Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, the most important words of our Constitution are the first three, ``We the People.'' This describes the entire purpose of our Constitution, which is to create a government responsive to the people and to produce laws that reflect the will of the people. It requires a close adherence to the vision embodied in the Constitution, including the advice and consent vision in the Constitution.

We know that the Founders of our country struggled with how to appoint people to high positions in the executive branch and in our courts. It was Alexander Hamilton who laid out the deliberations. He said: If a body or an assembly has that power, there will be a lot of horse trading back and forth, and we will not get the best people suited to the positions in the executive branch and in the courts. So the responsibility should rest with one person. That is how the nominating power came to be vested with the President.

The Founders also discussed the fact that a single person can go off track. The President might have favoritism toward people from his or her home State. The President might favor people who, in turn, had done favors for him or her and so forth.

They said that the way to avoid this is to have the Senate be a check upon the President, and that ``would tend to greatly prevent the appointment of unfit characters.'' That is how Alexander Hamilton summed it up.

Our responsibility is to review the record of individuals and make sure that no one is appointed who is of unfit character. That separation of powers has been honored over the centuries with the President nominating and then the Senate reviewing the entire record of the individual to honor its responsibility to figure out if this individual is fit or if this individual is unfit.

But now we have something we have never seen before, which is that the President's team has intervened in a massive way to block a thorough review of the nominee's record. There are three parts of this intervention. The first was to weigh in with Senate leadership and say: Don't request anything about his 3 years as Staff Secretary. There was a conspiracy then between the President's team and a few Senators to prevent the entire body from being able to review Nominee Kavanaugh's record.

That is unacceptable because each and every one of us has that responsibility. Each and every one of us takes the oath of office. This isn't just a responsibility that exists for one or two people who refer to themselves by title like majority leader or chairman of the Judiciary Committee. This is a responsibility that every one of us has, and that responsibility has been violated with this violation of the separation of powers.

The second thing the President did was to proceed to appoint an individual to use the stamp ``Presidential privilege,'' meaning executive privilege, to deny access to the Senate of some 100,000 documents when the individual served in the capacity of a lawyer on the team of White House Counsel. In this case, the Senate did request the records. This is solely the exercise of the President and perhaps, therefore, it is the clearest example of the violation of the separation of powers.

We have from the individual himself the statement: ``The White House . . . has directed that we not provide these documents.'' That is referring directly to the documents on which William Burck marked ``Presidential privilege''--100,000 documents.

Why are these documents important? Well, we know from the more limited ones we have received that it addresses his actions and his opinions on a host of important topics.

The documents reveal, for example, that while he said he wasn't involved in the discussions around certain nominations, we know that, at least in a modest way, he was, from the documents we have. But we don't have the bulk of the documents to explain the whole story.

He said he wasn't involved with the discussions regarding the use of torture, but we have a limited glimpse from the documents we did get that he was involved in those discussions. The remaining documents probably have a much more expanded vision of his involvement.

He said he wasn't involved in the receipt of stolen documents that regard nomination discussions--documents stolen from the Senate Democrats--and yet we find out from the existing documents that we have that he was and that these were received directly by him.

Here we are with this limited glimpse of three cases in which he misrepresented the story. We certainly didn't get the full story. What is in the 100,000 documents that were censored that we never got?

We have never been in this situation before where a President deliberately obstructed the review of the nominee's record in this vast procedure. Did the President's team go through them carefully and say: Oh, well, because of the sensitivity of XYZ, therefore, we are going to block documents ABC, and therefore create an index explaining that. No, they did not. We have a whole-scale blockage of key parts of the record.

There is more than that. There is also the President's role in marking documents ``committee confidential.'' Here is the challenge. We have a responsibility--a constitutional responsibility--that has been violated. That is why today I filed a motion to compel the President to provide those 100,000 documents marked ``Presidential privilege'' to us in the Senate, so we can review them and do our responsibility under the Constitution.

Let me switch topics. I have heard Senators here say: Well, we certainly couldn't vote for this individual if he lied to the committee in his testimony. That certainly would mean he was unsuited to serve. Yet we have numerous instances in which he has lied to the committee, and he is unsuited to serve.

At a minimum, the President should withdraw this nominee. It is certainly an enormous dark mark on the integrity of the Court to take someone who misled the Senate--Democrats and Republicans--about numerous topics. In just those three issues I mentioned, we had deception. On issues related to whether he received stolen documents, he did. He said he didn't.

Was he involved in the proceedings for certain nominees? He said he wasn't, but he was.

Was he involved in the conversations over torture? He said he wasn't, but he was.

That is just with the limited information we have.

Then we have the hearing in which he said that his friends who were at the gathering with Dr. Ford refuted her story. That is a straight- out lie. Not one of them refuted her story. They said they didn't remember. They said they didn't know. They certainly didn't refute it. That is a lie.

He said she wasn't in the same social circle, but we know she was. She dated his good friend.

When he was asked about certain things like ``boofing'' and ``Devil's Triangle,'' he lied to the committee about

what those terms meant and what all his friends knew they meant. They meant things I will not discuss here, but he wasn't honest with the committee. The list then goes on and on.

He said he was not aware of the story until he read it in The New Yorker magazine. It turns out that it was not true when, in fact, he intervened to try to sabotage that story before it was ever printed because he knew about it beforehand.

Colleagues, look, there are times when we may have an individual who suits one's judicial philosophy but who is totally unsuited to serve on the Court. Stand up for this institution. Stand up for the Senate. It has been unable to carry out its responsibility under the Constitution of reviewing this man's whole record. Stand up for the integrity of the committee process and the fact that we don't put people on the Court who lie to this body. Stand up for the vision of the United States of America--the vision of a ``we the people'' nation, not of a government by and for the powerful. Yet that is exactly what his decisions stand for. Stand up for the vision of a President and a republic instead of for the vision of a King and a kingdom, which is what his view of Presidential power turns into--a President above and beyond the law.

Colleagues, do your job. That means we do not vote until we have the documents and review his entire record, and when we vote, if he is still the nominee, we reject him because he lied, because he demonstrated intense partisanship, because he is angry under stress, because he threatened retaliation, because he is unsuited to serve on any court, let alone the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Mr. President, I am delighted to be here with my colleague from Rhode Island. This is a coast-to-coast presentation, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and on around the world, because our oceans are in deep trouble from climate chaos.

It is indeed time to wake up, and this week is my colleague's 222nd speech addressing that fact. It is so important not just that we speak but that the world act.

Driving these factors--whether we are talking about the impacts on the land or the impacts on the ocean--is carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide pollution. It is facts on the ground everywhere that people can pay attention to, but I think every now and then it is good to return to the basic science. So I am just going to share this chart which shows, with this red line, rising carbon dioxide levels. This chart ends a little bit early, but we are now well over 400 parts per million.

When I was born, we were at about 314 parts per million, and we are approaching 414. This generation over the last 62 years is the first generation to experience a 100-point climb in human history on this planet, the first one to experience this dramatic growth in carbon dioxide.

If it were just growth in carbon dioxide, if it were just a matter of changing the air chemistry a little with no impact, we wouldn't be here talking today, but now we have this set of black dots representing temperature changes. We can see, essentially, as the carbon dioxide levels rise, the temperature of the planet is rising as well. The heat that is being trapped has been well understood for a long time. It goes back more than a century.

In more recent times, in 1959, there was a scientist, Edward Teller, who was quite famous for his work on nuclear issues. He gave a speech to the 100-year anniversary of the petroleum. He said: This energy that you are pulling out of the ground--oil and coal and gas--is pretty powerful in helping humans transform the world and it can do a lot of good, but then he went on to say, it has two problems. The first problem is, there is a limited supply in the ground. It turns out there is a lot more carbon stored in the ground than Edward Teller had any idea about in 1959, but, he said, the second problem you have is that when you burn this resource, you create carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide traps heat and you are going to have a dramatic impact on the planet. He focused specifically on the issue of rising sea levels and the fact

that most people around the world live next to the sea.

That is a proper introduction to us recognizing that this issue has been understood scientifically for a long time, but in terms of our politics, individuals are reluctant to embrace that challenge because it requires action, and that action is sometimes hard to come by to shift the status quo to address this rising threat. In the 10 years I have been in the Senate, we have seen dramatic, dramatic impacts, and I will focus on the oceans today.

Oceans absorb 90 percent of the heat. I didn't know this statistic until my colleague from Rhode Island questioned a scientist who was being nominated for a key position in the administration and asked her that question, thinking it was just basic knowledge. I said to myself, actually, I wasn't sure how much the oceans absorb. I knew the open blue waters--non-ice-covered waters--absorb a lot of sunlight energy. I know they cover three-quarters of the Earth, but I didn't know that statistic that 90 percent of the energy is trapped by the ocean. So we see impacts around the world. We see coral reefs dying at an unprecedented rate, both from the warming of the ocean and from the increasing acidity of the ocean.

You may wonder why I raise the question of acidity. What does that possibly have to do with that? As that rising carbon dioxide level that was on the chart I just put up lifts, waves incorporate more of that carbon dioxide into the ocean, and it becomes carbonic acid. Essentially, we are pouring incredible amounts of acid into our oceans via carbon dioxide pollution.

When I stand on the shore on the coastline of Oregon and I look out to sea and see that ocean, I find it hard to imagine that we as humans could have changed the basic chemistry, but there was a rude-awakening fact that occurred when I came to the Senate back in 2008, when I was elected, and in 2009. That fact was the baby oysters being hatched in the Oregon State hatchery, the Oregon hatchery on the coast, started dying. They all started dying. So the hatchery rushed in experts from Oregon State University. They thought they would find a bacterium, they thought they would find a virus and they didn't and they were mystified. What is the answer? Why are they dying? It turned out it was simply the increasing acidity of the Pacific Ocean, the ocean having increased 30 percent over the time that humans have been burning fossil fuels for energy. When those baby oysters try to pull the molecules out of the ocean to form their shell, it is so much harder when it is a higher acidity, and they die. So now we have to artificially buffer the water in which the baby oysters are hatched in order for them to live. We lost a billion baby oysters.

Then, of course, we have the impact, and we have climate chaos in the form of hurricanes. Boy, have we received that message through storm after storm in 2017 and 2018.

Hurricane Harvey came rolling in, September of 2017. The storm formed and dissipated between August and September. The numbers are ones you really can't get your hands around: Twenty-seven trillion gallons of water dumped in Louisiana and Texas; 34,000 people displaced; 13,000 had to be rescued from rising floodwaters. The estimated damage: about $125 billion from that one storm, second only to Katrina.

Then, a few weeks later, here comes Hurricane Maria, devastating Puerto Rico, devastating the Virgin Islands. It knocked out the power grid in Puerto Rico for almost a year. I went there about 8 or 9 months after the storm to check it out, and I saw an island where thousands of families still had blue tarps over their roofs--a testament to the amount of destruction they had experienced, also a testament to how unprepared FEMA was to respond to that: an estimated $90 billion in damage; an estimate of roughly 3,000 deaths coming from the storm and the aftermath, many of them affected by the knocked-out healthcare services and the heat that followed.

Together, 2017 broke the record for the cost of the hurricane season, 16 major billion-dollar weather events costing over $300 billion. Why are these hurricanes more devastating because of climate chaos, because of carbon dioxide pollution? The energy comes from the temperature in the ocean. The warmer the ocean, the more energy, the more powerful the storms. A short explanation is that the warmer oceans produce more evaporation, more water vapor in the atmosphere. It increases approximately 7 percent for every 1.8 degrees of temperature rise. Then the storm as a whole moves across the ocean and across the land more slowly, which means not only do we have a more powerful storm, but it is more likely to hover over a given area for a longer period of time.

Between 1949 and 2016, it is estimated that hurricanes slowed down at sea by about 10 percent and by about 20 percent once they make landfall. The result: a lot more rain and a lot more wind hits any given area, a recipe for disaster.

If 2017 wasn't enough, we have already experienced Hurricane Florence this year. Again, unusually warm ocean temperatures. It is estimated that by previous understanding, this was a once-in-a-thousand-year event; that is, we go through 1,000 years, we would see something like this once, but we didn't just see Florence. We saw in the previous year Maria, Irma, and Harvey. In other words, these 1,000-year-events are becoming far more common as a result, setting record rainfalls, doing record damage. It is more deaths, more damage, and now we have thousands still in shelters as a result of Hurricane Florence and an estimated some $38 billion in damage.

There are other effects we should realize from these massive storms. One is that when the rivers flood up over the land, they tend to flood areas that were never intended to be flooded; things like, for example, leftover waste dumps from the ash from coal-burning powerplants. That ash can turn a river into a gray pudding, and you can see it from space. That ash contains arsenic, boron, copper, lead, and mercury, and giant ponds of coal ash throughout North Carolina were flooded. It has happened before.

In 2014, there was a catastrophic event at a Duke Energy plant that spilled some 39,000 tons into the Dan River. That spill urged more regulations to strengthen those coal ash deposits to prevent them from escaping during floods, but what happened last year? Well, President Trump's EPA and the North Carolina legislature weakened those regulations. Then, last month, two other Duke Energy ponds flooded in Hurricane Florence and released tons of coal ash into rivers and onto private property. Imagine that toxic sludge flooding across your land. How would you feel about that? Imagine that toxic sludge going into the river your city takes its water from. How would you like that? I know you wouldn't.

Another source of pollution: hog waste. North Carolina has roughly 3,000 unlined, open air pits containing millions of gallons of hog waste. The hurricane's flooding released a lot of that waste into the rivers. Again, how do you imagine the impact of that hog waste spreading across your flooded property or through the river you take your water out of? Not a pretty sight.

We are in the situation where so many legislatures want to put their hands over their ears and eyes and not acknowledge the basic science that is resulting in a warmer planet, warmer oceans, and all of the effects--the coral reefs; the Pacific blob and the impact it had on sea birds; the dying oysters; the pine beetles that live through the winter because the winter is warmer and kill the pine trees; the ticks that live through the winter in New Hampshire, New England, and kill the moose; the ticks that live through the winter and spread disease that humans get--devastating disease.

We have to stop and be honest about this impact on our planet. We used to talk about computer models, and many mocked those models saying that is just some ivory tower estimate; it is not really going to happen. Now the facts are on the ground, and what we are seeing is damage to our forests and to our fishing and to our farming.

This is not an urban issue or a rural issue. It is both an urban issue and a rural issue: urban cities getting flooded, rural areas having their farming and fishing and forestry profoundly affected. So let us come together. Whether we come from an urban area or a rural area, whether we come from a Republican State or we come from a

Democratic State, this threat doesn't discriminate, nor should we make it a partisan issue. We have a responsibility to this generation, yes, but the impacts are accelerating. We have a responsibility for the next generation and the generation after that and 70 more generations that will all ask: When the facts were before you in such an obvious and dramatic way, why didn't you act?

Acting means we have to drive through massive transition from gaining energy from fossil fuels to producing energy without fossil fuels-- producing energy with winds and tides and currents, producing energy with solar power.

We have this massive fusion reactor called the Sun, and it distributes energy on Earth through the wind and the sunshine. Let's harvest that for the benefit of human kind. I am pleased to be able to come to the floor to help celebrate the 222nd speech by my colleague on the Atlantic coast and to share a little bit on the perspective from the Pacific coast, but this is an issue that affects all points in between and around the globe.

I will be happy to.

It is a great question or a great point because when you have resources, you can respond to the impact far more easily. You can take and say: My house has been devastated, but I have the resources to go buy another house in a safer area, in a drier area.

Take, for example, the flooding of New Orleans. When New Orleans was flooded after Katrina, we saw that affluent families moved, and poor families had two options: One was to leave everything behind, leave the State, and start over but start over with no assets, which meant they were in extremely difficult circumstances, or stay and hope to rebuild. It was extremely difficult for low-income individuals to be able to do so.

As we look at the disparate impacts around the world, we can look within the United States and realize, for example, the impact on the Native American populations of Alaska are being significantly impacted by the shoreline eroding, by the ice disappearing, and with that, the traditional way of life is disappearing. Various groups have, therefore, had to appeal for help to be able to move their villages, as a result.

There is very little to be done to address the very changing nature of the commerce they have carried on with the sea. Their fishing or their hunting, which has gone on for thousands of years, now is being dramatically impacted. We do see a hugely disparate impact.

If we broaden this discussion to look at countries such as Syria, we find that when climate change affected the farmers and they had drought year after year, they had to abandon their farmlands and flee to the city, and they had no resources. It created competition for resources. It helped to launch the civil war and Syria has been in deep, massive conflict ever since, just as an example.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern Berenice Vargas-Sierra be granted privileges of the floor for the balance of the day.

Mr. President, I want to take a moment to recognize a wonderful member of my team who, after 9 years, will be leaving us at the end of this week.

For more than 9 years, Jodi Niehoff has been the heart and soul of our operation. She has been our administration and correspondence manager. She has been our intern coordinator and our unofficial planner for party events celebrating legislative victories or comings and goings of staff or birthdays. She has been the hostess and MC of our annual holiday gift swap and so many other things, adding to the esprit de corps of our team.

My team has pulled together a few stats, and these statistics indicate just some of the work she has done over these years during which I have had the privilege to work with her.

She has been a staunch believer not just in communicating with constituents but doing so quickly and in a meaningful and heartfelt way. Under her leadership, we have worked to have a substantive response to every single letter that comes into our office and try to get out that response, whenever possible, on the same day or the next day and when more research is needed, to do so within a few days. It is a huge challenge because so many people now are communicating via email, and we have weeks in which we can receive 10,000 or 12,000 or 14,000 letters. So in the course of responding to all those diverse issues that constituents have raised, Jodi has guided our team in producing 5,774 unique letters that are now in our constituent correspondence library. That averages out to nearly two letters a day 365 days a year for more than 9 years.

During her time on our team, she has mentored 227 interns, and 14 of those interns have gone on to join our team as staff members. So helping to enable them to have a significant experience here on Capitol Hill is a real contribution to the public.

I first came here as an intern--a summer intern for Senator Mark Hatfield from Oregon--and at that time, you only had a few interns. You didn't have that much mail. There were three of us over the course of the summer. I was the last to arrive, so it was my job to come in early, run all the letters--of course they were all paper letters--run the envelopes through the cutter, take out the sheets of information, the letters, and stack them into one of four stacks for the different correspondence.

Well, that now sounds like such a simple task compared to that which Jodi has guided with more than 200 interns and more than 5,000--almost 6,000--unique letters being drafted to respond.

Thank you so much. Jodi, you will be dearly missed by everybody here in Washington, DC, who has had the pleasure to know you, to work alongside with you, to partner with you over nearly a decade. I wish you all the best as you head back home to Minnesota to begin the next chapter of your life and the next chapter of your family's life. I know that the next chapter will be one in which a new set of individuals will have the pleasure, the delight, to be able to work with you.

We invite you back here anytime. We wish you and your family all the best. Thank you, Jodi, for your service to our team and your service to our Nation.

Nomination of Brett Kavanaugh

Mr. President, today I filed a lawsuit related to a violation of the separation of powers.

Our Constitution lays out a very clear framework in which the President of the United States nominates and the Senate proceeds to review the record of an individual in order to determine if that individual is of fit character to serve. This strategy came as our Founders struggled with how to enable staff to fill key positions in the executive branch and key positions in the judiciary, and it is something that Hamilton wrote about extensively in his Federalist Papers.

No. 76 was written in 1788 as a letter to the people of the State of New York. In it, he addressed this separation of powers at length. He said that the Founders had considered giving the assembly--that is a large group--the ability to choose those who would fill posts in the executive branch as a check and balance to the President but that they had considered the fact that Senators would probably horse trade, that one Senator from one State would want their friend in one position and another Senator from another State

would want a different person, and that that horse trading would not produce the best set of individuals to populate the executive branch or to serve as judges. So they came to rest on the idea of having one individual--the President--nominate individuals to serve.

Here is a short piece of his longer discussion. He said: ``The sole and undivided responsibility of one man will naturally beget a livelier sense of duty and a more exact regard to reputation. He will, on this account, feel himself under stronger obligations and more interested to investigate with care the qualities requisite to the stations to be filled, and to prefer with impartiality the persons who may have the fairest pretensions to them.''

He goes on to applaud the many merits of having one individual bear the burden of making these nominations.

But then, of course, it is a nomination; it is not an appointment. And to be appointed, the Senate must confirm.

He addresses this question of the role of the Senate. Alexander Hamilton, writing to explain the action and the design of the Constitution in his letter to the people of New York in 1788, says:

To what purpose then require the co-operation of the

Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence

would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent

operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of

favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to

prevent the appointment of unfit characters. . . .

He goes on to say that a President might be influenced by favoritism to people in his own State or favoritism to people in his family or family connections or favoritism because he had a friendship or a pursuit of popularity triumphing over professional skills. So for all of these reasons, the Senate process exists to review the record of the individual and to determine, as Hamilton put it: Is that individual a fit character or an unfit character?

Now, we all in the Senate took an oath of office to uphold the Constitution, and, certainly, that means defending and exercising our responsibility under the advice and consent clause of the Constitution. We cannot interfere in the ability of the President to nominate. That is the President's responsibility. We can give our suggestions, but in the end, whatever the President says in regard to an office, whatever person the President identifies, that is the nominee, and we cannot interfere with that. But so, too, then, the President cannot interfere in the exercise of the Senate in reviewing the record of the individual. Certainly, the President can share his or her insights on the individual and his or her encouragement to speed up the process but cannot interfere in the underlying exercise of reviewing the record.

But here we are in this extraordinary moment where the President of the United States has crossed the boundary between the separation of powers and has proceeded to interfere with the deliberations of the Senate, and he has done so not once and not twice but at least on three significant occasions. I will proceed to share those occasions.

The first was the President's team intervening to stop the Senate from accessing Nominee Kavanaugh's records when he served as Staff Secretary to President George W. Bush.

Senator Leahy, the longest serving Member of the Senate and a longtime member of the Judiciary Committee notes in a letter that the committee has a ``longstanding, bipartisan expectation . . . that any materials produced while a nominee was a public servant that could shed light on his or her views, thinking, or temperament, that are not privileged, should be subject to public scrutiny and carefully considered by the Senate prior to confirmation.''

Now, this was a view that was a bipartisan view. It is a view that was expressed by a senior member of the Judiciary Committee--a Republican Member. That individual, Senator Cornyn, proceeded to note that the documents that Judge Kavanaugh had ``generated . . . authored . . . or contributed to'' during his tenure as White House Staff Secretary should be conveyed to the Committee. This ``just seems like common sense,'' he added.

In other words, it just seems fundamental to our responsibility here in the Senate to review the record of Judge Kavanaugh, but just days after the senior Republican member of the Judiciary Committee expressed those sentiments, Republican Senators were summoned to the White House by the White House Counsel, Donald McGahn, and immediately following that summoning and those instructions--those directions from the White House--suddenly, Senators were being denied the opportunity to see those documents. In fact, it went so far as the chair of the Committee proceeding not to ask for the documents after this direction from the White House. So, certainly, that intervention did directly compromise our ability as Senators to review the record of the nominee and, therefore, violated the separation of powers and violated each of our abilities to fulfill our constitutional responsibilities.

The second occasion is that Defendant William Burck, who has a series of close connections to the White House, proceeded to exercise the power of executive privilege on behalf of the President to deny the Senate access to 100,000 pages of White House Counsel documents. What did this individual say when he was exercising this power of censoring the documents that would be obtained by the Senate? He said: ``The White House . . . has directed that we not provide these documents. . . .''

That is a direct interference in the advice and consent deliberations of the Senate, and all of us together--Democrats and Republicans, northern Senators and southern Senators, eastern coast, western coast, heartland--should defend our responsibility under the Constitution to provide advice and consent, which means the ability to review the record of the nominee.

Then there is a third occasion where Defendant Burck proceeded to label documents being presented to the Senate as ``committee confidential.'' In fact, the Committee consulted with him during the process to see what the extent of this was and why they were done.

There is no index that provides information to the Senate on why so many documents were blocked by Burck from ever getting to us. That log or that index doesn't exist saying: Yes, we looked at this, document and here is why executive power prevails. There is no record or log for why more than 141,000 pages of documents were labeled ``committee confidential,'' preventing Senators from proceeding to talk about the contents, to have the contents examined by experts, to have the contents examined by the public, to take feedback from the citizens of the United States, to have staff be able to look at these documents and to be able to review them, and to be able to get feedback on them to fulfill our responsibility as Senators to examine the record of the nominee.

Thus we are in uncharted territory. Never before have we seen this direct, substantial, and extensive intervention by the President in violation of the separation of powers under the advice and consent clause of the Constitution. Thus, it is important that we ask for judicial intervention.

There is no more important document to us than the Constitution--our ``we the people'' Constitution--of the United States of America. We will be failing if we do not aggressively pursue our responsibility to review the record of a nominee. So let us do that. Let us ask the courts for intervention to ensure that we have access to this record.

We have had over the past few days new information regarding the nominee--new information from women who have shared their difficult, difficult experiences. What would be the appropriate conduct here in the Senate? It would be for the FBI to investigate--not a criminal investigation but a background investigation. That was accorded to Anita Hill in 1991, a reopening of the background investigation to get the facts.

How is it that a Senate and a President that could support the proper role of the FBI in 1991 will not stand up today for fairness for women who are coming forward?

Why is it that the nominee, steeped in the law, who has said he wants a fair hearing--he wants a fair hearing--does not demand an FBI investigation so it is fair to him and fair to these three women--Dr. Ford, Deborah Ramirez, and Ms. Swetnick--who are coming forward? They are being treated very poorly by this institution. They are being treated as if they are a problem,

when they are, in fact, courageous Americans helping us to do our advice and consent responsibility to understand the record of the individual and whether the individual is fit or unfit.

To those who say that, well, these might not be true, wouldn't you be the first, then, to stand up and say that the FBI should reopen the FBI investigation and that nothing should go forward until the President authorizes that? If you want fairness, you want facts.

Here we are. Not only are we failing the test of 1991 in terms of the FBI investigation, but we are failing the test in terms of the witnesses. In 1991, numerous corroborating witnesses came forward to share and expand the dimensions of the events under consideration with Anita Hill. Now the Judiciary Committee is saying that we are only going to allow a ``he says, she says'' dynamic. This is absolutely unfair to the women who have come forward.

Now the Judiciary Committee is saying they are going to bring an individual to prosecute, as if this is a trial of the woman that is coming forward. How wrong is that to try to turn this into a trial? If you want a trial, well, then, shouldn't you have the FBI investigate and get the facts? It shouldn't be a trial. We should be listening carefully, and we should be allowing fairness to both, those with corroborating information and, certainly, for the nominee, as well as those who are sharing their experiences from the past about the nominee. Give transparency and opportunity to both but not this farce of a hearing planned by the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee.

We should be able to do so much better. We have had decades of experience since 1991, since we went through a parallel situation of allegations regarding personal conduct. How is it that now, 27 years later, we are doing so much worse in respecting women coming forward to share their stories. Why are we doing a worse job of respecting dignity, a worse process in terms of listening to facts, a worse process in terms of trying to turn it into a trial of a courageous woman who came forward to share her experiences?

Well, I have never felt so burdened by the misconduct of this Chamber as I feel right now. Let's stand up for decency and dignity and honor those who have come forward, respect them, listen to them, and explore the stories and the experiences they share so that their voices can be fairly heard before this body.

Let us not let the President of the United States trample all over the Constitution by violating the separation of powers and blocking our Chamber from receiving the documents necessary to review the record of the nominee.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern, Blanca Gaytan Farfan, be granted privileges of the floor for the remainder of the day.

Mr. President, thank you so much to my colleague from Oregon for his remarks on taking on the systematic corruption of dark money as it relates to this nomination.

I yield the floor.

Cloture Motion

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern Sam Satterfield have 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.'' It is the mission statement of our Nation--a nation of the people, by the people, for the people, as President Lincoln so eloquently stated, not a nation of, by, and for the powerful and the privileged.

Yet the powerful and the privileged are working overtime to undermine our Constitution. Ironically, they are using the courts to do it. We have seen it happening all week long as the Judiciary Committee has barreled ahead with hearings on Judge Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. This is the same Judge Kavanaugh whose record from 5 years of serving in a Presidential administration is still being hidden from the Senate and from the people of the United States of America.

For 5 years, Brett Kavanaugh had the ear of the President on a number of critical issues--on how we treat enemy combatants, conduct wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, use and expand Executive power through signing statements, or how the authorization for the use of military force is utilized. For 5 years, in the inner circle of America, he had been engaged in policy after policy after policy. Yet Chairman Grassley and the committee Republicans are unwilling to allow that record of insights on his views to be shared with Senators under advice and consent responsibility.

Then there is this parallel process in which the documents that are being made available are first being vetted by Bill Burck. Who is Bill Burck? He is a partisan Republican lawyer who used to work for the nominee. He is the one who has the final say over what the Senate sees. He is the one who has the final say over what documents are released, not just to the Senate but to the American people.

He is the one who decided to release 42,000 pages of documents--not the ones from those 5 years we are talking about--just hours before the hearing began. Who could possibly review 42,000 pages the evening or the night before the hearing occurs? It is humanly impossible. There we are with a process normally headed by the nonpartisan National Archives, which is still trying to do its work but can't do its work until the end of October to vet these

documents. So instead of nonpartisan public servants vetting the documents, we have a partisan Republican lawyer, who worked for the nominee, deciding what we are going to see in the U.S. Senate, what the public and the United States is going to see. This is not transparency. This is censorship, and censorship is absolutely wrong in numerous contexts but particularly in intervening with the responsibility of the Senate.

Instead of integrity, we have deceit. Instead of honoring advice and consent responsibility, we are dishonoring that fundamental constitutional role. This is a rigged system, completely and absolutely rigged through the censorship of the documents we see and the blockade for the documents we need.

As Kristine Lucius, who is a former Judiciary Committee staff director who worked on half a dozen Supreme Court nominees, said, this process is ``not just breaking the norms. It, frankly, is bordering on absurdity.'' Absurdity, censorship, a complete failure of integrity, that is what is happening right this moment during the U.S. Senate's deliberation of the Supreme Court nominee.

Not long ago, there was a time when my Republican colleagues argued for a full, transparent examination of a nominee's record before the Senate could consider the nomination. When Justice Kagan was nominated 8 years ago by President Obama, Members of this body, my Republican colleagues, said: We stand for the principle of transparency. They said: We need the full record of the nominee's White House service.

Chairman Grassley said on the Senate floor: ``In order for the Senate to fulfill its constitutional responsibility of advice and consent, we must get all of her documents from the Clinton Library and have enough time to analyze them so we can determine whether she should be a Justice.''

That was the Kagan standard articulated by my Republican colleagues and shared by my Democratic colleagues, a standard that was nonpartisan, a standard that was bipartisan, and a standard that was supported by Republicans and Democrats for the nomination process for a Supreme Court Justice.

The Kagan standard is one Democrats supported under a Democratic President and a Republican President. That is called integrity. That is called principle. What we have today is my Republican colleagues saying: We supported transparency under a Democratic President, but we support censorship and the blockade of documents under a Republican President. That is the opposite of principle. That is the opposite of integrity. The Kagan standard, supported by both sides just a couple of years ago, should be the standard we all support today.

We can't fully evaluate Kavanaugh's record if we don't have the full record of his involvement on so many issues during his time working in the executive branch.

Hearings are supposed to give us a chance to get at some of those issues, but what have we heard? Well, we heard the same, tired, obligatory responses, such as: I will be a judge who calls balls and strikes. We have heard that before, and then we have seen the rightwing judicial activists legislating from the bench on issue after issue after issue--on workers' rights, on environmental rights, on consumer rights, on reproductive rights. We know it is ``umpire'' before you get there, and then suddenly it is a desire to implement a far-right, anti- American, anti-Constitution philosophy of control by the powerful and privileged, undermining the core principle of the Constitution of the United States of America.

What else have we heard from Judge Kavanaugh? We have heard: Well, that is settled law. That is, perhaps, the most artificial, phony response we can possibly hear. Why is it artificial and phony? Because when you are on the Supreme Court, the decisions you make become the interpretation. You either reinforce or you unsettle, but you have no obligation to follow what the courts have done before.

The Roberts Court has overturned ``settled precedents'' time after time after time, and for a nominee of the Supreme Court to pretend that isn't the case, it means either he is ignorant or deliberately deceptive. I don't think Judge Kavanaugh is ignorant. He knows the record. He knows the Supreme Court changes prior precedents. He knows they change ``settled law,'' and so to evade an issue saying, well, that is settled, is simply to be deceptive.

Sometimes, in addition to the hearings, we learn some information through a nominee's meetings with Senators, but Judge Kavanaugh has refused to answer even the most basic questions about his jurisprudence, said Senator Schumer, following his own meeting with the nominee.

Senator Schumer went on to say that Mr. Kavanaugh refused to say if Roe v. Wade or Casey v. Planned Parenthood were correctly decided because that would actually be to indicate some sense of one's judicial view, and we are getting nothing.

As Senator Schumer said, he couldn't ``recall his level of involvement in a number of controversies during his time in the Bush White House.'' Here is a thought: If we get the records on his involvement in the Bush White House, we will actually know what his thoughts were, and maybe we can jog his memory that he so carefully and conveniently lost somewhere along the way. The American people deserve integrity in this process, and we are not getting it.

We do know a fair amount from his previous public decisions. We know he likes to legislate from the bench against workers, against consumers, against clean air, and against clean water. We know he doesn't believe healthcare is a fundamental right in the United States. We know he wants to strike down Roe v. Wade. We know he has a view of the Presidency that is appropriate for a King and a kingdom but not for a President and a republic.

He has this extraordinary view of Presidential power. He doesn't believe a President can be indicted. He doesn't believe a President can even be investigated. He believes a sitting President can choose to ignore laws passed by Congress if the President says they are unconstitutional, even if the court has said they are constitutional.

Think about that for a moment. Here is a judge saying he believes the President can ignore what the courts say is constitutional and unconstitutional. You can't get more expansive Presidential power than that.

So why was Judge Kavanaugh chosen off of this list of 25 individuals? The answer is pretty clear. It is because he is the one who can write a ``get out of jail free'' card for the President of the United States-- our President, who is under investigation. He is under investigation for colluding with foreign powers and flaunting our laws to win a national election. His former campaign chairman has been found guilty on eight different criminal charges. His former lawyer and fixer pled guilty to eight criminal charges and testified, as directed, to make illegal campaign payments at the direction of--drumroll, please--a candidate for Federal office. Who is this candidate for Federal office? None other than President Donald Trump--President Donald Trump, directing a felony crime.

When one hasn't been indicted in that situation, it is referred to as an unindicted coconspirator. The Watergate grand jury used that term, ``unindicted coconspirator,'' to describe the role President Nixon played in that national scandal, and it fits perfectly with the role President Trump is playing today.

To say that a dark cloud of corruption hangs over this administration and hangs over this nomination would be a massive understatement. Until that cloud is lifted and until this President is cleared, this nomination should not be considered by this body.

We have already seen that my colleagues have flipped their position from having a Democratic President to a Republican President. They have turned transparency into censorship. They have taken the Kagan standard and trashed it. We cannot act as if all is well in the Republic. We cannot act as if everything is normal. We cannot act as if this is any other nomination put forward by any other President because it is not.

It should be clear to all of us that this nomination should not go forward until the Mueller investigation is concluded. I know my colleagues are not prepared to take that stand, but surely we can agree that the Senate cannot

perform its advice and consent while our hands are tied by a partisan vetting process, hiding hundreds of thousand documents from the Senate and from we the people.

I call upon my colleagues to rise from this low point of censorship and the trashing of the responsibility of advice and consent. Stand up for the same principles you stood up for just a couple of years ago, when you demanded the full record for the Senate to undertake its investigation into a nominee. Bring courage and integrity into this process. Publicly refuse to proceed until we the Senate and we the people have the full set of documents about this individual's records. To do any less is to bring shame and injustice upon this body that I believe in so strongly, a responsibility of advice and consent that I believe in so strongly, and a responsibility that my colleagues believed in so strongly just a couple of years ago.

Let's stand together, as we stood together just a couple of years ago, Democrats and Republicans, demanding transparency and integrity. Let this not be the moment when my colleagues fail to uphold their constitutional responsibilities.

Thank you.

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

Madam President, I come to the floor to talk about two things. The first is that this Saturday will be the 1-year anniversary of the beginning of a horrific genocide against the Rohingya in the country of Myanmar.

This genocide was preplanned. All kinds of preparations were put in place, as various independent investigations have established. It is time for the United States to take a strong response as a statement of global leadership on human rights on behalf of this horrific circumstance. We have 350 or so villages burned, countless individuals slaughtered as they ran from their villages, shot from helicopters, systemic rape, and children tossed into burning piles. It doesn't get much worse anywhere in the world at any time in history.

Now 700,000 refugees who escaped have found their way to Bangladesh, but there is no room in Bangladesh. Bangladesh is a country half the size of Oregon. Yet Oregon has 4 million individuals, and Bangladesh has 160 million individuals.

Here are some things the United States should do right away on or before this Saturday. The State Department should release the report it has been compiling on the factual circumstances. Second, they should send this report to their legal counsel for an official determination if this constitutes genocide. The third thing they should do is ask the Senate to act quickly on the repatriation resolution that sets standards for the return of these refugees back to Burma, back to Myanmar. The fourth thing they should do is call on the Senate, followed by the House, to pass the Burma Human Rights and Freedom Act, which creates specific sanctions on those who planned and carried out this horrific ethnic cleansing.

Elie Wiesel said: ``A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.'' But if we do not respond clearly and effectively when there is this type of ethnic cleansing, this type of assault, then we are failing to prevent future assaults by those leaders who will be so tempted to divide their country on ethnic or racial lines, to take brutal action against a despised minority community.

The seeds of this slaughter began with a military coup in 1962, following which the military demonized this ethnic group year after year. Not only should the United States respond with a State Department report and a clear decision if this is genocide--and clear sanctions-- but it is time for the President of the United States to speak out boldly and clearly on the international stage on this issue. A year has passed, and we have not a single public statement from the leader of the United States of America. So let that change.

Nomination of Brett Kavanaugh

Madam President, the second issue I am here to talk about--and I am going to keep this short because my colleague is here, prepared to speak to his amendment--is the issue of whether the Senate proceeds to have hearings on nominee Brett Kavanaugh for the U.S. Supreme Court. The answer should be, by every Member in this Chamber, a resounding no.

First, we have the Kagan standard that has been set by the Republican majority, which states, when there is a Supreme Court nomination, it is essential to have all of the facts, all of the records that have been touched on, because only then will Senators be able to exercise their responsibility under the Constitution for advice and consent. So, if individuals want to exercise their responsibility effectively under advice and consent on a nominee from a Democratic President, shouldn't the same individuals make the same argument to exercise their responsibility effectively when the nominee comes from a Republican President?

The standard should be the standard. Let's stand up, out of the partisan troughs that have been dug, and fight for the vision of a fair and transparent and fully credible nomination process.

No hearing should be held until we have the full set of documents. It escapes no one's vision in the United States of America that only a fraction of the documents have been delivered. It escapes no one's vision in the United States that even those documents have been vetted by a Republican lawyer, a partisan lawyer, who has worked beforehand for the nominee. That is not transparent; that is not fair; and that does not allow us to have the full scope of the record.

Furthermore--and I will say this in just a summary format--there is an enormous conflict of interest here by which the President is attempting to print a ``get out of jail free'' card. Out of his 25 nominees who had been put forward from the list of names that had been given to him from the Federalist Society, one of them had an expansive view of the Presidency; that being that the President of the United States cannot be indicted and that the President of the United States cannot be investigated. That is the standard that says a President is above and beyond the law.

I challenge every Member in the Chamber to pull out the Constitution and find the provision that says our Founders established a kingdom and a King because I think they are going to

find that is not the case; that there is no clause in our Constitution that says the President is above and beyond the law.

As our oath of office requires, let's exercise our responsibility appropriately with the advice and consent responsibility, and let's get the full documents and resolve this conflict of interest before any hearing is held.

I thank the Presiding Officer.

Mr. President, somebody once said: What is the use of a house if you don't have a tolerable planet to put it on?

That is a question that we should all grapple with in this Chamber. It is a question that propels my colleagues from the Environment Committee to come to the floor and take note that the Trump administration's plan to replace the Clean Power Plan with a dirty power plan is one egregious step in damaging our planet. It is an egregious step to increase carbon pollution.

Carbon pollution has all kinds of effects that we are seeing across the country, from raging forest fires in the Northwest, with my State covered in smoke, to the stronger, more powerful hurricanes that hit the city of Houston of my colleague from Texas and the cities in Florida of my colleague from Florida, to the impact across the country on agriculture, to the impact with greater droughts in some cases and greater floods in others. One of the single most effective steps that can be taken is to reduce the amount of carbon pollution from powerplants and transportation.

Let's be clear. This dirty power plan from the administration increases the damage to the citizens of the United States, all just to pander to polluters. We have seen so much of this in the last year and a half.

I know that we are living in an era in which the administration has created a parallel universe of alternative facts, where truth isn't necessarily truth, as the President's lawyer said this past couple of weeks. But let's remember that if you are outside that parallel universe, if you are in the real world, there are real numbers.

By 2030, the Clean Power Plan would stop 870 million tons of pollution from poisoning the air that you and I, our families, our children, and our friends breathe. That is represented here by looking at this blue line in the year 2030 and the descending line of carbon pollution that is driven both by the fuel economy standards and the electricity standards. What we see under the President's dirty power plan is that, from here into the future, there is no further reduction--essentially zero reduction--then, past 2030, an increase in the carbon pollution that is doing all this damage across the country.

There is damage in every one of our States. This damage doesn't just happen in blue States. Texas is not a blue State. Texas suffered horrific consequences of this carbon pollution, so certainly representatives from that State would want to do something about it, and so on, through every single State. The amount of difference in the carbon pollution between the Clean Power Plan and the dirty power plan is equivalent to the pollution from 166 million cars on the road for a year.

It isn't just the impact on forest fires and the impact on hurricanes and the impact on drought, affecting agriculture, and the impact on floods. It is also the impact on human health. The estimate is that, by the year 2030, the difference between the Clean Power Plan and the dirty power plan is 4,500 premature deaths. So this decision kills people.

The difference between those two lines, by the year 2030, is 90,000 children's asthma attacks. The difference between those two lines is 1,700 heart attacks. Picture that many children with asthma attacks going to the hospital, 90,000 children. Picture that many heart attacks. Picture that many premature deaths. Aren't we here to make America stronger and better, not to kill Americans, not to put Americans in the hospital? Yet the President's plan does exactly that.

Those health problems result in a lot more expenses. The Clean Power Plan could result in $54 billion in health and climate benefits, and it creates a lot of jobs by driving renovation of the energy industry. When you renovate a house, you create a number of jobs. When you renovate an energy economy, you create a lot of jobs--millions of jobs--millions of jobs in clean and renewable energy, in wind and solar and geothermal.

The dirty power plan the President is putting forward says this: Instead of having a plan, we will simply tell the States to develop an idea of what they should do. In other words, the States have the responsibility, but no requirements, to act.

There is a little bit in there about improving the efficiency of coal-fired plants. But the idea is that if you extend the plants for a couple of years by making them more efficient, then you will reduce the adoption of renewable energy that is cheaper. So we are also talking about more expensive power by keeping inefficient, expensive forms of power, producing into the future.

These ideas that the administration has put forward about making the plants work a little bit more efficiently come with the caveat that, if you do that, you don't have to put the additional modernization pollution controls on them. It means more fine particulates, it means more sulfur, and it means more mercury--all things that damage human health. So it all keeps coming back to this assault on the health of Americans and on ag and on forests and on fishing. All three of those are affected by carbon pollution and climate chaos. That is the basic picture we are looking at.

Why don't we take a step back and just ask the simple question: What is the best outcome for America? Is it the adoption of cheaper renewable energy over more expensive fossil fuels? I would say: Yes, let's adopt the cheaper energy.

Is it the adoption of cleaner energy over dirtier energy? Yes, let's keep our air cleaner.

Is it doing what is right for the health of Americans? Yes, let's do right by the health of Americans.

Is it taking and contributing to a strategy of driving carbon pollution hopefully, eventually, down to zero? We want a plan that drives carbon down, not a plan that drives it sideways--that is, no change--or works eventually upward.

The question that David Thoreau put before us, ``What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?'' includes great significance for those American citizens who had their homes burned down this year because of carbon pollution. It would certainly be very relevant to those working in agriculture in America who are losing their farms because of drought or floods. It would certainly be relevant to those citizens living in Texas and Florida who have been deeply damaged by the hurricane storms of last year.

So let's do right for Americans, and let's reject this dirty power plan that will hurt us in every way possible.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern, Amelia Ziegler, have privileges of the floor for the balance of the day.

Mr. President, I am glad to be here following my colleague who is the ranking member of the subcommittee and who has done such excellent work, as well as with the Senator from Alaska, in undertaking and really bringing together a vision for their subcommittee that we have needed on this floor for a long time--well done.

I stand here as the ranking member of the Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee. I am very pleased to be able to pass this bill today--or we will hopefully soon do so--with strong bipartisan support. Appreciation to the chairman of the subcommittee, Senator Hoeven, and his excellent Appropriations Committee team, including Carlisle Clarke, Elizabeth Dent, Patrick Carroll, and Carlos Elias. They worked hand in hand with my team of Dianne Nellor, Jessica Schulken, Bob Ross, and Teri Curtin. I came to the floor the other day to speak to the excellent work Jessica Schulken has done over her career, serving for nearly two decades on the committee and just being a powerful, intelligent, persuasive, and insightful force in agricultural policy. I think, together, we have produced a very good bill. It provides funding for programs that are important to every American in every community, from the smallest rural town to the biggest city. And we rejected draconian cuts proposed in the President's budget.

Some of the essential items that we find in the Ag appropriations bill include rural development, which is very important to my State and my colleagues on both sides of the aisle--we have so much going on in our rural towns. It is important to fund our rural business, rural utility service, and rural broadband. Rural business and rural broadband, by the way, were zeroed out by the President and faced draconian cuts. I am so pleased we were able to reach a bipartisan decision to support these rural development programs.

We also support nutrition for Americans. In our country, there is no reason Americans should be going hungry.

We also maintain international assistance, which largely means buying American food and shipping it overseas to places in the world that are desperate. I had the chance to visit some of those areas in Africa and see firsthand how important our contribution to the World Food Program is.

Our environmental programs assist farmers in the stewardship of the land. It is something they have in their hearts, and it is helpful to have the EQIP program and the NRCS to support them.

The Agricultural Research Service is essential and so important to the great diversity of crops we have in my State and the unending list of potential pests, problems, and diseases that occur. We have to continue that research. I recently visited, for example, a wheat research station, and it was fascinating to see. From a distance, you would say: Well, that is just another field of wheat; what could be the issues? Well, it turns out there are all kinds of important issues that require agricultural research. Then there is risk management for our farmers and having that structure to support them so they aren't wiped out in rough times.

It has been a pleasure to work on this subcommittee and to see the broader Appropriations Committee returning to regular order, bringing bills to the floor, having a chance for all Senators to have a say in the process. So here we are in a better place, and I hope it is a course that we can continue.

Recognition of the Minority Leader

Mr. President, I come to the floor tonight with a simple and clear message, which is that we must not allow internment camps to be built in the United States of America.

I come with this message because we have heard on Capitol Hill that even as I speak, individuals are planning to bring forward legislation that would, in fact, create internment camps as a strategy of family incarceration--a strategy that President Trump has been championing. So I say tonight, absolutely not. We must not allow internment camps to be established in the United States of America.

When we look at the history of the world and the history of America, we realize that in many ways, we are still a very young nation, with less than three centuries behind us. In that comparatively short time, we have accomplished great things. We have helped save the world from tyranny and fascism, while pushing the boundaries of science. We spread democracy and human rights to nations far and wide. We have broken down barriers of race and gender and sexual orientation here at home in a vision of equality and opportunity for all.

Yet we cannot forget that along with those great accomplishments, there have also been some dark chapters in our history. We all are aware of these chapters when the United States embraced slavery from its founding up through the Civil War; that we embraced discrimination through segregation and Jim Crow laws; that we had in World War II a strategy of creating internment camps to imprison our citizens who were of Japanese ancestry.

Now, we have another dark chapter--a chapter in which our government has decided to treat those fleeing persecution from around the world as if they are criminals, to greet them not with Lady Liberty and a torch, saying, ``Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free'' but a different saying--a saying that if you are fleeing persecution and you wash up on the shores of the United States, we will treat you as a criminal. We will tear away your children, and we will throw you in prison.

In the span of just a few weeks, from May 4 and into June of this year, the Trump team tore around 2,600 young boys and girls from their parents' arms. They were families coming to the United States. They were fleeing persecution. They were seeking asylum. They were going through all kinds of trials and tribulations back in their home countries. They were going through all kinds of difficulties on the path of arriving in the United States. They had, in their minds, that vision that we are a nation where almost everyone has in their family history someone who fled persecution, who fled civil war, who fled drought and famine, who fled religious persecution, so surely they would be treated with dignity and understanding as they sought asylum from the persecution they faced back home.

Instead, many were stopped from coming through the entry points to claim asylum. Many resorted, therefore, to coming across other points in between the official border points, and they faced this new policy-- this policy concocted by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, President of the United States Donald Trump, the Chief of Staff, and Steve Miller. This plan was deterrence--deterrence by afflicting children so as to send a message, if you flee persecution, do not think of coming to the United States.

Let us recognize that the whole idea of establishing a political tactic, a political goal of deterrence through the infliction of trauma on children is a dark and evil place for our government to have gone. One that--now that light has been shed on it, now that America has cried out from boundary to boundary, from East to West and from North to South and said that this is wrong, it is immoral, no religious tradition in the world would support this, the administration has ended those family separations, those children being ripped out of their parents' arms. They are now under a responsibility to reunify the children with their parents. They have been ordered by the court to have deadlines for those children under 5 and for those children 5 through 17. They missed the first and second deadlines, and 700 children are still not reunited with their parents.

Reports are coming in on the impact, the trauma inflicted on the children and how seriously this modified their behavior. A recent piece in the New York Times told the story of a 5-year-old boy from Brazil who was separated from his mother for 50 days.

Thiago used to love playing with toys of the Minions from the ``Despicable Me'' movies, but now his new favorite game is patting down and shackling migrants with plastic handcuffs, and now when people come to their home, he flees. He runs away. He hides behind the couch, afraid he will once again be torn from his mother's arms.

His story is not unique. In fact, we hear story after story after story of children and the reverberations of the trauma they have experienced at the hands of the Trump administration; children terrified of being separated from their parents for even just a few moments; children whose whole outlook on life--their whole disposition--has been modified; children afraid of engaging in a life outside the house.

The act of tearing families apart has supposedly stopped with the President's order. He has an Executive order

which I have in my hand, but what this Executive order plans next is also horrible and shameful. This is a plan to establish internment camps in the United States of America. The President has gone from family separation, tearing children out of their parents' arms, to family incarceration, where families would be detained indefinitely together. Internment camps, tent cities out in the middle of the desert or maybe on military bases. We have seen this type of policy before. We know how badly it ends for our Nation. We made a huge mistake in World War II locking up Japanese-American families in internment camps, and we are still dealing with the consequences.

After visiting one of those camps in 1943, Eleanor Roosevelt remarked that ``to undo a mistake is always harder than not to create one originally, but we seldom have the foresight.''

In this instance, we should have the foresight. We know the history of the horror of internment camps. We have the ability to stop our Nation from making a terrible mistake. We know how history will look on us if we fail to prevent this mistake and follow the President's plan for internment camps, which he has laid out.

In the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, we allowed fear and bigotry to consume us. We took away the freedom of more than 110,000 Americans. Freedom, the most basic human right, was taken away by our government from 110,000 American citizens. We locked Japanese-Americans in prison camps behind barbed wire fences in some of the most inhospitable parts of the Nation for no other reason than their Japanese ancestry. Children grew up not in their communities but behind barbed wire. Adults were torn off their land, their farms, their orchards. They were torn away from their professions, which ran the full spectrum of professions across America, to be able to earn just a few cents a day, working inside those prisons. Families who once owned their homes, had a vision for the future, had a vision for the children's future were crammed together for years in wooden shacks behind barbed wire.

In a 1943 radio interview, Dillon Myer, the head of the agency in charge of the camps, spoke out against them. Mind you, this was the middle of the war. He was in charge of the camps. He knows it is wrong; he knows it is destructive. He said: ``Public opinion feeding on prejudice and fanned by hatred and fear of the unknown will do some peculiar things.''

He went on to say: Even though the war relocation authority is responsible for the operation of the relocation centers, we are convinced that they are not good things. It is not a normal way of life. It produces many kinds of abnormal conditions that are not desirable.

Indeed, as former First Lady Laura Bush pointed out in her op-ed article in the Washington Post a few months ago: ``We also know that this treatment inflicts trauma; those who have been interned have been twice as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease or die prematurely than those who were not interned.''

One Japanese-American hero, Fred Korematsu, challenged this racist policy. He challenged it all the way to the Supreme Court. In a 6-to-3 decision the Court would long regret, it upheld the constitutionality of these camps. Seven decades later, history embraces the view of the three dissenting justices. In the words of Justice Frank Murphy:

Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no

justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It

is unattractive in any setting, but it is utterly revolting

among a free people who have embraced the principles set

forth in the Constitution of the United States [of America].

This is why a commission, created by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, found that the internment camps were a ``grave injustice'' that stemmed from ``race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.''

It is why, when awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, President Clinton said:

In the long history of our country's constant search for

justice, some names of ordinary citizens stand for millions

of souls: Plessy, Brown, Parks. To that distinguished list,

today we add the name of Fred Korematsu.

Fred Korematsu challenged the legitimacy of internment camps under the Constitution of the United States. In fact, just earlier this year, 2018, Chief Justice John Roberts said: ``Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and--to be clear--'has no place in law under the Constitution.'''

So it was called a failure of political leadership that we established internment camps in World War II, and it would be an enormous failure of political leadership if we were to establish internment camps in 2018; yet I keep hearing this very plan is being cooked up to be put on the floor of the Senate when we return. That is why I am speaking about it tonight to say: No, absolutely not; those among us who are planning such a deed will face enormous opposition, not just from me but from everyone who cares about justice in the United States of America, everyone who cares about decency and fairness, everyone who knows that the strategy of ripping children out of their parents' arms was dark and evil and wrong. We are not going to allow family separation to be replaced by family incarceration.

But here we are, with this Executive order, and it says, in somewhat bland language, ``Affording Congress an Opportunity to Address Family Separation.'' This Executive order--this order right here--is an argument for establishing internment camps in the United States of America. This strategy, laid out by the President, must not happen.

This statement says that it is the official policy of the Trump administration to detain immigrant families together. What are they talking about? Internment camps--not handcuffs for the parents where the children are ripped out of their arms; it is handcuffs for all. It is an Executive order calling on the military to provide facilities for housing the immigrant families and, if they can't find them, to construct them, if necessary. This document instructs the Attorney General of the United States to try to find a way to overturn a legal settlement known as the Flores consent agreement, which says that children cannot be detained indefinitely.

So this document lays out two strategies to internment camps: one, by getting the courts to overturn the Flores consent agreement and the second, affording Congress an opportunity to address family separation. It calls on Congress to act, to make it legal to establish internment camps. Have we learned nothing?

Here is what I have to say about this Executive order: no internment camps in the United States of America, not now and not in the future. I will absolutely resist such a strategy. This Presidential vision is anything but Presidential--this vision of a President who is operating in a fashion outside of a vision of the Constitution. I know there will be many among us who will join in this effort to resist this strategy.

So if my colleagues--any one of them--should bring this to the floor, I want them to know this will be a fight. This will be a battle. We will call up the horror of the past and say that it will not be accompanied by a horror of the present. We will not go from family separation to family incarceration. Internment would be just as wrong today as it was seven decades ago. If we allow this to happen, it is more than a failure of political leadership. It is to allow America to dwell in a deep and dark and evil place.

Some may say that families fleeing persecution are coming to America to ask for asylum, which they are allowed to do under the Refugee Convention, of which the United States is a member.

They may say: Senator Merkley, you believe it is wrong to rip children out of their parents' arms, and you believe it is wrong to establish internment camps. What would you do? Well, here is what I would do: I would reestablish the Family Case Management Program. That is a program that worked well--that worked very well--but was dismantled by this administration approximately a year ago to pave the way for family separation, to inflict trauma on children.

What is the Family Case Management Program? I don't think the President of the United States knows about this program--the program he ended--or he doesn't want to know about it. He wants to paint some other vision. So let's remind the President of the United States how this works, the program that he got rid of, the program that worked so well.

A family comes seeking asylum. They present themselves with that case. They are treated with respect and dignity because we are a nation of individuals with family histories of individuals fleeing persecution. We understand what that is like. We understand what it is like, and we treat people with decency.

The families are put into a case management program while their asylum case is being prepared. The whole point of the program is to make sure they show up for their court appointments, make sure they show up for their check-ins, make sure they have someone who guides them through the system so they understand how it works. If they understand how it works, they know when to show up and where to show up, and they know how to prepare for those meetings.

This program was created by ICE and Homeland Security. They put their heads to work: How do we treat people with dignity and respect and make sure they show up at their check-ins and their court appointments? They designed a very good program, the Family Case Management Program. So families lived their life in preparation for their appearances in court, and we did not inflict trauma on the children. We did not treat them as pawns in some broader scheme of deterrence. We treated families with basic dignity.

Then, if they won their asylum case, then they came into a country that had received and treated them with dignity. If they lost their asylum case, they went back to their country. They were deported, but they had memories of a country that treated them with respect and decency until that asylum case date arrived.

This program had such a phenomenal success rate that I was stunned when I got hold of the inspector general's report. I want to make sure that folks can see this. This inspector general's report says, based on the information provided by ICE, that the overall program compliance for all five regions is an average of 99 percent for ICE check-ins and appointments and 100 percent attendance at court hearings.

That number is stunning, and I wouldn't share it if it were anything other than from the inspector general himself or herself reporting after a thorough investigation--99 percent for ICE check-ins, 100 percent attendance at court hearings. Wow. How often do you see a program that works that well?

There is another report, and that report came when the program was terminated. That report proceeds to have some additional numbers in it. This one came after the second report. It was an afterprogram report. It is called the Family Case Management Program Closeout Report, February 2018. This was in the hands of the Trump administration even as they were planning to end the program, actually did end the program.

What it says is, the program operated for 17 months. It says it was launched in the following cities: Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, and Newark. It had different nonprofits that operated it: Bethany Christian Services, the Frida Kahlo Community Organization, the International Institute of Los Angeles, the Youth Co- Op, Inc. in Miami, the Catholic Charities of New York. They served over 2,000 immigrants. It treated them by educating them about how this worked as they prepared for their asylum hearing. It provided them with individualized needs assessments and service plans, orientation and information sessions on legal rights and responsibilities and obligations, tracking and monitoring of those obligations, including showing up for check-ins, which they did 99 percent of the time, and showing up for court hearings, according to the IG, 100 percent of the time.

ICE concluded it was an overall success. This evaluation came after the IG's report. It was no longer 100 percent attendance of court hearings. Instead, it was 99.3 percent--a 99-percent success rate, 99- percent compliance with ICE monitoring requirements, including telephonic and in-person check-ins.

When participants reported on how they were treated, they talked about positive relationships with their case managers, and it centered on the trust that was established between the case manager and the participant. That is pretty amazing success for a program that the administration shut down in favor of choosing to deliberately inflict trauma on children.

We have not one report, not one evaluation; we have two. This report from February this year, with all this positive information about how the program worked, is not easy to find online. It has essentially been hidden.

After I raised this issue of the Family Case Management Program, a person brought this report to my team and said: Hey, did you know there is this other closeout evaluation that lays out the vision of how well the program worked in far more detail than the IG report?

I said: No, I didn't know about that. Great, I will share it with my colleagues, which I am doing right now.

I don't know why it wasn't circulated. Maybe it is because it had such glowing reviews of the program the administration shut down that they were embarrassed by their argument; the fact of this report says their argument that people wouldn't show up for their court hearings is simply wrong. I imagine that is why it wasn't circulated.

In this Family Case Management Program, they talk about costs in this evaluation. They go through the different strategies. The Family Case Management Program costs $38 per day. That is per participant, per day, $38. That compares with family residential facilities at an average cost of $237 per day. That is $38 versus $237.

The program worked incredibly well, and it was far less expensive than detention--family residential facility detention. In addition, we now have some recent numbers that have been put forward. Health and Human Services has told news outlets that it costs American taxpayers $775 per person, per night to house people at tent city internment camps--$775 per person per night versus $38. Thirty-eight dollars, no trauma--a relation of respect and trust versus incarceration at $775 per night.

This Trump strategy of inflicting trauma on children is wrong at every single level you can imagine. It is a costly, inhumane, damaging program, with lifetime consequences for the children versus decency and respect and trust, and the program costs just a fraction, one-twentieth of this reported $700-plus per night.

If you have those two options, which one would you choose? Would you choose the program that costs a fraction, one-twentieth, of the tent city internment camp strategy? Would you choose a program that builds trust and relationships and has a 99- to 100-percent rate of success in people showing up for their check-ins, a 99- to 100-percent rate of showing up for their court hearings versus a program that does so much damage to so many.

I have come to the Senate floor to say one thing as clearly as I possibly can to every colleague. If you are part of the plan to bring an internment camp strategy to the floor of the Senate, I will fight that plan with everything I have. It is an evil and dark place for this country to go. We know that from our history.

We know history has said it was a failure of political leadership to allow it to have happened in World War II. I will do everything I can to make sure we do not have another failure of political leadership that allows the vision of internment camps imbedded in the President's Executive order to occur in the United States of America.

Lady Liberty says: ``Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.''

It speaks to the fact that almost all of us come from family roots that involved immigrants, involved people fleeing persecution.

In that poet's words, Emma Lazarus, goes on to speak about ``the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!''

Let's keep that lamp lit here in the United States of America. Let's treat those fleeing persecution with respect and decency. That is what is in our blood as an American. That is what is in our DNA--a vision of compassion and freedom and opportunity that knows, through all too personal of family experiences, what it is like to flee religious persecution or famine or war and what a beautiful thing it is to be treated with respect and decency if you

come to the shores of the United States of America.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern, Erin McGinnis, be granted privileges of the floor for the remainder of the day.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my legislative fellow Long Lam and intern Erin McGinniss be granted privileges of the floor.

Mr. President, as ranking member of the Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee, I rise today to discuss the Agriculture appropriations bill. This is a good bill that was drafted in a bipartisan manner and passed out of committee unanimously.

A big thanks goes to Chairman Hoeven for his hard work on the bill, as well to members of his team who worked closely with members of my team throughout this process and considered requests and concerns from Senators on both sides of the aisle.

In his budget request, President Trump proposed more than a 25- percent cut to USDA's funding. He also zeroed out a number of very important programs, including programs that benefit

rural America, along with research programs and domestic and international nutrition programs. The bill that came out of the Appropriations Committee rejects those devastating cuts that were presented in the President's budget request.

This bill, which is within the subcommittee's discretionary allocation of $23.2 billion, makes smart, targeted investments in programs that are important to the American people while keeping out controversial policy riders. In this bill we maintain funding for important rural development programs while building on the increases provided last year for rural infrastructure initiatives, including rural water and waste programs and a broadband pilot program. These programs are vital in providing rural communities the ability to support entrepreneurs to be able to grow their businesses, creating much needed jobs in the community.

The bill protects vital research programs and makes important new investments for the organic industry. The Organic Transitions Program is funded at $6 million. The National Organic Program is funded at $15 million. The Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program is funded at $37 million. All of these are historic funding levels that demonstrate the commitment to a vital and rapidly growing industry.

What else does this committee bill do?

It supports funding for farm ownership and farm operating loans. With farm incomes on the decline, access to credit is crucial for farmers to stay in business. Farm loans will serve the most disadvantaged in the farming sector, including farmers who are just starting out, as well as ranchers, minorities, women, and veterans.

I am also pleased that we were able to include $150 million in funding for the Watershed and Flood Prevention Operations Program to protect our watersheds and help to prevent floods, reduce erosion, and protect wildlife habitats. With a backlog of $850 million for projects that have already been authorized, this funding is much needed.

For domestic nutrition programs, our bill maintains funding for the Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer for Children Program, which provides access to food for low-income children during the summer months when schools are out of session. Beyond that, the bill provides for $30 million for school meal equipment grants, $18 million for the Farmers' Market Nutrition Program, and $238 million for the Commodity Supplemental Food Program. This bill also protects SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which 42 million Americans rely on. It does not provide provisions that would eliminate benefits to those who qualify.

On the international front, the bill maintains strong funding for nutrition programs such as Food for Peace and McGovern-Dole. Since its inception, Food for Peace has reached over 3 billion people in 150 countries and more than 32 million people last year alone.

I have been in the field to see the impact of this program for communities that rely on it in some of the hardest hit parts of the world affected by conflict and climate chaos and corruption. This support is a considerable feature of what people around the world see in terms of the United States reaching out to assistant communities in need worldwide.

Meanwhile, in 2017, the McGovern-Dole Program fed 4.5 million children, and it helps to support education and food security for low- income countries, as well as increasing school attendance. This program supports good health and better education for children around the world, with a particular emphasis on girls. In the state of the world today, we need programs like Food for Peace and McGovern-Dole, which have a proven track record. I am pleased that we have worked in a bipartisan to ensure that these programs are funded.

The bill in front of us supports the important work of the FDA, or the Food and Drug Administration, through a $159 million increase in the agency's funding. Included in that funding increase, among other things, is full funding for the Oncology Center of Excellence, modernizing the generic drug review process, investment and innovation for rare diseases, and the continuation of last year's work on opioid prevention activities. I know, and my fellow Senators understand, just how important that opioid addiction prevention program is.

Tribute to Jessica Schulken

Mr. President, before I conclude, I wish to take a moment to recognize an outstanding member of the Agriculture Subcommittee team.

Jessica Schulken will be leaving us in the next few weeks after almost 19 years on the Appropriations Committee. Her accomplishments are numerous. During her years on the committee, she has been a tireless advocate for our Nation's farmers and ranchers, a fierce protector for rural America, a staunch advocate for ensuring that the Food and Drug Administration has all the resources it needs, and a defender of transparency who has worked hard to ensure that these agencies are answerable to Congress.

I cannot begin to adequately express the tremendous work that she has done on this committee as clerk. I speak for many who know how sorely she will be missed. Here is a big thanks to Jessica Schulken for her years of service and dedication, and I wish her well in her new chapter of life.

The process on this agriculture appropriations subcommittee bill has been emblematic of the type of good, strong bipartisan work that we would like to see much more often here in the Senate--bipartisan work that has assisted our ranchers, bipartisan work to assist our farming communities, bipartisan work to support rural communities and rural infrastructure. So I look forward to getting this bill passed, getting it through conference, and getting it to the Oval Office.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, this moment hardly seems the time for the Senate to engage in debating rhetorical phrases of praise for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency when that agency--better known as ICE--is deeply mired in the scandal of separating children from their parents. It is ICE that partnered with Border Patrol and Health and Human Services in this diabolical situation. It is ICE that holds the parents in detention camps. It is ICE that has failed to arrange for the knowledge within the system of which parents go with which children. It is ICE that often has prevented individuals from having access to counsel, from being able to even phone their children, and charged them for using the phone.

In this situation, some 2,500-plus kids have been torn out of the arms of their parents, and this particular resolution would engage in nice phrases of praise instead of addressing itself to solving the problem.

We should right now be considering Senator Harris's act, the REUNITE Act, which would accelerate the reunification of the children, would ensure that family separation never happens again, would coordinate actions between ICE and the Border Patrol and Health and Human Services, and would set up a family case management system that worked, according to the IG of Homeland Security, to deliver 100 percent of the time when individuals had a date for a hearing--100 percent of the time.

That is why I ask my colleague to modify his request so that the Committee on the Judiciary, instead, be discharged from further consideration of S. 3227, the REUNITE Act, and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

I strongly object.