Floor Statements

Mr. President, the most important words of our Constitution are the first three: ``We the People.'' Those three words, written in big, bold, beautiful script, convey the mission of our Constitution. We are a nation, as Abraham Lincoln opined, ``of the people, by the people, and for the people.'' That was the mission.

Our Constitution also lays out how our Founding Fathers intended to be a nation of, by, and for the people to be governed by coequal branches, with the branch carrying the weight of policy development being Congress: the House, and the Senate. The Executive is to have quite a different role in executing the laws. Judiciary has yet another role in weighing whether the laws are in accordance with the parameters of the Constitution--the principles of the Constitution.

So there we are, the branch of government--the Senate and the House-- with the power of the purse, with the responsibility for laying out the governing vision and rules for our Nation.

Yet, one-quarter of our government goes unfunded for a fourth week. Why is this Chamber not full of Senators? Why are we not debating funding bills? Why is there not a bill before the Senate right now? It is because the rhythm of the floor in this Chamber is guided by the majority leader. The majority leader refuses to put the bill on the floor so we can go about our work, putting the government back in business and ending this shutdown.

The majority leader has refused to have the Senate fulfill its responsibility and, indeed, has said: `` . . . will not take up any proposal that does not have a real chance of . . . getting a Presidential signature.''

In the Constitution, we have the ability to set law without a Presidential signature. It is certainly not a waste of time to be here debating proposals for funding the government. In fact, this is a complete abdication of our responsibility. It is an abdication at a time when 800,000 American families have a mother or father who is not getting paid, when many more thousands of contractors are not getting paid. Millions of Americans are seeking government services and finding there is no one to answer their phone call or their letter or process their online application, whether for an FAA mortgage, whether for an agricultural grant or loan for the next farming season, whether it is any of a host of hundreds of roles the government plays in facilitating the commerce and life of this Nation.

President Trump and the Senate majority are holding seven funding bills hostage. Hostage-taking is not the wisest move. Only one of these hostages has anything to do with the battle over the border. So why not release six of these hostages? Why not end the Trump-McConnell shutdown and release six of the seven hostages and on the seventh do a continuing resolution so we can continue debating the issues at stake while putting people back to work. That is a pretty good idea.

Here is the genius of the idea, which is, these are bills that already have support in the Senate. If we were to look at that support, we would find it was substantial when these bills came through in a bipartisan fashion under a Republican-led Senate. You have the Republican endorsement from here and you have the Democratic endorsement from the House. That is the making of a path forward.

Yet we need to remind the Members how our Constitution is constructed. Article I section 7 says in an abbreviated format: ``If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections.'' Then it goes back to the House and Senate, whichever body first initiated it. `` . . . and if approved by two-thirds . . . it shall become a Law.''

Let's recognize that the vision of our Constitution was not for us to sit on some chair or bench somewhere waiting for someone far down Pennsylvania Avenue to tell us what to do. That is not fulfilling our job. The President is supposed to implement the laws we pass--the vision we adopt--not for us to sit here doing nothing, waiting for the man in the Oval Office to tell us he has some message from on high on what we are supposed to do. No, that is not the vision of our Constitution.

It is disturbing that a responsibility we all signed on to--we took our oath of office--is being neglected in this Chamber at this moment, when so many Americans are suffering as a result.

Those funding bills that I was speaking of and that partisan support, how strong it was--the Agriculture bill, Interior, Financial Services, General Government, Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development. Those passed this floor just a few weeks ago on a 92-to-6 vote. How much more bipartisan does it get?

The State and Foreign Operations bill passed out of the Republican- led Appropriations Committee 31 to 0. The Commerce, Justice, and Science spending bill passed 30 to 1 in our spending committee. Homeland Security passed out 26 to 5.

So these have a powerful imprint of overwhelming bipartisan support in this Chamber, and yet we sit here afraid to take action and lay out the vision we have a responsibility to lay out.

I hope every Member will say back home that they invite the feedback of their constituents; that they will hold townhalls because then they will hear what I hear, which is that is an absurdity. It is an irresponsibility. It is a failure of leadership. It is a neglect of duty, and that is not what this Chamber should be about. It is not a proud moment to have such dysfunction in the heart of the Senate.

I am reminded of the historical reference: ``While Nero fiddles, Rome burns.'' It is a reference to the year A.D. 64, when Rome burned to the ground. The historian Suetonius records that Nero was responsible for the fire, and he watched it from a tower while playing an instrument and singing about the destruction of a different place--the destruction of Troy.

Here we sit today with our leadership's fiddling while our Nation suffers, while our leadership watches from afar from the tower, playing some fiddle for its amusement, instead of taking action here on the floor of the Senate.

While the Republican Senate leadership fiddles, our farmers aren't getting the funds or assistance they need to get through the winter to prepare for the next season because the Department of Agriculture is closed for business.

While the Republican leadership of this Chamber fiddles, firefighters whom we ask to risk their lives in fighting massive infernos in our Nation's forests are missing out on critical training and preparation time for the next fire season. In addition, the work being done to thin the forests, to make the forests more fire resistant, is suspended. The work getting the fuel off the forest floors to make them more fire resistant is suspended. The prescription burns being done to make the forests more fire resistant are canceled. Yet this is the time they have to happen. While the leadership fiddles, it is setting the stage for more savage forest fires to wreak havoc on the Western States in the United States in the summer to come.

While the Republican leadership of this Chamber fiddles, 100,000 low- income tenants are at risk because there is no staffer in place at Housing and Urban Development to renew the 1,100 affordable housing contracts that expired last month.

While the leadership fiddles, small, rural economies, like that of Lakeview, OR, are stuck in limbo and are unable to move forward on critical projects. According to the South Central Oregon Economic Development District's director, they are working at trying to give a loan to a small business in Lakeview, but they need EPA staff approval to be able to use the grant funding for an environmental assessment before they can borrow funds to buy a building. So they are up the creek while the Republican leadership fiddles.

The real victims in this misguided standoff are the hundreds of thousands of Federal workers who aren't being paid and the contractors who might never be paid. Let's listen to them. What do they have to say about this? Are they writing and saying: ``Love this dysfunction in the Senate. Love

the failure of leadership. Love the incompetence. Love the fact that nobody is working here to solve the problem''?

No, that is not what they are saying.

Erin, a furloughed Forest Service employee of Sandy, OR, writes that both she and her husband are Forest Service employees who have been furloughed in the Mt. Hood National Forest, and they are terrified about their personal finances.

Erin writes:

I have two boys that I will still have to continue to pay

daycare for so I do not lose their spot. That's $1,400 a

month alone.

She went on to write:

We have to be smart on how we balance our finances because

the cost of living is going up, but our salaries have not

been increased besides a minor cost-of-living adjustment last

year. So I am very worried what a long shutdown means for my

family and my coworkers.

Erin and her husband have every right to be worried about what is in the future for her family. They are suffering the effects of this shutdown through no fault of their own.

Steven, of southeast Portland, writes:

I am writing as a constituent, residing in southeast

Portland, and as a furloughed Federal employee. I do not in

any way support President Trump's efforts to build a wall

along our southern border. The proposed wall is unneeded. It

would be a wantonly wasteful use of taxpayer money. It would

be environmentally destructive, and it would further the

inhumane disregard of the rights of those seeking asylum.

Steven is a Federal worker who is not being paid, and he doesn't support this shutdown.

Julie, the wife of a firefighter in Redmond, OR, wrote last week that her husband ``isn't able to work because of the government shutdown.'' In just over a week, they are supposed to hire all of their seasonal firefighters for the summer. If they can't work, the hiring will get delayed or not happen, which will put communities at serious risk this summer from wilderness fires. This risk for this coming summer is very real in our State of Oregon.

Julie writes:

In no way is it OK to let the government shut down. . . .

Don't participate in holding our own country hostage.

Dr. Genevieve Grady, of Sheridan, OR, wrote:

I am a licensed clinical psychologist who is working at the

Federal Bureau of Prisons in Sheridan, OR. I am also a single

mom with two children under the age of 5. As an essential

Federal employee, I am required to continue to work without

being paid. As a licensed psychologist, I could cultivate

outside work with Agency permission to supplement my income.

However, I am unable to do this due to having to continue

working full time. Given that I am a single mother of two

small children, I must provide care for my children during

all other hours of the day. In order to maintain a roof over

my and my children's heads, I have had to contact my Federal

student loan company to seek relief. Unfortunately, they

cannot alter my student loan status any earlier than February

6. My daycare provider, who watched my children so that I may

continue going to work without pay, is an in-home provider

with three teenaged children of her own. I cannot ask her to

go without pay as she too needs to continue keeping her

family financially stable.

She writes:

There are very few expenses in my life that can go without

money: food, daycare, gas to get to work, car insurance to

drive legally, a phone required for my job to contact me in

an emergency, medical expenses. Both of my kids have been

sick during this furlough and have had to see the doctor to

get medication. After 26 days without pay, these bills

continue to require cash to pay, and I continue to wonder

how much longer I should keep coming to work or when I

should look for another job.

Linnea from Roseburg, OR, writes:

The unrepentant hostage holding of people's wages is cruel

and shows just how removed the Trump administration is from

the American people. I live in a single-income household in

which the only breadwinner is a government employee, my

mother. This means that we went through the holidays not

knowing when the next paycheck was going to come. We still

don't know.

Britt, a furloughed IRS worker who was proud of his government service and called it his small way of participating in our democracy, writes:

My savings is small and will not last through an extended

shutdown. I have already applied for unemployment insurance

compensation, but that process takes several weeks before I

actually receive any money. I have never had to file for

unemployment before, and it's quite unsettling that I am

forced to resort to government aid.

Like so many other Oregonians in a State that is 20-percent National Forest, Brien, of Pendleton, OR, writes:

As a United States Forest Service employee, I am waiting

for relocation reimbursement on a current move. I used most

of my savings to move duty stations 2 months ago, and with

the current furlough, I cannot afford to miss a pay period

even if I will get it in the end. I am currently paying

interest on my move that was to be covered by the Forest

Service. If the furlough lasts longer than January 13, it

will be extremely difficult to avoid late payment charges on

utilities, mortgage, and other bills. Don't hold me and my

middle-class family hostage to rich men's antics.

That is exactly what is happening with a President who is so far removed from the reality of ordinary people, with a President who worked with the leadership of this body in the Senate to approve a series of spending bills that we passed by a vast bipartisan majority but who then changed his mind and withdrew his support after they were passed. The President switched his position after the bills went through the Senate. The President bragged about owning this shutdown. He didn't have 1 second of worry about the plight of an ordinary American who was struggling to pay his bills.

From his ivory tower, his skyscraper in Florida, and his club--and, oh, he is still happy with his golf courses--he has no idea of the pain this is inflicting on people. If someone explains it to him, he doesn't care. That says a lot about the failure of leadership. As this writer said, ``Don't hold me and my middle-class family hostage to rich men's antics.''

Air traffic controllers are essential to the safety of our air traffic across this country. I received a stack of handwritten letters last week--old-fashioned, ink on paper, all kinds of paper, all colors of pens. They were handwritten by Oregon air traffic controllers who have been absolutely incensed with what is going on. Being an air traffic controller is an unbelievably tough job. Air traffic controllers are responsible for thousands of lives at any given moment. They have to be on their game 100 percent of the time. It can't be 99.5 or a plane is going to crash on you that day. These folks are working without pay. It is inflicting stress and anxiety on people who should have their absolute, full attention solely on the job of making sure no plane hits another.

James Ferguson, of Forest Grove, writes:

If the shutdown lasts any longer, I will lose my health

insurance and will no longer be able to pay for my 1-year-old

son's physical therapy, potentially adding additional months

to correct his spine and neck muscle problems.

This is another example of the pain. Here is a parent who feels the medical affliction of his child is going to be accentuated by the actions of the Republican leadership in the Senate and President Trump in the Oval Office. James isn't complaining that he needs to go shopping for new clothes or that he wants to check out a new car. He is worried about getting medical care for his infant child. He is worried about his infant child's recovery and of his improvement being stalled or damaged by this callous, inhumane shutdown.

Trevor Stokes, of Hillsboro, OR, and his wife are veterans of the U.S. Navy. They certainly are no strangers to sacrificing for their country.

In fact, in his letter, Trevor writes:

Over the past few weeks, during the shutdown, I have worked

both Christmas and New Year's as well as their eves. I was

not able to spend time with my family, which is a necessary

sacrifice.

Then he writes:

Now our financial future is uncertain due to a potentially

long unpaid period. I've had to withdraw from mutual funds

just to cover monthly financial obligations. My family and

the families of my air traffic colleagues have suffered from

the sudden loss of income. Please end the shutdown.

We ask so much of these people. We ask long hours and missed holidays in the name of protecting us as travelers. Shouldn't we also be looking out for them in their time of need?

Why don't we reopen the Department of Transportation and make sure our air traffic controllers start getting paid? All of these individuals are saying: Do your job. Do your job. Do your job. Senate leadership, do your job.

Put the bills that have passed the Senate already back on the floor so that we can send them to the Oval Office. Let us do our job.

This Trump-McConnell shutdown, this inaction of the Senate, abdicating

its responsibility--isn't that exactly parallel to Nero fiddling while Rome burned? That fire here in America is touching the lives of so many. There are 800,000 workers without pay. Thousands more are contractors. Millions of Americans are caught in limbo in the midst of an important transaction--applying for an agricultural loan, trying to get a mortgage, signing up for help from the Small Business Administration to launch their business, getting their paperwork processed in one of 1,000 different ways, and here, the leadership fiddles while the American public suffers. It is wrong.

It may not be comfortable to have a debate on the spending bills. It may not be comfortable to vote on these bills. It may not be sweet to support or oppose a particular amendment, but do you know what is worse? What is worse is doing nothing.

That is what this Chamber is doing right now. It is doing nothing, despite our responsibility to millions of Americans to act. Let's change that. Let's change it now.

I understand that the majority is going on a retreat. Instead of going on a retreat to play the fiddle, how about you be here on the floor and put these bills on the floor? Let's get all 100 Senators on the floor to actually talk to each other, to actually wrestle with the issues, to actually make our arguments, and to actually take the votes instead of going off somewhere to party. That is just wrong.

I encourage the majority leader to read the letter that was sent to him today from the freshmen from the House of Representatives down the hall. The freshmen haven't been here long enough to become cynical. They haven't become trapped in the partisan boundaries and warfare that seem to ensnare so much of this Chamber and the Chamber across the way. No, they are here, fresh from other occupations and other responsibilities, still full of common sense and the passion to do what is right for the American people. So let's listen to them.

Today they sent a letter to Majority Leader McConnell, which I read on the floor earlier today, and they said: Put the bills on the floor, put the spending bills on the floor--the bills that have already passed here in the Republican-led Senate or that passed overwhelmingly by the Republican-led Appropriations Committee, endorsed by the Democratic House. Put them on the floor and act.

Let's listen to the freshmen down the hall. They are reminding us that we have a responsibility to act, and let's do so immediately.

Thank you.

Mr. President, the most important words in our Constitution are the first three: ``We the People.'' With these three simple words, our Founders laid out the mission for our government; that is, a government to produce a form of legislation that reflects the will of the American people or, as Lincoln summarized it, a government of, by, and for the people.

That mission is being corrupted and damaged in a significant and extensive fashion. It is being damaged with a goal of converting this vision of ``We the People'' to a government by and for the powerful and the privileged. That corruption, that fundamental corruption of our government, comes in many forms, but it certainly includes gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter intimidation, and dark money in our campaigns flooding our system with unidentified resources to serve the powerful and the privileged rather than the people.

We in this Chamber, having taken an oath of allegiance to our Constitution, ought to be defending it, but we are not. The result is, we see many challenges facing our Nation unaddressed: stagnant wages and soaring income inequality, huge wealth inequality; skyrocketing healthcare costs; unaffordable higher education and homeownership; rent so high they drive people to live in tents; catastrophic climate chaos wreaking havoc on our planet with uncontrolled carbon pollution.

We have been paralyzed on these issues because of this corruption of our Constitution, because of the gerrymandering, because of the voter suppression intimidation, because of the dark money. It has allowed the hijacking of our Constitution, and we need to end it. It has been hijacked by corporate and Wall Street executives swimming in recordbreaking profits and trillion-dollar tax breaks, shuttering American factories and shipping jobs overseas. It has been hijacked by fossil fuel barons who exhibit a greed for profits that trumps the direct damage--or concern about the direct damage they are inflicting on our beautiful blue-green planet. It has been hijacked by cabals of shadowy organizations, using vast sums of dark money, no identified source, to influence and buy elections, undermining our institutions at every level and driving massive cynicism among our youth.

Our youth look at our government, and they see those beautiful words: ``We the People,'' and then they see the corruption, the corruption this body is doing nothing to address--not the gerrymandering, not the voter suppression, not the dark money. It is time to change that.

I have laid out a blueprint for our ``we the people'' democracy. I unveiled this document last week. I am happy to provide copies to anyone. It is available on the web. It is a blueprint for restoring our democracy that takes on the corrupting influence of dark money, takes on the corrupting influence of gerrymandering, takes on the corruption of voter suppression to ensure equal representation for every American.

Let's start by looking at dark money. We need to pass Senator Udall's constitutional amendment that overturns Citizens United and thereby end the corruption of the unlimited dark money.

According to one analysis, the top 15 dark money groups in America has spent over $600 million on campaign-related activities in the last few years. That is just the top 15 groups, writing check after check to drown out the voice of the people. It is kind of like the dark money is a stadium sound system cranked up to the top volume so voices and concerns of millions of ordinary Americans are wiped out, unheard, unlistened to; thus, driving decisions of this body in favor of the powerful instead of the people.

It is why we need to give Congress the ability to set reasonable limits on campaign spending and donations through that constitutional amendment. That is why we need to increase transparency on all money in the campaign system through Senator Whitehouse's DISCLOSE Act. His act calls for robust disclosure for corporate union, PACs, 501(c)(3)s that contribute over $10,000. It is why we need transparency through Senator Klobuchar's Honest Ads Act, which addresses the transparency of online ads, which are becoming a bigger and bigger part of our dialogue over campaigns in this country, the social media side. It requires those who purchase and publish those online ads to publicly disclose their financing.

Thomas Jefferson laid out how important an equal distribution of power is among the voters. He called it his equal voice principle, and he said this: ``[A] government is republican in proportion as every member composing it has his equal voice in the direction of its concerns''--equal voice. He said in this letter, after he was President, that if we lose this, which he called the mother principle of our democracy, we would not have laws that reflect the will of the people.

So here we are with the mother principle--a distribution of power among voters, a distribution of voice among voters. That, as the securing factor for government, reflects the will of the people.

This is in complete opposition to the concentration of power through Citizens United.

Let us turn to the corruption from gerrymandering. Now, there is a bit of a challenge to define what gerrymandering is, but let's try putting it this way: the drawing of funny-shaped districts in order to unbalance fair representation of voters in a State.

Now, here are some of the warning signs if you want to say it is gerrymandered. First, look to the districts and see if they are of funny shapes like these--like Nebraska, like the Fifth Congressional District in Florida, like the Seventh Congressional District in Pennsylvania, like the Maryland Third Congressional District, like the North Carolina First District, and the Texas Thirty-third District-- blue States, red States, all exhibiting varieties of gerrymandering.

Another way to look at gerrymandering is to look at an imbalance in wasted votes. That is, you take the number of votes required to elect someone in a particular congressional district and add up the surplus of those votes, and you add those up on the Democratic side and you add those up on the Republican side, and if there is a huge imbalance in the wasted votes, then probably these districts have been drawn to unbalance fair representation for people in the State.

A third way to look at gerrymandering is to look at whether the congressional representation in the House of Representatives is proportional to the popular vote totals in a State.

So those three things are warning signs.

How should this be addressed? It should be addressed through having national standards for independent redistricting commissions so that the citizens of the United States across the entire United States get fair representation in Congress and for the ridding of gerrymandering in the United States of America.

In 2016, North Carolina Republicans had 53 percent of the State's popular vote in House races but 77 percent of the congressional seats. That is a sign of gerrymandering. The same year, Pennsylvania Democrats won 48 percent of the popular vote in their State but only had 27 percent of the House seats.

So these are signs of a rigged system, and if you want to drive cynicism, keep a rigged system.

The House of Representatives is supposed to stand for equal representation for people, not for a biased, corrupted, rigged system that we get from gerrymandering.

So we need to take the power for redistricting out of the hands of partisan

elected officials and put it in the hands of independent commissions to draw fair, competitive congressional districts to truly reflect the voters' voices.

Now, as for that Pennsylvania gerrymandered seat that I referred to, after the 2016 election, the State supreme court stepped in and redrew the district lines to make them more fair and representative.

So what happened? Let's compare 2016 to 2018.

In 2016, you had the Democrats receiving 48 percent of the popular vote and 27 percent of the congressional districts, a gap of more than 20 percent. After the redrawing, you had Democrats receiving 53 percent of the popular vote across the State and winning 50 percent of the contested seats. So a gap of 21 percent goes down to a gap of just 3 percent. That is a sign that the State has been more fairly drawn to reflect the distribution of voters. It shows that the voters are being heard and that the corruption of gerrymandering is being ended. But it shouldn't just be ended in Pennsylvania. It should be ended across the country.

Now, the U.S. Supreme Court has punted on gerrymandering. In fact, it has been at the heart of each of these three corrupting practices: unleashing dark money through Citizens United; striking down the Voting Rights Act of 1965, allowing an unlimited set of strategies--a huge set of strategies--for voter suppression and voter intimidation; and never taking on the issue of gerrymandering.

Maybe the U.S. Supreme Court should read the Constitution and realize what Jefferson was talking about and realize that it is their job to defend the integrity of the United States of America and take on these corrupting forces that they themselves have unleashed in two instances and failed to take on in the third.

Well, voter suppression and voter intimidation are certainly alive and well as corrupting forces. That is why the Blueprint for Democracy calls for the passage of Senator Leahy's Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill would restore and modernize the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which the Supreme Court tore down in 2013 with their decision in Shelby County v. Holder.

Now, realize that the Voting Rights Act reauthorization had vast bipartisan support here in the Senate. This wasn't a partisan bill. The voting right is the fundamental foundation of our democratic republic, and it had broad bipartisan support, as it should. But the Supreme Court, in the interest of the powerful and privileged, tore down--they are no longer the defenders of the vision of our Constitution but the destroyers of the ``we the people'' vision of our Constitution. That should concern every Member in this body.

We have seen rampant voter suppression in our national elections used to block entire groups of people from exercising their constitutional rights at the ballot box.

Just this last November, we saw thousands of Native Americans living on Tribal reserves in North Dakota kept from casting a ballot. In Georgia, we saw the former secretary of state, who was running for Governor, attempt to block 53,000 Georgians, predominantly African Americans, from voting because of what were described as minor clerical inconsistencies. We saw thousands of Ohio voters purged from voting rolls on the order of the secretary of state of Ohio, and done so in a way disproportionately benefiting one party over the other.

That is just scratching the surface of the list of deplorable schemes to disenfranchise American voters.

There was one positive development that was in Florida, where Florida restored the ability of felons to vote after they have served their sentences.

Now, this process of taking away the ability of felons to vote has a deep, deep history of racism in our country. It was used after the Civil War to disenfranchise Black Americans so that White Americans could control areas that were predominantly African American.

So this use of the felon disenfranchisement--failure to restore the right to vote after you have served your sentence--is something that has to be put away, and Florida set a great example in doing so.

There is much more that we can do. We can have a polling place protection act, because the manipulation of polling places is just an irresistible strategy for election clerks. They move the polling places. They cut the hours of polling. Disinformation is put out about where they are. You have a process where some polling places that serve predominantly one community that may vote primarily on one party suddenly don't have enough clerks or enough voting machines so they have long lines here and short lines there to warp the outcome of an election.

So how about a polling place protection act? Isn't that something Democrats and Republicans can come together and do?

How about predatory purging of voter lists, where you analyze the voting list and decide for rules on purging voters in order to disproportionately favor one party over the other? Why not have standard policies across the country so that purging in a predatory partisan fashion is done away with? Shouldn't that be something on which Democrats and Republicans can come together and defend the integrity of American elections?

How about requiring paper ballots so that every election can be recounted? I always heard about these electronic voting machines with no paper ballots. Now, out in Oregon, we insist on paper ballots. We want people to have confidence that the election has not been messed with, that the voting machines have not been hacked.

I remember listening to a radio news story where a person went in and hacked the voting machine while they were on the radio with the reporter and changed the vote totals.

So shouldn't we require paper ballots that can be recounted to give confidence in America that the vote is not being hacked? Isn't that something that Democrats and Republicans can come together to support? Isn't it something that helps to make sure that foreign agents--Russian agents, Chinese agents, who knows whom--are not trying to hack our elections?

While we are at it, how about a national standard for early voting to ensure that people have the flexibility to come to the polls, to make sure the hours are not manipulated in a fashion to try to favor one party over the other.

Better yet, how about Senator Wyden's Vote By Mail Act? In Oregon, we have a special affection for this. Back when I was first running for the Oregon House of Representatives 20 years ago, in my first election, half the people of Oregon voted by mail and half at the polls, and I started going door to door to campaign, and I didn't really like this whole vote-by-mail idea because I felt it was important for the community to do something together on election day.

As I knocked on one door after another, one senior after another said: No, I really love this ability to vote by mail, because if it is rainy or icy in November, if there is snow that makes it hard to get to the polling place, it is no problem.

They said: And moreover, I really love to be at the kitchen table with my children or with my grandchildren and have the ability, then, to talk with them about these issues as we vote and inculcate them with the civic responsibility of voting.

Another said: You know, here in Oregon we have initiatives that can be very complicated. I love to sit at my kitchen table and study these initiatives and vote.

So I realized how popular it was. So there it was--vote by mail, a very important contribution to the possibility of high integrity in elections of the United States of America.

This last November, we had nationwide about 47 percent of the eligible adults voting--about 47 percent. That was better than 2014, when we had 37 percent. So that is pretty good--47 percent.

In Oregon, with vote by mail, we had 68 percent of the eligible adults voting--20 percent over the national standard. So that gives you a little sense of how automatic voter registration and vote by mail can make a difference in enabling people to fully participate.

If you believe in the vision of a democratic republic, don't you want to be on the side of voter engagement--not voter intimidation, not voter suppression?

A fourth area is equal representation. So we have had a number of elections where we created a discrepancy between the popular vote and the outcome for President--another factor driving citizens. The whole electoral college was set up in a world in which communication was very difficult. It might take weeks to get the votes to the Capitol, but that is not the world we live in any longer.

So isn't it time to go to a direct vote?

Back in the 2000 election, 48 percent of the voters picked Al Gore for President, and that was a majority, but we had 8 years of George Bush.

The electoral college is antiquated--an antiquated idea based on a historical factor of communication that no longer exists.

So let's move to direct vote, either through the national popular vote, which can be done State by State by State by sending their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the majority, or through a constitutional amendment.

And while we are at it, let's give voting representation in the House and Senate to the 4 million people who currently are American citizens who do not have a vote in the Presidential election.

While we are at it, let's give voting representation in the House and Senate to the 4 million people who currently are American citizens who do not have a vote in the House or Senate. For the people of Puerto Rico, Guam, a number of other Territories, and the Virgin Islands, shouldn't there at least be one person in this Chamber representing them?

I went down to Puerto Rico 8 months after the big hurricane to look at the restoration, and the restoration program was horrific. I came away thinking, if there was somebody who stood in this Chamber with a vote or in the House Chamber with a vote and could speak to the abysmal restoration of infrastructure after that hurricane, it would not have been such a disaster. We would all have listened and responded and helped. But there was nobody here that represented them. A number of us tried to carry their message, their plea, but it is different than having somebody who carries a vote.

So let's figure out a system--some system. No system will satisfy everyone, but give at least a vote in the Senate and a vote in the House for the portion of the population of those American citizens who do not have a vote.

So our constitutional system is in very deep trouble. When I came into political life we had a Voting Rights Act that had taken on the issue of voter intimidation and voter suppression. We don't have it today, thanks to the Supreme Court. Corruption is inhabiting our ``we the people'' Constitution.

When I came in we had a system that was much more transparent with people making donations to candidates, and today we have vast dark money corrupting the system.

Gerrymandering has been with us for a long time. Isn't it time that we address that? Shouldn't it be a situation in which voters pick their representatives, not representatives picking their voters? Isn't it time to address a national popular vote?

We have allowed so much to happen. We haven't pushed back the failure of the Supreme Court to defend our Constitution. When they struck down the Voting Rights Act, they said Congress can repass another one. But have we done so? Have we had a vote on the floor of the Senate since the Voting Rights Act was struck down? Do we have bipartisan buy-in that it is our responsibility to protect voters to have a fair process? If not, why not? It is way past time. So let each of us ponder the vision of our Constitution--the ``we the people'' vision of our Constitution. Let's remember that we took an oath to honor this vision and that we are failing. Now, in recognition of that, let's come together--Democrats and Republicans, House Members and Senate Members-- and take on this vast corruption that is destroying the fundamental vision on which our Nation was founded--a vision I love, a vision that will produce laws by and for the people, a vision that produces laws the reflect, as Thomas Jefferson said, the will of the people.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, I come to the floor tonight to talk about hostages, seven hostages--seven spending bills that have come through this Republican-led Chamber, bills the House is ready to move forward on that have, ironically, been taken hostage by the Republican leadership of the Senate and the President of the United States.

Those seven hostages, those spending bills, the House has said: Well, Mr. President, we have a difference of opinion that has to be worked out, and that is Homeland Security. So let's continue that debate while setting the other six free--freedom for six bills passed by the Republican-led Senate so we can put America back to work.

It sounds like a pretty good idea, but good ideas and common sense seem to be victims--victims of this Presidential temper tantrum over a symbol on the southern border. So it shut down nine Cabinet Departments: Agriculture, Commerce, Justice, Homeland Security, Housing, Interior, State, Transportation, and the Treasury--affecting all kinds of everyday functions for Americans.

The local schools keep functioning. They figure it out. The local city doesn't shut down. The county doesn't shut down. Has your State shut down? I don't think so. So why this childish behavior, why this incompetence, why

this disregard for the quality of life for Americans?

There are 800,000 workers who are either instructed to work without pay or who are instructed to go on furlough. We are all affected. Every one of us is affected by these Departments being shut down, but those 800,000 workers don't get a paycheck.

What does that mean when they try to write the check that will pay for their mortgage or their rent, their student's tuition, or their utility bill? How do they keep the lights turned on? It is all fine for the President. His lights are staying on. He is not inconvenienced, but these 800,000 Americans are more than inconvenienced. They are put into a hard place over this hostage-taking by the President and the Republican leadership of this body.

Out in Oregon, the estimate--admittedly somewhat imprecise--is that 9,000 workers have been affected. It seems in the ballpark. Oregon's population is about 1 percent of the country, and 1 percent of 800,000 is 8,000. So 9,000 sounds in the ballpark. There are 9,000 Oregonians who are affected by this foolishness.

An air traffic controller wrote to me and said, we are ``tired of being a pawn in the partisan games that are being played in Washington. . . . These shutdowns have compromised aviation safety.''

He said they hinder the FAA's ability to hire and train new controllers and upgrade air traffic control systems. They break down morale and an already understaffed and frustrated workforce.

Then there is the constituent who wrote to me to say: ``It is unconscionable for Trump to deprive Federal employees of earned and necessary income, holding them hostage for his foolish wall.''

There are seven spending bills held hostage, along with 800,000 Americans and their families' finances.

There is the young man in Lane County whom I spoke with after one of my townhall meetings last week. He was supposed to be moving to California to begin working in the Sierra National Forest this past weekend. He was all set to go, giving up his current living arrangements because he was going to be moving into Forest Service housing. Then the shutdown happened. Now he has no job, has no key to undo the lock. He has no ability to move into that Forest Service housing. He is stranded. There are just all kinds of everyday stories of challenges to Americans.

To President Trump, I say: Listen. Listen to the voices of ordinary Americans who are having a hard time because of you and because of the leadership of this Senate--the Republican leadership of this Senate. Ordinary Americans are caught in the middle of this.

This is your shutdown, Mr. President. You said so. You said it on television. You said it from the Oval Office. You said you were proud to own this shutdown. You said:

I am not going to blame anybody else. This is my shutdown.

Yes, it is, Mr. Trump. Mr. President, it is your shutdown, and it is not a shutdown with a mission, a mission that is important, because the mission that is important, that you talk about, is border security.

Every Democrat, every Republican supports border security. All of us who were here in 2013 voted for huge sums. I have heard some describe that bill we passed in 2013 as $35 billion for border security. I heard in an earlier speech tonight that it was over $40 billion for border security, smart border security--smart border security.

Don't you want to spend the taxpayers' dollars smartly? Do you want to waste them? Do you want to shut down the government and create a hardship for 800,000 people because you want to waste their money?

Mr. President, and to my colleagues across the aisle, listen to the common sense of people in your home State who want border security, but they don't want a foolish shutdown.

The President said there is a crisis--crisis--at the border because so many people are coming. How many people are coming to the border? Let's take a look. This shows the number of folks who have been apprehended at the border from the year 2000--19 years ago now--to year-to-date in 2018. This is slightly out of date, so you can add a little bit more to that final bar, but you see the point. There were massive amounts in the year 2000, really high numbers in 2001 through 2007, and then the numbers dramatically decline through 2011 and beyond.

I just got the numbers before I came to the floor for the last month we had, which was October. About 60,000 people came to the border. In 1 month, in 2000, 200,000 people came to the border. That is quite a difference. That is now less than one-third than last month.

There is no crisis there, only the humanitarian crisis, Mr. Trump, that you are creating with your war on children--your war on migrant children--shoving them back into Mexico to put them at the mercy of the Mexican gangs; proceeding to let them into the United States and then ripping them out of the arms of their parents while you lock up their parents; deciding you are going to lock up the children with their parents behind barbed wire and internment camps; establishing a national system of child prisons that, last month, held 15,000 children, which is up from 7,000 in June; failing to provide medical evaluations for these children when they cross the border. Two have died--one after 6 days in the care of the American border guard.

You, Mr. President, have created a crisis, a humanitarian crisis. The arrivals on the border are not the crisis; it is your hardened heart, your dark and evil heart, your war on children; the deliberate strategy of inflicting trauma on children in order to send a message of deterrence, a political message of deterrence.

Who here believes it is right to deliberately injure children to send a message of deterrence? That is the strategy Jeff Sessions announced last May that started this intense assault on migrant children. Who would defend it today? Find me one caretaker of children who believes that inflicting trauma on children is acceptable. Find me one religious tradition, one moral code that says that is OK--because it is not OK. Every human civilization recognizes that.

Meanwhile, our farmers are wondering what happened to their Farm Service Agencies. They are closed down across the country, including 23 in Oregon. What happened to those payments that the President promised for those affected by tariffs? The payments can't be distributed because of the shutdown. How about our Federal firefighters who need to be in training right now for the fires we are going to see next summer because of climate chaos?

We are seeing the impacts in every conceivable way, as my colleagues have been pointing out, and it is time to end it. It is time to release the hostages. It is way past time to end it. It has 18 days--3 days from the longest shutdown in history. It is time to end it, put people back to work, return to common sense, and at the same time quit afflicting children and migrant adults as a political strategy.

Almost everybody--probably everyone in this room--came here as a descendant of immigrants, almost all Americans. Not many of us are directly descended from Native Americans. Most of us are descendants from immigrants. How did we want them to be treated? We wanted them to be treated with respect and decency as they waited for an asylum hearing, and that is what we have to return to.

So release the hostages, return to common sense, and treat the American people with respect.

Thank you.

Madam President, I praise my colleagues from the Atlantic coast of New Jersey and Pacific coast of California for today putting our entire Senate on record and on a pathway to recognizing the deep darkness of this national scar on our justice system and on our psyche.

Work well done today in the U.S. Senate. Thank you.

Madam President, I rise to address a current-day scar, a wound in America--a wound in terms of how we are treating children arriving on our borders and seeking asylum.

George Washington said America is a nation open ``to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions.''

This sense of the vision of America was repeated 100 years later through Emma Lazarus's poem that is carved into the foundation of the Statue of Liberty. Phrases of that poem include: ``Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . . . Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,'' but that spirit is lost right now in the USA.

We are a nation almost universally of immigrants, and yet we are treating those children fleeing persecution as if they are criminals when they arrive at our borders.

I went down this last weekend with Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota, with Representative Judy Chu of California and Representative Beto O'Rourke of Texas. Four of us visited two family internment camps--one in Dilley and one in Karnes-- and all five of us went to the Tornillo child prison in the desert in Texas outside El Paso.

This war against children--this Trump war against children--was most dramatically demonstrated back in May and June when the U.S. Government implemented a ``zero tolerance'' policy that, in fact, said, if you assert your international rights and come to the border of the United States, we will treat you as a criminal. We will lock you up. We will rip your children out of your arms, and who knows if you will ever see them again.

I went down June 3 of this year to shine a light on this and find out what was really going on. I saw children in cages. I tried to enter a facility--a former Walmart--that I was told had hundreds of kids locked up in it. I was denied entry because of the administration's desires to keep the effects of

their child separation policy secret. There was an outcry from people across America saying the United States does not do this. We do not inflict trauma on children as a direct and deliberate strategy of sending a message to the world that we do not want you, if you are fleeing persecution, to come to our shores. We do not deliberately inflict trauma on children.

In addition to the public outcry, there was court action. The administration agreed and said: OK. We will stop doing child separation. We will quit ripping children out of their parents' arms, but the President said, if we can't rip children out of their parents' arms, instead, we will lock them up. We will lock them up with their parents--still treating them as criminals as they await asylum here. In fact, the bill to that effect passed the House of Representatives, and 35 Senators in this Chamber signed on to this bill to expand this system of family internment camps at the request of the administration.

I came to this floor. I pointed out the long and shameful history of family internment camps in America, and I proposed a different vision. I put forward a bill entitled the No Family Internment Camps in America Act. I noted it would be a fierce fight if those who want to proceed with internment camps attempted to do so. This body dropped that effort--stopped that effort. That is good, but the administration is still determined to pursue this, and they have been moving funds to people to expand family internment camps in places like Karnes and Dilley. So we went there to look at these family internment camps--one with fathers and sons; one with mothers and daughters.

You know, the right thing to do as families await asylum hearings is for them to get that hearing on a timely basis of 6 to 12 months and have them under a Family Case Management Program of not locking them up in prison. Locking up children in prisons does deep, traumatic damage to these children, so we must continue to fight this internment camps strategy.

The four Members of Congress who were there at Dilley met with a woman. She and her daughter have been locked up in Dilley going on 6 months. Yesterday was the daughter's 15th birthday. The Quinceanera is a big celebration--if you come from a Latin American tradition--of a young girl becoming a young woman. We asked the camp: Are you going to recognize this girl's birthday, this very significant 15th birthday, this quinceanera?

No, we can't do anything special to recognize one child.

We said: Well, why not have a policy of recognizing each child on his or her birthday, so you are doing the same for everyone?

They said: No, too much trouble. We will have a monthly gathering and list the names of those who had birthdays that month. That will suffice.

It is a symbol of the dehumanization with which we are treating people locked up--families we are locking up who have fled persecution and are awaiting an asylum hearing.

That young woman is suffering significantly. We met with her mother. Her mother told us she is not sleeping well, she is not eating well, and she was really depressed over the fact that this very significant day would go unrecognized. We should never be locking up children for long periods of time.

There is an agreement--a settlement--that said children will not be locked up for more than 20 days. It is called the Flores settlement. It was a settlement that came out of the fact that we recognized that locking up children hurts them, traumatizes them, that it should never happen, and it shouldn't happen for more than 20 days.

Well, it is happening more than 20 days and not just with the mother and her daughter who are locked up there. They fled persecution by a drug gang--a gang that was extorting the family to make payments from their beauty supply business or beauty parlor. When she couldn't pay, the gang came to her house and assaulted her daughter. She told us they fled the next day.

We need to improve the programs with which we are trying to help stabilize those countries and help decrease the power of those drug gangs, but, certainly, when those fleeing persecution come here to our shores, let's treat them with respect and dignity.

This is a birthday card that several dozen Members signed yesterday that we are sending to this young woman locked up. The card says: ``Feliz Quinceanera.'' It is signed inside by dozens of Senators. It says: From your friends in the Senate of the United States. We want her to know--we want every child who is locked up in these child prisons under the Trump war on children to know that we are working to end this war.

We went on to Tornillo--the child prison that was initially established to be an emergency shelter for 1 month for 450 children. It has now been extended 3 times, and it has been expanded to hold not 450 children but 3,800 children.

At this moment, they cranked up the number of people there to 2,700, and they are purposely keeping this as a ``temporary shelter'' so they can bypass all the laws related to incarcerating children; they can bypass the requirements for education; they can bypass the Flores 20- day standard.

I asked: How many children are here over 20 days of these 2,700, a couple of dozen?

The director said: No, more than 2,000 of the 2,700 children here are over the 20 days. Then we were told that 1,300 of those children already have a sponsor. They already have the sponsors who have filled out all the paperwork and have done their fingerprints and everything. They could be released immediately, if the administration would complete the paperwork.

He told us that 1,300 children could be in homes and schools and parks in 5 to 7 days from now if the administration would complete the paperwork. We proceeded to hold a press conference, and we said this is unacceptable that the paperwork is not being completed and these children are being locked up here.

We held this on Saturday. We said this Tornillo prison camp should be shut down. This is not the spirit of the USA and certainly is not being used as a temporary shelter for 1 month.

I have good news to report because yesterday the administration said they are changing the rules. They expect to release several thousand children within the next few days--that is the right thing to do--and we may shut down Tornillo.

So let's keep the attention of America on this. Let's keep the spotlight on it. Let's not let this war on children continue with our money, on our territory, under our government, deliberately inflicting trauma on children. It must end.

The Family Case Management Program, which was an alternative to locking people up, had a report from the Department of Homeland Security inspector general who said 99 percent of people show up for their check-ins and there was 100 percent attendance at court hearings. There was a closeout report for the program because the administration shut it down, and the closeout report called the program a success. It said 99.3 percent attendance for court proceedings overall, 99 percent compliance with monitoring requirements, including check-ins, and it costs $38 a day compared to many hundreds of dollars for internment camps or prison camps.

Let's restart a program that made sense--a program that worked. We have seen this series of attacks on children--child separation, family internment camps, child prison camps. Let's put America back on track and treat children coming to this country fleeing persecution with respect and dignity as they await their asylum hearings.

Thank you.

Mr. President, I am pleased to come to the floor with my colleagues from Massachusetts and Delaware to address the grave threat to America and to our planet from carbon pollution and climate chaos.

Over the last 2 weeks, representatives from nearly 200 countries have gathered together in Poland to continue the fight against climate chaos. They know that in each and every country we are seeing the impacts across this planet. There are more powerful hurricanes, like we have seen here in the United States, more destructive wildfires, like those we see in the Northwest of the United States, record breaking heat waves, air quality deterioration, loss of glaciers, loss of global ice, Arctic ice, insect-borne diseases that spread, and coral reefs dying. We are in trouble.

The scientists tell us we are now driving the sixth great extinction on planet Earth. It is being driven by human conduct, and a big factor in that is our burning of fossil fuels. We are, in fact, facing the greatest threat humankind has known on the planet. When you begin to damage your own home, you really are in a situation that needs to be immediately addressed.

It was back in 1959 that Edward Teller, a famed scientist, gave a speech to the 100th anniversary of the petroleum industry. He said: This energy that you have unleashed has done amazing things on the planet. It has given so much ability for humankind to magnify their efforts.

There was a lot of positive in that, but then the scientist, Edward Teller, went on to say: But there are a couple of challenges here, one of which is that there are only so many fossil fuels in the ground and so, at some point, we will run out.

Of course, we know that there are a lot more fossil fuels in the ground now than we knew about in 1959.

He said that there is a second problem. When you burn this stuff, it creates an invisible, odorless gas. So it doesn't really sound like a challenge, but it traps heat. He said that because it traps heat, it will melt the poles, it will raise the oceans, and that will be a problem for humankind because humankind lives along the waterways.

He didn't go into more details than that, but it was one of the first direct commentaries--in 1959--about how the age of fossil fuels was going to produce significant problems for human kind.

Now, that speech he gave in 1959. That was 59 years ago, and what have we seen in the ensuing period? We have seen a roughly 100-point increase in carbon pollution on the planet. Or to take my lifetime, for example, in 1956, when I was born, we had about 312 parts per million of carbon.

I will just put this chart up. What we see here on the red is the rising line of carbon, going back to roughly when I was born. About in here, 1956 until now, we see that it is accelerating, but essentially there is a 100 parts-per-million increase. We started at about 312 when I was born. We are at about almost 412 now at the very peak. That is a 30-percent increase in my single lifetime, just a little flash of time in terms of the life of this planet--a 32-percent increase in carbon in the atmosphere, and it is having a significant impact.

The most obvious way to look at this impact is the global temperature year after year. So here we see the 10 hottest years on record. We see that only one of those years, 1998, was before the turn of the century. The rest of them have all been since the turn of the century. In fact, 17 of the 18 hottest years on record have occurred since the year 2000. Not only that, but look at the dramatic, dramatic change for 2014, and 2015, and 2016, and 2017--these last four years--and how much hotter the planet is than it was just a few years before. That should trouble all of us.

We have seen all of this when global leaders came together in 2015 in Paris--the largest gathering of world leaders in human history. They said we have to put limits on what we are doing. We all have to apply a strategy of each reducing our carbon dioxide production. I would like to say that they have been successful, but they have not. Total global carbon production is still going up and, because of that, we are still in deep trouble.

If we didn't have the information just from these bars of the hottest years on record, we could turn to a more complicated analysis, or several of them, that have come out just recently. Just back in October, we had the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, bringing the work of scientists across

the planet together, and it painted a very stark picture of where we are right now and how this will only get a lot worse in the years ahead.

Or we can turn to the Trump administration's report that came out the day after Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving, we give thanks for a lot of things. The day after, the administration informed us that we here on the planet have a big problem. What did they say in that report? Again, this is the Trump administration speaking: ``Earth's climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities.''

Or we could turn to a third report that just came out called the ``Global Carbon Project,'' and it says that after plateauing for several years, in 2018, global carbon emissions rose 2.7 percent. So we are back on an upward trajectory. We hit a recordbreaking 37 billion metric tons.

How did the United States do? Well, similarly, our carbon emissions here in the United States went up about 2.5 percent.

Over the last 2 years, the Trump administration has tried to do everything it can to make the situation worse. There were rules in place to cut methane leaks because methane is much more of a potent global warming gas than is carbon dioxide. So you never want to let it out of the pipe. But they worked to weaken those rules. They worked to weaken vehicle emission standards so we get more pollution for each mile, rather than less pollution.

I did find one thing of interest; that is, when Judith Garber, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, went over to Poland to give a report for the United States. She bragged about our carbon capture utilization and storage technology, and how one powerplant in Texas is capturing more than 90 percent of the emissions from its blue gas stream. So she was holding this up as a vision of what the United States is doing to contribute to the technology in the world and to help things be better.

What she didn't say is, the previous week, on December 6, the Trump administration issued a draft rule exempting new powerplants from carbon capture. That would have been a much more complete story about the record of this administration.

Of the 20 nations represented at the recent G20 summit in Argentina, only the United States refused to sign a nonbinding statement saying countries were committed to fighting climate chaos. All we had to do is say, yes, we are aware it is a problem, and we are committed to fighting it, but the United States turned that down. Over in Poland, we joined with Russia and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait--three oil-rich nations--to weaken a statement recognizing the international report about the challenges we face.

We need global leadership. Without our help, countries still came together in Poland to write a rule book to try to go forward without the involvement and leadership of the United States. They worked very hard on that rule book, and it addressed things like transparency and accountability; it addressed issues related to carbon credits; it addressed issues that were designed to develop a strategy for technical experts and exactly how you count carbon in your country. It wasn't a perfect rule book, but we now have one, and we can make improvements on it in the future.

Think about how much faster we would go forward in tackling this problem if we had American leadership. We need this leadership. The world needs this leadership to tackle climate chaos. It is not something you can do just as good a job 10 years or 20 years from now as you can now because you can't get this carbon out of the atmosphere easily once it is in there. It stays for hundreds of years. It keeps adding to the trapping of heat for hundreds of years. We need to act now.

We are facing the big challenge of feedback loops. What do I mean? Up in the Arctic, when you have less ice, you have blue ocean, the sunshine goes into the water, and it heats it up more than if it were reflecting off ice. So it gets warmer and warmer and warmer.

How about this? Just a couple weeks ago, a picture was published of a lake in Alaska that was boiling--not with heat, but with methane; methane bubbling up out of the permafrost underneath the lake at such a rapid pace, it was a heavy boiling motion on the top of the water. That is a feedback loop that should scare us all because of the enormous heat-trapping properties of methane. All across the planet, as it gets warmer, permafrost and heat start off-gassing this methane.

So there we are. We have to move fast. We need American leadership to be fully engaged in the vision of Mission 100, going to 100 percent clean and renewable energy in the fastest possible time. We have to quit subsidizing fossil fuels and start subsidizing renewable energy or at least put them on a level playing field with each other. We need a green new deal to completely rebuild our energy economy in the United States of America and create all kinds of jobs--all kinds of working American jobs: sheet metal jobs, electrician jobs, pipefitting jobs, jobs of every kind--as we rework the energy economy to build that vision of 100 percent renewable energy. Think how many jobs you would create if you just proceeded to renovate your house. Now think of the tens of millions of jobs if you renovate the entire energy economy of the United States of America.

We need American leadership to work in partnership with other nations so every nation holds each other accountable to this vision of transitioning to renewable energy.

We need American leadership to say to Germany: Yes, you have done some things very well on solar, but why are you building a Nord Stream 2 pipeline to bring massive amounts of natural gas from Russia for the next-generation dependence on fossil fuel?

We need to say to Japan: You are putting your entire energy economy onto liquid natural gas. How can you meet your Paris obligations? How can you be a partner with the rest of the world if you are not willing to pursue renewable energy?

We need leadership in America that says to Australia: You are doubling down on coal while your outback is burning in the middle of your winter, and your Great Barrier Reef is half dead over the last couple of years from water that is too warm and too acidic due to climate chaos.

We need American leadership to tell China: Yes, you are investing in renewable energy at home. Great. Speed it up, but why are you financing 200 coal-powered plants around the world? That is not acceptable. Shut that down.

We have to have American leadership. This is not a question between economic development and the environment. Quite the contrary. In this case, renovating our energy economy creates a strong environment. It allows us to go to the cheapest form of energy on the planet, solar and wind.

Why is it the cheapest? Because there is no fuel. The fuel for solar is the Sun. We don't have to pay for that. The fuel for wind are the breezes that blow. We don't have to pay for that. In fact, just a few months ago Xcel Energy did a request for proposals for new electric generating capacity, and it came out at 2 cents per kilowatt hour for solar and 3 cents for wind. That is less than burning coal in an existing fossil fuel plant.

If you believe nothing about the damage to our planet because it is just too terrifying, and you don't want to hear that bad news, then at least turn to the economic opportunity of taking America forward to the cheapest, cleanest energy we can possibly have.

Wells Griffith, the administration's top adviser cop, said: ``We strongly believe that no country should have to sacrifice economic prosperity or energy security in pursuit of environmental sustainability.'' That is the big lie. That is the big Koch brothers lie to the planet; that somehow we must sacrifice our economy in order to pursue cleaner energy, when in fact the opposite is true.

American leadership has helped take the world forward in all kinds of technology. Some of those famous moments was our leadership in splitting the atom and creating atomic energy, putting a man on the Moon, creating the internet, taking on significant diseases, and leading the world in wiping them out--diseases like polio. We need that kind of leadership today, leadership to work in partnership with the world to save our planet.

I yield to my colleague from Florida.

I appreciate so much the comments of my colleague from Florida.

I had the chance to go down to Florida at the end of October at a rally to address the challenge of red tide, algae that was growing in the ocean that produces a toxin. The toxin is so powerful that it was causing a lot of respiratory problems for people who live along the gulf coast, and it was killing a lot of animals. People were talking about manatees, dolphins, turtles, and fish washing up on the beach. Not only did they have the toxins from the red algae, but they had the stench from the dying sea life.

The sense of people who gathered to talk about this was that dramatic action is needed; that this was completely compromising the quality of life, the health of the oceans, and the ability to harvest food out of the ocean. People were saying they were actually taking inland vacations; that is, leaving the coast until the air would get better. They said that, unfortunately, the circumstances had been in that bad condition for 10 months of the last 12 months--meaning they might not actually want to go back, at least not keep a home there.

I thought of the parallel from your State in Florida to my State in Oregon because we have an area in Southern Oregon that has been deeply afflicted by fire smoke the last two summers. The smoke has tainted furniture being sold. It has shut down outdoor events. It has stopped people from hiking the Cascade Trail. It is affecting the economy. House prices are changing. People are thinking twice about booking for--there is a different set of economic impacts. These are only the indirect impacts.

There is the direct impact on the Panhandle of Florida. I just saw the pictures of complete devastation when the hurricane came across earlier this year. Of course, we saw the pictures of complete devastation for some of the communities that the forest fires on the West Coast burned to a crisp.

So our two States and our citizens know there is a problem. Not everyone wants to face the underlying cause of methane and carbon pollution driving it, but everybody knows there is a problem.

We are fortunate to have your scientists--your NOAA scientists, your NASA scientists--and all the satellite information they are feeding us so we can study it and stand on the floor of the Senate and say: We do know the cause, and it is our responsibility as leaders of this Nation, leaders in the Senate, to proceed to make sure we act aggressively in partnership with the world.

I just want to say I thank you so much for your service in this Chamber and your knowledge about the scientific facts and willingness to never look away from them and to confront what those facts mean for the policies we need to adopt.

Mr. President, under our Constitution, we have article I, which addresses the powers of Congress, and article II, the powers of the Presidency. Our Founders were so concerned that the President would take us into war without justification that they made sure to explicitly place the power to go to war with Congress--with the House and Senate.

But here we are, debating the issue of how the President took us into war in Yemen as a facilitator of Saudi Arabia, providing intelligence, providing advice, refueling planes, providing armaments. It is time for us to take a powerful and clear stand and change this and end this.

Here is what has been going on. For multiple years now, Saudi Arabia has been bombing the civilian infrastructure of Yemen, indiscriminately slaughtering civilians, destroying schools and hospitals and neighborhoods and water systems. What is the result of destroying the water systems? The largest outbreak of cholera in the history of humankind. We now have well over 100 children under the age of 5 dying of hunger and starvation each day. We are told by the experts that 8 to 14 million people are at risk of starvation, but many are already starving, and not just children under 5--the whole spectrum of society.

We have been directly involved in ways that, in my mind, violate the War Powers Act by directly facilitating the movement of armaments and assisting Saudi Arabia in this assault, and this assault must end. We have to send a strong message, and we can do that through this vote we are facing ahead of us. That is one piece of the conversation regarding Saudi Arabia.

The other piece is that the Saudi Government has assassinated an American resident--an American resident who is also an American newspaper columnist. What do we have as a response? We have the weakest possible response from President Trump, with President Trump saying that we don't know what happened. The Saudi Crown Prince may have been involved; he might not have been involved. Who will ever know?

We need a strong watchdog for American values. We need the President to stand up to Saudi Arabia. We don't need to hear that we are going to be weak in the face of an assassination of an American resident because they happen to buy armaments from the United States. Yet that is what we are hearing from President Trump--weakness, selling out American values because they buy some American products.

What more trouble can we invite around the world if we don't stand up for human rights and we don't stand up for our residents and we don't stand up for our journalists, all tied in together here?

Let's be forceful in how we vote on this resolution. Let's send a strong message.

This challenge of the President in ignoring the article I powers in our Constitution, in which the power to be involved in war is vested in this body, Congress, is not the only problem we have. We also have core corruption of our Constitution in the form of gerrymandering and voter suppression and dark money, all of which erode the fundamental vision, the vision in our Constitution of a ``we the people'' government, one that serves as President Lincoln so eloquently said, to operate ``of the people, by the people, for the people.'' Instead, we have the government operating of, by, and for the powerful in this country--the 1 percent in this country.

It certainly wasn't done in 2017 with a tax bill that took $1.5 trillion--or call it $2 trillion, if you include the interest on the $1.5 trillion--out of our Federal Treasury and gave it to the very richest Americans. Boy, that is not a ``we the people'' action.

We didn't invest in healthcare. We didn't invest in education. We need apprenticeship programs. We need technical education. We need better public

schools. We need affordable colleges. We didn't invest in education. We didn't make our healthcare system more affordable. We didn't take on the drug companies. We didn't proceed to invest in the challenge of unaffordable housing. We didn't invest in infrastructure and create living-wage jobs. Those are the four foundations of a thriving family-- healthcare, housing, education, and living-wage jobs. We ignored all of that and had the government of the powerful giving $1.5 trillion or $2 trillion, if we include the interest, to the richest Americans-- government by and for the powerful.

Voter suppression is a key strategy in this. What did President Reagan have to say about that? President Reagan said: ``For this Nation to remain true to its principles, we cannot allow any American's vote to be denied, diluted or defiled.''

Now, there is a statement by a man who understood that voting is the foundation of our democratic republic--a core right of Americans--and he believed we needed to stand up and make sure that core value remains fully intact. But so often in our Nation we have seen those who wield power for the powerful proceed to deny or dilute or defile the power to vote, particularly in poor communities, particularly in communities of color.

We have seen everything. We have seen poll taxes. We have seen literacy tests. We have seen post-Civil War good character tests. We have seen the use of felony charges to make it impossible for African Americans to vote in the South. We have seen voter intimidation, and we have seen it sometimes through racist dog whistling and political postcards. We have a long history of these types of actions to deny, dilute, and defile the power to vote.

I would like to say there is something of our past that we saw with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but that act was struck down by the Supreme Court. We are seeing all kinds of forms of voter suppression emerge in 2016 and 2018.

In 2018, thousands of Native Americans in North Dakota living on Tribal reserves and using their P.O. boxes for their mail address were kept from casting a ballot because of a law that came into effect in 2018. It said you can't vote without a conventional address--the North Dakota ``conventional address'' effort to dilute or deny or obstruct the power to vote.

In Georgia, the then-secretary of State, Brian Kemp, who was himself running for Governor, attempted to block 53,000 Georgians from voting-- 70 percent of whom were African-American voters--because of minor differences in the wording of the way they filled out their registration form. If the name wasn't exactly identical or had some other slight variation, he was sitting on those voting registration cards--the ``identical name'' gambit from Georgia.

In Ohio, a county elections board proceeded on the orders of Secretary of State Jon Husted to purge thousands of Ohioans from the voting rolls. If you are not on the voting rolls, you can't vote when the election comes. Again, who were disproportionately affected? African Americans--the Ohio voting roll purge strategy of voter suppression.

What did we see in North Carolina? Thanks to a law passed by the Republican State legislature, nearly 20 percent of North Carolina's early voting locations were closed, forcing voters to travel longer or wait in long election-day lines to cast their vote. I will give you one guess on who was impacted the most. Who was this target aimed at? Well, it was aimed at African-American voters--the long line strategy from North Carolina and Kansas, as well.

In Kansas, the county clerk in Dodge City, citing construction, moved the only polling place in a town that is 60 percent Hispanic from a spot downtown to an arena built for rodeo and farming shows outside the city limits. This was a location that had no sidewalk and is separated from the rest of the city by train tracks, making it as difficult as possible for voters to get there. It was targeted at a Hispanic community.

We saw voting suppression aimed at college students, too. In Iowa, the legislature passed a bill to cut 11 days off early voting this year in order to make it harder to vote. It also had a tricky little deal on an ID requirement, which will not now go into effect until next year, but it created a great deal of confusion about this year because it made people think they weren't eligible to vote because it said your ID had to have an expiration date on it. Why was this tricky little thing done? Because college IDs often don't have an expiration date on them.

Well, it is a total violation of the vision Ronald Reagan laid out, and really, of the foundation--the vision--of our Constitution and the power to vote.

In New Hampshire, a bill was signed into law this past July aimed at suppressing college-age voters as well. It says students and other part-time residents have to become permanent residents. How do you become a permanent resident in order to cast a ballot? You have to buy an in-State license. If you have a car in another State, you have to reregister it in New Hampshire, which means registration fees, fees for license plates, and possibly separate State and municipal fees. It is like a poll tax placed on college students. So there we have this 21st century poll tax coming back aimed at college students.

Why are all these voting suppression strategies aimed at poor communities, aimed at communities of color, African-American communities and Hispanic communities? Why are they aimed at college students? They are aimed at these three populations because those three populations vote primarily on the Democratic side of the ballot. It is wrong for any official in this country to simply target voters of the other party to try to prevent them from voting. It is un-American. It goes against the essence of what our Constitution is all about.

It is wrong, and yet, since the Voting Rights Act was torn down by the Supreme Court of the United States, we see it time and again. We don't just see it before the election. We see it during the election day.

In Georgia, we saw hours-long lines to vote in majority-minority districts, either because machines didn't happen to be working or they didn't have the extension cords to turn them on.

In Arizona, one polling place didn't exist on election day because even though people were told to vote there, it was in a building that was locked up. Voting machines were inside, but the doors were locked. The building had been foreclosed on, but they didn't bother to move it next door or somewhere close by, enabling people to vote.

In Texas, we heard about the machines that were changing people's votes from a Democratic candidate to Republican candidate.

All the while, President Trump was working to cast doubt on the legitimacy of our normal election processes--tweeting out that ballots coming in after election night shouldn't be counted. What was he talking about down in Florida, about ballots that shouldn't be counted? We are talking about the absentee ballots for our soldiers overseas. But because the President was concerned that they might change the outcome, he didn't want them counted.

If only Ronald Reagan could spend a few minutes with President Trump and remind him of what our Nation is all about, what our Constitution is all about, how important voting is, and that it should never be denied or diluted.

None of these efforts are unique. We saw these efforts back in 2016, as well, in the first election after the Voting Rights Act was torn down by the Supreme Court. That was the Shelby County v. Holder decision. The Court thought this wasn't necessary any more. Maybe they should ask Congress whether it was necessary. Now that we find out it was necessary, maybe they should reverse their decision. We need to put a new issue before them. Maybe we need a new Voting Rights Act. Maybe it should apply to every State, rather than just the States that were in the 1965 Voting Rights Act bill.

In 2016, that first election after the Voting Rights Act was torn down by the Supreme Court, we saw 900 fewer polling places open to voters than in 2014--2 years earlier. Most of that change was in the States that previously were under the regulation, the oversight of the Voting Rights Act. We saw that in Texas, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and North Carolina. When you reduce the number of polling places in poor communities and communities of color, you create long wait lines, and you deny the vote.

Nearly 17,000 Wisconsinites--disproportionately minorities--were kept from the polls because of Wisconsin's voter ID law. The State saw its lowest turnout in two decades. This law had nothing to do with security. It had everything to do with voter suppression because it is a known fact that residents in low-income and minority communities are less likely to be able to access the IDs that are required for polls. This is keenly targeted.

In fact, after North Carolina's voter ID law was struck down in 2016, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals decision noted that it targeted African Americans with ``almost surgical precision.'' The State resorted that year--after it was struck down--to eliminating early voting days, severely curtailing the number of polling places, and affecting their hours of operation in communities of color.

By the way, the lead plaintiff in the case that challenged the voting suppression strategy of the voter ID law passed away this weekend at age 97. Ms. Rosanell Eaton was once described by President Obama as a beacon of civil rights. She was a life-long devotee of and advocate for voting rights. Now, that is a patriot.

It is because of unsung heroes like her that our Nation has come far and why we must continue pushing ourselves forward to ensure justice and equality for all.

In a ``we the people'' nation, can any of these efforts to suppress the vote be allowed to continue? The answer is no--not if we want the vision of government of, by, and for the people. How can any of us sit by and allow citizens of this country--citizens like Rosanell Eaton--to be systematically denied the most fundamental right?

We have to work together--Democrats and Republicans--to honor and to strengthen the vision of the ability to vote. We need a fierce and formidable voting rights bill for the 21st century, ensuring in every way possible that every single American can exercise his or her right to vote freely and fairly. We need a voting rights bill that bans the type of shenanigans and the types of deceptive strategies that target poor communities, communities of color, and college students that I talked about today.

But we also need a voting rights bill that requires preapproval for changes to voting procedures to make sure that they are not being changed in order to take away the ability to vote and to make it more difficult for some communities than for other communities within a State. We need a voting rights commission with the power to ban new voter suppression practices as they evolve because, surely, people will try new strategies from people who do not believe in the vision of our Constitution.

From the 15th amendment of 1870, which recognized African-Americans' right to vote, to the 19th amendment of 1920, 50 years later, which recognized a woman's right to vote, and all the way up to the civil rights marches of the 1960s and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, America's story has been of expanding opportunity for every American to have a say in the direction of our government.

But we are far from ensuring that today every American has that opportunity because the strategies of voter suppression are rampant, they are extensive, and they are targeted. Voter suppression and voter intimidation must end, and we need to ensure that every American has the unfettered right to have a voice in their government, that every American has the unfettered right to cast a ballot during the election.

President Reagan had it right back in 1981. He supported the expansion of the Voting Rights Act. He said: ``For this Nation to remain true to its principles, we cannot allow any American's vote to be denied, diluted or defiled.''

Let's make it so.

Thank you, Mr. President.

(Mr. GARDNER assumed the Chair.)

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern, Adam Berry, be granted privileges of the floor for the balance of the day.

Mr. President, the most important words of our Constitution are the first three: ``We the People.'' These words were written in supersized font so that anyone standing across the room would know exactly what the vision of our Constitution is all about: government of, by, and for the people, as Abraham Lincoln put it--not a nation by and for the privileged, not a nation by and for the powerful, but for the people.

Unfortunately, we see too much today of our government being taken over by the powerful. We see the use of gerrymandering, which has totally corrupted the distribution of power in the House of Representatives just down that hallway. We see the use of voter suppression in State after State. My colleague from Illinois just pointed out that a man nominated to be a judge here in the United States of America was a key advocate, a key participant, a key architect of voter suppression. That should deeply trouble every Member of this body because if you believe in the vision of our Constitution, you

would be a full-on advocate for voter empowerment, not voter suppression.

We see this played out in all kinds of different policies. We saw it played out in 2017 when the powerful drove through this body a $1.5 trillion theft of Federal resources and distributed it to the richest Americans. That is what happens in corrupt countries far overseas. But it happened right here, right in this Chamber--a theft of $1.5 trillion out of our Treasury, distributed through that tax bill to the richest Americans. I can tell my colleagues after having done 360 townhalls in my home state, 220 of them in very red counties, no one has ever come up to me--not from the left or the right or the center--and said: I have a great idea. Let's raid the Federal Treasury and distribute it to the richest people among us. Yet that is what we see with government by and for the powerful, as demonstrated right now, here in this U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives down the hall.

I will tell you where else we see it. We see it in the neglect of our responsibility to care for our beautiful blue-green planet. All across the land, we are seeing the devastating consequences of carbon pollution and the heat that it is trapping and the consequences that is driving. Yet here in this Chamber, on this most important responsibility, we do absolutely nothing. In fact, we make it worse, with the majority serving simply as the implementers of whatever version of fossil fuel special favor, special interest, powerful interest policy they can possibly think up--more and more for fossil fuels, more and more damage to our country.

This, certainly, is a situation we are in where we are seeing our land pillaged and polluted. That is a battle we have been waging for many years, but this last week we had a powerful reminder of just how much trouble we are in. Just last week--last Friday--the Trump administration released the ``Fourth National Climate Assessment,'' and what it has to say is frightening. It is shocking. Realize that this is not some environmental group; this is not some leftwing think tank; this is the Trump administration releasing this report.

This is what it has to say. It says that our climate is changing, that its impacts are being felt all around us because of human activity and the carbon pollution being released into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels. This report was written by 13 Federal agencies, and it reiterates this point time and again, and it has the following sentence: ``Earth's climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities.''

This is the statement from the Trump administration's 13 agencies that came together to alert us to exactly where we stand.

What does this mean in real terms? Well, it means we are going to see many more extremely hot days and far fewer cold days. We are going to see more extreme weather events, like the recordbreaking heat waves, like the extensive wildfires out West, like the intensified and deadly hurricanes that have been crashing on our shores.

We are also going to see the impact in our economy. The report estimates that within our children's lifetime, climate chaos will cost our Nation upward of one-half trillion dollars each year in crop damage, in lost labor, and in extreme weather damage to public infrastructure and that we will lose another $1 trillion each year in lost wealth and real estate along our coasts because of rising sea levels and because of more powerful hurricanes--hurricanes that remind us of Michael, Harvey, Irma, and Maria over the last 2 years.

We will also see an impact on winter tourism because of lower snowpack in the mountains, which means less skiing, snowboarding, and snowmobiling.

Back home in Oregon, when the snow level drops, we see a dramatic drop in snow tourism. We don't just think of it as tourism; we also think of it as our joy of being able to participate in these activities in our beautiful Cascade Mountains. Of course, that smaller snowpack means warmer, smaller streams--not too good for fishing--and it certainly means less water for irrigation.

The report--again, the Trump administration report--estimates that in parts of the Midwest, farmers will be able to produce less than 75 percent of the corn they produce today, with a similar impact on soybean yield, and corn and soybeans make up the vast majority of the 127 million acres of the Midwest's agricultural production. That area, in fact, is one of the most intense areas of agricultural production in the world, responsible for $76 billion per year in economic activity. So when it takes a big hit, the economy of the Midwest takes a big hit. That means a lot of farmers losing their farms.

Then we have the health impacts that are laid out in this report-- again, the Trump administration report. It lays out that there will be an estimated 2,000 additional premature deaths per year from extreme temperatures and unsafe breathing conditions. Within our child's lifetime, the report says, Chicago could resemble Phoenix, with up to 2 months of over-100-degree days, and scorching temperatures could make Phoenix practically uninhabitable for up to 5 months of the year.

Human health will also be affected with an expansion of mosquito- borne and tick-borne illnesses and water-borne disease, as well as ailments related to air contamination from wildfire smoke. This isn't just some future challenge; it is a challenge we have today. In both of the last two summers, a good portion of my State was covered by smoke from wildfires, and the result was that a lot of people had breathing difficulties and more intensified breathing difficulties, and a good number ended up in the hospital. A lot of asthma was triggered by that smoke. A lot of people cancelled their outdoor activities during the time of year when we most value the opportunity to be on the beach, in the mountains, on the hiking trails, and at the lakes.

Certainly, we saw economic consequences. Many of our outdoor concerts and venues, including festivals, had to cancel performances. I talked to the owner of a furniture store who said that even he was impacted because of the taint from the smoke smell. Certainly, our wine producers were concerned about what that might do to the taste of Oregon's fantastic pinot noir--the world's best, the best on the planet--pinot noir wine.

So who will bear the brunt of these health emergencies? Is it the powerful and privileged, who are driving the policies to keep burning as much fossil fuels as they possibly can to turn their multimillionaires into multibillionaires? No. The powerful and privileged, living in their gated communities, with their air-filtered and air-conditioned mansions, will protect themselves. They will move to where the impacts are the least. Who will bear the brunt? The young and the old, whose immune systems are more susceptible to health problems; low-income and middle-income Americans, who can't afford to move to where there are fewer consequences, whose jobs are most likely to be impacted by the economic consequences of climate chaos.

I know President Trump wanted to ignore his own report and put it out on Black Friday because he figured that the day after Thanksgiving is the day when the fewest Americans would pay attention. That is why I am on the floor right now to draw attention to this report, the Trump report, on the devastating consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuels.

Everything we saw laid out in this ``National Climate Assessment'' from the Trump administration was echoed by the international report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that was released last month. That report summarized that within the next 12 years--we are not talking 12 centuries or 12 decades but 12 years--we are going to start feeling intensified effects of climate chaos on top of what we have already experienced. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report was put together by 91 researchers in 41 countries. They summarized that we have already passed the 1-degree centigrade warming mark, which is almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit. They said we are well on our way to the 2-degree mark, which means catastrophic climate chaos.

If you were in the middle of the fires in Oregon, if you were in the middle of the fire in Paradise, CA, if you were in the path of Hurricanes Irma, Maria, or Michael, you might already say we have catastrophic climate chaos, but

they are using the term to describe a significant amplification from what we are seeing right now. They are ringing a five-alarm fire bell to say: This is the moment to wake up.

Wake up, America. You are a democratic republic. You are supposed to be able to respond to the challenges that come before us. And we have a massive challenge: devastating consequences of carbon pollution. You must stop burning carbon. Find a path to change how we operate in transportation, how we operate in generating electricity. Address this issue. Hold every hearing, summon every scientist, ring every bell, and get to work. That is what these two reports are saying to us.

So, colleagues, if you are sitting here asleep at the switch, you are not doing your job. If you are sitting here advocating for the fossil fuel industry, you are worse than not doing your job--you are helping to damage the land across this great Nation for all Americans. So wake up and get to work.

This isn't a Democratic issue or a Republican issue, a blue county or red county. In fact, the biggest impacts are felt in our red counties, where the foundation of the economy is farming, fishing, and forestry, and every one of those is being impacted by this effect. So we, as representatives in our democratic Republic, with our ``We the People'' Constitution--it is our job to operate for the people, not for the powerful, not for the privileged.

I will be introducing a resolution that recognizes and accepts the findings of these reports, acknowledges the expertise from 91 scientists in 41 countries and 300 scientists in 13 Federal agencies, the combined efforts of these two reports that say that we are in trouble and we must act, and we must act in partnership with the world.

We need to act here. We need to say to Trudeau of Canada: You want to be a climate leader. You claim you are a climate leader. Why are you tripling the size of the pipeline that serves the tar sands?

We need to say to the leadership of Australia: Your outback is on fire during your winter. Your coral reefs are dying. The Great Barrier Reef has died in the last 10 years. Why are you doubling down on coal?

We need to say to Japan: Don't base your energy future on liquefied natural gas, which is simply another fossil fuel strategy.

We need to say to Germany: Why do you want this gas pipeline from Russia as a foundation for your energy future?

Let's all be in this together because if any nation acts by itself, we can't change the course--the big course, the big picture--of the damage carbon pollution is doing. We have to work together. That means we now pivot and say: Let's recognize that renewable energy is now the cheapest energy. It is less expensive to generate a kilowatt hour of electricity from renewable energy, from solar wind, than it is from fossil fuels. Let's not just realize that carbon is doing all this damage; let's also recognize that the strongest economy will be built on the cheapest energy, which is renewable energy. So we have every reason to act.

Let's remember that we were founded as a ``we the people'' vision, and let's honor that vision.

Mr. President, today, we honor and celebrate Joan Middleton's commendable service to the Senate Employees' Child Care Center. On September 30, 2018, Ms. Middleton retired from the Center, where she worked as a floater assistant teacher for no less than 32 years. She was an admired and respected member of the Senate Employees' Child Care Center Team, her devotion to which was only rivaled by her love for the Washington Redskins.

Ms. Middleton carried important responsibilities at the center, including regularly assisting in each and every classroom, as well as supervising and closing the center each evening. She not only took these responsibilities seriously, but went well beyond the essential tasks of her post. Her deep care for the community was palpable, as was evidenced by her consistent, inclusive, and thoughtful leadership.

Without a doubt, Ms. Middleton played an integral role in each student and faculty member's day. For the students, she prepared snacks and lunches every day. All faculty went to her for anything from a ballpoint pen to a safety pin, garnering her the name ``Ms. Resource'' among her colleagues. Whenever anyone had forgotten where to find something or where it belonged, Ms. Middleton knew.

For over three decades, Ms. Middleton was a compassionate adviser who shared her wisdom with the many faculty members she took the time to mentor. While her invaluable institutional knowledge will be missed in her absence, her kind, diligent commitment to the center will live on through those members she guided throughout her tenure. The Senate Employees' Child Care center is deeply grateful for Ms. Middleton for all the positive ways she shaped the Center and enriched the lives of its students over these past 32 years.

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

Thank you, Mr. President.

Today I rise to bring attention to the No Internment Camps Act. This is an important bill to make sure that America does not repeat the mistake of World War II and develop and expand internment camps here in the United States of America.

One may think that this is something that is farfetched, that of course the United States would not establish internment camps, but the fact is, we already have 3, and the House passed a bill to greatly expand those internment camps. We have 35 sponsors of a bill here in the Senate to expand internment camps. We have the President issuing an Executive order asking Congress to expand internment camps. Recently, the President put forward a draft regulation to expand internment

camps without the consent of Congress. So it is all very real.

Where did this story begin? It began, as far as public awareness, on May 7, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a speech. He called this his zero-tolerance policy. I listened to the description of the zero-tolerance policy on arresting people at the border, and I said: You know, when you take away the fancy rhetoric, it sounds like he has criminalized families who are fleeing persecution from overseas. I thought, that is a pretty stunning situation because we in America often look to Lady Liberty and the words inscribed on the base or pedestal of Lady Liberty that say ``Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.''

The idea that our Attorney General is saying we are going to criminalize flight from persecution--and it was found, furthermore, that they were going to immediately throw adults into jail and rip away the children from their families. That is not possible. That is not possible here in the United States of America.

So I arranged to go down to the border. I went down on June 3 and visited the McAllen processing center. The McAllen processing center is a location that the press had never been allowed into, so they were stationed outside saying: What are you going to find inside? What are you going to see? What is in there?

I expressed surprise that the press here in America was excluded from this facility to see what was going on.

I went in. I was given a tour. What I found was pretty shocking--a room in which huddled masses of families were shoved into wire link cages with nothing but an aluminum foil Mylar blanket. Then in an adjoining larger space, a warehouse space, we saw larger cages, 30-by- 30 foot cages where families were being separated into fathers in one cage, mothers in another, daughters in a third, and sons in a fourth.

I stood in front of one 30-by-30 foot chain link cage and said: These young boys, who are lining up by height to prepare for being fed; these young boys, with the smallest being just knee-high to a grasshopper, maybe 4 years old; these young boys have been separated from their parents?

The answer was this: Well, Senator, not all of them. Some of them arrived unaccompanied.

I said: But many of these boys in this cage were taken away from their parents?

They said: Yes.

I said: Well, where did that happen?

They said: Well, we brought the family in that door over there, and then, with some explanation, we said, ``We need to take your son away. We need to take your daughter away. We need to take your spouse away.''

And they were locked up in these various locations inside that warehouse.

So it turned out it was real. The administration was criminalizing a flight from persecution, a flight that our ancestors know all too well, fleeing from civil war, from religious persecution, from famine to come here to the United States of America and see that beautiful, welcoming Statue of Liberty--``Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free''--but instead of that welcoming embrace, prison for the parents and, quite frankly, prison for the children, separating them.

I went from there up to Brownsville. I had been told by immigration advocates that many of these young men were being stuffed into a single building up in Brownsville, a former Walmart run by a nonprofit called Southwest Key. I had asked permission to visit this location, and I had been told: No, no, no. You have to give 2 weeks' advance notice.

They had a waiver system, so I asked for a waiver to be able to see what was going on inside this former Walmart. The waiver was turned down. Clearly the administration did not want any Member of Congress to see what was going on inside that building.

Since I was there in Texas, I drove up the road to Brownsville and said: Well, I will just call them up when I get there and say, ``Surely you have enough members on your staff that one of them could come out and talk to me, or maybe one of them could give me a tour of what is inside.''

When I arrived and walked up to the door of this former Walmart, there was a phone number posted on the front of it. I proceeded to call that phone number and talk to the assistant to the supervisor of the facility. The assistant said: Yes, the supervisor would be happy to come out and talk to you.

I waited 10 minutes. No supervisor appeared. I called again, and they said: Oh, no, the supervisor is on his way.

Well, what the supervisor was really doing was waiting for the police to arrive. They called the police to come and arrest me. Very interesting--you are arrested for knocking on the door and asking to have a supervisor talk to you? Well, they didn't arrest me. They hadn't actually formally asked me to leave the property, but they certainly weren't going to let me inside to see what was going on or even talk to me about what they were doing.

The immigration advocates have said: We have heard a rumor that possibly up to 1,000 young boys have been stuffed into that Walmart. I thought, that is not possible. As I was standing there and talking to the press, I repeated that. I thought, I shouldn't say this. I shouldn't say this because that is so outlandish. Surely no administration would try to stuff 1,000 boys into one building.

So I was refused entry. I brought attention to this scandalous child- separation strategy--this strategy of deliberately inflicting trauma on children in order to send a political message. No one in the world can justify inflicting trauma on children to send a political message. It is not acceptable under any moral code. It is not acceptable under any religious tradition. But the dark heart of this administration had hatched this evil plan, and it was being implemented.

I went back 2 weeks later, on June 14, and I went back with reinforcements--other Members of Congress. We went to that facility, and this time they granted a waiver and said: Yes, you may see what is going on. They allowed the press in as well. So we went in for a tour.

I asked ``How many boys are here?'' thinking, at most a couple hundred.

They said: Well, we are now ready to put 1,500 boys in this facility, and we are one busload short of filling it.

I think they said there were 1,467 residents in this one building.

They took me out to the outside area, where they had set up a soccer field. They said: Isn't this wonderful? We have a soccer field.

Imagine how long it takes for nearly 1,500 young boys to circulate through a soccer field.

They took me to a game room, and there was a broken Foosball machine. I thought, how long does it take 1,500 boys to circulate through a single broken Foosball machine? Maybe there were a couple of them; I remember seeing one. They were very proud that they had this soccer field and this game room.

I said: You know, you expanded so fast. At the beginning of the year, how many boys did you have?

They said: Well, we planned for 300. We had 300 bedrooms and 300 boys.

They said that 2 months ago, they had increased to 500, and now they have 1,500 or almost 1,500.

I asked: This rapid expansion--did you plan carefully for this?

They said: Oh, yes.

I said: Was there anything that you needed that you fell short on?

The director of Southwest Key said: Yes. We don't have mental health counselors, or at least we are short.

I said: How many are you short?

They said: Ninety mental health counselors.

Ninety? Wow. That is a big shortfall. Realize that these boys were fleeing persecution from overseas. So they had experienced trauma in their lives abroad, they probably experienced trauma en route, and now they are experiencing the trauma of being ripped away from their families and shuttled off to this warehouse. Yet there was no plan to have the mental health counselors needed for this population. This is one feature of the incompetence and callousness of this administration in implementing this policy.

Public outcry was significant. I thank all Americans who participated in that public outcry, saying that this is not our America-- criminalizing a flight from persecution, locking people up while they await asylum hearings--

that is not our America and you must stop. The courts said the same thing because it is actually illegal to lock up children for more than 20 days under the Flores consent agreement.

So President Trump sent a message. He sent an Executive order titled ``Affording Congress an Opportunity to Address Family Separation.'' Oh, how nice. The President is giving us an opportunity to address family separation. And what did the President ask for in that Executive order? He asked for us to pass a law to overrule the Flores consent agreement and allow the administration to establish family internment camps. Imagine--family internment camps here in the United States. That is what the President was asking for, that is exactly what the House of Representatives passed, and that is exactly what 35 Members of this body have signed on to cosponsor--family internment camps in the United States of America. That is absolutely wrong, it is absolutely unacceptable, and it is absolutely unneeded.

You may say: Wait. You are saying that the children shouldn't be separated from their parents and that you shouldn't lock up families together, so what do you propose, Senator Merkley? What do you propose that we do?

Well, the answer is, we had a very good program. It was called the Family Case Management Program. This Family Case Management Program said that when a family comes and is seeking asylum, they will be placed into the community and they will have intensive case management with somebody who speaks and writes their language, an individual who is in continuous contact with them, who makes sure they know exactly when their check-ins are and how to attend them and who knows exactly when the court hearing is and how to get to those court hearings.

So I wondered, did this work? How well did this program work? It turns out that there is an inspector general report from Homeland Security that came out--I think the date was November 30, 2017. Here is what the inspector general found: ``According to ICE, overall program compliance for all five regions is an average of 99 percent for ICE check-ins and appointments, as well as 100 percent attendance at court hearings.'' So 100 percent--you can't get better than that. The Family Case Management Program--the inspector general under this administration said that there was 100 percent attendance at court hearings. So if you hear a Member of the Senate say ``Well, we are concerned about this catch-and-release because people don't show up for their hearings,'' that is a lie. That is inaccurate.

That is inaccurate. If you hear the President saying, well, we are going to lock families up if they don't appear for their court hearings, that is inaccurate. That is a lie. The inspector general of this administration found 100 percent attendance at court hearings.

Fortunately, Members of this body have come to their senses and rejected the language from the House establishing internment camps, expanding them, authorizing them. Fortunately, Members of the Senate have come to their senses and abandoned their effort--for now, at least--to establish permission, authorization, and funding for internment camps, as well they should because it doesn't fit the vision of America: a nation where most of us are the children of immigrants, if not immigrants ourselves; a nation where in our family tree we have individuals who fled persecution, religious persecution, who fled famine, who fled conflict to be welcomed by the vision of the Statue of Liberty.

The story, unfortunately, doesn't end here. The President has now issued a draft regulation. That draft regulation says we in the executive branch are granting ourselves the authority to establish internment camps without permission or direction from Congress.

Are you kidding me? A lengthy regulation designed to authorize themselves, without Congress acting, to establish family internment camps is totally out of sync with the traditions of America, with the values of America, or the law as it exists under the Flores consent agreement.

Let me put this as simply as I can: Children belong in homes and playgrounds and schools. They don't belong behind barbed wire. I will fight as fiercely as I possibly can any proposal to put children behind barbed wire as they wait their asylum hearing. It is wrong. It is morally wrong. It is, from a policy perspective, totally unjustified, as was child separation.

That is why I am introducing the No Internment Camps Act. Let us not repeat the mistakes of World War II. This act ensures that no Federal dollars will be used for the operation and construction of family internment camps. It creates a 1-year phaseout of three family detention centers currently in operation, and it saves money from the family detention centers and transfers it to the Alternatives to Detention Program in order to reestablish the Family Case Management Program--the program that had a 100-percent success rate in getting people to their hearings. Put money into programs that work, not into prisons that afflict children.

There are many groups that have said how important this is and have endorsed the no internment camps legislation: Japanese American Citizens League, Human Rights Watch, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Women's Refugee Commission, the Anti-Defamation League, the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon, the American Immigration Lawyers Association of Oregon, Human Rights First, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Karen Korematsu, the daughter of Fred Korematsu, the lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that challenged Japanese internment camps in World War II.

Let us put an end to the prospect of the administration expanding on its own, through Executive order, internment camps in the United States. Let's do so by passing the No Internment Camps Act.

Mr. President, I wish my colleagues were here to share in this dialogue because there is such an absence of other Members sharing with each other their perspectives. We have a world that is enhanced by a media world that lives in a different universe that accentuates the differences between the parties.

I think we are on a course that does deepen the differences across America. I hope there is some way we can find in this Senate to be able to communicate across that growing chasm in a more effective manner.

I have heard many of my colleagues speak to the issue of fairness on this floor. I offer just a brief, couple of sentences of points for you to consider as to why not all of America shares the perspective that this has been fair.

When Dr. Ford was invited to come to speak to the committee, she said that she would like to come, but she wanted some time, and she would like to have corroborating individuals be able to appear before the committee. That was denied by the committee, and that bothered many people in this Chamber a great deal. Even in 1991, Anita Hill was given that opportunity.

What is also very bothersome to individuals is that Dr. Ford had put forward a list of eight individuals whom she had asked the FBI to talk to, to be corroborating witnesses, and the FBI could talk only to those within the scoping document that comes from the White House because, at that moment, they are not doing a criminal investigation, they are doing a background investigation, and they have to follow the President's instructions. Those instructions, we are told, were not to talk to any of the corroborating witnesses, not the 8 she put forward and not the 20 who were put forward by Debbie Ramirez. So 28 individuals were not brought before the committee and not talked to by the FBI.

I hope we have lots of opportunities to share our perspectives across the aisle to understand as we struggle with the issue of fairness because for many of us, fairness has not been achieved. The bigger message to these two women who came forward to share their journeys, to share their experiences, is that the U.S. Senate was unwilling to hear them out, unfortunately.

Thank you.

Mr. President, our Founders had a very clear design for the ability to put individuals into high posts of great responsibility. They really wrestled with it. They considered giving the ability to appoint judges and executive officers to the assembly, as it was referred to. I think we have to worry a lot about individuals swapping favors. One person saying: You support my friend, and I will support yours--that wouldn't lead to those with the best qualities serving in these key positions.

They concluded after great debate that it would go to a single individual, the President, to nominate. They realized that the President can go off track. They thought the President might express favoritism of a variety of sorts. Alexander Hamilton talked about this at some length: maybe favoritism to people in the home State, maybe favoritism to a close group of friends, maybe favoritism to individuals who were doing favors for the President. Who knows? Therefore, there had to be a check on the potential abuse of the appointment process. That is where the Senate came in, to advise and consent--the President, to nominate; the Senate, to consent. What that meant is that the Senate could not interfere with the President on the nomination process, and the President was not to interfere with the Senate in the confirmation process. Yet we have right now, for the first time in U.S. history, as far as anyone has been able to ascertain, a case in which the President of the United States has interfered greatly, first of all by requesting that the Senate not look at all 3 years in which this individual, Kavanaugh--the nominee--served as Staff Secretary to President Bush. Second of all, the President appointed an individual to provide the stamp of Presidential privilege on documents for when he served at the White House that they did not want the Senate to see. We have some of those documents. He said: Those are OK. Yet they censored 100,000 documents with the Presidential privilege stamp. This has never been done, ever, as far as we can determine.

This body, on a bipartisan basis, requested all of those documents. This was not a case of the President saying ``Please don't request,'' like with the Staff Secretary; this is a case in which the Senate together said ``Give us the documents,'' and the President refused.

This is something we should all stand together and say: Unacceptable. It is unacceptable that the President stepped across the separation of powers to interfere with the work of this body to review the nominee's record. The fact that there have not been loud cries of protests from the leadership of this Senate is a shame on this institution--that it has not fought for the separation of powers embodied in the Constitution. It has not fought for the ability of each and every Senator to be able to exercise full responsibility when we took our oath of office to review the records of nominees, engage in the advice and consent exercise.

Is this to be a precedent for the future because the leadership here has so shamefully abandoned the core principles of the Constitution and the responsibilities of this Chamber? I hope not. I hope that, together, all 100 Senators will find in the future they will make sure the President cannot interfere with our responsibility.

This is only one of the many problems, the many concerns, about Brett Kavanaugh. Brett Kavanaugh didn't raise a single voice about the interference of the President with the exercise of this body. He is being nominated to the Supreme Court. He is supposed to have read the Constitution at some point. He is supposed to understand the separation of powers. He is supposed to stand up for the principles embodied in that great document, and he did not. That alone should tell you this man does not belong on the Supreme Court.

Then, of course, there is the fact that he has a view of Presidential power that is above and beyond the law. Try to find that in the Constitution.

Among the 25, he was the one who had the most expansive view of Presidential power. He is the one the President chose. Why is that? Because the President is under investigation for conspiring with Russia to fix the election. That is why. He is worried. He is up at night. He wakes up early. He tweets out to the world--angry, hostile. He wants to make sure he has a Justice on that Court who can help write a ``get out of jail free'' card. What a conflict of interest. What a conflict of interest that this Court might have to rule on whether a President can pardon himself. It is something we have never had to worry about before, whether a President can fire a special prosecutor, despite the writing under the law.

That is not all. We have before us a nominee who has been deceptive and misleading to this Chamber time after time. Different articles have put up different lists. They all come down to here is what he said, and here is the truth. Here is what he said, and here is the truth.

I want to pivot, though, to perhaps the most shameful, difficult part of this nominee; that is, his record of abuse toward women and the complete failure of this body to look into that.

I heard earlier on the floor of this Chamber a number of my colleagues across the aisle use the word ``fairness.'' ``We want fairness.'' I heard it from one, two, three, four colleagues, ``fairness.'' Did a single one of them express any regret that when Dr. Ford came forward and asked for those who could corroborate her testimony, asked for the Judiciary Committee to hold a hearing with those folks able to testify? Did they express any regret they turned her down?

Even in 1991, the Judiciary Committee brought forward people to corroborate Anita Hill's story. Here we are 27 years later, and we don't treat a woman coming forward to share an experience of sexual abuse--we don't even allow those individuals who can corroborate to testify before the Judiciary Committee.

Did I hear a single Republican stand up and say ``I am embarrassed we treated her so poorly''?

Let's take Debbie Ramirez. She laid out a list of 20 individuals. The Judiciary Committee had a lot to say about her experience. Did they invite her to testify and be able to tell her side of the story? No, they did not. She had a list of 20 individuals who could provide corroborating information. Did they ask a single one of those 20 to come before the committee? Did they allow a single one to come? No, they did not. There was no fairness in that committee. Let's be clear about that.

Let's not hear more highfalutin arguments about fairness from the other side of the aisle when these two women were treated in such an egregious and awful fashion.

Then, there is the phony FBI investigation. I praise my colleague who insisted that the record be reopened, the background check be reopened for the FBI to provide an opportunity to check out these experiences shared by Debbie Ramirez and by Dr. Ford. On a background check, it is not a criminal investigation, and the FBI can't decide who to talk to.

Did I hear a single Member across the aisle express any embarrassment about the fact that they let the President constrain the investigations so not one--not one--of the eight people Dr. Ford asked to be talked to was talked to? Not one. Zero. You call that fair? That is not fair. That is not fair to her, that none of the people she asked to be talked to were talked to.

Did I hear a single person across the aisle express any reservations about the fact that that FBI investigation was so constrained by the President of the United States, with advice from the Republican leadership, that they did not talk to one of the 20 people Debbie Ramirez asked to be talked to about her experiences in college?

You know, 1 of the 20 was a suite mate of Mr. Kavanaugh's. Well, when you go through your freshman year and you are a suite mate, you share a common living area, and there is one bedroom here and one bedroom here, so you are with each other all the time. You know a lot about the other folks. Well, that is a pretty powerful association. That individual is now a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, and he heard this story when it happened. He heard about it, and he lived right there in the suite, and he thought it was horrific.

I heard some colleagues say there was no one who could substantiate her story. That is simply false, and it is shameful to allege that there is no one when you know there is. It is unacceptable to call something fair when you deliberately instruct or encourage the President to make sure that the people who can provide the information are not talked to.

This individual, now a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, has a very fine reputation. He was so upset about this, he talked about it with his roommate his first year in graduate school long before Mr. Kavanaugh ever came close to any type of nomination debate. So you can't really say that he made it up now when he told another person about it long ago. And that individual was on the list to be talked to, but did the FBI talk to him? No, because the President wouldn't let the FBI talk to him, and the President consulted with the Republican leadership, and they didn't want anybody talked to who could actually corroborate these stories.

That is a rigged system. For anyone on this floor to say that is anywhere close to a form of justice, that is not true.

These women have been horrifically treated by this Chamber. Just as the country knew Anita Hill was treated so poorly, so will, for decades from now, people talk about the abuse of power that emanated from my colleagues across the aisle against these women.

Across this land right now, women have been reliving their own experiences of abuse. It has been an extraordinarily painful experience. They have been calling our offices. I am sure they have been calling all of our offices. I got on the phone and took many calls today. I heard story after story. It takes a lot of energy out of your heart to listen to individuals say, I am sharing this with you, and they start crying on the phone--person after person.

I also have all of the stories that have been written and sent to me as letters. I thought I would share a few of them with you.

Here is a letter:

What a farce! The disrespect to Dr. Ford and to victims

everywhere. I am sincere in saying that this TRIAL is turning

my stomach. I have fought back tears. I am a victim of

similar offenses. It is no better, and in some ways worse,

that it is a woman going after Dr. Ford in a subtle attempt

to cloud the trust of her experience.

Well, what is she referring to when she says it is a woman going after Dr. Ford? She is talking about the fact that the leadership on the Judiciary Committee hired a prosecutor to come

in and act as if Dr. Ford were a criminal on trial and to interrogate her as if she were a criminal on trial. That is what this individual said ``is turning my stomach.'' And it turned my stomach, too, to see that abuse of power here in the U.S. Senate.

Another letter:

Hello, Senator. It has been 21 years since I was raped. I

had at the time only shared my story with the emergency room

doctors, the police, and my mom. Since it occurred, I have

only shared my story with my husband, until this week on

Twitter with the ``why I didn't report'' hashtag.

With each new accusation against Brett Kavanaugh, it has

forced me to relive all the horrible memories from the night

my assailant raped me. This moment in history and the fact

that the majority of Republican Senators who have either

tried to discredit the women coming forward or victim blame

and shame them has literally made the event so fresh in my

mind; as though it just happened all over again yesterday.

As like Dr. Ford, the details of dates, exact time, exact

clothing, are not extremely forthcoming to my memory,

although I remember the colors of what we were both wearing.

The fear, his actions, what I was feeling, and what was said

during the rape, I will never forget. And I will never forget

the smell of the cologne he was wearing and how it makes me

physically ill when I smell it to this day.

Kavanaugh can have his fake tears and shout his anger all

he wants because I guarantee you, if the man who raped me was

trying to get a job on the Supreme Court, and if I had the

strength to come forward like Dr. Ford did, then he too would

yell and scream at the realization he was being confronted

and that it was about to be taken away from him. Not to

mention, my sexual assault assailant would NOT require an FBI

investigation either.

And what is she referring to there? She is referring to the fact that Dr. Ford took a polygraph exam, and Dr. Ford asked for an FBI investigation. Mr. Kavanaugh did not take a polygraph exam, and Mr. Kavanaugh did not want an FBI investigation. Quite a difference there.

Here is another story:

Five years ago, I was assaulted by a trusted friend in my

dorm room. Although I don't recall some critical details,

indelible in the hippocampus is the humiliation and fear

of retaliation. That is why I never reported, even when

school nurses urged me to.

Years later, I suffered PTSD and rarely feel entirely safe.

Watching Kavanaugh's angry, arrogant performance was deeply

triggering to me--would my attacker act the same way if I

outed him?

And would he also find the support of 33 percent of

Americans, just like Kavanaugh?

Until now, I haven't shared that I am a survivor with even

the closest of my friends and family. But it is too important

to stay quiet now.

Here is another story:

Hello, Senator Merkley. When I was young in the early

1970s, I was raped for an entire year by someone close to our

family. I didn't tell. I didn't tell because his warnings and

threats were too powerful and frightening for the child that

I was.

The man went on to become active in a leadership role. He

was, in fact, in a position to give talks about morality and

principles, all the while knowing how he affected my life.

Because that was the year he took my childhood away.

Watching Dr. Ford's testimony was tough, but I did it.

I always knew if I came forward against the man who did

this, it would be his word against mine and as a female, I

would lose. So I stayed quiet, never naming him publicly and

never will.

But I'm writing today to ask you for two thing, please--if

you hear any of your fellow Senators say ``I know his

character. He would never do that. He's never done anything

like that in front of me,'' please remind them that they

don't like witnesses. For me, there was never a hint of an

assault until he got me alone.

And if you hear your fellow Senators say, ``But it happened

almost 40 years ago,'' please assure them that in the

victim's heart, mind and life, it happened last week. It

happened yesterday. It happened today. Because you never get

past what was done to you. Ever. You can't.

She went on to share that she wrote this letter to me and deleted it and wrote it again and deleted it several times. She had just deleted it again when her husband came in the door carrying a statement that someone had posted on the doors in the neighborhood that happened to have a quote from me, one of her two Senators, and she took it as a sign, and she decided to write that letter again and send it.

She said:

Now maybe what happened to me will bring about some good.

I know all of us are getting letters like this.

When she said she never came forward because it would be ``his word against mine and as a female I would lose,'' she is relating exactly what happened to Dr. Ford.

It was set up he said, she said, with no corroborating witnesses called even though Dr. Ford asked for them. And then because it was he said, she said, my colleagues could stand up and say: Just can't prove it. Can't prove it.

But why didn't my colleagues stand up and say: It is an outrage that we didn't call the people she asked us to call. It is an outrage that there was this phony FBI investigation that didn't talk to any of those people.

What she was talking about right here is how Dr. Ford was treated in this Chamber, that she would lose because men in power would rig the system and find for the man. That is what has happened here.

That is what happened with Ms. Ramirez, Debbie Ramirez. She had corroborating information from the suite mate of Brett Kavanaugh, but we here, this Senate, we rigged the system so that that information could not be considered. That is what this woman is talking about, why she didn't come forward, because it would be her word against a man's. The system would be rigged and would find for the man. That is what is so disturbing to women all over this country--a rigged system, that we couldn't find in our collective judgment, in our collective process, the ability to rise against partisanship and give fair treatment, a fair process, to the individuals who came forward. It may not have changed the course of events and the final vote, but at least women would know we have come from where we were. We may not have been entirely fair to Anita Hill, but we have learned and we have come further. Instead, we did worse. That is a regrettable, powerful consequence of what has happened.

Another constituent wrote to say that although he was not a direct victim of assault, both of his brothers were repeatedly sexually abused by a Catholic priest who spent 8 years in prison for abusing as many as 150 boys. He went on to say that this priest was in charge of a boys' choir even though it was known that he had issues with sexual abuse.

His brothers were part of the choir, and he is troubled, he writes, that his younger brother served in the same choir he did, and even though he was aware there was a problem, he didn't intervene.

He says, referring to the priest:

He ruined our lives. Though I was not directly a victim of

his abuse, I carry with me the shame of not knowing to speak

up about what I saw.

He says that shame is amplified because his younger brother sang in the same choir for a time.

He goes on to talk about a culture of power and privilege, where people think they can abuse others and get away with it.

He says:

We are seeing this behavior being accepted at the highest

level of office in our country.

He goes on to relate that this is similar to the culture of abuse towards women.

He says:

The culture of abuse towards women is being openly

perpetuated by the leaders of our country. The people we are

supposed to put trust in.

That was the end of his quote.

He went on to say:

I have never felt like it was my story to tell. The only

reason I tell it is because it illustrates how dangerous

these power structures can be and how easily they can be

abused. We have to take great care when choosing who to give

great responsibility to.

Have we in this Chamber recognized how easily our power structure can be abused? Did we rise to insist on fairness for individuals who brought their stories forward? Did we insist that they have the opportunity to have their witnesses and corroborating information considered by this Chamber? We did not. We failed them. We failed this country. And when he says that we have to take great care when choosing who to give great responsibility to, he is saying we should have taken great care. And we know that in this particular nomination, there are two powerful pieces of it. One, it is lifetime, so the person will serve for decades. The second is, it is the top Court.

Are there not individuals in this land of hundreds of millions of people who have stellar records of character who could serve on that Court?

I hope that across America, it will come to great discussion and lead to changes in how we think and how we behave. I hope that between now and the vote tomorrow afternoon, there will be some Members of this Chamber who will decide to take seriously the responsibility that we had and that we failed to exercise appropriately. We will decide that, you know what, yeah, we are going to close debate, but we haven't yet voted to put this man on the bench, and with the committee having conducted a completely rigged process, we need to stop and rethink what we are doing and not put Brett Kavanaugh on the Court.

Thank you, Mr. President.

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

Mr. President, I have a lot of concerns about the possibility of Brett Kavanaugh serving on the Supreme Court. They are concerns that come from many different directions, but let's start with the precedent that this body has not reviewed his full record. We haven't taken any look at all at the 3 years he was Staff Secretary to President Bush because the President's team intervened and asked us not to. And a couple Members of this body collaborated with the White House to deny everybody else here the possibility of looking at his record.

The thing is that each and every one of us has a responsibility to review the record. This exceptional situation in which a few Members have made it impossible for anyone in the body to fulfill their constitutional responsibility is an extraordinary abuse of power in this body.

Then we have the President of the United States reaching out in other ways--in ways we have never seen before--and putting the stamp of Presidential privilege on some 100,000 documents. These were documents from the time that Brett Kavanaugh served as a White House Counsel. We received a few documents, and there were a lot of troubling things in those documents, but 100,000 documents were censored by the President of the United States.

I will just remind my colleagues that the President is not supposed to interfere with the work of the Senate in the confirmation process. It is called the separation of powers. Maybe some of you would like to pull out your Constitution and study it for a moment and realize that the President nominates but doesn't get to decide what this body reviews. Yet that stamp of Presidential power, untested, has done so for, as far as we can tell, the first time in U.S. history.

Then we have the fact that he asked the same individual whom he had given the stamp of Presidential power to proceed to make some 140,000 documents confidential so the public couldn't see them. Well, that, too, was untested. That, too, was an original strategy. That, too, was a situation of minimizing the conversation that experts could have of what was in those records.

Of those three phases, I think the one that bothers me the most is the second one--the use of the stamp of Presidential privilege on 100,000 documents. When Presidential privilege--otherwise known as Executive privilege--was used in the past, a document was looked at and it was determined, what constitutional test does this meet for special treatment? One would think that since these were documents from the Bush administration, the Trump administration couldn't make any of the arguments that normally are made about compromising conversations in the White House, but no explanation was given. This was just straight- out censorship across the board.

I challenged that censorship, and the hearing that was supposed to take

place unfortunately won't take place because of this rush to complete the confirmation before the Senate can get ahold of those documents, before that hearing can occur.

Why the rush to cooperate with the White House to prevent this body from seeing those 100,000 pages that were censored by the White House? What is the President hiding? Is it Brett Kavanaugh's involvement in the policy of torture? Is it Brett Kavanaugh's involvement in holding the documents stolen from Senate Democrats, because we know he received them? Is it his involvement in other nominations where he said he wasn't very involved? What is in those 100,000 documents that the White House was desperate that this body not review? That is certainly troubling. No nomination should go forward without a review by this body of a nominee's records, certainly not for a lifetime appointment and certainly not for the Supreme Court.

Then there is concern over the temperament of the individual. Out of the hundreds of millions of Americans across this land, certainly there are at least nine who have the temperament to serve. No need to turn to someone who is belligerent and condescending. No need to turn to someone who is angry and unstable. But what did we see? That is exactly what we saw when we heard him testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

He said things like: ``Some of you were lying in wait and had it ready,'' although he said it in an angrier tone than that.

He said: ``This confirmation has become a national disgrace.'' Well, I don't actually argue with that because it is a disgrace because of the compromises of fairness that have occurred in this process toward the women who came forward.

When he was asked by Senator Klobuchar if he has ever been blackout drunk, he responded: ``I don't know. Have you?'' Well, interesting response. Did he respond ``I don't know'' because he can't remember because he blacked out? Was that his point?

Then we saw the partisan rhetoric: a frenzy on the left to come up with something, anything, to block my confirmation. Angry and partisan, all in one moment.

Then he went on to say much more about things being calculated and orchestrated, about things being a political hit, fueled with pent-up anger about President Trump. He talked about fear unfairly stoked. He talked about revenge on behalf of the Clintons.

He threatened the Senate. He said: ``As we all know, what goes around comes around.''

This man with these quotes is qualified to serve on the special body known as the Supreme Court of the United States? I don't think so.

He talked about the fact that he didn't drink too much and he didn't become belligerent. Yet we saw a lot of belligerence when he came before the body. This is called not having judicial temperament. That performance of intemperate behavior led to 2,400 law professors noting that it was improper, inappropriate, simply wrong, that this man should serve. They wrote a letter October 3rd: ``The Senate should not confirm Kavanaugh.'' The letter was presented to us the following day. They said this:

Judicial temperament is one of the most important qualities

of a judge. As the Congressional Research Service explains, a

judge requires ``a personality that is evenhanded, unbiased,

impartial, courteous, yet firm, and dedicated to a process,

not a result.''

The concern for judicial temperament dates back to our founding. In Federalist 78, titled ``Judges as Guardians of the Constitution,'' Alexander Hamilton expressed the need for the integrity and moderation of the judiciary.

The letter continues:

We are law professors who teach, research, and write about

the judicial institutions of this country. Many of us appear

in State and Federal court and our work means that we will

continue to do so, including before the United States Supreme

Court. We regret that we feel compelled to write to you, our

Senators, to provide our views that at the Senate hearings on

September 27, Judge Brett Kavanaugh displayed a lack of

judicial temperament that would be disqualifying for any

court, and certainly for elevation to the highest court of

this land.

They continued based on their background--2,400 law professors from across the country--saying:

The question at issue was, of course, painful for anyone.

But Judge Kavanaugh exhibited a lack of commitment to

judicious inquiry. Instead of being open to the necessary

search for accuracy, Judge Kavanaugh was repeatedly

aggressive with questioners. Even in his prepared remarks,

Judge Kavanaugh described the hearing as partisan, referring

to it as ``a calculated and orchestrated political hit''

rather than acknowledging the need for the Senate, faced with

new information, to try to understand what had transpired.

Instead of trying to sort out with reason and care the

allegations that were raised to him, Judge Kavanaugh

responded in an intemperate, inflammatory, and partial

manner, and he interrupted and at times was discourteous to

Senators.

As you know, under two statutes governing bias and recusal,

judges must step aside if they are at risk of being perceived

as or of being unfair. As Congress has previously put it, a

judge or justice ``shall disqualify himself in any proceeding

in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.''

These statutes are part of a myriad of legal commitments to

the impartiality of the judiciary, which is a cornerstone of

the courts.

We have differing views about the other qualifications of

Judge Kavanaugh, but we are united as professors of law and

scholars of judicial institutions in believing that he did

not display the impartiality and judicial temperament

requisite to sit on the highest court of the land.

Signed, with their respective institutional affiliations, 2,400 law professors, saying that this man is not suited to serve.

Another concern not mentioned in that letter was his fidelity to the truth--misrepresentations, inaccuracies, and straight-out whoppers.

Some of our colleagues, like the senior Senator from South Carolina, said: I have argued to you that when you found that a judge was a perjurer, you couldn't in good conscience send him back into the courtroom because everybody who came in that courtroom thereafter would have a real serious doubt--a real serious doubt over whether the truth was being told.

Brett Kavanaugh said that all witnesses to his alleged assault of Dr. Ford refuted her claim or said it didn't happen. What is the truth? Only one person said it didn't happen: Brett Kavanaugh. All of those other folks he said refuted it--nobody refuted it. They said they couldn't remember, but they didn't refute it. And one said that while she couldn't remember, she believed Dr. Ford. So Brett Kavanaugh, in the most generous capacity, simply doesn't have the ability to keep the facts straight on a pretty straightforward thing--big difference between refuting and not remembering--or he deliberately misrepresented the facts, in which case he lied.

Brett Kavanaugh said he first heard of the Ramirez allegations in the period since The New Yorker published the story, but we have had multiple reports that Brett Kavanaugh and his team were working to discredit Ramirez before The New Yorker story. Why did he say that he learned about it after, when he was working to discredit it before? Did he think this was clever, that he could kind of say: Well, I heard about the full story in The New Yorker after The New Yorker article was published. Was that what he was trying to imply--like maybe I can slip by on that one--because he didn't want people to know that he knew about it early and had worked to discredit her? Another whopper from Brett Kavanaugh.

Brett Kavanaugh said he did not travel in the same social circles as Dr. Ford, who went to Holton-Arms, but what was the truth? His classmates said they routinely socialized with the Holton-Arms girls. So much for that statement.

Brett Kavanaugh said he categorically did not receive documents stolen from Democratic Senators and their staffs by Manny Miranda in the early 2000s, but in one of those documents that didn't get censored, that slipped its way through to the Senate, what did we find out? It shows that he clearly received the stolen documents--another lie from Brett Kavanaugh.

Brett Kavanaugh said that Judge Pickering's nomination was not one he primarily handled. Well, let's just say that this is less than the full truth. Maybe if you emphasize the word ``primarily,'' you find some shred of accuracy, but it is certainly not a full and appropriate presentation because it turns out that he was involved in a number of critical aspects of the Pickering nomination.

Brett Kavanaugh said he did not see or hear anything about President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program before it was publicly reported,

but in some of those other documents that slipped through, we find out that he did know about them, and he emailed John Yoo about the warrantless wiretapping long before the program became public.

Brett Kavanaugh said the Bush administration did not consider ideology when selecting or vetting judges, but the truth is that the documents show that they did consider ideology.

Why did this man, Brett Kavanaugh, feel the need to misrepresent the truth time after time after time?

He implied that when it came to drinking, he didn't drink excessively and he did not get aggressive. Yet we have person after person after person saying that is exactly what happened.

He said the phrase ``Renate Alumnus'' in his yearbook was ``clumsily intended to show affection.'' Let me repeat that: ``clumsily intended to show affection.'' And he continued: ``and that she was one of us.'' Isn't it nice that he and his colleagues got together to pick out this one young lady and show in their yearbooks that they had affection for her, when everyone else involved said that is not what it was all about at all? It was about this group of men bragging about sexual conquests. It may not have actually occurred, but they were laughing over the prospect of disgracing this individual. What kind of a warped character goes out of his way to either brag about sexual conquests or to imply-- imply--a character that she did not have, to tear her down? But that is Brett Kavanaugh.

He went on to tell some real whoppers--that folks in his circle say the term ``ralphing'' refers to throwing up when drinking. He said: No, it refers to a sensitive stomach. They are all things that he had written.

``Boofing,'' what was that all about? He said that has to do with flatulence, but everyone around him says: No, that was a crude sexual activity that he was describing. That is what that word means. I will not give the details of it.

He said ``devil's triangle'' is a drinking game, when everyone else says: No, it wasn't a drinking game; it has another sexual connotation.

So he couldn't bring himself to be honest and say: I don't feel comfortable giving the definition of those in a public hearing because I am such a nice, sweet guy. But instead, he lied. Lying came so easy-- lie after lie after lie. As my colleague from South Carolina said: When a person lies once, you don't trust them after that. How would anyone, after breaking the truth, be believed in the future?

So we have the fact that his character is one of hurting and attacking others, of lying even to the U.S. Senate. Some 2,400 law professors note that his temperament, his animosity, and his partisanship make him unqualified to serve on the Court.

So what is this all about? Why are my colleagues across the aisle so intent on getting him confirmed? It has to do with his judicial philosophy and taking no risk that this seat is not filled with this judicial philosophy--this philosophy for the powerful over the people.

There have been some interesting aspects of this philosophy. One is that he believes that the President is above and beyond the law and should not or cannot be indicted or investigated while he is in office.

The Court may well have to make some rulings on how President Trump conducts himself. President Trump might just fire the special prosecutor. Is that within his power? The Court may have to decide.

The President may decide to pardon himself--something never done in U.S. history--given all the investigations into egregious conduct. Why did the President pick this individual, who has the most expansive view of Presidential power, to serve on the Court? Maybe he is trying to write himself a ``get out of jail free'' card. But if you can't find in the Constitution that the President is above and beyond the law--and I dare you to try; I dare anyone in this Chamber to find that in the Constitution, because it is not there--why are we putting a man on the Court who thinks it is, who is so comfortable twisting and torturing the words on the page to reach a predesired conclusion?

Yes, he was handpicked by the Federalist Society after Trump promised to appoint anti-Roe v. Wade judges who would strip away the constitutional right to a full range of reproductive services. It bothers me a lot--the idea of a judge who believes the government should be in the exam room, between a woman and her doctor. The government does not belong in an exam room, between a woman and her doctor on difficult medical life issues.

But in every decision--or virtually every decision--Kavanaugh finds a way to twist the circumstances in order to find for the powerful over the people. That is what this rush to jam this person onto the Court is. Does he believe the Court should take on gerrymandering, which is a huge blight on equal representation of the people? There is no sign that he does. We currently have a Court where the majority has not wanted to take on those issues, despite the fact they are the ones who are supposed to maintain the integrity of the Constitution.

Do we have any sign that he is upset or concerned about the tearing down of the Voting Rights Act, which this Chamber passed and the House passed and was law for decades but was torn down by the court? Rather than letting this Chamber or the House together decide to adjust that law, they decided to tear it down, saying: We don't have to worry about this anymore.

Is there any sign that Judge Kavanaugh cares about the desecration of the opportunity of citizens to vote in this country? No. An offense against the Constitution, yes. His concern, none.

What about the dark money that is the consequence of a huge concentration of wealth and influence--a huge concentration of influence because the Supreme Court opened the door with the case Citizens United? I found it kind of bizarrely humorous to hear colleagues across the aisle complaining about dark money, because they have been absolutely arguing that dark money should be permitted. When we had the idea of not having dark money and shining a light on it--it was called the DISCLOSE Act--every single Republican in this Chamber voted against it. Every single one voted against sunlight. Why is that? The Koch brothers essentially are the puppet masters of this Chamber. They invested hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money, thanks to Citizens United, in making sure that they had control of this Chamber. Did we hear Judge Kavanaugh have any interest in cleaning up this mess?

Thomas Jefferson was speaking to the core architecture of our Constitution, and he said that the mother principle--he referred to it as the ``mother principle''--was that there would be an equal voice among the citizens. Now, we know it was not the case that everyone had an equal voice. Communities of color did not have an equal voice and women did not have an equal voice, but what Jefferson was speaking to was the distribution of power across the electorate. He said only then will you have laws that reflect the will of the people.

But Citizens United is the opposite of that. It concentrates power. If you have an individual like the Koch brothers who can put $100 million into a campaign and you have an ordinary person who can put $100 into a campaign, then you are granting the Koch brothers 1 million times the influence. It is the exact opposite of Jefferson's ``equal voice'' principle.

Does Kavanaugh have the slightest understanding that the construction of the Constitution was to avoid the powerful--running the government by and for the powerful? The Constitution was a response to that very problem in Europe. There is no sign of that, no interest in that--in fact, quite the opposite.

He has bragged about being the most pure on the First Amendment. What does that mean? It means that he loves the weaponization of the First Amendment, twisted as an instrument to give the powerful victories over the people time and again--decisions against the environment, decisions against workers, decisions against consumers, decisions against reproductive rights. That is the rush to put this man, unqualified in every possible way, to serve on the Supreme Court--not having the temperament, not having the integrity. That is the rush--to secure and ensure that Jefferson's concept of equal voice is destroyed.

The most troubling is his conduct toward women. The fact that he collaborated with other boys to damage the

integrity of a young woman was troubling. Troubling beyond troubling is the story of his assault on Dr. Ford, but you might say: Wait. We don't have any corroborating information about that.

But Dr. Ford asked for her corroborating witnesses to come before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and how many of those were allowed to come before the committee? None. None. Zero. The committee was determined to make it just ``he said and she said,'' without any other information. That is treating an individual unfairly--absolutely unfairly--to cherry pick information and only to allow it to support one side of the argument and to deny her the ability to bring her corroborating people before the Judiciary Committee. Even in 1991, that was not done with Anita Hill. This body treated Dr. Ford worse.

Then the sham of the reopened FBI investigation, which was only opened because one courageous colleague from Arizona said: I am not going forward unless we really examine these situations that involved his assault on women. But the decision on how to conduct that FBI investigation wasn't up to this Chamber. It was up to the President, and the President does a scoping document and tells the FBI whom to talk to. Apparently, he consulted with the leadership, it is reported-- the Republican leadership of this Chamber--on whom to let the FBI consult with, and the result was not to consult or talk to or interview a single one of those eight people that Dr. Ford asked to be interviewed.

It would take some time, I guess, to know exactly who said what to whom. It was the President's decision. So the responsibility rests there. But in the interest of fairness, was there not one Member of this body in that conversation who could speak up and say: We want the facts not a whitewash. We want the facts.

Apparently, no one did. No one insisted on that. They said: No, we will go forward, even if we hide all of the facts.

Then, there was Debbie Ramirez, who shared her story of being assaulted, her story from the college dorm. In that case, she said there were 20 people that the FBI should talk to. Well, she wasn't invited to appear by the Judiciary Committee at all, and none of her 20 individuals whom she suggested should be talked to were invited. So she got no hearing--complete exclusion. Yet many Members of this Chamber attacked her. Do you think that is fair, attacking a person but not letting her come before this Chamber to give her story? Do you think that is fair? It is not fair.

Then we have the FBI receive instructions from the White House, after consultation with the Republican leadership, and the result is they didn't talk to one of her corroborating witnesses--not one. Why, in this day and age, where we have been in the middle of a ``me too'' conversation, can individuals in this Chamber on the right side of the aisle take such joy in being so unfair to a woman coming forward to share a story? It is even worse because each one knew, if they read the newspapers, that there was a lot of corroborating information.

Kenneth Appold was in the same suite in the dorm. He lived in the same suite--two bedrooms, sharing a common space--and he heard the story. He independently recalled many of the same details that Ramirez shared, including that a male student had encouraged Kavanaugh as he exposed himself. The classmate recalled that the party took place in a common room on the first floor.

I have known this all along, he said. It has been on my mind all these years when his name came up. It was a big deal.

How come his voice was not allowed to come before the Senate? Why did the FBI not talk to him and put it into the report? I will tell you why. It was so Senators could go down and review the report and say, oh, there is no new information.

Of course, there is no new information. It is because the President's team reportedly asked the Republicans' leadership what they wanted done, and apparently it didn't want any of the people who had corroborating information to be talked to or reported on. That is a betrayal of justice. That is a complete corruption of justice.

Mr. Appold is a professor now at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is deeply respected.

He said: ``It had been on my mind all of these years when his name,'' referring to Kavanaugh, ``came up. It was a big deal.'' The story stayed with him, he said, ``because it was disturbing and seemed outside the bounds of acceptable behavior even during heavy drinking at parties on campus.'' He said he had been shocked but not necessarily surprised because the social group to which Kavanaugh belonged often drank to excess. He recalled that Brett Kavanaugh was relatively shy until he drank, at which point he could become aggressive and even belligerent.

Now, this individual, Kenneth, may be quick to judge, and one may say, well, he just invented this memory, except here is the problem--he shared it with his roommate from his first year in graduate school. He told what had happened that year, so he has a lot of credibility. He is a professor at a theological seminary. He lived in the same suite. He heard the story about it shortly after it happened. It disturbed him so much that he shared it with his roommate from his first year in graduate school. That is a pretty persuasive substantiation of Debbie Ramirez's story.

There was another classmate, Richard Oh, an emergency room doctor in California. Soon after the party, he recalled overhearing a female student tearfully recount to another student an incident at the party involving a gag with--well, you know the story--followed by a male student exposing himself. Was Richard Oh invited to come before the Senate and tell his story? No, he was not--another transgression of justice. Did the FBI talk to him? No, because it had instructions not to talk to these individuals who had corroborating information.

This is situation in which, when a woman comes forward to share her story, she is treated with disdain by this institution. That is why these women didn't want to come forward. They thought they were mistreated. Unfortunately, it turned out to be right, and everyone supporting and voting for Kavanaugh shares the shame of the mistreatment of Dr. Ford and the mistreatment of Debbie Ramirez.

Across this land, it has caused women to relive the experiences they have gone through, with many of them having written to our offices. I encourage every Senator to read every one of the letters they are getting before voting late this afternoon on the question of whether Kavanaugh should serve on the Court. I read five letters earlier, but I have received a lot of letters. I am going to read more of them now.

This individual writes:

Please do what you can to block the Kavanaugh vote to the

Supreme Court. I was also a victim of sexual assault when I

was in graduate school in the early 1970s. I never pursued

that due to fear of consequences and feeling that this was my

fault.

``This has to stop,'' she concludes the letter.

Do you think that she got any encouragement from the completely unjust way this body treated these two women? No. It is exactly the classic setup and rigged response with which, so often, women have met when they have had the courage to come forward with their stories.

Another woman wrote:

I cried all the way to work, listening to Dr. Christine.

She is referring to Christine Blasey Ford.

If you can do anything as my Senator, do everything you can

to change the course of our national Court decision. There

isn't much more I can say as a mom, as a professional, as a

sexual assault victim who has never come forward. Please.

I appreciate her writing to me, and I share her concern and the belief that we should change the course we seem to be on at the moment because there is nothing like confirming this man without fairly examining the women who have been courageous enough to come forward. It is more insulting to all of these women who have gone through the experiences of being assaulted.

Another Oregonian wrote to me:

I am a survivor of sexual abuse. I was assaulted as a child

by someone my family trusted, then again by a stranger when I

was in college. In both instances, I remember the sinking

feeling I had afterward--the feeling that even if I spoke up,

I wouldn't be believed. I have long felt trapped inside my

own trauma, but over the past couple weeks, I have drawn such

strength from the sisterhood of survivors who have shown up,

protested, and shouted out their own survivor stories. I have

drawn strength from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's testimony. I

know that because she stepped forward, other survivors will

feel brave enough to speak up too. There is power and comfort

when women come together and speak our truth before the

world.

I say to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, I am sorry you were treated in this horrific manner by the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate. I am sorry you were treated so unfairly that not a single one of your corroborating witnesses was pulled before the committee. I feel terrible that those at the FBI did not talk to any of the people you asked them to talk to. It was a rigged system. You were set up. You were betrayed by the leadership of this body, but your courageous action in coming forth was not without results.

This woman, like thousands of others, is looking to you and saying thank you--thank you for the courage you had to share. Even though you were afraid that you would be treated unfairly, you came forward anyway, and that gives others courage to share their stories. Unfortunately, your fears, Dr. Ford, were justified. May it never be again the case. The only right thing now is for us not to send Brett Kavanaugh to the Court.

There was an article that appeared in an Oregon newspaper, and I am going to read the story but, like the newspaper, not share her name.

The newspaper story starts out this way:

The event happened 75 years ago when ``Dorothy''--[not her

real name]--watched the testimonies of Christine Blasey Ford

and Brett Kavanaugh on television, on Thursday, during

Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation hearings. The memories

came flooding back, and for the first time, she felt she must

tell her story--a story she never told her mother, a story

she didn't tell her husband either.

Dorothy's story is similar to the story Blasey told, on Thursday, in testimony that was part of the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Nominee Kavanaugh. Blasey accused Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her when they were both at a house party with a group of high school students. Kavanaugh denied the accusations, which are now the subject of an FBI investigation.

Dorothy, now 91, was a student at Reedsport High School in

the 1940s. One day, she was at a friend's house where several

kids her age were gathered. She said she was carried into a

bedroom by a popular football player, and before she knew

what was happening, she found herself pinned to a bed,

underneath the boy, who was struggling to get her pants off.

He was both a ``big man'' on campus and ``just big.'' She was

85 pounds.

In some ways, Dorothy's story is different from Blasey's in that she was carried and not pushed into the room. There was no one in the room except her and her attacker. Dorothy said she was able to push the boy enough that he hit his head on the bed's headboard, and with his weight off of her, she was able to yell for help, and her friend and her friend's brother rushed in and rescued her.

Dorothy doesn't want The News-Review to use her real name, so she is being referred to by a name that was given to many girls in the year she was born. She still has difficulty dealing with what happened to her in high school. For most of her life, she has refused to think about it. She has had plenty else to think about. She has raised kids, been widowed, remarried, widowed again, but it is still with her.

She said:

You try to bury all of that, and you do for a long time.

Then something like this news comes up, and it brings it all

back.

Dorothy started off talking about sexual harassment. It was later when she felt able to call what had happened to her by a more legally accurate name--attempted rape. Dorothy said she was naive when she was 16:

I was pretty shy and naive and unsure of myself, I guess. I

don't know if feeling ``inferior'' is the right word. I made

good grades, and I worked in the school office, but I was a

country kid.

She couldn't talk to her mother about sex.

If I tried to ask her anything about sex, she said, ``That

is dirty. We don't talk about that.'' She had a general idea,

enough to understand what her attacker was after. She didn't

know if he and other boys were drinking, but she was not. The

kids had been dancing before it happened. It never occurred

to her to report the incident. That just wasn't done in those

days, and she was ashamed--embarrassed--as if the whole

incident were her fault.

The story got around at school, though, and the other kids

were not sympathetic. You look, and people are kind of

giggling as you walk by. They had heard about it.

Now she wonders if the same boy went after other girls.

It is part of life, and it happens a lot more than people

realize. It probably happened to other girls in the same

school, she said. Many years after the event, Dorothy said

she saw her attacker. He was in a wheelchair, and she

couldn't help thinking, ``Great. He got what he deserved.''

Even though 75 years have passed, she has never forgotten what he did.

I can still shut my eyes and see that guy packing me over

his shoulder and throwing me on the bed and jumping on top of

me.

Watching Thursday's hearings made Dorothy furious. She believed Blasey, and she was horrified by the Senators who defended Kavanaugh.

They are so unfeeling, you know? I would hate to be their

wives. If they just sit there and take this guy's word for

it, I feel sorry for the wives of these guys who are so macho

that they can't see a woman's point of view.

The hearing motivated her to come forward.

I just felt now is the time to tell my story, and maybe

other women will come forward, and maybe they will do

something more about the way that women are disbelieved.

She said it was a relief to finally share her secret. ``I am about to get weepy,'' she said.

Do you think this woman, who is now in her nineties and went to Reedsport High School, takes any good feeling away from the Senate in the way the Senate treated Dr. Ford with regard to the fact that it did not allow anyone supporting her story to appear or with regard to the fact that leadership was consulted by the White House and that the result was a scoping document that did not allow the FBI to talk to the people who had supporting information?

Do you think she takes any good feelings away from the way this Senate treated Debbie Ramirez in its attacking her and disqualifying her without even letting her come and tell her story and not talking to the 20 people she suggested had corroborative information?

Do you think she takes anything good away from the horrific way these women were treated and the unfair way they were treated? I do not think so.

You must look at the way the Senate behaved and say that is supposed to be a distinguished body, that it is supposed to being an esteemed body. We should expect the best from the U.S. Senate and we got the worst.

Another woman wrote:

You must stop the confirmation of Kavanaugh, especially

after his angry, abusive testimony today that was full of

lies. I am a sexual assault survivor, and I am absolutely

full of despair this evening.

I am not the only one getting these letters. So, to my colleagues, I ask: Are you doing anything to address the anger about the way Dr. Ford was treated? Are you insisting that she get fair treatment before you vote to send Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court of the United States? Are you insisting those who can corroborate Debbie Ramirez's story, including a professor at the Princeton Theological Seminary, have the chance to tell their stories before you send Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court? Are you?

Another individual wrote:

Please, please, please vote no to elect Brett Kavanaugh to

the Supreme Court. As a victim of domestic violence, I am

full of fear for everyone who would be affected by the

decisions Kavanaugh would have the power to make.

This letter starts out:

Senator, I want to thank you for expressing your concerns

regarding the Kavanaugh issues. I am a survivor of rape by my

best friend's older brother at the age of 10. I also

survived many years of abuse by my ex-husband. While

watching the coverage of the Kavanaugh news, I have heard

Senators make very hurtful comments about the women who

have come forward. I was proud of my Senator for having

the courage to publicly announce that the way this has

been managed by the Trump administration is wrong.

I totally relate to what Dr. Ford describes as being held

down and not being able to breathe. The only word that

adequately describes this type of treatment is torture. I do

not know where my former best friend's brother is; however,

my ex-husband walks around with a religious cross around his

neck. He is a pillar of his church, has the admiration of our

daughter. I never told my

children, while I am left with years of nightmares and fear.

The Kavanaugh allegations in the news have triggered

memories I have tried to bury for decades.

She says:

Though, your comments have renewed my faith that other than

my older brother, there exists good men who want to support

women who live with the torment of sexual abuse.

I would love it if this letter said: I was afraid that the all-male majority of the Judiciary Committee would treat Dr. Ford unfairly. I was afraid but relieved when they heard her out. I was relieved when they insisted that those who could back up her story were allowed to testify. I was relieved and pleased they took her seriously enough that they insisted the FBI--they told the President the FBI has to talk to those folks for us to have any credibility. I would love for this letter to say that, but it doesn't say any of those things because this body, this leadership, let her down and let every woman across America who has been a victim of sexual violence down.

Another woman wrote and said:

Today's hearing was difficult yet important to watch. As a

victim of sexual assault myself, I applied your support

hearing Dr. Ford's accounts and believing in doing what is

right and just.

Wouldn't it be better if this letter could say: I applaud the Senate, the Senate leadership, and the President of the United States for believing in doing what is right and just. We didn't get letters like that, did we.

Another individual writes:

Today was an extremely difficult day watching the Kavanaugh

hearings. I was so amazed by the bravery Dr. Ford showed

throughout her testimony. Her experience was raw and

credible. As a young victim of sexual assault, I feel

emboldened because of Dr. Ford's testimony. Women need to be

heard and believed. We have to hold the Supreme Court to the

highest standards. Brett Kavanaugh is clearly not a candidate

for the Supreme Court.

Isn't that right, that we should ensure that we have the highest standards for those who serve on the Supreme Court?

All those district judges across the land writing their decisions, they get appealed to the circuit courts, and all those circuit court judges writing their opinions, they get appealed to the Supreme Court, to nine individuals. Isn't it important that we proceed to ensure that we ``hold the Supreme Court to the highest standards''? We will not do that if we confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Court.

We will be setting an abysmally low standard for integrity for all of the falsehoods he has told and an incredibly low standard for behavior. We saw the behavior and the partisanship. We didn't see judicial temperament and impartiality.

He violates basically every standard we set for someone to serve on the Supreme Court. Yet we are having a vote later today with an indication that he will be approved.

Here is another letter:

I am a sexual assault survivor. I watched today. The sex

crimes prosecutor looks like she had nailed Kavanaugh by his

own calendar. Dr. Ford testified that it was early evening

and casual. It appears the assault happened at the home that

Kavanaugh and his friends worked out. This is when one of the

majority Judiciary members took over and became angry

partisans.

That is all she writes, but I think what bothered a lot of people was that the majority chose to bring in a prosecutor--a prosecutor--to question Dr. Ford, as if Dr. Ford had committed a crime.

She didn't commit a crime, my friends. She is a brave woman who came forward to share her story, hoping she would be taken seriously and treated fairly, afraid she wouldn't, and it turned out her fears were justified. They hired a prosecutor to treat her like a criminal. Wow. That is insult to injury.

This letter is longer. It is the 16th story I am reading that I received from constituents back home.

Watching Dr. Ford's treatment in the Senate today, I am

having a hard time getting my own work done. Dr. Ford's

assault experience parallels my own in ways I have not

thought about in years. However, unlike Judge Kavanaugh, my

assailant was able to complete the assaults he set out to do

because we were not inebriated at the time he violated me. He

merely used his size to overpower me, outweighing me by 150

pounds.

Like Brett Kavanaugh, my assailant attended an all-boy's

Catholic school, attended a prestigious university, went on

to become an attorney. I have considered, because of the

types of clients he represents, bringing the multiple

assaults he perpetrated over the course of 2 weeks, while I

stayed with his family across the country from my own, to the

attention of the State bar where he practices or journalists

in the State where he defended Catholic priests accused of

abusing children.

Seeing now what Dr. Ford is being put through, knowing she

was driven from her home and threatened, is now being

assaulted by her colleagues, gives me pause.

My assailant isn't up for any prestigious promotions. He is

not on the short list for a Federal judicial position or

running for any public office. It has been 18 years, and the

statute of limitations in the State where this took place may

or may not have run out, depending on how the acts are

defined. If my assailant decides to follow through with his

goal to become a politician, my calculus may change. For now,

I need you to do what you can to shut this nomination down,

to show the world that you not only believe Dr. Ford but you

honor--honor--her testimony.

Your colleagues, your Republican colleagues, clearly

believe her; they just don't think it matters. Please, as a

survivor and as a constituent, I am begging you, make her

testimony matter.

Are we going to make her testimony matter? We are not going to make it better if we send Kavanaugh to a seat on the Supreme Court.

Her desire, her interest, her possibility of coming forward is cut short by the way she saw this Senate treat Dr. Ford. That is a very sad commentary on the injustice perpetrated by this body.

This is letter No. 17. I have more than 50 letters here. As you can start to hear, the themes of women being assaulted are very similar; women hearing in Dr. Ford's story their own experience, and they are asking the Senate to treat the women who have come forward with fairness and justice and are being deeply disturbed that they have not been treated with fairness or justice.

There is still time. There is still time until we vote and send Kavanaugh forward, if we vote no, as these women asked because an individual with this record does not belong on the Court. Then we will admire the courage of these individuals to come forward.

The next letter:

As a survivor of assault, it's important to me that the

nominee for one of the highest offices have an impeccable

record, which Kavanaugh has demonstrated he does not have,

both through his reactionary hearing and the accusations

against him from survivors. I implore you to be a voice of

reason in the chaos.

My first assault happened in 2011. I am so ashamed that the

only way my sister found out was because she found an STD

test I had received from Planned Parenthood and asked me

about it. I was 24. I had nightmares for months. It changed

everything.

My second assault happened in 2015. I was drunk and in an

unfamiliar part of town. An acquaintance offered to give me a

ride when I was leaving a bar and my phone died.

She goes on to describe the attack. She says:

I say this not for shock value, but to emphasize how

painful watching this hearing was and how unsurprised I will

be if Kavanaugh is confirmed.

Unsurprised because she doesn't expect men to treat women fairly who have been assaulted and have come forward. And everything that has happened in this Chamber confirms that.

The next letter notes:

As a survivor of sexual assault, this issue is of the

utmost importance. I rarely speak of these events and have

tears streaming down my face just writing this. I was unable

to report my assault for various reasons, including explicit

death threats, fear of exposure by the media, and threats by

several powerful men who had the ability to end my career

before it had even really begun. This situation hits so close

to home that it has been physically painful--physically

painful--for me to watch much of the coverage. I have been

unable to obtain justice for myself, and that is soul-

crushing. But what would be a greater travesty is to allow a

serial predator a lifetime appointment affecting the lives of

every single woman in America. Are we going to be part of a

greater travesty?

Letter No. 19:

As a constituent and a victim, I am writing to you to make

sure that you vote against Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation.

During his hearings, Kavanaugh misled the Judiciary Committee

under oath. He refused to say whether a sitting President

must obey a subpoena and refused to answer whether President

Trump could pardon himself or bribe someone with a pardon.

And now, Kavanaugh has been accused of sexual assault by

multiple women.

Kavanaugh's answers during his confirmation hearings add to

the evidence that Trump nominated him not to protect the

American people, not to protect the Constitution, but to

protect himself. It was only a few weeks ago that Trump's

former lawyer incriminated him in two felonies. It's becoming

inevitable that a Trump case will reach the Supreme Court,

either over his role in crimes to win the White House or a

subpoena to answer questions from the special counsel.

We already know that Kavanaugh believes sitting presidents

should not be under Federal prosecution or even

investigation. Now, under oath, Kavanaugh isn't even

pretending to be an impartial justice. That is exactly why

Trump nominated Kavanaugh--to be his get-out-of-jail-free

card.

Letter No. 20 begins:

As a rape victim myself, I am livid that this man is even

being considered for a high position. Brett Kavanaugh's views

are extreme. His belligerent behavior during the hearing

shows that he should not sit on the highest court in the

country. I urge you to reject that radical choice of a

justice who would put our basic rights at risk. Use your

constitutional authority of advice and consent to ensure that

the President cannot place unfit extremists in positions of

power that can affect us for decades.

Serving for life on the highest court, justices have the

solemn responsibility to be fair, to be evenhanded, to uphold

the sanctity of our laws and our Constitution, and to keep

faith with the letter and the spirit of the Nation's core,

public health, environmental, civil rights, and labor laws.

His record rejects these principles. Please do all in your

power to stop Brett Kavanaugh's nomination.

Letter after letter reminds us that the Supreme Court is so important. We should only send individuals to serve on that Bench who are of unimpeachable character.

Letter No. 21:

I am deeply concerned about Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to

the Supreme Court after hearing Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's

story. There is no need to wait to publicly say that you

believe Dr. Ford. She has generously offered more than enough

information for us to fiercely support her.

I, too, am a victim of sexual assault. When I was 21, my

boss at the time raped me, leaving me with a lifelong

disease, and it never was reported. I had no support. I was

embarrassed and humiliated and wanted to just forget about

it. Looking back, I wish I would have tried to report him. I

was a single mother with a 2-year-old child and my 12-year-

old sister present when the assault occurred in the middle of

the night as they slept.

This happened to me in 1974. I am now a 66-year-old woman

who has had relationship problems her whole life and self-

esteem and anxiety and sexual dysfunction ever since.

A lifetime impact from sexual assault.

Each of these women wants us to take seriously the experiences that were shared, and to take it seriously means we would look into it with fairness and credibility, but we didn't. The Senate didn't.

Letter No. 22:

It would be beyond unethical to continue with Kavanaugh's

nomination in the wake of Dr. Blasey's story. I am counting

on you. Signed, a MeToo survivor.

Letter No. 23:

As a victim of sexual assault during my military service,

I, too, told next to no one. Why? I wasn't about to subject

myself to being treated the way these courageous women who

have spoken up are being treated. I am counting on you. Thank

you.

We hear this time and again. Women say they didn't speak up because they thought they would be treated unfairly--unfairly--just the way the Senate treated the women who came forward and shared their stories about Brett Kavanaugh. Isn't that a sorry legacy for this body? Isn't that a shameful result, that women say they didn't speak up because they thought they would be treated unfairly, just like the Senate is now unfairly treating Dr. Ford and Debbie Ramirez? Wouldn't it be a beautiful thing to have done it differently, to have proceeded to say: Your story matters, so we will talk to those you suggested have corroborating information. We will report what information there is for the consideration of the Senate. We do appreciate that you have shared your experience, and we will look into it.

Wouldn't that have been a very different message to send, an example to send for everyone across this country--for companies when an employee reports an assault, for places of worship when a parishioner reports an assault, for schools, universities, when a student reports an assault?

Wouldn't it have been great to set an example--a high example of how to treat an individual fairly? But we did the opposite. We showed exactly the type of treatment that these women fear--a rigged, unfair, unconcerned response. But there is time to remedy that by not voting to confirm.

One of the reasons I am reading these letters is that many of the women who wrote said they were writing to try to make a difference. My team called and talked to a number of them, and they encouraged their letters to be used. They want to be heard. They want to be honored with our intention that we care about the experiences they have suffered, that we take them seriously. They want us to think about what we have done and take Dr. Ford and Debbie Ramirez seriously. That hasn't happened, but there is still time by not confirming Brett Kavanaugh.

In this letter, the individual says:

How you vote on Brett Kavanaugh's nomination is one of the

most crucial votes you will cast. Please vote no.

Prior to hearing this round of hearings, I was concerned

about his ability to be truthful. Now, as a survivor, I am

fearful for the entire female population. I urge you to vote

no for all of those reasons.

Letter No. 25:

I believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. I do not believe a man

who could have stifled a frightened woman's screams while he

felt entitled to put his hands on her body without her

permission. I do not believe such a person is fit for one of

the highest courts in our country. She took a lie detector

test. He did not. She called for an FBI investigation. He did

not. She was calm and collected. He was not.

As a sexual assault survivor and your constituent, I

implore you to stand with women.

Letter No. 26:

Thank you for fighting. I was a victim of sexual assault at

age 12. I am now 71. I remember it vividly. It has affected

my whole life. If Kavanaugh is confirmed, we will put a

horrible man on our highest court.

Thank you for highlighting the serious deficiencies in the process of President Trump's nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, to the Supreme Court.

Letter No. 27:

I am heartened by your efforts and like-minded Members of

Congress who have joined the 21st century, many whose eyes,

ears, hearts, and minds have witnessed the scourge of sexual

misconduct. I am a 58-year-old Native American, native

Oregonian. I grew up on a Catholic Indian mission with both

my parents and seven brothers and sisters. Later in life, I

recalled through discussions with my younger sister that my

older brothers had most likely sexually abused me when I was

a very young girl, less than 7 years old. I never reported it

because I didn't recall it until I was in my 40s. My parents

were alive and it would have destroyed them.

I am a sexual assault survivor who never told my best

friend in high school when one rape occurred.

She proceeds to share information about several other assaults when she was serving in the Army, and she says that each time, she didn't report it.

All of these incidents left me fearful, feeling vulnerable,

psychologically damaged, PTSD, emotional trauma, physical

trauma, and other problems too incalculable to quantify.

I think these topics are often not discussed. Women in our own lives may have had experiences they have never shared with us, thinking that they might be blamed, feeling that they are ashamed, considering that they might not be believed, anticipating that they might expect that we would feel they should somehow have prevented it or somehow invited it. All of these conflicts--they sense they will not be treated with respect and dignity as the victims they are. Let's treat them with respect and dignity when they bring forward their stories.

Dear Senator Merkley: I have never taken the time to write

a Senator. With Trump as President, or having Trump as

President has caused depression and anxiety, but I have

gritted my teeth, battened down the hatches, and tried to

weather the storm. However, this saga with Kavanaugh has

mobilized me to speak out and protest a person of his moral

ineptitude.

I am a victim of sexual assault. I am sure you're hearing

the outpouring of messages like mine from hundreds of women.

I am so angry and so bitter about the current environment

that promotes racism, sexism. The things I have seen voted in

make me despair.

Rather than the Senate behave in a way that makes women despair, what if we behaved in a way that inspired, set an example, had people say: We didn't think you would rise to the challenge because so often we have seen mistreatment when they bring forward their stories, but you shocked us because you took it seriously and you treated these women fairly. Wouldn't that be a beautiful story rather than the reality of where we are right now?

Letter No. 29:

There are a number of viable options for this Supreme Court

seat--individuals not accused of any crimes--and regardless

of innocence or guilt, Kavanaugh has shown himself to be

unqualified to remain impartial as a judge. Furthermore, the

backlash of there being any question of guilt regarding rape

accusations is too great for him to successfully fulfill the

duties of that position and will cause a division between

voters that will likely never be healed.

Speaking as both a concerned voter and rape survivor, there

is no legitimate reason that we cannot find another candidate

for this job. If he is appointed despite these allegations,

it will be all but impossible for a rape survivor to ever

feel safe in the U.S. again. How could we if an accused

rapist is presiding as a member of the highest court in the

country?

She makes a point. There are many other people who can be considered to be brought forward. Why this individual who demonstrated such partisanship? Why this individual who bent and, yes, broke the truth many times before the committee? Why this individual who wrote offensive, mocking, accusing, disgracing things, attacking a woman in his yearbook? Why this individual who chose to join a fraternity with a reputation for assaulting women? Why this individual who chose to join a secret society with a similar reputation? Why this individual about whom credible women have come forward and shared their stories of assault? And why this individual when we had the full opportunity to have considered the corroborating information from 28 individuals who they asked that we talk to and we didn't?

There is still time to reject this nomination and somehow restore the tarnished reputation that is the product of the behavior of this body during this nomination process.

Letter No. 30:

I am 66 years old, nearly 67. I can tell you exactly what

occurred when I was a victim of sexual assault and attempted

rape at age 16. It was burned into my memory and will forever

be a part of me.

I continue to be shaken to the core that anyone would

explain such behavior as normal, part of young men growing

up. It is unconscionable, unacceptable, and must no longer be

ignored.

Letter No. 31:

Dear Senator Merkley, I am reaching out to you as a

survivor of teenage rape. Like so many other survivors, I

have been following the events surrounding Judge Kavanaugh's

nomination with so much emotion that I cannot really begin to

express it. I do not believe that I need to ask you to say no

when it comes to a floor vote, but I want you to add my voice

to the many who are speaking out in the hope that the country

will listen.

Sexual assault affects millions of girls, boys, women, and

men. Too many of us live our lives in shame and silence,

disbelieved if not outright blamed.

Nearly 30 years have passed since a fellow student in my

small town high school took my innocence, to then proceed to

publicly shame me. People believed him, not me.

This has to stop. People need to realize that we may forget

some details, but we will never, never forget what happened.

And when we know the perpetrator, we will never forget his

name. He may grow old. His appearance may change. But his

name will remain etched in our brains forever.

She goes on to say:

Putting Kavanaugh on the court means telling all of us, the

countless millions, that we do not matter.

She closes by saying:

We matter. I matter.

Yes, you do. And when you say that you are adding your voice to the many who are speaking out in the hope that the country will listen, I commend you. I commend you for being brave enough to share your story and to ask those in this Chamber to listen. But so far, they have not listened because listening would mean treating with respect and dignity the women coming forward. Listening would mean giving these women the opportunity not just to present their case, their experience, but to have those who can corroborate their information come before the Judiciary Committee and share their stories. Listening would mean insisting that the FBI actually talk to the corroborators rather than not talk to the corroborators.

So you have not been listened to, I am sorry to report, but there is still time for someone--for several people--to say: We have reflected on this situation and realize how unfair and unjust we have been, how much we add to the trauma of millions of women by not listening to the women who have come forward, not taking them seriously, and rigging the system, as they feared would happen.

This individual writes:

I have a voice even if those screams were stifled inside of

me so long ago. Today that voice says that Kavanaugh is not

fit to be a member of the Supreme Court.

Beyond the details of what transpired when he was a

teenager, his atrocious display during Thursday's hearing

should disqualify him outright. Integrity, level-headedness,

respect for the rule of law, and lack of partisan bias should

be fundamental requirements of any justice.

Kavanaugh did not display any of those traits. His

confirmation would stain the Senate and the judiciary for

years to come if not permanently.

I will conclude by saying that Dr. Ford's incredible

courage has helped me more than any therapy session. She

spoke. In speaking her truth to power, she spoke for all of

us.

I have shed so many tears watching and following these

proceedings, but finally feel like I can stand tall, that I

do not need to hide or live in shame. Her story is, in so

many ways, my story. The smart girl who loved math and

somehow made it through Stanford, completed a PhD, and

embarked in a career in research despite the trauma that

followed. . . .

All too often we hide behind a smile and mask of strength

so that people do not see that inside we cannot stop shaking.

Lawmakers would be well advised to not underestimate the

strength of our power when we raise our heads, shed our shame

and reclaim our voices. We may tremble, but we will speak. We

will be heard. We will NOT be dismissed.

Letter No. 32:

I am a victim of sexual abuse as a child, rape as a young

adult, and sexual harassment during my professional career. I

am also a successful practicing Child/Adolescent/Adult

psychiatrist, with 20+ years of experience.

Since Ms. Ford's testimony, on Friday I saw two female

walk-in patients, one of whom revealed to me her own sexual

assault, which occurred around the time of Ms. Ford's. She

confessed this is the first time she has told anyone about

this. The other woman I saw that day told a similar story.

From the press I understand crisis lines lit up all over our

nation, doubling their traffic in some cases.

I write because I am worried. The press reports that only

two of the three women making complaints against Mr.

Kavanaugh will be interviewed by the FBI. . . .

I am concerned that only two of the three alleged victims .

. . will be heard. To establish a pattern . . . the FBI must

include as many credible victims and witnesses as possible .

. . particularly given the timelines and deadlines they are

up against.

Statistics on rape in the United States are shockingly

high, higher even than many less developed countries.

She was concerned the FBI would not be able to speak and interview those who could corroborate the experiences. It turned out far worse than she could ever have imagined: 0 for 28--0 out of 28. Not, well, we talked to 5 out of 28. Not we talked to 8 out of 28. The FBI was 0 out of 28, not because the FBI would choose to do that but because they could only talk to people whom they were allowed to talk to by the President's scoping instructions. Those instructions were not to talk to anyone who had credible supporting information. That is such a violation of fairness, of due process, of justice.

There is that beautiful set of words carved into the front of the Supreme Court: ``Equal justice under law.'' Wouldn't anyone who had the right character to serve there have insisted--insisted--that these women get fair treatment? But we didn't hear Judge Kavanaugh insisting. He didn't even want an FBI investigation. He certainly didn't insist on there being one that actually talked to the people who had information. If your conscience is clean, if your life experience is clear, you don't fear an investigation.

This letter goes on:

Furthermore, currently our Congress and Senate do not

reflect the 50.5% of Americans who are female. In fact, in

2017 US female representation by gender in Congress and the

Senate was far lower in the US than Germany, France, United

Kingdom, Sweden, Belgium, Netherlands and Spain.

She cites the source as the Inter-Parliamentary Union Parline Database on National Parliaments.

As a result we rely on men to understand and act on this

predominantly female problem. American women depend on your

gallantry to ensure our government does right by us.

I plead with you to persuade our leaders to do the right

thing. Think of your mother, your wife, your daughter and the

women you love. Show us we are valued. As you make your phone

calls know American women watch with fear and hope. Don't let

us down.

Did we treat Dr. Ford and Debbie Ramirez in the way we would want our mother, our wife, our daughter, or the women we love to be treated? No, we

did not. She wrote asking for us to not let her down, and we have let her down. There is only one appropriate thing to do, and that is not to send this man who has bent and broken the truth many times before the U.S. Senate to the Supreme Court, not to send this man who has credible accusations of sexual assault that we were unwilling to investigate to the Court.

The letter next notes:

As a sexual assault survivor it's essential to me that no

person who perpetuates such crimes ever sits in a position of

power ever again.

That kind of sums it up.

This is letter No. 34. She says:

I am a 52 year old proud Oregonian woman. . . . I too am a

victim and survivor of sexual abuse, and sadly a member of

the ``Me too'' club. Should you confirm Judge Kavanaugh, you

will be disrespecting every Me Too victim in America, young

or old.

Victims of abuse are across the spectrum, and no doubt

probably also in your families. Judge Kavanaugh is a nominee

for a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, an

interviewee. HE IS NOT A VICTIM. . . .

I did find it, by the way, so disturbing to hear colleagues treat the women who come forward as the criminals and treat the nominee as the victim. That is exactly the type of inversion that women fear. That is exactly the type of reversal that has women deciding that they will never get a fair hearing, and it is exactly what happened right here in the U.S. Senate.

The letter continues:

Mrs. Ford was very brave in her testimony. . . .

All of you on the Judiciary Committee--WAKE UP! It is 2018,

not 1991 with Clarence Thomas, we now acknowledge and believe

victims that come forward to tell their stories, aka HER-

stories.

We will never forget your actions in this confirmation

process.

Well, the writer is saying it is 2018, not 1991, and yet we treated Dr. Ford and Debbie Ramirez worse--worse than we treated Anita Hill in 1991.

Letter No. 35 is a letter from Oregon constituents writing in to share their anger, their angst, their concern, their desire that women coming forward be treated fairly, their desire that we treat them seriously enough to actually talk to corroborating witnesses. Yet, unfortunately, we did not.

In letter No. 35, the woman writes:

I was also a victim of sexual assault when I was in

graduate school. I never pursued that due to fear of

consequences and feeling that this was my fault. This has to

stop.

Letter No. 36:

Senator Merkley, I write to you today to urge you to vote

no on the Kavanaugh nomination. The time has come for women

to have a say in this society that men will listen to.

I am a victim of sexual abuse. My case happened when I was

22.

I never told anyone about my experience until I remarried

39 years ago.

I have an 8-year-old granddaughter, and I pray that she

will not ever have to battle someone to save herself.

I am now 75, and I remember the exact time and place this

incident occurred. One never forgets.

Letter No. 37:

I am myself a sexual assault survivor.

I listened to the testimony of Dr. Blasey Ford . . . last

Thursday. It was clear to me that her testimony was credible.

The likelihood that she may not accurately recall the

identity of her assailant, who was known to her before the

assault, is extremely improbable. Trust me. It is not the

sort of detail that an assault victim forgets.

The likelihood, on the other hand, that Brett Kavanaugh may

have failed to remember assaulting a . . . woman when he was

inebriated is quite probable. Not only does excessive alcohol

consumption dull the memory, but males who think so little of

women that they would thus assault them are likely to dismiss

the experience from memory as inconsequential.

I implore you to continue to work tirelessly to encourage

your colleagues to vote no on Kavanaugh's confirmation. . . .

His integrity and character are in serious question, and he

showed a total lack of judicial temperament. . . . I urge you

to stand up.

I know these letters didn't just go to individuals on this side of the aisle. So I ask my colleagues, have you read the letters that you have received that have asked you to take seriously the experiences shared by Dr. Ford and by Debbie Ramirez? Have you taken them seriously? Did you insist that their corroborating witnesses be interviewed? The President's team says it consulted with the Senate's leadership on how the FBI investigation should be done. We now know that, in the way it was done, none of the 28 corroborating witnesses were talked to--none. Did you take seriously the women in your home States who wrote to you the way the women in my home State wrote to me?

Letter No. 38:

If the FBI's investigation was limited to Ford's and

Ramirez' allegations and excludes the third credible

allegation of Avenatti's client, it is wrong to cherry pick

credibility. I emphatically state that this third allegation

reflects my personal experience. I do not divulge this

lightly. It happened to me when I was 14. It was both legally

and morally wrong, and I never reported it.

This was in 1971 in Southern California. It was a recurrent

event before I came to learn that others were victimized in

the same manner--rendered unconscious in order to be engaged

without consent. It seems incredible that I would end up

attending other gatherings where individuals participating in

such activities would also be, but, in fact, this is my

experience as well.

One of my sisters--9 years younger--recounted that this

culture existed during her high school years in a party

environment in Northern California. In these environments,

there are certain coalitions of males who covertly foster

these environments, and the victim is typically isolated in

some back room or even some hotel room.

Please maintain my anonymity, but take seriously the

consideration of my deeply personal account. There are many

qualified jurists who possess the appropriate qualities to

sit on the highest Court of America.

That was letter 38. Yet there are so many more letters pouring into my office, reading: Take our experiences seriously. Take seriously the voices of Dr. Ford and Debbie Ramirez. This institution has failed them.

I ask you, are you comfortable voting for this nomination when this body did not hear from the individuals who had corroborating information and you did not invite them to testify? Even that was done in 1991. Are you comfortable voting to support this nomination when the FBI investigation was limited by a scoping document that excluded having interviews with any of the 28 people, put forward by the 2 victims, who had information to support them? Are you comfortable with that? You shouldn't be. You shouldn't be comfortable voting for a nominee who is under a shadow of allegations that we didn't even bother to explore.

It confirms everything that women across this country fear--that when they come forward and share their stories, they will not be taken seriously, that the system will be rigged, and that they will be blamed. Everything they saw in the way the Senate handled this situation was shameful and embarrassing and beneath the dignity of this body that should have given a stellar example of how to respect and investigate, but it did not.

My colleague from New York has arrived to share her thoughts. I thank her for her strong and fierce defense of women across this country who have suffered so much and been silent so often in fear they will be disrespected as the two women who came forward, Debbie Ramirez and Dr. Ford, feared they would be disrespected. This body confirmed every fear they had.

Let's not vote to put on the Supreme Court of the United States an individual who bent and broke the truth many times before the committee; an individual with a record--even, as we know, from his high school and college years--of abusing women; an individual of arrogance and anger; an individual with partisan sentiments; an individual who thinks the President is beyond the law; an individual who finds, time after time, for the powerful over the people. That is not the person who should be confirmed to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

I thank the Presiding Officer.

Mr. President, moments ago, I was outside at a rally on the lawn of the Capitol, looking at the Supreme Court of the United States of America. When you look at that beautiful building, you see the phrase ``equal justice under law'' above the big, beautiful doors of entry--equal justice under law. That is the concept behind the Supreme Court. Every other court can make decisions, but they can be appealed--the final determination, balancing the parts of the Constitution against each other, understanding and exercising the fundamental vision contained in this beautiful ``We the People'' document. That is what those nine Justices are all about.

For an individual to become a Justice, it takes two steps. The first is, it is considered by the President as to whom to nominate. Having nominated, it comes over to the Senate. This is the confirmation process.

The Founders, when they wrote the Constitution, wrestled with, how do you appoint individuals to these key positions? They said: Well, we could give the power to the assembly, so that would be a check on the executive or a check on the judiciary getting out of control. But they worried that Senators might trade favors: You put my friend in this position; I will put your friend in that position.

They said that the nominating power needed to rest with one individual--that being, of course, the President of the United States of America.

Then they said: What happens if a President goes off track? Alexander Hamilton spoke to this and called it favoritism--favoritism of a variety of types. What if the President goes off track and starts nominating friends when they are qualified for particular positions? What if he only nominates people from his home State, ignoring the qualities of many people who might be better qualified? What if there comes a situation where perhaps favors are done for the President in exchange for a position? The Founders said that there needs to be a check; that is, the Senate confirmation process. It is a pretty good design. I can't think of any one better.

Essentially, the confirmation process is like a job interview: Is this individual fit to serve in the executive branch? Is this person fit to be a judge? Is this person fit to be a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America? That term, ``fit,'' is the term that Alexander Hamilton used when he was writing about the fundamental goal of the Founders to decide if an individual by experience and character was fit or unfit.

That is our job here. Throughout our history, it is a clear separation of powers. The Senate cannot intervene in terms of whom the President nominates, and the President cannot intervene in terms of the review process of that nominee.

Now we have something that has happened in an extraordinary fashion. It has never happened in the United States before, as far as we are aware; that is, the President of the United States, President Trump, has violated that separation of powers, and he has done so in three fundamental ways.

After nominating, he did not leave the Senate to review the record. He instead had his team call up Senators who lead the Judiciary Committee and say: Don't let the Senate get their hands on any of the records for the 3 years in which the nominee served as Staff Secretary.

That is a direct intervention, a violation of the separation of powers. When I say ``he,'' I am referring to his team. That intervention was unacceptable.

Then the Senate requested the records for the time he served on the White House Counsel. In this case, the President assigned an individual and gave him a stamp labeled ``Presidential

privilege,'' and that individual proceeded to stamp not 10 pages of documents, not 100, not 1,000, not 10,000, but 100,000 pages of relevant information were stamped ``Presidential privilege'' and were not delivered to the Senate. The President of the United States, instead of responding to the Senate's request for records, proceeded to exercise what he referred to as Presidential privilege or what we know to be Executive privilege and prevented the Senate from getting those documents.

Why did that happen? We got some of the documents that made it through that censorship process but not all of them. From the documents we did receive, we found some information. We found out that when he served, he had been very involved in several nominations, discussions on nominations, even though he had indicated he had not played much of a role. We found out that he was involved in the conversation on torture, even though he had said he had not been involved. We found out that he had directly received documents stolen from the Democrats, even though he said he had not received those documents. That is just in the documents received. What is in the 100,000 documents the President marked ``Presidential privilege'' so we could not get them? What is being hidden in those documents?

This violation of separation of powers--a violation that has never occurred in this manner to this degree, to this extent or anything close to it as far as any researcher has been able to ascertain--is unacceptable. The Senate must stand up for its right to be able to review the record of nominees.

Sure, some of my colleagues are pretty happy that these documents got blocked because they don't want to know what is in them because they have already made up their minds. But reverse the situation. Consider that maybe a different President is in place, proposing a judge of a different judicial philosophy.

Do we really want to compromise the fundamental rights of the Senate, their responsibilities of the Senate of advice and consent? We do not. It is wrong. Each of us, every one of us, took an oath of office to uphold the Constitution. Now, that Constitution gives each of us, every one of us, the responsibility to review the record of nominees and decide if they are fit or unfit, and none of us can do that if we don't have those records.

So let's stand up together and tell the President to deliver those documents. Well, now, you might ask: Isn't there some justification for this Presidential privilege? Consider this: These are records that occurred under President Bush, but it is not President Bush asserting privilege, it is President Trump. How could his--that is, President Trump's--conversations be compromised by records from a previous administration? Doesn't this sound suspicious?

The only reason anyone can think of is not that they compromise confidential information about the Trump administration but that simply they have information that would not look good in regard to our review of Judge Kavanaugh's record.

So when you have this situation, this abuse of power, we sometimes turn to the courts to say stop that abuse, and that is what I have done. I filed suit and said: Stop this abuse of power by the President stepping in and blocking the Senate from seeing those 100,000 documents, for which no justification has been provided.

It isn't that the President said: Well, on this page there is this type of sensitive information and that is protected because it affects my administration. No, no justification. So that alone tells you this Senate should never confirm this individual because we have not had the opportunity to review his record. The President is hiding these documents. He does not want us to see them because it probably has a lot of information unbecoming to this nominee. You don't hear the nominee saying: No. Deliver the records. I want the Senate to know everything about me. No, the nominee is not interested in us being able to actually see his judicial views or his character in that context. So this is one reason he should be rejected.

How about this. Should anyone serve on the Supreme Court, that beautiful place where we consider equal justice under the law, who has repeatedly lied to the U.S. Senate during his confirmation hearings? He lied in 2006 time after time. My colleagues who served in 2006--I did not--have pointed this out in detail. He lied on key issues, key issues related to the documents I was referring to.

Then we had his performance in the Senate just last week where he proceeded to tell all kinds of whoppers. The press has laid them out. Some articles talk about 20-plus whoppers he has told, and by ``whoppers,'' I mean lies. I mean deceptions. I mean inaccuracies. I mean things he knew not to be true. That is unacceptable, to put any individual on the Court who cannot be truthful when questioned before Congress.

Then we have the fact that he has this record of engaging in behavior abusive to women. Now, it took a lot of courage for Dr. Ford to come forward and tell her experiences in high school, and it took a lot of courage for Debbie Ramirez to come forward and talk about her experiences in her freshman year. She shared how Mr. Kavanaugh--Judge Kavanaugh--had directly engaged in massively inappropriate sexual behavior.

When women come forward to share these experiences, we need to treat them with respect; we need to treat them with dignity; we need to hear them; we need to understand their pain, but what did the Senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee majority do? They hired a prosecutor in order to treat her as a criminal. Yes, the 11 Republican men hired a prosecutor to treat Dr. Ford as a criminal when she appeared before the committee.

Now, she asked for an FBI investigation. The committee didn't want to give it to her. The leadership of the committee didn't want to give it to her, and I praise my colleague from Arizona who said it is so important to investigate the credibility of her story, to talk to those who have additional information. She asked for that. She invited that. She wanted that.

She provided a list of eight individuals whom, if you want to corroborate her story, these are the people you should talk to.

So the President, at the request of my good friend from Arizona, said: Yes, we will reopen the background investigation, the FBI investigation, but the President produced a scoping document that says whom the FBI can talk to. So of those eight women, those eight women who are on Dr. Ford's list, you would expect, if the goal was to explore her experience as she presented it, the FBI would be authorized by the President to speak to all eight. To my colleagues, have you paid attention to how many individuals the FBI was allowed by President Trump to talk to who were on that list--Dr. Ford's list? The answer is zero.

So any colleague in this Chamber who says that was fair treatment of Dr. Ford I will contend is absolutely wrong because Dr. Ford presented individuals who had relevant information, and the President's scoping document prevented the FBI from talking to them.

Now let's talk about Debbie Ramirez. She is there during Judge Kavanaugh's freshman year at Yale, in the dorm, and he behaves in a totally inappropriate manner, according to the information she relayed about excessive drinking, followed by this individual, this nominee, exposing himself to her and laughing about it.

She provided a list of 20 individuals who have corroborating information about that experience--20. So, of course, if the FBI was going to reopen the background investigation and it was going to be an investigation with any form of integrity, any form of legitimacy, any form of fairness, the FBI would be allowed to talk to those 20 people.

How many of those 20 people did the President, in his scoping document, allow the FBI to talk to? None. Zero. Not a single one. That, again, is not fairness to the individual who came forward with her experience.

Now, why is it that the President didn't want the FBI to actually talk to these individuals? Well, let's discuss one of them. One of them lived in the suite, lived right there in the same cluster of bedrooms with a common area as did Mr. Kavanaugh that freshman year, and he heard about this story in real time. He heard about it and he remembered it and he thought it was outrageous that Mr. Kavanaugh had behaved in this fashion.

Now, he remembered it so clearly that when he was in a discussion with his roommate in his first year in graduate school, he shared that story with his roommate years and years and years before Kavanaugh was ever nominated to a judicial position. So here you have a suitemate who heard the story of what was done by Mr. Kavanaugh to Debbie Ramirez, who relayed that story to another student in his first year of graduate school and who went to the FBI and said: Come and talk to me because I can tell you she is telling the truth. I may not have witnessed it, but I heard about it after it happened, and I am not making it up now because I told somebody about it, and they are willing to come forward and talk to you.

So it goes to the FBI. Could the FBI talk to him? No, they couldn't because the President of the United States prohibited the FBI from talking to anyone who had real information about the two experiences those two women brought forward. That is just beyond wrong.

Think about how much worse this body is treating these two women than the Senate treated Anita Hill in 1991. Think about that comparison. You would think in the nearly three decades since we would have improved, 27 years--but have we?

With Anita Hill, the President immediately reopened the FBI investigation of his own volition, wanting to get a full background check of the issue. The committee held hearings over multiple days, had multiple people come forward who had corroborating information. They heard them out.

How many of those 28 individuals have been given an opportunity to come before the Judiciary Committee to share their experience? Not a one. The leadership of the Judiciary Committee has blocked all of them--has not invited one of them to share their story. The President blocked the FBI from talking to them. The leadership at Judiciary blocked the Judiciary Committee of this body from hearing them out.

This is perhaps the worst example of injustice we could envision in this body, and I would like to call it an esteemed body, but how can I call it that when my colleagues are treating these women in such a horrific fashion?

Should an individual serve on the Supreme Court based on this job interview that we are conducting? Would you hire this individual into your company, into a position of trust, after the testimony of these two women? Wouldn't you say: If I am even giving a thought to hiring the individual, I will check out these stories, not block these women from being able to have the corroborating information shared with the Senate, not block the FBI from being able to talk to them? No. This is a failure. We cannot allow this to stand. We have a responsibility, particularly more with the Supreme Court than any other organization, to exercise our advice and consent through a responsible process, a process of integrity, of fairness, of decency, of transparency, none of which is happening at this point.

So we have deep differences over this man's judicial philosophy, but I know that if he is rejected, then the President will propose someone of a similar judicial philosophy. So my colleagues who support that philosophy can be assured they will have a chance to put another person in who hasn't lied to the Senate, another person who doesn't have a record of abuse toward women.

I heard some interviews this evening of some of my colleagues saying things like: Oh, it is so horrific that these women are trashing his reputation.

Are you really telling me that for a woman to share a horrific experience from her life, who is willing to have the FBI investigate it and who provides people who have corroborating information, you are calling that an attack? You are calling that person the wrong person? How dare they come forward with their story, you are saying. That is just wrong. That is so completely wrong to treat women in that fashion.

So to my colleagues who want somebody of a similar judicial perspective, you will have a chance to have that person, but you will do incredible harm to this institution if this man, after this record, is put onto the Court, and that is why he needs to be rejected.

That is why the President should withdraw him. That is why my Republican colleagues should call up the President and say: Withdraw this nominee and send us another.

I happen to disagree with his judicial philosophy as well. We are in a battle in this country between the ``we the people'' vision of the Constitution, as it was written, and a rewrite done by a group of lawyers who want to have government not by and for the people but by and for the powerful: Don't worry about those consumers. Let the company run over the top of them. Don't worry about those healthcare opportunities. Snatch them away. Don't worry about those environmental laws. Knock them down.

It is government by and for the powerful. That is Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh has gone through decades of a process designed to prepare him to execute that philosophy--government by and for the powerful on the Court. They are so happy. The powerful in this country are so happy to jam him through that they are putting extreme pressure on my colleagues to approve him despite his horrific personal record.

I say to my colleagues: Stand up for the integrity of the Senate. Stand up for the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. Don't allow yourselves to be brought into a vortex of determined outside power saying: This must be done, and this must be done now, and this must be done with this flawed individual.

I am deeply disturbed--deeply disturbed--about where we stand right now with the vote to close debate tomorrow and to send this body into 30 hours of final debate before a decision. That timeline gives us no chance that the courts can provide us the documents that have been censored by the President of the United States. It gives no chance to reawaken the opportunity of the committee to hear from those 28 individuals whom the FBI did not investigate because the President of the United States wouldn't let them--no chance to get to true justice.

Remember that phrase across the front of the Supreme Court: ``Equal justice under law.'' That phrase will be tarnished, the Court deeply diminished, and the people deeply divided, if we proceed to the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh.

Thank you, Mr. President.