Floor Statements

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, I come to the floor because this week, hopefully, our House colleagues will be taking up legislation that they have named America COMPETES. My colleague was just here on the Senate floor talking about the legislation we passed last year, and we are glad our colleagues are finally addressing this in the House of Representatives.

I said ``glad'' they are ``addressing''--we are happy about that because, between 1996 and 2015, federally funded research led to over $1 trillion in economic growth and millions of new jobs. So we know that when we invest, we see a big return in our economy.

What we know, however, is that R&D investment is at its lowest point in nearly 45 years, as measured as a percentage of GDP. That is where we have been going. And the rest of the world isn't waiting.

Overall, U.S. R&D spending places us ninth globally, behind advanced economies like South Korea, Japan, and Germany, and far below the fifth place ranking that we held in the 1990s.

So this is why we need to do something, and that is why we passed what was called the United States Innovation and Competition Act last year and why we encouraged our colleagues to take it up. There is a competition for global leadership in technology in a range of areas-- semiconductors, manufacturing, artificial intelligence, low-Earth orbit satellites. And there are countries that are very eager to make investments to try to capture those jobs that I mentioned that come as a result of investment in technology.

We know that we tried to solve this problem before; that is, to stay competitive. We passed an America COMPETES Act in 2007, and we passed one in 2010. And we were trying to stay competitive with changing economies and the information age that we now are in. These acts were intended to double the key research accounts at the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, but, unfortunately, the appropriations authorized did not materialize. In large part, we had a 2008 recession and subsequent fiscal sequestration, and we reduced the NSF and DOE budgets.

So we had the right idea. We had a year or so of activity that really tried to get us on the right track, and then fiscal issues put us behind.

So job openings today and the opportunities for us to grow our economy by making this investment are just monumental. And that is why we hope that this is a bipartisan effort by the Senate and, ultimately, a bipartisan effort by the House to come together to make the investments to help fill these jobs of the future.

Job openings in computer science occupations are expected to exceed 1 million in the next few years, nearly 400,000 just in the area of cyber security alone.

The Wall Street Journal reported that planned growth in the U.S. semiconductor industry will require up to 90,000 more workers by 2025-- 90,000 more workers just in that 1 sector. And these are very well- paying jobs.

According to the National Science Board, the only way that the United States can fill the gaps in these STEM workers is to double the number of women in the STEM workforce and double the number of other unrepresented minorities in these jobs. And that is exactly what we are trying to do with this legislation.

On our manufacturing sector--which we have a very large manufacturing sector in the Northwest, driven by aerospace but also other forms of transportation, and it also includes small and medium-sized manufacturing--but one organization estimated that it will take up to $250 billion over 10 years to help us upgrade our existing infrastructure in manufacturing and equipment to be competitive.

So that means we must do our part. Many of these industries will do their part. But on the R&D side, we must continue to do our part.

Other countries are investing heavily. On the semiconductor advanced manufacturing facilities, which are very, very expensive to build, we just heard of a major announcement by Intel a few weeks ago about their investment in the State of Ohio. These facilities can cost $30 billion over 10 years, including $20 billion in just the capital expenses. Other countries are making huge investments to help build cheaper foundries, anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of the investment in Asia.

So, as a result, over the last several decades, the United States has lost a big share of what they had in the semiconductor manufacturing chip sector, going from about 37 percent of the market for production from the United States down to 12 percent today.

So the United States must respond, and we must continue to make investments in these sectors. My colleagues, as we had this floor debate, will remember, we talked about a $52 billion investment--an enormous amount of money. But I asked my colleagues who helped us get this legislation and those who weren't with us at that moment to consider this information: The semiconductor shortage cost vehicle manufacturers, just in 2021, $210 billion. In 1 year, our shortage cost us $210 billion.

So I think making this investment in chip production in the United States is critical. It is time we try again with our House colleagues. It is time that we engage in a bipartisan legislative process to get this legislation to the President's desk.

I know the House will consider many amendments on Friday when they are supposed to take up this bill. We in the Commerce Committee had over 230 amendments filed. We approved 130 amendments. We had a 6-hour markup. We had healthy debate on amendments, and then the Senate proceeded to an open-floor debate and hundreds of amendments were filed here on the Senate floor.

So I encourage our colleagues in the House to have their amendments, to consider these ideas, and to come to an effort with us to get this legislation passed.

We know that this would be the largest 5-year commitment to public R&D in our Nation's history. We need it for the job growth. We need it to stay competitive.

This legislation would also make a $15 billion investment in growing and diversifying that STEM workforce. As I said, given the large amount of job openings in this sector, we are not going to find the people to take them unless we are diversifying our workforce.

This would establish a Senate-confirmed position on improving STEM diversity and make sure that NSF and the investments we would make would help us not only assure diversity but geographic diversity within the United States.

This legislation would also create a first-of-a-kind NSF--National Science Foundation--tech directorate to help accelerate the development and translation of new technologies within the United States to the future and helping those jobs grow more quickly.

Now, I know a lot of people, probably at the beginning: If NSF was already doing a good job, if DOE was already doing a good job, why do we have to do something different?

Well, the issue is the United States is producing a lot of R&D, and that R&D is being used by other people. It is actually documented public information that ends up getting used and translated by somebody else hungrier, faster moving, with opportunity, and thereby getting translated. So this bill addresses that. This bill, with the creation of a tech directorate, is about accelerating the R&D that we do and turning it into real manufacturing at a faster rate.

We call this tech transfer. And if you have any kind of university in your State, you know exactly what I am talking about, and these universities play a key role in tech transfer. In fact, tech transfer in this realm of university has been responsible for about 4 million jobs over the last 20 years, I think it is--the last 20 years. So these are big investments that they have supported. They have supported over 4 million jobs.

So USICA would make an investment of 17 billion in the Department of Energy and authorize the tripling of the manufacturing extension partnership to help with those manufacturing opportunities and also make investments in tech hubs to help create private sector investment and the same kind of workforce opportunities for the future.

As I mentioned, the announcement by Intel in Ohio to build a new foundry and the expensive cost of building a new foundry was interesting news because it wasn't in the same places that

investments in chip fabrication has been done so far. And yet the CEO of the company said, if we pass this legislation, there could be 100 billion in investment.

That is important because we have to understand how important chip fabrication is, semiconductors are, to the information age that we live in today--how important it is that we not lose market share any lower than 12 percent and we actually start going back in the other direction so that we can grow these jobs in the future.

So I just want to emphasize: There is a lot to agree on with House colleagues. Both bills call for a $52 billion investment in the semiconductor industry. Both bills call for major investment, about $160 billion, in critical R&D Agencies like the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. Both bills recognize the need to invest in creating tech hubs and making investments in the domestic supply chain. Both bills call for growing the diversity of our STEM workforce to meet workforce gaps. Both bills attempt to address disparities in our trade and research policies that I was just mentioning--trying to not let people just grab the R&D that the United States does and translate that, but make sure that we have strong laws in preventing intellectual property theft where it occurs and making investments in American businesses. And we know that there are other provisions that we will be able to agree on as well. So with our investment in R&D reaching a 45-year low, now is the time to grow our economy.

I hope our colleagues in the House will join in a bipartisan effort. We stand ready in the Senate to join a serious discussion to get this legislation onto the President's desk and grow these jobs. It is a very important economic opportunity for the United States and continues our leadership.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, for the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation I report favorably the following nomination lists which were printed in the Records on the dates indicated, and ask unanimous consent, to save the expense of reprinting on the Executive Calendar that these nominations lie at the Secretary's desk for the information of Senators.

Madam President, I care about the future of this institution, but right now, I care more about the future of our democracy. Our country has been the bedrock for democracies around the world. It has been the gold standard by which other countries wishing to achieve transparency and validation of their governments, have asked us to come and witness their elections.

Let's not forget what is great about a democracy. The power rests with the people. And when you have an election, it is the people who have spoken.

So whether it was F.D.R. and the New Deal, or Ronald Reagan declaring ``Morning in America,'' the people had spoken, and the country went about the change that was implemented because of free and fair elections.

Trust me, there are countries who are jealous of this. They obviously run their countries by other means. They are less stable, and they are less egalitarian. And yet, if we think of the many great advantages of a democracy, nothing says it better than the people have spoken.

Yet now, we have a former President of the United States, Donald Trump, who has dared to say and continues to say the people haven't spoken. Donald Trump is not just like the guy at a football game who doesn't like the referee's calls. Donald Trump has taken it to a whole new level of basically, without evidence, saying his team didn't lose the game.

Can you imagine an NFL or college football structure where the coach says, ``I don't like the ref's call. My team didn't lose the game. And I'm going to spend the rest of my time going, marching around to every football game and every community saying my team didn't lose the game.''

Well, thank God college and professional coaches know better. They don't do this. And yet former President Trump keeps saying, I don't like the call of election officials, judges, Federal courts, never mind there were 60 decisions by different courts. I am going to protest the outcome of this election.

Never in the history of our country do I know a major race where someone declared they really didn't lose. What if everybody went around saying, I really didn't lose? What if our system of governments would be affected by that?

Well, it is getting to that level of absurdity. The Republican nominee in the 2020 Washington gubernatorial election lost by over 600,000 votes. Yet he claimed voter fraud. He lost by 56-43. And even though he lost by such a huge margin, he claimed voter fraud. He sued the secretary of state, who happened to be a Republican, in King County Superior Court. He only dropped the election fraud lawsuit after the court threatened his lawyer with making meritless claims.

Do we really understand this danger, the danger of people in our country, to

our economy, to our way of life if these falsehoods continue? We are not here, though, just because a former President cannot accept an election loss. He began sowing these seeds of distrust into our election system the minute he stepped onto the national stage.

We are here because the problem has become so serious that people are now trying to disenfranchise the voting rights of our fellow Americans. Some voter suppression tactics are being put in place because some believe the former President did not like the outcome of the election.

I want to be clear. There are people on both sides of the aisle that do believe in free and fair elections. There are Republicans in key election positions who stood up to the illegal tactics of the President when he tried to change the outcome of the last election. But what our country can't afford right now is the continuation of Trump-think to allow to erode the voting rights of our fellow Americans.

Voting rights have been hard fought and hard won. I know the President presiding understands this--first by women in 1920, then, later, protecting minority groups in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act. In 1970, we updated it, making standards helping to regulate Presidential elections--in 1975, saying we had to protect minorities. Both sides of the aisle agreed to this. And in 1992, we expanded it for bilingual education requirements. That passed with 75-20 votes. And again in 2006, the last time the voting rights was updated, we were in a similar situation. The Supreme Court had two cases and struck down part of the act, and we all came together to renew and reaffirm the constitutional protections for people in the United States of America. It passed 98-0.

There is nothing wrong with the John Lewis Voting Rights law before us. There is nothing wrong with the John Lewis Voting Rights law before us.

It is a bill with bipartisan support that tries to maintain, I think, a Federal minimum assurance that States don't suppress the rights of our fellow Americans. When Martin Luther King was fighting this fight, he said, ``one man, one vote.'' He knew that this was about making sure that everybody had a chance to vote.

The John Lewis Act is a continuation of those rights in upgrading something that has been upgraded numerous times since 1965. That is why my colleagues Senator Manchin and Murkowski called for bipartisan reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, a bipartisan call for reauthorization last spring of the Voting Rights Act. They said, ``Inaction is not an option.'' They continued to say, ``Congress must come together just as we have done in the past time and time again to reaffirm our long-standing bipartisan commitment to free, accessible, and secure elections.''

And that is what we must do now. That is why there are 150 businesses who support the John Lewis Act--companies like Microsoft and Google, Intel and Tesla, Target, PayPal. These are companies who know and understand, they want to do business in a democracy. As Tim Cook said, the right to vote is fundamental to our democracy.

American history is a story of expanding the right to vote to all citizens, and Black people in particular have had to march, struggle, and even give their lives for more than a century to defend that right, and we support efforts to ensure that our democracy and our future is more hopeful and inclusive than the past.

There are others--Best Buy--an election cannot be free or fair if every eligible voter is not given a fair chance to vote or if the law makes it harder to do so.

Now, I disagree with my colleague who was just on the floor because there is a lot of demeaning of the system. I am not going to spend a lot of time on this now because I have another segment here on the floor later, but I come from a vote-by-mail State, and I am proud of what our State has accomplished. So I do not appreciate the disinformation of Newt Gingrich when he says, ``The biggest way with to expand voter fraud is to expand vote-by-mail.''

He is wrong. If I could slash a red line and a red circle through this now, I would do so. But I will spend many minutes later on the floor talking to people why vote-by-mail is part of the solution and not the threat that he thinks it is.

Companies know that when it comes to our economy, we are greatly aided by being in a democracy, and that is why they don't want it eroded. It will cost us if we are a less stable place to do business. So why now do people refuse to engage on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act?

You know, I might be one of those people who would say, ``Don't change the filibuster rule, we can wait.''

Wait? Wait? For what? What are we waiting for? Our Capitol was attacked. We were attacked. People defending us were killed. For what? For what? A big lie, a big lie about our election.

I sat outside the Capitol on January 6 and listened to the President telling these lies I knew weren't true. I knew what he said wasn't correct about our voting laws because I know and understand them, and I certainly know vote-by-mail. But he said many lies that now many court decisions have all said are not true.

But the point is that Donald Trump and his followers keep following and they tell the people the election wasn't fairly decided, and now, they are trying to pass State laws eroding our constitutional rights to protect every American's ability to vote, and some here don't want to act.

Our democracy is under threat, and people are trying to undermine the credibility of our elections, and you don't want to act. Trump supporters are literally trying to hoist a Jolly Roger flag over our democracy because they lost the election, and some people don't want to act. Some percentage of the Republican Party now believe that the election was wrongly decided, and some people don't want to act.

We have to have faith in close elections, and the best way to do that is not to suppress the vote but encourage and empower more people to vote in a safe and secure manner. We need to believe in our voting system, not believe that we can undermine it.

Democracies don't grow on trees. They need to be protected. They need to be defended. They need to be fought for. And with all the challenges we are facing--COVID, a changing economy in an information age, global migration, climate change--I am getting too many questions from my constituents about whether we are becoming a fascist nation.

Why am I answering those questions? Because Trump told a big lie and he got people to attack our Capitol and now he is ramping up fear and anxiety to the point where locals are changing their election laws and eroding our democracy? No, I can't stand by. I will vote to proceed and change. I will not stand by because my parents taught me better.

My father fought in World War II and reminded me constantly when I was growing up that if someone's rights were eroded, you better stand up because if you don't, they are coming after your rights next. And a threat to one was a threat to all.

My mom worked at the polls on election day. When she was a child, she played in her backyard and met an African-American woman who became her friend. When election day rolled around, my mom noticed that her friend had to wait outside in the cold to vote, where the White voters got to go inside and wait. My mom took her friend by the hand inside the polling place and said, ``My friend's not waiting outside.''

It earned my mom the nickname ``Little Eleanor'' after the First Lady of the period.

What might seem surprising is how much my mom liked her fellow Republican precinct committeemen. She felt like they were on the same team--Team Democracy: people who got the vote out. They may not agree on who they were voting for, but they agreed people should vote. And they were willing to live with the consequences. And believe me, my parents had a lot of--a lot of things that they had to keep fighting for, but they believed in democracy.

I remember my mom saying how uneasy she felt when she realized her friends and neighbors, seeing the results of her precinct, didn't support John Kennedy for President of the United States.

My parents were crushed when John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., were all assassinated, but they never lost faith in

the system, and they never said the system was rigged.

What we need to do now is to protect our democracy. We need to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. We need to say, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, that one man, one vote is what our country stands for, and it is the strength of our Nation.

One thing about January 6 that bothers me the most--it bothers me the most because I think about my father and his brother. My father quit high school to fight in World War II because his brother was already missing or in a POW camp. He knew he had to join the fight against the oppressions, the tyranny, the fascism that existed. He knew he had to join the fight to uphold the democracy of the United States.

This is a picture of what it looked like to be escorted back into this chamber on January 6. All I could think of when I saw this picture is, obviously, yes, support and gratitude for the military who supported us. But all I could think about was my father and his brother who fought in World War II for these rights, to uphold a democracy, so that I could stand for election and that my friends and neighbors could vote for me, and then I would come here in an environment where I was free to walk into the Capitol at any moment and cast a vote on behalf of the people that I represent.

And yet, on one fateful day, that all changed. And we were no different than some other country who had to use military force to support our democracy here in voting. That is not the way it is supposed to be. That is not what we are fighting for. Many Americans have fought to uphold the democracies of our Nation. The least we could do is pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. The least we could do is work in a mission together to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and show that our country believes in holding these important values of a democracy as utmost important. Let's vote to get this done. Let's move forward to show our country we believe in voting rights in the U.S Senate.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I was out here a little while ago talking about why it is so important for us to move forward and vote on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and to uphold the voting rights of American citizens, something I feel very strongly about.

I have had the good fortune to be in the U.S. Senate since the year 2000 and I got here--I should say the election was in 2000; I took the oath of office in 2001. I got here in an election that was decided by 2,229 votes. It took 3 weeks to decide the election. It took recounts. It took verification by counties--and, yes, the vote-by-mail system which was pretty much the majority of votes at that point in time. Not everybody voted that way, but a big portion of votes at that time was a system that was starting to flourish in our State.

And when I think about the year 2000 and the close election, I give thanks to my predecessor Slade Gordon for, even though it was a close election, not contesting the election. If people remember, that was the same year that there was such a close election that people considered what was the outcome in Florida. And yet Al Gore conceded the election to George Bush.

My point is that where have we gotten to today? Because all of those people, George Bush, Al Gore, me, Slade Gordon, even though we had close elections, we had confidence in the outcome of the election, and we moved forward.

We moved forward so much in fact that when our country was attacked just a few months later, we all pulled together to work together to build a more secure nation. We didn't sit around and say--Slade Gordon didn't sit around and say, ``I lost by 2,229 votes.'' Al Gore didn't sit around and say he lost Florida by so many votes and the votes weren't counted.

No, we moved our country forward, and here in the U.S. Senate, we even discussed voting rights, and we discussed our Federal role, and we discussed what reforms we wanted to have in the system to build more confidence in our electoral system. We didn't disintegrate into voter suppression activities. I can't say that there wasn't some.

I now call it nostalgia. There were some who said, ``Oh, yeah, vote- by-mail. Maybe we shouldn't have it.'' I remember one of our colleagues here on the Senate floor, he was saying, ``I so much like to go into the polling place. It is my patriotic duty. I like to sign my name. I like to get on with it. I don't want to get rid of that and I don't like vote-by-mail.''

Well, myself and Senator Wyden, Senator Murray, and others successfully defended vote-by-mail. And we can see today where it has now been more embraced in the United States of America and more than the nostalgia that my friend had.

Trust me, I could say a lot of nostalgia about going into a voting place and voting. My childhood was spent getting the vote out because that is what you did in my family. You spent the day getting the vote out; you helped. I remember 1 year, I said to my father, ``I'd miss too much school, and I didn't want to miss anymore school, and I had to go to school on election day.'' He told me there was no greater education than getting the vote out and that I was going to be doing that. So I can be nostalgic, too.

But right now, I am proud of the 84 percent turnout in the State of Washington in a Presidential election year, thanks to vote-by-mail. And I am proud that vote-by-mail, I think, is the antidote to the accusations that people have about a voting system that they think can be attacked by a foreign government or undermined in an electronic voting system. The fact that when you vote-by-mail, you sign your name, both on the registration form, sign your name on the mail-in ballot, rip off a tab, basically mail in that ballot, and you have proof that you voted. And your signature is the verification. I am going to talk about that in a minute.

Your signature is the verification that that system works. So, yes, I am not very happy that we are here because a lot of the tactics that we are hearing about around the United States of America is about limiting vote-by-mail. It is about trying to stop it or slow it down or raise accusations about how it doesn't work.

And part of the initial establishment of preclearance in the United States in the 1965 Voting Rights Act was about the great disparity that existed in the United States between States, that some States had very different turnouts than other States in a Presidential election, maybe 20 percent or 30 percent different. And so people were starting to say, ``How are you affecting us if some States aren't really empowering their citizens to vote, and the consequences is suppressing voter activity?''

I definitely believe in the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. I definitely believe that, starting in 1965, we had disparity in States and the way they voted, and we did something about it. And we did something about it because people were being discriminated against, and that was the premise of the law, stop the discrimination.

Stop the discriminatory tactics that States were using to discriminate against people so that their votes couldn't be cast. And now, we have updated that law many times over the last several decades in a bipartisan fashion, most of the time signed into law by Republican Presidents. So I don't get the stumbling block here. I don't get the stumbling block why people won't come to the table and help us write the next version of the 1965 Civil Rights Act that is just called the 2022 Civil Rights Act. I don't get it. I don't get why people aren't coming to the table to do that. But I know this, that one of the big lies out there, and the Republicans--I see my colleague was here from Alaska, and I do feel a great affinity.

People may not understand the relationship between the State of Alaska and the State of Washington, but it is a very true affinity. We come from the same part of the world. Our economies are integrated. We have many people who live in both places. We share commonality of culture, of our environment. And my colleague from Alaska was here talking about their vote-by-mail system.

And so the fact that people are telling lies and trying to suppress the vote by suppressing vote-by-mail or calling it fraudulent is very frustrating. It is very frustrating, and it is one of the reasons we should come together in a bipartisan way and support vote-by-mail. We should be empowering people, and particularly in a pandemic, to cast a vote so that we know their voting is counted, so that we can have confidence we had an election and people spoke.

Here, we have Newt Gingrich who said numerous times now, ``The biggest way to expand voter fraud is to expand vote-by-mail.'' Now, he said that on FOX News. It has been quoted in the paper--not once, he said it several times--or maybe they keep reading the same clip over and over again.

Then his next line, which I didn't put on a chart, is, ``And the Democrats want universal access to vote-by-mail.'' Well, I am not sure what is wrong with vote-by-mail. We are going to talk about that because I am not sure what is wrong with vote-by-mail.

Seriously, I have seen it over the 20 years I have been in office expanded in our State and in Oregon and now used as the majority of the way that people vote. And so I don't take kindly to his comments or to the former President's comments that somehow this is a fraudulent system. It is not.

(Ms. BALDWIN assumed the Chair.)

Madam President, first of all--I have got a lot of charts here, so you will have to excuse us.

First of all, when you get a voter registration form for vote-by- mail, it says right on the form you must be a citizen of the United States of America to vote. You must be 18 years of old the next election, or--yeah, or 18 before the special election. That is what it says right on the form. There is no mistaking about it. There is no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

You are going to sign your name and attest to these issues. In fact, the attestation basically says, ``Knowingly providing false information about yourself or the qualifications for voter registration is a class C felony, punishable by imprisonment or a fine up to $10,000, or both.'' That is a pretty hefty fine. That is a pretty serious issue. I don't think most people are going to say, ``Oh, I want to help perpetrate voter fraud because I want to go to jail or I want to pay this fine.''

And the notion that somebody illegally in the United States is going to sign up for this--most of these people are just trying to earn an income and stay on a low profile. I don't think any of them--if you are an illegal immigrant and you sign up for vote-by-mail and you vote-by- mail, you will be deported. You will be deported.

So I don't think people are out there doing this voluntarily because they think this is some great way to gain the system. In fact, the statistics just done by a major report shows that there is less than 1 percent of voter fraud in this system. It is not really this notion that the former President would like to perpetrate.

Well, the biggest reason why vote-by-mail works is what is here, but you don't see it. I guess I should sign my name--because right here, I declare the facts on this registration form are true. I am a citizen of the United States. I live at this address, for at least the last 30 days before the election which I am going to vote in. I am old enough to vote in that election, and I understand the jurisdiction of the Department of Corrections; you can't currently be serving a sentence for a felony conviction or incarcerated for a federally or out-of-state Federal conviction.

OK. Right there, you have to sign your name right below that. So this attestation and requirement--oh, by the way, part of the requirement on the form that you get is you also have to put in your driver's license or an I.D.

Now, in many States, you are moving to this enhanced driver's license requirement, which you have to prove you are a citizen of the United States. Not every application you get at a driver's license office you have to prove that, but this is the information on your voter registration card that you have to prove that you are attesting to the fact that you are a citizen of the United States. It is information that can be searched.

So, now, we come to the actual ballot. I don't know if we have a copy of the ballot here. Well, we will have to go grab one of those. But on your ballot, you do the same thing. You get a ballot. Your ballot has to have that signature on it. You vote who you say you are going to vote for. You put it in a privacy envelope. You stick it in another envelope. And you mail it in. So at the county auditor, they match that signature that you signed on your voter registration card with the signature on that ballot. And that is how they know you are who you say you are.

Now, that is no different, really, from most of the way voting has worked in our country for decades. When you go into the polling place, they ask you for your name. You go to a book, if you noticed, your name and address were there, in a blank space. And they say, Sign your name.

Most Americans probably never noticed at the top of that page was also an attestation that said, ``If you are lying about who you are, yeah, you are going to pay a fine, and you are going to jail.''

So when you went to a polling place and you signed your signature, they went back and saw it was the signature that you had on your registration card. So vote-by-mail is replicating that same system. An application card matched to a signature on your ballot. And that is what happened.

Now, that is not to say there isn't attempts at fraud, not to say that there isn't attempts at monkey business, because there is. But it says the system is based on something that is safe and secure and can be validated. I am going to shock some people, I am sure, by saying this, but when I went to vote in the last election, somebody had requested several ballots in my name--several ballots in my name. I am sure it was ill intent. There was nothing good about it.

And when I looked to see that they hadn't counted my ballot, even though I had voted very early in the process, I became alarmed and called the auditor and said, ``Why haven't you counted my ballot?''

And he said, ``Several people have filed ballots under your name.''

I am sure there was ill intent and monkey business by somebody. So I decided I am going down to the courthouse to see what this was all about. But by the time I got there, the auditor had sorted it out and said, ``I found the one signature that matches your signature, and we have counted your ballot.''

So if they hadn't done that, they probably threw it in a pile--``Oh, we got 10 ballots under this name''--whatever it was. Why did that happen? I don't know. But I know the system worked because he pulled them all aside and, when he got to it, they matched my name with the ballot that existed.

Now, for us in Washington, because we have had some very close elections, the vote-by-mail system has got a lot of scrutiny. We got a lot of scrutiny in a Governor's race a few years after I got elected, and the race got down to several hundred votes, really, I think in the end. It was several hundred votes.

And we had people admitting that they had voted for dead spouses. We had all sorts of things at the end, when people knew that the level of--most elections aren't that close. But when you are down to hundreds of votes and you know that there is going to be scrutiny, the system works. It doesn't mean there won't be a mistake somewhere and that you won't have to redo the count and find it. It doesn't mean that there is absolutely zero, zero, zero, zero fraud.

It means that there is a system based on a safe and secure measure and that you can go back and check it. Now, I love our vote-by-mail system, and the voters are proving it, at 84 percent turnout in the last Presidential election. Sometimes, in off-year elections, we get as high as 70 percent turnout. So it is working in off-year elections.

Who is not for empowerment and enfranchisement of people? Apparently, Newt Gingrich isn't because he thinks it is a mastermind theory or some scenario where we are going to try to take over the world when, in reality, I would say it is the next phase of voting, particularly in an era of pandemic and that we need to have our elections be more secure.

I would say that if people are going to fool around and create distrust in your election system, have a system where you get to tear off a tab and keep it at home and know that your ballot was cast and know that you can count it and know that you can count it again.

In my election when I won by 2,229 votes, the tallies weren't the same each time. They weren't. It changed. It didn't mean they were wrong. It just meant that various mistakes were made, they verified their work, and they were corrected. But my predecessor did not undermine the U.S. democracy by claiming he lost. He didn't go out and try to pass voter suppression laws. He came back here and worked on the 9/11 commission with all of us and tried to defend our country.

But that is not where we are today. We are here with Mr. Trump-- President Trump--and on January 6, I sat outside and listened to the President. I really thought, ``I am going to go ahead and give a speech that night.'' I had no idea what was going to happen to us.

I thought I was just going to speak on the floor that night. I thought that

was it. I had no idea that we were going to face an insurrection. So I was taking notes, I thought I was going to give the speech. Turns out, I didn't get to give that speech. We had kind of a truncated session that night. We give a few speeches. A few people talked. But I didn't give a big speech.

I have been waiting to give this speech for a long time. I have been waiting to repudiate what the President said at his rally for a long time. And the reason is because I cannot stand to have our election system, the basis of our democracy, the basis of our country, why we are the gold standard around the world--I am not sure anybody should go on a codel anymore to witness an election in another country until we get our election system right here.

What are you going to say when you get there? What are you going to say if you are going to go to another country and witness their election? ``We know how to do it in the United States''? Because right now we are not proving that. We are showing that we can't move forward on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

Let's go over what President Trump said that night because President Trump claimed that--his first claim that the Michigan secretary of state flooded the State with unsolicited mail-in ballots sent to everybody on the rolls in direct violation of State law. That is what he said last, that is what he said. That is what he said at his rally. ``Go down there. Go down there.''

You know, there is moments in this craziness when you realize there are people who will stand up. And I am not trying to embarrass anybody, but I was probably the last person to leave this Chamber, and the Parliamentarian refused to let anyone touch the ballots, even though she could barely walk down the hall, even though she could barely carry all those supplies.

She knew that allowing anybody else to touch these certifications of the election would give somebody the claim that, somehow, somebody had interfered. So people were doing their job, and in this case, the secretary of state, in response to a 2018 vote by the people of Michigan, they approved, in a vote by the people, a no-excuse absentee voting law. That is what the people of Michigan voted for.

So the secretary of state sent out ballots. Some people didn't like that. Some people challenged it. And in September of 2020, the Michigan court of appeals upheld the decision that the secretary of state, citing the Constitution and their authority over elections, that they had the authority to mail those ballots.

The supreme court of Michigan didn't take up that case. They didn't refute it. So it is false. He is trying to say mail-in ballot applications were illegally sent. It is not true. The people voted for it. The secretary of state did her job. The courts upheld it.

He tried to say 17,000 ballots were cast by deceased voters. OK. I mean, to say nothing of the fact that there are probably a lot of people with the name of John Brown in Michigan, there are a lot of people by the same name. But there is a system that uses the Social Security Administration to flag death of deceased voters. And ballots in this case of those who have died are not counted in the Michigan election.

In the State of Washington, if you cast a ballot and you mailed it and you die 2 days later and the election is not until the next week, your vote counts. Now, your spouse can't cast it after you die and say, ``My wife intended to vote for so-and-so.'' No, no, no.

But once you fill the ballot out and you put it in the mailbox or ballot box, your vote is good, even if you die the next day. That is our State--in Michigan, no. So they did not do this. They did not have this claim that the President had.

And then he claimed the turnout in Wayne County was 137 percent of registered voters--or 139 percent, somewhere in there--also not true. In Wayne County, it was 61 percent of the vote of more than 1.4 million registered voters. So all that he said about Michigan that night was false. It was false. And the courts upheld it. It was just a big lie.

Let's go to the Presiding Officer's State. Let's go to Wisconsin. Trump claimed 170,000 absentee ballots were counted without a valid absentee ballot application. Now, the President knows that her State is infamous--famous, appreciated, for the same-day voting. And in Milwaukee and Dane Counties, a total of 170,000 people did vote absentee ballot, in person in the 2020 election.

They filled out an absentee ballot application, located in the envelope like I showed, and sent in the ballot. So they know who those people are. They know that they were legitimate voters. They didn't vote without an application. They filled out the application as well. So this, too, is part of the Big Lie.

And then Trump claimed that 100,000 ballots were backdated by U.S. Postal workers. That is what he claimed. The U.S. Postal Service Inspector General investigation to the allegations in all of the USPS workers and contractors refuted these allegations. There was no evidence--there was no evidence. There was no evidence that that occurred.

And then the famous thing that the other side of the aisle constantly talks about--which I just don't--I don't understand--ballot harvesting. They think that, somehow, this is going to lead to ballot harvesting.

So Donald Trump claimed that Madison had 19,000 ballots collected by human dropboxes. I don't even know what a human dropbox is. I don't know what he means by a human dropbox or operatives. Well, facing influx, Madison and the city clerk held a pair of events in which people could go to a park and drop off their absentee ballots at stations set up and staffed by poll workers.

What is wrong with us if we are trying to make it harder to vote in America? What is the premise? If the premise is that you want to certify that people are actual citizens of the United States, great. We have a system. If you want to certify they live there, great. We have a system. We have a fine. We have a penalty. We have a way to investigate them. We have a way to catch fraud.

So what is it? You just want to make it harder to vote? No, no, no. Democracies are about enfranchising the vote. It is a constant effort. The same things we did in 1920 don't apply in 2020. In 2020, it is an information age, and we had a pandemic.

What is wrong with making the vote available to people? So the ballot harvesting, that he claims, did not happen. That is also part of his speech that night. He went on for 45 minutes. He went on for 45 minutes, whipping people up to come down here and attack the Capitol based on these lies that weren't true--big lies that weren't true.

Then he went on to Georgia. He claimed over 10,000 ballots in Georgia were cast by individuals whose names and birth dates matched Georgia residents who died in 2020 prior to the election. He later revised that down. He was like, ``Oh, wait. No, that is too high.'' He said it was 5,000. And the State election board in Georgia conducted a comprehensive investigation of deceased voters submitting ballots and found four cases--four cases. Four cases.

Again, I don't know what Georgia's law is. I don't know if it is like Washington, I don't know if it is like Michigan's, I don't know what it is like but they found four people. But it wasn't 5,000; it wasn't 10,000. Trump claimed that there were 66,000 people that were under the age of 18 who voted.

I think this has gotten a lot of attention because I think there is been some public accounting of this in the press. I think the secretary of state refuted this several times. But in general, the secretary of state said that there were zero individuals under 18 who voted in the election based upon a comparison of people who voted in the 2020 election in Georgia to their full birth dates. So that also was refuted.

And then Trump claimed--I showed you that attestation on the Washington ballot, the certification that you have to sign, what it says. You can't vote if you are incarcerated or a felon. So Trump claimed that there were 2,500 ballots cast by incarcerated felons in Georgia prison. So there was no mass incarcerated voting of felons.

They did investigate and did find 74 potential felons who they think could have cast a ballot. And guess what happened? They pulled them, so they weren't counted. That is how the system works. That is how the system works. That is what you are supposed

to do. That is why you have the system. So just like the other States-- no, those voter claims were false.

OK. Let's go to Arizona, also another claim. He has made a lot of claims since then, but I am just focusing on the ones mostly from that evening because that is what sent people down here and, now, that is what sent us on where we are with candidates all across America pledging Trump-think to run for office, which is undermining our election system and undermining our democracy. And all I want is our colleagues to work together on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. That is all I want.

This can't be more tumultuous than 1965. I am not saying that the former President isn't stirring up a lot. He is. But I have got to believe that we can work together. So he said 36,000 ballots were illegally cast by noncitizens.

Why am I going through this? Because I get a little tired of everybody just saying, ``Oh, the courts decided. The courts decided. He was wrong, the courts decided. He was wrong.''

No, no, no. People need to have faith in the system. We need to work to build faith in the system. We need to work in a bipartisan fashion to build faith in the system, and we need to stop the discrepancies between States.

The 2020 turnout in Washington was 87 percent; Alaska, 60 percent; West Virginia, 63 percent; Georgia, 66 percent; and Wisconsin, 72 percent. I don't know. I think it is probably a little higher. I don't know. Preclearance was based on that there was 20 percent difference in States voting; 20 percent difference still exists today. How are we working to protect our democracy and enhance voting rights if we are here trying to suppress those rights through these various State actions?

So in Arizona, the President said 36,000 ballots were illegally cast by noncitizens. Well, I showed you that attestation that you have to sign that basically says you are going to jail or you are going to be deported or you are going to pay a fine. And in Arizona, the Supreme Court basically had previously struck down a law requiring that proof, and so they did submit proof of their--they do submit and attest to their citizenship. So they do attest to their citizenship, and since then, Arizona has further enhanced their laws.

And 22,000 ballots were returned that were scheduled to be mailed out. I love this all the time--I love this all the time, this notion that, somehow, somebody leaked a bunch of ballots, as if they all don't have a barcode on them. They all have a barcode on them that you know where they are. They have a number attached to them.

But because we have so many people who vote overseas or vote even here in the Washington, DC, area--some of my staff here get a ballot earlier than I would get a ballot at my home in Edmonds, WA, and the reason is because they know that they live here and it takes a long time to get the ballot and get it back to the secretary of state.

So they are probably referring to ballots that were being mailed out. The claim was really just a misreading of data that parties that mailed in the ballot on the first day that literally could have been overseas ballots before the ballots actually went out because a previous batch of ballots were already sent.

There was a claim that there were more than 11,000 ballots cast, the numbers of registered voters in the same State in the 2020 election. The secretary of state reported 3.4 million votes were cast out of 4.3 million registered voters for a turnout of 79 percent.

So there weren't more--there might have been at some moment. I mean, one of the things that you see in close elections, particularly in our State because it takes a long time to count vote-by-mail, because, again, you are doing the verification of signatures, is counties will list how many ballots that they have left. No county ever overestimates how many ballots they have.

They don't know because you are still getting them in because of the vote-by-mail. Nobody says they have more ballots than they do because then everybody is going to say, ``Where are those ballots,'' so people underestimate the number of ballots. The consequence is you have different numbers that come in every day.

It doesn't mean there is something wrong with the system--the system, again, based on your signature, on your registration, on your attestation. Again, it is not to say there won't be less than a decimal percent of 1 percent fraud. There will be some things that happen, but it is not pervasive to the system. And there is a way to catch them. There is a way to penalize them.

And 150,000 voters were registered in Maricopa County without voter registration deadline--after the deadline had passed. And a Federal judge, basically, in that case, cited the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and there were 20,000 ballots that basically were registered after October 5. The court legally extended that deadline because of

Madam President, I rise to speak in support of our next vote, the nominee to head the National Telecommunications and Information Administration at the Department of Commerce, Alan Davidson.

My colleagues know now, in an information age, how important access to broadband is. They know because of COVID-19 how important it is for healthcare, how important it is for education, and how important it is for people to have the flexibility in all parts of the United States to have access to the ability to connect and to connect with people around the world.

We have long talked about the need for an NTIA Administrator who understands the public sector and understands the private sector. Mr. Davidson does that. He comes to us with a wealth of experience in both sectors, and he is coming at a time when my colleagues have been asking for more leadership from the administration on broadband issues. That is to say, many of my colleagues, like Senator Wicker, Senator Klobuchar, and many others, have asked for coordination between various programs that exist within the Department of Commerce, the Department of Agriculture, and the issues in coordination with the FCC and oversight of their programs to better maximize the delivery of broadband.

The Presiding Officer knows how much money is now on the table for broadband. We all know that this implementation is going to take a very skilled hand at trying to address both the issues of affordability and access. But more importantly, we will be getting with Mr. Davidson somebody who understands these issues well and will help us strive to get America better connected as quickly as possible.

We can't say enough about how important that is as COVID-19 continues across the United States of America with different variants. I am not saying it is going to be the new normal and continue for the next several years, but we know this: We need Mr. Davidson's help. We need his help effectively and speedily to get broadband deployed to both sectors of our economy--those who are unserved and those who are underserved.

We look forward to advancing this nominee and putting him to work as quickly as possible, and I personally look forward to working with him on these very important issues. There is much to do to leverage the dollars we have made available, but we have to work cooperatively with all parts of the United States to make that a reality.

Nothing could be more important now to upgrading U.S. infrastructure than getting fiber deployed, getting broadband to American homes, and making our grid more secure. With all of these things, I look forward to working with Mr. Davidson, and I appreciate his comments to me about his commitment to those issues as well.

I yield the floor.

Vote on Davidson Nomination

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the scheduled vote occur immediately.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Reserving the right to object, my colleague is right-- he has been to the floor to talk about this issue, and I don't think, though, that he has all the facts right.

We just had a major transportation hearing in the Commerce Committee before we left for the holiday recess, and we heard from airline executives--some who had implemented their own vaccines, some who had implemented other mandates and systems on their own, and others who basically responded to the Federal Government's desire to say that passengers would be required to wear masks. All of them said that this was a big success. All of them said that this, along with the Federal dollars that went into preserving the airlines, allowed us and our economy to recover better than other nations had; basically that when the upswing in transportation got to the point where people felt it was safe to travel, that those mechanisms themselves helped us have an airline sector and industry that could respond so that we literally, by Thanksgiving, were up to 85, 90 percent of where we had been the previous year.

So my colleague, I think, would like us to predetermine today exactly everything we are going to do on this issue; that we would prohibit the President, the Department of Transportation, Amtrak, and the Transportation Security Administration from making these decisions in the future.

Now, I can just tell you, I get up every day and I read the press. I also went to the gym today, and the first thing they said is, Where is your vaccination card or we are not letting you in? So there is the fact that businesses--the airlines and small businesses--are using this as a tool. Even though DC has the highest explosion of COVID cases in the Nation as a percentage right now--I understand that in the neighborhood I live in, there was a pretty hearty New Year's Eve, but everybody had to show a vaccination card to get into those businesses. Those businesses decided they were going to stay open. Those consumers decided they were going to participate--not the choice I would have made, but they decided to do that, and they showed their vaccination card.

So these businesses, the ones that the Federal Government is involved in--Amtrak and our transportation system--they also might have further issues in the future that they want to look at, so why pass a bill today that restricts them from showing proof of COVID vaccine in order to travel?

The proposals that were made at the time--we didn't really know 2 years ago now what was going to happen. But I can say--and that is why we had our most recent hearings--that we were right that the transportation sector was going to be critical to helping us fight the pandemic, that it was going to be critical for us to respond in our economy, and that it was going to be critical to providing essential services to some areas of the United States. The things we did allowed that air service to respond, and those business leaders showed up. In fact, one of them made a little mistake and said: Oh, you know, I think HEPA filters have really, really good responses, and maybe we don't need anything.

Well, he corrected that the next day. He corrected it the next day. He said: Oh, yeah, yeah, by the way, I believed in the mask mandate and still do.

An airline executive was questioned by some of my colleagues, who said: Why did you implement your own vaccine mandate of your employees?

He said: Because I wanted to have a workforce, and this is the best way I could get this workforce.

So this isn't a clear-cut issue, but I know, right now, why should we prohibit Amtrak or anybody from a decision that some of these small businesses are making right in this neighborhood, here in DC or probably Baltimore? My colleague has just joined us on the Senate floor. These people are making these decisions, and all we are saying is that the Federal Government, instead of passing Senator Scott's bill, should also have that decision in the future in their toolbox if they so choose. Why? Because the movement of commerce and transportation is so important to our infrastructure. It is so important to us as a nation to keep it going. I don't want to preclude any of the tools in the toolbox at this moment.

So therefore, Mr. President, I object.

Mr. President, I come to the floor tonight because I want to remind our colleagues and the people of the United States of America that we did pass an infrastructure bill, and it was bipartisan.

But we are here tonight because the very people that it takes to implement that bill, the very people that work at the Department of Commerce, the very people who work at the Department of Transportation are being held up in not

being able to be fully confirmed by this body to do the work that it takes to implement that legislation.

I know this is incredibly important to people across the United States of America because we know how popular that bill was. My colleagues are with me tonight--two members of the Commerce Committee-- who worked hard and contributed mightily to the Surface Transportation Act that passed out of the Commerce Committee in a robust bipartisan fashion to come here to the floor. It was added with other legislation from other committees.

So we are here tonight--myself, my colleague from Montana, who has a State as big as any State in the United States. It probably is the largest State. All I know is it takes me at least an hour to fly over it. So I guarantee you that is a lot of roads, that is a lot of bridges, that is a lot of railroad, that is a lot of infrastructure. If it is not fixed and it is not taken care of, then the Montana economy is hurt.

My colleague from Wisconsin is here, and she played a major role in the infrastructure bill as well. She made sure that we focused on at- grade crossings and the safety of our rail system. Why? Because we have to move products from the Midwest to reach Asian markets. If they can't get there because they are stuck in congestion, then, we aren't going to be competitive as a nation.

It is ridiculous that we are in this position tonight, ridiculous that there are dozens of nominees from the Department of Transportation and the Department of Commerce that the majority of our colleagues support, but they are being held up by one or two people who don't want to see them move through the process.

I am talking about nominees that are part of the Federal Railroad Administration--the Administrator. We are giving a bunch of money to the Federal Railroad Administration so they can put grants out, authorize this new program for at-grade crossings to improve the speed of moving our product, and people don't want the FRA, or the Federal Railroad Administration, to have an Administrator. I don't know what possibly could be wrong with that.

Someone doesn't want us to have the CFO for the Department of Transportation. The CFO--you don't want us to have a CFO? How political could the CFO of the Department of Transportation be? I guarantee you, not very political. The CFO is a person who is going to make sure that we spend the money correctly, administer the new programs as they get set up, and make sure the money goes out the door. It is hard to imagine a lot of money will go out the door of the Department of Transportation if we don't have a CFO.

There are other people here that are part of the transportation system on analysis. There are people I am pretty sure my colleague from Montana will talk about.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration--why? Again, because I guarantee you there are a lot of trucks in Montana. There is a lot of moving of product. You have to have trucking safety, and you have to have help in administering that. And if you have to have help administering that, then, you need to have an Administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

These are basic positions. These are positions that are part of the infrastructure that we need for the Department of Transportation and, as I mentioned, the Department of Commerce. These are issues that are important to us.

Let me just say a few words about Commerce nominees. We have someone who is supposed to do the analysis of industry for the Department of Commerce. We have someone who is supposed to help us with trade and international matters.

I am pretty sure my colleague from Florida, who is objecting to some of these nominees, is going to say: It is about the supply chain.

These are the very people that we need for the supply chain. You need the analysis and the construct of the Department of Commerce to say: These are the problems that we have with the Department moving forward on various issues that we have with a major focus on our infrastructure.

The infrastructure bill provided $1.2 trillion in funding for transportation, for energy, for disparities that we have in our infrastructure and that has to get spent, and it has to get spent as soon as possible.

Markets in China and India are expected to be worth $26 trillion by 2030, but some people think: Well, we will just take that money we gave to move ahead on our infrastructure--something that has been dilapidated for a long time.

That is what people don't understand. Over several administrations, our investment in transportation infrastructure fell to less than 1 percent of GDP, and we didn't correct it. The last administration didn't correct it, but this administration came in--a Democratic administration--and said we are going to correct that because economists will tell you that you are not keeping pace if your infrastructure investment is less than 1 percent. Now President Biden is going to get that number up over the next several years, and that is the kind of investment we need to make.

We don't need to slow down because there is a big world economy, and 95 percent of consumers live outside the United States. But, OK, let's just take our sweet time in implementing this bill and getting U.S. products to international markets, when 95 percent of consumers are outside the United States. Let's just take our sweet time because someone wants to object to these nominees--the CFO, the Administrator, these people who have been moved out of committee in a bipartisan fashion.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime, once-in-a-generation investment that we have to make. But they have to have people over there to make the investment and they have to have people to be fully staffed. And we have to make sure that these important steps that the President is taking on supply chain are met. That is why these issues of working on various logistics of operations, of pricing, of transparency, and overseeing shippers and making sure that some of our largest shippers are committed to moving cargo during off-peak hours are important.

My colleagues on both sides of the aisle know how important agricultural products being delivered to market on time is. And we need to make sure that our farmers, our people who have U.S.-manufactured products, like in the State of Wisconsin, are getting a fair deal on their shipping.

And that is why we also have to have the nominee for the Federal Maritime Commission and get somebody on the Commission who is going to hold people accountable to make sure that our products get somewhere safely and securely and in a timely fashion.

So these issues that we are facing on the supply chain are complex. They are not going to be fixed overnight, but they have to have people in the jobs. They have to have people who are going to answer the questions, work together, and to get this done.

So I would ask my colleagues, who I know are going to join me in making several nominations, I ask unanimous consent to consider the following nomination: Executive Calendar No. 315, Karen Jean Hedlund, of Colorado, to be a Member of the Surface Transportation Board for a term expiring December 31, 2025; that the Senate vote on the nomination without intervening action or debate; that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate; that any statements related to the nomination be printed in the Record; and that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

Mr. President, I ask that it be in order to make the same request with respect to Calendar No. 550, Max Veckich to be the Federal Maritime Commissioner for a term expiring June 30, 2026.

Mr. President, I think my colleague knows darn well the President of the United States has been doing something about this. That is why he used his leadership to make sure that we made major infrastructure investment so we could move products. That is why he has gotten the ports to work 24 hours to move product more expeditiously.

That is why he has been focused on all of the infrastructure needs in moving our country forward and continuing to deal with chokepoints, whether they are on the highways, our ports, or our rail system.

My colleague knows, too, that the Secretary of Transportation and the Secretary of Commerce--whom I am sure he has talked to--are working very diligently on this. I am sure they are willing to talk to him.

There is no secret here. There is the administration and a bipartisan group of people who are working together to try to solve these issues, but there are those on the other side of the aisle, probably those who didn't support the infrastructure investment, who also don't support having people spend the money and make the investments.

I am going to yield to my colleagues who are also here to try to move some of these important nominees to make this investment work in the United States.

Mr. President, my colleague from Montana is making some great points in this debate.

I can't emphasize this enough to my colleague from Florida, a member of our committee. He knows how hard we have all worked on these. He knows how bipartisan this effort was. He knows that he is not joined by a bunch of other colleagues here tonight, you know, in making these objections. It is because they want these nominees. They voted for them.

To come from a State like mine, where one in four jobs is related to trade, it is all about infrastructure. It is about our ports, our airports, our railroads, our roads. It is about getting the products from Montana out to the Pacific and to those destinations. It is all about making this infrastructure investment, and we finally have a President who is willing to put everything on the line to get us back to making an infrastructure investment that is more than 1 percent of GDP and who is smart enough to know that those ports and everything else are not going to function well and that we are not going to be competitive with Canada or with South America or with other places if we don't make this investment.

Well, now we have made it. We have made the investment. Now, we just need the people to execute on it, and our colleague doesn't want those individuals to be part of this process. He is not ready for them.

Everybody gets frustrated with the position of an administration. Everybody wants to hear from a nominee. I have called nominees. You would think that some of those people might call me, but, no, I have had to pick up the phone and call them and say: Here is what my concern is. Where are you going to be on this issue? What are you going to do about this problem?

Did I have everything guaranteed? Did I have every policy that I wanted to see for that nominee? No, but I picked up the phone and got the commitment that I needed to see things through and get things moving.

So, now, the fact that we have these nominees who continue to be held, as my colleague said, by a minority of the minority because they don't want to see the infrastructure investments that we have already voted on put in place is just really holding up government. It is just holding it up.

I think the President deserves to have his nominees. We deserve to get to vote on them. We deserve to give the President of the United States our opinion, but we also deserve to have these nominees voted on and not held in this process so that the government--so the actual functioning of the infrastructure bill--can't be implemented even though the majority of the Senate voted that way.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that it be in order to make the same request of Executive Calendar No. 468, Mohsin Raza Syed, of Virginia, to be an Assistant Secretary of Transportation.

Mr. President, my colleague knows very well that, just yesterday, the Deputy Secretaries of Commerce, Transportation, and Agriculture met with--and it may have been on a Zoom call or on the phone--Senators to talk about exactly what is going on to help work on the supply chain. The Senator knows very well. Now, he may not have liked exactly what he heard in the outcome, but there are no harder working people than the Secretary of Commerce and the Secretary of Transportation in implementing the things that need to be implemented to keep our country moving.

The problem, I think, is that the Senator from Florida may not understand that there is a huge upside. We just had a hearing yesterday with all of the airlines, and we acted on the Payroll Support Program. The end result of that has been a big boon to our economy because they were there and in place to capture the upside when the vaccines worked and the flying public returned. So we, the United States of America, have outdone Europe and Asia and Canada. Basically, the upside is having our air transportation system now back up to 90 percent of capacity. We did that because we acted. We made an investment, and the investment is paying off, and it kept a workforce that otherwise would have been on unemployment benefits.

So this administration is working. This administration is working, and it needs people to help them implement the bill we just passed. The administration has been working with major ports to have night and weekend cargo operations. It has been working with companies to improve the transparency of

logistics and pricing. It has been working with shippers to get the cargo and containers in and out of the ports faster.

He is urging some of the largest shippers--Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Samsung, FedEx, and UPS--to commit to moving cargo during off- peak hours and making those commitments.

Two major railroads--Union Pacific and BNSF--have announced that they will create new incentives for cargo owners to move cargo on the weekends.

CMA CGM--one of the largest carriers--has begun providing $100 discounts on the containers if they are picked up immediately, which is helping move them off the docks. One of the problems is that empty containers have been left on the docks, and this has caused congestion at the ports. So the administration has worked with these carriers to help incent people who have been part of the shipping system to get that product off of the docks. We have begun to see positive results from this.

This month, the CEOs of the major retailers told President Biden that the supply chain conditions have begun to show signs of improvement. This is from the major retailers.

As to the issues that we are focusing on here, we are talking to two people who are out fixing the problem. The Senator had a chance to talk to their Deputies about this. These are people who are definitely available to be talked to about this problem. Yet they are asking us to continue to have a workforce.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that it be in order to make the same request with respect to Executive Calendar No. 469, Victoria Marie Baecher Wassmer, of the District of Columbia, to be Chief Financial Officer, Department of Transportation.

Mr. President, these nominees we are talking about are nominees who are literally just the people who are going to help get these things done within the Agencies. The Senator is basically denying people the ability to have analysis, to talk about competition, to talk about the effective strategies that we need to put in place.

The Commerce Committee has had three hearings on the supply chain. In fact, we had some fabulous testimony, starting in--I think it was-- February or March, about the supply chain. It was a fabulous panel of experts, and it was about the complexity of what was happening to the supply chain and what our problems were going to be.

The one thing that is clear is that this isn't an issue for just COVID; that this isn't an issue for just this administration; and that this isn't an issue even for the next, you know, few years. This is an issue about the fact that, in the world economy in 2019, prior to the pandemic, something miraculous happened: The majority of the population of the world reached middle class. That meant the majority of people outside the United States was going to be a huge market opportunity for our goods and our products. It is a huge economic opportunity that 95 percent of consumers are outside the United States. That means we have to get things to those markets cost-effectively and competitively.

For us in Seattle, the Port of Seattle has to compete with the Port of Vancouver. The Port of Vancouver and the infrastructure of--Canada has made all sorts of infrastructure investment all across Canada with rail and port investment so that they can have the state of the art and so that it can be cheaper to ship through Canada than the United States. The same thing is happening in South America and other parts of the world. This is about who is going to reach the Asian market and how fast they are going to reach the Asian market.

The infrastructure investment was critical. It was critical to making sure that our railroads worked, that our ports worked, that our motor carriers had the right people and had the right safety. This was, literally, upgrading our infrastructure that had been ignored-- basically kept on life support--for so long, and now, we have a President and a bipartisan group of people who are going to make the investment. So the fact that those Agencies now need people--even the next nominee we are talking about--it is just literally about making investments so that they can figure out the strategy and the strategy moving forward on these individuals.

I don't understand why so many of these nominees my colleague has to object to because these nominees are individuals who are part of our infrastructure investment and, in this case, are part of where we are with the Department of Commerce in understanding what is even happening in the supply chain and what we also want to do.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that it be in order to make the same request with respect to Executive Calendar No. 355, Grant T. Harris, of California, to be an Assistant Secretary of Commerce.

Mr. President.

We are here on whatever today is--December 16. We are here, you know, as Congress careens toward trying to get some work done before we break for the holiday season.

I am sure that my colleague knows very well where the administration is on getting its nominees. We are not even the only committee that is out here on a weekly basis complaining about the number of nominees who are not allowed to serve. Even though they come out of committee with bipartisan support, they are not being allowed to be taken up and acted upon.

We have had people out here from the Foreign Affairs Committee. We have had nominees. We have had various committees--the HELP Committee. So we are just here now talking about the Transportation Committee.

So, yes, we have a minority within the minority that doesn't want the administration to have the nominees it needs to get things done. In this case, it is infrastructure. The importance of that is that the majority of people voted for infrastructure. The majority of people have voted for these nominees, and these nominees deserve to get in their place so that individuals can do their work.

If the Senator from Florida doesn't want to support--didn't want to support the infrastructure bill, doesn't believe that it was done just like he

would do it, I would ask him to consider the fact that his colleagues, the majority of whom did support it, are now going to be delayed in getting those resources out the door.

Now, maybe that is what he wants. Maybe he is playing a game of the calendar. He is just hoping that those nominees won't ever get into these spots, that it will take forever for us to get these programs implemented. Our economy can't wait for that. Our economy and the investments that we all decided to make can't wait for this kind of gamesmanship. The small businesses that my colleague from Montana talked about can't wait for that gamesmanship.

I guarantee you those Secretaries will be in front of the Commerce Committee in the new year at some point in time. I guarantee it. That is what happens around here. I am pretty sure they will be asked these questions. I am sure they are asked these questions every single day. I am pretty sure they would take a call from my colleague tonight or tomorrow. I am pretty sure they would have the input from him that he would want to give in these situations.

But this is an issue about whether you are for the infrastructure investment and whether you are for making that a reality by having the people whom it takes to implement it. And if you don't have CFOs, if you don't have the Administrators of the Agencies, if you don't have the people who are targeted to do the investment, I am not sure how you can do it.

One of those nominees, Arun Venkataraman, currently serves as a counselor to the Secretary of Commerce on trade and international matters. He has more than 20 years of experience in working on these issues and is somebody who could benefit us in this analysis of the challenges that we are facing to get our products into these markets and get them into these markets quickly.

So I ask unanimous consent that it be in order to make the same request with respect to Executive Calendar No. 586, Arun Venkataraman to be Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Director General of the United States and Foreign Commercial Service.

Mr. President.

Mr. President, I think we have had a good discussion of exactly what these individuals--the Secretary of Commerce and the Secretary of Transportation--have been doing. They have been making their deputies available for conversations about supply chains. We have had supply chain hearings. We will continue to address this issue. I am pretty sure they will take his phone call.

I am pretty sure that the reason we are out here is because when the other side of the aisle holds up so many nominees, there are only so many cloture motions that you can file. But I guess we will be here this weekend, and we will find out exactly how many cloture motions and how long it will take to continue to get these nominees.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to executive session to consider the following nominations en bloc: Calendar Nos. 402, 587, 606; that the Senate vote on the nominations en bloc with no intervening action or debate; that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate; that any statements related to the nominations be printed in the Record and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate consider the following nominations en bloc: Calendar Nos. 497, 597, and 598; that the Senate vote on the nominations en bloc without intervening action or debate; that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate; that any statement related to the nominations be printed in the Record and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's actions.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate consider the following nominations: Calendar Nos. 600, 601, 602, 603, 604, and all nominations on the Secretary's desk in the Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Space Force; that the nominations be confirmed en bloc; the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate; that no further motions be in order to any of the nominations; that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action and the Senate then resume legislative session.

Without objection, it is so ordered.

The nominations considered and confirmed are as follows:

in the army

The following named Army National Guard of the United

States officer for appointment in the Reserve of the Army to

the grade indicated under title 10, U.S.C., sections 12203

and 12211:

To be major general

Brig. Gen. William J. Prendergast, IV

The following named officer for appointment to the grade

indicated in the United States Army while serving as Chief

Defense Counsel for Military Commissions under article II,

section 2, clause 2 of the United States Constitution and

section 1037 of the National Defense Authorization Act for

Fiscal Year 2014:

To be brigadier general

Col. Jackie L. Thompson, Jr.

in the space force

The following named officer for appointment to the grade in

the United States Space Force under title 10, U.S.C., section

624:

To be brigadier general

Col. Timothy A. Sejba

in the army

The following named Army National Guard of the United

States officer for appointment in the Reserve of the Army to

the grade indicated under title 10, U.S.C., sections 12203

and 12211:

To be major general

Brig. Gen. Roger D. Lyles

in the marine corps

The following named officers for appointment in the United

States Marine Corps to the grade indicated under title 10,

U.S.C., section 624:

To be major general

Brig. Gen. James H. Adams, III

Brig. Gen. Eric E. Austin

Brig. Gen. Michael J. Borgschulte

Brig. Gen. William J. Bowers

Brig. Gen. Stephen E. Liszewski

Brig. Gen. Keith D. Reventlow

Brig. Gen. Sean M. Salene

Brig. Gen. Roberta L. Shea

Brig. Gen. Benjamin T. Watson

Brig. Gen. Christian F. Wortman

Nominations Placed on the Secretary's Desk

in the air force

PN1307 AIR FORCE nomination of Troy J. Johnson, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of October 27, 2021.

PN1308 AIR FORCE nomination of Mary T. Guest, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of October 27, 2021.

PN1309 AIR FORCE nomination of Eric J. Jordan, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of October 27, 2021.

PN1310 AIR FORCE nominations (24) beginning ZACHARY P.

AUGUSTINE, and ending MICHAEL L. TOOMER, which nominations

were received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of October 27, 2021.

PN1311 AIR FORCE nominations (11) beginning CHAD A.

BELLAMY, and ending ANDREW L. THORNLEY, which nominations

were received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of October 27, 2021.

PN1312 AIR FORCE nominations (37) beginning ROSS ANDREW

BROWN, and ending LISA MARIE WOTKOWICZ, which nominations

were received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of October 27, 2021.

PN1313 AIR FORCE nominations (25) beginning KIP T. AVERETT,

and ending DANIEL S. WALKER, which nominations were received

by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional Record of

October 27, 2021.

PN1314 AIR FORCE nominations (73) beginning SHAWN J. ALVES,

and ending ALEXANDER J. ZOLL, which nominations were received

by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional Record of

October 27, 2021.

PN1315 AIR FORCE nominations (29) beginning PATRICK E.

BRACKEN, and ending THADDAEUS J. WERNER, which nominations

were received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of October 27, 2021.

PN1329 AIR FORCE nomination of Anthony W. Perez, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 1, 2021.

PN1330 AIR FORCE nomination of Dustin R. Meredith, which

was received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 1, 2021.

PN1387 AIR FORCE nominations (9) beginning GEORGE L.

CHAPMAN, and ending MICHAEL L. YAMZON, which nominations were

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 15, 2021.

PN1388 AIR FORCE nominations (79) beginning LUIS J. ADAMES,

and ending MICHAEL J. WILLEN, which nominations were received

by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional Record of

November 15, 2021.

PN1389 AIR FORCE nomination of Rebecca L. Hess, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 15, 2021.

PN1390 AIR FORCE nominations (2) beginning ANGELICA M.

DREXEL, and ending WILLIAM R. SINGISER, which nominations

were received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 15, 2021.

PN1391 AIR FORCE nomination of Kyle P. Allen, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 15, 2021.

PN1392 AIR FORCE nominations (5) beginning SEAN M. BATZER,

and ending LENARD W. TOL, which nominations were received by

the Senate and appeared in the Congressional Record of

November 15, 2021.

PN1393 AIR FORCE nominations (4) beginning ASHLEY D. BROWN,

and ending ALEXANDER T. PINGREE, which nominations were

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 15, 2021.

PN1394 AIR FORCE nomination of Ross C. Stanley, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 15, 2021.

PN1395 AIR FORCE nominations (296) beginning BRANDON R.

ABEL, and ending BRANDON A. ZUERCHER, which nominations were

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 15, 2021.

PN1396 AIR FORCE nominations (110) beginning BRADLEY D.

ALTMAN, and ending ROBERT J. YATES, III, which nominations

were received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 15, 2021.

PN1397 AIR FORCE nominations (52) beginning ALICIA D.

ABRAMS, and ending JAMES A. WRIGHT, which nominations were

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 15, 2021.

PN1398 AIR FORCE nomination of Simone E. Zacharias, which

was received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 15, 2021.

PN1414 AIR FORCE nomination of Adrian A. Andrews, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 17, 2021.

in the army

PN984 ARMY nomination of Richard J. Sonnenfeld, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of August 4, 2021.

PN1266 ARMY nomination of Andrea N. Apple, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of October 19, 2021.

PN1304 ARMY nominations (21) beginning ROBERT J. ABBOTT,

and ending MEGAN WAKEFIELD, which nominations were received

by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional Record of

October 27, 2021.

PN1305 ARMY nomination of Tanya K. Bindernagel, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of October 27, 2021.

PN1306 ARMY nominations (80) beginning GRANT T. ALEXIS, and

ending THOMAS J. WITKOWSKI, which nominations were received

by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional Record of

October 27, 2021.

PN1331 ARMY nomination of Gabrielle L. Murray, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 1, 2021.

PN1332 ARMY nomination of Michael R. Ruiz, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 1, 2021.

PN1333 ARMY nomination of Nicholas J. Beck, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 1, 2021.

PN1334 ARMY nomination of Peter A. Doblar, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 1, 2021.

PN1335 ARMY nomination of Francis E. Igo, IV, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 1, 2021.

PN1336 ARMY nomination of Ken M. Woods, which was received

by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional Record of

November 1, 2021.

PN1337 ARMY nominations (46) beginning KATHARINE M. E.

ADAMS, and ending HANS P. ZELLER, which nominations were

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 1, 2021.

PN1338 ARMY nominations (3) beginning ALEJANDRO L. BUNIAG,

JR., and ending MICHAEL W. WEAVER, which nominations were

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 1, 2021.

PN1339 ARMY nomination of Erica A. Wheatley, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 1, 2021.

PN1340 ARMY nomination of Jamison S. Nielsen, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 1, 2021.

PN1341 ARMY nominations (2) beginning ROBERT P. LEWIS, and

ending SCOT W. MCCOSH, which nominations were received by the

Senate and appeared in the Congressional Record of November

1, 2021.

PN1342 ARMY nomination of Jader A. Morales, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 1, 2021.

PN1343 ARMY nomination of Moises Salinas, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 1, 2021.

PN1399 ARMY nomination of Michael S. Schwamberger, which

was received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 15, 2021.

PN1400 ARMY nomination of Kyle A. Lippold, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 15, 2021.

PN1401 ARMY nomination of Taylor K. Opel, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 15, 2021.

PN1402 ARMY nominations (21) beginning SHAWN G. ABBE, and

ending NATHANIEL C. STONE, which nominations were received by

the Senate and appeared in the Congressional Record of

November 15, 2021.

PN1403 ARMY nomination of Jamie E. Mueller, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 15, 2021.

PN1415 ARMY nominations (9) beginning PETER S. BLACK, and

ending ROBERT G. SACCA, which nominations were received by

the Senate and appeared in the Congressional Record of

November 17, 2021.

PN1430 ARMY nomination of Edward W. Lumpkins, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of December 1, 2021.

PN1431 ARMY nomination of Gina M. Farrington, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of December 1, 2021.

PN1432 ARMY nomination of Disa L. Rifkin, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of December 1, 2021.

PN1449 ARMY nomination of Jessica K. Smyth, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of December 2, 2021.

PN1450 ARMY nomination of Brock A. Chavez, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of December 2, 2021.

in the marine corps

PN1344 MARINE CORPS nomination of Eric A. Walraven, which

was received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 1, 2021.

PN1345 MARINE CORPS nomination of Daniel T. Celotto, which

was received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 1, 2021.

PN1346 MARINE CORPS nomination of Jason A. Retter, which

was received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 1, 2021.

PN1404 MARINE CORPS nominations (100) beginning RYAN P.

ALLEN, and ending MATTHEW P. ZUMMO, which nominations were

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 15, 2021.

PN1416 MARINE CORPS nominations (629) beginning NICHOLAS P.

ADAMS, and ending JOHN B. ZIMMER, which nominations were

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 17, 2021.

in the navy

PN1316 NAVY nomination of Stephen M. Dyer, which was

received by th Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of October 27, 2021.

PN1347 NAVY nominations (34) beginning MITCHELL I. BELL,

and ending PATRICK Z. X. YU, which nominations were received

by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional Record of

November 1, 2021.

PN1348 NAVY nomination of Matthew C. Dennis, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 1, 2021.

PN1405 NAVY nomination of Joseph M. Molina, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 15, 2021.

PN1451 NAVY nomination of Stephen B. Koye, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of December 2, 2021.

PN1452 NAVY nomination of Michael J. Urbaitis, which was

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of December 2, 2021.

PN1453 NAVY nominations (3) beginning ALEXANDER C.

CHARALAMBOUS, and ending TAIBATU E. I. OBASI, which

nominations were received by the Senate and appeared in the

Congressional Record of December 2, 2021.

in the space force

PN1349 SPACE FORCE nominations (2) beginning CHRISTINA N.

GILLETTE, and ending D. S. ROGERS, which nominations were

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 1, 2021.

PN1406 SPACE FORCE nominations (10) beginning ALBERT J.

ASHBY, and ending JOHN C. ZINGARELLI, which nominations were

received by the Senate and appeared in the Congressional

Record of November 15, 2021.

PN1407 SPACE FORCE nomination of Kevin G. Amsden, which was

received by the

Senate and appeared in the Congressional Record of November

15, 2021.

PN1408 SPACE FORCE nomination of Travis Richard Prater,

which was received by the Senate and appeared in the

Congressional Record of November 15, 2021.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 5746, which was received from the House.

I ask that the Cantwell amendment, which is at the desk, be agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 127, S. 1543.

I ask that the committee-reported substitute be agreed to; and that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time.

I know of no further debate.

I ask that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.