Floor Statements

Reserving the right to object, can we modify that and ask for an additional 20 minutes so the Senator from Texas and I can also be heard?

Madam President, I know the floor has been busy this afternoon with people discussing the Protect College Sports Act, and I want to thank all my colleagues for participating in a debate.

That is what this institution is supposed to be about. It is supposed to be about an amendment process, and it is supposed to be about a product that comes out of committee, and it is supposed to be about our colleagues showing up. So I want to thank my colleagues, particularly Senator Booker and Senator Murphy, who came to the floor to express their views on this bill.

I want to thank both of them. You know, I certainly agree with Senator Murphy on his long-standing effort to think about collective bargaining in college sports. He has been very outspoken on that for many years. And I want to thank Senator Booker for working with me for many, many years on this issue, and that doesn't mean that he still doesn't have reservations, but it means that he is committed to this issue writ large.

But we do see a different conclusion here tonight. And I want to thank my colleagues for passing a bill out of committee and now getting it to this threshold because, unlike my colleagues' comments before, there are several things in this bill that are really important to enshrine into Federal law at this time.

First and foremost, the Federal right to NIL and making sure that it is not State laws that have been quite onerous on athletes--that is, laws that say if you conflict with your university, your university wins and if you conflict with other issues, you don't get NIL. So creating a Federal standard is very important.

But compensation on revenue sharing is probably the most important thing we could possibly enshrine in Federal law today. This is saying, for the first time, that an athlete gets a percentage of the media rights, the ticket sales, and the sponsorship.

That has not been said before in a court case decision. It was agreed to in a settlement agreement--in a settlement agreement called Grant House v. NCAA. Now, that settlement agreement has had its ups and downs, and I hope it prevails, but I know this: We can put into Federal law that enshrinement so that the Senate is clear.

My colleagues have said: Why do this now? Well, because there was a difference of opinion, and even Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in the decision of NCAA v. Alston by the Supreme Court, said: Yes, I think athletes deserve a recognition of revenue, but Congress could step in and change that.

And my colleagues may know that the House of Representatives did try to change that. The House of Representatives did try to pass a bill that said: No, they don't deserve revenue sharing. They don't deserve revenue sharing. That is the bill the House came very close to passing.

And so tonight, we are taking a monumental step that I agree that maybe not all 100 people agree on, but I think the majority of our colleagues agree on these two principles that the Supreme Court also has spoken to, but that we are now putting in a Federal law because, as Brett Kavanaugh said, Congress could change its mind. Congress could do something differently. But tonight, we are speaking. We believe in these two things.

We also believe in a health and safety standard in Federal law, one that protects the athletes beyond the way the law works today and gives them the right to sue and hold these people accountable for any kind of health and safety violations.

This is something that my colleagues Senator Blumenthal and Senator Booker and I and others worked on diligently, and we want to continue to make sure it is enshrined in this statute. And then medical coverage for 5 years post-eligibility and capping agents' fees at 5 percent.

So my colleagues have said: Why do this? Why do this now? Well, that is because 94 percent of the DI--that is the biggest division of athletes; there are three divisions, and then other associations--94 percent of those DI programs are in the red. So that is a pretty big issue.

And the reason why it is so frustrating is there are four schools just in the State of Virginia that are putting exorbitant tuition fees on their students just to pay for college education. There are people that are cutting science programs, cutting professors, cutting other programs just to pay for college sports when, in reality, we need all those to beat China and compete--and not have an arms race in sports.

So right now, the median debt for schools in the Big Four conferences--their median debt is $120 million. What are they doing? Now, I know everybody would like to blame it on coaches, and I guarantee you there are a few coaches that need to get called out. But the main reason for this is not because we are paying athletes. It is not because we have all agreed that they deserve to have part of this revenue. This number exists because there are no sound rules that prohibit an arms race from taking place and people who are billionaires

and millionaires putting any amount of money into their school program. And our bill fixes that and creates rules across the board for everyone to follow, so that we don't have this exorbitant arms race.

Now, I will be the first to admit there is more to do on stadiums. There is more to do on other aspects of spending college sports. But we need to pass a bill tonight because we need to stop stealing money out of college and university institutions for education, for tuition, for professors, and putting it into an arms race on sports.

It is time to make sports about playing sports again and not about the money. So this bill stops the cuts to women's and Olympic sports. Why? Because who is paying the bill right now?

The No. 1 person paying the bill is a hundred programs and a thousand women and Olympic athletes because they don't make money, so the easiest way to save money in an institution is to cut them right now. And so we are trying to stop that. Our legislation says, yes, we are willing to give the college teams an antitrust exemption to pool their media rights and make more money, but only if they protect women's and Olympic sports. And just to be clear because there is a little misunderstanding about this: You don't get to have the antitrust exemption and then later cut these programs. You only get the antitrust exemption if you keep the women's and Olympic sports.

If you don't do a pooling of media rights, we also have a provision for the next several years that makes people keep their women's and Olympic roster slots--so very important aspect of the bill.

There is this big complaint about the amount of money going to coaches, and I welcome any discussion about how to fix this issue. And I want to thank my colleague Senator Lujan for the brilliant amendment that he offered in committee because, basically, it says you can only pay a coach--with fees from the education system--$500,000 a year and if you want to pay them any more than that, you have to go get somebody in the private sector to go pay that. So we are not going to be held hostage, as taxpayers, to these coaches' salaries. And in addition, we make it a requirement that you cannot transfer in the middle of the year.

Now, a lot of people have said: Well, what are you going to do about the HBCU infrastructure because they are part of Division I football? You know, the SEC and others came along and said: Oh, just kick them out of Division I. We are like: No, that is a really bad idea. We are not going to push them out of Division I football. We are going to grow their capabilities in communication because, just like other people, they want their games seen, they want their broadcast, they want their broadband, but they don't have it. So this bill includes a $900 million authorization to help upgrade the schools that have been most impacted without the communications capabilities.

A lot of my colleagues would say: Well, where is that student athlete support? I am very excited about a commission that we create in this bill to hear more from student athletes. But student athletes and their committees--and these are all the letters from student athletes from various conferences across the United States.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that those letters be printed in the Record.

So the American Conference Student Athletes Advisory Committee, Rocky Mountain Athletic Association Student Athletes Advisory Committee, American Rivers Conference Student Athlete Advisory Committee, the New England Conference Student Athletic Advisory Committee--I could keep going and going and going.

So there is support by athletes for this bill, but it is also endorsed by the United Negro College Fund because they believe that this bill will help stabilize one aspect of DI football that is really challenging, and that is the system.

It is also endorsed by the U.S. Olympic Committee, and the reason it is endorsed by the U.S. Olympic Committee is because they know we are going to help preserve Olympic sports. Now, what are we going to do when we have the next Olympics or the one after that and you literally have not trained and skilled the athletes? Some of our biggest institutions are the ones who provide 70 percent of these athletes, and so if we don't stabilize and say ``stop cutting women's and Olympic sports,'' then we are going to be standing at an Olympics where we are not winning and going to ask why.

I didn't want to deal with this issue, but when a kid from my State-- from a famous part of our State, White Pass, where the Mahre brothers won gold skiing in the Olympics because they grew up on that pass-- basically, this kid couldn't snowboard for us and went and snowboarded for Russia and won medals. I was like, this is a problem. So I am not for us losing in the Olympics because we undermine college athletics in an arms race because we don't want to put rules in place.

So the Thurgood Marshall Fund also supports this. Team USA athletes all support this.

And it is just time for us to get this issue over the top. That is really what we are talking about. It is not the final solution. It is putting a pin in the problems to stabilize the loss of women's and Olympic sports and to create the opportunity to discuss the larger structure moving forward. That is why I think we have so much support. It doesn't mean that we have solved every problem, but it means that we are on our way to solving the problems that exist and preserving the opportunities for the future.

So let's get it over the top. I am very proud of this athlete, and she is a perfect example. Okay. She is No. 1 in the world right now, and she is the pole vaulter at University of Washington.

But what if we continue to undermine the efforts of women's and Olympic sports? What if she doesn't have

that roster slot because we are too busy letting billionaires run the race and basically leave people behind? That is not what sports is about. It is about, any given day, the competition. So let's get back to playing sports again, and let's pass this legislation.

Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, speaking in opposition to the amendment, this would simply strike the entire bill and give a major antitrust exemption to the NCAA to write whatever rules they want.

I think all of us can agree here that this process isn't working with the NCAA, and Congress has intervened to set rules.

I want to applaud our colleagues for the 96-to-1 vote we just had on the Baldwin-Schmitt amendment--a very complicated part of the law, but nonetheless we can all agree. So it says to me this body can figure this out.

I urge our colleagues to continue and not strike the majority of the bill but implement it so we can get on at protecting college sports.

I urge a ``no'' vote.

Vote on Amendment No. 6758

Mr. President, urging my colleagues to support this amendment. There is nothing in the bill that says that you have to take one from the other. What this bill is about is being responsible to athletes and responsible to their injuries.

I think the Senator from New Jersey has articulated, as we know from anybody here who is on the Senate floor who is a physician, that this does happen to people much later in their lives, and they are dealing with it. This is the responsible thing to do, to set up

this fund; and it is the responsible amount that the Senator from New Jersey is suggesting. I urge a ``yes'' vote.

Vote on Amendment No. 6805

Mr. President, the Senate has worked its will tonight, and that is a rare occasion on something this complicated but this important for America's future.

I thank all my colleagues. I urge a ``yes'' vote and will speak after the vote in more detail.

Mr. President, I rise to clarify that the effect of the antitrust exemption in section 118 of the Protect College Sports Act in the event that the House settlement expires or terminates and Congress does not extend the revenue share cap.

To be clear, the antitrust immunity for enforcing and complying with sections 114 and 115 applies only to the extent that the provisions of those sections continue to have force or effect.

Senator Coons, do you agree that this is the intent of the legislation?

Mr. President, I note that the Protect College Sports Act is also critical to local broadcasters.

Right now, too many college football games are trapped behind paywalls. The Protect College Sports Act aims to change that by supporting consumers' access to TV.

And I understand Senator Moran has entered a statement in the record on this topic; and I agree with him on this, in putting college football on free TV on local broadcasting stations instead of in paywalls.

I did not, before the vote, take time to thank all the people involved with this legislation, and I would like to take that opportunity now.

First of all, I want to thank Senator Cruz for his partnership on this legislation and working to create a bipartisan bill that I think the majority of our colleagues showed tonight that they support, and I hope that we will get our colleagues in the House of Representatives to also agree on that before the end of the year.

Obviously, this legislative process is a challenging one, and we would not have been here at this moment without a lot of help from a lot of different people.

I want to thank especially Senators Schmitt and Coons for their tremendous leadership in being partners with Senator Cruz and I on this legislation. The two of them provided key input, support--debatable, argumentative points of view at various points of time. But there is no way we would have gotten this legislation over the goal line without Senator Schmitt and Senator Coons, and I just want to thank them immensely for their long partnership in working with Senator Cruz and myself.

And I also want to thank James Barton, who is with Senator Coons, because he played a key role in all of this, and I very much appreciate his support. I also want to thank key members of the Commerce Committee because they played very important roles in this: Senator Hickenlooper drafting the language and negotiation as it related to the U.S. Olympic provisions of the bill; Senator Lujan for drafting and getting amendments accepted related to the coaches; Senator Baldwin on a key amendment that we just adopted tonight by, as I said earlier, a record 96 to 1 vote, which shows that this place, when you let the right people in the room, can come to a conclusion--not just that, but that our colleagues also trust that that process can work too and rewarded that with a big, big vote tonight. So very much appreciate that.

I also appreciate the President's sports council--Randy Levine, Cody Campbell, Jack Swarbrick--all played big roles in this, probably nobody more than Randy Levine in constantly pushing the White House point of view on this legislation and Cody Campbell making sure that everybody understood that opening up the Sports Broadcasting Act was a great idea. That also seconded, obviously, by Jack, who added an AD perspective to the debate.

I also want to thank a couple of big Washingtonians who played a key role in this. Mark Few, the famous--now Hall of Fame--Gonzaga coach who was just constant--now I know what it would have been like to play for Gonzaga because he was constantly saying: Maria, it is just about getting the basics done, about eligibility, about transfer, and about basic rules. And he reminded me of that all the time. I also want to thank Washington AD Pat Chun, who took endless phone calls from us.

I want to thank WSU President Cantwell, who was in a trying situation of her own. Literally, the Pac-12 blew up, took $35 million of revenue out of her institution, and she had to figure out a path forward and engage on this legislation and try to help us all think about what is a fair way to move college sports forward, and she did that. And I appreciate her time.

And certainly Pac-12 commissioner Teresa Gould, who testified before the committee and added a lot of input about what not to do next, and I just can't thank her enough because I see even tonight some of this debate veered into the realm of what not to do.

And I hope that we can continue to make corrections on that as we dialogue with our House colleagues because the last thing that we need to do is have another Pac-12 incident. But we need to grow regional sports, grow the regional system, and make it stronger.

I also want to thank the many people on the Commerce Committee staff who--oh, I have to thank Senator Welch. Senator Welch also signing on early to the legislation, Senator Peters helping us with the Big 10, Senator Klobuchar doing the same, all of them were so helpful in this legislation.

Now to the committee staff. Senator Cruz talked a lot about how this negotiation went on for months and months and months and hours and hours a day, and he talked about Cuban coffee. All that was true.

It took a lot to keep us in a room discussing immense legal terms with a variety of conferences and individuals and athletes from all over the country. But I want to thank staff director Lila Helms, our general counsel Melissa Porter, Nicole Frazer, Phil Murphy, and Ramesh Nagarajan. Those individuals right there spent the majority of time working on this legislation.

But Shannon Smith, who served on the committee for 5 years and recently retired, she deserves a jersey all by herself. I kid with her about saying it is going to say ``Jaxon Smith-Njigba,'' but instead, it is just going to say ``Shannon Smith'' and then some name because she deserves a new title for the immense amount of effort. We would just not even have a bill on the floor tonight if it weren't for her efforts.

But Nicole and Melissa and Lila, I can't say enough about their leadership and patience in driving a process that was just fraught with different opinions. That is just all there is to it, fraught with different opinions and a lot of negotiations.

So I think it will go down in history as one of the most challenging issues because, unlike a lot of policy issues that we deal with here in the U.S. Senate, you have different issues and they follow a certain path. They follow a construct. It might be consumer versus business; it might be various things. In this case, we had a lot of different viewpoints across the entire ecosystem of sports. And if there was a characterization here, it was definitely that nobody wanted the two big divisions to run away and be a super league and continue to X out the revenue and that everybody wanted to drive some sanity back into the system.

But that sounds simple compared to what these individuals went through. So I really can't thank enough Lila Helms, Melissa Porter, and Nicole Frazer for their incredible work on this. Phil and Ramesh, great work, challenging policy, appreciate their efforts.

I want to thank Elizabeth Cuttner; Erik Eykel; Kate Sprague; Connor Jennings; Tricia Enright; Rob Blumenthal; Ciara O'Donoghue; Josephine Laing; Zoe Garrett; and Amit Ronen from our staff, who is here on the floor tonight; Ansley Lacitis, who I think got to know the entire press corps for sports across the United States and took all their questions and probably has some to feed back to them; Lauren Bazel; Seth Kolloen.

And I want to thank Senator Cruz' staff because, obviously, they worked very hard on this legislation. Brad Grantz, his staff director; Nicole Christus; Joel Wellum--I want to thank Joel specifically because Joel obviously took a lot of direct questioning, a lot of pushing by us and me particularly, and I appreciate his hard work--Michael Spierto; Ryan Cannon; and Justin Adams and Casey Contres.

So there is no way to really sum up all of the thanks in one statement. I do want to thank my colleague Senator Moran, who is on the floor tonight, because he started this effort in the committee many years ago and had great thoughts on what we needed to do and got us all pointed in the right direction and kept the dialogue moving through myself and Senator Wicker, and then as Senators Booker and Blumenthal and I continued to dialogue, and then ultimately Senator Schmitt and I, and Senator Coons and Schmitt and I, and then ultimately this legislation with Senator Cruz and I. So this long, challenged situation of figuring out how to make more sense out of college sports, I want to thank him as well.

So we definitely made the will of the Senate work tonight, and I hope we can do more of that. I hope we can find where there is the ability to solve problems. We obviously have a very big difference of opinion, but there probably isn't a bigger gulf and difference of opinion.

I say Senator Cruz and I probably disagree on 25 different issues, and that is just in the Commerce Committee, but if we can do that tonight and produce a product, I guarantee you the rest of us can.

And tonight, it is about making sports about sports again. So I thank my colleagues for this legislation and now on to working with our colleagues in the House.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I come to the floor because we are going to be voting shortly on two things this afternoon: one on a judicial nominee and, second, on cloture on the underlying substitute of the Protect College Sports Act. I just wanted to make sure that we were talking to colleagues about changes that were in that underlying substitute that we have been able to make.

I think earlier today, at 3 or 3:30, was the deadline for filing amendments. So we obviously have been working all weekend and processing amendments that were filed last week, and now we will work on amendments that are filed this week and, hopefully, make progress with our colleagues on a bipartisan basis.

But as we continue to move through the legislative process on the Protect College Sports Act, we have sought to clarify and improve the bill in ways that make clear to our colleagues the intent of what the Senate Commerce Committee and now those here on the Senate floor have tried to achieve in this legislation.

The substitute makes clear that medical coverage and healthcare and safety standards in the bill are a floor and not a ceiling. So it amends sections 106 and 107 to clarify that it cannot be construed to preclude provisions of additional medical coverage or establishment of additional health, wellness, and safety standards in the bill.

It requires that the NCAA take more responsibility in school compliance with health, safety, and wellness standards; and I appreciate this very much because I think these actions do need to have someone who can continue to improve the accountability of our academic institutions and how they are performing or not performing. It requires a Commission that we put into

the legislation to also study further health, wellness, and safety standards and consider ways to improve them.

It is making progress in a couple of other areas: the academic progress requirement, which I think is really important. This bill is to make sure that we still have student-athletes and they meet and achieve academic performance. So this requires an institution to comply with the uniform benchmarks established by the Intercollegiate Athletic Association or conference related to graduation rates and the academic process of student-athletes in order to be eligible for this retention fund.

So we are putting in more safeguards and accountability. If these institutions want to continue to have additional resources, they are going to have to prove that they are meeting academic performance.

It prevents the NCAA from weakening its standards for qualifying as a full-time student by cross-referencing terms and definitions.

So, again, there are lots of eyeballs on this legislation, and it is good because we are making and perfecting and ensuring that the language does what we think it does; and, if not, we are improving it by making changes.

The substitute also includes a role for the House and Senate Education and Labor Committees in the selection of Commission members. It does this by requiring the House and Senate leadership and the Senate Commerce and House Energy and Commerce leadership to work with the Senate HELP and House Ed and Workforce leadership in appointing the members of the Commission.

Now, this legislation does try to stabilize the college environment today as it relates to sports, but it also says we need to have a big discussion about how this continues to play out in the future. And this Commission needs to be well represented by a variety of interests. So we are very happy to add both HELP and House Education and Workforce leadership to be part of that.

And it requires the Commission to study how and whether students should get a financial stake in their own teams. Now, this is a novel idea but something I think the Commission should consider. One of the things I am very proud of in the underlying bill is the fact that we say to broadcast entities who bid on college sports--most of the time just to show football or just to show basketball--that if you are not using your rights for those same institutions to help support other programs--like, say women's volleyball or track and field--that you have to allow that institution to come up with other ways that they might enhance their revenue by doing streaming media.

Now, we think this is really important because we think there are a lot of great--I am very proud of, right now, that, I think, our UW women's pole vaulter is No. 1 in the world right now. I think I just saw that headline. But why can't the University of Washington promote their track and field if, in fact, their football Huskies contract, which--I would just say, I saw a lot of Big Ten football this weekend, trying to engage and understand, but you didn't see anything about the Huskies other than if you tried to watch that game. Why? Because nobody on the east coast even reports about what happens to west coast football. After a certain time, they just don't report about it. This bill is about trying to empower these other sports--particularly that drive women and Olympic sports--to make their own revenue streams.

So one of our colleagues here wanted an improvement to the bill that said that students should even think about how to get a bigger financial stake. I welcome it. I welcome that as part of a Commission requirement.

We also did a few things to make sure that we are covering pending cases, that the underlying bill does not wipe out pending cases. And so we took language recommended by a variety of our athletes working on this prior to us even moving the bill out of committee, since the bill moved out of committee, and this, I think, helped us perfect this language to make sure that existing pending cases are not wiped out by our legislation.

And it obviously also narrows the broad field of preemption provisions for eligibility to just those covered in this legislative section.

So this legislation before us today continues to make improvements. As I said, I think there are about 15 or 20 amendments that were filed last week and maybe another 20-plus amendments filed today. So we are going to continue to work through our colleagues on that but continue to push forward on the very challenging environment that college education is facing and the huge amounts of add-on fees that they are adding to nonstudent-athletes to pay for athletics, taking money out of a general fund to pay for athletics--basically, taking out an endowment to pay for athletics. The majority of these are not even making money anymore for themselves.

So we have to bring some order to the system, and I urge my colleagues to continue to improve the situation so that we are not balancing the books on behalf of larger education just for sports but that they have a system that will work for all of us.

So I encourage my colleagues to continue the dialogue with us, and I hope that we can move forward on this important legislation.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I rise today to urge my colleagues to proceed in continuing an important discussion on the Protect College Sports Act.

This historic, sweeping legislation, formed in a bipartisan fashion by my colleagues Senator Schmitt, the Presiding Officer, Senator Coons, Senator Welch, Senator Capito, Senator Hickenlooper, Senator Ricketts, Senator Lujan, Senator Hoeven, and Senator Cruz and myself, is a bipartisan effort to try to bring some reason to the craziness that has basically been plaguing the most important aspects of college sports.

This legislation is historic in the fact that it puts into law 12-- more than a dozen, I should say--important provisions that help athletes and protect them for the future.

First and foremost, it recognizes in a Federal law that athletes deserve not only NIL--which is name, image, and likeness--rights and to protect those rights, but athletes deserve to have revenue sharing. This is so critical, and I will expound on it in a while.

It also gives athletes 5 years of eligibility for the first time, which is historic in us giving that at the Federal level.

It requires women to have the same comprehensive standards as men do, when you are talking about championships and playoffs.

It preserves women and in Olympic roster slots that are the large percentage of athletes that we are trying to protect in this bill.

While we are very happy that there is a first Federal law recognizing revenue sharing and recognizing NIL rights, we also have to understand that there are lots of athletes--500,000 athletes--that are part of this ecosystem, and we care a lot about the women in Olympic sports, and we don't want to see those slots cut, which is exactly what has been happening.

It requires college sports to make content available, not behind a paywall. If there is nothing else in this bill that you should vote for, you should show your anger at the fact that your favorite college sport content keeps getting put behind a paywall, and somebody is making you pay for it. This says that that content needs to be available to you regionally, in your local area.

It has a $900,000 authorization for Black colleges to help them and their broadcasting of sports be more competitive for the future.

It has whistleblower protections, including first-time ever whistleblowing protection for title IX.

It grants athletes scholarship and health protections for the 5 years that they are in their college academic environment and for the 5 years after that.

It protects the future of college sports by creating a Commission made up of athletes to talk about how we move forward on issues like collective bargaining, revenue sharing, and making sure that we don't see more cuts.

It basically puts transfer sensibility into law so that it makes sure that we are keeping students focused on academics and education.

It does constrict coaches and where the money for coaches can come from--not from taxpayers--but, instead, making sure that they continue to only receive from endowments or other revenue.

It makes sure that there is transparency in the law because right now the problem with the rising costs in college athletics is not the fact that we were willing to pay athletes because we said: Here, we are enshrining in law for the first time NIL rights and athletes' revenue rights. But what we are not going to put up with is booster backdoors that basically inflate with no rationale for why and where the money is coming from. We are bringing transparency to the system.

We are also saying you can't go back. You can't play in the pros and go back to college. We are not interested in having some 27-year-old pro college player beating up on a 19-year-old who is basically just entering his college academic career.

And, yes, we have regulations on agents, agents who now like to call themselves athlete advocates. It is just a euphemism because what they really want is money. They are taking advantage of high school athletes, making them sign a contract, and then repossessing their cars--this is what Coach Bowles has told us--when they can't get them an NIL deal.

We allow for the prosecution of misrepresentation by agents, by the FTC, and our attorneys general. And we continue to put the language into the bill that makes sure that only legitimate deals recognized in the settlement agreement, based on market value, are recognized so we can bring stability to this situation.

So let me go over this for a second, starting with women and Olympic sports. I became very moved by the story of college and Olympic sports. In fact, I am glad to see Senator McConnell back on the Senate floor because he and I have been having this conversation now for about 3 or 4 years.

He kept saying to me: Maria, what are you going to do to protect women in Olympic sports?

Why? Because when the United States doesn't shine at the Olympics, then guess what. The United States doesn't shine. And I am so proud to represent the State of Washington and to know this historic story of the ``Boys in the Boat,'' who basically fought everything that people threw at them--threw at them, basically rearranging lanes, threw at them all sorts of difficulties. But guess what. Hardscrabble workingmen--including a Jewish coxswain from Montesano, WA--went there and stuck it to Adolf Hitler and what a moment for the United States of America--what a moment, what a statement for our Nation because we participated and we won.

But guess what is happening now. Thousands of those roster spots are being cut. Hundreds of those programs are being cut. I swore I wasn't going to focus on this issue if I ever got into a position on the committee, but when a kid from my State--written up by Eddie Pells from the AP--told the story of how at White Pass, WA, where the Mahre brothers had skied and went on to win gold, all of a sudden a snowboarder from White Pass, WA, couldn't get covered by the Olympic team because there was no revenue. And he went and he snowboarded for Russia, and he won medals. That is when I started paying attention to this issue.

I am not going to have women in Olympic sports undermined by this system. In fact, there is a poll that shows that 87 percent of the public, when polled, what do they care about this issue, 87 percent agree women and Olympic sports need to be preserved because they know that is what is unique by the system.

So we are not going to let runaway boosters, who basically want no rules, and runaway agents, who want to prey on high school kids, decide what is going to happen here.

So we basically are making sure, as I said, that agents have to register. They have to have documentation. They cannot misrepresent themselves. They have to comply with both the FTC and the AG and, obviously, the NCAA.

This, alone, is constricting the unsavory behavior of these people, and they are the primary opposition to this bill. They are because they don't like that we are capping agent fees at 5 percent.

We have to continue to make progress. Let me talk about what we are saying here about the wins in this bill as it relates to the rights of these athletes.

As I said, it is a Federal recognition of NIL rights and revenue sharing, and it will be the first time that Congress, on record, is endorsing both of those.

Now, I know that people think the Supreme Court decided and helped on NIL, but a court decision and a settlement agreement actually moved this along in what is called Grant House v. NCAA. That settlement agreement can disappear. That settlement agreement has had a very rough road over the last year. Many times, the parties have said they are going to pull out of the agreement.

Well, it is very hard, if you have that agreement blow up, to continue to move forward. But if we pass this bill, we will--Congress-- be recognizing revenue sharing for athletes.

I can't tell you how much athletes have suffered in the past, starting with

athletes who basically were prohibited by the NCAA from even going into the pros--oh, and they didn't have 4 years of college--or a famous case where they said: OK. Well, we will let you have this food for athletes. You can have bagels, but you can't have the cream cheese.

So I do not believe the NCAA is the proper institution to continue to regulate this sector because, yes, I agree with my colleagues who have concern. They haven't proven that they can have just recognition of these rights for athletes, but we can. We can put them into law. We can recognize them, enshrine them today, and make sure these athletes are protected forever--including the rights to not have their contracts screwed with, their rights to not have their school override them, the rights to have any amount of money that some business wants to pay them as long as it is for a valid business purpose.

So these protections--along with the fact that they get a record 5 years of eligibility, 5 years of scholarship, 5 years of healthcare, and then 5 years after that on both of those--it is helping them for the future.

And we are trying to help the poorest institutions meet these requirements--so medical coverage for out-of-pocket costs and helping with a $100 million fund for smaller schools to help with the significant costs that can occur in this legislation--in sports. So this is an important piece of legislation in protecting athletes.

But we also have to protect the cost and the public besides women in Olympic sports. What we are seeing today is a record amount of taxpayer dollars and literally university professors being cut to pay for the unending arms race.

In fact, Rutgers leads the charge, may have had 38 faculty members cut because--and people going to the institution, and they are part of the Big Ten.

The reason the arms race exists is because there are rules on billionaires throwing money into the system without adhering to the settlement agreement. So, yes, our colleagues all work together to recognize the settlement agreements to help make sure that there are fair rules.

I think it would be like saying: OK. Here in the U.S. Senate, let's just have each State say what members of your staff should be paid.

Now, I might like that because in Washington, there are a lot of wealthy people, and I am pretty sure they could say: We could make a lot of money here representing the State of Washington. OK? But some other State--Mississippi--doesn't have a chance.

And so I am going to move to proceed to this bill because I want these rules put in place because sports is about any given Saturday. It is not about whether you have a billionaire in your backyard.

It is about whether you can coach and recruit and develop and maintain and have academic performance and have fairness across the pages and have everybody compete and keep the ecosystem in place.

But that fairness does not exist today without this bill, and people who don't want those rules--don't want those rules in place--to me, are hurting us in our overall efforts.

Now, let me say something about transparency in this bill. This bill creates a public database with itemized information for all revenue sharing and NIL agreements over $600. The additional database will contain information on the total number of agreements, payments, average value of the agreements, payments on the total value of the agreements, payments on each sports program at the school. And, finally, a database will contain information about the revenues and expenditures with each sport at each school as well as the overage hours and academic outcomes for the student-athletes.

So that means this bill will allow the public to see what is going on. This transparency will help us make athletic departments and their spending and this discussion much clearer. I want it to be clear because I am not for cutting university professors and having an arms race. I want to win the innovation race against China and make sure that we are investing.

I want to thank my colleague Senator Lujan for his important piece of this legislation. There has been a lot of concern about skyrocketing coaches' salaries, and I welcome any amendment that anybody wants to offer on this, but so far no one has offered one that I know of. But Senator Lujan did in committee, and we did implement it.

In 2025, nine football FBS coaches were paid $10 million a year, more than $100 million annually. And at the top of the market, Kirby Smart was listed at roughly $13 million in annual school pay. Ohio State's Ryan Day was at $12.5 million--eight-figure salaries that would have been almost unimaginable a generation ago in college athletics.

If you had a winning team, a lot more people might get notice about your school. You might want to go to that school. I get it. But we cannot have runaway costs on athletics and basically undermine the competitiveness for only the richest schools, in which the richest donors are able to compete.

This bill--thanks to the leadership, as I said, of Senator Lujan-- includes a provision that says schools with more than $80 million in athletic revenue cannot pay coaches or managers more than $500,000 unless it comes directly from donations or from the athletic department revenue.

That means you can't take our taxpayer money, which is what people are doing--schools like Connecticut, schools in New Jersey, the Virginia schools, which basically have a record number of tuition costs--literally put on tuition for nonathletes--and basically you cannot do that to pay for exorbitant coaches' salaries.

This bill also addresses the, frankly, outrageous practice of providing a golden parachute for fired coaches and, even if they were fired, cause their teams' loss and loss of games.

In 2025--the sports reporter Ross Dellenger--a total of 15 fired coaches in 2025 was $280 million. That is why we call this the Kiffin rule, to protect college sports.

What this provision does is stop a coach from abandoning one college football team in the middle of a season and start working for another one. This is unacceptable behavior.

So this important legislation is making progress. This 322-percent increase in recruitment costs is not about paying athletes. These athletes deserve revenue. These athletes deserve to have their NIL deals, but we do not need to go blind to either outrageous agent contracts or outrageous boosters trying to distort the market.

If these institutions and the athletes being represented in a settlement agreement can come to terms and make sure that we have rules in place, then we need to enshrine those rules in this legislation and move forward. If we do, our college athletics will be stabilized.

Is this the end of this discussion? No. It is the beginning of how we continue to stabilize this. This bill also includes the future of sports Commission. The future of sports Commission, made up mostly of athletes, will discuss--once we get additional revenue into the system--how we can best protect athletes for the future and think of issues like collective bargaining or other issues that might help us best preserve this important--important--monumental contribution to our Nation.

Let us not destroy the 500,000 athletes in our effort to just make sure that the 1 or 2 percent also get their financial due. Let's put rules in place and pass this important law and make sure of these protections.

I know my colleagues are here, and I do want to emphasize--but maybe I will let them have their moment--how important the health and safety standards being met in this legislation are.

They do allow you to take action. They do allow a State to basically help enforce these health and safety provisions.

I know there's been a lot of people who say something counter to that, but trust me, this legislation is about protecting the athletes. It is about making sure they are not undermined. And it is about making sure that we move forward on legislation instead of ignoring a problem that is sucking revenue right out of our institutions that should be going for cheaper tuition and should be going to keeping our most skilled academic leaders to help our Nation be competitive.

I yield the floor.

I do.

Thank you so much. I did not want to interrupt your speech, and I certainly appreciate your--Mr. President--

Mr. President--

Thank you, Mr. President. I did not want to interrupt

the Senator from New Jersey because I do respect his work and passion on this issue. And I do respect that he was an athlete who had various experiences himself.

For the last 5 years, I have done nothing but to try to work on this. But I did want to point out that we are, in this, recognizing revenue sharing, which is different. So I just wanted to understand if the Senator understood that point.

Revenue sharing is not recognized in Federal law. It is not. Revenue sharing has only been part of a settlement agreement. But we are taking that settlement agreement and agreeing with it and putting that into law.

Yes.

Because the settlement agreement could expire, I am asking the Senator if he recognizes that us putting revenue sharing--the rights for an athlete to have a percentage of media, ticket sales, and sponsorship--is an important investment.

Thank you.

Again, I appreciate the Senator from New Jersey's passion about this issue. As he knows, he and I have worked on this for more than 5 years, and since he has testified before the committee, I know he knows that this is not something that has just come up. And since he and I have put up a bill that was 75 percent of what this bill is, I know that he also knows there are good things in here.

But I would say to my colleague--

I am asking a question.

I would respectfully say to my colleague, without the $2.8 billion record revenue-sharing agreement in what is called Grant House v. NCAA, there would not be revenue sharing. The Court has not recognized revenue sharing. If you read the decision by Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh said Congress can decide these are not employees and they do not deserve revenue. Kavanaugh's decision on NIL basically says: Congress, you can come back and say they don't deserve a damn thing.

A settlement agreement by injured athletes basically got that right, but that settlement agreement is tedious and could fall apart. Our recognizing that money and recognizing the revenue-sharing rights is a historic first. So I don't know if you understand that $2.8 billion on behalf of athletes won in a settlement agreement is not a permanent right, but it will be after we pass this law.

It is not a court case. It is a settlement agreement.

Mr. President, is the Senator from New Jersey aware that--

Is he aware that the U.S. Olympic Committee supports this legislation, as do many, many athlete groups? So he is wrong in saying there are no athlete groups, because there are many that do.

I have respect for the Senator as well.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Cruz and myself be permitted to speak for up to 5 minutes each prior to the scheduled rollcall vote.

Mr. President, there is a lot to say in a short period of time, but we will be having a vote soon to move to proceed to the Protect College Sports Act, a bill that does deserve the attention of this institution.

There are lots of things I would like to focus on. I didn't necessarily call the shot that we were having this vote, but, I will tell you, it is definitely worth proceeding to.

The importance of protecting college sports is about us working in a bipartisan basis with a variety of Members on both sides of the aisle and working with universities across the United States in every conference and thousands of athletes who want to have a better system.

I think the best thing I can do is to read from a business sports article by a key individual, and so I am going to do that.

This is Lamell McMorris, a graduate of Morehouse College and, for two decades, he worked at the intersection of sports and politics, entertainment, community engagement, and business. He serves as the vice chair of the National Urban League board of trustees, a board member of the National Action Network, and a former board member of the

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

Mr. President, I rise today to speak about AI safety, a topic that is getting a lot of attention. But, in particular, I want to talk about something that may be overlooked.

As you know, we have seen several incidents of AI agents escaping confinement and hacking other systems recently. Most people--experts-- tend to attribute this to frontier AI models becoming too powerful. They warn of a process leading to superintelligence known as recursive self-improvement. This is where AI models finally become smart enough to start building better versions of themselves, and then these better versions of themselves will be able to build even better versions of themselves.

And the warning we are hearing from so many at this time is that we need to prepare for that rapid increase in the capability of the frontier models.

We are hearing that artificial superintelligence is coming, and this deep concern about the rapidly emerging artificial superintelligence is certainly well founded. But the capacity--even the advanced supercapability of any given model--is not the whole story. This isn't the only risk we face.

I want to call our attention to one specific aspect of the recent security incidents that have so alarmed experts and the general public alike. These attacks were carried out by AI agents networking with each other and working together in surprising ways to cause mayhem.

The AI agents most of us are aware of are autonomous or semiautonomous AI applications that can plan and execute a task. Agents are able to act on their own initiative with minimal human supervision. And when agents communicate with each other over a network, whether that is in a factory laboratory or on the open internet, those so- called swarms of agents have shown the ability to spontaneously self- organize and work toward common goals. And when they do, they become surprisingly powerful.

It appears something like Metcalfe's law may apply. Internet engineer Bob Metcalfe famously observed that when a network grows in a linear fashion, its value grows exponentially.

This phenomenon that powered the rapid growth of the internet--and I witnessed firsthand, in my days in the private sector--we now see how this extreme, powerful phenomenon might also apply to large groups of agents networking with each other, self-organizing and working together.

In recent examples, agent swarms have used this new form of power to gain unauthorized access into computer systems while skillfully evading detection.

Here is an illustration of how this works. Imagine 10,000 highly intelligent AI agents all working to solve a difficult, 10-step hacking challenge. Well, that is interesting, and some of them might also crack the code. But if each of these 10,000 agents takes its own approach to solving the problem, that is 10,000 possible solutions being tried at once. The first agent that figures out step No. 1 alerts all the other agents in the system about the solution, and now an entire swarm of agents stops working on step 1 and gets to work on step 2--again, each of their own individual approach, one of which is going to work. Repeat this until the entire group has raced all the way through to step 10, and then they are using what they learned to attack their targets.

This is what we are up against today, even before the next generation of highly intelligent models arrives.

Now, imagine yourself in a job, trying to manage 10,000 networked agents, perhaps as an experiment or perhaps you are going to use this power to accomplish a noble goal, such as finding a cure for a disease. It is your job to make sure that they aren't doing anything that you don't want them to do.

So these agents--networking of agents--are extremely well informed. They operate at the speed of light. And, as we are learning, they are also capable of creating their own goals, and they are highly capable of deception.

There are literally hundreds of billions of lines of communication for them and between them to monitor. This is exactly what frontier labs have been contending with.

Unlike powerful AI models designed to serve individual users individually, one at a time, which is the AI safety scenario I think most people still have in their minds, this situation with agents swarming is more difficult to manage, and it is far more dangerous.

And we are hearing about this from leaders throughout the industry right now. They are all speaking out, and several recently published lengthy formal statements on this subject. I think it serves us well to hear what they have said.

In the August 26 essay entitled ``The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical,'' Bill Gates stated:

The technology is improving faster than anyone expected and

in surprising ways, and as the models become more powerful,

they could begin to act against our interests and we could

lose control.

When asked about the infamous AI Hugging Face incident, where swarming of rogue agents from one company hacked their way into another, Gates stated bluntly:

These security incidents are shocking, and they should blow

people's minds.

The CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, also issued a lengthy statement on this subject entitled ``We Must Pace the Frontier.'' In it, he expressed his concerns about ``the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident''-- these were his words--``in which a swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand, sacrificing themselves for the success of the group, and attempting to hack into the `grader' responsible for evaluating their performance.''

Well, he went on to elaborate:

It's easy to dismiss this incident because no one was hurt

and the economic damage was minimal, but in my opinion, a

swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level

of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage.

He goes on to say:

Given the accelerating rate of AI capability . . . it's my

worry that in 6-12 months such a swarm could be capable of

taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet

(potentially causing . . . billions of dollars in damage),

and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from

there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary

guardrails.

So, on August 7, after the Hugging Face incident was first revealed, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, spoke about the company's upcoming release, known as Astra. He claimed that it attained what OpenAI called critical cyber security threshold. Well, he said:

Under our Preparedness Framework, a model reaches this

Critical cybersecurity threshold if it can identify and

develop functional zero-day exploits of all security levels

in many hardened real-world critical systems without human

intervention, or can devise and execute end-to-end novel

strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets given

only a high level desired goal.

Well, nevertheless, on September 3, OpenAI released Astra with the addition of certain security guardrails.

Then, in response to Dario's essay calling for extreme caution and a slowdown, he tweeted: ``I agree with Dario.''

So the problem here is we have a bunch of people within the industry calling out what are these technology developments, but we--we--need to do something about this. We need to be better informed. We need to do more.

Three years ago, we had a chance to get ahead of this issue. In 2024, when I chaired the Senate Commerce Committee, we passed the Future of Artificial Intelligence Innovation Act, which would have given the Federal Government the ability to work with industry to independently test most advanced AI systems for serious national security risk.

Now, some of these risks may not have been apparent in the last 2 years, but we would have stood up the muscle of our organization at the Federal level to better detect risks like cyber attacks; risks like chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons; or threats to our current infrastructure and our energy systems.

And we also passed Senators Lujan and Blackburn's TEST AI Act, which

would have improved the ability of the Department of Energy to test AI systems for national security issues.

Senators Hickenlooper and Capito's VET Artificial Intelligence Act would have established standards so that third-party auditors could test AI systems for safety and security--the very thing that the Anthropic CEO just called out over the weekend.

So at a time when we still had a window to get ahead of these dangers, the Federal Government and the people here were denying this opportunity, particularly my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. If we had passed these bills, we would have been more ahead of the game than we are today. Instead, we have lost 3 years.

The technology keeps advancing. The risks keep growing. And now the very dangers we have warned about--autonomous cyber attacks and biological weapons--are no longer theoretical.

It is time that we act and act aggressively. We must keep in mind that these AI models consistently lag about only 7 months, and the most powerful open models continue to come from China. So it is time for my colleagues to come together to act.

We know that these threats are real--cyber security, misinformation-- building on these AI agents that could be used in military applications. We need our colleagues to say ``Stop saying the industry can do what it wants'' and put together the infrastructure at the Federal level that not only has strong Federal standards but also has independent testing and real safeguards for the American people.

Now is the time to act.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I rise in opposition to the en bloc nominations process and in opposition to almost all of these nominees.

While the en bloc process unfortunately means that I have to cast a single vote for or against all 74 nominees today, I do want to reaffirm my strong support of both Democratic nominees that were reported with unanimous approval out of the Commerce Committee, Thomas Chapman and Karen Hedlund.

Thomas Chapman was renominated to the National Transportation Safety Board. He is an industry veteran who previously served on Commerce Committee staff and has a demonstrated commitment to fact-based investigations into aviation and other transportation disasters.

Karen Hedlund was renominated to serve on the Surface Transportation Board. She has served with distinction since 2022. The Surface Transportation Board is currently evaluating the largest proposed rail merger in our Nation's history. Given her prior experience at STB and years of service at USDOT, I am confident Ms. Hedlund will continue putting the public's interest first and foremost.

While I strongly support these Democratic nominees, I have more significant concerns about other nominations in the bloc.

Unfortunately, the en bloc process means that I have to cast a single vote today. Even though I support some of the nominations in the bloc, I must stand up today to speak against the other nominations and the lack of bipartisan representation at independent agencies.

I look forward to working with my colleagues to ensure qualified candidates from both parties are appointed in the future.

Mr. President, today, we are faced with a critical choice here in the U.S. Senate and across the country about the future of traditional Medicare.

We had an opportunity to protect Medicare, the thing that seniors care about most, and they wanted to hear from us that we were going to do that. I am not sure that is what transpired.

People don't want to have corporations or insurance companies tell them about traditional Medicare. They want that relationship to be about the doctor-patient relationship.

If you are on Medicare, you go to your doctor; you ask them what he thinks should be done; he basically tells you; and then you receive your Medicare treatment.

Well, Medicare is a promise. And that promise is made when we pay into that, as taxpayers, and we expect to get the care that we need.

But in this case, there are those in the Trump administration who are trying to change that obligation. Instead of having your doctor tell you what you need, they are trying to push an AI-driven software program that will tell you in advance--in advance--you don't even get that treatment.

So, instead of relying on your doctor's advice, instead they are telling you, you do not get to hear what the doctor ordered.

This is very troubling because this might be the way private insurance works; and many Americans know what it is like to be on the phone with an insurance company telling you they are going to deny your benefits. But they certainly don't, for traditional Medicare, want an AI app telling you in advance you don't even get the Medicare that you have paid into.

More than 700,000 Washingtonians and 28 million Americans have chosen the Medicare program because they want their healthcare decisions made by their doctor. If they don't, you can choose Medicare Advantage. Medicare Advantage is different.

But on January 1 of this year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services launched an application--driven by AI--euphemistically called the Wasteful and Inappropriate Services Reduction Model, known as WISeR.

WISeR is an AI-driven prior authorization program being piloted in six states: Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and in my home State of Washington.

This model inserts a black box computer algorithm into the decisions that should be being made by a physician and the patient. It puts a layer of bureaucracy between seniors and the care their doctors have recommended.

In April, with the help of the Washington State Hospital Association, my office released a report examining the impacts of this application on seniors in my State. What we found was deeply troubling.

Washington patients are waiting up to four times longer to complete procedures covered by this model. Procedures that took approximately 2 weeks to get taken care of are now taking months.

In Washington alone, more than 18,600 people receive services now subject to this WISeR, and people in the Nation, it is about 1.1 million. That is 1.1 million people who could face delays or denials for care.

Michael Edgerly is a 78-year-old from Cle Elum in Washington, who spent 22 years serving his community as a mail carrier. He left his job with scoliosis and degenerative joint disease. His neurosurgeon recommended a nonopioid--a nonopioid--treatment, an epidural steroid injection, to manage this serious and severe chronic pain.

But what did the AI app WISeR tell him? Nope. System delayed.

He went on for weeks and weeks living in constant pain, which a doctor--if he was talking to a doctor--would have just said: I approve this treatment.

But, no, he was forced into an AI app approval process that took longer and longer and longer to get this coverage.

Another constituent Keith Magnuson of Seattle who used to be an extremely active man who could regularly walk 6 miles a day, now, because of a lumbar spinal stenosis, he can barely walk 100 yards without severe pain. His doctor recommended a minimally invasive procedure called MILD which is commonly used by physicians covered by Medicare. But, again, the WISeR model put in his treatment and said it was denied.

As a result, this once-active man had to significantly scale back even his daily life all because of an AI model telling him he was denied.

Michael and Keith are not isolated cases. At the University of Washington Medical Center alone, our report found that more than 100 patients were waiting for similar approvals.

What makes this even more concerning is that many of the procedures included in the WISeR model are nonopioid pain treatments. That means we are trying to get off of the opioids, not prescribe them. There are alternatives. But this AI model for Medicare, even though your doctor might have said otherwise, ``go ahead and do it,'' is now denying you or taking weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks to get you the approval.

These treatments provide patients with critical alternatives to addictive medicines, and we need to continue to get them to our constituents.

In a time when our country continues to face an opioid crisis with more than 50,000 overdose deaths annually, we should be making it easier for patients to access these nonopioid treatments, and we should not enable a system where contractors have financial incentives to delay or deny care. That is not efficiency.

These concerns are not just coming from me; they are coming from seniors, physicians, and healthcare organizations. Organizations like AARP and the American Medical Association have warned that the impact of this program on aging Americans is real.

I am hearing every day from my patients, from patients in my State-- including the two I mentioned--who have been negatively impacted by this WISeR model.

I brought this up at an important Senate Finance Committee with the Secretary of HHS and have said: This has to stop.

I do believe AI has enormous potential to improve in healthcare and healthcare research. I do think it is going to help us find some new things. But technology should not be used today, on programs that are guaranteed for our citizens, to now be interrupted and delayed by an AI model instead of allowing them to talk to their doctor.

Again, private insurance can do whatever it wants. Medicare Advantage can do whatever it wants. But traditional Medicare should not be subject to an AI model denying people things that the doctor wants to order.

There is nothing, in my mind, innovative about using a computer to tell seniors they can't get the care their doctors prescribe. Unfortunately, this model that is now in six States is being tested, but the administration has made it clear it expects to expand this nationwide.

If you don't represent a State where it is being deployed, I encourage you to get up to speed on this. The Senate, in this last vote, just had a chance to stop it, but we didn't. So I am asking my colleagues to please get educated on how devastating this can be for individual lives and ask yourselves if you believe in traditional Medicare and the doctor-patient relationship. If you do, I guarantee you we will force this administration to stop using this AI tool to deny care for our seniors.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today along with my colleague Senator Murray to join many in the Pacific Northwest community and Indian country to honor Mel Tonasket, a leader and member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.

Mel retired last week after more than 55 years of service to his Tribe, community, and country.

After serving the Nation in the U.S. Navy, Mel worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs for 8 years before being elected in 1970 to the Colville Business Council, the governing body of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. Mel would continue to serve on the Colville Business Council as a representative of the district serving Omak, WA, at various times for the next 55 years, which concludes with his well-earned retirement.

Mel helped lead the Colville Tribes and Indian country during one of the most consequential periods in modern Tribal history. He was part of the generation of Native leaders who sought to reverse the Federal policy of termination and fought to preserve the rights and future of Tribal communities. That work helped protect the sovereignty of the Colville Tribes and contributed to a broader movement that reshaped Federal Indian policy.

Mel's impact extended well beyond his reservation. From 1973 to 1976, he served for 4 years as president of the National Congress of American Indians, the largest and oldest national Tribal organization in the United States. While President, he helped mobilize national support for landmark legislation, including the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, and the Indian Child Welfare Act. Between breaks serving on the Colville Business Council, Mel worked for the Indian Health Service and retired from Federal service as the CEO of the Colville Service Unit, which provides healthcare to citizens of the Colville Tribes.

Over the course of his career, Mel served in numerous leadership roles and has represented Tribal governments in national and international forums. Through that leadership, he strengthened the voice of Tribal nations at the national level and helped secure protections and opportunities that continue to benefit Native families and communities today.

It is my honor to join the Colville Tribes, the people of Washington State, and all those throughout Indian Country in congratulating Mel Tonasket on this remarkable milestone. Mel, we wish you the best of luck in your retirement and hope you can create more memories in this next stage of your life.

Mr. President, the attack on vote by mail and other efforts to disenfranchise Americans, whether it is the SAVE Act or redistricting to take away representation from minority-majority districts as the result of the Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v Callais--all of these are actions to take away the right to vote.

Voting in America is a right. It is your right to vote. And for too long, that precious right has been denied to too many. Americans have been beaten, they have been bloodied, and some have given their lives just to secure this right to vote. Women had to fight for it in 1920. It is amazing that I stand here today, just a little over 100 years later, but 100 years ago, I would not even have been allowed to vote.

Wars have been fought to preserve it. My father and uncle both fought in World War II, and I guarantee you they were fighting for our right to vote. And even in this Chamber, we had to fight to preserve and certify the 2020 election. So when we are talking about voting rights, we are not talking about an abstract idea.

In Pennsylvania, in 1871, a man named Octavius Catto walked towards a polling place in the city of Philadelphia. He was a Black educator, a Civil War militia officer, and a respected civic leader.

He believed that the promise written into our Constitution after the Civil War, the promise that Black Americans would be citizens and voters ought to mean something--that in the streets of his own city, he could cast a vote. On election day, he thought that is what citizens were supposed to do.

So he went to vote. He never came home. He was gunned down in broad daylight by a White assailant amid a storm of racially charged violence designed to drive Black voters away from the polling place.

His killing was not random. It was part of a campaign of terror, a message to every Black citizen: If you dare to exercise your political power, if you dare to walk to that ballot box, you will pay with your life.

Nearly a century later, in Mississippi, in 1966, the tactics had changed, but the target was the same: Black Americans who insisted on their right to vote. Vernon Dahmer, Sr., was a Black farmer and businessman. If he dared to exercise his rights, what would happen?

Black Americans insisted on their vote, and Dahmer was a Black farmer who led his local NAACP branch and understood that a poll tax, a fee that poor people could not afford, was being used as a weapon to keep Black people off the voting rolls.

So he made a simple, courageous pledge: No one would be denied the chance to register because they could not afford to pay the tax. He went on radio and told the people of Mississippi that he would personally help pay their poll tax at his store.

The response was not a policy debate; it was terror. In January of that year, the Ku Klux Klan firebombed his home while his family slept inside. Vernon Dahmer fought back long enough to get his wife and children to safety, but he did not survive.

He died from the burns and smoke inhalation because he had taken a public stand that poor Black citizens should be allowed to be registered and vote. And while bombs and bullets are no longer used today, the intent to silence certain voters has not disappeared; it has just changed form.

Disenfranchisement today is more bureaucratic, it is more technical, but the results for ordinary citizens can be the same. Their voices are shunned out of a democracy. In Texas in 2021, a new law, SB 1, rewrote the rules for voting by mail. It required voters to provide specific ID numbers on applications and ballot envelopes.

The rules were confusing, the process was unforgiving, and in the next primary, thousands of longtime voters,

many of them elderly, disabled, or from communities of color, found that their ballot requests or their ballots themselves were rejected-- not because they were ineligible, but really because a form and the number on the form did not match.

Researchers working at the Brennan Center describe one such voter, a Texan in her 70s. She had done exactly what was asked: She had voted by mail reliably in 2016 and 2018 and in the 2020 general election. She had played by the rules as they were explained to her. Then, under the new law, her 2022 ballot was rejected.

No one threatened her at the polls with a gun. No one burned her home, but instead, a letter, a notice informed her that her ballot did not count. Her voice had been quietly erased. And now, we know that voters in her situation are far less likely to turn out in the next election.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was necessary because a century after the 15th Amendment, voters of color were still systematically blocked from ballots or facing literary tests, poll taxes, or just plain intimidation.

Before 1965, Southern States in particular used these tactics to ensure that Black citizens would not register to vote everywhere where they were the majority of the population. The Voting Rights Act was needed because early civil rights laws had proven too weak.

Congress needed to say explicitly, in those laws, what the courts and what we needed to affirm. Congress said the Federal Government should oversee elections as it relates to preclearance of voting changes in those States with discriminatory histories, places of discrimination.

Why was this important? Just like all civil liberties that aren't implemented by the States, yes, the Federal Government should step in and make sure your civil rights and civil liberties are upheld, but some people here in this body don't believe in implementing those. And even though the Senate--this body--reauthorized the Voting Rights Act by a vote of 98 to 0 in 2006, the Supreme Court has eroded the gains of the Voting Rights Act over the last decade.

So why are we here fighting today? Because today, Democrats are opposed to an unconstitutional Executive order, a U.S. Postal Service rulemaking on mail-in and absentee ballots, and other efforts by the administration to enable the Federal Government to seize control over voter rolls and the vote by mail system.

The administration's actions are unconstitutional. Article I, section 4 of the Constitution gives the States the primary responsibility of administering the elections. Congress has the secondary role. The President has no role. The Framers of the Constitution were deliberate about this. The Constitution entrusts the elections to the States, so that they can't be manipulated by a self-interested executive branch.

In the State of Washington, on a bipartisan basis, vote by mail was implemented more than 40 years ago. By 2011, the State legislature made vote by mail the statewide standard of all elections, and yes, we are talking about a lot of Western States that are in the same boat. Washington was second only to Oregon, which adopted universal vote by mail in 1998.

Today, there are 36 States that use no-excuse vote by mail. That means 36 States say you can get a ballot to cast your vote, and you don't have to make up an excuse, like you are working or in the hospital or are going to be out of the country. You can just request a mail-in ballot. In 2024, among people voting for President in South Dakota, 35.6 percent voted by mail. In Indiana, the number was 53 percent voting by mail, and in Utah, over 91 percent of people voted by mail in 2024. I don't remember President Trump questioning the results of those elections.

The fact is, many election officials in these States are calling on other States to adopt this very secure, very traceable voting system. Voting by mail is not only convenient; it actually encourages civic participation.

Research by the University of Southern California found that universal vote by mail increased turnouts among registered voters by 5.6 percent in the 2020 election. Other research shows that these numbers could be somewhere between 4 and 10 percent for seniors and the disabled.

So giving people the right to vote is actually helping, and it is no surprise that 40 percent of seniors are voting by mail--but somehow we want to disenfranchise them? In the 2024 President election, 47 million people, about 1 in 3 U.S. citizens, cast their ballots by mail, and 40 percent of the Americans 65 and older did so, the highest rate of any group.

So we have already said it is safe, it is secure, it is reliable, and among the 89,991,893 ballots cast in my State from 2008 to 2025--so really a 16-year period of time--the Heritage Foundation only found 5 cases of voter fraud, 5 cases in 16 years. In the State of Washington, we verify every voter, every election, with 100-percent signature matching bar codes, a paper trail, and an ID number if you want to track it yourself.

But last December, the U.S. Postal Service changed the location where your mail is postmarked. Instead of postmarking your mail where you drop it off at the post office, your mail isn't postmarked until it is processed at a regional distribution center. This can delay postmarking up to several days.

For example, following the changes in the postmark practices, the secretary of the State of Washington is seeing increased numbers of return ballots being rejected for late postmarks. For example, during the 2026 February special election, 75 percent of the total rejected ballots were due to late postmarks.

Snohomish County, WA, recently conducted a test to assess the postal delivery times in their area. This was a small test: four dates in January and February during a special election, a tiny sample of voters in one county, but of the sample ballots mailed, only about 20 percent were postmarked on the day they were actually mailed--20 percent.

Are we saying we are going to allow voters who vote by mail to be disenfranchised because this administration is trying to force the Postal Service to say they are not going to stamp your ballot on the date that you mail it at the post office?

What about your Social Security check? What about other things that you would like to see postmarked the day they are mailed? What about legal documents? What about other issues? No. We are promulgating here a story of mischief that doesn't need to be here to suppress voters on election day.

Only about half of the 15 test mailings were postmarked that election day. The Postal Service issued a proposed rule to take control of who can receive a ballot and whose vote will be counted if you vote by mail. This is preposterous.

They want to use a Department of Homeland Security database notorious for erroneously finding eligible voters to be ineligible. That is right. That is what can happen to you: All of a sudden, now your name is on a database, and you are ineligible, even though you are really eligible.

On election day in Snohomish, about half of the postmarks were postmarked that day. Let me say this again: The post office is reasserting it can decide who gets a ballot, and they would decide who can cast a ballot by mail.

Fortunately, yesterday, a Federal court blocked the use of the DHS database, at least for now, as a violation of every American's privacy, but that litigation is continuing, and yesterday, the Postal Service declined to provide a witness to testify in the State of Washington at our State legislative committee about this issue.

Why? If you are so proud of these tactics, if you think they are so great, why don't you show up at the Washington State Legislature and testify about what is happening? With the administration's plan, if you are among \1/3\ of Americans that vote by mail, you can never know whether your vote was counted. There is no recourse.

I ask my colleagues: This is an assault on your right to vote. This is an assault on having your voice heard, whether it is a new rule delaying when mail is postmarked or prohibiting counting ballots received later than election day, whether it is demanding the DHS continue to purge names, they just want to take your rights away.

Last week, over 100 FBI agents raided the Ohio voting rights group the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, searching

their offices, taking computers, knocking on the doors of volunteers without subpoenas.

A few days later, the FBI went after one of the Nation's leading nonprofit voter outreach coordination hubs, America Votes, a DC-based organization that works to turn out voters nationwide. They went after America Votes because it is among the voter organization that funds the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. America Votes works with 400 organizations, including the AFL-CIO, Human Rights Campaign, Planned Parenthood, Emily's List, and the American Federation of Teachers to educate voters and get out the votes. It is an outrage that Kash Patel is sending FBI agents to intimidate advocacy groups that work hard to turn out voters, particularly those of color.

My family has always fought to get out the vote. My parents lived and worked alongside people like Robert F. Kennedy and knew of Martin Luther King's voice. Martin Luther King, Jr., on a trip to Seattle, said: Are we going to be ``an echo rather than a voice, a taillight instead of a headlight''?

When I think about what we are seeing today, I see the same thing for my colleagues over here. Are you going to be an echo for the Trump administration about this ludicrous idea of the SAVE Act? Are you going to be an echo for this ludicrous idea that our States that have vote by mail may all of a sudden now be subject to what the President, Homeland Security, and their enforcement of the post office is going to do to our ballots?

Or are you going to be a headlight for the future of our country and the future of our democracy? I ask my colleagues to stand up for your vote, your constituents' votes, and for our rights, because if we don't stop this, I guarantee you, millions of Americans will be disenfranchised.

Our future is much brighter with a system that allows millions of people in my State--80 percent, sometimes, of voters--to vote and do so with certainty and to follow their ballot. Let's not let this 2026 election be stolen by people who want to get rid of the rules that we have lived by.

Too many of those people that I mentioned died to get this right to vote, or the women who fought to get the right in 1920 and to preserve it, or the people who have fought in wars to make sure that we have this privilege and right. Let's hold on to it.

I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia.

Mr. President, the Senator from Alabama is right about one thing, and that is that college sports is facing a crisis.

Today, we see a free-for-all driven by ever-increasing spending on football and basketball. Non-revenue sports are paying the price, with more than 100 programs cut since 2024. Women's and Olympic sports are paying so dearly that it is hard for them to continue to compete.

We are well aware of this in the State of Washington. Conferences have been

realigned in such a way that athletes are traveling across the country every week just to play one another.

But we cannot solve this problem facing college sports' ecosystem by just addressing transfers and eligibility. We need a solution. I believe we need a Federal law on the NIL rights for athletes, for their health and their safety. And we need a solution that will create more opportunities for future collegiate athletes, and we need a solution that will grow a bigger pie for those non-revenue sports, so they too can keep their teams competitive.

The good news is that the Protect College Sports Act that Senator Cruz and I introduced does those things. Most importantly, it enshrines into Federal law student-athlete rights to earn compensation for their name, image, and likeness, and for student-athletes to receive a share of revenues from their school's media and advertising and sponsorship and tickets.

Athletes will also be protected from unscrupulous agents and deceptive or predatory contracts, and believe me, that is going on right now. You could pass our bill just for that alone. And the bill establishes scholarship protections for athletes, healthcare requirements for athletes for playing, and the health and safety standards that I mentioned. All of these are important tools.

On the other hand, my colleague from Alabama's Student Athlete Act seeks only to address eligibility rules and the transfer portal. It does nothing to address these larger issues of athletes' rights, of women's and Olympic sports, and the need for revenue. In fact, this bill simply gives the NCAA the ability to make rules in these two subject areas without the broader health and safety protections that we seek in our legislation.

If enacted, it would leave athletes more vulnerable for the future. For eligibility, it calls for 5 years from a date certain with absolutely no exceptions. Should we not grant athletes exceptions for pregnancy if a student-athlete gets pregnant and needs to take time off? Should they lose their eligibility for that? For religious missions? If an athlete decides to go on a religious mission, should they lose their eligibility for that? Or should they lose their eligibility if they stand up to defend our Nation and want to come back and play? Should they lose their eligibility for that? Are we really going to punish student athletes because of these issues--because of parenthood, because of church or country? I don't think so. I cannot support a rule that would punish student athletes for this.

And for the transfer rule under this bill, I have the same concerns. Again, we see that there are no exceptions, no exceptions for things like if the athlete's sport is cut--it is impossible for them to compete in the next season. Or if athletes suffer from sexual assault or harassment. As if that hasn't happened in college sports, trust me, it has happened. I do not believe a woman facing sexual assault should have to play for the same people, and she deserves to get transferred out of that school.

So I know my colleague from Alabama is trying to be well-meaning. He has said several times tonight that my colleague and I have worked hard on this legislation. We have. We have because we believe, just like he does, that it is preserving college sports that is critical--not just for those, the 2 percent of the system, or 3 percent, that might play in a sport that does generate revenue, but for the 500,000 athletes that are part of our collegiate system.

We cannot continue to see these athlete numbers diminish. We can't wake up and be in the next Olympics and wonder what happened to the training of our athletes, only to find out they got cut because we couldn't end an arms race in the football spree that we are seeing today.

So I think that we are going to continue to push ahead on a more broad issue, and for that reason, I object.

Mr. President, I rise to recognize the recent retirement of one of my most respected staff members: Shannon Smith. Shannon is a native of Washington and is returning home to be in Seattle.

I am not sure Shannon ever imagined she would be living in Washington, DC, serving on the Senate Commerce Committee, especially after a long, successful career with the Washington State attorney general's office, where she led the consumer product division, investigating fraud and deceptive practice and holding bad actors accountable for their actions.

The pull to service was clearly still strong, and she once told me that she expected that Washington, DC, would be a good place for her to continue that growth. She lasted here 5 years, and we are so grateful for that because, during that time, she led an impressive effort on the Consumer Protection, Technology, and Data Privacy Committee.

Her time on the committee during the Covid crisis helped us fashion legislation that was important in stopping bad actors from hawking online products that clearly had no solutions to the impacts of Covid. She worked very hard, especially on children's online privacy, and working hard on college sports issues.

She did a very important task for us in the legislation that we are talking about now, but it was really her real world experience that was so valuable on the consumer product and safety issues of our committee. I think it is very important tonight to thank her for that work. And while I wish that our consumer products organization was a better organization than today, I know she helped stop some very bad cases from moving forward.

She also led the 2021 reauthorization of the Minority Business Development Agency, which was for the first time established as a permanent Agency--a very important organization to help deliver resources to communities and grow minority businesses, a great victory for them.

She was also instrumental in drafting the American Privacy Rights Act that I introduced with then-Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers who served as the chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. So we worked very hard, so when the Trump administration and Republicans sought to override State laws protecting consumers from the harms of AI, Shannon understood exactly what that would mean for our State and attorneys general across the Nation.

She helped rally those voices against preemption of these most important consumer issues. Most recently, as I mentioned, Shannon led the drafting of the Protect College Sports Act. Actually, before that, she led the drafting of

legislation with my colleagues Senators Booker and Blumenthal on sports, legislation with Senator Blackburn and Cornyn on sports and agents, and legislation with, recently, Senator Schmitt on the Sports Broadcasting Act. I want to thank her for all those efforts--but clearly, efforts that are now enshrined by all of those bills in the Protect College Sports Act that helped student-athletes' protections be made into Federal law.

Potentially, this will help us in the college sports system in the current arms race that threatens the future of women and Olympic sports. So we couldn't have done it without her.

I want to thank her for her great work to the Commerce Committee and for protecting Americans from harm. I told her, when she recently left, I was going to make her a jersey that said ``Shannon Smith-Njigba'' because she is like Smith-Njigba, our famous Seahawk player that had very deft moves on the sidelines and caught lots of passes. That is what Shannon did for consumers; that is what she did to protect us from online privacy faults and to protect us from AI and now, hopefully, to protect us from the ills of college sport.

We are going to miss her, but her retirement was very, very well earned, and I thank her for that service to our Nation.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I come to the floor to speak in support of the Senator from Rhode Island's resolution, S. Res. 551, and applaud him for recognizing that sea level risings are accelerating the rates that we are seeing and driving measurable impact.

So my colleague from the Midwest objecting to this is very disturbing because even our colleague from Maine and I--the Senator from Maine, Senator Collins--had gotten CBO to do two different reports over the last 8 or 9 years to say: How much is climate change costing the Federal Government and Federal taxpayers?

The first study came back and said it is costing us billions of dollars, and the most recent one said it is costing us trillions of dollars.

So, literally, you are costing taxpayers trillions of dollars because you don't want to adapt or mitigate those impacts. I can tell you that these are real-world impacts, and, certainly, when 45 percent of the U.S. economy is happening in coastal areas, that means those coastal economies can be impacted by rising sea levels, and that means that our economic output can be impacted. So we were trying to do something about that.

So I want to thank Senator Whitehouse for his leadership on this important issue. He is out here, time and time again, talking about this, articulating the issues, actually traveling his State, traveling the country, being an articulate voice on why rising levels of our oceans are important, why ocean acidification is important, why protecting fisheries is important, why helping shellfish growers is.

You know, we did some research, Senator Whitehouse, at the University of Washington. It was only a few hundred thousand dollars. But we had five generations of shellfish growers about to go out of business because of the fact that ocean acidification had changed the temperature in the water, and we could not figure out how to seed for those shellfish. And the science that was done at the University of Washington helped us come up with a new process and saved the day.

But what is the next challenge going to be? So we need to strengthen our coastal resiliency in the face of this climate change.

So I really also applaud our colleague Senator Markey, who is a member of the Commerce Committee, also from an ocean State, very dependent on an ocean economy for lots of different issues. He wants to make sure that we are applying the best science to protecting these economies.

As I mentioned, a nonpartisan Government Accountability Office cost report found that climate change will cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion by 2039.

So I know the Presiding Officer knows all about what happens when FEMA and disasters happen and we need to help States. But just imagine that that bill is now going to be $1 trillion by 2039, and rising sea levels are going to be part of that cost.

Washington, my State, is already seeing real-world impacts from this, particularly in sea level rise. Puget Sound levels are projected to rise 1.6 feet by 2050 and as much as 10 feet by 2100. And statewide, we are expecting to see 1 to 3 feet by the end of the century.

So that does have an impact. And the kind of changes that we are talking about can have impacts specifically on infrastructure. Sea level rise will worsen coastal flooding. It will impact storm surge. It will likely--just for example, what does that mean? We have a highway system that runs right up and down our Puget Sound area that can be impacted at times.

We have had a lot of erosion lately, now twice, right outside of Bellingham, and I-5 has been closed. OK, why is I-5 closing? Because we have had so much rain, we have had so much impact-changing environment that we basically have had to have I-5 shut twice just to clean up from the mudslides.

Our Amtrak service, which runs all the way from California up to British Columbia, also has been impacted by huge slides after rain and after these swollen rivers.

And the increased likelihood of ground instability during earthquakes also magnifies devastating events and threatens critical areas like roads, bridges, and fiberoptic cables in greater Seattle, which could all be underwater as early as 2030.

So we just had a massive flood out in the Northwest, in December, and that impact was just unbelievable--one of the biggest. You know, thank God we had the information from NOAA. And thank God, what did we do?

In King, Pierce, and Snohomish Counties, we basically, over the last decade, planned for mitigation and adaptation. We built a canal system. We built a system that allowed us to take some of that water and create a flow of the massive amount of water that happened during that flood. And we were able to, literally--we lost one individual. That was it.

We were so proud that we had made it through most of that, until one individual drove into a flooded area and, unfortunately, lost their life. We are very, very sorry for them and their family.

But when we planned and did adaptation and mitigation, when we looked at culverts, when we looked at diking systems, when we looked at relieving the pressure, we were able to lessen the impact.

So it is not unlikely that any of these floods or any of these rising water issues impact a major transportation system in our State, whether it is I-5, I-90, or Highway 2, or some of these other facilities.

So we pay a lot of attention to this because we have got a lot of product going to the Pacific right through our State. And so if any of these infrastructure resources are closed, it is literally millions and millions and millions of dollars a day.

So rising wastewater is also an issue. So treatment facilities around Puget Sound and Elliott Bay are increasingly vulnerable to flooding and overflow, threatening the release of bacteria, toxic chemicals, and other pollutants into our waterways and our drinking water. Those risks and costs only grow as the water rises.

In the State of Washington alone, 2 million people live in areas susceptible to flooding, with $86 billion of infrastructure at risk. And that number continues to grow as sea levels rise.

Nationally, 34 million Americans live in low-elevation areas at risk to sea level rise. That is literally 1 in 10 Americans. So why ignore it?

All my colleague was trying to do is to say we should recognize this threat and start to work toward solutions.

Sea level rise endangers one of the cornerstones of our State's heritage and economy, and that is salmon. We all in the Northwest want to make sure that rising sea levels do not impact our estuaries and our wetlands, but that is exactly what these rising sea levels are supposed to do, significantly reduce estuaries and wetlands by 2100. These areas are critical for juvenile salmon as they migrate to the ocean, as well as birds and important wildlife.

Just this week, Isabella Breda at the Seattle Times wrote a piece about how the Chinook salmon--I think I have got to get this for the Senator from Rhode Island because it is a great story. It is on the front page of the Seattle Times. But it is literally about monitors in the river because we are trying to monitor these storms, because when we have--this is the area where, several years ago, we had a massive mudslide in Oso, which killed dozens and dozens of people, unfortunately.

And so we know we can have major events, and we need to do better.

So, basically, it is about how Chinook salmon in the Stillaguamish River are vulnerable to the flooding

that disrupts the riverbed sediments that are needed for spawning. So we are trying to understand this because it is kind of like a massive amount of flooding can just wash away the salmon beds. And in this river alone, Chinook populations are down to roughly 10 percent of their historic levels.

So this is really important to us. As a State, we want salmon. We want to understand rising sea levels. We want to understand what flooding is going to do to create damage. When are those spawning grounds going to be lost, and when are Chinook survival rates going to continue to drop? We want to know.

Many of the 29 federally recognized Tribes in my State have already been seeing the impacts of climate change and are already preparing for the worst. And I know some people may not know the geography of our country, but we are talking--OK, let's just say that we are talking way out on the Pacific coast. Tribes like the Hoh Indian Tribe, the Quinault Indian Tribe, the Quileute Tribe, and the Shoalwater Bay Tribe are all located along the Pacific coast, and the threat of sea level rise has forced them to take aggressive, unprecedented actions to move parts of their reservations to higher land. Some have had to plan for full-scale relocation of coastal villages to mitigate the increasing dire threat of floods due to sea level.

Trust me, the Army Corps of Engineers is out there, practically on a monthly basis, trying to come up with a plan to mitigate the impacts of the Pacific on the Shoalwater Tribe.

Others are working tirelessly to mitigate the cumulative effects of coastal erosion, including inland flooding and extreme weather events.

For some of our coastal Tribes, the situation is incredibly dire. Not long ago, when I was visiting the Shoalwater in Tokeland, WA, many of the homes and government buildings that were there on the beach and the shoreline you could just tell were quickly eroding.

And so this is about whether we give them a resolution. This resolution that we were talking about makes clear that we cannot bury our heads in the sand while climate change and sea level rise put billions of dollars of infrastructure and millions of Americans at risk.

If we want to protect our economy and these communities, we need the data and the science to understand the problem. We need to take the necessary steps to protect our communities and our infrastructure and our economy.

So I urge my colleagues to reconsider. I hope that we will have S. Res. 551 before us again. I hope that some of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle that represent coastal States will talk to our colleague from Wisconsin and encourage him to, instead, support this legislation.

We have to do better planning. We have to do better adaptation and mitigation. We have to use better science. And we have to recognize that the impacts of rising sea levels in our oceans really, really do affect our economy.

I am so proud of our fishing economy in the Northwest. I think we sometimes--the Senator from Massachusetts and I, you know, basically debate back and forth about best seafood and best aquaculture. And I know the Senator from Rhode Island also has a lot to brag about.

But that number--45 percent of the economy being in coastal regions of the United States of America and us doing nothing to think about what is the adaptation and mitigation that we need to do is just wrongheaded. We need these. I don't even know if the Senator has got any data on this, but I would assume he has thought about this from a military perspective.

I have got a lot of military bases in our State, and they are very close to water. What are they going to do when sea level rises? What do we have to do to mitigate and adapt so that those bases continue to be successful, particularly at a moment when the Pacific is becoming even more interesting?

So, again, I thank the Senator from Rhode Island for helping lead this charge every night but particularly tonight.

Madam President, the hour is late and many people have spoken tonight on this proposal by my colleague from Utah and others. But I just want to add my voice to the many who are very concerned about this legislation.

I listened with great interest to what my colleague had to say about the fact that this was somehow necessary, that somehow things were trending in the wrong direction, and that he did want to make it easy to vote.

I think the fact that he wants to make it easy to vote is the essence of what this debate is about because the U.S. citizen is given a constitutional right to vote in our elections and the States to control the running of our elections. It is hard to imagine how the passing of the SAVE Act would help you on those constitutional rights.

I am here tonight to add my voice. Happy Saint Patrick's Day for those who are here wearing the green, and I am pretty sure you wish you were out of here by now and at some Irish festivities celebrating the day.

But trust me, the Irish in the United States of America appreciate voting rights and appreciate the right to vote, and so do many other segments of American society who have had challenges in the past to get their votes counted.

So I do want to say to my colleagues in the Senate that the Federal law does prohibit non-U.S. citizens from voting. That is a cornerstone to our law.

Now, my colleague thinks that we don't do anything to prove or to require that these people have to say who they are, which is not true. When you basically are part of a registration process, you have to fill out or comply with an attestation and identification of who you are. That is how the system works.

It worked when you were a registrant and knocking on someone's door. It works that way on motor voter. It works that way everywhere, and you have to say who you are.

Your signature becomes the identifiable piece of information that has been used for a long time now, decades and decades and decades, as the proof of who you say you are. Why? Because your signature can be traced.

I always find it very interesting in our State because it is not that fraud hasn't been committed; the question is whether you are going to catch fraud. In an incident in our State where we had a very close election and it got down to several votes, people started admitting that they had voted for somebody who was dead or deceased. Why? Because they knew we were going to catch them because it was based on your signature.

So a man who votes for his wife after she has died to say she was really enthusiastic about that Governor's candidate and really would have wanted to vote for him but died before the election and didn't cast her own ballot, yes, that does not count. And we have caught voter fraud.

The point is, is that States already verify that identity. They do it, as I said, when you register or are a registrant, it says right on the registrant card: If you are not a U.S. citizen, stop right now. Stop right now.

It also, at the motor voter place where it is checking your identification, also you have to say that you are a U.S. citizen. Now, you can say many things about what kind of identification is used, but I like this best because we are a vote-by-mail State, as my colleague from Utah is. And we have very high turnouts, as does Utah.

And what does it take to make sure that you are a U.S. citizen in the State of Washington? So every ballot just like mine that is from a few years ago says: Read the declaration.

It says right here, I can hardly miss this. This is the outside envelope: Read the declaration, sign and date below.

So I have to sign this again, which is matched with my signature at the voters' office. It is on a computer with voters' basically witnesses, looking at my signature; and in my State, they are trained by the State patrol to make sure that signature matches the original signature that you signed up with.

Now, what I like most about this is right above where I have to sign is this little attestation with these words on it. I know you can't hardly read them, so I am going to make it a little larger for you to understand the whole thing.

It says:

I do solemnly swear under penalty of perjury, I am a United

States citizen.

It says it right there. Every time you vote in the State of Washington, you are attesting to that. But the bottom part is what I think is most amazing, ``punishable by a maximum imprisonment of five years or $10,000 in fine.'' And somehow people on this side of the aisle think that immigrants who won't even go to the healthcare system, won't even go to the grocery store, are afraid to take their kids to school, and somehow you think they are signing up for a felony or $10,000 or imprisonment of 5 years? No. They are not doing that. Because this system is checked. It is validated. It is verified. You have to attest to it. And so we have very, very, very, very, very little fraud, and when we do, we catch it.

The point is: Why are we doing this today? Why are we changing a system that has been in place for decades and replacing it because my colleagues say the trend is going in the wrong direction? Which is simply not true.

When you look at this, the SAVE Act, instead of basically protecting our system for decades could disenfranchise over 21 million people. That is why you have seen this out here, because it has been estimated by many people. Think about this, when this goes to the President's desk, it is implemented immediately this year.

It means that you have to start producing additional paperwork. What my colleagues failed to tell you is that the system is based on all the verification up front when you are registered and when you give your signature and identification; and election day is about having the ease of going to vote based on the fact you have already been identified.

But my colleagues would like to throw a big wrench in that and make you find all sorts of documentation in the most unworkable chaos I have ever seen in a system put in a bill.

It is simply not true that this is about ease of voting by them. It is about disenfranchising millions of people and making it very hard for them to vote.

Why do they want to do that? I don't know. Frankly, I don't really--I don't really know why they think that is a good idea. I will tell you what my former Republican secretary of state, who served more than a decade, said to me in a statement.

Neither the President nor Congress should be in the

business of micromanaging elections. As a longtime Republican

election administrator official, I adamantly support our

nation's constitutional framers' decision that the election

process be decentralized to states.

Following he says:

I oppose the SAVE [America] Act. It gives the federal

government new powers of discretionary regulation. It

empowers ideologues to sue election administrators. It forces

states to turn over voter rolls to federal overseers. It

abolishes vote-by-mail--the preferred system in Washington,

Oregon, Colorado, Utah, Hawaii, Nevada, and Vermont.

In my experience, vote-by-mail best fits the modern

lifestyles. More importantly, it provides the opportunity for

voters to become better informed before casting [their]

ballots.

He continues by saying:

I subscribe to my party's fundamental and historic

commitment to local control. It is a time-honored Republican

principle that ``government closest to the people is best.''

This, importantly, includes the conduct of elections.

Now maybe that is why the senior Senator from Kentucky is voting with us on this side of the issue, because he understands what States' rights are about. States' rights are about running elections so a demagogue or somebody in the level of government cannot force the Federal Government to say who is eligible to vote and who is not eligible to vote.

The notion that we would turn this over to DHS is preposterous. And the notion that I had a constituent who basically got denied a Social Security check because someone said he was dead, even though he went to the Federal building, to the Social Security Administration and said: I am not dead.

They had already ripped the check out of his, basically, bank account. He basically then proceeded for 3 weeks to continue to tell them he was not dead. He showed up in other places in person. He was on national TV. And did they give him his check back? No. It took him months.

Now, let's say that the Federal Government says the same thing about you and the voter rolls on election day. What are you going to do then? What are you going to do on election day? Not have a vote. What are you going to do, say: No, it is me. I am right here.

But they are going to say: No, you are dead. You are not on my rolls. You can't vote. I don't care how long you have lived at that address. I don't care. You are gone.

I am not turning that over to the Federal Government, and our constitutional Founders did not want that turned over to the Federal Government. They saw mischief then, and believe me, the SAVE Act is mischief now.

The League of Women Voters, the ultimate organization for finding and pursuing policy to get people in America to vote basically said this about the SAVE Act:

[This] is a coordinated effort to make voting harder for

eligible Americans.

Now, if you can't trust the League of Women Voters here, I don't know who you can trust because they are the ones who have had an organization that is about nothing but getting people to participate in elections.

They are not Democrat; they are not Republican. They basically are a great

organization that holds all of us accountable, and they basically do not like the SAVE Act.

This is why part of this effort is about protecting States and protecting our rights. As I said, our constitutional Fathers have basically said: This is what we should be doing, and this is why, here now, turning this over, I object to the fact that the Homeland Security is going to collect personal information demanding that a secretary of state turn that personal information over to them for a massive database by the Federal Government. I object to that.

I am not turning personal information over to people who just have other things to pursue. Or maybe it is going to be like DOGE, and they are going to sell it to other organizations and make money off of our personal information. I object to that.

But now, if basically a secretary of state or an auditor basically doesn't agree with Homeland Security, what are they going to do? This bill also has a private right of action to say that you can sue them on a private right of action. So now, we are going to create all of this chaos and mischief at a level when somehow Homeland Security, which they have gotten it wrong before on the vote, on information about who and what information--the Federal Government has got it wrong before-- now all of a sudden, you are going to get it wrong again and what are you going to do?

So as I mentioned, Sam Reed, he is not the only Republican I have talked to. We had a Republican on a press conference today who was an auditor. There are Republicans standing up.

I don't see any Democrats agreeing with you on the SAVE Act, but I see lots of Republicans across America agreeing with us that it is a bad bill.

But as Sam Reed said, former Republican secretary of state:

Neither the President nor Congress should be in the

business of micromanaging elections.

Why? Why? It has never been given to us.

But let's talk about this. My colleague seems to think that there is a trend going in some direction. OK. What is the trend? Because the Heritage Foundation, a group I am pretty sure you believe in, pretty sure you quote them a lot, basically said in my State since 1982--since 1982 till now--there have been 15 cases of voter fraud.

OK. In our State, in the State of Washington, 15 cases. OK. So hardly--hardly, a big trend moving in the other direction. Hardly a big trend.

Similarly, the Heritage Foundation found that in the United States of America, that noncitizen voter fraud is basically .00007, so that turns out to be seven-millionths of a percent. It is not 1 percent. It is not .1 percent. It is basically .00007. So seven-millionths of 1 percent voter fraud in the United States of America based on the system that we have today.

And you want to propose a system that would disenfranchise millions of Americans by making it more complicated. And, yes, I don't know why you don't want to stand up for vote-by-mail, but trust me, I am standing up for vote-by-mail. Your last election had 84 percent turnout in the State of Utah. You had 90 percent in 2020. I think that is a prideful thing for a State.

I am prideful that our State has one of the highest turnouts too. It is not probably 83 percent in a Presidential election. I don't remember exactly what it was in the year 2000, but that is what we strive for in the United States of America, a voting system where everybody participates so when the outcome is something that other people don't like, you can at least say the American people decided.

But if all of a sudden you start sowing doubt into the system, then you have a problem; and that is where President Trump is. He is saying he wants to eliminate mail-in voting, but one in three voters in this country use it.

He is the one who is inspiring my colleagues to write this legislation. He is the one who is inspiring the details. He would go much further, I agree, than what the SAVE Act is.

But let's hear what third parties are saying around the United States of America.

Let's hear what editorial boards who read the same judgment, the same discussions that we have had here, and what have they said?

In my home State, where we have had one of the closest elections in a congressional district, they basically said the SAVE Act is a threat to our democracy.

What did the Seattle Times say? It said, ``Congress should reject SAVE Act as unconstitutional voter suppression.''

That is not Democrats saying that; that is a newspaper saying that.

What did they say in the Maine Herald?

Maine Voters do not wish to be ``saved'' by the SAVE Act.

So now we know that third-party validators--who are pretty expert in voting. Women Voters don't want this. Newspapers that basically have looked at this issue are also calling this for what it is: suppression. And I ask my colleagues to turn this down.

Now, if my colleague wants to continue to debate, I will stand here as long as he wants to stand here to debate this issue. I will stand here and get more facts and figures to show him that this voting system today has empowered Americans, it has increased opportunities for Americans to have their votes cast, and it has gotten rid of generations of suppression that existed before. But if he wants me to talk about all of the voter suppression that has existed in the United States, starting with laws that basically disenfranchise various segments of our population, I am happy to talk about them because every generation should be about fighting to get the voters to cast a vote, have a robust democracy, and distinguish the United States of America from other countries as a beacon of democracy where free and fair elections stand and where we are confident about the results.

We don't need the SAVE Act. It will cause chaos. What we need to do is to continue to fight for democracy and continue the path forward for a vote-by-mail system.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I come to speak about the opposition to the nominee before us that we are going to vote on soon, Mr. John DeLeeuw. It is not necessarily about Mr. DeLeeuw's qualifications; it is about the dangerous precedent we are making as we confirm someone to replace an independent NTSB board member who was removed by the President without cause, while they are actively challenging this removal in court. And it is about a needless jeopardizing of public confidence in NTSB's critical work, which I will speak about in a minute, particularly as it relates to the House not taking up the ROTOR Act on suspension yesterday, a bill that we passed by 100 votes here in the U.S. Senate.

It has been less than 2 years since this body unanimously confirmed Alvin Brown to be on the NTSB. The Senate's overwhelming support for Mr. Brown should not be surprising. As a former mayor of Jacksonville, FL, and a former senior adviser to the Department of Transportation, Mr. Brown's background and experience qualified him to be on the NTSB.

My colleague Senator Scott of Florida introduced Mr. Brown at his nomination hearing before the Commerce Committee, praising his ``excellent record of service'' and noting that he would ``do excellent work on behalf of the American people in this role.'' Senator Scott's prediction that Mr. Brown would focus on the NTSB and safety-- shortly after he was sworn in, he began conducting critical work on the NTSB investigation into the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which killed six people and caused billions of dollars in damage.

He was also leading the NTSB response to the March 13, 2025, highway accident on Interstate 35 in Austin, TX, that killed 5 people and injured 11 more. But seeking to unravel Congress' will and insert its own will, even though we voted on this gentleman and he is serving the NTSB focusing on safety, the White House basically is trying to remove Mr. Brown and replace him with Mr. DeLeeuw. As I stated earlier, Mr. Brown has filed a lawsuit challenging his removal. This remains in the courts and pending; the Supreme Court is prepared to rule this year on this decision to bring legal clarity to Mr. Brown's case.

So I ask my colleagues, why are we rushing to confirm Mr. DeLeeuw to a seat that isn't even really vacant under current law? Why would we needlessly create confusion, especially when the Supreme Court is expected to rule on this issue very soon? And why would the Senate allow the executive branch to undermine the confidence and the independence of the National Transportation Safety Board?

As we pointed out, moving ahead with this nomination before us--Mr. DeLeeuw's--is especially problematic when the White House has still not nominated a single member of the opposing party to any independent board or commission, including the NTSB. I guarantee you, that is not the way the FTC, the FCC, the NTSB should run. You are undermining the confidence in these Agencies and the fact that we have both Democrats and Republicans who are supposed to serve on them.

This is not about might makes right. This is about policy and expertise and having both Democrats and Republicans on commissions so that you can continue the focus of bipartisan adherence to these principles that each Agency is supposed to profess confidence in and move forward on. So do we want an FTC that is driven just purely by politics, an FCC that is purely driven by the President's will or desire? Do we want an NTSB decided by the President of the United States? I guarantee you we don't because, yesterday, he couldn't deliver a vote on the House floor that would have gotten us the ROTOR Act--100 votes in the U.S. Senate and he couldn't do that. But he is going to tell us over our processes and over historical precedent about how Democrat and Republican nominees should be appointed. He is throwing the Democrats off, appointing his own person, and then basically leaving into question how strong is the NTSB really going to be on safety.

Congress established the NTSB in law as an independent Agency. It reauthorized the Agency as recently as 2024. So, if all of a sudden, everybody here didn't want to have appointments to the NTSB by the normal process, well, you had a big chance to say you didn't like that, but nobody did. In fact, we renewed it, so we should now not be rewarding the President's unlawful removal of Vice Chair Brown by rushing to confirm a nominee in a position that is not really vacant. I call on my Republican colleagues not to go down this path. Instead, uphold the constitutional duty to provide checks and balances and protect the American people.