Floor Statements

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, while other colleagues are joining us to speak on behalf of the Cortez Masto language, I wanted to thank the Senator from Nevada for her legislation and just emphasize how important this is to people all through the United States, including my State. It happens to be a border State, but even in Seattle, providers are worrying about a chilling effect.

I was wondering if the Senator from Nevada--while our colleagues have been talking about how this impacts individuals, people seeking healthcare in other States, what is happening now with the chilling effect to providers and their anxiety over people pursuing them for seeing patients from States in which Roe v. Wade is not fully protected?

I want to thank the Senator from Nevada. We were joined by the American Medical Association that also expressed this concern. They are speaking on behalf of the providers that want to provide reproductive choice in States that pass this law, and they are concerned. We need to get this legislation passed.

I thank the Senator from Nevada.

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, later this afternoon, we are going to vote on Mary Boyle to be a Consumer Product Safety Commissioner. This organization, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, works on the frontlines to protect consumers from dangerous and defective products, and Ms. Boyle's confirmation will give the Commission a full complement of Commissioners to complete its important work.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission is responsible for regulating the safety of more than 15,000 everyday products and helps keep hazardous products out of our homes and away from our families. The Agency is responsible for investigating hazards, effectuating product recalls, issuing and enforcing product safety standards, and informing consumers and manufacturers about potential dangers and how to avoid them. The CPSC's work literally saves lives and prevents injuries.

We know that Ms. Boyle is well qualified for this position and that she will make consumers a top priority and their safety a top priority.

Now is an important time for the Consumer Product Safety Commission

to be well equipped to fight for these consumer safety issues. We need it to remain a strong force in keeping unsafe and defective products, including children's toys, infant rockers, household appliances, and other issues in the development space, like elevators and space heaters, out of the market.

When it comes to recalls, for example, this year the Consumer Product Safety Commission and three residential elevator manufacturers announced the recall of 70,000 residential elevators that posed a serious risk of injury and, tragically, death to small children. I am encouraged to see that the Consumer Product Safety Commission is taking action on this heartbreaking issue. There is more to be done, and we need a Commission that will follow through.

The Commission is also responsible for investigating tragedies, such as home fires that might have been caused by defective products. In fact, the Consumer Product Safety Commission was quickly on the scene in the Bronx earlier this year when a fire from a space heater caused the death of 17 people, including 8 children. When I sent a letter to the Consumer Product Safety Commission asking them to look further into this issue, they acted quickly and knew that we had to investigate.

While these investigations are still ongoing, we need assurances that if a defective product is found to be the cause, that the Consumer Product Safety Commission is going to be fully equipped to take action.

I also want to mention with respect to the Consumer Product Safety Commission's rulemaking authority that the Commerce Committee recently passed the STURDY Act, a bill that would speed up the Consumer Product Safety Commission's rulemaking process to deal with furniture tipovers.

Unfortunately, many furniture items are designed in such a way that they can tip if a child grabs or climbs upon them, with the potential of very tragic consequences. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has been undertaking a rulemaking to ban unsafe furniture items by imposing strict tipover testing requirements. I hope we will see a safety standard for this very soon.

Over the course of more than a decade at the Commission, Ms. Boyle has worked on these issues in senior positions across the Consumer Product Safety Commission, including as General Counsel and Deputy General Counsel before assuming her current role as Executive Director.

As the Consumer Product Safety Commission's General Counsel, Ms. Boyle served the Agency's chief legal officer--providing legal, policy, and strategic advice on a multitude of regulatory, statutory, fiscal, litigation, and enforcement issues--and examined proposed product safety rules and standards. So I think she is well qualified for this job. She worked with the Department of Justice on Federal court litigation in which the Commission was involved.

In her current role as Executive Director, she is the chief operating officer of the Agency, ensuring that it meets program and operational and administrative functions. She is more than well-versed in the Agency's processes and eminently qualified to hit the ground running as a Commissioner.

Over 90 different organizations have written to my office in support of her nomination, including the AFL-CIO, the Consumer Federation of America, the National Consumers League, Kids in Danger, and many, many more organizations.

I want to say to all my colleagues, I hope you will vote to confirm Ms. Boyle to ensure that the Consumer Product Safety Commission can move forward so that these important issues can be addressed and Americans can find safer products in their homes.

I look forward to working with Ms. Boyle at a critical time for the Agency in making sure that these products are safe and that Americans are protected from dangerous and defective products.

Unanimous Consent Agreement--Executive Calendar

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at 2:15 today, the Senate vote on the motion to discharge the Freeman nomination; further, that immediately following that vote, the Senate vote on confirmation of the Boyle nomination as under the previous order; and that if the nomination is confirmed, the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now recess until 2:15.

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

Mr. President, I come to the floor to talk about developments this week in trying to fight to make sure that American consumers aren't paying artificially more for gas to fill up their cars and trucks and take a vacation for the holiday than they should be paying.

This is an important issue for everybody in the United States but particularly my constituents, who all throughout the State of Washington are paying--well, Seattle, definitely over $5, and many other parts of the State over $5. And if you are not paying more than $5 a gallon, you are paying very close to $5 a gallon. So it is important that Members of Congress do their job in oversight and policing of these markets to make sure that there is transparency; that is, a bright light to make sure that no one is taking advantage during this tight supply and artificially driving up that price for their benefit.

That is why we introduced the Transportation Fuel Market Transparency Act that asked the Federal Trade Commission to expand on authority Congress already gave to them to police transportation petroleum markets and make sure that the trading that is done on indexes that have very little oversight--very little oversight--that those indexes have a brighter light shined on them so that we make sure consumers aren't being gouged because of the kinds of practices that happen.

Well, lo and behold, just this Tuesday, the Federal Government and the Department of Justice and the CFTC--the Commodities Futures Trading Commission--basically gave a statement on the largest settlement in history, a civil monetary penalty and disgorgement exceeding $1.1 billion on Glencore, one of the largest commodity trading firms.

It is a major participant in the global, physical oil and oil derivatives market, and for more than a decade, it engaged in a wide- ranging scheme to manipulate oil markets--schemes to defraud other market participants by manipulating the information going to financial markets, schemes that created artificially high benchmarks so that Glencore's derivatives and physical positions would settle or price at levels more favorable to the company.

(Ms. CORTEZ MASTO assumed the Chair.)

These were some of the same practices that are were uncovered during the Enron scheme. I know the Presiding Officer knows because she comes from the State of Nevada, and two of the areas most hard hit by the electricity crisis were the State of Washington and the State of Nevada. Why? Because people wanted us to continue to pay on fraudulent electricity pricing.

That is why we fought, along with the Presiding Officer's predecessor and others, to make sure that electricity markets were properly policed for any kind of manipulative practices.

I am very proud that we authored legislation after that scandal that really has given the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission the tools it needed on electricity and natural gas.

They, to this date, since 2007, have used that authority to police electricity and natural gas and have had over a $1 billion of fines and settlements against companies and their bad practices.

These are the same sort of practices that we are uncovering now in the commodities market and on oil market manipulation.

I know my colleagues on the other side of the aisle would like to pretend that this issue doesn't exist. I ask them, go home and face your constituents and tell them you voted to do nothing--nothing--to bring more transparency into the gas markets that are affecting them today and see what their reaction is. I guarantee you they are paying too much at the pump, and they want to know that we are properly policing these markets.

They get the dilemma that we are in, particularly given Russia and Ukraine. They get the issues of a changing economy coming out of COVID. But they are madder than heck when they read about some company that has been doing this practice for decades and basically making money off of the back of their hard earnings.

Consumers could pay as much as $1,000 more for gas this year. They want to know why. This company raked in over $320 million in improper gains. And while some of the record settlement involved penalties for bribes and kickbacks in foreign countries, the company agreed to pay $485 million in settlements for criminal and civil investigations for various fuel oil prices.

Various fuel oil products that were manipulated and impacted included Los Angeles and their Bunker Fuel Oil, New York Harbor Low Sulfur Fuel Oil, New York Harbor High Sulfur Fuel, and U.S. Gulf Coast High Sulfur Fuel Oil.

I am not sure how much consumers ended up getting fleeced, but it is clear that at least hundreds of millions of dollars impacted these markets.

And as the Presiding Officer knows, because she has been the chief law enforcement for her State, if you don't have a policeman on the beat policing these markets, more of these fraudulent activities will exist.

After the derivative crisis, I also made sure that anti-manipulation authority went to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. When we called recently to ask about their use of this authority, they told us they had put fines and penalties against companies at over $4.5 billion. That was before Tuesday's announcement of clear oil market manipulation.

Some of my colleagues, as we push this transparency bill through the Commerce Committee, said: Why, if they caught some people on Tuesday,

do we need to mark something up on Wednesday? Well, the issue is that we were talking about the futures market. As I just read, these companies are very adept at manipulating the futures market and the physical market to get their best gain. We are asking our colleagues to vote for transparency in the physical market of indexes traded after the product is refined.

We know that there is a world oil price. We know that it is refined. But what we can't figure out is, after it is refined, why--particularly on the West Coast--is it at exorbitant rates, well over the national average and paying well over what we think market fundamentals determine?

We saw, at a hearing that we had before the Commerce Committee, energy experts testify that some of these fundamentals do not make sense; that something else is going on in the market. So why turn down the opportunity for us, as a Federal Government, to get more transparency in these energy markets? Why would anybody want to say that more transparency over these indexes is not a good idea?

Well, some of our colleagues--I am not sure, because they offered no substantive amendments to the legislation before us. In fact, those that were, what I would say, some improvements around the edges to the bill, we actually accepted in committee. The rest of the amendments offered were all about the issues and discussions of more supply, which were out of the jurisdiction of our committee, and I encouraged my colleagues to take them up on the Senate floor.

So no substantive changes were offered to this legislation. Nobody objected on the basis of the idea that transparency is a bad idea. And yet people are holding on to an idea that they don't want to answer about this issue of manipulation.

Trust me, I was shocked when I was elected to the U.S. Senate, before I was even sworn in, to find out that we were in an energy crisis; that somehow the price of electricity had gone from some of the cheapest in the United States to the most exorbitant price ever, 3,000 times the rate. I thought this couldn't possibly be a scheme. This couldn't possibly be something perpetrated because, obviously, we would catch that. Obviously, we have a policeman on the beat. Well, it turned out that the California market, what is called the ISO, really wasn't catching it, and there really was manipulation by Enron.

Enron manipulated the supply of electricity by cooking up various schemes to move supply out of California to create artificial shortages and then drive up the price of electricity. They had traders who lied on the phone to people buying long-term contracts, telling them: Buy the long-term contract because the price is going up. And an analyst saying to a trader, and the trader replying back: That is not true. And the analyst saying: Tell them anyway. That is the kind of thing that we need to police.

So I was shocked to find that one of my first tasks being a U.S. Senator was going to be to spend 2 years policing electricity just so my State and the State of Nevada would not pay on fraudulent contracts for more than a decade.

I guarantee you, not only would the lights in Vegas have gone out, but much of the Washington economy would have been affected.

This is so important now because these high gas prices are affecting every sector of transportation. It is affecting our airline economy. It is affecting our trucking economy. I have heard from our railroads on the diesel engine prices. It is affecting every part of our economy while we have to pay more.

And even if it is 50 cents--as one of the witnesses testified, it may be as much as 50 cents a gallon that is artificially being put onto the consumers--why would you not want to know the answer and simply give the Federal Trade Commission the authority to make sure that these markets are properly policed for unfair and deceptive practices?

I know my colleague who is presiding knows because we have even had suggestions from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that the practice is so bad among energy traders that we should consider legislation to ban energy traders who continue to perpetrate these schemes. That is right, they go from one company to another company. They know how the schemes work. They think it is just the price of doing business. Even if they get caught, they will just pay the fine, like Glencore is paying now.

If you think about it, this $1.1 billion is one of the largest oil market manipulation cases ever. People probably aren't hearing about it this week because of other stories that are in the news. But trust me, this kind of behavior needs to be rooted out.

So, Madam President, I hope that when my colleagues return, I hope that they will spend the recess asking their constituents whether they think there needs to be more transparency in oil markets. I will be very surprised if they don't say that something is going on, and we want to know what it is. That is because consumers have felt for a long time a disconnection between market fundamentals of supply and demand.

And, yes, there have been some changes in supply as it relates to what we are facing on an international basis. My constituents understand that. But we have always been an isolated market in the Pacific Northwest for refineries in my State, most of the supply coming from Alaska. And yet we pay the highest prices in the Nation. So our constituents want to know why.

My colleagues, Senator Wyden, Senator Feinstein, and I have prosecuted these issues. We have asked for more information and transparency. In both instances, when we were successful with electricity and natural gas, we did find behavior that needed to be rooted out. And here, we have proof now in this Glencore case that there is manipulation in oil markets. We are simply asking that, just don't leave it to the futures market, because if you want to give law enforcement, the Department of Justice, our attorneys general, others, the tools to root out bad behavior--even if it is 5 cents a gallon, it is worth fighting for. Even if it is a few cents more to uncover and drive down the cost, it is worth it to our constituents, who are paying exorbitant prices.

Let's make sure everybody understands in a tight supply, it is a lot easier to do manipulation, and that is why we need to get this done now.

I wish that the authority that we had given to the Federal Trade Commission on this issue in 2007 would have been used, but the point is, you actually have to have people and the information to prosecute these cases.

My colleagues at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission built such a unit. That unit, as I said, has been successful in monitoring electricity and natural gas. I hope that they will emulate what the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has done.

I am proud that the CFTC and our Attorney General, Merrick Garland, made this announcement on Tuesday of this unbelievable manipulation, of bribery, of schemes, of all of the work that goes behind the scenes for people to make billions of dollars of profits when we and our consumers are being gouged with extra prices.

Let's find the answers. Let's do something as basic as passing a law about transparency on a product--petroleum--that is so critical to our economy.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to print the attached letter in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to print the attached letter in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for the following Senators to be permitted to speak prior to the scheduled vote: myself for 20 minutes, Senator Toomey for 5 minutes, and Senator Brown for 5 minutes.

Mr. President, I am not sure I will use all 20 minutes, but you never know on a subject this important and this vital to women and families across the America. It may take a little more than a few minutes to talk about this issue, and that is that 70 percent of Americans believe that we should not overturn Roe v. Wade or a woman's right to her own reproductive choice.

This is so critical that 70 percent of Americans are in agreement. This was part of a Pew Research report. Twenty-five percent don't agree, and about 5 percent are not sure what they think. But anybody who thinks this isn't about settled law or about mainstream views in America is wrong because it is about almost 50 years of settled law, and it is about what mainstream Americans believe are their constitutional rights. That is why it is so important for us to listen to those Americans and their long-held beliefs, starting with the laws that we got from England and baked into our Constitution, the right to privacy.

Yes, people are right. The word ``privacy'' isn't mentioned, but it is in various amendments believed to be rights within the Constitution. But we have a Supreme Court made up of men and Ivy League institutions who now discuss in a decision--we don't really know exactly where it came from--this notion that privacy and a woman's right to her own reproductive choice somehow doesn't deserve stare decisis--that is, predicated on previous law--and somehow isn't in the Constitution.

Well, I have got news for a lot of people. If you have a Supreme Court that is going to take a run and run from privacy in the Constitution, as this decision does--as this decision does--it barely mentions the case law predicated that made decisions about a woman's right to privacy based on those issues. It is barely mentioned.

Now, I am sure it is because those Justices decided, if they had to agree that privacy was really there as a right, which we as Americans believe it is--against the government's unwarranted search and seizure on you, the government spying on you, the government taking action against you that has not been followed in law--you know, I spent 2 years on the Judiciary Committee, and I really couldn't believe this.

Somebody told me--actually, a conservative judge passed this information on. If you ask them whether they believe in Roe v. Wade or settled law, they will tell you: Oh, yeah, it has been there. But if you ask them whether they believe in rights to privacy enumerated in the Constitution and do they believe in the penumbra of rights that basically give us this right that Griswold v. Connecticut, that Casey v. Planned Parenthood was decided on, a true, true conservative who wasn't going to uphold the law will tell you they didn't believe in that.

So that is the conundrum. We had a bunch of the smartest guys in the room from Ivy League schools who came here and hoodwinked the Senate, saying things like: Oh, I will follow or I think stare decisis is very important. Yet the same people are about to put their name on a document that says we don't really think there is any strong holding here. We don't think there is any strong case. Well, there is a case. There is a case for privacy.

I remember my first days on the Judiciary Committee, when John Ashcroft, then-Attorney General, tried to come before the committee and make light of the fact that the government was spying on Americans. When I said to him: Mr. Ashcroft, this is a serious issue of the FBI and others using software technology to spy on the lives of Americans, he said: You remind me of a joke.

I couldn't believe it. I remind him of a joke? And he went on to tell the story about how a little boy sat on Santa Claus's lap, and he said: I know whether you have been bad or good. And he says: Oh, you are not a Santa Claus; you are John Ashcroft. He thought this was hilarious, and I reminded him that not everybody in America was laughing.

Now look at where we are, 20-some years later, fast-forwarding on the rights to privacy that we have in the United States and how every day we have to fight for those rights to privacy.

I know the Presiding Officer knows this because he has joined me on these issues, particularly as it relates to children's online privacy issues and so many other issues that this body and this institution are going to have to decide on, but Americans know--70 percent of them agree that this is a mainstream, settled issue and now are shocked to find that, somehow, somebody is proposing something to overturn it.

I am not even sure people understand. I just had a conversation with somebody who said: Oh, you mean they are going to give some rights to men in determining the pregnancy and some rights for women?

I said: No. They are talking about making abortion illegal. They are talking about passing a law that takes the reproductive rights and choices of women and turns them back into the dark ages.

This person got it right away. They said: Who do you want caring for women--someone in a back alley or a trained healthcare professional?

That is really what we are talking about here. American healthcare technology has come to the point that women who do not want an unwanted pregnancy can have the choice of a morning after pill. There are lots of different ways for them to deal with planned and unplanned pregnancies. Yet this institution wants to tell them, by the Supreme Court, that they don't have a privacy right; that it doesn't exist; that Connecticut v. Griswold, which, if you think about it, was about contraception--it was really about whether women at the time had the right to have contraception and plan pregnancies.

I know the Presiding Officer knows about this time period. We both come from big families. We know all about big families.

All of a sudden, in that decision, in Connecticut v. Griswold, the right to privacy--the penumbra of rights within the Constitution--was determined to say that women have the right to control their bodies and have contraception. The fact that this is not the basis of upholding the law after almost 50 years--I can't even explain how unbelievable it is that somebody would not fully discuss and cite it. And if they don't believe in the penumbra--but I am guessing the reason they don't want to even discuss the penumbra of rights is because they know darn well we live in an age and time in which privacy needs utmost protection, and individuals need people like us to be voting for things that are going to protect individuals' rights of privacy in the era of big government, of big corporations, of undue intrusions in, yes, even our own healthcare. We need protection.

We are now here talking, though, about overturning these rights that affect the healthcare lives of women. We are not talking about the healthcare of men. We are not sitting here--I can't tell you how many times in the last 15 years that I have been here that every budget decision, every major almost-going-over-the-fiscal-cliff when John Boehner was the Speaker--oh, if we don't have a vote to get rid of a woman's right to choose--every budget issue down to the last wire is always about whether you are going to get rid of a woman's right to choose. It has been the fight of the other side of the aisle all along to try to say they are going to control women's bodies and women's healthcare choices.

We know that you are not going to get rid of abortions if you pass this

law. You are not going to get rid of them. When we passed Connecticut v. Griswold and Casey, that is when we basically went down the road of making sure that women weren't killed in back alley abortions. We actually saved lives of women, and we started getting people to take care of planned pregnancies and make progress of having people on contraception.

We are not going to get rid of abortions by listening to the Supreme Court or passing something. They will happen. It will go back to any back alley approach or other issues to try to deal with it.

So I ask my colleagues: What are you thinking when you are advocating for a return to pre-Roe? What exactly do you think is going to happen in the United States of America? I can tell you, you are going to leave women without the ability to control their own bodies, without the ability for them and their doctor to make decisions.

So many of these issues are about that woman and her doctor making a decision. You know, we make laws to deal with the parameters and the exceptions to the rule. This is a process by which we have laid out what we think is reproductive healthcare choice and then directed people to deal with their physician on these issues. But the other side would like to take these issues to the extreme and say that women have gone too far on their own healthcare choices.

I guarantee you, there are many times where it is a decision between the life of the mother and the life of a child. Do we really want government making that decision, or do we want the physician and the individual woman making that decision?

I ask my colleagues: Do you believe the right to privacy exists within the Constitution or are you like the Supreme Court? You don't believe in the decisions of previous Supreme Court Justices? You don't think they have solid standing because you don't believe that privacy is a long-held view of the United States? I guarantee you, it is fundamental to who we are as a country, and it is fundamental to who we are today and why individual women should have that right and have that protection.

But people aren't even thinking about the broader impacts. Secretary Yellen testified today:

Eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when

and whether to have children would have very damaging effects

on the economy and would set women back decades. Roe v. Wade

. . . enabled many women to finish school and increase their

earning potential.

No one has even talked about exactly how this would work. I am confused about how it would work State by State. I will also tell you, this Supreme Court really--I don't even know what to say about it except for when I interviewed one of the Supreme Court Justices, who I am pretty sure is making this decision--I said: This is very important to the State of Washington because the people of the State of Washington have voted to make Roe v. Wade the law of our State.

And he said: Oh, Senator, Senator, you are mistaken.

I said: I am mistaken about my State, about what happened?

He said: You mean your legislature voted.

I said: No, sir, the people in my State voted by initiative in the nineties to codify these rights into our State law because that is what the people of my State believe.

So the arrogance of this Court, you can see, continues not to listen to the views of 70 percent of Americans.

I believe that you should be able to ask Justices what their judicial opinion and philosophy is. They should tell you. If these Justices did not believe that this was the law of the land and should be upheld, if they didn't believe in these rights of privacy, they should have told everybody clearly.

But it is hardly in the mainstream view of Americans.

Tomorrow we will have a chance to say whether we believe in these privacy rights, whether we believe in a woman's reproductive choices, whether we believe that 50 years--just about 50 years--and 70 percent of the American people are worth listening to. I would listen and pass this legislation tomorrow because I guarantee you, if it is not just this privacy right, why are you going to trust them on any other privacy decision in the future if they are not going to be fighting to uphold your privacy rights on women's reproductive health?

I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, I rise today to urge my colleagues to support the nomination of RADM Ann Phillips to be Administrator of the Maritime Administration.

Rear Admiral Phillips served in the U.S. Navy for 31 years, served in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, and held leadership positions such as the Director of Surface Warfare for the Chief of Naval Operations. Most recently, she served as special assistant to former Governor of Virginia Ralph Northam, where she focused on coastal adaptation and protection.

This nomination is so important to our maritime industry, especially as we are facing unprecedented challenges in the maritime supply chain. The Maritime Administration is responsible for supporting America's maritime transportation industry, including supporting the health of the U.S. merchant marine fleet, investing in port infrastructure, supporting American shipyards, and growing and training the maritime workforce.

Never before have maritime and shipping issues been more important to the health of our economy and consumers. Our ports are handling record amounts of cargo as COVID-19 has caused consumers to shift their spending habits to e-commerce. The arrival of these imports has led to record volumes at our U.S. ports.

In 2021, the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach moved 10 million containers for the first time ever. In my State, the State of Washington, the Northwest Seaport Alliance saw a 15-percent increase in container volumes over the last year. So this unprecedented volume continues to cause massive challenges of ships backed up offshore and vessels anchoring or loitering in waiting areas near the Ports of L.A. and Long Beach. Twenty-two percent of sales have been lost by agricultural exports due to transportation delays and cancelations, with products like potatoes, milk, wheat, and seafood that are literally rotting on our port docks.

My colleagues and I have been working hard to pass the Ocean Shipping Reform Act. And we did that out of the Senate, and now, obviously, our colleagues in the House--we have different bills--hopefully, will either resolve this in USICA or, with the passage of one of these bills, with the Senate bill maybe being passed by the House.

But the Federal Maritime Commission needs tools to crack down on bad actors in the shipping industry and reduce costs facing consumers. Our bill that passed in March that, as I said, we are working to reconcile, we believe needs to become law as soon as possible.

But the bill is only a piece of the supply chain challenge. We need to make serious investments in our port infrastructure to handle the increasing capacity and get goods moving, and MARAD is charged with overseeing the Port Infrastructure Development Program, the primary grant program used to invest in our ports and help move our products. That is why it is so important to have this position.

President Biden's bipartisan infrastructure law included 2.25 billion MARAD port infrastructure development dollars for the next 5 years. I want to thank my colleague Senator Wicker for working with us on this-- this is such critical infrastructure investment--and all my colleagues who supported those programs. This huge economic opportunity and the volume of our trade needs the infrastructure at our ports to continue to increase.

We need Rear Admiral Phillips confirmed to make sure those dollars get out the door and get them to our ports now. We need the leadership of this organization to improve the resiliency of our ports, which are vulnerable to climate change and extreme storms. And we need Rear Admiral Phillips' experience in coastal resiliency as we have charged MARAD with building a maritime industry for the future that makes sure that we are looking at shore power issues and operating on cleaner fuels.

And we need Rear Admiral Phillips' experience in the Navy that will bring the expertise to the workforce mission. MARAD is tasked with ensuring that the United States has a strong merchant marine workforce to support the U.S. Sealift Program. The events in Ukraine have shown us that we must deal with the shortage of merchant mariners. It is estimated that we are over 1,800 merchant marine officers short of the need in case of a conflict. With the rise of China and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, we cannot take another minute for granted for the need for U.S.-flagged ships and U.S. mariners to support the logistics of the U.S. military. I know the Presiding Officer knows this very well.

In addition to strengthening our workforce, we need to invest in our shipyards, maintain our national defense needs as well as strengthen the U.S. flag fleet. This means investing in modern shipyards and identifying incentives to build new generations of U.S.-flagged ships.

These U.S. merchant mariners are also vital to the maritime industry. My State and various States face a workforce shortage and many of our other maritime sectors also. We need to skill and train a workforce for tomorrow.

Maritime jobs are good, family wage jobs, but we need to have a talented workforce that is inclusive, and we need to have an inclusive environment and work with the Coast Guard and the maritime industry to address issues of sexual assault and harassment to keep people safe in the workplace at sea.

Rear Admiral Phillips is the right person for this job to help the industry, the maritime unions, the shipping companies, and the Coast Guard to foster change. She has been a trailblazer in her career because she has been the first woman to command a destroyer squadron, the first woman Director of Surface Warfare, and now the first woman Maritime Administrator.

I urge my colleagues to support her nomination.

Mr. President, speaking against my colleague, I am sure he is well-meaning, but the language in this underlying amendment would condition the funds of this bill. Say the taxpayer money provided to universities on research--think about what we do today with universities on a lot of subjects. Just ask yourself, would you ever have an ROI on the COVID vaccine? basic research around lifesaving medicine? It took 60 years to prove the return on that investment. There are underlying DARPA funds in this bill. Do you think that all of those DARPA funds showed return on investment? Say goodbye to those moneys.

This also says that it can be conditioned for a clawback. Who? So nuclear research done by one institution and one administration but not liked by the next administration is clawed back? I think we have trusted our universities to do this research for us, and that is what a research economy is about.

We need to dust off our R&D skills and make these investments and make the commitments. The underlying bill has safeguards on spending in the bill.

I ask my colleagues to vote no on this motion to instruct.

Vote on Motion

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for an additional 30 seconds.

I, too, oppose this amendment.

Striking the authorization does strike competition. NASA has asked for continued competition, and there are many defense contractors who have expressed interest--Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Dynetics.

So I understand my colleague's frustration and what he wants to complain about, but this is about safety, and it is about redundancy, and it is about us authorizing the Artemis program; not just having appropriators make a decision, but having the authorization of safety and redundancy that we expect if we as a Nation are going to take the next woman astronaut all the way to the surface of the Moon.

When I think about what happened with the space shuttle Columbia and the disaster, NASA suffered great consequences. They have said redundancy matters, and that is what we are authorizing, and the competition my colleague just mentioned.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to complete my remarks prior to the vote.

If the Senator--first of all, I want to associate myself with the comments of the Senator from Montana, and I wanted to ask a question because I--look, I hear from my cattlemen about this all the time.

I think the issue is, they think they are going to get a price, they think they are going to grow beef, they think that they are going to have some certainty in this marketplace, only to find, at the last minute when the beef is about to be delivered to the packing house, the packing house comes up with a scheme or scenario to drop their price after our growers have made these investments. Is that right?

Well, I thank the Senator from Montana for articulating this issue.

Too much market control, not enough transparency, and our growers basically get stuck with having invested costs never to recuperate them because somebody used that market power to basically lower those costs. And, you know, we have seen this a lot. We have seen them import a ton of Canadian beef right at this very moment, right when they are about to deliver U.S. product into the meat packing plants: Oh, we just dropped the price because we got so much supply because they just let a lot of supply in from Canada.

So this--the gentleman from Montana is talking something that is existing in other aspects of our economy too. So I am very glad that we are trying to better police these markets and do a good job. And I know you and the Senator from Mississippi have focused on this issue, and we very much appreciate you doing that.

Well, Madam President, we are about to go to conference on the United States Innovation and Competition Act and the House America COMPETES Act. Boy, this is a long time coming. I want to thank Leader Schumer and my colleague Senator Wicker, also Senators Young and Cornyn and other Members who worked hard to help us reach an agreement so that we can have this process today.

Obviously, I hope my colleagues will vote yes to compound this motion and go to conference and allow for these various motions to instruct.

It has been 324 days since the Senate passed this bill on June 8, 2021, and it has been 488 days since we authorized the CHIPS Program. I am here to implore my colleagues to get this done today and to say that we need to move faster.

We just heard yesterday from Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who said even in Ukraine, weapon replacement is being hindered by a lack of chips. We know that we are facing other problems. I am talking about Beijing with further lockdowns. What does that mean? It means fewer people producing products. It means more serious supply chain issues. So if you are serious about America's competition, Americans being allowed to build more and invest more in the United States, onshoring of our manufacturing supply chains, our competitiveness, then you want to vote yes and go to conference.

We have had so many letters in the last month--the American Society of Engineering Education, tech companies that believe in the competition and the opportunity that we have seen--writing us and saying to please get this legislation done. We have seen used car prices shoot up 40 percent because semiconductor shortages have basically created havoc in the automotive market.

And it is clear that our European and Asian counterparts aren't waiting. They are moving ahead trying to deal with this supply chain shortage because as the Secretary also told us yesterday, the shortage is well defined. We know that it is going to last well into the future; that is, there is demand.

So the question for the world economy is, Are you going to try to meet that demand? And the answer is, there are a lot of people who are going to try to meet that demand.

The question is, Are we going to try to meet that demand? The longer we wait, the longer we take to meet that demand, the more the investment is attracted to go somewhere else.

Now, the United States of America believes in having the leading edge in semiconductor production, and we are excited that the next generation of chips can do so many things for the smart appliances; smart tools; clean energy economy; obviously, the communications economy; the next generation of all sorts of technology as it relates to our telecom sector. But we need to get this bill done. We need to resolve the differences between the House and the Senate. And we need to have bipartisan support to show that the U.S. Senate can function legislatively on an issue that is not a mandatory or annual bill but a process by which an issue, presented to us as a nation--supply chain, competitiveness, manufacturing issues--that we can get the job done.

We in the United States pride ourselves on being a nation of inventors. We are a leader in global technology. We know that we can solve our problems by solutions that we, together--business and labor and government and R&D investment--can bring the best ideas to fruition and help us as a nation.

But we have to show that we, Democrats and Republicans, House and Senate, can master the next step in the innovation process. That is what these underlying bills do. It basically allows us to dust off our R&D skills and say: Let's do more translational science.

So we have had lots of letters from people supporting tech hubs-- investments of universities working with business in a centralized location to solve engineering problems and move ahead. We have the Manufacturing Extension Partnership Program. And many of our small and medium-sized businesses that need access to technology and supply chain data to better compete in a global economy and provide security want this legislation.

So the risks of inaction are too great to ignore. The U.S. Innovation and Competition Act is clearly part of our supply chain solutions. I urge my colleagues to not only help us by invoking cloture and going to conference but help us resolve these issues in a timely fashion so we can send a price signal about the investments that we want to make in the United States of America to make our Nation and our manufacturers more competitive.

With that, I yield the floor.

Cloture Motion

Madam President, I come to the floor to talk about something that is impacting consumers

every day, and that is our supply chain shortage as it relates to semiconductors, or abbreviated here as ``chips.''

I can't emphasize how important this issue is to Americans. It is affecting Americans who can't buy a used car. There is a 41-percent increase over what they would have normally been able to buy. It is really impacting Americans. Why? Because Americans can't get new cars. They can't get new cars because they don't have semiconductors. It is impacting our transportation sector that ships goods. It is affecting our ability on national security. It is affecting our communication systems.

I know that a year ago, we passed this legislation out of the Senate. I am pretty sure that if we would have passed the funding a year ago out of the U.S. Senate and it would have been adopted and gone to the President's desk, we would be in a different supply chain issue today.

I want to ask my colleagues to move quickly at going to conference on this legislation. Reporting indicates that semiconductor shortages may have cost the United States a full percent of economic input-output in 2021. Other reports highlight the fact that the semiconductor shortage is driving inflation. Yet our colleagues don't want to help get us to conference. When you don't have chips, you don't have trucks to drive.

We have an opportunity to invest in American workers and to show international leadership and innovation by going to conference and passing this Innovation and Competition Act.

I want to thank Senator Schumer and Senator Young for their work in a bipartisan fashion to get this legislation before us, to help us move it through the process, and now to help us deliver on what is impacting Americans--critical supply chain shortages.

My colleagues have long spoken about the need to reshore our semiconductor supply chain. That is why, when we passed this bill a year ago, we had strong bipartisan support, and we have continued to grow the support for this action.

We are here today, though, to say that if we continue to delay this issue, the investment is going to go somewhere else; that is, companies are trying to figure out how to deal with the shortage. They have a shortage; they want to get going on it. They know that not only is the shortage here today, but we have to double and triple the amount of chip fabrication that we need to do for the future economy. The longer that we don't get at that task, the more this supply chain issue is going to be exacerbated. So our colleagues need to sign up for helping America with a critical supply chain shortage issue and come help us deal with this issue.

I have spoken many times about the importance of semiconductors. We know that the cost of a used car has risen 41 percent since the semiconductor shortage, bringing them almost to the price of a new car. I have heard so many stories from my constituents about this. They just need to get to work. But all of a sudden, going and trying to find a used car or repair their car because they can't afford to get a new or a used car--all of this has had a huge impact. Yet people here don't want to solve that problem of moving forward.

The lack of security in the semiconductor supply chain isn't just affecting automotive industries; it is part of critical agricultural equipment. We are hearing stories now about agricultural equipment that had a chip in it, something has happened, and now you can't fix or replace that because there are no chips to do so. So, literally, our agricultural production is being slowed down, and they may miss growing season because they don't have the semiconductors.

All of these industries are being impacted.

In December of this past year, 59 different company CEOs--Apple, Cisco, Ford, GE Healthcare, and many others--wrote to Congress saying that they supported this important investment in design and research of manufacturing of semiconductors, and they pointed to the domestic vulnerability of our supply chain as the main reason to get this done. They knew that our domestic capabilities were sagging.

Companies like John Deere and other precision agriculture equipment companies depend on those chips to maximize the yield in the field so that our farmers can be fed.

Chip shortages create delays of 40 weeks or more for new equipment and parts needed to repair those of farmers and ranchers and those working in our important agriculture sector.

About two-thirds of the medical technology companies have semiconductors in over half of their products, like ventilators, respirators, and pacemakers. These medtech companies need mature chip technologies and compete with already impacted automotive and industrial sectors. They know what the shortage is about, and yet we continue to delay to go to conference.

If you care about anything in the supply chain and the shortages, then help us go to conference and get this legislation. Medical tech component delays of 1 year or more have been reported. Knowing the hard-fought experiences of the pandemic, we need to have this issue with our healthcare system addressed.

Early on in the pandemic, the aviation industry avoided supply chain experiences that we now see with the autos, and they know how much the safety depends on those chips. But now airlines are having to upgrade and modernize, and they also are seeing the chip shortage. This is coming from lots of different people in the aviation sector.

Space X Starlink, which is a satellite internet service provider, is trying to provide internet service to underserved areas and beneficiaries of some of the investments that we just made in broadband to the very, very hard-to-serve remote areas of our Nation. They say that the semiconductor chip shortage had impacted their ability to fulfill orders.

What more do my colleagues need to know?

We have a supply chain crisis. We have a chip shortage. And now people want to continue to delay going to conference and getting this done.

The aerospace and defense industries are important to our national defense, and they are impacted. In February, the Department of Defense published a report on our vulnerabilities. They said:

[The] decline in domestic manufacturing represents a

substantive security and economic threat for the United

States and many [of our] allied nations.

And yet people want to delay.

They also said that U.S. companies are finding it so expensive to build leading-edge chips that they are choosing not to do so, especially in face of the fact they can get foreign subsidies. It is 30 or 40 percent cheaper to build a semiconductor fabrication facility in Asia than it is in the United States. And this is one of the things, I think, our colleagues don't understand; that is, how expensive these facilities are, in the billions of dollars to get done, in the capital investment.

And I know some of my colleagues are concerned that ``Why should we help in this supply chain crisis?'' Well, we know that the United States wants to be a leader in this technology for our own national security issues. As one of my own constituents said, ``if there is a reason we support agriculture for food security, we should support chips for national security.'' I couldn't agree more.

I am not going to see the most advanced chips made by somebody else, threatening us at some point in time that they won't give us the chips that we need for the operations of our economy. We need to build this equipment now, and we need to move forward. American companies know that semiconductor supply chains are vital and that reshoring in the United States now--as we look at how supply chains due to COVID, now due to Ukraine--have caused national security issues. So these companies understand that being more secure by having the supply chain in the United States should be a national priority.

It should have strong bipartisan support. We have companies trying to invest, but they also are saying: Is this legislation really going to get done?

The fact that it was basically passed out of the Senate and now we are delaying in tactics to go to conference is frustrating.

Earlier this year, Intel announced they were investing $20 billion in Ohio to build semiconductor fabrication facilities. The CEO of Intel testified before the Commerce Committee about

the importance of this investment and the importance of this underlying passage of legislation.

He testified that this investment of $20 billion could soon become as big as $100 billion, but not if we don't pass this legislation.

GlobalFoundries announced that it would invest billions of dollars in semiconductor manufacturing equipment in places in the northeast part of the United States, but they too are contingent upon us passing this legislation.

When I think about the workforce that is going to be needed to produce this kind of product or the workforce that is going to be needed in cleaner sources of energy, I know that passing this legislation is key to getting the training and skilling of that workforce underway, right now, as soon as possible.

There is one reason that Apple, one of the largest sellers of smart phones in the world, announced last year that they would have to bring back some of their production to the United States. It is because the government worked to bring leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing into Arizona.

This is about securing leadership in innovation. It is about this ``ah-ha'' moment that everybody around the world has seen, because of COVID and Ukraine, that the security of doing this needs to be done now and invested in the United States.

But some people are still dragging their feet. Congress needs to act now and act swiftly to go to conference, to reconcile these differences, and support this supply chain crisis that is affecting our economy.

Every day that we wait, our companies, our manufacturers, our universities, our workforce are questioning whether we are going to invest in the United States of America. The CEO of Intel told us that Europe has put $49 billion in a chips package, and they had the money available before we had our legislation done. That is right.

People listened to this issue of bringing, for more secure reasons, investment out of Asia and back to the United States, but, yes, Europe listened and went and got the money and got the bill done. That is why some people have said: We are not going to be buying chips in U.S. dollars. We will be buying them in euros.

This is so important. We must get this legislation done. Companies may test their ideas in Europe. Maybe the R&D is in Europe. But is that what we want? We want to be the leaders of this. There is an entire ecosystem in an information age that is about the next generation of advanced chips that leads to the next advanced manufacturing.

If you want our auto makers, if you want our truck makers, if you want the communications technology and the defense people to also have that ecosystem, you have to send this price signal now--that the Congress, the House and Senate, are serious about resolving this issue.

This is not a summertime issue. It is not an after-the-November- election issue. It is a now issue. Show the American consumer that you have concern for their costs and shortages that are plaguing them in all aspects of their lives and get an agreement, and let's go to conference and show Americans that we can work on a bipartisan basis to address the supply chain crisis.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I, too, would like to come to the floor and thank my colleagues from the Upper Midwest for their great work on this legislation, the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022.

Our colleagues from the Upper Midwest know how important agriculture products are, and they know how important it is for them to reach their destination. As Senator Thune was the previous chair of the Commerce Committee, he knows all too well about how products can get boxed out because of other products on the rails.

My colleague from Minnesota knows all too importantly about exports and has been a big supporter of our export economy in general and represents a State that is very robust on the global economy. So her leadership on a very tough issue has been very, very appreciated.

I would like to thank, from the Commerce Committee staff, a variety of people, and from Senator Wicker's staff and from Senator Thune's. A lot of people worked on this: Nicki Teutschel, Alexis Gutierrez, Dave Stewart, Grace Bloom, Charles Vickery, Eric Vryheid, Michael Davisson, Matt Filpi, and Megan Thompson. From Senator Wicker's staff: Andrew Neely, Fern Gibbons, Brendan Gavin, Paul Wasik, Kyle Fields. And from Senator Klobuchar's staff: Obviously Baz Selassie--couldn't have done it without all of his hard work. He is really the guy behind this. And Senator Thune's staff: Chance Costello. And certainly Rob Hickman from Senator Schumer's staff.

So, today, the passage of this bipartisan legislation couldn't come at a more important time for our growers and producers and exporters; that is, today we are saying that American farmers matter, and their survival matters more than the exorbitant profit of international shipping companies. That is what we really tried to tackle in this legislation. Our two colleagues brought forth this legislation in record time. It was passed in the House of Representatives, led by Congressmen Garamendi and Johnson. Those two passed that in December, and our colleagues got this bill here in the Senate in February, and we were able to pass it now here at the very end of March.

I thank again our two colleagues--Senator Klobuchar for her leadership and Senator Thune for getting it done so quickly. Literally, it was introduced in February and passed in March. I hope it is an example of what we can do on other legislation that is affecting our supply chain.

Our economy is built on trading goods in a timely manner with our partnerships from all over the world. Anderson Hay Grain in Washington said:

The agriculture economy in our region does not work if we

don't have competitive access to world markets.

Right now, the supply chain isn't working. Our ports have been clogged. Shipping companies have struggled to keep up with demand, and the costs for American exporters who are trying to get hay and milk and apples to the global market have gone through the roof. It is hurting our consumers here at home as they see prices increase, and it is hurting our exporters when they are looking at products that they are trying to get to market.

American exporters are being charged more and more for containers due to shipping delays that are really out of their control. They are trying not to increase these costs. But, basically, consumers are paying more, and our exporters are having a tough time getting their products to market.

According to the freight index, by September 2021, shipping a container had gone from $1,300 a container to $11,000 a container. Reports and news articles talk about how that has affected our supply chains, that there have been increases in costs in consumer electronics, like computers and other equipment, and in furniture and apparel. They are all seeing increases because of the increases in our shipping costs.

The Federal Maritime Commission found that between July and September of 2021, American businesses were charged $2.2 billion in fees in addition to freight rates. That is a 50-percent increase compared to the 3 prior months.

Getting overcharged is only part of the problem. Some of our businesses can't even get their containers on the ship. During 2021, there was a 24-percent drop in full shipping containers leaving from the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma. That drop increased to 30 percent in January and February of this year. That means 30 percent less containers are leaving for international markets that are full of American products. American exporters and their products are being left on the docks. That is why we wanted to act quickly.

The American farmer, with growing season upon us, can't afford to wait another minute for the Federal Maritime Commission to do its job and help police this market and make sure that our products and our farmers are not being overcharged or left on the dock.

The Washington State Potato Commission reported an 11-percent decrease in exports in 2020 from 2019. According to Darigold, American dairy producers lost $1.5 billion last year due to port congestion and related challenges.

All of this means that getting this legislation onto the President's desk could not be more important. That is why we acted fast in moving this legislation today to give the first reforms to the Federal Maritime Commission in two decades. Those new tools given to the Commission are to increase the rules to prevent American products from being left on the docks; increase transparency so that the fees the shippers are charged are known and they can't be overcharged; and three, prevent the shipping companies from retaliating against our local American businesses.

These three changes are significant changes to the authority, and the committee made sure in the changes to the legislation that these new rules need to be in place in the next few months. We cannot continue to wait for those rules to take place until next year. They need to be done now. That is why the Commerce Committee I am sure will work in a bipartisan fashion to see the implementation of this law and to make sure that the Commission is aggressive in going after the exorbitant fees that are being charged by these international shipping companies.

It is a huge task. The Commission is charged with regulating a $14 trillion international shipping industry. But this industry has done nothing but become more concentrated in the last several decades. As the supply chain challenges unfold, it is clear that the Commission is left trying to rein in the practices of five very large international companies. That is why we had to act fast and we had to be aggressive in making sure the Federal Maritime Commission would work to put rules in place that will help American ag exporters and help protect American consumers.

Again, I thank my colleagues for their great work on this legislation.

The State of Washington desperately needed to see the Federal Maritime Commission reform. I am proud to say that we were able to get a new Federal Maritime Commissioner, Max Vekich--who I think will officially be sworn in soon--from the State of Washington, who has been working on the docks for 40 years. He knows what it takes to move product. He also knows that we need aggressive action by the Federal Maritime Commission to protect all of us from these exorbitant shipping costs and to help us in making sure that products--good American exports, like our apples and hay and wheat--are not left on any dock but reach their destination in foreign markets.

I yield the floor.