't give a crap about the cost of your healthcare. They don't give one single crap about it.

So I hope my colleagues find it in their hearts to say: Let's fix the system, fine. But at least for now, give us a 1-year extension so we can have a real conversation.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today to talk about something that threatens nearly every American: cyber attacks.

I call on my colleagues to pass the Protecting America from Cyber Threats Act--a no-brainer step to defend our citizens from cyber threats.

This is a very wonky law, but it has a very, very simple objective: to encourage companies, private sector companies, to report hacks to the government so that together we can prevent it from happening again. This bill extends protections defined back in 2015 that encouraged companies to report cyber attacks to the Federal Government. It minimizes the risks companies once faced in reporting these hacks, and in doing so, it makes us all safer.

Extending these protections has never been more important. Today, cyber attacks are top of mind for Americans across the country and certainly across the political spectrum.

Two months ago, I traveled to Benton Harbor, MI, and Troy, MI--two communities--to talk about national security threats and what is keeping Michiganders up at night. Nearly every single person, regardless of profession or party, had a story about cyber crime: identity theft, robocalls, and scams robbing people of their life savings; hacks on hospitals for patient data; and shutdown access to electronic records.

As a former CIA officer and Pentagon official, I have responded to countless threats to American security, but never before have we seen American citizens so exposed to security threats here at home. In the age of cyber warfare, everyday Americans are quite literally on the frontlines. And Americans know the stakes. That is why they are scared. One Michigander said to me: Warfare is still on the ground--still things like rockets--but it has also changed; cyber warfare can be just as brutal.

But more than scared, Michiganders are frustrated. They don't believe that their government is taking the threat of cyber crime seriously, and if we don't renew this law, we will prove them right.

On October 1, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 expired--this last October 1. That means that companies are no longer incentivized to report hacks to the Federal Government.

When a company self-reports a cyber attack, there is no longer a law to prevent the Justice Department from using that admission against them, and companies once again are incentivized to hide hacks from the government, which makes us all less safe.

Companies have to see the government as an ally, not as a threat, and our safety depends on it because, unlike other threats like tanks and nukes and subs, the weapons used in cyber crimes are not created, owned, and controlled by a government; they are from the private sector. So we have to work together to prevent these attacks.

This law has already been consequential. The Department of Homeland Security used it to respond to China's relentless Salt Typhoon campaign, which targeted every single American's unencrypted phone calls and text messages.

As long as the law remains expired, America is less safe. As long as we refuse to renew it, we are moving backwards in keeping the country secure.

Today, very simply, I am calling on my colleagues to renew these protections for another 10 years--they are renewed for 10 years at a time--so we can restore our cyber security defenses and better protect our Nation. There is no good reason not to renew it. Businesses support it. The Trump administration supports it. My colleagues on both sides of the aisle support it.

I know there is a proposal out there to extend the law--instead of 10 years--for just 5 weeks, in the House's version of the temporary funding bill, but it is such a pivotal time for something that is actually a bipartisan consensus idea, half measures shouldn't do. We have known that this was going to expire for 10 years. Americans deserve to have us not kick the can down the road for another 5 weeks. There is too much at stake, particularly given the losses among the American public.

Some things are bigger than party politics, and national security should always be one of them. This law is essential to keeping the country safe, to keeping Americans safe, so I urge my colleagues to renew it.

Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of Calendar No. 182, S. 2983; that the Peters substitute amendment, which is at the desk, be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I rise today in support of Senators Schiff and Kaine's resolution regarding war powers.

This resolution would just say very simply that if the Trump administration wants to be at war against a terrorist organization, they should come to Congress, notify us, and seek our approval.

Currently, the administration is waging a secret war against a secret list of unnamed groups that they will not tell us about. There have been four lethal strikes against boats in the Caribbean. The administration wrote us a letter--wrote this body a letter--about what they were doing in September. They said they considered themselves to be in a ``non-international armed conflict''--that means a war--against a secret list of ``designated terrorist organizations.''

I received a briefing last week on the administration's strikes in the Caribbean. During that briefing, Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, from both sides of the aisle, asked a Senate- confirmed official whether the Department of Defense could produce a list of the organizations that are now considered terrorists by the United States. They said they could not provide that list.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am a CIA officer. I am a former Pentagon official. I did three tours in Iraq--armed--alongside the military. I participated in the targeting of terrorist groups. I actually have no real problem going against cartels, given what they have done in their inserting drugs in our community and with the death of so many Americans. But as a nation, I think we should have as a basic principle that you can't have a secret list of terrorist organizations that the American public and, certainly, the U.S. Congress don't get to even know the names of.

The problem for me is that this is unprecedented. You know, during the Global War on Terror, which is kind of my era, it was very clear. Terrorist organizations would be notified. If we wanted to declare a new terrorist organization, it would be notified to Congress. Then our intelligence community, the military, and law enforcement would spin up to go after information about that group and prosecute--you know, target against that group. But that is not what is going on today, and we will not understand, apparently, the dozens of terrorist organizations that we have now named until we understand their names.

This is important in the foreign context, right? This is unprecedented in terms of what we have done against foreign adversaries, against foreign terrorist organizations; but what I want to draw people's attention to is the implication for what is happening inside of our own country.

In September--also last month--the Trump administration put out a new Executive order about domestic terrorist organizations. They said that they were going to, again, make secret lists of ``terrorist groups'' inside the United States and send the full force of the U.S. Government against those terrorist organizations. They are not telling anyone the name of these organizations, but they are authorizing law enforcement and the intelligence community to double down and come up with that list.

This is a problem because the Trump administration defined in that document a ``terrorist organization'' or ``domestic terrorism'' incredibly broadly. It suggests that any group that talks about anti- Christian values, views they don't like on migration or race, differing views on the role of the family, religion, or morality could all be grounds for labeling an organization ``domestic terrorists.''

If this administration is not telling us who is on their secret designated terrorist list for groups in the Caribbean, they are definitely not going to tell us who is on their list of domestic terrorist organizations.

We saw, to start us off, the attorney general down in Texas put out publicly that he is now going to launch a campaign against domestic terrorist organizations in his own State. So it has begun.

Meanwhile, we know what is going on in some of our American cities. Trump

said that he would invoke, potentially, the Insurrection Act of 1807. He has made more than 800 of our military generals fly in from across the world and talked about going after the ``enemy from within''--his words--and making American towns and cities their ``training grounds'' for the military.

This is important, and I think every American should understand what it means if the President of the United States follows through with what he said and says--that he is now invoking the Insurrection Act. That means--a certain city--if the violence has gotten to a level of an insurrection, it means that the U.S. military can now be used as law enforcement in our cities. It means the U.S. military can raid; they can arrest; they can detain. You can easily see a world where the President of the United States labels protest groups ``terrorists,'' doesn't tell anyone, and creates an excuse to unilaterally use the military inside our cities, similar to the way he used them in the Caribbean.

Just to be clear, this is straight out of an authoritarian playbook where the President gets to play judge, jury, and executioner. This time, instead of stopping drug traffickers, it will be stopping Americans potentially from exercising their right to freedom of speech.

This is not theoretical, using the U.S. military in our streets. It is not something that the President hasn't already thought about. We know that in the first Trump administration, the President called up his Secretary of Defense and his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs because he was upset about protests that were going on in front of the White House. Mark Esper was the Secretary of Defense. He wrote about this in his book called ``A Sacred Oath,'' and he talked about some of the things President Trump asked him to do.

President Trump wanted him to send in not the National Guard but the 82nd Airborne--an Active-Duty military unit, one of our most elite, a large unit--to quell protests here in Washington, DC. He asked for them to be moved into the city. And when the back-and-forth happened with former Secretary Esper, President Trump asked him point blank: ``Can't you just shoot them in the legs or something?''

I want to just flag for everybody that we are seeing a repeat of that story but in exponentially more gruesome detail play out right now. The President is looking for an excuse to send the U.S. military into our streets, to deploy the U.S. military against his own people, to prompt confrontation, and to hope that confrontation justifies even more military force and military control.

This is a well-worn authoritarian playbook. It is one that quite literally the United States of America was founded on rejecting--the idea that the British soldiers, when they occupied American cities, abused American citizens to the point where Americans turned against them.

I am a former CIA officer, a former Pentagon official. I have worked alongside the military my entire life. I cannot stomach the idea that the American people would fear the uniformed military who have given their lives to protect them for so many years.

But all of us in this Chamber and certainly those of us who have served in the past swore an oath to the Constitution--not to a King, not to a party, not to any one person. Nobody gets to rewrite the Constitution--not a President, not an adviser, no one.

If the President wants to use force abroad or at home, he needs to come to this body and explain it publicly to the American public.

I yield the floor.