Floor Statements

Thank you, Senator Tillis, Senator Armstrong. It was a delight to travel with you. I think it is appropriate to point out how much work goes into a trip like this. To our team and our staff that put this together and to the Ukrainians that were our hosts, a big thank-you for the things we were able to see and do.

As you mentioned, this was a unique codel--the first, as I understand it, since the war began to actually go just a few miles away from the front.

We were told about stories where they would actually put a black bag over people's heads as they took them into these underground bunkers so they wouldn't be able to identify where they were later on for the Russians. They spared us that indignity and actually put us in vans with curtains that were 360 degrees as we drove into these facilities. We were then shown firsthand how this war is being fought and why this is a different war than most people expected and why the Ukrainians actually are having significant progress.

In reality, we saw drone pilots fly these drones into Russia, strike their targets, and have a pretty large impact. As a matter of fact, more Russians are being lost per month than they are able to replace.

My staff pointed out that had you put a snail on the Russian-Ukraine border the day the war started, it would actually make more progress than Russia has made. And I think that is an important story for us to come back and tell because the American people need to know this is not the war they thought it was 4 years ago.

Ukraine, we learned, is not the adversary we thought it was 4 years ago. It appeared, when this began, to be a very weak friend--a friend that was totally dependent on the United States for its support. In reality, what we found while we were there is that Ukraine is not only not weak and not dependent on the United States, they are actually now a partner with the United States in providing us things and help that will help us in the future. The benefits to the United States far exceed, in my opinion, what we have actually put into this. I think we will see that at a greater rate in the future.

Clearly, these drones have changed the way battles are fought. What Ukrainians are learning, the data they are collecting--imagine the data from

thousands and tens of thousands and millions of drone strikes. That data is all being collected, and that is just one of the small parts they have to bring forward to us.

I would also like to mention that one of the aspects that doesn't get talked a lot about is how much humanitarian aid is going to Ukraine that is nongovernmental.

While I was there, I had a chance to peel off from our group and go see a village called Hansen Village. A constituent in Utah, a friend, started Hansen Village. Obviously, it is Mr. Hansen. The amount of effort and work he has put into this so that some of these Ukrainians can start over and have hope and have a chance is overwhelming and touching.

I had a chance to talk to a couple of people in this village and hear their stories of imprisonment and torture by Russia. One gentleman had seen his son tortured to death. The stories will break your heart. But I am so grateful not just for the U.S. support but for the humanitarian support.

It just may be in Utah that we have more people who speak Ukrainian as a second language than anywhere else in the United States, and certainly it touches a lot of the hearts of Utahans.

There is a lot I would like to cover, but I don't want to dominate. Perhaps we can come back in just a minute. But I would like to turn the time over to my colleague from Oklahoma, Mr. Armstrong.

I will be brief because I want you to have the last word, but I came home convinced that we should continue finding ways to do four simple things: 1, help Ukraine to defend itself; 2, affirm NATO's resolve to use force against any threats or attacks on our members; 3, impose costs on Russia and those sustaining its war machine; and 4, one of the things we learned over there is that signals from the United

States matter. We need to send a signal and make it clear that, from Moscow to Beijing, invading your neighbors is not a successful strategy and we will push back.

I yield to Oklahoma.

Mr. President, my closing remarks are just simply this: When you make trips like this, you find out firsthand who your friends are and who they are not. And I will clearly say that Ukrainians are allies and friends, and Putin is not.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, when Utah's pioneers first arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, they had almost nothing. They had no reservoirs, no pipelines, no pumps, no Federal grants, and no municipal bonds. Their most sophisticated earth-moving equipment ate hay. What they did have was a problem. There was not enough water where they needed it, so they moved it.

Even before Brigham Young entered the valley in July of 1847, members of the advance company diverted City Creek to soften the dry ground and irrigate crops. Within a year, thousands of acres were under irrigation. As settlements grew, Utahns did not simply accept the limits of the streams flowing conveniently past them. They built ditches and canals. They diverted mountain streams. They constructed the Jordan and Salt Lake City Canal that stretched, roughly, 28 miles across the valley. Eventually, they developed water exchanges, providing farmers with water from Utah Lake and the Jordan River in exchange for higher quality canyon water that could serve a growing community.

There is something important in that history lesson for us today. These were people with picks, shovels, horses, and oxen. They had almost no capital; yet they were willing to undertake enormous projects because they understood that the limited water available to them at that moment did not have to define the territory's future. The pioneers were bold. They thought big.

We need some of that thinking again. Utah is growing. The West is getting more crowded. We are in a pattern of drought. The Colorado River is under extraordinary pressure, and the Great Salt Lake reminds us that every gallon has competing demands. Conservation has to be part of the answer. Agriculture needs to become increasingly efficient. Cities should reuse water and eliminate unnecessary consumption. We need to be better stewards of the water we already have. But I don't believe conservation alone is a long-term water strategy for a rapidly growing State.

We should also be asking: Where is the next water, and how do we get it?

I recently met with a group of experts who were working on water in the Great Salt Lake, and I challenged them to think like pioneers. What are the big ideas? What are the ideas that sound a little crazy today but that might not sound so crazy 50 years from now?

For purposes of the discussion, I asked them to temporarily take money and even engineering implementations off the table. Before telling me why something couldn't be done, I wanted to hear what might be possible. The list quickly became long. What about desalination plants? What about bringing water from wetter parts of the country? What about ground water beneath the Great Salt Lake? Can we recover water that is currently stranded from the lake? Can we reduce evaporation? Can we develop crops that produce more with less water? Can better forest management help more winter snow actually reach the ground? Some of these ideas may not work. Some will be too expensive. Others may fail because of engineering, environmental, or legal problems. That is fine, but we should know they don't work because we took them seriously enough to find out.

Utah has done big things before. The Central Utah Project moves Colorado River Basin water across the Wasatch Mountains through a remarkable system of reservoirs, tunnels, aqueducts, and pipelines. It took generations to conceive, finance, and build. Before that came the canals, and before the canals came a ditch from City Creek.

We have a tendency to look back at what the pioneers did and accomplished and romanticize it. We celebrate their courage, put their pictures in museums, and tell their stories every July. I wonder if one of the best ways to honor them is to simply think and act more like they did. Imagine telling a Utah pioneer that constructing a 28-mile canal with picks, shovels, and horse-drawn equipment was too ambitious. Imagine telling them the valley could support only as many people as the existing water streams happened to accommodate.

They looked at what Utah had and started building the Utah they wanted their children to inherit. Our challenge is different, but I think our responsibility is much the same. None of this means we should build every project someone can draw on a map. We need good engineering, honest accounting, environmental responsibility, and respect for our neighboring States. We should conserve aggressively before spending enormous amounts of money to create or transport additional water, but we should not assume that today's water supply is all Utah will ever have.

The answer probably isn't one enormous project but, more likely, a combination of conservation, agricultural efficiency, reuse, watershed restoration, desalination, better storage, new technology, and perhaps, someday, bringing additional water into the Colorado River system. And there are probably good ideas we haven't thought of yet.

Utah has an extraordinary collection of engineers, entrepreneurs, capital providers, universities, lawmakers, and technology companies. I would like to see more of us working on this problem. We need our best minds to help us figure out water. Most importantly, we need to think beyond the next legislative session or election cycle. Water projects can take decades. We ought to be thinking 50 and even 100 years ahead.

The pioneers who diverted City Creek in 1847 could not have imagined millions of people living along the Wasatch Front or a modern Utah economy built around technology, manufacturing, and innovation. Fortunately, they built more for Utah than they could see, and we should too.

Our ancestors came to one of the driest places in America and built thriving communities because they were willing to move water where it was needed. Nearly two centuries later, we have resources and technology they could not have even imagined. We could use a little more of their ambition and dreaming. When Utahns look back at us 100 years from now, I hope they will say that we didn't just manage the water problems we inherited but that we started building the solutions they need.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I, too, would like to give my colleagues a shout-out. Senator Padilla and Senator Merkley, thank you for being down here on the floor with me for this first UC of my Senate career. More importantly, thank you for your work on this bill.

And a shout-out to our colleagues. We share this commonality of Western State, and it is no secret that just as I speak today, Utah is in the midst of one of our worst fire seasons--over 1,200 fires over half a million acres in our State. And with these fires come devastating floods and other consequences. And every day the threat to our communities and our lands grows substantially more severe.

That is why it makes sense to not leave a critical tool like these controlled burns off the table. You both have described how well these prescribed burns help us channel and focus these forest fires. The data, as presented to me by the Forest Service, is clear: Wildfire prevention and containment are more successful in areas where prescribed burns took place. Yet States that proactively use prescribed burns can face regulatory consequences for the temporary emissions created by the very work that prevents far greater emissions in our environment.

Our bill, the Wildfire Emissions Prevention Act, provides States with greater certainty by ensuring that prescribed fires and other wildfire mitigation activities can be treated as exceptional events under the Clean Air Act.

The people of Utah are not looking for an emissions loophole. They are looking to protect their families, communities, and land. This is about recognizing that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

We have alluded to it today, all of us have. This bill passed through our Environment and Public Works Committee 19 to 0. This is exactly what people back home want us to do, to work up these bipartisan solutions. This reflects something I think we can all agree on: States should not be punished for taking responsible action to prevent catastrophic wildfires.

I appreciate our chairman and ranking member--once again, Senators Merkley, Padilla, also Senators Boozman, Kelly. Thank you for your work on this legislation.

I also urge my House colleagues to support WEPA and help us get this commonsense legislation across the finish line.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 620, S. 5045.

I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that if Senator Van Hollen or his designee makes a motion to discharge S. Res. 852 from the Foreign Relations Committee, the Senate vote on the motion to discharge at 7 p.m. today.

Mr. President, I rise today to recognize and honor Natalie Kaddas and Kaddas Enterprises on this 60th anniversary celebration.

Natalie Kaddas, the company's second-generation owner and chief executive officer. When John and Carol Kaddas were ready to retire, they turned the company over to their son Jay and his wife Natalie. Natalie's own story is a distinctly Utah one. She attended Salt Lake Community College's Travel and Tourism program, stepped away to raise a family, and returned to the classroom again and again over the years, training in employment law, accounting, sales, and electrical technology as the business demanded new skills of her. In 2019, SLCC recognized her with its Distinguished Alumni Award. She is also a graduate of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program, and Utah Business named her one of its 30 Women to Watch in 2025.

Under Natalie's leadership, Kaddas Enterprises has grown from a regional manufacturer into a company whose products protect wildlife and power infrastructure on multiple continents. She has taken her father-in-law's original mission--protecting raptors from electrocution--and expanded it dramatically. Just this year, Kaddas Enterprises and the Kenya Power and Lighting Company launched a 5-year partnership to bring the BirdguarD line to East Africa, a region where wildlife contact with power infrastructure causes roughly 30 percent of outages. The agreement will help protect species such as the Augur Buzzard and Martial Eagle in habitats like the Soysambu Conservancy, while reducing the animal-caused electrical faults that can spark wildfires and endanger nearby communities and critical energy systems. It is Utah innovation, quite literally, saving raptors, protecting the grid, and preventing wildfires around the world.

Natalie's leadership extends well beyond her own company. She serves as chair of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Small Business Council, sits on the Chamber's board of directors and executive committee as the West Region's vice chair, and serves on the Utah District Export Council and the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business Voices National Leadership Council. In every one of these roles, she carries Utah's small business perspective to a national stage.

Sixty years ago, John and Carol Kaddas built a company in their kitchen. Today, under Natalie Kaddas' leadership, that company protects eagles in Utah, buzzards in Kenya, employs dozens of Utahns, and stands as a model of what a family business can become.

I ask that my colleagues join me in congratulating Natalie Kaddas and the Kaddas Enterprises team on 60 remarkable years; may their work continue to benefit future generations of Utahns and have lasting impact on here and abroad.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, tomorrow, Utahns will celebrate Pioneer Day, which commemorates the arrival of the first company of Latter-day Saint pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847.

For many outside Utah, Pioneer Day may seem a little unique and a strange local observance, but the values it commemorates are profoundly American and can resonate with all of us. We recognize not only a historic journey but the enduring pioneer spirit that helped shape the American West and continues to shape our country today.

The early members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sought to actualize our first freedom and something every American should cherish: religious liberty. Instead, they were driven from their homes, stripped of their property, and forced to flee into an uncertain wilderness. Thousands traveled more than 1,300 miles across plains, deserts, and mountains.

I recently walked 250 miles in remembrance of that journey, and it is true that it challenged me, but I had every modern advantage, including seven pairs of shoes, a support team, and an RV to sleep in. Their sacrifice was of an entirely different magnitude: parents buried children, children buried parents, spouses buried their soulmates. Yet they sang a song that will be sung in many church buildings across Utah on Sunday: ``Come, Come, Ye Saints.'' In that song, they sing ``All is well,'' for they had a vision of a land, as the song goes, ``far away in the West, where none shall come to hurt or make afraid; there the Saints will be blessed.''

When they finally reached that place, the Salt Lake Valley, they didn't dwell on all they had lost; they focused on what they could build. Within days, they were planting crops, digging irrigation canals, laying out streets, and creating communities where none had existed before. Over the decades that followed, they established hundreds of settlements across the Mountain West, built roads and bridges, and helped countless other immigrants travel west.

That is the pioneer spirit. That is the American spirit. It is resilience in the face of hardship. It is self-reliance married with cooperation. It is choosing to build instead of surrender.

As our Nation celebrates its 250th anniversary, I believe those values are as relevant today as they were nearly 180 years ago. Every generation faces its own frontier. Ours may not be crossing the plains, but we are still called to solve difficult problems, to contribute meaningfully to our communities, and to leave a better nation for those who inherit it.

Americans still want to build something meaningful. They still want to provide for their families. They still want their children to inherit greater opportunities than they themselves received. Those aspirations haven't changed. What has changed is that sometimes we forget the virtues and the sacrifices that are required to achieve them.

May we all this Pioneer Day recommit ourselves to remembering that heritage and channeling that spirit in our own hearts because the American story has never belonged to just one generation. It is written by each generation willing to work, sacrifice, and build for the next.

That is why the resolution I am introducing with my colleagues today is about more than honoring the past. It is about carrying forward the virtues that made those pioneers successful: faith, sacrifice, community, industry, and perseverance. May we honor their legacy by living those same values and by continuing to move our Nation forward one faithful step at a time.

Mr. President, almost 250 years ago, 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress affixed their signature to the most influential document in the history of human rights: the American Declaration of Independence.

Over succeeding generations, more than 100 other nations would model their own declaration of independence with statements that followed the American pattern of 1776. It proclaimed liberty as an unalienable right in what Walter Isaacson has called ``the greatest sentence ever written.''

Among our unalienable rights, the document declared, are ``Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.'' Defining liberty and giving definition, substance, and legal guarantees of that right has been one of America's greatest ongoing commitments to the betterment of humanity. And at the forefront of that pantheon of liberties the Declaration affirms has been the right to believe and practice religion according to the dictates of our own conscience.

Four decades ago, 160 of 170 international constitutions were modeled, in whole or in part, on the American model. Freedom of religion is guaranteed in principle, if not in fact, in 97 percent of those constitutions.

When the first colonists arrived in the New World, religious freedom existed in theory, like that of John Locke, but not in political practice. Roger Williams founded Rhode Island on the principle of sole conscience in 1636, and 150 years later, in 1786, Thomas Jefferson authored the pioneering Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom:

Almighty God hath created the mind free and manifested his

Supreme will that free it shall remain.

The State legislation he proposed therefore decreed that no person shall ``suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all [persons] shall be free to profess . . . their opinions in matters of religion.''

It was a long journey from Jamestown to Plymouth Rock, to that Virginia statute, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

America has made great progress, but the road has been, at times, harrowing for those people at the margins of our mainstream.

Quakers were hanged in Massachusetts in 1659. Baptists were imprisoned in Virginia in the 1770s. Catholic convents and schools were burned in 1834. My own people, the Latter Day Saints, were mobbed and murdered in Missouri and Illinois in the decade to follow. And Jewish people have been the victims of discrimination and violence from the founding to the present.

One of the lessons to be learned from this history is that you can legislate religious protections but you cannot legislate respect or compassion or bonds of charity. Yet religious freedom hinges on these virtues.

Our public discourse, however, has never tipped so precariously into what Arthur Brooks has called a ``culture of contempt.'' If you think you sense something alarming in the air, the statistics say you are right. A March 2026 Pew survey reveals the distressing fact that Americans view their fellow Americans with more hostility and suspicion than is the case in any democracy surveyed.

The United States is the only place surveyed where more adults describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad, 53 percent, than as good, 47 percent. We can do better. We have to do better.

Yes, as members of this national community, we have the right to espouse our values--religious, moral, or political--without hindrance or constraint. That also means we must accord to others the right to espouse their values without hindrance or constraint.

Religious freedom is distinctly intertwined with pluralism because the free exercise of religion presupposes a mosaic of differing values and other life orientations.

The words ``kindness,'' ``civility,'' and ``charity'' nowhere appear in our Constitution or our Declaration of Independence, whose anniversary we will commemorate next week. That is because those values were presupposed by the Founders.

This grand experiment in democracy required for its organization and requires for its continuation a willingness to build bridges of understanding, as well as defend principles to which we are committed.

Dr. Matthew Holland has written of how civic charity is deeply embedded in our thoughts; John Winthrop, leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, of Thomas Jefferson, America's apostle of religious liberty, and of Abraham Lincoln, who so powerfully invoked the better angels of our nature at a time of national crisis.

We will never achieve consensus on the particulars of our religious commitments or our lack of religious commitments, nor should we. Our pluralism is a source of our strength and should be a source of pride.

However, we can honor our founding principles by returning to the particular kind of faith they did have in common: faith in the essential goodness of each other and one another.

The psychologist Jamil Zaki has written: Cynicism is a lack of faith in people. Skepticism is a lack of faith in our assumptions. Charity is the only way whereby we flourish in our differences, even as we work together for a more perfect Union.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

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

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to waive the mandatory quorum call with respect to the cloture motion on the motion to proceed to Calendar No. 311, H.R. 7147.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 3697 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that there be up to 2 minutes, equally divided.

Mr. President, I rise today in support of my amendment to create a pilot program to address the shortcomings in the locality pay system that are impacting Utah and likely impacting all of you in your military installations and all of your Federal employees around this country.

The outdated locality pay formula has several flaws in its metrics. In my State, it doesn't take into account blue-collar workers. It doesn't even take into account cost of living.

My amendment creates a pilot program for OPM to use Utah's situation as a case study on these pay disparities to improve the formulas for all of us. It is a top priority for Hill Air Force Base and a top priority for me. I suspect, in many of your cases, it is a priority as well.

I urge my colleagues to vote for my amendment.

Mr. President, my thanks to my colleague from Michigan. I think it is clear that we share the objective together.

I also want to point out that I do share your concerns and am anxious to work with you. In my perfect world, we would do this in conference because every day this is not figured out is a day that our troops are not getting the

appropriate pay. If that doesn't happen, let's work together; let's find that common ground between the objective we are trying to accomplish here and the safeguards that you are worried about.

I yield back my time.

Vote on Amendment No. 3697

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, Tremonton UT, is a quiet town in the Bear River Valley, known for, among other things, the Box Elder County Fair, now celebrating its 100th year. It is the kind of place where folks wave as they walk past, where neighbors look out for each other, and where life feels far from the noise and the chaos of other parts of the country.

But on Sunday, August 17, that peace was shattered. Sergeant Lee Sorensen and Officer Eric Estrada, two devoted public servants, responded to a domestic disturbance call. In the line of duty, both were shot and killed while protecting their community. Their loss has left a hole not just in the families but in Tremonton and across Utah.

Earlier today, we laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in their honor. It was a humble reminder that sacrifice, whether on foreign battlefields or the quiet streets of our towns, is what preserves our freedom.

We all know policing is never easy. Officers step into the unknown often with seconds or less to decide between life and death. Domestic calls are among the most dangerous. That night in Tremonton, Lee and Eric faced lethal fire. Yet their courage saved lives. A deputy and his K-9 were injured but survived. Others made it home because Lee and Eric did not.

Sergeant Sorensen, a 16-year veteran, was known as steady and kind. He checked on grieving neighbors, looked out for late-night grocery store employees, and every year rode his bike in the county fair parade, tossing candy with a smile.

Officer Estrada, just 31, was a husband and a father, known for his humor and compassion and for putting people at ease.

Together, these men embodied the best of Utah law enforcement: service rooted in responsibility.

To give you perspective, the Tremonton-Garland Police Department has just 17 people, officers and staff together. They didn't get to stop and grieve. They had to carry on, leaning on each other and on a community that has shown incredible kindness.

At their funeral, thousands lined the streets in the rain. Blue ribbons appeared on homes and storefronts, and money was raised for their families. That is Utah at its best: neighbors locking arms and lifting one another.

Utah has always honored sacrifice. My pioneer ancestors climbed Ensign Peak in 1847. They looked out over a barren desert and imagined what could be: a thriving home built on faith, family, and community. They didn't have much, but they had courage. They knew the future would demand hardship and unity.

Sergeant Sorensen and Officer Estrada carried that same pioneer spirit. They stood watch so others could rest. They chose duty over comfort. They walked into danger so others could walk in peace.

President Kennedy famously said:

Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can

do for your country.

Lee and Eric lived that creed. And as President Ronald Reagan reminded us, freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. On that quiet street in Tremonton, they stood against that extinction.

Deputy Allred, who was shot and survived, said while recovering:

If I could ask one thing to come from this senseless

tragedy, don't forget how much love and support is being

handed out right now. Communities are coming together.

Kindness and love are being shared. Keep this moving forward,

and don't stop ever.

That is the charge before us. Our mission is to ensure Lee and Eric are remembered not as headlines but as symbols of Utah values and American courage. And our commitment should be to work for solutions to better support our law enforcement, strengthen protections for families and individuals, and bring peace of mind to our hard-working citizens. So let us pledge today: Sergeant Sorensen and Officer Estrada will not be forgotten. Their service, their laughter, their sacrifice live on in us. May we honor them not only with our words but with action worthy of their examples.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

I know of no further debate on the Brown nomination.

I understand the Senate received H.J. Res. 89 from the House.

I move to proceed to H.J. Res. 89.

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