Floor Statements

I ask unanimous consent that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

Mr. President, I come to the floor today to bid farewell to an individual who has not only served as a longtime staff member but a highly respected member of our close-knit team, Jake Oken-Berg. Serving for the last 10 years as my business liaison, Jake has been my ambassador to Oregon's business community and its leaders. Frankly, when you consider some of my positions, Jake has undoubtedly developed the diplomatic skills necessary to actually be an ambassador.

Mr. President, I so much appreciate the words of my colleague from Minnesota, who has brought the Rules Committee to bear in a maximum capacity to fight to defend the freedom to vote for all Americans.

When I was in high school, I had the opportunity to live in West Africa under a dictatorship as an exchange student. And in that country, the military dictatorship would exist until there was a new military coup, and then there would be another military dictatorship. And that happened time after time after time.

So, as a 16-year-old, I saw the contrast between a nation where citizens had no voice in the future of their country versus the United States of America, where the foundation of our Republic, the core vision of our Nation is that each citizen has the opportunity to participate, to fight to help shape the American dream, the path into the future, to the benefit of a better nation.

President Johnson noted that the ballot box is so essential that ``the vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised . . . for breaking down injustice.'' Really, that ballot box is the pulsating heart of our democracy.

President Lincoln, when he was speaking at Gettysburg--speaking that the soldiers who died there did not die in vain because they fought to preserve the vision of government of, by, and for the people, that it shall not perish from this Earth. Well, it is the vote that preserves the vision of government of, by, and for the people. It is free access to the ballot box.

Over the course of our history, we have sought to fulfill that vision through the 13th and 14th Amendments, through the 15th Amendment, through the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But here we find, at this moment in our history, the right to vote is under attack once again. Some 18 States have passed some 30 laws trying to target specific groups of individuals and prevent them from being able to vote. These strategies in State after State are to make it harder to vote and easier to cheat.

Well, I will tell you what this bill does that we are talking about today, the Freedom to Vote bill. It makes it easier to vote and harder to cheat. It takes on three key forms of corruption that are haunting our election system.

First, it takes on dark money--dark money unleashed by Citizens United that allows billionaires to buy elections around this country.

Do a poll of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents and ask ``Should we have this dark money, source unknown, haunting our election system, producing all of those attack ads, and you have no idea where they came from?'' and citizens of every political stripe will say ``Absolutely not.''

Dark money, the hidden manipulation of the elections by the powerful--buying these vast sets of television ads, trying to destroy the character of candidates in order to manipulate the outcome--should not exist. It is in the DNA of Americans that this is a corrupting force. Well, this bill takes on the dark money.

The second thing that it takes on is gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is where districts are drawn to favor one political party over the other. Ask Americans across this country ``Is it right that politicians should choose their voters rather than voters choosing their politicians?'' and they will say ``No.'' Ask if they believe in the vision of equal representation as a key to a just society, and they will say yes. They want equal representation. Republicans say yes. Democrats say yes. Independents say yes.

This bill takes on gerrymandering and puts an end to it with national standards for redistricting.

Now, let's turn to the ballot box. I never thought I would live to see the day that we go into a time machine and return to before 1965, in which one of the two parties is determined to block targeted groups from voting--to target Black Americans from voting, Hispanic Americans from voting, low-income Americans from voting, college students from voting. This is completely un-American. This is racist. It is a past that we had proudly put behind us, but this bigoted past has arisen to haunt us once again in these some 30 laws in some 18 States, targeting specific groups of Americans.

This bill says that strategy of cheating on election day by trying to block targeted groups from voting will not stand. We will make it easier to register. That is what this bill does. We will make it easier to vote before election day to undermine those election-day shenanigans. We will have 15 days of early voting. We will have the opportunity for voting by mail. We will make sure that our I.D. laws are not used in a fashion to favor one party over the other. These are core protections against these strategies designed to disenfranchise Americans and manipulate the outcome of elections.

I will tell you what else this law does. It takes on election subversion. We have seen strategies of election subversion in many of those State laws. So this bill says: You know what. No, you cannot have frivolous challenges where one person stands at a poll and challenges the legitimacy of every single person who comes into that poll place in order to make it hard for people in a certain location to vote.

It protects election officials from improper removal. It protects election workers from intimidation and harassment. It preserves election records so they cannot be manipulated. It guarantees that we have paper ballots that can be recounted. It prevents observer interference in the elections. It makes sure that people in line, if something terrible should happen and those lines are long, will still be able to have access to water and food, which is a strategy that has been now employed by several States, to say: You know what. On election day, we are going to make sure targeted precincts have long lines, and then we are going to say you can't even get a sip of water from a friend in that line, in order to try to stop people from voting.

Wow--the lengths these Republican house, statehouse, and State senators and Governors are going to stop people from voting. We have seen the strategies in the past. We have seen eliminating the number of precinct voting locations to make it harder for targeted areas to vote. We have seen locating them in new locations to confuse people. We have seen false information put out about where the locations are to make it harder to vote. We have seen the understaffing of key places to create long lines. Well, early voting, vote-by-mail, and protections in this bill stop these efforts to cheat in elections across our country.

So we are defending that most powerful instrument ever devised by human beings for breaking down injustice with this Freedom to Vote bill. We are defending the right of every American to cast a ballot. We are fighting against the big three corruptions infesting, if you will, our election system across the country. This should be passed 100 to 0.

I invite my Republican colleagues to remember the oath they took to the Constitution and to remember that the right to vote is at the very heart of that Constitution and join us in these core protections and to pass the Freedom to Vote Act on the floor of the Senate.

Mr. President, we have the privilege to come to this floor and examine issues important to every American. And what could be more important than the fundamental right to participate in the guidance of our country and to be able to cast a ballot. And that ballot box, it is the pulsating heart of our Republic.

In fact, it is 56 years ago, just a couple of days ago, that President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And what did he say? He said it is wrong--deadly wrong--to deny any American the opportunity to vote. Well, what was deadly wrong in 1965 is deadly wrong in 2021.

It is hard to believe that over 50 years--over half a century--has passed, and we are reverting to that period before 1965, where there was a systematic effort to target specific groups of voters and prevent them from going to the poll.

And we all know how this worked. On election day, there would be fewer precinct voting locations in those areas that you didn't want to vote, and they would be understaffed so there would be long lines, or their voting machines would be out of order, or they would change the location every 2 years so people would be confused about where to go, or they would locate them where there was no parking--all of these things deliberately aimed at preventing Black Americans from voting and preventing other communities of color from voting.

Well, today, we are seeing in State after State after State an expanded version of this, not just targeting Black Americans and other communities of color but also targeting poor communities and college students. And we see these laws unfolding in just the recent months.

I would expect 100 of our colleagues here to stand up and defend the ballot box. Aren't we long removed from those days of that racist past? But apparently not.

So some of us have to stand up and say: We are going to stand up to the vision of our Constitution where all men and women are created equal and every man and woman has the right to participate in the guidance of this country.

You know, we know that in the founding of our country, we had a beautiful vision, imperfectly formed, that Black Americans, Native Americans, and women were not allowed to vote. We fixed those things over time. We progressed in an arc to full opportunity, and that is what we are fighting for now--full opportunity of every citizen to have a full measure of what it means to be a participant in a Republic.

Well, there is much more in this bill to mend the assault on equal representation through the diabolical gerrymandering denied to bias the outcome from one party over the other, and certainly to keep billionaires from buying elections.

And when we ask people around the country--Independents, Democrats, Republicans--they all say: We do not want billionaires to buy elections. We do not want equal representation destroyed by diabolical gerrymandering, and we want every citizen to have access to the ballot box.

But in this Chamber, suddenly, the views of the Republicans across this country are forgotten by my Republican colleagues across the aisle. In that thirsty quest for power, they are willing to violate the fundamental principles that inspire our Nation, and it is wrong--deadly wrong--today as it was in 1965.

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

Madam President, I am here on the floor today to talk about climate chaos. It is a monumental crisis that requires immediate and bold action.

The reason I am speaking about climate chaos at this moment is because several things are happening today that create this connection. The one is that the IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change, has released its 2021 climate report, and the second is, we are in the middle of talking about infrastructure for our Nation, and the investments in climate infrastructure are going to be critical to take on the crisis that we are facing.

We are in pretty big trouble. This report that came out today--``5 Big Findings from the IPCC's 2021 Climate Report''--it lays out how dramatically

things have shifted in just a few years. It notes that the concentration of carbon dioxide is now higher than it has been for 2 million years, and we have made that happen over just the last 100 or so years but particularly the last 30; that the glacial retreat is unmatched for the last 2,000 years; that the last decade was warmer than any period for 125,000 years; that the summer Arctic ice coverage is smaller than at any time in the last 1,000 years; that the ocean is warming faster than at any time since the last ice age; and that ocean acidification is at the highest level in the last 26,000 years.

These things would not have been true a few years ago, and it is because of the massive buildup in carbon dioxide from our burning of fossil fuels to power our energy economy, and it is from the massive release of methane gas because of our use of natural gas, which is a very nice name for what is mostly methane gas. We collect methane gas, and we have accelerated that through fracking. A tremendous amount leaks out through that drilling and fracking system. A tremendous amount more leaks out through the millions of miles of pipes that carry it to its destinations, and then when we burn it, it creates carbon dioxide, also a global warming gas.

So we don't need to really get this report to know we are in trouble because we just have to look at the facts on the ground from our home States right now. I mean, Oregon is aflame. We have so many fires burning simultaneously, and the largest fire is over 400,000 acres-- 400,000 acres. Think how long it would take, if you were on a hike, to pass through 400,000 acres.

You know, a few years ago, we had a group of homes that were burned out in John Day, OR, some 24 or so homes, and we thought that was a big deal. Then last summer, we had six towns burn to the ground, completely incinerated. Now we have these massive, massive fires, as do Idaho and Montana and Washington State and California State and Colorado and Utah and New Mexico, Arizona. The West is aflame because the temperatures are so much higher.

What else is happening in Oregon? Well, our snowpack is disappearing; average snowpack is decreasing. It is affecting the amount of irrigation water we have. It is affecting the fact that our streams are now smaller and warmer than they were before, affecting our trout and our salmon, and the ocean is acidifying. Now we have some 30 percent more acid in the ocean. It affected first the reproduction of our oysters, so now we artificially buffer the water for our oyster scene to survive, baby oysters to survive. Now it is starting to affect the Dungeness crab, one of the most significant financial enterprises in terms of sea life production in a commercial sense off the coast of Oregon. So we are seeing impacts in every possible way.

I know that as I travel rural Oregon, people emphasize that this is a huge impact on rural Oregon and rural America because it is affecting our farming. It is affecting our fishing, and it is affecting our forests.

So we are engaged here in a two-part plan. The first plan is an infrastructure bill that address water, transportation, and broadband. Well, all well and good, but if part one sails away from the dock and leaves part two stranded, what is left behind? Housing, massive investment; education, a massive investment in 2 years of preschool and 2 years of community college. Foundations for thriving families are left behind, the support for daycare for working families; and the child tax credit, which is lifting half of the children in poverty out of poverty in America--the most massive tax cut ever envisioned for middle-class America.

What other thing is left on the dock? The investment in climate; the transition from burning fossil fuel, the fossil fuel economy, to the renewable energy economy.

We cannot let part one sail away of the infrastructure bill without doing part two, and the report from the IPCC today emphasizes how absolutely important it is that we act and we act boldly. That report said it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, the ocean, and the land. The report, crafted by 200 global scientists, concludes, as one of the report's coauthors summarizes:

There is no uncertainty language in this sentence because

there is no uncertainty that global warming is caused by

human activity and the burning of fossil fuels.

The report goes on to say that we are now on an irreversible course towards a hotter planet; that if we do the severest cuts in carbon emissions right now, the severest cuts, we are still going to see temperatures rise 1\1/2\ degrees Celsius or about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. That was the goal of the Paris Agreement. We would have to massively cut our carbon emissions and our methane emissions right now to meet the Paris target.

The report goes on to say that extreme weather events, which were rare or completely unprecedented, will now be common and more common as we approach the new normal or it becomes a new normal because of climate change.

I think the U.N. Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, summed it up when he said this report is ``a code red for humanity''--``a code red for humanity.'' So that is why all 100 of us here in the Senate should be on the floor discussing how to respond to a code red for humanity.

Wow, we have a lot of work to do, but that first part of the package has nothing in it or almost nothing in it--a little bit of money for charging stations, a little bit of money for electric buses, a little bit of money for improving the electric grid, but nothing like the massive investment that is required to respond to a code red, a code red for the planet.

Now, clearly, as the planet gets hotter and it is affecting our forests and our farming and our fishing--forest fires that are destroying towns, more powerful hurricanes affecting the seashore, more intrusion of saltwater into freshwater supplies--cities are having to basically start to build dikes around themselves in order to keep the seawater out.

I heard one Member of the Senate say: You know, here is the thing. We shouldn't do anything about this because the investments required to take on climate change will be disruptive.

Well, I will tell you what is disruptive. Forest fires are disruptive. The loss of the snowpack for our winter sports and our irrigation water and our healthy streams, that is disruptive. Sea life being damaged by ocean acidification, that is disruptive to our economy. Forests with pine beetles thriving and trees dying, that is disruptive to our forestry. Lack of rain, such that the groundwater is not recharged, is disruptive to our irrigation for our ranchers and our farmers.

What is disruptive is doing nothing, and the damage will far exceed the cost of taking an honest effort to transition quickly to renewable energy.

Failing to act means failing our future generations. We cannot allow that to happen. So that is why I am so pleased that on the same day that the IPCC released their report, we also saw the budget resolution released.

Now, the budget resolution is the second half of the package, the part that addresses families, that addresses forests, that addresses housing, that addresses children, and, yes, addresses climate. So there is hope.

And what does it do? Well, it funds the Civilian Conservation Corps to put Americans to work in good-paying jobs to help conserve our Nation's public lands and waters and bolster community resilience and to advance environmental justice.

It establishes the Energy Efficiency and Clean Electricity Standard that my colleague from Minnesota, who is presiding over the Senate right now, has been so instrumental in laying out for the Senate to act on. That clean electricity standard will have an enormous impact because to escape the fossil fuel energy economy, we have to electrify everything on the production end. We take the power off the grid, but we have to put renewable energy onto the grid. So it is the key. It is the centerpiece--the centerpiece--of how we act.

And there are a lot of subsidies, yes, for things like electric buses and also for electric vehicles. And I think it is so exciting that we now are going to have an F-150 electric. And the F-150 electric goes from zero to 60 miles per hour in 4.4 seconds. Try that with your fossil fuel car, my friend, because you will fail. But you get the new Ford F-150, and it will press you back in the seat like you have never experienced as you take off, and you can still do your

industrial work with your pickup. And there is a Ford Mustang coming on, electric, and that is going to be a hot item, an exciting item as well. And so it is kind of neat that what is good for the environment is also going to be good for all of us to have a good time driving.

So all of these pieces that are in the second half--the second half of the infrastructure package--that has to get done, and it should be absolutely bipartisan because these investments in families are desired by Democratic families and Republican families and Independent families. These investments in housing--affordable housing in our country--are needed by Republican and Democratic and Independent families.

And you know what? It is going to be completely paid for--completely paid for by having the megarich pay their fair share. And as you all know from all the reports, they have been jumping and diving and ducking their taxes, many of them paying zero. Billionaires who are putting themselves into space on a joy ride pay zero in taxes. Billionaires are using tons of the products of what we paid for of our road infrastructure and our water infrastructure and our education infrastructure. They are employing all kinds of folks who are funded by Pell grants to get through college, paying zero--zero--in taxes.

Why are the billionaires paying less than you and me? Why are they paying less than the clerk at the grocery store or the person bagging your groceries? Why are they paying less than the secretaries? Why are they paying less in taxes, the billionaires? Good question.

It shouldn't be the case. So the responsible thing is to pay for the package with tax fairness for all Americans, everyone doing their fair share, including our companies, some of which have posted tremendous, astronomical profits while paying absolutely zero in taxes.

If we turn the clock back to Henry David Thoreau, who said many interesting things in his book, ``On Walden Pond,'' and one of the things he said is, ``What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?''

Well, his question was kind of looking toward the future that we are now in, where the ravages of a heated planet are destroying our forests, our fishing, and our farming, undermining the foundations of our rural economy, creating storms that assault our shores, creating fires that burn down houses and towns as well as trees.

It is time for us to act, and to act boldly, because we are under a red alert for the planet and we need to act.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

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

Madam President, I come to the floor today to bring attention to the wildfires raging in our Western States, devastating community after community. I am also here to call on my colleagues to use the ongoing infrastructure discussions to take the swift, bold action necessary not just to confront the current crisis but to address the root cause and help save others from having to endure similar fires and tragedies in the future.

For nearly a month now, the Bootleg Fire, pictured here, has been the biggest of 91 fires burning across 12 States. It has been raging in Southern Oregon. It has burned about 415,000 acres. Translate that into square miles. That is 646 square miles. Translate that. That is an area about 20 miles wide and 30 miles long, half the size of the State of Rhode Island reduced to ash and smoke.

It is ranching country. There are not a lot of developed communities, but you still have a lot of homes getting burned, at least 161 homes; double that or roughly double that in outbuildings. Hundreds of vehicles have been destroyed. Thousands of families have been forced to evacuate.

This fire grew so large, it started generating its own weather system. Think about that. Usually, we watch the weather to see how the weather is going to influence the fire. Will rain and storms slow them down? Will humidity slow them down a little? Will dry, hot conditions help them grow or, worst of all, hot and dry with wind? Well, that is not the case with the Bootleg Fire, which created these massive clouds rising more than 30,000 feet into the air, and as the air surges up, then below it, it pulls in air from all around, which feeds oxygen to the inferno. Then, when that air cools and drops down, it pushes the bottom air out, spreading sparks like some living monster sucking in fire, intensifying oxygen, and then spewing out fire-spreading embers as the air cools and descends. It even generates its own lightning storms and spawns fire tornadoes, swirling vortexes of heat and flame.

Fires are an annual occurrence in Oregon, but decade after decade, they are getting a lot worse. There are two major reasons for this. Climate chaos is one, and poor forest management is the other. The forests, due to climate chaos, are drier and more prone to fire. Why are they drier? Because, well, carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and methane gas leaking out of our natural gas systems are heating the

planet. So we have to pivot quickly and transition to renewable energy to stop it from getting worse.

But that is a discussion really for another day. Let's focus today on the second part of the challenge, which is forest management.

When fires erupt, we put them out as fast as we can, trying to prevent devastating fires like the Bootleg Fire. But the result of putting fires out fast over decade after decade after decade is that a lot of fuels build up on the floor of the forest.

In addition, we have a lot of forests that are second-growth forests, with trees planted very close together, and they all grow up at about the same height and their canopies are touching each other, which makes it very easy for the fire to spread from tree to tree to tree.

So you throw in the combination of longer, hotter, dryer summers and second-growth forests, and you have the perfect recipe for infernos like the big fires we have been seeing out West.

To reduce the risk of these devastating fires in the short-run, we have two basic tools. One is, we reduce the grass and undergrowth that fuels the fire--we sometimes call that mowing--and then we do prescribed burns, and the second is, we thin the forest.

Now, thinning the forest works better in some forests than in others. For ponderosa pine, it works really well. You spread out those pine trees. They would never have grown so close together. In the old days, when fires regularly swept through, they would kill the younger trees. The older trees would survive, widely spaced trees. They would burn up the fuel on the floor of the forest, and it worked well. Other forests--wetter forests, Douglas fir forests, other types of forests-- we are still trying to figure out exactly the best way to do forest management to reduce fire risk. The Bootleg Fire did show the effect of these types of efforts.

Over the last decades, ecologists have been working in the Sycan Marsh Preserve. They have been thinning out the forest, and they have been using prescribed fires. So they have been reducing the number of ponderosa pines to make it a less fire-prone forest.

As the Bootleg Fire came into the preserve, firefighters on the ground report the flames didn't jump as easily or readily from treetop to treetop; they went back to the ground. Going back to the ground, where there had been prescribed fire, they didn't burn as quickly. The fire moved a lot more slowly, and, in addition, it is easier for firefighters to get into the front of the fire.

So the thinning and burning of the Sycan Marsh Preserve are strong proof of why we need to use these tools, with science-informed adjustments resulting in the most effective strategies for different kinds of forests. But, again, those strategies may not work as well in other types of forests, and we need the best science. I have asked the head of the Forest Service to get us the best science so we can apply the best strategies to make different types of forests more fire- resilient.

But we need to be able to fund such efforts on a much more massive scale. Out in Oregon, we have 2.3 million acres that have been approved environmentally to be treated that aren't treated because we haven't had the funds. So this infrastructure bill is an opportunity to address so much of the work that needs to be done to make the forest more fire- resilient.

Well, I am pleased to say that the bill is going to have quite a bit in it, and I really am pleased with this. I have been pushing for this for years, that we need to spend not millions but billions of dollars in forest management. So $8 billion of wildfire-related funding is included, and that will go out through the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior; $2.4 billion for hazardous fuels reduction efforts; $2.1 billion for efforts to restore ecosystems on a broader scale in a fashion that will help reduce the vulnerability of the forests and other ecosystems to fire; $1 billion to help fund wildfire mitigation activities for at-risk communities; $650 million for rehabilitating areas burned by fires; and $600 million to give firefighters the pay raises they deserve and to increase the year-round workforce.

For years, I have been saying that one of the problems we have is a big attrition rate for firefighters. They go out for a season, and then the job is over, and they have to find other jobs. When they find those other jobs, well, they are not there to fight the fire the next season. Crew bosses are essential. You don't want to lose these experienced crew bosses.

So what is the answer? Well, part of the answer is, let's create year-round jobs with decent pay so that when you are not doing firefighting directly, you are doing fire prevention by working on forest management projects, and I think that idea is starting to gain some traction.

We also have funding in here to increase the collaborative forest landscape restoration projects, CFLR projects. A CFLR collaborative brings together the stakeholders from every perspective--from the environmental side, from the timber side, from all sides in between-- and they work out what they refer to as a prescription for a specific forest.

They go out, and in the beginning, when they don't really have a great trust relationship, they go out together, and they will go through the acreage and mark the trees. Then later on, as the trust grows, they write the prescription, and they know it will get implemented as they desire, and they can get a lot more work done. Do you know what? It means this thinning operation, this forest treatment operation, stays out of the courts. That is very important because if we are just treating forests through timber sales that are always hung up in disputes in the courts, we are not getting the job done.

This effort to increase the role of these collaboratives puts people in the room who have been traditional opponents. They are talking to each other, and they are working out plans together. They find out they actually sometimes like each other. So we need a lot more of these collaboratives.

We have in Oregon close to two dozen collaboratives. Only four are federally funded. So by increasing the funding, we enable more collaboratives to do a lot more work, and that would be a very good thing.

I spoke to the billions of dollars, but you know what--these couple billion dollars is not enough. I will be introducing legislation modeled on the Great American Outdoors Act to fund $30 billion in hazardous fuel treatments across our public lands over the next 5 years. That is closer to the scale we need to undertake to manage these forests.

It used to be you thought about, well, when do I want to go out and hike on the Pacific Crest Trail? Well, August has the least chance of rain. Now it is like whatever you do, think twice about going out in August because you will be dodging forest fires. It has happened to my wife Mary and me a number of times now. We planned to hike in the southern part of the Pacific Crest Trail, and twice we had to move to the northern part. We hiked in the northern part twice and had to dodge forest fires. One time, it was the fire that erupted and put the whole Columbia Gorge on fire. They had fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Just last year, we were hiking starting on the Warm Springs Reservation, and other hikers said: Hey, did you know that there is already a fire on the Warm Springs Reservation--right where we were. Well, the wind was blowing the other way. We hadn't smelled the smoke. You are out of cell phone range. You are up in the mountains. We hadn't heard that. But it reflects the fact that you have to worry now when hiking because the forest is so vulnerable. It is so dry. It so easily turns into a fire that can move very quickly, especially if there is a wind.

I have worked to get funding for the National Guard to be able to help fight fires over the last 4 years, including 1,500 members of the Oregon National Guard who have been trained. They have been out helping on this Bootleg Fire, so that is great. We have been working to enable FEMA to deliver disaster assistance more quickly to the communities impacted by catastrophic fires.

And we have sat to recognize that we need to tackle the issue of smoke. We didn't used to talk about smoke in Oregon, but it was smoke from burning our grass seed fields, because the way to get grass seed very pure was to burn fields every year. So we had this haze

throughout the summer. Well, it was very unhelpful to people's health to be breathing that smoke. So eventually we said: No, no, no, we are not going to burn the fields in that fashion.

But now we have the smoke from the forest fires, and--wouldn't you know it--when I was home last weekend, I expected to see a lot of smoke. There was a previous moment where I drove 600 miles during the Labor Day fires last year, and I never got out of the smoke for 600 miles. This time, I was in blue skies. And then I looked and saw that the weather patterns were driving the smoke from our fires into Montana, and it was going up in the jet stream. It was swirling around. There was a lot of smoke here in DC from the fires out West.

Well, so it is a national issue. In fact, I guess the index for air quality in New York City surged to 157, and anything above 100 is pretty dangerous. But that just shows the level of challenge that we are addressing.

So we need to tackle the smoke, and that is why I am introducing the Smoke-Ready Communities Act and the Wildfire Smoke Emergency Declaration Act. We need to recognize the threat not just from the fires but also the impact of the smoke on communities. So we need to have a way to respond and create a national emergency related to it. We need to prepare our communities to be ready for the smoke, to have some kind of air-filtered locations where people with asthma and other healthcare conditions can escape and get to clean air when the air quality drops so dramatically.

And we need to protect our farm workers. So I will be introducing the Farmworker Smoke and Heat Protection Act. We lost one of our farm workers due to heat when this heat dome struck Oregon a couple of weeks ago. There in Portland, where my house is, it was 116 degrees, plus a wind that was blowing that turned it into a hairdryer. You stepped outside, and you were just watching the plants just shrivel up.

And we were fortunate. We converted our gas furnace to a heat pump so that we could heat our house with renewable electricity rather than fossil fuels. The side benefit is we got air-conditioning. So we had air-conditioning for the first time. But so many houses in Oregon don't have it. Think about the impact of 116-degree heat in a place where it is rare to have a single day ever break 100 degrees during the summer.

So we need Federal standards related to smoke. We need to work with the Occupational Health and Safety Administration to ensure that farm workers get the assistance they need to be able to work safely.

I can't underscore enough the importance of us coming together as a nation to tackle these western fires. At this moment, the fire season is just beginning in Oregon. It feels like we have been in it forever. It is just July. We have August, September, October. Well, we just turned the calendar onto August--August, September, October. We had fires starting early in the year, as early as March, burning late in the year. In California, it is a year-round proposition already, and Oregon isn't far behind.

My fervent hope is that with fires engulfing Oregon and California and Idaho Montana and others, it will be a wake-up call that we need in this Chamber to realize that we have a responsibility to act and to act quickly.

We have an opportunity to make an impact, but we have to have the policy knowledge and the political determination to take that quick action

Madam President, I rise today to add my voice to my colleagues in remembering and paying our respects to our dear friend and former colleague Senator Carl Levin, whom we sadly lost last night.

My colleagues have been sharing their stories and their experiences of this incredible human being, this amazing Senator, and I want to share one of my own, a story of how he made an impact on my life and my approach to being a Senator.

It was back in 2009, when we had an enormous collapse of our economic system. I came here as a freshman Senator, and we were working to say what happened and how can we prevent this from happening again. A lot of what happened was enormously leveraged bets made in the Wall Street casino. A staff member of mine kept saying, you have got to read this essay by Chairman Volcker about how we take and shut down this Wall Street casino and how it puts our entire economy at risk and will do so again in the future again if we don't act

After two or three times that my team member had approached me on this, I put out an email to all of the Senators and said: Here is the challenge that is presented, and here is what we need to do to protect the future economy. Would anyone join me in undertaking to establish this Volcker rule to shut down the Wall Street casino?

The next day, I came to the floor of the Senate, and Carl Levin comes up to me. And he says: About your email from yesterday, about your email, I want to join you in that project.

He knew a lot about this issue, and he had staff members who knew a lot about this issue. Then he went on to say: And you may think because you are new and I have been here for a while that I am going to sweep in and take this over. He said: But I want to tell you, I am not going to do that. I don't want to do that. I want to work in full partnership with you, together.

And that is what it became, this full partnership: our team members working closely together, Carl and I working closely together, no one leading, if you will, or, to put it differently, leading together. And it had many, many chapters in this effort.

It was not an easy path to say the big banks needed to change how they operate. But what struck me in how he conducted himself was he expressed not egoism but altruism. He didn't focus on what he should do to advance himself politically; he wanted to know what we can do to serve the best interests of this Nation, not grandstanding but problem- solving to make the United States of America work better for everyone. And so we proceeded.

During the debate on Dodd-Frank, we had an opportunity to put forward an amendment to establish the Volcker rule. Colleagues across the aisle were none too happy about that, and it shut down the Senate for a full day. So Carl and I kept working during that day to say: No, this should be debated. This should be voted on. But eventually, our second-degree amendment died when the first-degree amendment was taken down. But our team members had worked through the night to make it a germane amendment so it would have survived had that not taken place.

So then we went, in partnership, over to speak with Mr. Frank, Congressman Frank on the House side. And Congressman Frank joined in the battle. And we kept pushing, and eventually, in conference, the Volcker rule was brought to life.

And then we started partnering and trying to prevent the rulemaking from tearing it down. And Carl would call me up and say: Here is what is happening. What are we going to do? And we would write a letter and we would call the regulators and we would rally our fellow Senators. He just kept at it. Like a dog with a bone, he was not going to let go. He was tenacious, saying: This matters. Every piece of it matters. We are going to get this done.

So when we think about the fact that that Wall Street casino no longer threatens the American economy because it no longer operates as it did, well, we have Senator Carl Levin to thank for that.

There is so much more he did here. Colleagues have been speaking to other chapters of his work, but this was the chapter I was involved in. I think it said so much about who he was. His policy expertise, his humble approach to the fight, his willingness to take on powerful actors, that is truly what it is to be a public servant.

I wish Carl were here so we could have him hear these stories from us directly. I am thinking now about his colleagues representing Michigan who have followed in his footsteps. They are here: Debbie Stabenow, Gary Peters. I know they are inspired by the example he set.

A couple of years ago, I had a chance to debate in Michigan and called up Carl so we could get together for dinner, together with his wife Barbara. And, boy, he was just interested in every aspect of what we were doing here and how we were, hopefully, making the Senate work better.

And just not so long ago, he wrote an op-ed about how to make the Senate work better by enabling the minority to slow things down, to have leverage but keep this body from being paralyzed. So he continued to think and to engage right up to his final days.

So, Barbara, we are thinking about you. We are holding you and your family in the light, and we are doing so with such appreciation of the life and work of Carl Levin.

Thank you.

Mr. President, this is a critical time for America. It is a moment in which the actions we take or don't take will affect the very design of our government for generations to come.

Our Founders had a vision that we all are created equal. In our initial Constitution, it wasn't fully manifested, but we have worked through several hundred years to come to that point that we recognize that every American should be able to participate in the direction of their country. We had some key moments in that national debate.

I was always fascinated that when my father was born in 1919, women couldn't vote in America. We had all kinds of other barriers for communities of color--for Black Americans, for Native Americans--and those barriers we struck down time after time after time.

Then we came to 1965, and we said there are still so many ways that communities are trying to keep every citizen from participating in voting, and we are going to make sure that ends from this point forward.

President Johnson said that the power of the vote is the most significant tool ever developed to strike down injustice. It is a powerful tool. It is really the beating heart of our Republic, that ballot box, the ability to say: This is what I like, and this is what I don't like. This is who I like, and this is who I don't think will carry the policies I believe in.

At its heart, this is a vision of power flowing up from the people, not down from the powerful, but here is the problem: The powerful don't like that vision of America, so they have many, many strategies designed to try to override that founding vision of participation. They have legions of lawyers, and they have legions of lobbyists. There are three drug lobbyists for every single Member of Congress. They

have the ability to fund mass media campaigns to try to change the way that issues are framed. They have the ability to participate with dark money in elections that manifests itself in those endless attack ads you see on social media and on television.

They have all of these abilities, but the thing they really fear is the ballot box, and right now in America, they are going after the ballot box. We have to decide if we are going to defend it or not. That is the challenge that faces us, and it is a challenge that shouldn't be that difficult because every single one of us in this Chamber took an oath to the Constitution. The Constitution lays out the power, the vision of government of, by, and for the people. It starts off in the Constitution ``we the people,'' not ``we the powerful''--``we the people.''

This assault has now spread to 18 States and 35 new, restrictive voting laws. These laws attack the ability to vote, and they are targeting Black Americans, communities of color, poor Americans, and college students. They make it harder to register. They make it easier to purge voters off the voting rolls. You can't vote if you are not on a voting roll. They attack early voting. They attack vote by mail. They attack curbside voting. They make it hard to drop off your ballot. They make it hard for people with disabilities to fill out their ballots.

In some cases, they are creating a strategy of voter intimidation by allowing poll watchers to essentially hover over you as you vote and challenge your legitimacy to vote. They have even decided, in some cases, to make it so that, if you are in line to vote and it is a hot day, nobody can give you a drink of water. All of these strategies are about biasing America in its process so the powerful will run this place rather than the people.

I would love to hear a Senator come to this floor and defend these attacks on the right to vote because, if you are not defending the right to vote, you are not defending the Constitution, and every one of us took an oath to that Constitution.

We also have a challenge with the courts. It is the Supreme Court that said that it is OK to have hundreds of millions of dollars of dark money--and nobody knows where it came from--in our elections. Now, if you or I donate $100 to someone, it has to be disclosed. Everyone knows I made that donation. Yet if a powerful corporation or a billionaire puts $1 million or $100 million into an election, he can do it and remain in complete secrecy. That is why it is called dark money, and that is what the Court unleashed with its Citizens United decision.

Then the Court said: That is not enough. We are going to go after voting rights by undermining the 1965 Voting Rights Act, even though this Chamber has reauthorized that act on a bipartisan basis time after time after time.

First, the Court said in Shelby County v. Holder that preclearance no longer applies. So a State that had been routinely attempting to block citizens from voting no longer had to have new changes in its voting laws precleared to make sure it did not have a prejudicial effect against a targeted group of voters. Within days, chambers in this country were plotting about how to stop people from voting. The Supreme Court was maybe just so idealistic that they said nobody would ever do this again in America and that no chamber would ever do this in America. If that were right, if that were their thought, they were wrong because, within days, those plots unfolded.

Then we have the most recent Supreme Court decision of Brnovich v. DNC, and Alito says that making voting inconvenient doesn't make access unequal. Well, let's just explain to this Justice, who apparently knows nothing about how voting really works, that when you make it inconvenient for a targeted group, you make access unequal. It is exactly the intent of these laws to make access unequal. Elena Kagan, in her dissent, said of the equal chance to participate in our democracy--referring to the 1965 Voting Rights Act--that this law, of all laws, should never be diminished by this Court.

Section 2 is the most recent section attacked by the Supreme Court, and it bars procedures that result in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of one's race or color. Well, one of the issues was from Arizona. It was a situation wherein you had no easy places to drop off your ballot in large Native American reservations. So by banning the ability of people to collect ballots and drop them off, you essentially make it extraordinarily difficult for this targeted community to vote, and that was the intent. That was the intent.

Now, this law, section 2, didn't say anything about intent. It said the result. It didn't say it had to be a denial. It said an abridgement--in other words, an infringement--on the ability to cast a ballot, but Alito doesn't care. The majority on the Supreme Court doesn't care about defending the right to vote, the pulsating heart of our Republic.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us as the critical factor to defend the Constitution. The Supreme Court won't do it. The States are undermining it. It is our responsibility--our responsibility--to set out those basic standards that defend the ability of every American to vote. That is why I am here on the floor tonight, talking about the For the People Act.

It is called S. 1. Why? Because defending the right to vote is our No. 1 responsibility. That is the challenge we face, and if we fail in this challenge, then across this country, in State after State after State, communities are being targeted to make it hard for them to vote, and it will be harder for them to vote. It will change the outcome, and it will destroy the idea of equal representation. We cannot let that happen.

Today, I met with members of the Texas Legislature. They have come here in order to stop the Texas House of Representatives from passing these types of laws that are targeted at stopping specific groups from voting.

What are the types of laws that are being considered by the Texas Legislature right now? One is they don't like the idea of Christian communities voting on Sundays and getting in buses to go to the polls together. They call it Souls to the Polls. So they said: Do you know what? It will be against the law for more than three of you to get in a car and drive together to the polls. Are you kidding me? Has anybody heard of the right of association? Are any Senators here caring about defending the right of association in our Constitution?

Can you imagine something so diabolical as to say: ``All three of you can get in a car but not four,'' and ``Do you know why? Because we want to stop you from using vans or buses to go vote''? That is crazy. It is as crazy as the Georgia effort to stop people from passing out water in long voter lines.

What else is the Texas Legislature trying to do?

It is infringing on overnight voting, voting for people who have long hours, who are working during the day. Overnight voting really made the ballot accessible.

They are attacking drive-through voting. They are attacking online registration. They are attacking assistance to disabled Americans. They are making it easier to purge voters off the lists of voters, the registration lists.

They even have in that bill stopping election workers from sending out absentee ballot applications. Is it a crime to be able to help your fellow citizen apply for a ballot? Yes, if Texas passes that law.

They are also engaged in a process of voter intimidation by allowing partisan poll watchers to freely intimidate voters. That is wrong on so many levels. Intimidation is something that has a long history in our country. It is a very racist history. I remember one of the stories after the Civil War. You had a situation wherein you formed a group of horses surrounding a ballot poll place to prevent Black Americans from being able to get to the polls to vote.

There are all kinds of other voter intimidation strategies. They were racist strategies. These efforts to stop Black Americans from voting are racist strategies. It is simply, simply wrong, and we have the responsibility to end these practices. The effort to silence the voices of the American people, to stop them from having a say through their votes, is just fundamental to the vision of a government of, by, and for the people.

Citizens wonder why it is they are hearing that billionaires don't pay any taxes and that some of the most profitable corporations in America don't pay

any taxes. Well, it goes back to the many advantages the wealthy have in influencing the outcomes. Those reams of liars, those platoons of lobbyists, those media campaigns, that dark money, and now the effort to block the ballot box, that is how afraid the powerful are that the voice of the people will say: Invest in American families rather than tax breaks for billionaires. Tackle healthcare and housing and education. Create living-wage jobs rather than new tax cuts for the already wealthy and influential.

What we have is a battle between the powerful and privileged holding onto their lever of power, trembling at the idea that American voters can get to the polls and determine to block it. They are afraid that, if voters can get to the polls, they might elect people who are fighting for Main Street rather than Wall Street. They are afraid they might invest--those elected individuals--in quality, affordable healthcare--and healthcare should be a right, not a privilege--that we might invest in housing because there is a tremendous housing shortage across America and that we might invest in education because education is the path to success in our complex society.

So how do we address this? We pass S. 1, the For the People Act. We do it by following the example of men and women who sat in this Chamber half a century ago and used their power to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act to give every American a full opportunity to vote.

Once again, this more than half a century later, we are called upon to fight to defend our Constitution, to defend the ``we the people'' vision and ensure that every American can freely and fairly cast a ballot.

This bill sets out basic national standards for how elections are conducted in accordance with the constitutional power specifically stated for Congress to be able to so set such standards to ensure that every American has equal freedom to vote, equal opportunity regardless of who they are, the color of their skin, or where they live. It ensures this access by protecting vote-by-mail, early voting, and fairness on ballot drop boxes.

Why are early voting and vote-by-mail so scary to the powerful? Here is why. On election day, there are so many ways to stop people from voting. First of all, you reduce the number of precincts in the communities you don't want to vote, so there are fewer places to vote. Then you put them in places where there is no parking. That makes it harder. Then you reduce the number of precinct workers in those locations, so there are really long lines. You have heard about those lines--3 hours, 4 hours, 5 hours, 6 hours, 7 hours. Then you tell people you can't even give people a glass of water to those who are waiting in those lines. Then you intimidate people by allowing partisan poll watchers to hover over people while they vote or one single person to challenge the legitimacy of the right to vote of every single person who walks in that door, because that is another one of the bills that is being passed in State after State.

Election day can be easily manipulated, and there are even more ways to do it. One is--and this happens--you send out false information about what day is election day. You send out texts that say: So sorry you missed the election last Tuesday. Hope you make it to the polls next time.

So people think they missed the vote. They are, like, well, I thought it was next Tuesday, but I got this text, so it was last Tuesday.

You put out false information about where the voting location is. You proceed to make sure you change the location from the previous time so people get confused about where to go and vote in the wrong precinct, and then you make it illegal for their vote to be counted if they voted in the wrong precinct.

Election day is easy to manipulate. The antidote is early voting and vote-by-mail, and that is why the powerful are attacking early voting and vote-by-mail.

Now, my State, Oregon, was the first State to adopt vote-by-mail. It did so when we had a Republican house and a Republican senate in my State. Utah was a major early State to do vote-by-mail. It is considered a red State, a Republican State. This isn't blue or red. This is American. This is our Constitution.

A second thing that the For the People Act does is stop billionaires from buying elections with dark money. You know, no matter if you poll Republicans, Independents, or Democrats, they all believe billionaires shouldn't be able to buy elections with dark money. They know that if a billionaire can create the equivalent of a stadium sound system that drowns out the voice of the people, that that is just wrong.

Think about how Americans thought of those early debates in the town square. Everyone got their chance to stand up and have their say. You didn't allow someone to erect a big sound system to drown out the people you didn't want to speak. No. Give everyone--that is kind of the heart, isn't it, of our First Amendment? Free speech. Everyone should be able to have their voice heard and not be drowned out by advertisements by anonymous billionaires buying elections.

The third thing this act does is it ends partisan gerrymandering. It creates independent Commissions--equal numbers of Republicans, Democrats, Independents--and therefore fights for the vision of equal representation.

Now, I have heard some folks salivating over increased gerrymandering, hoping to influence that other institution down the hall, saying: Hey, we have an extra 15 votes we shouldn't have right now. Let's get 25 with increased gerrymandering.

Well, it is just wrong to attack the principle of equal representation. You don't have equal representation if the system is rigged so that politicians choose their voters rather than voters choosing their politicians.

The fourth thing the For the People Act does, it takes on ethics reforms and targets corruption. Again, whether you ask Democrats, Republicans, or Independents, they want the corruption out of our system. They want to ensure that public officials serve the public, not some private cause or serve themselves; that we are going to do the people's business, not the business of some outside billionaire or some outside corporation.

These principles are widely supported across the country. The people sometimes say: Why don't you have any Republican sponsors on this bill? Why don't Republicans support this bill?

Across this Nation, Republicans overwhelmingly support these four principles in this bill. It is incredibly bipartisan. But not here in this Chamber because here is where the powerful speak, and the minority leader has said: I am going to lock down my Senators from supporting these efforts to defend our Constitution.

I would be embarrassed--I would be embarrassed if a leader of a caucus said it is going to lock me down to prevent me from defending the Constitution. I would be more than embarrassed; I would be alarmed. I would be outraged, as should every Member of this body across the aisle--should be outraged that they are being told they are locked down from defending the Constitution.

Next month, America will celebrate the 56th anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the most powerful, significant advancement this Nation has ever made to realize that ``we the people'' vision of America.

Lyndon Johnson called August 6, 1965--the day he signed that law--``a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield.'' He said: ``The heart of the act is plain. Wherever, by clear and objective standards, States and counties use regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote, then they will be struck down.''

Well, that is our job, to do what President Johnson thought was accomplished when he signed the Voting Rights Act--to strike down regulations, laws, or tests designed to deny the right to vote to targeted groups of Americans across this country. So let's do our job. Put this bill on the floor, and get it passed.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate

proceed to legislative session for a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate

proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 87, S. 65.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the committee-reported substitute amendment be agreed to and that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time.

Mr. President, I know of no further debate on the bill, as amended.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of Calendar No. 92, S. Res. 107.

I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, that the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged from further consideration and the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 289.

I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, that the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 10 a.m., Thursday, July 15; that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and morning business be closed; further, that upon the conclusion of morning business, the Senate proceed to executive session to resume consideration of the Liang nomination; further, that at 11 a.m., all postcloture time on the Liang and Remy nominations expire in the order in which cloture was invoked; that the cloture vote on the Cunningham nomination occur at 1:45 p.m.; finally, that if any nominations are confirmed, the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it stand adjourned under the previous order, following the remarks of Senator Blackburn.