Floor Statements

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the en bloc consideration of the following Senate resolutions submitted earlier today: S. Res. 414, S. Res. 415, and S. Res. 416.

I ask unanimous consent that the resolutions be agreed to, the preambles be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, all en bloc.

Madam President, I have eight requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders.

Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate:

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand adjourned until 10 a.m. on Thursday, October 19; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for later in the day, and that the Senate be in a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.

Madam President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask that it stand adjourned under the previous order.

Madam President, the bill that we will be voting on shortly reflects intense bipartisan collaboration here in the Senate, the type of collaboration that we need to see a lot more of in this institution.

I share a lot of credit--let me put it differently. I thank the coleads, Senator Murray and Senator Collins, for working so hard to get all the appropriation bills out of committee and finding a path forward for us to make sure that, with the CR, we can keep the government open.

It doesn't have things in it that I would like--a lot more disaster aid for folks around the country, a lot more support for Ukraine. But I think it represents exactly the type of modest package that is appropriate at this moment, while, as the chair of Appropriations pointed out, we will continue to work together in the month to come to pass the actual appropriation bills.

The issue that I am very concerned about on the House side right now is that they are taking and putting together a package that has no support for Ukraine and that bans the administration from moving funds throughout the Defense Department and the State Department to be able to support Ukraine.

If you want China and Russia being No. 1 and No. 2 in the world, then that would be the path to go. If you want to have dictatorships, authoritarian governments crush democracy, then that would be the way to go.

But I want our vision of a republic, our vision of a democracy, our vision of a state that has freedom of speech and freedom of assembly to be able to be the model that expands freedom in this world.

Let's support this package before us, and let's support a package that has both disaster aid and aid for Ukraine.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I am standing here at the desk next to the desk of our fallen colleague, Senator Dianne Feinstein. It seems enormously strange that instead of being able to sit here and have her next to me, her desk is covered with a black cloth and a crystal bowl of white roses.

We come from the west coast where our States sit side by side, so perhaps it was fitting that we sat side by side here on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

One thing, in particular, that Senator Feinstein liked to do was share with me pictures of her dog Kirby, whom she absolutely loved. And she had a lot of pictures on her phone to show Kirby in different moments of delight. And I must say, for me, this was kind of a powerful, personal connection because I enjoyed showing her pictures of my dogs, Roxy and Lila, whom I love dearly.

So even as we work on the great issues of international affairs or the

big challenges of America, sometimes it is just the personal connections, simple connections in life that can bond people to each other.

Very few people's lives are as full of as much history and consequence as Senator Dianne Feinstein's: the first woman to serve as mayor of San Francisco; the first woman to serve as a Senator from California; the longest serving Senator not only from California, the longest serving woman in the Senate ever at just over 30 years.

In 2009, during my first year in the Senate, she made a point to invite me as a freshman Senator to meet her friend the Dalai Lama. I had a chance to previously meet the Dalai Lama when I was head of the World Affairs Council in Oregon, and I had invited him to speak to the people of Oregon. But this was in a different context of the connection, the foreign relations, in which we were striving to elevate concerns about the treatment of the Tibetan people. She was a passionate supporter of Tibetan people.

She had met him 30 years before in India. She had welcomed him on his first visit to the United States, as the mayor of San Francisco. She never let up on the importance of that challenge and her concerns about the mistreatment of the Tibetan people.

In fact, I also had the opportunity to work with her on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which strived to shine a light on many human rights issues, but one of which, certainly, was defending the Tibetan people's human rights and culture from the repression of the Chinese Government.

She was also a powerful partner as we worked together to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act here on the Senate floor, which we did in 2013, and then to strive to elevate the Equality Act, the gold standard for ending discrimination against our LGBTQ community--an act that we have not yet passed on this Senate floor but absolutely should. I hope someday we will have the votes to do that.

She just believed that nobody should face discrimination, everybody should have an equal opportunity to thrive here in the United States of America.

We also served together for many years on the Appropriations Committee and the Rules Committee. She was a persistent voice in this last couple of years, time and time again, calling for better pay for our Federal wildland firefighters. Now, that particular issue is so essential because of the fires we are facing in the West, and no one raised it as often or as passionately as she did. As a result, we won that pay raise. I know that she would be insisting, if she was here today, to make sure that pay raise is sustained in any continuing resolution that we might pass in the next couple of days.

She knew how essential that was out West, that we have wildland firefighters who can work year-round and be paid decently so we are actually there on the job.

I was proud to cosponsor her legislation this year, the West Coast Ocean Protection Act, to prohibit the exploration, development, and production of oil off the west coast, a mutual concern of those of the west coast that our coast and our multiple fisheries--our crabbing, our whiting, our shrimp, our salmon, our groundfish--are not damaged by oil, that our shoreline is not damaged by oil.

It was essential, she felt, that we preserve the health of our oceans against the potential damage of drilling off the coast. In fact, she was a strong voice in this modern conversation about climate change. She understood climate chaos and how the changing temperatures are affecting us in so many different ways.

At one point when we were serving on the Appropriations Committee together, I had a simple amendment that supported our international obligation to help fund an intergovernmental panel on climate change, and we had a deal between legislators on both sides of the aisle that we would simply hold a voice vote because legislators across the aisle felt it should be passed. But they knew anything that related to climate was so controversial, and they didn't want to bring that controversy into the discussion about honoring a treaty obligation. So the agreement was to pass it by voice vote.

When I proposed the amendment, Senator Dianne Feinstein spoke up--I hadn't filled her in on the background--and she said: This issue is about climate. It is so important we should hold a recorded vote.

I probably went a little bit pale because I wasn't sure that, as a recorded vote, we could vote to honor our international agreement. But, fortunately, and just by a single vote, we did. It worked out. But it just shows her commitment to having a public discussion, public votes, public accountability to take on this incredibly significant challenge that we have faced with the changing climate.

Senator Feinstein helped open the doors of the Senate to so many other women legislators. She took weapons off the street. She believed torture was un-American and unacceptable, and those who are responsible must be held accountable.

She raised vehicle emissions standards and protected so many of California's and America's beautiful outdoor spaces for future generations, including the interest she had in protecting Lake Tahoe.

Yesterday, Senator Feinstein, who did so much to open this government to so many, cast her final vote in the U.S. Senate. It was a vote to keep this government open, keep the American Government serving the American people.

She lived an exceptional life--a life dedicated to public service. She has left behind an enormous public legacy--a legacy of tenacity, a legacy of and willingness to build bridges across the aisle to solve problems. I hope that many of us can just hope to do as well.

My thoughts are with her daughter Katherine and her granddaughter Eileen. It was an honor and privilege to serve with Senator Dianne Feinstein here in the U.S. Senate.

Thank you.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the privileges of the floor be extended to Mike Zwolinski, a member of my team, for the balance of the day.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that privileges of the floor be granted to Allison Arbuthnot for the balance of the day.

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

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern, Marcus Mildenberger, be given privileges of the floor for the balance of the day.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 30 seconds before we take the vote.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that privileges of the floor be granted to Luz Carmen Dominguez DeJesus during the balance of today's session.

Mr. President, I want to share the perspective of individual Senators who, at various moments, are extremely stressed over getting their amendment considered or how to deal with a particular issue that is coming up. There have been moments, for example, not too far back into last year, when I really wanted an amendment up and was asking Trish, how do I do this? How do I position this to get this done? And I know that many of us, when we are trying to do something we consider important or are concerned about something happening that is detrimental, our emotions are high. Every time that I have been in that position, you have been a calm and steady presence facilitating our efforts--maybe raising an eyebrow now and then about whether this was the right moment or the right process but giving sound guidance and taking our levels of anxiety and stress down a few notches and helping us get the job done.

So all of us who, in moments--critical moments--have come to you and asked for your help and your insight on how to proceed, thank you for being a wise and sober and calming counsel to us. And I wish you all the best in your next chapter.

Mr. President, I rise today to honor a departing member of my team. This is the first time in 7 years that I am delivering a farewell speech regarding one of my team members that wasn't written by my speechwriter, Mike McKiernan, because Mike is the departing team member we are honoring today.

In June of 2016, he left a glamorous job at the Motion Picture Association of America to join my office. He was excited to return to Congress ahead of what many anticipated would be the incoming Hillary Clinton administration. Well, as we all know, history doesn't always work out along the path that one anticipates. It worked out a little differently.

Six months later, President Trump was sworn into office, and Mike found himself in the middle of many intensive issues, writing speech after speech regarding the new administration's policies--often opposing those policies--and the administration's nominees--often nominees who didn't seem to have the qualifications necessary for the roles they were nominated to.

Then not far into 2017, we arrived at a watershed moment of Trump's first year in office: Trump's determination to complete the theft of a Supreme Court seat through his nomination of Neil Gorsuch. It was Mike McKiernan who compiled a whole set of big three-ring binders with details of Supreme Court history, the influence of powerful special interests on the Court, and, of course, every detail, large and small, about Judge Gorsuch's record, enabling me to hold the floor for over 15 hours, attempting to focus America's attention on the grave injustice that for the first time in American history, a Supreme Court seat had been stolen from one administration and passed on to the next with no hearing or consideration of the nominee from the previous President.

It was a long night--a long night for Mike McKiernan, a long night for me--but an important effort to highlight something very important about the politicization and polarization of one of our three key institutions, the Supreme Court of the United States.

If you asked members of my staff for a couple of words or a phrase to describe Mike, you might hear the words ``steady presence.'' Throughout the years, he has brought a cool, calm, and collected aura, even during moments of considerable stress.

Being a speechwriter might seem like a quiet, intellectual job, but here in the Senate, chaos finds us all--many moments of frantically making last-minute edits, last-minute edits on a script for a speech or a conversation over Zoom, conversations recorded as a video greeting to an organization operating back in Oregon, or crafting comments with only an hour or two of notice to make, to block, or to request a unanimous consent request on an amendment or on a bill.

There was, for every speechwriter and for Mike, the near daily challenge of finding just the right story or just the right analogy or just the right poem to illuminate a commentary over a policy, as, indeed, Mike delivered just the perfect poem on butterflies last year for my closing remarks at the Monarch Summit.

It was Mike who crafted my 2017 quiz show series that I conducted here on the floor of the Senate featuring weekly climate facts, trying to find a new way to engage Americans about the challenges facing us with the evolving impact on our forests and our fishing and our farms and so many aspects of our environment. Our quiz show did not become the smash hit on YouTube that we had hoped for, but at least the Senate pages perhaps learned a thing or two from the quiz shows, and we had fun doing them. Our climate work also led to other fun moments, like hosting Bill Nye the Science Guy in my office and doing a joint video on climate science.

Mike always had the extremity challenge of deciphering my handwriting--handwriting I can't decipher after I have been away from it for even a few moments. I have no idea what I wrote, but I am sure it was excellent--figure it out.

Mike, I think we are sending you away with a certificate in advanced handwriting decoding.

Along with the fun and good humor that Mike brought to the team, he also brought deep care and purpose to some of the most challenging moments we have handled as an office. He found great meaning in bringing, in his words, ``to life as accurately and impactfully as possible'' the stories of those who are oppressed and suffering.

When the previous administration tried to take DACA status away from Dreamers, Mike helped me share the stories of young Americans who have known no other home.

When President Trump sent Federal agents to attack Portlanders on the streets in the summer of 2020, Mike helped me to share the experience of those whose civil liberties had been shattered and to hold the administration accountable.

When President Trump implemented his horrific tactic of tearing children out of the arms of their parents at the border, Mike was instrumental in sharing the stories of those families with the world-- stories of little children with hopes and dreams who simply wanted to play, to learn, to be loved, and be able to go to school; parents who would do anything to protect their children from violence and oppression and build for those little ones a safer future.

Mike, we will miss your wordsmithing. We will miss your adorable photos and hilarious stories of your two young children, Clara and Braden, and we really require you to keep sharing them as you go forward. Most of all, we will miss your kind, compassionate, mission- driven spirit that embodies what it means to be on our team. You are leaving big shoes to fill, but we are thrilled that you will be staying in the extended Team Merkley family, going to join our former deputy chief of staff J.P. Piorkowski in the Director's Office at the Peace Corps.

One thing our world needs more of is peace and the cross-cultural understanding that comes from Americans going out around the globe to help communities thrive.

I know that in your next chapter and whatever else you do throughout your career, you will never stop working to build a better world, and what better mission could there be for one's life than building a better world?

I wish you all the best. And thank you so much for being a member of the team.

Madam President, I have 11 requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders.

Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate: