Floor Statements

Mr. President, last week the Senate watched the House and the American people watched the House because the House was on the verge of taking away access to healthcare for 24 million Americans. Then last Thursday, a week ago from today, the House said: We are going to postpone that vote. We are not sure we have the votes to take healthcare away from 24 million Americans, but maybe we will vote tomorrow, Friday.

That was 6 days ago. Friday came, and the House said: No, we are not going to do that vote today because we don't have the votes.

Why didn't they have the votes? Because across the country, millions of Americans said that taking away healthcare is the wrong thing to do--to take away healthcare from Medicaid expansion, the Oregon Health Plan; to take away healthcare by restricting standard Medicaid as it existed before ACA; to take away the healthcare bill of rights that people so much appreciated; to undermine the ability of low-income working families to buy policies with significant subsidies on the exchange--all of that.

The House set it aside. I thought that was tremendous because this week, we are not going to have a diabolical bill destroying healthcare here on the floor of the Senate. But the majority party decided: No, we can't go a week without destroying healthcare, so we are going to put up this Congressional Review Act that would take healthcare away from 5 million mostly low-income women who gain access to healthcare through Planned Parenthood. We won't bring up on the floor the bill that failed in the House for 24 million Americans; no, we will just focus on 5 million mostly low-income women and take away their healthcare.

That is what this vote is about right now, later today. Clearly this attack on healthcare for women across America is wrong, just as it was wrong to try to destroy healthcare for 24 million Americans. It is an attack on women's right to choose what to do with their own bodies. It is an attack on the basic decency and compassion of the American people.

Since 1970, the title X family planning provider network has been dedicated to providing individuals with comprehensive family planning and critical health services, such as screenings for breast and prostate cancer and sexually transmitted diseases.

Just in 2015 alone, title X provided basic primary and preventive healthcare services, including Pap tests and breast exams and birth control and HIV testing, to more than 4 million low-income women and men at nearly 4,000 health centers across the country. That is a huge impact on the health of the individuals served through title X.

In 2010, title X services prevented 87,000 preterm or low birth weight births. I can tell you, when my wife Mary was carrying each of our two

children, I so much hoped that we would not have a complication that would result in a low birth weight birth or a preterm birth in which the child might not even survive. So failing to provide that care is really setting back not just the health of thousands of babies but maybe affecting whether they live or die.

Title X services prevented 2,000 cases of cervical cancer. That is a big deal, cervical cancer, and it is a good deed to have title X services preventing it.

For 40 percent of women in America, their visit to a title X family planning health center is the only healthcare they receive annually.

So let's be honest about what repealing this rule means. It means family planning providers can be discriminated against by States that want to withhold Federal funding from family planning providers for reasons other than their ability to offer family planning services. It means less access to quality care and less access to affordable care.

By overriding this regulation, Republicans empower States to pick and choose who provides services on a criteria that has nothing to do with the quality of care patients receive. States have done this in the past, and it resulted in dramatically fewer women accessing critical family planning and healthcare services.

We know what this is about. It is about any Federal funding for Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides care and resources to 5 million women every year. They have been doing it for 100 years. And they are the target. But what has been their mission? Their mission has been to provide easy and affordable access to address reproductive health and enable women to make their own decisions about their healthcare. But now, thanks to this Congressional Review Act proposal before us, that principle is under attack, that principle of easy and affordable access to women's healthcare and women's control over healthcare choices, to keep the politicians out of their choices. This resolution is about putting the politician in charge of the individual healthcare decisions of women in America, and that is just wrong.

I encourage my colleagues to take a close look at this. You were spared having to vote on eliminating healthcare for 24 million Americans, but now you are required today to vote on eliminating healthcare for 5 million women--mostly low-income women--in America. Are you going to attack the healthcare of those women? Are you going to injure the babies they are carrying? There will be more low birth weight and preterm babies. That is the wrong thing to do.

Vote no.

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

Madam President, here in America we hope that families will have the opportunity to build successful lives in preparation for a beautiful retirement. That involves many different factors. It involves the solvency of Social Security. It involves the foundation of a good, living-wage job. It involves, certainly, the question of whether, through one's life, they are able to save for retirement.

This has become more and more important over time because fewer and fewer jobs have a retirement pension plan. Without that, it is really incumbent on the individual to be able to succeed to put money aside, and we know how difficult it is for an ordinary working family to have the extra funds to be able to put into a retirement account. Certainly, we want to make that as simple and as easy as possible. But what we know is that the simplest strategy--which is to be able to save through your work, to be able to have funds automatically deducted from your paycheck so you never actually get it in your hands--is often unavailable.

According to one 2013 study, 40 percent of small business owners themselves had no retirement savings, 75 percent had no plan to fund their own retirement, and of those who are working for employers who hire and have 100 or fewer employees, more than 60 percent--62 percent of the workers--do not have access to a work-based retirement plan.

We can imagine the difference between going to work at a job where the employer says: Hey, we have a retirement plan. You just need to sign this document, and you will be part of it. Please sign up. After a few months, if you feel you can't afford to keep setting those funds aside, you can change what you are doing. You have that flexibility. You can choose between options for different types of investments. But it is all right there. It is all very easily accessible. All you have to do is do it. The difference between that and a situation where there is nothing in the workplace--no benefit in the workplace, no retirement structure--is that in that situation it becomes a much more complicated undertaking.

Fifty-five million Americans--nearly half of private sector workers-- work for employers that do not offer any form of workplace retirement saving or pension plan. Roughly 45 percent of working-age households, half of which are headed by someone between 45 and 65 years old, lack any type of retirement account asset.

So if there is no structure to make it simple to plan for retirement, it is more likely that one goes into those golden years without any form of gold; that is, without the resources in the bank to back up Social Security.

We know that more than half of the folks who are on Social Security depend on it for more than 90 percent of their income. Or, more simply stated, for more than half of Americans in retirement, Social Security is essentially their only source of support, and it is often not enough to maintain even the minimal essentials of life.

Why is it that so many businesses don't set up a workplace plan? What it

really boils down to is complexity for the employer. A lot of small businesses don't have a human resources person. They don't have an extra individual who can do the administrative work to set it up. Maybe the plan requires a match, and the employer isn't sure they will be able to afford a match. There are all sorts of reasons that this is complicated. It is difficult either financially or just in terms of additive overhead for a small business. So they don't set up the plan.

We know that if they had a plan, employers would participate. We know that because in States that have plans, the employers participate. In addition, the General Accounting Office did a study in 2015 which found that the overwhelming majority of workers would participate in an employer-sponsored retirement plan if they had the opportunity to do so.

So this brings us to the fact that many States are saying: Let's make it easier for employees. There are 30 States that are looking at the possibility of the State setting up a retirement plan that wouldn't be attached to a single employer, so that an individual could carry it with them. For example, imagine that your teenager has their first job serving yogurt--one of the jobs that my daughter had--or as a lifeguard at a local swimming pool or serving coffee--those first service jobs they get. What would happen if, from that first job, 3 percent of their income was placed automatically into a retirement account--a retirement account that they could control the options of, a retirement account where they could increase the amount of their income to go into it if they wanted, or a retirement account that they could always opt out of if they chose to do so. But if they were automatically enrolled, we know the vast majority of individuals stay in the plan. If you go, then, automatically from job to job to job--and in our economy that is the way it works; people don't sign up with one company and serve there for 30 or 40 years--in every job 3 percent was being automatically deducted. Then when you actually went into retirement, you would have a sizable nest egg to complement Social Security.

That is what States are looking at. That is what they are pursuing. In more than half of the country, States are considering legislation to create a retirement savings opportunity for small business employees who do not have a work-based plan. Seven States, including my home State of Oregon, are already working at implementing these plans. On July 1 of this year, Oregon is going to launch its plan with a voluntary pilot group, and then it is going to expand to employers with 10 or more workers in 2018 and finally to all employers in the State in 2019.

Under this plan, employees who do not have an employer-provided savings account will be allowed to save part of their paycheck in their own personally managed accounts, and it will be automatically deducted unless the employee decides to opt out. Once it expands to all employers, 800,000 Oregon workers are expected to have access to a State-sponsored retirement savings program. Again, this will be an automatic-in, opt-out strategy to make it really simple.

In Oregon, 95 percent of our businesses are made up of small businesses. More than half of our workers are employed by those small businesses. So this is a pretty good arrangement to facilitate this opportunity.

Now, here is something that we may not immediately think about. When an employee saves for their retirement and is, therefore, financially better off in retirement, it reduces the cost of government programs. Within the first decade after these plans are established, total State spending on Medicaid could drop by $5 billion. In Utah, a recent study found that the State would save $3.7 billion for five essential government support programs--not just Medicaid--over the course of 15 years.

When I first read about Medicaid costs dropping because of a retirement plan, I said: How does that work?

It turns out to be very simple. If you have saved money and are financially better off, you are not in a position where you would be in the Medicaid Program, thus reducing the number of people who are in it. This study found that over 10 years, for the States that are already working to implement plans, California would save more than half a billion dollars; Maryland would save more than $100 million; Connecticut and Oregon, about $60 million a piece; and Illinois, a quarter of a billion dollars. So that is just an interesting piece that we should be recognizing--that when families do better, not only do they do better, but they lower the cost of government programs, which I think many folks here, on both sides of the aisle, would say would be a terrific thing.

Then there is this principle of experimentation at the State level. Why would we in this Chamber, having failed to provide an automatic-in, opt-out opportunity as people move around the country to various jobs, having failed to do a Federal version of this, stop our municipalities and our States from experimenting to see if this is something that will increase the success of our families? Why would we stop a State from experimenting?

Now, I hear all the time here about States' rights. I hear all the time about how States are the place for experimentation, to see what works and what doesn't work, innovation. Give them the opportunity to try things. Well, this Congressional Review Act proposal says the opposite. It says: Let's stomp out experiments by our municipalities. Let's devastate and decree that you cannot experiment and innovate at the State level on a very significant challenge facing America. So whether you want families to succeed or whether you simply believe in the power of local innovation and opportunity, you should be against this proposal.

What this proposal is about is this: There is a twist in the national retirement law known as ERISA that an employer might possibly have liability related to an employee signing up for a State-sponsored or a municipality-sponsored account. Well, that pretty much puts a wet blanket over employers signing up under these State plans or under these local plans, because the thought that you might have liability for something you have no control over doesn't sound like a good place to be. So to correct or clarify this, a regulation was issued and it should be obvious why it is right, which is that the employer will not have liability over provisions of a State- or municipal-sponsored retirement account. They didn't set it up. The employer didn't advocate it. The employer is not choosing where the investments go within the account. They are not deciding which companies' retirement plans get to participate as options or whether there are even company retirement plans. The employer is not doing any of that. The employer is simply the host. The whole point of the plan is to make it very easy for the employer, because that has been the burden in the past of an employer- by-employer plan. In this case, it is just automatically set up.

In States like Oregon, they are setting up a pilot project, where employers are willing to experiment and be a part of it so they can learn from that. Then, they can design a better plan for larger small businesses, those that have more than 10 employees. Then, they can make it, after having worked the kinks out of it, work for everyone, including very small employers. If along the way they run into an obstacle, they can pause and work on that.

This is absolutely the best in policy strategy in America. Give municipalities, give States the opportunity to experiment, and on an issue that can help families thrive, help our young ones thrive.

I know that my son and my daughter are going to be better prepared for retirement and in a better financial position if, in every job they pursue in Oregon, they are automatically saving 3 percent of their income--or more if they choose to or less if they opt out. But certainly, the vast majority of workers, once in a plan, stay in the plan. It is kind of how it is with deductions on your Federal and State taxes. When it comes out of your payroll automatically, you get used to it, you adjust to it, and you say: Hey, that works.

So, to my colleagues, please oppose this Congressional Review Act proposition that will squash innovation by municipalities, and its companion will squash programs by States--programs that are very valuable, both for us to understand possible important policies to help set a platform for the success of our families, and it is very important

to the families themselves. Please vote no.

Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, the most important words in our Constitution are the first three words. Our Founders made sure that, when the Constitution was written, those were displayed--``We the People''--in super-sized font so that, generations later, we would not forget what our Constitution is all about.

Our Constitution was not crafted to create a government that would make decisions by and for the powerful. It was not crafted to create a government that would make decisions by and for the privileged. That was the power of the ``we the people'' vision, as President Lincoln so eloquently stated, ``a government of, by, and for the people.'' Well, that is the vision we have the responsibility of maintaining, and it is a vision that is facing a dramatic test in this coming week--a test that affects the integrity of this body, a test that affects the integrity of the Supreme Court.

Back in January of last year, a Supreme Court seat came open. A Supreme Court seat for which the President had a responsibility to nominate a replacement, a new Justice to serve on the Court. We here in the Senate had a responsibility--a responsibility to exercise advice and consent. That meant that we would vet the nominee, that we would research, have a committee hearing, have a committee vote, and then forward it to the floor, where we would have a floor debate. But for the very first time in the history of the United States of America, the majority party decided that they would not exercise their constitutional responsibility, that they would instead steal this seat from the Obama administration, wrap it up, pack it into a time capsule, and send it into the future, in hopes that they would be able to succeed in packing the Court by having a different President, a more conservative President, proceed to fill the vacancy.

I am going to go through the 16 cases in our history where there has been a vacancy during an election year, and in 15 cases, the Senate acted. But last year, this Chamber refused to act, for the first time, in trying to exercise a seat-stealing, Court-packing scheme, and that diabolical act against our Constitution will have its final chapter of discussion next week. I think it is important that the Members of the Senate understand the history of the United States of America and the setting in which this debate is going to occur.

If you read the Constitution from start to finish, nowhere does it say that the Senate has the option of refusing to consider a Supreme Court nominee in the final year of a Presidency. This strategy was announced within hours of Judge Scalia dying. And why would the majority choose to reject their responsibility under their oath of office? Why would they choose to do that? Certainly it wasn't because Merrick Garland wasn't qualified. He hadn't been nominated yet. Certainly it wasn't because there was a precedent because there was no precedent in U.S. history for stealing a Supreme Court seat.

Here is what transpired. The majority said: This might be a nominee who will fight for the ``we the people'' vision of our Constitution, and we don't want that because we are committed to a different vision-- a vision of government by and for the most powerful people in the United States of America--and we want to make sure that the Court has a 5-to-4 majority to keep turning the Constitution on its head, destroying the vision that this Constitution, our Constitution, was designed for.

Well, the President proceeded to carry out his responsibility despite the fact that the majority said: We are not going to consider your nomination because we are not going to honor our responsibilities under the Constitution.

Despite that, the President said he would honor his responsibility, and he nominated Merrick Garland on March 16.

The story here in the Chamber was that if he was on this floor, he would have plenty of votes, far more than 60 votes to be confirmed. So that kind of hardened the opposition, because there were more than 60 Senators who were going to say: Yes, let's embrace this mainstream judge who wants to fight for our ``we the people'' Constitution. But the leadership said no.

What have we seen unfold over the last few years of dark money ruling American campaigns? In 2014, we saw the Koch brothers decide that they wanted to control this Chamber, so they said: We are going to spend vast sums to elect a majority that will respond to our perspective as billionaires, coal and oil billionaires, kind of like a government by and for the powerful.

So they spent huge sums of money in Arkansas and in Louisiana and in North Carolina and in Iowa and in Colorado and in Alaska and in my home State of Oregon, and they won most of those States. Suddenly, there was the majority they had hoped for.

Then they sent a warning message to the Republican leadership in the form of this: In January 2015, the Koch brothers said: Pay attention because we plan to spend nearly $1 billion in the next election, 2 years from now, and if you cross us, you might know the consequences because we can spend money in primaries as well as in general elections.

That is the background on how the Senate majority decided to steal this seat for the first time in U.S. history.

Just to make sure we are checking all of our facts on this, let's take a look at those various vacancies. As I mentioned, there have been 16 in our history. In one group of nominations, those vacancies occurred after the election, so there was very little time for the Senate to act.

Nominee John Jay--President John Adams--was nominated on December 18. At that point in time, the new President took office in March, so there wasn't very much time, but nonetheless the Senate acted and confirmed the nominee, and, in kind of an interesting twist of fate, the nominee turned down the post.

When Ward Hunt was nominated by Ulysses Grant in December of 1872-- again, just a couple of months before the next President would come in--the Senate acted.

Let's take a look at William Woods. The nominee from President Rutherford Hayes was also nominated in December of that year, just months before the new President would come in, but nevertheless the Senate acted.

In all three cases, they confirmed the nominee within that short period of time. They debated. They vetted. They acted. They fulfilled their responsibility under the Constitution.

Now there is another group of nominees in an election year where the vacancy occurred before the election, but the nominee was nominated after the election, and there are four in that group. We have President John Quincy Adams, who nominated John Crittenden. The day he nominated him was in December of 1828--again, just a few months before the new President would take office--and in that case, it was proceeded to be acted on by the Senate. The Senate chose to postpone the action, but they acted. They took a vote. They decided.

There was Jeremiah Black, the nominee, in February 1861. There was a motion to proceed. The Senate voted, and they rejected it.

Then we have a nominee from Abraham Lincoln in 1864, and that nomination was confirmed.

Finally, under President Dwight Eisenhower, there was William Brennan, and that nomination was confirmed as well.

In all of these cases, even though the nomination occurred after the election and there was little time, the Senate acted.

There is a set of nine more nominations that occurred in an election year, and these are cases where both the vacancy occurred before the election and the nomination occurred before the election.

Nominee William Johnson under Thomas Jefferson. Final result: The Senate acted. They confirmed.

Edward King under President John Tyler. The Senate acted. They rejected that nomination, but they acted. They tabled it.

Edward Bradford under Millard Fillmore. They proceeded to again reject the nomination, but the Senate acted.

Melville Fuller--nominee under Grover Cleveland--was confirmed. And realize this was in May of that year.

George Shiras under Benjamin Harrison. He was confirmed. That happened in July that the nomination occurred.

Brandeis under Woodrow Wilson. He was nominated in January. Confirmed.

John Clarke, also Under Woodrow Wilson. Nominated in July. Confirmed.

All of these were before the election in a parallel case to the situation with Justice Scalia passing away and a nomination in the election year.

Benjamin Cardozo was nominated by Herbert Hoover. He was confirmed.

So there we have 16 cases--actually, I have only mentioned 15 so far--15 cases in our history in an election year, and in each and every case, the Senate acted--in each and every case except for the tragedy, the desecration of the Senate process that occurred last year.

Merrick Garland was nominated by Barack Obama in February. No action. The first no action in U.S. history. The first stolen seat in U.S. history.

Let's understand that this is politics out of control when Senators would ignore their oath of office, would proceed to engage in a Court- packing scheme and steal a Supreme Court seat. This is politics completely unhinged. This is driven by the dark money of the Koch brothers. This is the powerful, behind-the-scenes puppet master telling the Senate what to do because they cannot afford to have a Justice who hadn't been appropriately vetted by conservative think tanks to make sure how they will vote on Citizens United possibly get on the Supreme Court. Nobody knew how Merrick Garland would vote on Citizens United. On the Democratic side, we worried that he might sustain it. On the Republican side, they worried that he might strike it down and be a ``we the people'' Justice. But instead of engaging in responsible Senate action required by our oath of office, for the first time in U.S. history, the majority, driven by a powerful special interest, the Koch brothers, decided to steal the seat.

So that is the setting in which next week's debate will occur. We have heard some very self-righteous words coming from the majority side saying: Look how qualified he is. How could you possibly say there is anything wrong with this nomination?

Well, I asked my fellow colleagues to realize the reality of what they are engaged in, that they had a responsibility and that every Senate majority in U.S. history exercised that responsibility until last year. And it corresponds to this enormous growth of dark, secret money under Citizens United entering our campaigns. It corresponds to the threat that the Koch brothers made in January of 2015 that they were going to spend nearly $1 billion in the 2016 election.

One of our Republican colleagues said he thought the Senate should do their job. He thought we should hold a debate, we should hold a vote. And there was a tremendous pressure brought to bear on that colleague from the suppliers of this dark money, and then 3 days later he changed his position.

This is a corruption of the very foundation of our democracy, and that is why there is only one legitimate nominee who President Trump should put forward to end this act of theft, to honor the integrity of the responsibility of the Senate, and that is Merrick Garland. We don't know where he stands on lots of issues. He has been a judge who came right down the middle. He has been a judge whom everybody respected. He wasn't from the extreme. But the process of stealing the seat was to get a judge whom everyone knew where he stood, because they wanted to make sure that he would sustain Citizens United, that he would take the corporate side against the consumer time after time after time. This is why there is a tragedy unfolding right now. I urge the American people to pay attention because the very foundation of our democracy, of the integrity of our institutions are being shattered, degraded, and destroyed right before our eyes.

Those who care about the Constitution, those who care about the integrity of the Senate doing its job under its oath, those who care about the integrity of the Court must stand up and say no to this effort to pack the court.

One of the arguments colleagues made, not knowing the history of the United States, was that there just wasn't time. There was just not enough time to consider a nominee. So here is a little bit of information regarding time. Since the 1980s, every person appointed to the Supreme Court has been given a prompt hearing and a vote within 100 days. Since 1975, the average is 67 days.

So to those who said that this seat opened up in January and there wasn't time left to have the Senate exercise its responsibility, we can see that they were just presenting a falsehood, that there was plenty of time for the Senate to exercise its responsibility. To those who said that the nomination didn't come until March, there was still 10 months left. So from the time that Merrick Garland was nominated, 293 days were left in the administration.

For Kagan, consideration took 88 days; for Sotomayor, 67; for Alito, 83; for Roberts, 63; for Breyer, 74; and for Ginsberg, 51. Do we hear any numbers equivalent to 293 days?

Let's look at Thomas, 69 days, Kennedy at 65, Scalia himself at 85, Rehnquist at 89, and O'Connor at 33. They all fall into the same pattern of a couple of months for the paperwork to be done, the investigation to be completed, and the committee to hold hearings and to act. But there is Garland, with 293 days, and the Senate failing to act.

This simply reinforces the pretense put forward that there wasn't enough time, or that there was a tradition of not considering a nominee for a seat that became available in an election year, because it has happened 15 times previously in our history, and in all 15 times the Senate acted--every single one. So every argument put forward was phony, was wrong, and was based on falsehood. It was driven by dark money puppeteers of this Chamber wanting to make sure they could keep open their Citizens United money corrupting American campaigns and debasing our democratic Republic.

So to everyone who cares about the integrity of the Senate and the integrity of the Court, let this Senate know that they must return to respecting this institution and to respecting the Court. That means Merrick Garland must be the nominee until the Senate has acted on him, and the nominee before us must be rejected. To do anything else is to desecrate the integrity of this Court and this Chamber.

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

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

Mr. President, the most important words in our Constitution are the first three words, ``We the People.'' With those words, our Founding Fathers laid out the vision, the principles, and the foundation for our new Nation's government. It would be, as President Lincoln so eloquently described, ``a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.'' It would not be a government by and for the privileged. It would not be a government by and for the powerful. It would not be a government by and for the elite, and it certainly would not be an authoritarian government.

I believe it is more important than ever for us to recommit ourselves to that vision, a vision of a nation that measures successes, not at the boardroom table but at the kitchen tables of hard-working Americans across this land, the vision of a nation that derives its power and authority from the people.

In order to do that, we must resist President Trump's dangerous tilt toward authoritarianism. Throughout his candidacy and now within the walls of the White House, President Trump has viciously and repeatedly attacked the media. He has inflamed people's anger toward immigrants, toward religious minorities, toward refugees, and he has undermined or attacked individuals who publicly stand up to him and the shortcomings of his policies. These are four strategies used by authoritarian leaders from time immemorial to consolidate power. These are strategies that are incompatible with our constitutional ``we the people'' construction of government, and we must call out and resist these strategies.

President Trump's authoritarian leanings were there from the beginning. Like many figures throughout history, he rode into office as much on a cult personality as on the merits of his policies. It started with the nicknames and the unrestrained insults, calling opponents crooked and lyin' and phony, calling critics dumb as a rock, incompetent, crazy, or dishonest. He escalated the calls to toss out or hurt protesters at his rallies. At one point, he promised to pay the legal bills of a man arrested for punching a protester at a rally in North Carolina. Then there were the ``lock her up'' chants that he repeated himself, calling for imprisoning a political opponent. Threatening to throw your opponent in jail if you win is a strategy usually seen only with dictators.

Mr. Trump himself best summed up his populist cult personality when he said at one campaign event: ``I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?'' The scary thought is that he was probably not so far off the mark. This aggressive and unswerving loyalty is a challenge to our ``we the people'' democracy.

Let's take a look at Senior White House Policy Adviser Stephen Miller's declaration on Face the Nation last month. He said: ``Our opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the President to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.''

That is an interesting statement to make: The President's powers will not be questioned. What a bold, un-American, authoritarian statement to make because here in America, our Nation, our national government, is premised on the concept that we can challenge our leaders. It is not only a privilege, it is a responsibility. Yet Mr. Trump has repeatedly attacked this fundamental American principle and those who exercise it.

Take, for instance, his attack on freedom of the press. Demosthenes, an ancient Greek statesman, orator, and legal scholar of the third century B.C. once said: ``There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots--suspicion.''

What Demosthenes was saying is that in a democracy we don't take the statements of our political leaders simply at face value. We test those statements against the facts to find our way to the truth. In the United States, a free and open press is how we exercise that suspicion and find our way to the truth.

Thomas Jefferson believed that. He said: ``Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press.'' Our liberty depends upon the freedom of the press.

Benjamin Franklin echoed that belief when he said: ``Freedom of speech is ever the Symptom as well as the Effect of a good Government.''

John Adams wrote: ``The liberty of the press is essential to the security of the state.'' It is so essential, in fact, that the Founding Fathers enshrined our commitment to a free and open press to the very First Amendment to the Constitution, that ``Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.'' Yet what we have seen time and again from President Trump is an endless attack against the fourth estate, against the press. He said: ``The media is very unfair. They're very biased.'' He complained on FOX News last August.

He attacked the New York Times in that same interview, not for the first or last time, saying: ``You look at The New York Times, I mean the fail--I call it `The Failing New York Times.' ''

Apparently any news story critical of the President is now ``fake news.'' He tweeted in February: ``Any negative polls are fake news.''

And when asked about leaks from the intelligence community during last month's press conference in the East Room, he said: ``The leaks are absolutely real. The news is fake because so much of the news is fake.''

His staff has gotten into the action, too, pushing at one point the Orwellian term, ``alternative facts.'' During an interview on NBC's Meet the Press, Kellyanne Conway said: ``Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts,'' and, in the administration, ``we feel compelled to go out and clear the air and put alternative facts out there.''

The White House has taken their fight with the media so far as to block access to outlets they disagree with, banning outlets such as CNN, POLITICO, the New York Times, and Los Angeles Times from an off- camera press briefing last month.

But of all of President Trump's relentless attacks against the media, the most disturbing to me was when he tweeted in February: ``The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!''

President Trump, I have a message for you: A free and open press is not the enemy of the American people. A free and open press is the salvation of our democratic Republic. It is an essential warrior in our Republic against fake news, charlatans, and those who would use fake news and attacks on the press to advance authoritarian government.

I thought my colleague from Arizona, Senator McCain, made a very apt analysis when he said that suppressing free speech is how dictators ``get started . . . when you look at history, the first thing that dictators do is shut down the press.'' Senator McCain went on to say: ``If you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press.''

So this is a major concern, this attack on the media, and particularly an attack on news organizations that work to vet their reporting before they

share it with the American people. In other words, we are in the ironic situation that the very groups under attack by President Trump are the groups that work hardest to get true facts, actual facts, vetted facts, carefully fact-checked information to the American people. That is the foundation for a national dialogue: carefully vetted information so that we know when we read it, it is reliable. That is the type of news we need more of in this Nation.

Mr. Trump's authoritarian tactics aren't just limited to his war on the media. His second approach is to attack and scapegoat immigrants, religious minorities, and refugees ever since he stood in the lobby of Trump Tower and said:

When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their

best. . . . They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime.

They're rapists.

Since then President Trump has made it his mission to turn the American people against Mexican immigrants, to make them the enemy. He has talked about the ``bad hombres'' flooding across our southern border, stealing our jobs, committing crimes, and murdering American citizens. In his mind, the people coming from Mexico are all dangerous, violent cartel members transporting an endless supply of drugs across our country in order to ruin America. But this storyline is completely at odds with the facts. First, drug cartels do not ship their products into our country through the backpacks of immigrants.

Recently I traveled with a congressional delegation to the U.S.- Mexico border to examine this issue. The experts on the border told our delegation that drugs come into the United States through freight, in trucks, and through tunnels--not through backpacks. What this means is that a proposal to build a wall, whether it is 20 feet high or 30 feet high, will be absolutely useless in diminishing the flow of drugs into our country.

I will tell you what else they told us. They said that an end zone defense does not work against drugs. If you want to stop the flow of drugs, you have to work carefully with regard to everything from the moment they are being manufactured or shipped into Mexico until they migrate north. That means you have to work in close cooperation with the security agencies of Mexico, with the police, and with the intelligence agencies of Mexico. That cooperation requires a very close coordination between respected partners, and disrespecting the partners of Mexico is the best way to damage the ability to intercept drugs that are coming into the United States.

We also know that the underlying premise of there being a flood of Mexican immigrants coming into our country is false. A 2015 study from the Pew Research Center found that between 2009 and 2014, there was a net outflow of 140,000 Mexican immigrants from the United States. They were migrating from the United States to Mexico, a net outflow. A more recent Pew Study determined that the number of undocumented Mexican immigrants in America has declined by more than 1 million since 2007. If you take the span during the Obama administration, there was an outflow, not an inflow--the exact opposite of the story line the President is presenting.

What about those violent crimes being committed by undocumented criminals? The data does not support the President. In fact, the New York Times reported that ``several studies, over many years, have concluded that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States.'' Between 1980 and 2010, among men aged 18 to 49, immigrants were one-half to one-fifth as likely to be incarcerated as those born in the United States.

When you look closer, the attacks on immigrants fall apart, as I have pointed out, but that is what authoritarian leaders do. They create a false enemy, and they use the perception of that enemy to generate hate and fear. They use that hate and fear to consolidate power. It is our responsibility as citizens, as the press in the United States, and as legislators to resist this authoritarian strategy of President Trump.

Another of his strategies is to attack religious minorities in our country and abroad. Take for instance his pledge on the campaign trail for a ``total and complete'' shutdown on Muslims entering the United States. As we know, Mr. Trump followed up on this approach after the election by asking Rudy Giuliani to help fashion a legal Muslim ban.

During a FOX News interview, Mr. Giuliani said:

Trump called me up. He said, Put a commission together.

Show me the right way to do it legally.

To attempt to meet constitutional muster, Trump aimed his ban at immigrants from seven Muslim-majority nations.

Rudy Giuliani went on to say in that same FOX News interview:

What we did was we focused on, instead of religion,

danger--the areas of the world that create danger for us,

which is a factual basis, not a religious basis. Perfectly

legal, perfectly sensible. And that's what the ban is based

on.

But, as William Banks, the director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism at Syracuse University, observed, ``Since 9/11, no one has been killed in this country in a terrorist attack by anyone who emigrated from any of the seven countries.''

The President's own Department of Homeland Security recently reported that citizens from the countries listed in the Muslim ban are ``rarely implicated in U.S.-based terrorism.'' In fact, the report concluded that individuals who died in the pursuit of or who were convicted of terrorism were far more likely to be U.S.-born citizens than to be immigrants.

Here is the great irony and the tragedy of President Trump's effort to demonize Muslims: Instead of protecting the United States, he is damaging the security of the United States. His attacks feed perfectly into and therefore strengthen ISIS's recruiting strategy of claiming that the United States is at war with Islam. Video of his speeches and public statements, especially Trump's call for a Muslim ban, has already been featured in ISIS's recruiting tools. In addition, it weakens the Muslim leaders we are seeking to partner with in taking on ISIS. It undermines those leaders' support from their own countries in their cooperating with the United States.

Trump's strategy does double damage to American security, and I wish his impact against religious minorities stopped there. I wish it stopped long before there because it is incompatible with the fundamental premise, the fundamental values of the United States of America, which is religious freedom. Yet, throughout the course of his campaign, he gave voice time and again to the views and opinions of White nationalists and anti-Semites. He did not directly attack the Jewish community, but his White nationalist rhetoric and actions have had the effect of doing it indirectly. When he needs news or information, he turns to the White nationalist Breitbart News--a fake news source which has infamously attacked American Jews with stories like ``Bill Kristol: Republican spoiler, renegade Jew'' and another one that attacked Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post, which read: ``Hell hath no fury like a Polish, Jewish, American elitist scorned.''

But President Trump does not just tap into the Breitbart White nationalist themes; he brought the former executive chair of Breitbart, Steve Bannon, into the White House as his chief strategist and then appointed him to the Principals Committee of the National Security Council. This individual has no business being anywhere near the Capital of the United States and certainly not on the Principals Committee of the National Security Council. Bannon is a man who has not only been embraced by White supremacists for his views, but according to testimony from his ex-wife, he has said he does not want his children going to school with Jewish kids and had once asked a school administrator why there were so many Hanukkah books in the library.

If you think this theme has not had a real effect on our country, you are wrong. When Donald Trump was elected, the KKK and other White nationalist groups celebrated. They felt free to come out of the shadows. They felt bold enough to hold an annual White nationalist conference right here in Washington, DC, at the Ronald Reagan Building, steps from the White House, because they finally felt like they had one of their own in the Oval Office.

These nationalist groups are so emboldened that we have seen more

than 100 bomb threats called in to Jewish community centers around the country since January. We have witnessed the desecration of Jewish headstones in cemeteries in St. Louis and in Philadelphia.

Last month the President, speaking to a roomful of State attorneys general, said he condemned these threats. I applaud him for condemning them. But then he turned around and said: ``You have to be careful, because the reverse could be true.'' What did he mean by that? Commentators have suggested that the President meant by ``the reverse could be true'' that the bomb threats, the Swastika graffiti, and the desecration of Jewish burial sites might actually be the work of Jewish Americans to generate criticism of President Trump. There is no evidence of that, and I certainly do not believe it to be true. What I do believe is that a ``blame the victim'' tactic is reprehensible and in itself an anti-Semitic strategy.

The President has also dedicated a significant amount of time to trying to make the country fear refugees, to demonize refugees. Many of us grew up in a world in which Lady Liberty's words of ``give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free'' stirred our hearts because, unless you are 100 percent Native American, you are tied in through your parents, your grandparents, your great- grandparents, your ancestors. You are tied to those who immigrated to the United States, who came here, often fleeing persecution, often fleeing famine. This Nation gave them a place to stand and in which to build a new life and thrive and hand down a better, stronger nation to their children. That is a property of our history. That is a value deeply rooted in our hearts.

The President, instead, has dedicated his energy to attacking refugees, those, like our ancestors, who came here, fleeing persecution and fleeing famine, especially Syrian refugees, who are fleeing for their lives in search of a safe haven. He has falsely claimed they represent a ``great Trojan horse'' that threatens the safety of Americans. Mr. Trump says these victims of war have to be subjected to extreme vetting because we have no idea who these people are or where they come from. The fact is that we do know who they are. We know exactly where they come from because before they can come here as refugees, they already go through extreme vetting. It takes 18 months to 2 years of vetting, on average, before refugees are given tickets to come to the United States of America, and if at any point during that 18 to 24 months something does not add up, they do not get the tickets.

Now, if ISIS or another terrorist organization wants to get people who are dangerous into our country, they do not go through an 18- or a 24-month vetting process. No. They come on tourist visas or student visas or business visas. Going through the refugee process would be the worst possible way to do it.

As an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute reminded us in October of 2015, of the 784,000 refugees who have been resettled in our country since September 11, 2001, 3 have been arrested for planning terrorist activities. None of them got past the planning phase, and only one of those three was talking about potential attacks here in the United States. The others were talking about sending money and weapons to al-Qaida. In other words, no one has been injured by those 784,000 refugees.

These are just some of the pieces of the President's authoritarian strategy to demonize groups, to create hate, to create fear, and to try to consolidate power. As a result of his activities, we have seen waves of hate crimes and violence and bigotry sweep across our Nation.

Latino and Latina students in our schools and in our classrooms have been forced to confront classmates' bullying and taunts, chants of ``build the wall'' and ``go back to your country,'' and graffiti sprayed on walls to ``build the wall higher.''

We have heard reports of verbal and physical attacks against people of the Muslim faith.

A woman at San Jose University lost her balance and choked when a man attempted to rip off her head scarf.

A Muslim student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus reported having a knife pulled on her.

A Muslim teacher in Georgia found left on her desk a note that read that a head scarf is not allowed anymore and that she should hang herself with it.

Within the last 8 weeks, four mosques around the country have been burned to the ground.

Just recently, a man in Kansas went into a bar, hurled ethnic slurs at two Indian engineers, and shot them, killing one and seriously injuring the other.

As I mentioned earlier, since January, there have been more than 100 bomb threats against Jewish community centers.

Throughout history, we have seen this tactic used by an executive here, an executive there, by a dictator here, a dictator there, in country after country, to characterize minority communities as a threat to be feared in order to make the body politic afraid, to make them angry, and to make them willing to support authoritarian exercise of power.

What is our job? It is our job to expose this strategy, to call attention to this strategy, to address the myths that are used to instill fear and the falsehoods that are used to instill hatred. It is our job to oppose this authoritarian game plan in every way possible.

The third leg of President Trump's authoritarian attacks are ones that go against public opposition to him and attack the protests of the people of the United States. What was the President's response after millions of people in cities all around the country--and all around the world, for that matter--joined the women's march to stand up for the fundamental values of peace, tolerance, and equality? His response was a rebuke and a dismissal. He tweeted:

Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression

that we just had an election! Why didn't these people vote?

Well, President Trump, they did vote, and they all voted overwhelmingly for your opponent, by a 3 million-vote margin.

We saw similarly disparaging responses from Republican lawmakers like the Facebook post from a State Senator in Mississippi who said:

So a group of unhappy liberal women marched in Washington,

D.C. We shouldn't be surprised; almost all liberal women are

unhappy.

After countless citizens around the country began showing up at townhall meetings to make their voices heard, what was his response? He dismissed these engaged citizens as ``so-called angry crowds,'' and then he tweeted: ``Professional anarchists, thugs and paid protesters are proving the point of the millions of people who voted to make America great again!''

I have held a lot of townhalls since January, many of them filled beyond capacity with regular citizens who are deeply distressed by what they are seeing in our country. At one townhall, more than 3,500 people showed up. We had so many people that the hundreds of folks who couldn't get in had to stand outside the building in the cold, listening. We took a speaker and put it in the window so those outside could hear, and they watched through the windows.

This is ``we the people'' government. This is American citizens saying: Your strategy, President Trump, is not OK. Your strategy to divide us into factions in America and to pit one faction against another, to demonize groups, to incite hate is just wrong.

I find it truly disheartening to see the President attacking citizens exercising their voice, which is often the most basic civic duty.

President Jefferson said there is a mother principle for our government, and the mother principle is that the actions of the government will only reflect the will of the people if each and every citizen has an equal voice. We know, in the modern day of campaign financing, some citizens and, indeed, often some noncitizens--that is, massive rich corporations--have a very loud voice compared to the average citizen. So citizens, to compensate, are saying: We are going to show up. We are going to take our time and our energy and we are going to join together and we are going to send a lot of emails to Capitol Hill, a lot of letters to Capitol Hill, but we are also going to show up in the parks and the streets to

march in order to say this strategy, this authoritarian strategy, or this strategy to take away healthcare from millions of Americans is absolutely unacceptable. And the President somehow is living in a fantasy world where he thinks they are paid? I don't think so. I don't think this last weekend, when 800 people showed up at Redmond, OR, to my townhall, that a single one of them was paid--not a single one.

When we look across the country and we see the 7-year-old who wanted to be at a townhall because he doesn't want us to cut funding for PBS in order to build a wall, he wasn't paid, or the Muslim immigrant who risked his life for our Nation in Afghanistan as a military interpreter and now wants to know ``Who is going to save me here,'' he wasn't paid.

American citizens are using their voice as designed in our ``we the people'' Constitution, but in the mind of our President and in the words of his adviser, Stephen Miller, his powers are very substantial and will not be questioned, not even by the citizens and voters of this great Nation.

Well, they are being questioned, massively, by citizens raising their voices in every possible way.

American citizens everywhere are deeply disturbed by what they are seeing unfold in our Nation. They fear we are headed down a dark and dangerous path that will betray the founding principles of our ``we the people'' government, and they have every right to be anxious and concerned.

There have been allusions made by a number of experts to Mr. Trump's actions and the early days of Vladimir Putin's regime and especially his relentless war with the media. All of these are reasons citizens are fired up, raising their voices to oppose the authoritarian tactics of this administration.

While the President seeks to dismiss the legitimacy of these voices, I stand here today to praise those Americans for standing up, for taking on their responsibility as citizens to create a powerful, courageous chorus, a public stand against the authoritarian strategy of President Trump--his strategy of attacking the media, his strategy of attacking immigrants, his strategy of attacking refugees, and his strategy of attacking religious minorities.

A friend sent me a message the other day saying:

I'm more devastated daily. I can't believe the Republicans

are not stopping this, saying something. How can this be

happening? Don't the Republicans see what's happening? I weep

for my kids.

Millions of Americans across the country are feeling those same fears. It is up to all of us here, imbued with the awesome responsibility to speak for and represent the people of this Nation, to stand up against advancing authoritarianism. It is right for us to fight for a free, open democratic republic, with a ``government of the people, by the people, for the people.''

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I appreciate the opportunity that my colleague from Hawaii has given me to ask a question. Particularly, I appreciate his willingness to be on the floor making this case because being the guardians of clean air and clean water in the United States of America is an incredible responsibility, and the individual we place in this position as Director of the Environmental Protection Agency is going to make decisions that will affect the life and death of millions of American citizens, that will affect the quality of life of millions of American citizens.

When the Director of the Environmental Protection Agency proceeds to say we are to fight for the mercury standard, that means that fewer children will be exposed to a persistent neurotoxin that stunts the development of our children's brains. On the other hand, if that individual says: I am not concerned about that or I think I will just look the other way because I want to help the fossil fuel industry make a few more bucks, and he decides that weighs more heavily than the health of our children, then the health of our children is impacted. That is true with one form of pollutant and another, and they are just across the landscape. This is an incredibly important position. That is why understanding the viewpoints of the nominee is so critical.

My understanding is that the individual who controls access to the emails in Oklahoma is the attorney general; am I correct in that understanding?

So we have a situation where an individual has accepted a nomination from the President for this incredibly important position and then has turned around and said: By the way, I am the guardian of the gate for the very records the Senate needs to see in order to determine if I am a fit character for this position, and he says: No, I will not allow the Senate to see my records.

My question to my colleague from Hawaii is as follows: Just the fact that a nominee, accepting a nomination and knowing the Senate has a responsibility to vet the nominee, who turns around and says, but you can't have access to my records, shouldn't that in itself disqualify that individual from consideration?

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to engage in a colloquy with the Senators from Hawaii and Rhode Island over the course of the coming hour.

Mr. President, I believe that will be charged to my time, but I have asked for that to be the case.

Mr. President, in this conversation about these emails, the thing that keeps striking me is that our fundamental question is, Is the individual, is the nominee, given his record in Oklahoma, going to be an advocate for the environment, an advocate for the health of the citizens of the United States of America, an advocate for upholding clean water and clean air that have done so much to improve the quality of life for Americans, or is the individual, Scott Pruitt, going to be, instead, an advocate for the oil companies and the coal companies and the gas companies? That question goes to the heart of whether the individual, Scott Pruitt, is fit to carry this responsibility.

The American people have been very pleased with the enormous changes in the quality of the environment over the last 30 or 40 years, and it has added a tremendous amount of improvement to their lives. Here we have somebody who, possibly, is not going to advocate and fulfill the responsibilities of the office but who is going to use the office as director of the EPA as an extension of the complex matrix of fossil fuel companies and work on their behalf and not on the people's behalf.

I will invite my colleagues, if they have insight or questions related to this question of whether Scott Pruitt is going to serve the interests of the people or the interests of the fossil fuel companies, to feel free to weigh in.

My colleague from Rhode Island put up the web. Maybe ``web'' is a better word than ``matrix'' because it looks like a giant spiderweb. What is being ensnared in this spiderweb, in this web of denial, in this ``denial beast'' as you have labeled it, is the truth.

What the complex group of organizations does is to put out information from every possible direction. They hold conferences; they hold workshops; they write letters to the editor; they write opinion editorials in our newspapers; they organize research--all so that it can reverberate in a way that an ordinary citizen hears from here and here and here the same lie--the lie that it is not clear whether carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is damaging our environment.

Here is the truth: We know very clearly the damage that is being done by burning fossil fuels, by burning natural gas, by burning coal, by burning oil, but there is so much money, so much profit, that they can build this enormous web of organizations to mislead the public, and that is half of it.

Then there is the second chart my colleague put up, which lays out these funds of dark money. This is really about the corruption of our democratic Republic. Maybe if I come over here, this will be in the same frame of reference. These funds flow through in a fashion that they contaminate the debate among citizens in election after election after election. This dark money is corrupting the very soul of our democracy--our elections.

Here is the interesting connection. Right now, a judge has ruled and said: ``There was an abject failure to provide prompt and reasonable access to documents requested.'' Our nominee is in control of these emails, his own emails. He has been stopping access to them because he has that power as attorney general of Oklahoma because he is afraid of the information the public will learn from his communications.

The lines on the chart that my colleague from Rhode Island put up showed his connection to fund after fund after fund. In his communications with these groups, which may possibly be among the communications that the judge has just said will be released to the public, wouldn't it be interesting to find out what he said related to those organizations? Was he serving the public, or was he serving the fossil fuel industry?

This information will be available next Tuesday, but the majority leader has said, essentially, that he is willing to deny Americans the right to know the truth about Scott Pruitt. He is willing to deny Americans the right to know the truth about these emails. He is willing to deny Americans the right to know about these leaks between organizations and whether Scott Pruitt served the public trust or served the fossil fuel industry, served the Koch brothers.

It is an offense to this body and it is an offense to the American citizens' right to know that we might be voting tomorrow without getting the information necessary to make a considered judgment on this nominee.

Yes.

Mr. President, I appreciate the questions from my colleague from Hawaii. As we stand here tonight, I think about how Hawaii is a State completely surrounded by water. It is very vulnerable to changes in the environment, very vulnerable to the introduction of invasive species, very vulnerable to changes in the acidity of the ocean, which is affected by carbon dioxide, and very vulnerable to the rising sea level.

I appreciate so much that as a citizen of Hawaii as well as now a leader for the voice of the State here in this Chamber, he keeps going back to his fundamentals of concern for our broader environment.

As you were asking this question, I was thinking about President Richard Nixon creating the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. He recognized that we all share ``a profound commitment to the rescue of our natural environment and the preservation of the Earth as a place both habitable by and hospitable to man.''

Well, that is a pretty clear statement that things were in trouble and we needed to operate a rescue. I think about that in the context of growing up in Oregon and, as I grew up, through my church and through my Boy Scout troop, we would go and do different projects to try to clean up messes that had been left. One of those was that we had a problem with these plastic six-pack rings that held all of the six cans together and the birds that were on the Pacific Flyway would stick their head through one of these plastic rings that would have held the top of a soda can, and they wouldn't be able to get it off, and they would end up choking or dying. Also, these plastic rings were being digested by the animals, and it was affecting them.

Then we had these flip-tops where you would open a can of soda by pulling off a triangular piece of metal and it would be a little hook that would sit on the beach or the pathway, and then somebody would step on it and cut their foot open or an animal would eat it, and this nice little curved object would tear up their throat and kill them. Those issues of: Why? Why do we have to operate with these consumer products in the fashion that are creating these specific hazards? The answer was: We didn't.

There was a bill in the Oregon legislature, and we eliminated the plastic rings that birds were sticking their heads through. And then we had a proposal--and I can't really recall if was done by initiative or by the legislature--to eliminate these flip-tops. The industry said: You cannot eliminate these flip-tops. People will not be able to open their cans of soda. It will be a terrible tragedy for America. There is no solution. You cannot touch this. Adamantly, they said: Nothing can be

done. It is an impossible problem to solve.

But we passed the law. We adopted that law, either by initiative or by the legislature, and a magical thing occurred. Within what seemed like a few days--maybe it was a few weeks--those peel-off flip-tops disappeared and were replaced by a different mechanism that opens that same triangle, but stays attached to the can.

Well, I have seen this time and again where there is a proposal where we need to improve our habits as humans, and as we are engaged in making our consumer products more complimentary to the environment, we are told: It can't be done. It will be too expensive. It will be too difficult. And then, when we say no, it can be done, and we pass a law, the solutions appear. And everyone says: Oh, that works just fine.

So now we don't have those plastic rings. Now we don't have those peel-off flip-tops that sit on the ground.

But we would go out in my Scout troop or in my church group and we would clean up and we would think that this would be so unnecessary to have these, and I saw the changes that occurred.

Then people said: What about all of these aluminum cans and glass bottles that are sitting all around here on the pathways around our State. Oregon had a strong ethic for the environment, but we were littered by all of these aluminum cans and steel cans back then, and also by glass bottles and broken glass bottles. If you have cleaned up a broken glass bottle, you know that it is real a pain to do that. And if you step on the shards from a glass bottle, you regret that somebody else shattered it and left it on the ground.

So we said: Why can't we change that? So the legislature put forward the idea and said: Let's just put a deposit on this so when you turn it in, you get 5 cents back. So we had the first bottle bill in the Nation, and that bottle bill got a huge percentage of those cans and those bottles returned that were left out in the public. And if somebody did leave something in the public space, somebody else would come along and say: There is a nickel; I will grab it and return it.

I must say that the amount of deposits in Oregon hasn't kept pace with inflation. When my kids were small, I would say: There is a bottle; grab it. There's a nickel. And they would say: It is just a nickel, Dad. A nickel isn't what it was three or four decades ago. But nonetheless, it still was an innovation that served as well.

About that same time, Oregon was worried about the developments of its beaches because we had a huge public trust with the beaches. The beaches belonged to all the people in the State, but the law was a little bit vague in this regard. But there was a provision that said that essentially public byways would remain public byways, and those beaches were established then by law in Oregon as belonging to all of the people of the State, and that access would be available to all of the people in the State. So nobody could take a piece of beach and say: This is mine. It belonged to everyone. So we gained our public beaches during that time period.

Then, someone else said: Well, look, we are seeing what is happening with congestion in some other States. And, with apologies to my fellow Senators from California, a lot of Oregonians turned to California and said: We are seeing a lot of sprawl, we are seeing a lot of congestion, and maybe we can do something about that and change the way that development occurs.

So under the governorship of Tom McCall, who, by the way, was a Republican and who, like Richard Nixon, believed in the environment--it was Richard Nixon who was President when we did the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, and we established the EPA, and it was the Republican Tom McCall who preserved the beach bill and the bottle bill and this land use planning bill that said: Let's put a boundary around each town and city, and you will not be able to build outside of that boundary so that we don't have sprawl. And some said: Well, we want to still have the right to build anything. So a compromise was struck. And it was that the tax rate outside of those boundaries would be much lower. So, with that, the farmers said: That is a sweet deal, we will take that. And the forest industry said: We will take that. Meanwhile, it meant that our city started to develop more densely with intense services, and we avoided the sprawl that had been experienced elsewhere.

I mention each of these issues--the bottle bill, the beach bill, the land use bill, the fact that we got rid of the flip-tops--because these were strategies to make us be able to operate in a more sustainable fashion, in accordance with the vision that Richard Nixon laid out when he created the Environmental Protection Agency.

Let me read that one more time. He said that we all share ``a profound commitment to the rescue of our natural environment and the preservation of the Earth as a place both habitable by and hospitable to man.''

He will.

I appreciate that question. It is something we have witnessed unfold over the last two decades. It was not that long ago Republicans--both parties--for example, would stand up and say: We have a serious threat to our planet. That threat is the temperature of the planet is increasing, that we are suffering the impacts of methane and carbon dioxide pollution, and we must address that threat, but in the last few years, we have seen a steady diminishment of Republican commitment to address that threat. What does that correspond to? It corresponds very precisely to the

growth of dark money from the fossil fuel industry.

I hate to lay out this story because it is offensive to anyone--any patriotic American who wants to see government of, by, and for the people--to hear this story about the massive corruption of our body politic by this dark money.

If I go back a few years and look at a set of campaigns the last time I ran for office, that dark money became involved in Senate campaign after Senate campaign after Senate campaign after Senate campaign, and it very much had an impact on the composition of this body. As those races were won with dark money from the fossil fuel industry, the willingness of some individuals to stand up and speak truthfully, forthcomingly, and powerfully about the challenge to the environment diminished and diminished and diminished. That really has to change. It is why we have to take on this role of dark money. It is the factor that means there is no longer a Governor McCall--a Republican who is fighting for the beach fill, a Republican who is fighting for the bottle bill, a Republican who is fighting for the land use bill to make our environment work better.

As a kid, we had rivers in Oregon you couldn't swim in, and now you can. Now, they are not perfect. They still show a touch of humankind on them, but the point pollution--the pipes full of toxic materials that went in the river--those are gone. What we have left primarily is nonpoint pollution, which is a much harder thing to tackle, but even that we are working to control through buffers and a variety of regulations to try to clean that up. We have made big improvements.

That, to my colleague from Hawaii, I would have to say is the factor that has changed this body.

I will.

I appreciate the Senator's chart because I think it demonstrates, in a much more precise way, what I was describing, the corrupting role of dark money. Here, the Senate has illustrated how that money was really unleashed by the Citizens United decision and how the impact has been dramatic, just squelching the ability of my Republican colleagues to share this effort to create a sustainable planet.

I think, when we are asking for these emails to be reviewed before we vote, we are asking the question: Does Scott Pruitt share the mission that Richard Nixon stated when we created the Environmental Protection Agency? If you are going to head the Agency, do you share the mission? We want to know whether Scott Pruitt has, in Richard Nixon's words, ``a profound commitment to the rescue of our natural environment.'' We want to know whether Scott Pruitt has a profound commitment to the preservation of the Earth as a place habitable to mankind. We want to know whether he has a commitment to the preservation of the Earth as hospitable to mankind.

Henry David Thoreau kind of summed it up like this: What use is a house if you don't have a tolerable planet to put it on? That is a good question. It is a commitment to the fact that where we live is just not the house, the structure of our bedroom and our kitchen and dining room, where we live is on this beautiful blue-green planet. That is our home, and we must care for it just as we do the structure of our house.

When I ask this question: Is Scott Pruitt committed to the mission of rescuing our natural environment, I think there will be answers to that in these emails. That is why we should see these emails, as the judge has said that we should see those emails. He said there was an abject failure to provide prompt and reasonable access. By whom? The person who blocked it was the attorney general of Oklahoma, who is the nominee whose record we are examining--the attorney general of Oklahoma. The reason this body hasn't had these emails, the reason the American public has not been able to answer the question: Are you committed to the mission of the Environmental Protection Agency, is because Scott Pruitt prevented us from being able to answer that question.

He has been quite clear in other circumstances which amplify our concerns. On the Agency he has been nominated to lead, he describes himself as a ``leading advocate against the EPA's activist agenda.'' Just with those words, we sense a certain hostility to the work the EPA does to try to clean up the air, clean up the water, and hold polluters accountable. Activists. Isn't it a good thing to fulfill the mission you are charged with doing? It is not a pejorative. It is an important commitment to work hard to fulfill the responsibilities of the office.

That is one piece of evidence, but here is another. Devon Energy sent a letter to Scott Pruitt and said: Would you please make this the position of your office and address it to the Environmental Protection Agency, to the Honorable Lisa Jackson, head of the EPA.

Here is the letter as it was sent to Scott Pruitt by Devon Energy, saying: Won't you take our position as your position. Here is the letter that was sent on. This is the first page. There was a longer amount to it. As we can see, these paragraphs in yellow were lifted 100 percent over here into the letter. There was one sentence that was dropped out in the course of this lengthy letter. I think it is less than 5 percent of the letter was dropped out. Essentially, he took their letter and printed it on his stationery as the position of the attorney general on behalf of the people of the State of Oklahoma.

So I asked him in the hearing whether he felt he was representing Devon Energy and making his office an extension of this corporation or whether he was serving the people of the State. He had earlier said he would like to hear from everyone and get all sides of something. He said: Well, I consider, in printing Devon's letter as Oklahoma's attorney general's letter, simply advocating for an industry that is important to Oklahoma--so making the oil position the position of the attorney general's office.

I said: Well, earlier you stated that you liked to hear the various sides of an issue and consider the input. Whom else did you talk to about this issue before you simply took the position of the oil company?

The answer was: No one.

So we can only conclude that, at least in this one instance, the nominee before us didn't look out to the people he was representing as attorney general. He didn't look after the body of law, the body of opinion, the body of effects. He didn't consult with anyone, except one organization--Devon Energy.

I must say, this is evidence, at this moment, of not serving the people, as an officer of the people is committed to do, but serving a company. So is this an anomaly or is this essentially the way he operated day in and day out? The answer is in the emails that we do not have. That is why it is a travesty if we vote tomorrow without getting those emails next Tuesday and enabling the public to examine them.

We normally have 30 hours of debate postcloture after we officially close debate. We don't quite close it but say there is another 30 hours of debate. That is what we are in right now, and that is why we are here tonight. Wouldn't it make sense to suspend this debate until after the citizens of the United States of America have a chance to pour through those emails and know the answer? Is this what we

can expect; that we will have an Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency who is serving Devon Energy and the Koch brothers and this dark money cartel or is he going to serve the citizens of the United States of America? That is what we want to know the answer to.

I will.

One of the things that I want to return to is why we are so concerned about this complex matrix of corruption, of dark money changing the outcome of campaigns, changing the makeup of the Senate, changing the type of rules that are adopted and the laws that are passed, because behind it all is a rising tide of pollution that is changing the chemistry of our air and changing the temperature of our planet.

This is a very simple chart here, and this shows temperature and carbon dioxide. If we look at this carefully, you can see that the carbon dioxide rises and the temperature rises. This is what has happened. The scientists have looked back hundreds of thousands of years. Carbon dioxide goes down, and the temperature goes down. Carbon dioxide goes up, and the temperature goes up because carbon dioxide is essentially a blanket.

If you increase the thickness of that blanket--that is, the density of the carbon dioxide--more heat is trapped on the Earth's surface. When we realize the age of the Earth, which is measured in billions of years, the time that we have been here in human civilization is pretty brief. And the time that we have been burning fossil fuels for energy is very brief--150 years--a very small blink of the eye.

In that time, we have changed the chemistry of the air. We have increased the size and the weight of the blanket substantially. Prior to the burning of coal, for many thousands of years, the carbon dioxide level had varied up and down, but the top level was 280 parts per million. That is this blue line.

What we see is that the carbon dioxide level has steadily climbed as we burn the coal, the natural gas, and the oil. As we have done that, the black line is going up and down. It has varied a little bit from year to year. It has steadily increased as well.

There are many folks who look at this and say that is just lines on a chart. If you project into the future, that is just a computer model. It can have different assumptions, and you can tweak that computer model. But this is a powerful, powerful explanation of facts on the ground that we are seeing every day.

Let's look at the facts on the ground. Let's set aside the computer models. Let's even set aside this chart showing temperature rising as the carbon dioxide levels rise.

What do we see in my home State of Oregon? What we see is that we have warmer winters, and those warmer winters mean that the pine beetles don't die off in the same way they do when there is a very cold winter. So they come out, and they attack more trees and more trees are killed. That is damaging to our forests. We see that effect.

What else do we see? We see a change in forest fires. Our forest fire season has grown enormously, by more than 2 months over about the last 40 years. Two months is a big additional portion of the year with fires raging, and the fires have been more intense. Partly, they are more intense simply because the forest is different.

The old-growth forests were more resistant to fire than the second- growth forests, and that is a result of our logging practices. In addition, there is the dryness of the forest. The forest is more dry. Sometimes the wood on the floor of the forest is as dry as a kiln-dried two-by-four. Then we have these weather patterns that involve more lightning, and there are more lightning strikes that are starting fires. So we have drier forests.

We have more lightning strikes. We have more dead trees, and we have more damage from these fires. We see a significant impact on our forest. How about on our farming? Farming depends on water. We have had three worst ever droughts in the Klamath Basin over the last decade and a half--three worst ever droughts. It had a huge impact on ranching in that basin and a huge impact on farming in that basin.

As we see that impact, we realize that on the frontline--on the very frontline--in the battle with rising temperatures is rural America, where we have industries that depend on our natural resources, on our forests, on our fishing, and on our farming.

Let's turn to our fishing for a moment. As the winters have gotten warmer, we have seen that in most winters--not in all but in most winters--the snowpack has been decreasing. What does that do? Partly, it affects farming because you have less water stored in the form of the snowpack, but it also affects the mountain streams. So you have warmer, smaller mountain streams for trout and for salmon.

For those who love to fish in Oregon--and so many people do love to

fish in Oregon; in fact, people come from many parts of the world to come and fish in Oregon--you now have streams that are less hospitable for that purpose.

Let's think about what is happening on the coast of Oregon. On the coast, we are a Pacific Rim State. We have the vast Pacific Ocean. Ponder this question. Is it possible that you could burn so much coal and so much oil and so much natural gas in 150 years that you could put so much carbon dioxide into the air, that the ocean could absorb a good share of that, and you could change the chemistry of the ocean?

I have to tell you this. Apologies to my colleague from Hawaii. This is the most beautiful coastline on the planet. You have these incredible mountains dashing into the ocean. You have these gorgeous Pacific waters. You have all kinds of wildlife, all kinds of fishing industry. The Oregon coast is one of the most spectacular places in the world. I must say that, in fairness, I have really enjoyed seeing the Hawaii coastline as well. It is different. It is beautiful and rugged in a different way, but spectacular.

There you are on the coast of Oregon, and you are looking out from those mountains that come crashing into the sea. We have capes--one cape after another. The cape is a big projection of land. You can stand on top of those capes, and you can see out to the horizon of the ocean. You can't see any land. You realize you can only see about 20 miles with the curvature of the Earth, but you know that the ocean goes on and on, far more than a thousand miles. And you say: That is a lot of water. That is an incredible amount of water on the planet Earth. It surely can't be possible that we have changed the basic chemistry of the ocean through the burning of carbon dioxide.

Then you talk to the marine biologists who measure what makes up the Pacific Ocean, and they tell you: You know what, the burning of coal and oil and natural gas is changing our ocean in a way that is making it less hospitable to life.

Here is what they are talking about. The ocean through wave action absorbs that carbon dioxide that we have been putting into the Earth. In fact, the carbon dioxide level in the air would be much, much higher if it weren't for the oceans pulling a good deal of it out. And then, in the water of the ocean, the carbon dioxide becomes carbonic acid.

When you hear the word ``acid,'' you say: Well, that doesn't sound very good. And you are right. That acid, then, has an impact on the ability of marine organisms to create shells. One specific example of this are the oysters on the Oregon coast. The oysters, as little babies, start to pull molecules out of the water and form shells. If the water is more acidic, it is much more difficult for them to do that, and the result is they die. They put all their energy into that effort. They can't do it. So they die.

In about 2008--the year I was running for office--we had this big die-off of baby oysters in the hatchery on the Oregon coast. It was a big scientific puzzle: What is causing this? What is the virus or the bacterium that is causing this?

The scientists got together, and with a lot of help from Oregon State University, the industry got together and they studied this, and they couldn't find that there was a virus causing this action. They started looking for a bacterium. Well, they looked. They didn't find that either.

What else could it be? It has to be one disease agent or another. It turned out that it wasn't a disease agent. It was the increasing acidity of the Pacific Ocean.

Now, this morning, the owner of that hatchery happened to be coming through DC and came to my ``Good Morning Oregon'' reception. I hold this every Thursday morning that I am here. People can show up. We have a little bit of good Oregon coffee and a warm chance to reacquaint ourselves with old friends and to hear what folks who are visiting are thinking. He said to me this morning: Buffering is now continuous.

What did he mean by that? What he meant was, when they discovered it was the acidity that was killing the baby oysters, they had to start taking this seawater--they have a big pipe that pulls seawater up into the oyster hatchery, and they have another pipe that recirculates it back into the ocean. They had to start artificially reducing the acidity of the seawater so the baby oysters could thrive. What he said this morning is: We now have to buffer continuously. The condition has become so bad, it is bad on any given day. So that is where we are.

If the acidity of the ocean has changed from the burning of coal and oil and natural gas, isn't it time for us to wake up and pay attention? Isn't it time for us, as the stewards of the environment here in terms of making laws, to be paying attention? Shouldn't we be thinking again about those words that President Richard Nixon said when he created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970; that we all ``share a profound commitment to the rescue of our natural environment.''

How are we going to rescue our natural environment from the harm of burning fossil fuels if we keep burning fossil fuels? That is the question before us, and the answer is that we can't. We have to stop.

We have to, in a modest period of time, a rather short period of time--really, in the course of human civilization, just a microsecond of time--we have to move from burning fossil fuels to basing our economy on energy from clean and renewable sources. We have to do this very conscientiously. We have to do it through grassroots action. We have to do it through a framework that we create here at the national level. Both are powerful. Let's do both.

In the middle of that is the Environmental Protection Agency. That is why it is so important that we have a Director of the EPA who is committed to the vision of rescuing our natural environment, and that is why we need to have access to these thousands of emails before we vote in the U.S. Senate.

I think that as we consider this, we need to ponder that the conditions we see in Oregon--that are derived from global warming, increasing temperatures--are not simply happening in my State. I used those examples because I come from Oregon. I represent Oregon. You can see these things right where I am, but you can look across our Nation, you can look across our planet, and see the effects everywhere.

If you take the 100 largest glaciers in the world and track their average retreat, it is dramatic. There are those, by the way, who say if you want to see a glacier at Glacier National Park, you better go soon because a number of glaciers in Glacier National Park have retreated substantially.

You can go to other parts of the country and see other impacts. For example, if you go to the Northeast, you have the challenge--just like the pine needles aren't being killed in the winter, the ticks aren't being killed, and the ticks are infesting the moose, and the moose are dying because you have these big clumps of ticks sucking the blood from the adults and from the babies. The list goes on.

Our colleague from Maine says: We are concerned about our lobsters. Our lobsters are migrating up the coast to find a temperature of water that used to be in Maine, and now they are moving north toward Canada.

You can talk to those who track insects, like certain types of mosquitoes that carry the Zika virus, and their range is spreading. There is an insect called a sandfly that thrives in Central America, that is starting to show up in the United States of America because the temperature is changing, and that sandfly carries a disease called leishmania. This disease basically is extraordinarily difficult to cure, and it is a single-cell parasite. When you get bit by a sandfly, you get an enormous number, if it is an infected sandfly, of these parasites that start eating a hole either in your organs or in your skin--very difficult to cure.

As I describe this, I am just touching the surface. I haven't talked about the Great Barrier Reef, much of which has died over the last couple of years off Australia, and the list goes on and on.

So to close, we need a Director of the Environmental Protection Agency who has that profound commitment to the rescue of our natural environment, and the preservation of the Earth as a place habitable by and hospitable to humankind. That is why we need the emails,

and that is why this vote should be delayed until they have been examined fully by the public.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Christy Veeder be granted floor privileges through the remainder of the year.

Madam President, as everyone in this Chamber knows, we are currently debating and preparing to vote on the nomination of Scott Pruitt to be the next Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

The truth is that we don't have all the information we need to make this important decision. We don't have all the facts we ought to have. That is because the nominee, in his role as attorney general of Oklahoma, worked very hard to keep the information contained, controlled, and unavailable to the Senators in this Chamber and unavailable to the citizens of the United States of America.

For 2 years now, his office has stonewalled attempts to make public the records of over 3,000 email communications with members of the fossil fuel industry. Two years ago, the Center for Media and Democracy requested these emails through the Oklahoma Open Records Act. Who is the person who decides whether to release those records? The attorney general of Oklahoma. Who is the nominee before us? The attorney general of Oklahoma.

When Democrats on the Environment and Public Works Committee requested these records from Mr. Pruitt during the confirmation process, the answer we got back was this: ``I would direct you to make a request of the Oklahoma Attorney General's Office under the Oklahoma Open Records Act.'' Now, when he encouraged us to make that request, he knew--and we shortly knew--that he had no intention of actually granting access. He was telling us to get in line behind more than 50 other requests for that information, and that request has not yet been answered. In fact, Senator Whitehouse did put in a request directly to the Oklahoma attorney general's office using the Oklahoma Open Records Act. Imagine what the result was. Did the attorney general of Oklahoma immediately release these records? He did not. Have we those records today? We do not.

But yesterday, Oklahoma County District Judge Aletia Haynes Timmons ruled on whether or not the public deserves access to these emails and deserves access to these records, and she ordered the attorney general to do his job--to release the records so that we here in the Chamber will have that information, so that the American public will have that information. Judge Timmons said there was ``an abject failure to provide prompt and reasonable access to documents requested.''

On Tuesday, the first batch of emails is going to be released to the public. That is just a few days from now. But if we vote today, we won't have that information before us. It will be too late for us to have all the facts and information we need to make a qualified decision on whether Mr. Pruitt is a fit character or unfit character to be a member of the President's Cabinet. That is exactly what the Founders of our Nation charged us with doing in the advice and consent responsibility--to determine whether a nominee is a fit character or unfit character.

So we here in the Senate are not doing our job. Under our responsibility under the Constitution, if we vote today, not having yet reviewed the information in those emails that the judge has just said must be released, we are being asked--or, more pointedly, forced--by the majority leader to rush through the confirmation of Mr. Pruitt without having this vital information.

This is a question of transparency. This is a question of exercising our authority in a responsible fashion. This is about the right of the Members of the Senate to have the information needed to fulfill their responsibility under the Constitution. This is about the right of the citizens of the United States to know Members here are doing their job and to weigh in--to weigh in with us on what they consider to be fit character and unfit character. We should not deny Americans the right to know.

That is why I will ask unanimous consent of this Chamber in a moment to postpone the vote until 10 a.m. on March 3, because that would give us the full ability to get both sets of emails and have 3 days to review them, which I think is most reasonable.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the confirmation vote on Calendar No. 15, the nomination of Scott Pruitt for Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, be postponed until 10 a.m. on March 3.

Madam President, I am disappointed with the majority leader's objection. I know all of us who serve in this Chamber want to do our job in a fashion in which we thoroughly and responsibly execute the responsibilities of our office. We can't do that without these emails. These emails have been stonewalled for 2 years. I know that if the shoe were on the other foot, there is a very good chance the advocacy for transparency would be coming from multiple Members across the aisle.

So I am disappointed the decision has been made to object to holding the vote after the time that both sets of emails have been released. But I do understand the majority leader has responsibility for the schedule for the Senate. So I am going to tailor back my request and ask that the vote be held after the first batch of emails is released. They are going to be held next Tuesday and we are going to be out next week. So under this request, no time is lost in the Chamber in considering the nomination. It does not delay any other work of this Chamber. It does not stand in the way of anything else we might do. It just means that we hold the vote when we get back, instead of holding it this afternoon before we leave.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the confirmation vote on Calendar No. 15, the nomination of Scott Pruitt for Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, be postponed until 9 p.m. on February 27.

Madam President, both of my unanimous consent requests have been rejected, as is the right of any Member. But still, there is a principle here--a principle of executing our responsibilities and a principle of transparency, a principle of understanding whether or not the individual before us is a fit character to serve in the office.

So I am going to make a formal motion, which is allowed under the rules, to extend this debate. The rules call for 30 hours of debate but provide a clause that, by a vote, we can extend that debate. I propose we extend that debate for an additional 248 hours. That 248 hours would take us until Monday evening, on the evening we return. So again, no time is lost with the agenda before this body, but we would all have the chance to review those 3,000--or at least the first batch of those emails--to determine if there is information that is related to whether the nominee is fit or unfit to hold this office.

I object.

Madam President, when President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, he recognized that we all share in a ``profound commitment to the rescue of our natural environment and the preservation of the Earth as a place both habitable by and hospitable to man.'' That is a pretty powerful commitment. That is the mission of the Environmental Protection Agency--to rescue our natural environment and keep our planet--our world, our Earth--as habitable and hospitable to humankind.

For more than 46 years, the Environmental Protection Agency has been the top cop on the beat, safeguarding our natural environment while also protecting critical aspects of public health--controlling toxic and poisonous chemicals, improving air and water quality, enhancing vehicle efficiency and emissions controls. The lists of the Environmental Protection Agency's accomplishments go on and on.

Today, we are considering President Trump's nominee for the Environmental Protection Agency. The appropriate question for us to ask is, Does this nominee hold in his heart the mission of the Environmental Protection Agency? Does he have a profound commitment to the rescue of our natural environment, a profound commitment to the preservation of the Earth to keep it habitable by humankind, hospitable to humankind?

This individual is Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt. We would like to have the full set of information about his work as attorney general that has been very relevant to this question, because the limited information we have shows that he has very deep connections and very close allegiance to the fossil fuel industry. And rather than displaying during his time as AG a profound commitment to our natural environment, to preserve it and keep it hospitable and habitable, he has instead weighed in time and time again on behalf of the polluters.

So for us to have a full sense of these connections, we need to have access to the emails and correspondence that he has generated over the last 2 years tied to the fossil fuel industry.

There are some 3,000 emails and associated pieces of correspondence-- we are not sure of the exact total, but that is a substantial body of information that has been identified--and for 2 years, the attorney general, Scott Pruitt, has stonewalled the efforts to obtain these documents. There have been repeated requests time and time again filed with his office, and his office has failed to produce the information requested under the Public Information Act of Oklahoma. Time and time again, he said no, no, no.

So then he comes to this body as a nominee to be the steward-in-chief of the responsibilities for our environment. So here in the Senate, we asked for those emails to help understand

whether he has served the public or whether he has served the polluters. That is the question before us. He said: Well, apply to the attorney general's office of Oklahoma for those emails and information.

This is rather unique. I don't know if this has ever happened in the history of the United States, the nominee saying: Yes, you can acquire that information by applying to me, back in my role as attorney general, knowing full well that he had absolutely no intention of actually providing that information.

Then yesterday a court stepped forward and said: Yes, this information must be provided. This is not the type of information that can be compiled overnight, so they gave Attorney General Scott Pruitt a couple of days--until next Tuesday--to be able to compile this information and provide it. And when it is provided, it will simply be the equivalent of PDF documents--scanned copies, if you will--of the printed copies of the emails and correspondence. Then it has to be shipped out to the group that applied for the information, and then they have to digitize it and send it out for us to have it here. It is still not searchable. Then we need time to go through it.

Well, it is convenient that we delay this vote until after we have this information because we are not going to be here next week. So whether we hold the vote at this moment, scheduled for 1 p.m., as we are leaving for a week or we hold it until when we return, on the Monday we return, it doesn't have any impact on slowing down this body. It would cost nothing in terms of the processing of the President's nominees to delay this vote until we return, at which time we will have the emails, and we will have had time to examine them, and the public will have had time to examine them, and that would honor our responsibility.

The Constitution was laid out in a fashion to put full responsibility on the individuals staffing the key agencies and Cabinet departments with the President. The Founders, the writers of the Constitution, wrestled with who should have that responsibility. They thought perhaps the appropriate check would be to have the Congress--they refer to it as ``Assembly'' in their dialogues--the Assembly decide who would be the folks staffing the executive branch at the highest levels of management. They said that was a problem because there wouldn't be full transparency. The public wouldn't be able to determine why one person was chosen or another person was chosen. There might be all kinds of trades taking place between the Senators. One might say: If you give me my choice for this Cabinet post, I will give you your choice for another, and the public wouldn't even know how those deals were being struck.

So the public accountability was honored by our Founders by saying the President will nominate, but in case the President goes off track and starts to nominate people of unfit character--unfit character--the Senate will have the responsibility to review the person's record and stop that nomination. That is our responsibility. That is the deterrence that Hamilton used, that we would take the process of this Chamber to ensure we do not confirm someone of unfit character. But to make that determination, we must have access to those emails, which are going to be distributed next Tuesday.

Madam President, I yield the floor to my colleague.

Could we have that unanimous consent request restated?

No objection.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak for 2 minutes, followed by Senator Heinrich for 10 minutes and Senator Tester for 10 minutes.

Madam President, I thank the floor staff who were here through the night last night and also the staff of the Republican cloakroom and the Democratic cloakroom. They have enabled us to continue this process at great expense to their energy and fatigue. As Senators, we all appreciate the team that has made this possible.

I also want to draw attention to a letter from 773 EPA employees, who state:

We write as former employees of the Environmental

Protection Agency (EPA) to share our concerns about Oklahoma

Attorney General Scott Pruitt's qualifications to serve as

the next EPA Administrator in light of his record in

Oklahoma. . . . Our Perspective is not partisan. Having

served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, we

recognize each new Administration's right to pursue different

policies within the parameters of existing law and to ask

Congress to change the laws that protect public health and

the environment as it sees fit.

However, every EPA Administrator has a fundamental

obligation to act in the public's interest based on current

law and the best available science. Mr. Pruitt's record

raises serious questions about whose interests he has served

to date.

Madam President, with that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Peters be allowed to speak for 5 minutes, followed by Senator Carper for 10 minutes, followed by Senator Barrasso for 10 minutes.

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

Mr. President, here we are on another evening, debating another Cabinet nominee, addressing the question that Hamilton put before us, which is whether an individual is of fit character to serve in a particular post. This effort, this advice and consent responsibility held by the Senate, is one that was anticipated by our Founders to be used rarely because the very existence of this power, they felt, would ensure that a President would nominate people who are appropriately suited to the post they would hold. So I do find it troubling the number of times I have come to the floor in these last few weeks to speak about a nominee and consider whether they are fit and to find that perhaps the individual is lacking.

Tonight we are considering the nomination of Congressman Mick Mulvaney to head the Office of Management and Budget. This is a powerful organization, and it is a very important position. It plays a critical role in the oversight and management of our Federal budget. It plays a critical role in determining what gets funded and what doesn't get funded. So with that in mind, it is important that we have a robust debate about this position and about this nominee.

To break that down a little bit, the Office of Management and Budget puts together the budget for the President. In doing so, they take the vision our President has articulated, and they build it into a roadmap to accomplish that vision because where you spend money affects what actually happens as we pursue programs here in the United States of America.

It is the Director of the OMB who works to make sure the various pieces of the Federal Government are working together like gears that mesh cleanly together and do not conflict. It is the Director of the OMB who helps to determine the cost of proposed legislation, which can advance or doom any particular proposal. It is the position of the OMB Director to review the impact of proposed regulations, and that can also have a significant impact.

I come to this conversation with a number of concerns, and the first is the position of the nominee on Social Security. For 82 years, Social Security has provided for the American people, and it has helped our Nation prosper.

On the third anniversary of the Social Security Act, in 1938, Franklin Roosevelt pointed out: ``Men and women too old and infirm to work either depended on those who had but little to share, or spent their remaining years within the walls of a poorhouse.''

That is not the vision we have today. Thanks to Social Security, our seniors have a basic income to see them through their golden years. They can live out their lives in relative comfort and security, rather than, as Franklin Roosevelt put it, ``within the walls of a poorhouse.''

In 2016, roughly 61 million Americans received over $900 billion in Social Security benefits. That is a huge injection into our economy, and it is spent almost immediately on fundamental goods. Nearly 9 out of 10 Americans older than 65 receive Social Security benefits, and for one-quarter of our Social Security beneficiaries, including both those who are single and those who are married, Social Security accounts for virtually their entire income. That would be many millions--more than 15 million Americans who would definitely be struggling in the most difficult fashion financially if Social Security didn't exist.

Retired workers and their dependents account for about 71 percent of the benefits paid. Funds also go to disabled workers. Disabled workers and their dependents account for about 16 percent of the benefits. Survivors of deceased workers account for another 13 percent or roughly one-eighth of the benefits paid.

Simply put, Social Security assists our retired workers, our disabled workers, and the survivors of our deceased workers. It is one of the best ideas America has ever put forward, but Congressman Mulvaney doesn't agree. He sees Social Security as a Ponzi scheme. Let me explain what a Ponzi scheme is. A Ponzi scheme is something where the incoming amount raised immediately pays for the benefits of somebody who paid in money previously.

We actually have a Social Security trust fund, which is the difference between Mick Mulvaney's description of Social Security and what we actually have. If we made no changes, no changes at all to increase the lifetime of the trust fund, it would continue to be able to pay 100 percent of the benefits through 2034 and roughly three-

quarters of all benefits currently promised ever after. That is if we make no changes.

If we make small changes, our Social Security trust fund is solvent for decades and decades into the future. Certainly, I think we should aspire to that vision of a trust fund that has a 75-year horizon, a full solvency.

The issue that Congressman Mulvaney raises, the idea he raises for changing how we adjust Social Security, however, isn't one of increasing the amount of wages that are subject to Social Security tax; it is not one of putting premiums on the income earned through nonwages, which is primarily income raised by wealthier Americans. Instead, it is to say to folks: Just retire later.

When you are a white-collar worker and you work in an office that is nicely air-conditioned and you have had full healthcare benefits throughout your entire life, maybe when you get into your sixties, you say, ``Well, maybe I could keep working a little longer,'' but the reality for a huge percentage of Americans who work difficult jobs, who work jobs where their bodies wear out, they don't have the choice of simply saying: I will retire in another 5 years, because they literally have developed so many issues and challenges that it is impossible to do the same kind of work they did in their twenties and their thirties in their sixties.

So that strategy of moving the goalpost on American workers, many of whom are decades already into the work they are doing, doesn't fulfill the promise and the vision of the Social Security Program.

While Social Security is a great idea, moving the retirement age to age 70--which Mick Mulvaney advocates for, from his view as someone who comes from a job that perhaps isn't as arduous as many jobs in America--is a bad idea.

This vision continues on into Medicare. Like Social Security, Medicare is also a generational promise, a lifeline for countless Americans since President Johnson signed it into law now more than five decades ago. Over 55 million Americans rely on Medicare for their health and their financial security. Roughly, 46 million are older Americans, 9 million are younger Americans with disabilities or certain illnesses.

While this program has worked incredibly well, our nominee wants to ``end Medicare as we know it.'' Those are ominous words for the 55 million Americans relying on Medicare. He also believes we have to raise the retirement age.

He told Bloomberg News in 2011: ``You have to raise the retirement age, lower a payout, change the reimbursement system.''

The problem with raising the retirement age is the same problem we have with Social Security. For American workers working hard in many types of jobs, their bodies are worn out. I used to have folks come to my townhalls and say: Senator, I am just trying to stay alive until I get to age 65, and they would tell me how they had multiple diseases and they were choosing between which disease to treat or how they had a single significant problem, but they were deciding to skip their pills every other day or cut their pills in half or perhaps go a week without their pills at all or how they were choosing not to go to the doctor when they developed a difficulty because they were afraid they wouldn't be able to afford the payment. That is not a healthcare system, but Mick Mulvaney wants to say to those folks: Oh, you reached age 65, too bad. I am providing this healthcare program another 5 years into the future. That is simply wrong, but more than wrong, it is also in direct contradiction to the promises made by President Trump during his campaign.

The contrast is incredibly stark between the President's promise to Americans that unlike so many of the folks in his party, he would not be the one to promote tearing down Medicare and Social Security. He would not be the one to promote advancing the retirement age so people who are struggling have to struggle for another 5 years. So it is a poor fit between this individual and the office and the promises made to the American people.

Another concern I have is in regard to Congressman Mulvaney's advocacy for shutting down the economy. He seems very comfortable playing Russian roulette with our economy. He and a group of other House Members brought our government to a screeching halt in 2013 because they wanted to defund the Affordable Care Act. What is the Affordable Care Act? The Affordable Care Act has enabled 20 million Americans to gain access to healthcare that they didn't have previously.

In my home State of Oregon, the Affordable Care Act has enabled about one-half million people to gain access to healthcare, both through expansion of Medicaid, known as the Oregon Health Plan, and also through the healthcare exchange and marketplace where you can compare one policy to another, shop for the policy that best fits your family, and those of modest means get credit to help pay for those policies so they can actually afford them. It is an affordable care plan that provides for a healthcare set of benefits--benefits such as the ability to keep your children on your policy through age 26, benefits such as not having an annual limit or a lifetime limit on your policy so that when you do get seriously ill, you don't run out of healthcare partway into treating your disease. It is the Affordable Care Act that ends gender discrimination in the insurance marketplaces. It is the Affordable Care Act that says if you have a preexisting condition, you can still get insurance.

I was at a fundraising walk for a woman who had a family member with multiple sclerosis. It was a fundraiser for multiple sclerosis. She said: Senator, this year is so different from last year. That was the year before the Affordable Care Act was implemented. I asked: How so? She said: A year ago, if your loved one was diagnosed with MS and they had insurance, you knew there was a good chance that your insurance was going to run out at the end of the year or they would hit a lifetime limit, and they wouldn't be able to pay for the care they needed. She said: If you didn't have insurance, you now have a preexisting condition that would prevent you from ever getting insurance.

She went on to say that the difference between last year and this year, because of the Affordable Care Act, is that now members in the MS community--those who had the disease and their family members who were supporting them all out at this fundraising walk--now knew their loved one would have the peace of mind that they would get the care they needed. This is what a healthcare system is all about, peace of mind, but Mick Mulvaney wanted to tear away that peace of mind. He proceeded to support a 16-day government shutdown that cost our country $24 billion--and to what purpose? To rip peace of mind away from 20 million Americans.

Back in 2015, he threatened to do it all again. The damage he had done--the $24 billion he had stolen from the American Treasury in the context of damaging the government with that shutdown--he was ready to do it all again in order to make sure Planned Parenthood never gets a dime from the government. To be clear, not a single dime from the government goes to Planned Parenthood for abortions. In fact, the organization that has done more to decrease abortions than any other in our country is Planned Parenthood. The government funds go for different purposes. They go to Planned Parenthood to do cancer screenings, breast cancer screenings, prostate cancer screenings, and a whole host of fundamental basic healthcare. They are the healthcare provider for 2.5 million American women. Just as he was ready to recklessly shut down the government to rip healthcare away from 20 million Americans in 2013, he was ready to defund these essential healthcare clinics serving 2.5 million Americans in 2015. That is a sign of someone who has lost their policy foundations and is acting in an irresponsible and unacceptable manner.

Let's talk a little bit about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB was in response to a big problem in America, which was that we had no one looking out to shut down predatory financial practices. It was the responsibility of the Federal Reserve, but the Federal Reserve had their conversation on monetary policy up in the penthouse--the top level, if you will. That is what the Chairman of the Federal Reserve paid attention to.

They took the responsibility for consumer protection and put them down in the basement, and they locked the door and threw away the key.

Folks kept coming to the Federal Reserve saying: Hey, there is a major concern here. We have these predatory mortgages that have these teaser rates, and they are going to destroy the families who get those mortgages. They are going to destroy their dream of homeownership and turn it into a nightmare. People went to the Federal Reserve and said: By the way, we now have these wire loans, where there is no documentation of income and people are being sold these loans that they have no hope of repaying. In addition, we have another predatory practice called steering payments, which are kickbacks to originators. So they are getting kickbacks to steer people into subprime loans with high interest rates rather than prime loans that they qualify for. What happened? The Federal Reserve ignored all of that. That is the foundation for the collapse of our economy in 2008.

So along comes Elizabeth Warren. Elizabeth Warren, as an advocate, not yet a Senator, comes to this body and said: We need an agency whose mission is to look out and stop predatory financial practices, a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and we got it done.

What does Mick Mulvaney say about this effort to stop predatory financial practices? He says it is a ``sick, sad joke.'' So I asked him about this in committee. I said: Really? This is an agency that finally is watching out for working families so they are not prey to predatory, fraudulent practices. And he said: Yes, ``a sick, sad joke.''

I said: You know, they have returned funds to 27 million Americans. What other agency has fought for Americans in that fashion--returned funds to them from folks who were operating in a predatory fashion, to 27 million Americans. I didn't change his view by raising that.

I said: You know, this agency, to those 27 million people, has returned $12 billion. There was $12 billion returned to people who were cheated; isn't that a good thing? But I didn't persuade him.

He said: You know, I don't like the way this agency is set up. I want it to be a commission rather than an individual who heads it, and I want the funds to be appropriated annually by Congress.

I can tell you exactly why he wants those provisions, because that is the way Congress, at the behest of Wall Street, can step on the airhose that supplies the oxygen to CFPB. They can stop the CFPB from functioning as a guardian, as a watchdog for consumers in America by simply defunding it.

We have a President who ran on the principle of taking on Wall Street, but Mick Mulvaney doesn't want to take on Wall Street. He wants to do their bidding, to be able to shut down this agency that is finally fighting for financial fairness for working families. Wait. We have a President who said he is going to fight for working families. Mick Mulvaney should be backing the CFPB. He should be expanding the CFPB. He should be championing the CFPB, but, no, he wants to tear it down. That is deeply disturbing.

I see my colleague, the Senator from Hawaii, who is prepared to make remarks. I am going to wrap up my remarks.

There are more concerns that I have about the policy perspectives and how out of sync this nominee is with the promises the President made to fight for working Americans, the promises he made to take on Wall Street, the promises he made to protect Social Security, the promises he made to strengthen Medicare, not to tear it down. So for all these reasons, I find Mick Mulvaney is not the right person to fill this post, and I encourage my colleagues to vote against confirming him in this capacity.

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

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

Madam President, even now, more than 2 months after then President-Elect Trump nominated Steven Mnuchin to be Treasury Secretary, I still find it hard to believe. Month after month out on the campaign trail, President Trump attacked Wall Street. He said, time after time, that he was going to take on Wall Street. He attacked his opponents in the primaries and in the general election by saying that they were too close to Wall Street and, specifically, too close to Goldman Sachs.

He said, regarding Secretary Clinton: She will never reform Wall Street. I know the guys at Goldman Sachs; they have total control. But he countered this by saying that he would do it differently. He promised to take on Wall Street. He promised to fight for middle-class Americans. He promised to drain the swamp and reduce and eliminate the powerful entrenched special interests here in Washington, DC.

But what a change can happen within a few weeks. Less than a month after winning the Presidency--I should point out, winning the electoral college but losing by a massive margin the popular vote, the citizen vote--who does Mr. Trump pick to be Treasury Secretary? A 17-year Goldman Sachs veteran, a foreclosure king--Steve Mnuchin.

So here tonight, not even a decade after the second worst financial crisis

in U.S. history, we will be holding a vote on whether Steve Mnuchin is a fit character to be Secretary of the Treasury.

What is particularly puzzling is not only the Goldman Sachs background, in contrast with the President's campaign promises, but also that this individual was a contributor to many of the predatory practices that nearly destroyed our economy in 2008, and he is someone who made a fortune throwing struggling American families out of their homes and onto the streets.

I am somewhat shocked we are here tonight and that some of my colleagues are considering voting to put a man in charge of our Nation's financial system who played such a role in bringing it to its knees just a couple of years ago.

Let's remember the massive impact on American families. They lost jobs by the millions. The unemployment rate soared. They lost their retirement savings and often they lost their homes--not just because they lost their jobs and couldn't pay their mortgage but because of the predatory design of the mortgages.

So I am shocked that I am here tonight and we are holding this vote and that we are particularly considering an individual who worked to tear down the protections and throw American families to the Wall Street wolves.

Maybe we should have a Treasury Secretary who succeeded in the past to build up the economy, not one who participated in tearing it down. Maybe we should have a Treasury Secretary who worked hard to put tens of thousands of people into homes, rather than someone who personally profited by throwing tens of thousands of American families out of their homes. I would be feeling much better about the vote we are holding tonight if that was the case because the American people have endured too much pain and suffering at the machinations of Wall Street.

I thought we had perhaps learned our lesson. We worked hard to pass the Dodd-Frank reforms that would end those predatory mortgages, that would end those liar loans, that would end those teaser rate-exploding interest rate loans that brought families to their knees, that would end the securities designed in such a fashion that you couldn't evaluate whether they were AAA or AA, that would end this process and this formulation that turned the dream of American homeownership into the nightmare of American homeownership--this nightmare in which, instead of building wealth for American families, homeownership became a predatory instrument for draining wealth from American families.

What was Steve Mnuchin doing when the Banking Committee was working to save the economy he had helped to tear down? Well, he was foreclosing on more than 36,000 struggling homeowners, conducting more than one-third of all the reverse mortgage foreclosures, running a bank with a record of discriminating against minority home buyers, running a bank with a record of discriminating against minority neighborhoods.

So for all these reasons, this is the wrong man; the wrong man because he does not fit the promise the President made to take on Wall Street; the wrong man because he participated in destroying our economy, which harmed millions of American families; and the wrong man because he wants to dismantle Dodd-Frank, which had been put together specifically to end the predatory practices, including the illegal robo-signing he participated in.

This individual has no business overseeing the financial future of the American people so I will be voting no on his confirmation, and I passionately urge my colleagues to do the same.

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