Floor Statements

Madam President, first, I would like to say that my colleague from Utah was out here a minute ago. We often disagree on many things, but every now and then, we agree on something. I just want to say how grateful I am that the Senate, today, passed by unanimous consent a bill that we have been working on for years and years and years, with the community around Crystal Reservoir, to make sure that that can be transferred from the Forest Service to the people of Ouray, who desperately, desperately need it. I am grateful that we were able to get this done, and we will continue to work on this together to make sure we get it passed in the House of Representatives. So it is a bright light in an otherwise not so bright day legislatively around here in the U.S. Senate.

Trump Administration

Madam President, I wanted to come to the floor because today may be the end of the opportunity to talk on the Senate floor for this session of the Senate before we recess for the coming elections. I wish that there was a lot of stuff that we had addressed together.

The American people are struggling with costs and this economy in a way that they have never struggled before, and that is not an exaggeration. It is true in rural Colorado and in urban Colorado. It is true in Republican parts of the State and in Democratic parts of the State. It doesn't matter. People--no matter how hard they work--feel like they can't get ahead and their kids can't live better lives than the lives that they are leading; that no matter how hard they work, it is becoming harder and harder and, in some ways, impossible-- impossible--to live a middle class life anymore.

For the kids who are graduating from high school right now in America and for the kids who are graduating from college in America, it feels like the American dream is further and further and further out of reach because it is. It is. I see the pages who are sitting here on this floor today. They are the first generation of Americans since forever-- I don't want to depress you tonight, but I guess I can tell you the truth so you can help fix it. They are the first generation of Americans who are likely to earn less than their parents earned if we don't change it. We are living in a world where people who are 30--a lot older than the pages who are here today--on average, are going to earn less than their parents earned.

We are living in a time when 1 percent of the American people own 50 percent of the value of the stock market, and the bottom 50 percent of the American people own 1 percent of the value of the stock market. If you have not been somebody in the United States who owns assets--who owns real estate, who owns stocks and bonds--it has been a tough 15 years or 20 years. It has actually been tough going all the way back to Ronald Reagan, to be honest, when these trickle-down policies started. Ronald Reagan was certainly a purveyor of these. You know, he put in place a lot of the tax cuts and other things that were kind of the beginning of trickle-down economics. I don't think even he could have foreseen what the Trump administration would have done to pursue the kind of trickle-down economics that they have pursued. It has been like a raging forest fire that has gone across the United States of America at a time when our inequality is growing; at a time when Reagan could never have imagined, I don't think, the wealth inequality that we now have in this country, the lack of economic mobility we have in what I still refer to as the ``land of opportunity'' because, in the end, I am relentlessly hopeful about where this country is headed.

But the reality is--the reality is--unless you are at the very top of this economy for decades, you have not done well and your kids have done worse. That is the opposite of the American dream.

I am sorry to say this to the pages that are here, but there was a time in American history--when I was your age, for example--when we took it as a given that each generation was going to benefit from the work of the previous generation, and the greatest gift we could give the next generation was more prosperity than our generation had.

My daughters are now in their midtwenties--actually, to be honest, the youngest is in her early twenties--but my daughters are now in their midtwenties, and they are really serious about the question, which I am not going to repeat on this floor because I would be thrown out for using ``W-T.'' That is their view, though. That is their view because they know a lot about history. They know what the transition was from one generation to the next. They know what the solemn responsibility of every American generation was. And now they find themselves and their whole generation finds themselves completely ignored by this Congress, completely ignored by the President of the United States. He could care less about their future.

I used to be a superintendent of schools in Denver before I came here. I was in business before that. I have had kind of a checkered career on the way to the U.S. Senate. And I can tell you, I can assure you that President Trump does not see the families of the kids I used to work for in the Denver public schools, who are working two and three jobs just to feed their children, who are working two and three jobs just to keep a roof over their heads, just to pay the rent in this economy, this savage economy they are facing.

I am sorry to say this to the pages as well. The Trump administration is breaking new records every week. Gas prices are up 42 percent from the year before. Diesel is the highest it has ever been in American history at $6.50 a gallon. It has never been higher.

There are farmers and ranchers all over Colorado who have had to put thousands and thousands and thousands of incremental dollars, of extra dollars they don't have, dollars they need to invest in their own kids' future, dollars they need to invest in their own businesses--they are having to burn it in their tractors because Donald Trump decided to go to war in Iran--against the advice of all of his advisers, by the way, who told him that

if you drop bombs on the mullahs, they are not going to abdicate; who told him that if you drop bombs on the mullahs, there won't be a regime change, and, in fact, the people that come will be more radical than the ones you are attacking; who told him that they would close the Strait of Hormuz; who told him that you better watch out, Mr. President, because you might be facing--and since you don't probably drive a tractor, you may not care as much, but the farmers and ranchers all over America are going to be facing diesel prices that are $6.50; that it will be the difference between their ability to afford healthcare or invest in their business or pay for their kid to go to higher education, to learn a trade. That is all going away because of these insane prices--gas prices up 42 percent and diesel at $6.50.

Now, something that is hard to understand for some people around here is the effect of these interest rates, which are hitting some of the highest levels we have seen in decades. The 10-year yield is the highest level since 2007--20 years ago, two decades ago. You have to go back 20 years to get to an interest rate like this. The 30-year reached its highest level since June 2002. That is a catastrophe for anybody in this economy who is trying to borrow money. This is a catastrophe for anybody in this economy who is trying to pay a mortgage on a house.

Mortgage rates are now over 7 percent in the United States of America because of Donald Trump's policies, because he invaded Iran, because--I have to say both parties are somewhat responsible for this.

My friend that I respect so much from Oklahoma is here. By the way, my oldest daughter is living happily--happily--in Tulsa, OK, because she can pay I think 28 percent of her income in housing. She is very, very happy to be there at a time when, in lots of other places, no one, you know, who is her contemporary, who went to college with her, can afford to pay to live anywhere. So she is delighted to have a chance to be there, to be working in Tulsa. But for people that are trying to buy a house in America, for her generation, rates are now at 7 percent, and none of them can afford to buy a house.

By the way, they got--I can't use those words. They got totally--you know the word I want to use--when interest rates were at zero, when the Federal Reserve was trying to keep interest rates at zero because the first Trump administration would say: Keep them at zero. Keep them at zero. Keep them at zero.

And what did that do? Yes, the loans went to zero as well--they were low--but the price of housing went through the roof; the stock market went through the roof. Anybody who had assets, anybody who was rich, anybody who had a fancy house anywhere in America benefited hugely.

We are in that moment again. We are in that moment again, the moment we have been in for almost 50 years in America. When the economy grows, the wealthiest people do incredibly well, and for everyone else, it is like a recession. In fact, it is a recession. It is a recession.

When there are recessions in America today, those are real recessions for working people and for poor people. For wealthy people, that is a period of economic growth. Our Nation has detached the wealthiest people. It is like they are in a capsule floating above all of us. They are in a capsule floating above all of us, and when the economy does well, they do great; when the economy does poorly, they do poorly.

I wish everybody well, everyone in this economy, but the reality for everybody else--in fact, I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that for 95 percent of Americans, for decades, the periods of economic growth have basically acted as recessions, and recessions have been devastating.

For the next generation of Americans, for my kids' generation, they can't even get a glimmer of economic prosperity, where their share of the American dream is going to come from, their opportunity to be able to participate meaningfully in this democracy and in this economy. And they are all smart. They are all--my daughter will get mad at me, but she is teaching a history class at a community college in Tulsa. And they know the history of this Nation. They know we have been a nation that stood for freedom and for opportunity for all these years. But something is broken in the way this works, and it doesn't work for them.

If you wonder, by the way, why we are facing all this division and chaos in our politics, if you wonder why we seem to be living in a moment when no one in this Chamber can work together and where the American people are--at least the ones that are on their social media-- are relentlessly at war with each other on that social media, there might be a lot of reasons, but I am telling you the real reason is because we have lost the sense of economic opportunity in the Nation because we don't really have it anymore for the people that are coming after us, and our gaps in wealth are just getting larger and larger and larger and larger. The chance for people to get ahead is getting harder and harder and harder. That always breeds politics of division; that always breeds the politics of chaos.

I wish Donald Trump were interested in any of this, except for the division and the chaos. His politics has been a politics of sowing division, of sowing chaos, of preying on the divisions we have, and we have, unfortunately, fallen into that trap at a time when America actually needs us to be solving the problems they are facing, and I think a lot of folks feel like we have just given up on it.

Our kids are reading--our literacy levels in America are worse than they were 30 years ago, and they were low 30 years ago. We spend twice as much as any other industrialized country on healthcare, and we get much worse results.

When Ronald Reagan--I mentioned him earlier--when he was President, we had the same life expectancy of everybody in the world. Now we are 6 or 7 years behind the industrialized world here in the United States. If you are African American in this country, whether you live in Oklahoma or Colorado, your life expectancy is even shorter than that.

The good news is that there is no shortage of challenges we could confront. I will give you another one that I know my colleague cares about and I care about. We now have $40 trillion of debt on the balance sheet of this country--$40 trillion. That is one of the reasons why interest rates are going up the way they are.

From my daughters Caroline, Halina, and Anne's perspective, their generation's perspective, they look at that and say: What did we get for that? You guys went out and borrowed $40 trillion. Like you put the biggest mortgage that you could ever pull out of a bank on the United States of America.

Imagine if our country were a big house, and you went out there and took a $40 trillion mortgage on it, and then you built yourself a swimming pool, and you built yourself a bunch of statues. I suppose, in the case of Donald Trump, you bought yourself a bunch of gilded stuff that you hung in the Oval Office or tried to knock Jack Kennedy's name off the Kennedy Center by putting your name up there, which doesn't deserve to be up there. It shouldn't be up there. You spent your time building statues and layering them in gold leaf.

The next generation of Americans might rightly say: You borrowed $40 trillion for this?

The reality is that all of that pales in comparison to the tax cuts these guys have given to the wealthiest people in this country without paying for it. All of that pales--and I just want to be honest and admit that it pales in comparison to the $8 trillion we essentially lit on fire in the Middle East to pay for two forever wars there that, by the way, President Trump said he would never repeat.

He got elected--actually, Barack Obama got elected by first saying: I am not against all wars, but I am against dumb wars.

He found a way to jump a whole generation of politicians to become President on the strength of that argument.

Donald Trump made a very similar argument, which is: No more long wars. No more forever wars.

Now he has created one. This war of choice in Iran is going to be a war that ends when the mullahs decide. That is a long war. That is a long war.

I have a long memory. I can remember. I can remember. This is long before you guys were born. I remember when our folks--our diplomats were

taken hostage in Tehran. These are the people we are dealing with.

By the way, I am the first person to say the mullahs and Iran should never have nuclear weapons. They should never have nuclear weapons. That is what makes this even more irresponsible. He has no strategy. He has no game plan. He has no budget for what he is doing.

(Mr. HUSTED assumed the chair.)

He is consuming, by the way, missile after missile after missile that is really important to our deterrence of China and in the Pacific theater. And he hasn't paid for a single dollar of that--not a dollar, not a dollar.

By the way, I think all of us should be voting against his defense budgets. I am. I am, partly because they are not paid for but also because he has no strategy.

That is the best way for us to end this war. That has happened before.

We are not powerless. The U.S. Senate is not powerless. People on this floor, in both parties, they brought the Vietnam war to an end by saying: We are going to cut it off if you don't stop.

And we are in that position today.

I would be shocked if there is anybody over there who really supports what the President has done in Iran. I certainly can't find anybody in Colorado who is a Republican, a Democrat or unaffiliated--almost anybody, almost anybody--a handful who believe this was a good idea, especially the next generation.

And certainly not our farmers and ranchers, who are facing higher input, as I said, and now higher borrowing costs because of this President's policies and weakening commodity prices, because we have a completely incoherent trade policy.

Xi Jinping was just over here. Donald Trump did nothing to get him to buy our soybeans. And, by the way, having said that he was going to do something about it, he has now allowed Brazil to come and steal our business, which they are doing.

Exports are incredibly important to our farmers, incredibly important to our ranchers, and Donald Trump has cut them off for his ridiculous trade wars.

And I have said for years on this floor: We have to take China on. We have to take China on. But we have to do it in a smart way, not in a stupid way, not in an incoherent way, not in a way that gives Brazil the opportunity to knock our farmers out of the picture.

And I will say that everything that I said earlier about the difficulties of the next generation of Americans, the difficulties of the generation of kids that I used to work for in the Denver Public Schools--all of it is magnified if you live in rural America, if you live in rural Colorado, because it is just harder when you have fewer people.

Healthcare is more expensive. Childcare is more expensive. Groceries are more expensive. Gas is more expensive. Everything is harder, and you have to travel long distances to get places.

And now, everyone in America is spending more. Families are forced to pay more for everything. They are paying more on gas. Bags of groceries are a month's rent now or more. People are having to make choices between buying their kids clothes for school and buying groceries. There are hundreds of more dollars that people are having to spend on electricity and on housing itself and rent.

I haven't heard President Trump talk about any of this because the next generation is entirely invisible to him. He has no concern about it. He is not worried about it. That is not of his concern.

Every day he parades what his real interests are across the front pages of what is left of the newspapers of America and the television and his social media feed. And he is proud of it, by the way. He is proud of it.

So I know, when I talk about this, if he hears about it, he will say: Oh, I got his goat. Well, that is what I wanted to do.

And he is. He is proud of his corruption. He is proud. He wears it on his sleeve.

The latest of this was that he has now spent millions of taxpayer dollars on political advertisements--millions of taxpayer dollars on political advertisements.

I would be surprised if there is anybody here who supports that. We have 330 million Americans. Of that, all but three think that it is a bad idea to use their money--to use taxpayer money--when we have $40 trillion of debt, when we have 7 percent interest rates, when diesel is $6.50 a gallon, and that the President is using our money to pay for ads for his reelection and the election of people in his party in this midterm.

He is hanging his photograph, his picture, on the outside of the Federal Agencies here in Washington, DC. That is not the worst thing that he has done, but it does make me feel, every time I drive through it, like we are living in an occupied state, like we are living in North Korea or Beijing or some other place where the great leader is respected because he tells everybody in the country how they are supposed to think about everything.

I know he thinks he is the greatest President in American history. I know he does. He has even said that. I think he thinks he is greater than George Washington.

None of those people put their pictures on the outside of these buildings. None of these people tried to hang their name next to Jack Kennedy's name or put their photo on the Department of Justice or the Department of Labor.

But part of his renovation of this town has been a billion dollars in White House renovations, including his ballroom and his helipad--a billion dollars that he has spent on the ballroom and the helipad.

And he has cheerfully basically admitted that he has made $1.4 billion in crypto profits while being President of the United States, and his family has made untoward amounts. And he has relationships, the President, all over the world that are helping him pursue those economic interests while he is in the White House.

I know we are living at a really unusual time in American history. I know we are living in a time when there is enormous frustration, when there is enormous anger, when there is a lot of division and distrust. I know we are. But I think it is fair to say that most Americans don't want their Presidents to get rich when they come to office.

I think that most Americans know that no President has ever gotten rich the way Donald Trump has, when they can't even afford to pay the rent, when they can't even afford to buy shoes for their kids and give them school uniforms.

They know no President has put their own face on the outside of these buildings, like this is some cult of personality instead of what it is, which is the American democracy.

I think that most people in America are going to say that they don't really want to live in a country where Federal law enforcement wearing masks can show up in your neighborhood and bang on your door and drag you out of your house, which Donald Trump has also done.

I know that no American would agree--no American would agree--that any President should weaponize the Federal Government for his own political purposes.

This is not a country where, you know, if one party loses and the other one wins, that the one that wins uses its office to weaponize the power of the Federal Government against States that didn't vote for them or disagree with them.

And I am telling you, folks, that if we fall into that trap of treating that as the new normal, we are going to be here for a really long time because this is how democracies and republics die. This is how they spin out of control, when we jeopardize our values and our beliefs for a set of behaviors that are just totally out of the mainstream of American history--in this case, the weaponization of politics.

Colorado has witnessed a form of this firsthand. The administration canceled $109 million of transportation grants. The President denied disaster declarations for the Elk and Lee Fires in Rio Blanco County, and for flooding in Western Colorado.

They tried to block 100,000 families from receiving SNAP benefits. They have tried to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.

And most shamefully--I mean, that is a long list. But most shamefully, they stole the promise of clean drinking water from 50,000 Coloradans in the southeastern part of my State who

have been waiting for decades for the Federal Government to finally finish a project that was promised by Jack Kennedy when he went out to Pueblo in 1960 and promised it to the farmers and ranchers there.

We have passed it unanimously in the Senate. We have passed it unanimously in the House. And yet President Trump has taken it away.

So not only is he focused on the things that won't make our economy better, not only is he not focused on the next generation of Americans, not only is he not saying to himself, ``What do I do every day to try to deal with the costs that people are facing and the affordability crisis?''--it is a crisis that they are facing--he is making matters worse. It is like he is going out of his way to make everybody's life harder and worse.

I would be shocked if there are people here who actually support what he is doing in Iran. I know the American people don't. And it is not just because it is crushing them economically because of what the mullahs are doing with energy prices and what they are doing with--not them but what the war is doing with interest rates. It is not just because of that. It is because they can see how ridiculous this is--the lack of strategy, the lack of focus.

They know that he snatched Maduro in the middle of the night and that somehow he decided that dropping the bombs on Iran was going to get the same result, even when all the intelligence said: That is not what is going to happen. You are not going to replace the regime. You are not going to be able to take away their nuclear weapons from the air. They are going to constrict oil from the Middle East.

There isn't anyone in the Middle East that doesn't think they are not going to be paying tolls from now until eternity to the Iranians, to the mullahs, because of what Donald Trump has done.

It is ridiculous. It is not just a war of choice. It is a war that has created catastrophe for the American people.

We have lost the lives of soldiers in this country. They have bombed our military bases and the bases of our neighbors--which, by the way, our intelligence Agencies said they would--and now they are in a better negotiating position than they were before the war was started. And now they have people in charge that are actually more attached, if you can believe it, more attached to the prospect of getting nuclear weapons than the people that they replaced.

As I said earlier, he has put us in a worse position with China. Xi Jinping shows up here, and the President goes and meets him at the airport and drives him back to the White House and genuflects over and over and over to him.

And I can guarantee you, Xi Jinping was happy to be feted this way by the President of the United States because he knows how much advantage he is taking of the President.

The Iran war has been a huge boon to China--and to Russia, by the way. It has put them in a much better position than they were in before he started.

The Ukrainians, with no help basically from the President, finally had Putin on his heels. And they are doing an unbelievable job. We all owe them a huge debt of gratitude. And then President Trump gives Putin the gift of invading Iran, the gift of driving these people into each other's corner.

I mentioned his incoherent trade war with the entire world. We are basically tariffing the entire world, and that is haunting our farmers and ranchers. It is crushing our small business owners all over Colorado--and consumers as well. Consumer sentiment is at the second lowest point in 70 years.

Please stop, Mr. President. Stop. We cannot afford your policies anymore. We are trying to raise our kids, build our small businesses, turn something over to the next generation that we are proud of.

People are stuck in the jobs that they are in because there is nowhere for them to move. The hire rates in America are at record lows. No one can buy a house because of interest rates.

And, by the way, seniors who would like to maybe downsize and move out of their house so that my kids' generation can move in, they can't do anything. They can't go anywhere. And in many ways those folks, our seniors on fixed incomes, they are in as rough a position as anybody because of his policies.

But let me tell the Presiding Officer this. Here is what is happening in Donald Trump's economy right now: Forty-two percent of the recent college graduates in America--42 percent--are underemployed, and their peers are in even worse shape in this country. That is a hard way to start your life. If you are a young man in America today in your twenties, you are making 40 percent less in real dollars than you were in 1976--40 percent less in inflation-adjusted dollars than you were in 1976.

There is no way--no wonder people are getting stuck in their parents' basement. By the way, nothing would fill me with greater joy than having my own daughters move back into my basement, but I get the idea that kids don't want to do that. They want to start their lives. They want to start their businesses. They want to be able to afford higher education, which they can't. And now, even if they get it, 42 percent of them are underemployed.

I will just finish. I know that I have colleagues who want to talk. But let me just say one other thing that has been in the news lately that the President has been happily making news about, which is this whole issue of AI, which is part of the economic anxiety that especially the next generation is feeling--and for good reason. They are worried about what this is going to mean for their jobs and the economy. That is not irrational. That is why I put out language last week to create a new Federal Agency to actually negotiate with these guys.

No one in America has had a negotiation with Mark Zuckerberg over anything. We haven't had a negotiation about our privacy, our data, our kids' mental health, our economic interests. This Congress 15 years ago should have put this in place to deal with, if nothing else, the mental health issues that have been afflicting our kids because of these social media platforms.

But now, with AI, it is clear we have to have--Congress is never going to be able to figure it out. States can't regulate it.

We have Anthropic, one of the leading American companies, says that its technology poses an ``existential risk to humanity.'' That is what they wrote. That is what they wrote. I think about the lawyers that are drafting this stuff for the AI companies that are having to put in it that the technology is potentially an existential risk to humanity. And I wonder, if the worst happens, who they think is going to be there to sue them if they don't put that language in.

But that is where we are. That is what the industry is saying itself. The President has responded with his ``morally binding'' agreement with the AI companies and themselves, calling fears over AI a ``hoax''--a ``hoax.''

We could fix that here. We could create a new Agency in America to have that negotiation with Zuckerberg and the rest of these guys, just like Teddy Roosevelt did, Franklin Roosevelt did. There is a reason we don't have planes dropping out of the sky. There is a reason why we know our drugs are safe. There is a reason why we have been able to proceed with our nuclear weapons and nuclear technology without destroying ourselves. It is because we came together to work together in a way that was rational, created a synergy between the new inventions that were coming on and public safety, preserving innovation in America and public safety. We have to do that again. Well, we haven't been working on that because the President says his agreement is ``morally binding'' with these guys that are themselves saying that their own technology creates an existential risk to humanity.

We could have spent the time fixing our broken healthcare system, which is just becoming more and more and more expensive, in part, because of the President's policies. We could be dealing with our broken immigration system, reintroduce ourselves to the idea that we live in a nation of laws and we live in a nation of immigrants. We do, and we have been both at the greatest moments in this country's history.

I am sorry to say we haven't done any of that. I mentioned education earlier. I mentioned our literacy rates in this Nation that are the lowest they have been for 30 years.

So now we are going into this recess. We have all come out here this afternoon to do our procedural motions on

this floor about various things that we didn't get done. But what we didn't get done is anything to make the American people's lives a little bit better, to deal with the burdens of cost and expense that our farmers and ranchers in Colorado are facing and every small business owner in Colorado is facing, that the next generation all over America is so worried about that they don't even know whether they are going to have a future of opportunity in this country, in the land of opportunity. They don't know whether we have abandoned permanently the obligation that each generation of Americans has to create more opportunity, not less, for the people coming after it. They don't know.

In fact, they doubt it. They doubt it because what they see is the economic catastrophe of the way the economy is working--not just under President Trump but for decades and now much worse under President Trump--and the political chaos that we are leaving behind. That is part of our legacy as well, unless we are going to figure out a way to come together on these fundamental issues and make some hard decisions here and focus attention on the next generation.

I have said many times that I don't blame Donald Trump for being elected President. I am sorry that he was, but I don't blame him for being elected. He won. But the rest of us that don't want to go down this road anymore on the American people's behalf have to find a different path. We have got to find a way to give each other hope in this country that we can make progress; that we can build an economy that, when it grows, it grows for everybody, not just the people at the very top; that we can have a Tax Code that actually supports work instead of passive investment, instead of just the assets that go up every time we pass a bill around here that wastes more trillions of dollars of the American people's tax money.

I am optimistic about that. I am not optimistic in this moment because we are leaving the Senate floor without having done it. I am not optimistic at this moment because Donald Trump is more focused on putting gild stuff on the walls of the Oval Office; putting his name on the Kennedy Center; building a ballroom; building a new triumphal arch in Washington, DC; breaking the Reflecting Pool; his own crypto. He is more focused on that than he is on the issues that we need to focus on. But there is nobody here who is surprised about that. He is not doing anything he didn't say he would do.

We need to find a way to create confidence in the American people so we can build a politics that is not just about chaos and division, that is not just about fanning the flames but is actually about embracing the next generation and our responsibility to them, our obligation to them--and I would say to this country--to fulfill and to live up to the example that our parents and grandparents set for us and to make sure we get this right before we move on. That is what we need to do, and I believe we will.

I appreciate the indulgence of the Presiding Officer. I am sorry to have gone on so long tonight. I thank the Presiding Officer for the time, and I thank my colleagues for giving me the chance to speak on the floor.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, over the past few weeks, familiar scenes have been playing out in Colorado and all across the country. Families are buying new books and backpacks, picking up school supplies, and taking their children to the pediatrician for their annual checkup.

For decades, back-to-school season did not prompt anxiety or confusion--except for maybe the kids like me that didn't do their summer reading. Parents could rely on the recommendations from their pediatricians, and the questions they did have were answered by professionals.

But that peace of mind is being undermined by the current administration--including by the President of the United States and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who have worked tirelessly to undermine decades of settled science around routine vaccinations that have kept kids safe in this country and around the world for years.

The consequences of that broken trust are showing up in our emergency rooms and in our classrooms. Parents are increasingly concerned that their kids will go to school and come back with a serious disease.

Right now, our Nation is living through the most severe measles outbreak in over 35 years. Measles is not a mild childhood inconvenience; it is one of the most contagious viruses on Earth, capable of causing high fevers, brain swelling, long-term disability, and death.

In Colorado, we have already confirmed 25 cases this year, including 7 hospitalizations. Of these cases, 22 people were unvaccinated. Of the 25 who have measles in Colorado today, 22 were unvaccinated. That is the most we have had in over 30 years. You have to go back to 1995 to find an outbreak in my State that is even close to what we are seeing today. We are going backward when it comes to public health in the richest country in the world, and families in Colorado and all across this country are suffering the consequences.

But what is taking place in Colorado is especially tragic because Colorado's experience is one of the reasons that the United States has a two-dose vaccine recommendation today.

Back in 1988, an outbreak of 84 measles cases swept through Fort Lewis College in Durango. It caught public health officials completely by surprise because nearly every student on that campus had already received a measles shot. Under the guidance at that time,

one dose was supposed to be enough, so CDC researchers--not people playing politics--CDC researchers went to Durango to figure out what exactly had gone wrong, to learn from this surprising outcome. There, they discovered something that continues to inform our vaccine policy even today: While the virus infected students who had only received a single shot, not a single student who had had two doses got sick.

That campus in Durango became the proving ground for today's recommendation on measles. Based directly on what they saw at Fort Lewis and similar outbreaks at that time, the CDC updated its guidelines in 1989 to establish the two-dose MMR schedule recommended for every schoolchild in America today.

This updated recommendation paved the way for measles to be officially eliminated across the United States in the year 2000. That was a quarter of a century ago, when, following the science, this country eliminated measles; and for 30 years after that, routine vaccine recommendations have kept children safe and in the classroom.

Back then, faced with a public health emergency, we did what you would expect: We followed the evidence, updated our practices, and successfully prevented another outbreak of that scale or severity going forward. We learned from each other.

Today, we are taking the opposite approach. Instead of defending the settled science that saved millions of lives, President Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., have spent months waging a campaign to promote skepticism, stoke fear, and amplify outright lies.

Look at what has happened in just the last few weeks. In August, President Trump signed an Executive order on childhood vaccines that overrides decades of settled scientific consensus. It encourages States to abandon school entry requirements. It recommends reducing the number of routine vaccines protecting our kids. And it calls for breaking up longstanding combination shots like the measles, mumps, and rubella-- MMR--vaccine into separate single-disease doses spread over multiple doctor visits. That recommendation ignores the basic, undeniable fact, which is that separate single-disease shots for measles, mumps, and rubella do not even exist in the U.S. market today. They are so obsolete, and we were following the science, such that those single shots that the President and the HHS Secretary are calling for don't even exist today.

And it ignores the evidence that we have from countries that have already tried to separate the dose and then reverted back because it didn't work. In the 1990s, Japan moved away from the combination MMR shot and attempted to separate the vaccines. The result was predictable. It was immediate and disastrous. They saw vaccination rates plummet and measles outbreaks surged. And, earlier this year, Japan officially abandoned the experiment--as we will, undoubtedly--and returned to the combined MMR vaccine.

We don't need to repeat another nation's mistake when the safety and lives of American children are on the line. And telling parents to ask for shots that don't exist today only plunges families into further chaos. It forces parents to schedule endless appointments, take time off work, and pay multiple copays for vaccines that used to be delivered safely in a single visit.

As everybody in this place knows, before I came to the Senate, I was the superintendent of schools in Denver. This was such a happy time every year, when people were coming back, bringing their kids back to school. And the last thing that they wanted to worry about was getting a free vaccine for their children or whether they should have that vaccine at all.

In those days, not that long ago, there was nobody worrying about a President or an HHS Secretary peddling misinformation that would lead to the biggest outbreak in measles that we have had in 30 years.

Things are hard enough as it is for families in Colorado and all across this country right now. We don't need to make matters worse by intentionally misleading them about what is safe and making it harder for them to get a free vaccine at the pharmacy down the street.

And, by the way, I know my colleagues here well enough to understand something that I don't think the administration understands. It is not good enough just to get your kid vaccinated. The other kids in the school need to be vaccinated. The other kids in the classroom need to be vaccinated for vaccines to work. And, until this administration, that wasn't controversial because we could see what the science told us.

And for families in rural Colorado, where healthcare access is already stretched thin and local hospitals are already in danger of going bankrupt because of the razor-thin margins, this burden that they are creating is almost unbearable.

And to make matters worse, the other week, the President told the American people that the MMR vaccine--a safe, lifesaving shot given to hundreds of millions of children over four decades--the President called it ``quite lethal''--``quite lethal.'' They had to send out Dr. Oz to clean up the record after that--the Director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. They had to send him out on live television to contradict the President of the United States, who said that this routine vaccine that we have relied upon to save millions of lives was ``quite lethal.''

Meanwhile, Secretary Kennedy spent last week serving as the keynote speaker for an anti-vax convention. In the middle of the worst measles surge our country has seen in 35 years, the Nation's top health official stood in front of a crowd of anti-science activists and reassured them that they have ``a strong and steadfast friend in the White House.''

I wish I could tell families trying to get their kids back to school that they have a steadfast friend in the White House, that they have somebody who is trying to make their life easier, not harder; to make it easier to bring up a kid, not harder.

When the leadership of HHS spends its time amplifying conspiracy theories, they are not making communities safer; they are driving down immunization rates, leaving our schools vulnerable, and putting the lives of Colorado's children directly in harm's way.

Today, Colorado has the sixth lowest measles vaccination rate in the nation for kindergartners. Only 87.7 percent of Colorado kindergartners have received both doses of their MMR vaccine, and that is well below the 95 percent threshold for herd immunity. In fact, 57 out of Colorado's 64 counties now fail to meet that basic safety line.

My message to Colorado parents from this floor tonight is simple: Vaccines are safe, they are effective, and they remain our strongest defense against diseases like measles.

And when we allow misinformation to drive down vaccination rates, we aren't just failing to meet an important public health indicator; we are failing moms in Aurora and in Pueblo and in Durango. We are failing pediatricians like Dr. Stinar in Grand Junction, who are fighting on the frontlines of this disease; and we are failing vulnerable children across Colorado who have no choice in the matter.

Parents, pediatricians, and families across Colorado should be able to expect more from their government. They deserve certainty. They deserve clear communication. They deserve to know that their public health system is designed to keep them safe, rather than to pursue another political agenda that has nothing to do with their education or their health.

I think we should be having a debate in this country about the state of healthcare in the United States of America and about the ways in which we failed this generation and the next generation in providing a system that actually delivers better healthcare at a reasonable price and mental health care at a reasonable price, instead of plunging people into further misery or into bankruptcy.

I wish we were having that debate on the Senate floor, but we can't begin to have that until the basic facts about science and medicine are taken seriously by this administration. The President should start by rescinding his Executive order today on childhood vaccines. He should fire Secretary Kennedy, as I have long called for. But until that happens--and I don't think it is going to happen in the foreseeable future. Until that happens, we are

going to be stuck fighting battles against a disease that we functionally eliminated 30 years ago. Kids and families in Colorado and all across this country deserve so much better than that.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 185, motion to invoke cloture on Executive Calendar No. 780, John George Edward Marck, of Texas, to be United States District Judge for the Southern District of Texas. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 186, confirmation of Executive Calendar No. 780, John George Edward Marck, of Texas, to be United States District Judge for the Southern District of Texas. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 187, motion to invoke cloture on Executive Calendar No. 777, Michael J. Hendershot, of Ohio, to be United States District Judge for the Northern District of Ohio. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 188, confirmation of Executive Calendar No. 777, Michael J. Hendershot, of Ohio, to be United States District Judge for the Northern District of Ohio. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 189, motion to invoke cloture on Executive Calendar No. 778, Arthur Roberts Jones, of Texas, to be United States District Judge for the Southern District of Texas. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 190, motion to proceed to Calendar No. 432, S.J. Res. 196, A joint resolution providing for congressional disapproval under chapter 8 of title 5, United States Code, of the rule submitted by the Department of Education relating to ``Reimagining and Improving Student Education-Federal Student Loan Program Final Regulations''. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 191, motion to invoke cloture on Executive Calendar No. 776, Matthew A. Schwartz, of New York, to be United States Circuit Judge for the Second Circuit. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 192, motion to proceed to the consideration of S.J. Res. 185, a joint resolution to direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities within or against the Islamic Republic of Iran that have not been authorized by Congress. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

Mr. President, I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 136, Thune motion to proceed to the bill which provides $69.5 billion in funding for Department of Homeland Security immigration and border enforcement agencies for FY 2026, including: $22.6 billion for Customs and Border Protection; $38.5 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and $8.5 billion in additional funds to DHS for immigration enforcement. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted no.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 137, Schumer motion to commit the bill to the Senate Judiciary Committee with instructions to report the bill back in three session days with changes that safeguard the Department of Justice from partisan political influence, which may include prohibiting the use of funds for a so-called ``anti- weaponization fund.''. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 138, amendment No. 5452, Tillis motion to waive the Budget Act to permit consideration of the Tillis amendment (to the Graham substitute amendment), which prohibits the attorney general from using appropriation funds to pay out claims as part of an ``anti-weaponizing fund'' and would instead provide $1.7 billion for Justice Department anti-fraud enforcement activities. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted no.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 139, amendment No. 5512, Merkley motion to waive the Budget Act to permit consideration of the Merkley amendment (to the Graham substitute amendment), which prohibits federal funds as well as private donations from being used for the construction of the East Wing modernization project without congressional authorization. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 140, on amendment No. 5514, the Reed motion to waive the Budget Act to permit consideration of the Reed-Bennet amendment (to the Graham substitute amendment), which redirects $62.1 billion from funds intended for immigration enforcement towards the Housing Department's HOME Investment Partnerships Program. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 141, Ossoff motion to commit the bill to the Senate Judiciary Committee with instructions to report it back with changes that would amend the False Claims Act to require the Department of Justice to establish a task force to conduct investigations into health insurance companies that are found to routinely deny and delay patients' access to medically necessary care. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 142, on amendment No. 5535, Hassan motion to waive the Budget Act to permit consideration of the Hassan amendment (to the Graham substitute amendment), which provides such sums as necessary for the HOME Investment Partnerships Program through September 30, 2029, to build 7 million homes. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 143, amendment No. 5556, Warner motion to waive the Budget Act to permit consideration of Warner-Kelly amendment (to the Graham substitute amendment), which prohibits any Senate-confirmed head of another federal agency or department from being directed to perform the functions and duties of the director of National Intelligence in an acting capacity. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 144, amendment No. 5779, Graham motion to waive the Budget Act to permit consideration of the Graham et al., amendment (to the Graham substitute amendment), which adds a provision to bar educational institutions that receive federal funding from allowing transgender women or girls to participate in athletics programs or activities designated for women or girls. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted no.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 145, amendment No. 5501, Hickenlooper motion to waive the Budget Act to permit consideration of the Hickenlooper-Bennet amendment (to the Graham substitute amendment) which prohibits the use of federal funds to make prosecution-related payments to individuals who were convicted for certain crimes, including election interference, identity theft and official misconduct. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 146, amendment No. 5545, Kim motion to waive the Budget Act to permit consideration of the Kim-Booker amendment (to Graham substitute amendment) which provides $2 million to the Office of the Inspector General and Office of Detention Oversight to conduct, within one week of the bill's enactment, an unannounced inspection of the Delaney Hall Detention Facility in Newark, New Jersey; requires Congressional reports on facility conditions and recommendations on whether to pursue charges against immigration agents and other facility employees who responded to protests; and requires the Homeland Security Department to suspend contract payments to operate the facility until the department certifies that the facility's deficiencies have been adequately remediated. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 147, Warnock motion to commit the budget reconciliation bill to the Judiciary Committee with instructions to report the bill back within 3 days with changes that amend the provisions of law commonly referred to as the ``False Claims Act'' to require the Department of Justice to establish a task force to conduct investigations and make public findings and records relating to the causes of denial of Medicaid coverage to eligible beneficiaries. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 148, amendment No. 5451, Sanders motion to waive the Budget Act to permit consideration of the Sanders amendment (to the Graham substitute amendment), which places reasonable limits on contributions to Super PACs which make independent expenditures. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 149, amendment No. 5485, Baldwin motion to waive the Budget Act to permit consideration of the Baldwin amendment (to the Graham substitute amendment), which redirects $14.3 billion in funds made available under the bill from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be used by the Department of Health and Human Services to carry out low-income family child care programs. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 150, on amendment No. 5803, Booker motion to waive the Budget Act to permit consideration of the Booker-Kim amendment (to the Graham substitute amendment) which redirects $28.6 million of the funds in the bill to the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman; and prohibits using the funds to pay contractors or cooperating entities that violated law or detention standards or engaged in substantiated misconduct. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 151, amendment No. 5806, Lee motion to waive the Budget Act to permit consideration of the Lee amendment (to the Graham substitute amendment) which requires individuals to provide proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections and to present photo identification in order to cast a ballot. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted no.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 152, amendment No. 5806, Durbin motion to waive the Budget Act to permit consideration of the Durbin, et al., amendment (to the Graham substitute amendment) which redirects $10 million provided in the bill for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be used for the processing of renewal applications under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program; and prohibits the use of funds in the bill to

detain or deport individuals reasonably believed to be DACA recipients on the basis of immigration status. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 153, Wyden motion to commit the bill to the Senate Judiciary Committee with instructions to establish a task force to conduct investigations related to confidential drug pricing agreements entered into by a Federal agency and pharmaceutical manufacturer. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 154, amendment No. 5506, Hirono-Van Hollen amendment (to Graham substitute amendment), which redirects $105 million in funding provided under the bill for each of fiscal years 2026 to 2029 for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be used for youth mentoring programs in the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 155, amendment No. 5763, Peters amendment (to the Graham substitute amendment) which rescinds any unobligated funds made available under the fiscal 2025 budget reconciliation measure (PL 119-21) and returns the money to the U.S. Treasury to reduce the deficit. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 156, amendment No. 5813, Gallego amendment (to the Graham substitute amendment), which decreases funds appropriated to the Homeland Security Department by $11 million and increases funding for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services by $10 million for the processing of renewal applications under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 157, amendment No. 5808, Padilla amendment (to the Graham substitute amendment), which requires that at least $300 million of the bill's funds provided for U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement be used for the implementation and deployment of body cameras for federal immigration agents. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 158, amendment No. 5457, Coons motion to waive the Budget Act to permit consideration of the Coons amendment (to the Graham substitute amendment) which prohibits the use of taxpayer funds for settlement payments to individuals convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers at or around the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 159, amendment No. 5812, Cassidy motion to waive the Budget Act to permit consideration of the Cassidy-Van Hollen amendment (to the Graham substitute amendment) which provides $100 million in the Justice Department's ``anti weaponization fund'' to pay law enforcement officers who suffered bodily or financial harm as a result of the Jan 6, 2021 events in the U.S. Capitol; prohibits payments from the fund to any other person; and offsets the funding by reducing funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement by $102 million. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 160, amendment No. 5463, Cortez Masto amendment (to the Graham substitute amendment), which redirects $31 billion in funding from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Justice Department local law enforcement hiring grant programs. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 161, amendment No. 5632, Van Hollen motion to waive the Budget Act to permit consideration of the Van Hollen amendment (to the Graham substitute amendment), which prohibits payments from the Justice Department's ``anti-weaponization fund'' to pay individuals convicted of certain crimes, including assaulting a police officer, crimes against minors, and sexual assault. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 162, amendment No. 5740 Schiff motion to waive the Budget Act to permit consideration of the Schiff-Kelly-Slotkin amendment (to the Graham substitute amendment) which prohibits the authorization of funds to pay out a judgement award, settlement, or claim filed by the U.S. president or vice president for any cause of action arising on or after Jan. 20, 2025. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 163, passage of the bill which provides $69.5 billion in funding for Department of Homeland Security immigration and border enforcement agencies for FY 2026, including: $22.6 billion for Customs and Border Protection; $38.5 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and $8.5 billion in additional funds to DHS for immigration enforcement. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted no.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 164, Thune motion to proceed to the House message to accompany the bill which extends the surveillance authorities of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) through April 30, 2029. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 165, motion to invoke cloture on Executive Calendar No. 744, Anthony W. Mattivi, of Kansas, to be United States District Judge for the District of Kansas. If I were present, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 166, Confirmation of the nomination of Anthony W. Mattivi, of Kansas, to be U.S. District Judge for the District of Kansas. If I were present, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 167, motion to invoke cloture on Executive Calendar No. 745, Anthony J. Powell, of Kansas, to be United States District Judge for the District of Kansas. If I were present, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 168, confirmation of Executive Calendar No. 745, Anthony J. Powell, of Kansas, to be United States District Judge for the District of Kansas. If I were present, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 169, motion to invoke cloture on Executive Calendar No. 765, Brock Dahl, of Maryland, to be Legal Adviser of the Department of State. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 170, confirmation of Executive Calendar No. 765, Brock Dahl, of Maryland, to be Legal Adviser of the Department of State. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 171, motion to invoke cloture on Executive Calendar No. 742, Justin D. Smith, of Missouri, to be United States Circuit Judge for the Eighth Circuit. If I were present, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 172, confirmation of Executive Calendar No. 742, Justin D. Smith, of Missouri, to be United States Circuit Judge for the Eighth Circuit. If I were present, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 173, Motion to proceed to S.J. Res. 190, disapproving the rule submitted by the Executive Office for Immigration Review relating to ``Appellate Procedures for the Board of Immigration Appeals'' (Kaine), I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 174, motion to discharge S.J. Res. 172, a joint resolution to direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities within or against the Islamic Republic of Iran that have not been authorized by Congress. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 175, motion to proceed to consideration of the House Message to accompany H.R. 6644, 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 176, motion to invoke cloture on Executive Calendar No. 760, Michelle Steel, of California, to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Republic of Korea. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 177, confirmation of Executive Calendar No. 760, Michelle Steel, of

California, to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Republic of Korea. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 178, motion to invoke cloture on Executive Calendar No. 763, George Holding, of North Carolina, to be United States Director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 179, motion to discharge S. Res. 616, a resolution requesting information on Honduras's human rights practices pursuant to section 502B(c) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 180, motion to invoke cloture on the motion to concur in the House Message to accompany H.R. 6644, 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, with further amendment (No. 5823). Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 181, confirmation of Executive Calendar No. 763, George Holding, of North Carolina, to be United States Director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 182, motion to concur in the House Message accompanying H.R. 6644, 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

Mr. President, I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 131, Motion to invoke cloture on Executive Calendar No. 736-- Kathleen S. Lane, of Montana, to be United States District Judge for the District of Montana. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 132, confirmation of Executive Calendar No. 736, Kathleen S. Lane, of Montana, to be United States District Judge for the District of Montana. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 133, motion to invoke cloture on Executive Calendar No. 743 Jeffrey M. Kuhlman, of Kansas, to be United States District Judge for the District of Kansas. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 134, confirmation of Executive Calendar No. 743, Jeffrey M. Kuhlman, of Kansas, to be United States District Judge for the District of Kansas. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 135, motion to proceed to Cal. No. 409, S.J. Res. 188, disapproving the rule submitted by the Environmental Protection Agency relating to ``National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants: Coal- and Oil-Fired Electric Utility Steam Generating Unites: Final Repeal.'' If I were present, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 136, the motion to proceed to

Cal. No. 417, S. 2, To provide for reconciliation pursuant to title II of S. Con. Res 33. If I were present, I would have voted nay.

Mr. President, I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 125, the confirmation of the en bloc consideration of 49 nominations on the Executive Calendar pursuant to the provisions of S. Res. 690. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 126, motion to invoke cloture on Executive Calendar No. 735, Sheria Akins Clarke, of South Carolina, to be United States District Judge for the District of South Carolina. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 127, confirmation of Executive Calendar No. 735, Sheria Akins Clarke, of South Carolina, to be United States District Judge for the District of South Carolina. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

Mr. President, I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 114, the adoption of S. Res. 690, Authorizing the en bloc consideration in Executive Session of certain nominations on the Executive Calendar. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 115, the motion to close further debate on confirmation of the nomination of Executive Calendar No. 728, Kevin Warsh, of Florida, to be a Member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System for a term of fourteen years from February 1, 2026. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 116, the Confirmation of Executive Calendar No. 728, Kevin Warsh, of Florida, to be a Member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System for a term of fourteen years from February 1, 2026. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 117, the motion to invoke cloture on Executive Calendar No. 727, Kevin Warsh, of Florida, to be Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System for a term of four years. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

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

Mr. President, today, I am bringing the Congressional Review Act resolution to the floor to challenge EPA's disapproval of Colorado's regional haze plan. I want to thank my colleagues Senator Hickenlooper and Senator Whitehouse for joining me in this effort.

For decades, we have relied on a simple principle in this country to keep our air clean: States and the Federal Government work together to reduce pollution and protect public health. That includes programs like Regional Haze, which is designed to improve visibility in national parks and wilderness areas, like Rocky Mountain National Park in Northern Colorado.

In 2022, Colorado submitted a good-faith plan to improve air quality. The State provided a range of solutions--including the voluntary, already-planned retirement of aging coal plants.

The decisions to close these plants were driven by basic economics. Colorado utilities recognized that it no longer made sense to keep them open, based on the high costs of maintaining and operating. And so in its regional haze plan, Colorado incorporated these previously made decisions into the State's strategy to reduce air pollution.

But EPA rejected Colorado's plan--not because it failed to meet Federal standards. EPA rejected it because President Trump is laser- focused on keeping even aging coal plants operational, regardless of the costs or the desires of the local communities.

EPA's disapproval of Colorado's plan was based on an unprecedented and flawed legal theory. EPA alleges that under section 110 of the Clean Air Act, Colorado must somehow prove these coal plant requirements would not violate the Constitution's takings clause, or, in other words, not constitute an illegal government seizure of private property. But that is an impossible case for the State to make. It is also not, in fact, what section 110 of the Clean Air Act requires or what Congress ever intended.

And to make matters worse, the EPA made this shift without any meaningful public input. And the consequences of President Trump and Lee Zeldin's actions are real. They are real for Colorado and for the West and for this country.

They are making it harder--harder--for Colorado to chart our own path on the energy transition and trying to force Coloradans to pay tens of millions of dollars to keep outdated coal plants running. And they are doing this at a moment when energy prices have already increased as a result of the administration's own reckless actions.

Since President Trump's unprovoked war, gasoline prices have risen over 30 percent in Colorado. They have cut investments in the cheapest types of electricity, while promoting the most expensive. Everything the administration has done has made it harder for parents in Colorado to pay their bills and heat their homes, and now to take their children to enjoy some of the incredible national parks and public lands our State has to offer.

If this ruling stands, it won't stop in Colorado. It could open the door to similar challenges across the country, weakening air quality protections and leaving States in an impossible position--responsible for results but stripping them of the tools and the authority to achieve them.

And so I urge my colleagues to support S.J. Res. 139 to overturn the EPA's decision.

I ask consent to yield back all time.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

I move to proceed to Calendar No. 364, S.J. Res. 139.

Mr. President, I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 75, motion to invoke cloture on Executive Calendar No. 672, John Thomas Shepherd to be United States District Judge for the Western District of Arkansas. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 76, confirmation of Executive Calendar No. 672, John Thomas Shepherd to be United States District Judge for the Western District of Arkansas. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 77, motion to invoke cloture on Executive Calendar No. 674, Christopher R. Wolfe, of Texas, to be United States District Judge for the Western District of Texas. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

Thank you, Madam President.

May I be recognized after Senator Merkley, Madam President?

Thank you, Madam President.

Madam President, I thank the Presiding Officer for the recognition.

I spent last weekend in Grand Junction. I am happy to be here tonight on the floor with my colleague from Colorado John Hickenlooper. I spent last weekend in Grand Junction, in our State, on Colorado's Western Slope. And my conversations with young parents and with families just starting out, I think--I would hope--would be familiar to many colleagues that are here. We discussed the price of housing, which has surged over 80 percent over the last 10 years in Colorado; the price of healthcare, which is ratcheting higher and becoming impossible for families to afford, not just in Colorado but all across our country; the cost of childcare, which is making it harder for families to live any semblance of a middle-class life--families that are working two jobs just to pay the mortgage can't even afford childcare when they are working with those two salaries--and our inability as a nation, as a State, to prepare our kids for the dynamic and potentially hugely unforgiving economy they are about to enter. This is a tough economy that we are in today, and tariffs and now gas prices haven't helped.

Last week, colleagues, I met with a food bank from El Paso County, who told me that they stay open late--listen to this, U.S. Senate. This food bank in El Paso County said that they stay open late 1 day a week to have teachers' night so the teachers that have worked all week teaching children have the opportunity to come to that food bank in the evening to get food to feed their own children at home.

I doubt very much that there is a living American who can remember a decade in this country when we took it for granted that teachers would have to go to a food bank to feed their own children.

Can you imagine, in the 1950s, in this Chamber, if it were known that people teaching in America--in inner-city America or in the suburbs of our great cities--that the pay wasn't satisfactory, so they had to go to a food bank after work?

And that is happening to working people all over our country, people that are in what we think of as traditional middle-class lives, because of how savage this economy has been, because of the affordability crisis that, I will say, has been with us for decades in this country but the current administration, the Trump administration, has made far worse and now is making it even worse with what they are doing to energy prices because of their unauthorized war in the Middle East.

I wish we were working on that affordability crisis today. I wish we were working on building an economy that worked for everybody, not just the people at the very top.

This is a choice that is being made by President Trump and the majority in this Senate, the Republicans, who have spent the entire week fighting for a bill that will make it harder for family members and for aging parents and for their cousins to vote or to register to vote. That is what they have chosen to use the floor of the U.S. Senate to do. It is shameful. It is shameful both because it is ignoring the affordability crisis that our families are facing, but it is shameful because there is no excuse for taking away the right to vote from people all over the United States of America.

These are people who are supposed to believe in States' rights, believe in the ability of States to be able to run their own affairs. And Donald Trump--President Trump--and the Republican's SAVE America Act rewrites the way we run elections in America completely. It rips up the processes all over the United States of America at the local level that county clerks and election officials understand. It requires the Federal Government to have access to the voter rolls, a shocking thing from the party that is supposed to be about States' rights.

And it creates yet another unfunded mandate for States and for local communities. There is no money in here to fund the stuff that is in this bill.

Most troublingly, it imposes new document requirements for voter registration that many Americans do not have or do not have access to. Madam President, 146 million Americans don't have a passport. Almost 70 million women do not have a birth certificate that matches their real name. That should be self-evident to anybody in this Chamber, but it is ignored completely by the people who wrote this legislation.

Over 8 million Americans have moved to a different State within the last year, and an average of over 17 million will have moved counties. Many of them--probably most--do not have the paperwork that this bill requires. That doesn't make any sense. These people aren't trying to evade the law. These people are availing themselves of their right as an American citizen to move from place to place in this Nation.

This radical legislation actually requires people to register in- person, banning common methods, as we heard from the Senator from Alaska who is standing up for her State as she always does.

We should be supporting her. We should be supporting Alaska's way of running their elections rather than imposing Donald Trump's corrupt way of running his elections.

This radical legislation actually requires people to register in- person, banning common methods of registration--online registration, through the mail, or automatically at the DMV.

That is how 94 percent of Americans register to vote. Many of them are seniors. Many of them live in rural communities. I would like to see the majority party in this Chamber come to western Colorado and try to take--rather than having this fake filibuster--try to actually take mail-in ballots from the people of western Colorado.

I would like to see that. They would avail themselves of any means necessary to prevent that from happening.

The SAVE America Act would set our voter registration process back decades. If you are one of the more than 60 million Americans who live in rural areas, you might now need to drive hundreds of miles to stand in line at a local election agency.

If you live overseas, you will have to fly back. If you don't have a passport, you better have your birth certificate. If you don't have your birth certificate or you changed your name like tens of millions of married women across this country living in the 21st century, you will have to provide additional documents and sign affidavits.

All of this will--

I will not yield. I will not yield. I have waited an hour--

You will have your time.

Thank you, Madam President. Thank you, Madam President.

Madam President, I will yield for the one inaccuracy you think that I have--

Well, then you will have to wait. Then you will have to wait. Then you will have to wait.

Madam President, I haven't yielded the floor.

I didn't. I said I would yield for one inaccuracy. That is all I said.

I am not willing to hear it. I am not willing to hear it. I will hear it after--

I don't believe I did yield.

If I did yield--

I will exercise my right to withdraw.

Madam President, all of this will have to be done in-person. Kansas tried to implement its own State-level version of President Trump's SAVE America Act in 2013 with disastrous results.

This law, which included citizenship documentation requirements, ended up blocking the voter registration of more than 31,000 U.S. citizens who are otherwise eligible to vote. That represented about 12 percent of all Kansas voter registrations during that period.

Even Kansas Republican secretary of state who championed the bill when he was a State legislator has warned against the bill now before us. He has warned against the bill now before us saying: It didn't work out so well.

And Kansas law was blocked by a Federal court, as it should have been.

If we pass this bill, we will have now two different election--Madam President, can I have the floor without the interruption of my colleague from Utah?

If you guys are done, I would like to--Madam President, I would like--

Madam President, if we pass this bill, we will now have two different election regimes in this country--one for Federal elections and one for local elections. That is insane in and of itself and begs the question: Why does Donald Trump want to pass this bill?

He wants to run roughshod over our election system because he claims there is an epidemic of voter fraud caused by undocumented people voting. That is at the heart of his claim, and that has been the heart of his claim throughout two Presidential elections and this Presidency.

The problem is that he is blowing up our elections, and there is no evidence to support his claim of fraud. The fact is that even his own Department of Homeland Security used by many States to verify voter citizenship returned .04 percent of voter participants as noncitizens.

A bipartisan policy center analysis of the Heritage Foundation's debate of noncitizen voting found only 77 cases in 25 years of nearly 2 billion votes cast.

And individual States tell us the same. We heard it earlier tonight. Last year, Utah performed a citizen review of its entire voter registration list. There was no noncompliance. After an assessment of more than 2 million registered voters, Utah identified only 1 confirmed instance of noncitizen registration and no instances of noncitizen voting.

We definitely have a crisis in our democracy and in our economy and they are related. Over the decades, we have suffered through an economy that has reduced economic mobility and hollowed out America's middle class.

At the same time, we have built a tax system that disproportionately benefits those who own assets and perpetuates the inequalities that accumulated with generational wealth, a tax system that allows Donald Trump and Elon Musk to pass their stock portfolios onto their heirs without paying a dollar on the gains that they have accrued.

That is a crisis. The lack of economic mobility is a crisis, and I am sorry to say that that tax regime, that has been done in a bipartisan manner. Republicans definitely more than Democrats have pursued trickle-down economics, but Democrats and Republicans both played a role creating an unfair system that reinforces our desperate lack of economic mobility and concretizes our deep and growing economic inequality.

At the same time, this body has failed to make important investment in our infrastructure while saddling future generations with ever- greater amounts of debt, debt whose service costs will now predictably take up $1 trillion of our annual budget in interest--more than we spend on Medicare or defense, a higher share of the economy than at any point in American history.

We are in a dangerous moment at home and abroad. There is no doubt about that. And at the same time as Coloradans and Americans across the country are struggling to get by, as teachers are going to those food banks to feed their own children, when confidence in our institutions and in our politics is at record lows, and we have a campaign finance system that gives inordinate power to the wealthiest.

Tonight is not the night to go through how wrongly decided Citizens United was, how wrongly decided, how ignorant that decision was of the way politics actually works in this country.

But let me just point out to you that in 2008, before Citizens United was decided, the top 100 individual donors contributed a combined $80 million--$80 million in 2008. That is what the 100 donors contributed.

In 2024, the top 10 donors--the top 10 donors--contributed over $1.2 billion. Spending by outside groups has exploded from a total of $574 million in 2008 to almost $4.5 billion in that last election, an increase of 8 times--8 times.

No one could possibly believe that the amount of money--that that amount of money is helping our democracy. Let me tell you something: Does the SAVE Act do anything about that corrosiveness in our politics? Of course not. Of course not.

And let me tell you something that was a fatal flaw in the Supreme Court's decision while I am here. Maybe the pages, when they are Senators, will be able to fix this problem because we sure aren't going fix it.

At the end of that--at the end of their decision, they said: By the way, if the Congress ever passes a constitutional regulation of--in their words--constitutional regulation of the outside spending in our political system, we will, of course, have to give that the proper analysis, the proper--excuse me--the required constitutional analysis.

Of course, nobody will ever pass that around here because the billionaires that are writing checks to these elections just have to rattle the pennies in their pockets and the change in their pockets and threaten to run a primary against anybody in this place, and the bill won't be brought.

And then there is a profound corruption of inaction that sets in as a result to our legislative branch both here and in the House of Representatives.

Does the SAVE America Act address any of this? Of course not. Instead, Donald Trump and the Republicans have brought to the floor a bill to make it harder for ordinary American citizens to register and to vote.

Fundamentally, the SAVE America Act is an astonishing Federal overreach in search of a scandal that doesn't exist and would have the effect of undermining fraud-free elections like we have in Colorado.

Colorado was the first State in America to complete a risk-limiting audit, the gold standard for verifying the integrity of election results.

It entails counting and comparing a representative sample of ballots to the reported result. To prevent hacking, none of our voting machines are connected to the internet. We require county clerks to use two- factor authentication to access voter databases.

Once a vote is cast, a bipartisan team of election judges in each county

checks every signature against the copy in the database for any discrepancies. All election officials and judges with access to the tabulation process must first pass a Colorado Bureau of Investigation background check. And Colorado has spent years--years--implementing top-tier cyber security measures and audits to prevent hackers from interfering in our electoral process.

We should be modeling our Federal system off the gold standard framework we have in Colorado, a national leader in terms of voter access, election security, and might I say, voter turnout.

Instead, the SAVE America Act would eliminate--eliminate, outlaw-- many of the practices that Colorado has adopted to keep our elections safe and increase voter confidence.

How dare you?

It would end Colorado's mail-in and online voter registration system. It would force Colorado to increase the security risks of our voter data and routinely purge voter rolls. It would push experienced county clerks and election workers out of the field. It would remove the possibility of using a number of State IDs when going to vote. It would create two tiers of voting for Federal and State elections and possibly upend our mail-in ballot system itself by requiring that every Coloradan proactively request a ballot and resubmit proof of ID alongside their ballot request in every election.

Colorado already has ID requirements when casting a ballot. We already have among the cleanest voter rolls in this country. We don't need Donald Trump to corrupt our process. Even the Heritage Foundation ranked us as second in the Nation in 2020 for clean lists--the Heritage Foundation.

We have one of the most secure election systems of any State in our country, and because Coloradans have trust in our elections, we have some of the highest voter turnouts in the country.

But the SAVE America Act--the so-called SAVE America Act--does not bring our system anywhere close to what we enjoy in Colorado. Instead it turns into a dark but familiar pattern in American history.

And I am sorry to say, but this bill before us is just another in a long line of legislative efforts to limit the franchise in this country, to add new restrictions and additional obstacles.

Nobody wants voter fraud. I do not want voter fraud. I come from a State where there is no voter fraud. We set the gold standard, in part because of the work my colleague John Hickenlooper did when he was Governor of Colorado.

This is a pretext. This is a pretext to invade our elections.

I know my colleague from Texas wants to speak. So I am trying to skip ahead here.

We have had a fight over many, many, many years in this Nation to broaden the franchise, from the very beginning, and that fight was won by men and women who marched to demand that their vote count equally in this country, no matter what color they were, no matter where they lived in our Nation, no matter what education or religion their parents had or whether their parents were immigrants to this country.

In this modern era, when one of the real fundamental risks to our democracy is the American people's loss of confidence in our institutions, including our voting process and elections themselves, we now have a group of people who are trying to create political advantage for themselves by restricting the vote in the name of addressing a mythical voter fraud that does not exist.

The American people will not be fooled by this. They will be angry about this, as they should. The American people have come to rely on vote-by-mail, and registration by mail, and early voting. They believe our system is fraud free, and where it is not, the State should address it.

Our citizens have come to rely on having the franchise extended through modern technology and modern practices. Nobody I know in Colorado has said they doubt the validity or veracity of our voting system--no matter what party they are in or whether they live in rural Colorado or urban Colorado--or the importance of the ability to register online, or for students and others to have the benefit of same-day registration.

I wish everybody in this country had the benefit of that. Those are ways of encouraging participation in our democracy. None of us want fraud.

None of us want fraud. And there is no fraud. The good news is there is certainly no evidence in Colorado or across the country that that fraud exists.

And this is the most sweeping effort, make no mistake, by Donald Trump, by the Republicans here in the Senate, to ``nationalize our elections,'' to undermine voter confidence, and inject new chaos into a system he is terrified will turn against him; to make life harder for Americans that he thinks voted against him, and probably will make it harder for the people who voted for him.

Since the President's return to office, he has focused relentlessly on false narratives of voter fraud. He has issued Executive orders that are unenforceable. He has sued States that have refused to comply and threatened to take control of the electoral process in States he views as political enemies.

He has sent Federal agents from the FBI and the Director of National Intelligence to seize ballots in Georgia, election records in Arizona, and voting machines in Puerto Rico.

His Justice Department has sued 30 States, including Colorado, demanding sensitive, unredacted voter data to create a national voter database. And President Trump has pursued a longstanding and inexplicable grievance against mail-in voting, which he falsely claims can be used to commit mass amounts of fraud. It is simply not true. It is simply not true.

He sees it, in his own words--the SAVE America Act--as a method to ``guarantee the midterms'' this November. He sees, in his own words, the SAVE America Act as a method to ``guarantee the midterms'' this November. And that is why they put this on this floor now? I hope not. I really hope not.

This is an election bill that distorts our shared understanding of what free and fair elections should look like, and Coloradans want no part of it.

This legislation, by the way, is wildly unpopular in America. We have received thousands of calls and letters in opposition to the SAVE America Act. We received over 7,000 last month alone.

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

The Founders understood the gravity of the debate before them about who could and who could not claim the franchise. The authors of Federalist No. 52 explain that ``the definition of the right of suffrage is very justly regarded as a fundamental article of republican government.''

They wrestled with this question. They wrestled with this question. They debated it. And, ultimately, they excluded the great number of subjects who were newly made Americans, but, nevertheless, were denied, as those at Seneca Falls wrote, ``the first right of citizen.''

This was the founding generation's great mistake--this and the enslavement of Americans. And we have spent centuries working to rectify it--centuries working to rectify it.

Should the SAVE America Act pass, we will fall further away from realizing this country's promise and retread the familiar errors of the past. We should reject that vision of our democracy. We should reject that return to a history that we have fought so hard to free ourselves from. Coloradans and all Americans deserve better than this.

I yield the floor and look forward to hearing my colleague from Texas.

Mr. President, I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 44, on the motion to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 6644, the Housing for the 21st Century Act. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yes.

Mr. President, for many months, the Trump administration has unleashed a campaign of fear across American cities, deploying thousands of immigration agents onto our streets and into our neighborhoods in an effort to terrorize and punish communities.

In Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, and most recently Minneapolis, we have watched masked Federal agents in unmarked cars snatch people from the street, destroy private property, and leave others bloodied on the side of the road.

We have witnessed an approach to internal immigration enforcement that no President in our history has pursued, that no President would ever have conceived because of how fundamentally it violates our principles and the rule of law.

We have witnessed children separated from their parents--a 5-year-old detained by armed agents in Minnesota--people pulled from their cars, their engines still running.

All us have read reports of people grabbed off the sidewalk and abandoned hours later, miles away.

Every step along the way, Donald Trump's immigration troops have escalated tension on our streets with total disregard for the rule of law, basic safety, and their own accountability.

These events would be terrible enough, but even as communities across the country have struggled to pick up the pieces left in their wake, we have been forced to contend with another injustice: an administration that has tried to convince us time and time again that what we have seen with our own eyes is not the truth, that somehow the opposite has taken place, that reports and testimony contradicting the administration's position are simply political propaganda.

Over and over again, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and others in the administration have lied to the American people and to Congress about what we are all seeing in plain sight. Now they are lying to justify the murder of Alex Pretti.

Right after the shooting of Alex Pretti in the street, Noem went on national television and told us that Alex was ``brandishing'' a firearm, ``impeding'' the law enforcement officers and attacking them, and that he acted ``violently'' or ``reacted violently'' when officers attempted to disarm him. She insisted that ``an agent fired defensive shots'' and that it appeared that this was ``a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and kill law enforcement.''

Stephen Miller, who works at the White House, called Alex a domestic terrorist and a would-be assassin. Vice President JD Vance amplified these statements.

Gregory Bovino, a senior Border Patrol official who is serving as ``commander at large,'' maintained that Alex had intended to ``massacre'' law enforcement agents. At a press conference, Bovino turned the facts completely upside down, insisting that the victims of Saturday's violence were the Border Patrol agents that were there.

Bovino, by the way, has served as the face of the administration's operations as they have swept through America's cities--in Chicago, in Charlotte, in New Orleans and then Minneapolis.

The American people deserve to know the truth, and Alex Pretti and his family deserve to have the truth told about him and what he did.

Thanks to a number of courageous bystanders at the scene, we know what happened that day, and we know that everything that Noem and Miller and others have said has been lies. The truth is that Alex put himself between

Federal agents and a woman they were shoving in the street. He had been filming Border Patrol agents detaining someone else on the side of the road when he went to help this woman. The officers responded by pepper- spraying him and wrestling him to the ground, where he was quickly surrounded by a group of seven agents. They struck him repeatedly with the pepper spray canister while he lay in the street. One officer took away his gun--a gun that had remained holstered and that Alex was legally allowed to carry. Then, disarmed and incapacitated, they shot him in his back. They shot him at least 10 times within 5 seconds.

Alex Pretti was killed by his own government, and then his government immediately began to lie about him and what had happened. He did not attack the agents. He did not threaten them. And at no point did he pull a gun. In the video of that horrific scene, it is clear that an agent disarmed him before any shots were fired. Multiple agents held him to the ground. Three of them beat him.

No reasonable person would have believed he posed any threat to the agents or anyone else at the scene, but the agents still shot him. They shot him 10 times.

(Mr. HUSTED assumed the Chair.)

In the days since his murder, we have learned a lot more about Alex from those who knew him and loved him. Alex was a dedicated ICU nurse at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis. His colleagues described him there as helpful and kind and that he was uniquely capable of handling things with integrity and with grace.

His high school classmates remember him as a role model. They recalled him being a really good friend and a really good man.

Alex loved his country, and, like many of us, he was deeply concerned about the Trump administration's actions and the devastating effects they are having on our democracy.

It is true that he had very strong feelings about the presence of ICE on his city streets, but the day he was killed, Alex was exercising his First Amendment rights to peacefully protest and document the actions of Federal agents as they threatened his community.

Alex's parents, Michael and Susan, live in Colorado. They want the world to know the truth about what happened that day and the truth about the kind of person their son really was.

They told the world that Alex wanted to make a difference in the world. His patients and colleagues, friends and family testified to the fact that he did, and it is another tragedy that he will no longer be able to continue to do so.

But Alex's murder is only the most recent outrage we have been subjected to by a reckless and out-of-control DHS. On January 7, Federal agents shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis. Renee was a mother of three and a native of Colorado Springs. The next day, Federal agents shot and wounded two people in Portland. A week later, Federal agents shot and wounded another man, again, in Minneapolis.

It is worth remembering that these are just a few of the instances that have occurred in broad daylight and in public spaces, where bystanders have been there to witness these brutal activities firsthand and managed to capture video of what happened.

But if this is what is happening out in the open, it is hard to imagine what is happening behind closed doors.

Last year, 32 people died in ICE custody. That is the most in over 20 years. Given the total lack of transparency and accountability that we have seen from ICE, we can't be sure what has happened to these people. There have been reports about sexual abuse of detainees. There are disputed facts over deaths that occurred in ICE custody.

People in ICE facilities have reportedly been forced to ration food. They often go days or weeks without their prescription medicines or access to medical care.

Overcrowded detention facilities leave the lights on 24-7, and families report extreme violence and intimidation by guards.

These stories are consistent for people held in detention across the country, including in the detention facility in Aurora, CO. But the administration has lied about all of them.

President Trump has claimed that Renee Good was a ``professional agitator,'' that she was ``very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer.''

Noem described Good's efforts to leave the scene peacefully as ``an act of domestic terrorism.'' Her Department issued a statement saying that ``violent'' rioter had ``weaponized her vehicle.''

In October, Noem and her Department lied when she said no U.S. citizens had been arrested, detained, or deported.

In November, Federal Judge Sara Ellis described Gregory Bovino as ``evasive,'' ``not credible,'' and declared that he was ``outright lying'' when questioned under oath.

A consistent pattern of lies corrodes American's faith in our government, which is already stretched dangerously thin. It strikes at the core of our constitutional system, which requires at least some basic level, some basic fidelity to facts in the conduct of our public affairs and our public discourse.

When the Secretary of Homeland Security appears on television to insist repeatedly on her preferred version of events, she is not just offering another lie that must be rebutted; she is insisting that there could never be a truth that actually mattered to the American people or to our sense of public safety or to our exercise in self-government.

And that is what is at stake here. If we allow this to continue, we risk falling into a degraded version of political debate when there are so many lies and so many contested facts, that the American people regard any claim with exhausted cynicism and suspicion. And if we go too far down that path--and we are headed a long way down it right now--the only guaranteed outcome will be greater contempt felt by Americans for their government and for the political process.

They will withdraw from public life, and the possibility for genuine political disagreement--in other words, a debate over what to do in the face of facts, rather than over the facts themselves, or unwilling to even have a discussion about it because of our permanent partisan division--will be erased.

Every one of us has a responsibility at a moment like this, and we know from American history that, in some ways, the most significant resistance in moments like this comes from the public itself. It comes from the people of this country. I could see that on the steps and the grounds of the State capitol in Colorado, last weekend, when thousands of Coloradans were there to rally, not just for themselves but for their fellow citizens in Minnesota and across our country.

I think, when times are tough, we often have a tendency to think that we are living in uniquely bad times. But I believe that way of thinking almost always does a disservice to the people who have come before us, who took on even tougher battles with longer odds and who, while they were doing that and because they were doing that, bequeathed to us their own legacy of resistance and the possibility of change, no matter how hard it seemed. And I think we should look to those battles for inspiration in our time.

It is important for us to tell our kids about those battles, to make sure they understood what those fights actually looked like and how hopeless, at times, those fights seemed to the people that were waging them.

When I was growing up--and I know this is true for many of my colleagues who are here--the moral character of this country was defined by the civil rights movement, the struggle against segregation, and the fight for equality. This fight, this battle--the effort to demolish centuries of legalized discrimination and disenfranchisement-- never was going to be easy, and many believed that it was nearly impossible. And there were others who believed that it shouldn't have been fought to begin with. And, I would say, to this day, we have a long, long way to go.

The structure of Jim Crow, of the poll tax, of separate and worse schoolrooms and hospital wards and lunch counters had been built up over generations. State laws had established these exclusionary practices. State officials enforced them, and State courts upheld them.

There was no guarantee that they would ever come crashing down, but they did because the leaders of the civil

rights movement and ordinary citizens in the streets and in America's pulpits, and reporters and journalists sent their reports on the demonstrations. And the conditions of real life in the South of this country made it impossible to ignore the facts.

It was harder then than it is in our own time just to turn the channel and imagine that that alternate reality didn't actually exist. For people in that country, with the broadcasters--ABC and CBS and NBC--it was impossible for the public to ignore what was right before their eyes.

The success of that generation of brave Americans was achieved because they forced a broad swath of this country, a majority of this country, to finally see what they would have preferred to be blind to-- the reality of segregation and the subordination of their fellow citizens under law.

It is a story of moral reckoning and of citizen action. It is a story of street protests and police brutality and political vacillation, but it is also a story of American renewal, of our ability to author our own history, to continue the endless founding and refounding of this country as generations of Americans lay claim to it and shape it.

I don't believe that we have lost that ability. I don't believe that we have lost that ambition. I don't believe that people in Colorado and Minnesota and all across this country have given up on the promise offered by America, a promise that can only be given and kept to each other.

As Alex Pretti said himself when honoring a veteran who died in his care, ``today we remember that freedom is not free. We have to work at it, nurture it, protect it, and even sacrifice for it.

In the end, it is also not enough for there to be just public expressions of disapproval. We actually have to change the laws.

Part of our job here as Senators is to uphold the ideals that Alex and so many others in Minnesota and across Colorado and across the country believe in and are fighting for. And it is our job here in the Senate to provide a check on an Executive that our Founders knew was always susceptible to the temptations of unlimited power. That was their concern about a unitary Executive, the President of the United States.

And this week we have an opportunity to be that check. We have an opportunity to change the law.

The Senate is considering a number of bills to fund the government, including one that provides over $10 billion to the varied Departments responsible for the murder of Alex Pretti and the chaos we are seeing in communities across the country.

It would be unconscionable for us to pass this bill without amending how ICE or the Border Patrol operate at all.

In fact, we should use this as an opportunity to do it. What better opportunity will there be?

As written, the Homeland appropriations bill provides no real accountability, no oversight, no guardrails or transparency. It offers no guarantee at all that what happened to Alex Pretti won't happen again.

That is all the more absurd because Republicans gave the Department of Homeland Security an additional $190 billion on top of the regular annual appropriations. Think about that--190 billion additional dollars on top of the annual appropriations last year as part of their Big Beautiful Bill that they passed on a partisan vote. And this funding, I can assure you, came with no accountability or oversight at all.

In the midst of all this, it would be a profound abdication of our responsibility as Senators to entertain the idea of providing more funding to the Department unless serious reforms are put in place. I think these reforms are common sense that you would want for any law enforcement agency operating in America but especially when it comes to a Federal Agency operating in some sense now as the President's internal army.

I think the least we could ask is that children are no longer detained or stripped from their families. Who wants to come to this floor and debate the opposite of that point?

Immigration officers should take off their masks and provide clear identification.

There is no doubt in my mind that the minute we get through this fraught political moment in America, there will be a broad consensus-- in fact, I think there is one now--that ICE shouldn't be separating children from their families; that law enforcement agents shouldn't be wearing masks; that they should use body cameras consistently with any immigration enforcement activities; that ICE stay away from sensitive areas like schools and hospitals and places of worship; and, consistent with our responsibility, our duty to provide a check, to provide our own oversight, that Members of Congress have full access to immigration detention facilities.

Those are reforms that do not today define the way ICE does its work--they do define the way a lot of our local law enforcement does its work--but I think they reflect a massive consensus in the country about what would fix the challenges we are facing. It would at least be a basic start in the right direction.

In my view--you might disagree, but in my view, President Trump would be doing himself and the country a favor if he removed Kristi Noem from her position and prevented her from doing any more harm to this country and to our communities and if he removed DHS agents from Minnesota and other cities across our country.

I would say to all of my colleagues here, Republicans and Democrats, that we cannot simply accept a promise of change or action or reform from this administration, which has spent months lying to Congress and the American people with a straight face. There is no world where we can sit back and assume that the President and his team are going to be persuaded to do anything--anything--unless we write it into law. Even then, we have no guarantee, of course, that this administration won't just break the law as soon as it is written. That has been our experience in Colorado. But at least putting this into statute would be a better pathway for holding Noem and Miller and others accountable for the bloodshed and chaos we are seeing in our streets.

After that, I think we could have serious conversations about passing a funding bill. Until then, we can't allow this legislation to go forward.

Our children and future generations have a reasonable expectation that their elected officials will do everything in their power to keep them safe and to provide the plain facts as they are.

As legislators, it is our responsibility to stand up to an executive branch that is unleashing mayhem in our streets and gunning down American citizens while insisting that the public should not believe what they have seen and what they have heard or that it is unpatriotic all of a sudden to disagree with the President's version of events.

We have seen this story before. There is nothing new under the Sun. We know the dark path this can lead us down. But we have also seen the courage that was demonstrated by the generations of Americans who have come before us, who have disagreed in this Chamber, who have disagreed with each other, but who ultimately have rejected injustice, particularly when it was directed from the highest levels of government.

One of these people was a hero of mine, it won't surprise anybody here to know, and it was Colorado's former Governor Ralph Carr, who spoke out against Japanese internment when most politicians in the West and in this country were staying silent.

Addressing a crowd one day on the Eastern Plains of Colorado, Governor Carr said:

I am talking to . . . all American people whether their

status be white, brown, or black . . . when I say that if a

majority may deprive a minority of their freedom, contrary to

the terms of the Constitution today, then you as a minority

may be subjected to the same ill-will of the majority

tomorrow.

What happened to Alex Pretti and the lies that followed were an assault on every one of us, on all of our children, on our sense of dignity and our innate understanding of right and wrong.

Now is the time for my colleagues to come together and demand that we reassert these principles and demand the return of safety and security and sanity to our government rather than the chaos and destruction we have recently seen. It is what all Americans expect, and it is what our country deserves.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I am grateful for that. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you for holding open the floor.

Mr. President, last night, President Trump announced his attempt to disassemble the National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR, which is based in Boulder, CO.

NCAR is the leading atmospheric research institution and a central part of our Nation's scientific infrastructure. Its research forms the backbone of weather forecasts, disaster preparedness, water planning, wildfire prevention, and aviation safety all across our country. Its work even protects American troops overseas by providing next- generation weather prediction for military operation.

NCAR scientists, engineers, and meteorologists equip emergency responders, airline pilots, farmers, local utility managers, and military planners with the tools they need to protect American lives, property, and our national security.

The President has blown all that up. But as he tries to shut down this institution, the world has not gotten any less dangerous. We can't wish away extreme drought or pause seasonal wildfires, which, as my colleagues from other Western States know, don't stop at State lines and barely have a season at all anymore because they are so present. You can't rebuild decades of scientific research and expertise once it is destroyed.

That is why, today, my colleague Senator Hickenlooper and I are offering an amendment to the appropriations package that would protect funding for NCAR. This isn't about one lab, one institution, or even one State. It is about protecting the foundation of our national research capacity, a capacity built over decades--decades--and generations of taxpayer investment and public service, capacity that once lost can't be replaced and may never be replaced.

But we know from painful experience that this attack on NCAR is just another instance of senseless destruction and political retribution, one we have all watched take place over the past year, time and again.

Colorado has been singled out by the President. The people of Colorado have found themselves the victims of political retaliation. That is why he vetoed the bill to finally finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit and deliver to 50,000 rural Coloradans access to clean drinking water. This legislation would finally fulfill Washington's promise to deliver clean drinking water to farmers and ranchers in Southeastern Colorado, a promise made over 64 years ago by John F. Kennedy. The conduit has always been a partnership between the Federal and local governments, driven by the leadership of the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District.

In the face of rising costs of materials and labor, once again, Southeastern Coloradans came together and put forward an inventive solution to lower costs by changing the project's financing, with no increase to Federal spending.

The bill passed both Chambers of Congress unanimously, with the most bipartisan support anybody could have. But President Trump used his first Presidential veto of his second term to deny Coloradans what should be a basic fundamental right--the access to clean drinking water.

This retaliation campaign is why he continues to delay Colorado disaster relief and is working to cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in Federal grants for childcare, for energy, for wildlife, and for transportation funding. That is why the President is interfering in the State's ability to decide how we clean up our air and deal with the aging costly energy infrastructure that we have. That is why the President has doubled down on his attacks, not just in Colorado but in other places, on food assistance programs, and, sadly, why he moved Space Command out of Colorado to a State that had voted for him.

But these attacks are just the beginning, when it comes to this singular lawlessness and recklessness of President Trump. As soon as he returned to power, President Trump weaponized his office, punishing political opponents, rewarding loyal allies, working tirelessly not for the benefit of the American people but for those--only those--who supported him and for himself and for his family.

That is not the American way. It is not how an American President should make decisions about anything. An election is one thing, but once we hold office, we have a responsibility to represent every citizen, regardless of their politics, regardless of who they voted for.

This President has taken the opposite approach, unleashing mayhem on American citizens, based primarily on whether they live in a State that voted for him or one that didn't vote for him.

We have seen a President send a surge of ICE agents to occupy Minnesota and deploy the National Guard into one American city after another. We have all watched the videos of the chaos and fear and heartbreak these decisions have wrought.

No matter your views on our immigration problems, I don't believe any person in America should have to wonder whether masked men in unmarked cars, carrying guns, might, at any moment, snatch them from the street or break their car windows or leave them bloodied on the side of the road.

That is not the country that I grew up in. That is not the country that we want to live in. But it is happening today in American cities all over our country.

We have seen the President, without congressional authorization or even notification, send helicopters to seize a foreign dictator and the next day tout the investment opportunities that he has created by this incursion--investment opportunities, by the way, that few American companies seem excited about and which promise only to flood the international oil market at a time when oil prices are the lowest that they have been in years.

When one oil company decided to dare to tell the truth--to say what any sane executive would be thinking, what any sane observer of the market would be thinking, what anybody who understood the oil markets would say, which is that a country that has a history of expropriating property is not the first investment choice--they were quickly punished. And that should come as no surprise.

President Trump's Federal Communications Commission attempted to silence a late-night comedian because he didn't like the criticism. That, itself, would be laughable if it weren't so troubling.

For decades--for decades--the United States has stood up for the freedom of expression and freedom of the press, for the right of journalists and authors and comedians to not hide their opinions in underground newspapers and in hidden leaflets but instead to deliver it honestly and widely; to hold power to account; to undergird an important public debate that is the root of our democracy. But those same rights are under threat today here in America.

Even the Federal Reserve is not immune from efforts to control or curtail its independence. The United States boasts the largest and most dynamic economy in the world, with the deepest and most appealing and most attractive capital markets. We print the global reserve currency here in America. We are the envy and the first destination of every entrepreneur and innovator in the world. But President Trump seems eager to throw all of that away through lawsuits and investigations designed not to deliver justice but to squeeze the Federal Reserve Chair until he gives President Trump what he wants--lower interest rates.

With every action like this, President Trump is undermining the American economy and driving up costs for communities all over our State, and he is doing it in almost every way imaginable.

Not even 6 months ago, I was here on the Senate floor during the longest

government shutdown in American history, all because President Trump refused to extend tax insurance, premium tax credits, and provide reliable, affordable healthcare that the American people deserve. Now healthcare premiums are set to double, to triple, and in some cases to quadruple. That comes on top of other price pressures that families all over this country are facing, which have been caused in part by the President's trade war with the entire world.

The dollar has depreciated sharply since March as investors hedge against the effects of the President's tariffs. Hiring has stagnated, and the unemployment rate has risen. Residential electricity prices increased over 10 percent in the first 8 months of 2025. The price of beef has risen 16 percent over the last year, and coffee is up almost 20 percent. The Agriculture Department expects grocery prices, which are already out of sight, to increase even more in the coming year.

Families and small businesses all across America are struggling to afford housing and struggling to afford groceries and other basics, and the President has only made things harder.

At the same time, President Trump has worked to withdraw our country from the world--at least when it comes to diplomacy.

One of his first acts as President was to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, which provided things like medical supplies, lifesaving vaccines, and clean water infrastructure to the most vulnerable populations around the world.

When his trade war with China began to go badly, he quickly capitulated in exchange for a relatively paltry amount of agricultural purchases. He gave our greatest strategic competitor access to cutting- edge technology. They didn't even ask for the semiconductors.

After aiding our adversary, he has turned his attention to our allies. He is threatening to annex Greenland--a NATO country's territory--and take military action against Colombia and Mexico, which are longstanding U.S. partners. In the case of Greenland, President Trump's threats risk the unity of NATO--the most successful alliance in human history. This dangerous behavior makes clear to our adversaries and to our allies that the United States is more focused on extracting concessions from its friends than in protecting our collective security.

His continued abandonment of basic principles of international law and order will eventually reverberate against American national interests. The only question is when.

Coloradoans don't need to look abroad to understand the President's destructive impulses; they have all the evidence they need here at home. When Coloradoans open a newspaper, they might see that the Federal Government has rescinded childcare funding for themselves and for their neighbors; they might see that transportation funding that this Congress has appropriated has been canceled or that energy investments that this Congress has passed have been pulled back.

They feel like they are under attack from a Federal Government whose obligation is to protect them, to support them. This is a belief that is felt very strongly by the people of my State, and I think everybody here should understand that if it is happening to Colorado, it could happen anywhere in America, for any reason.

The Trump administration's announcement that it was dismantling NCAR was made on the evening of December 16. Over the next 2 days, my office received over 2,000 pieces of mail. By the end of the new year, we had received 500 phone calls on the same topic. We have since surpassed 4,000 letters. I know Senator Hickenlooper has had the same, especially in those first 2 days of outreach when fierce windstorms were sweeping across the Front Range of Colorado and creating an enormous wildfire risk.

Numerous citizens wrote to me as they recognized the important role that NCAR scientists play not just in Colorado but in the Nation and in the world. They identify communities that are in the greatest danger. They inform a power company's decision about where to shut off electricity to keep people safe. People in Colorado and throughout the West and I think throughout this country understand the value of NCAR, and they know that sort of essential information and those emergency services are at risk of disappearing possibly forever.

I really want to thank everybody who has written in, and I want to highlight some of the stories they took the time to share with me. I am going to read some of those letters now.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that these letters be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I will start with a constituent from Canon City.

I am writing to express my strong opposition to the

administration's recent plans to dismantle the National

Center for Atmospheric Research, NCAR. NCAR is a cornerstone

of American scientific leadership and public safety. Since

1960, it has provided the essential infrastructure, including

super computers, research, aircraft, and sophisticated

modeling that protects American lives and our economy every

single day. I urge you to push back against the move for the

following reasons: public safety. NCAR's research is vital

for predicting extreme weather events like hurricanes,

tornadoes, and wildfires. Dismantling this center puts our

emergency response capabilities at risk; aviation and

transportation: NCAR technology is used at a major hub like

Denver International Airport to manage snow and ice, and

their wind shear detection systems are crucial for aviation

safety; economic security: from agriculture to energy, the

private sector relies on NCAR's open source models to manage

risk and maintain a competitive advantage; national defense:

NCAR collaborates with the Department of Defense to develop

tools that ensure our military can operate safely in any

environment.

Stripping NCAR of its funding or breaking up its integrated

labs will leave our Nation behind in the atmospheric threats

of the 21st century. Please support the continued funding and

operation of NCAR and its headquarters at the Mesa

Laboratory.

From a constituent in Denver:

I am writing as a concerned Coloradan to urge you to stand

up for the National Center for Atmospheric Research and

oppose any plans to dismantle or significantly weaken the

institution. NCAR is not only a world-class scientific

organization; it is a major economic asset to Colorado and to

the United States. Its presence strengthens our State's

economy. It supports high-quality jobs, attracts private

investment, and reinforces America's global leadership in

science, technology, and national security. NCAR's direct

economic value to Colorado is substantial. The center employs

hundreds of highly skilled scientists, engineers, IT

professionals, and support staff, many of whom live and raise

families and pay taxes here in Colorado. These are stable,

high-paying jobs that cannot be easily replaced. They won't

be easily replaced. In addition, NCAR's operations support

local contractors, suppliers, and small businesses across the

Front Range, creating a multiplier effect that benefits the

broader regional economy. NCAR is also a powerful driver of

innovation and private-sector growth. Its research underpins

advances in aviation safety, agriculture, water management,

energy production, wildfire forecasting, and weather risk

modeling--industries that collectively represent billions of

dollars in economic activity. Private companies rely on

NCAR's development tools and data to improve efficiency,

reduce losses, and plan investments. The weakening of NCAR

would not reduce regulation or bureaucracy; it would reduce

the high-quality information that businesses need to compete.

From a national perspective, NCAR strengthens U.S. security

and resilience. Accurate weather and climate forecasting is

essential for military readiness, disaster preparedness,

infrastructure planning, and supply chain resiliency. These

capabilities help save lives and taxpayer dollars by reducing

the costs of natural disasters and improving long-term

planning. Other nations are aggressively investing in

atmosphere, science. Dismantling NCAR would cede leadership

to global competitors at a time when American technological

dominance is increasingly challenged. Finally, NCAR

represents an excellent return on taxpayer investment. Its

budget is modest relative to the economic losses it helps to

prevent and the innovation it enables. Cutting or dismantling

NCAR may appear to save money in the short term--I doubt very

much anybody really believes it--but the long-term costs to

businesses, farmers, municipalities, insurers, and emergency

responders would be far greater. Colorado has been a leader

in science, innovation, and pragmatic problem-solving, and

NCAR is a cornerstone of that legacy. I respectfully ask for

you to stand up for Colorado jobs, American competitiveness,

and fiscally responsible governance by opposing efforts to

dismantle or weaken the National Center for Atmospheric

Research. Thank you for your service to our State and for

considering the economic and strategic importance to our

State.

From Boulder:

Thank you for supporting science and specifically for

supporting NCAR. I don't need to tell you how important

NCAR's work is for the safety of our Nation. This move

against NCAR serves no valid purpose. It appears merely

punitive as are many of the moves that the Trump

administration has made against our State. I work in research

at a university. We work closely with NOAA and with NCAR. The

last shutdown was stressful to our researchers and our

institutions, but if another shutdown were to happen in order

to save institutions like NCAR from arbitrary posturing and

governance, I know that our research and community would

support that cause. Stand strong, Senator. We support you.

And here is a letter from an NCAR institutional stakeholder:

We write to express our strong support for continued--

This is from, I think, the Governors: Jared Polis, Josh

Green, Spencer Cox, Bob Ferguson, Michelle Lujan Grisham,

Gavin Newsom, and Katie Hobbs--Democrats and Republicans.

We write to express our strong support for continued

Federal funding for the National Center for Atmospheric

Research, NCAR, and to underscore its importance to States

all across the Nation.

Governors rely on NCAR's research and modeling and data

infrastructure to help protect lives, strengthen regional and

national economies, and improve preparedness for increasingly

complex environmental challenges.

NCAR's work directly informs decision making at the State

and local level, supporting emergency management,

infrastructure planning, and long-term resilience.

We agree with your administration's fiscal year 2026

National Science Foundation budget request to Congress that

NCAR is a critical national research and infrastructure

asset. As the budget request notes, NCAR is an NSF-sponsored,

federally funded research and development center that

integrates advanced observational facilities, widely used

community weather and climate models, and high-performance

computing. Together, these capabilities provide foundational

tools used by Federal Agencies, the military, State and local

governments, universities, and the private sector. For our

States, NCAR's work delivers direct and practical value.

By the way, I have not found a single person on this floor who doesn't agree with what these Governors have to say, who hasn't said that NCAR is a vital resource to their State, that their work delivers direct and practical value.

In wildfire-prone regions, NCAR research improves

understanding of fire behavior, smoke transport, and extreme

weather conditions that exacerbate fire risk, supporting more

effective mitigation and response and recovery efforts.

Governors depend on these insights to inform emergency

management decisions and to protect communities'

infrastructure and public lands. Where else are we going to

get this data and information?

NCAR's modeling and forecasting capabilities are also

essential to agriculture and to water management across the

West. Seasonal and subseasonal forecasts help producers plan

for droughts, floods, and shifting precipitation patterns,

while supporting more efficient use of scarce water

resources. These tools are increasingly important as our

States work to sustain agricultural productivity, rural

economies, and food security amid growing variability.

I can't find a single person on this floor who would disagree with what the Governors have said.

In addition, NCAR's capabilities support national defense and homeland security priorities. Accurate, timely weather and Earth system information is critical for military operations, forest protection, aviation safety, and infrastructure resilience.

NCAR's high-performance computing and data integration

capacity strengthens situational awareness and operational

readiness across air, land, and maritime domains.

The Governors continued:

Tourism and outdoor recreation, cornerstones of many of our

economies, also benefit from improved forecasting and hazard

preparedness. Reliable weather and environmental information

helps protect visitors, supports local businesses, and

reduces disruption from extreme events, reinforcing economic

stability in communities that depend on these sectors--

Which is to say, virtually every community in the American West.

We [these Governors] respectfully urge your administration

to continue supporting NCAR, consistent with your 2026 fiscal

year budget request, and to work with Congress to ensure

stable funding for its core capabilities. Continued

investment will allow NCAR to deliver high-value research and

service that strengthens public safety, economic resilience,

and preparedness all across the Nation.

Thank you for your leadership and your continued

partnership with the Nation's Governors.

These Governors sign on.

Here is Tony Busalacchi, who is the president of UCAR, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, the operator of NCAR. Busalacchi--I apologize if I butchered that name.

NSF NCAR's research is crucial for building American

prosperity by protecting lives and properties, supporting the

economy, and strengthening national security. Any plan to

dismantle NSF NCAR would set back our Nation's ability to

predict, prepare for, and respond to severe weather and other

natural disasters.

I have an open letter here from major scientific societies--from the American Meteorological Society, the Alliance for Data Science and AI. I won't read the rest, Mr. President.

The letter says:

The United States of America needs the National Center for

Atmospheric Research. On behalf of the scientific societies

we represent, we write to express our strong support of NCAR

and the full breadth of scientific research undertaken by the

scientists at NCAR.

The benefits of NCAR to the United States and the world are

enormous. Since its inception in 1960, NCAR has made

groundbreaking advances in weather, water, and climate

science. Working with partners within the United States, as

well as across the world, NCAR scientists have provided

crucial insights on severe storms, flash floods, drought, air

quality, wildfire, climate, and weather predictions, to name

just a few key contributions.

These discoveries improve early warnings and weather

forecasts, ensure enhanced transportation safety by air, sea,

and ground, and reverse the adverse impacts of hazards.

Crucially, they save lives and make America safer!

Recently, the White House announced plans to dismantle it.

Sending various parts of NCAR to other cities will isolate

expertise and reduce the synergies and enhanced productivity

that results when people work together. NCAR is an incredible

resource, and losing it would hurt the economic health of the

Nation and the safety of its people. A better option would be

to work to maintain and strengthen NCAR, including through

enhanced cooperation with Federal science Agencies, academic

institutions, and private sector researchers.

Science improves lives and drives economic prosperity.

``Science improves lives and drives economic prosperity,'' and we used to care around here whether we were the leader among nations in that.

Scientific innovation promotes public safety, enables new

businesses, and helps us thrive in a competitive global

marketplace. The United States has long been a world leader--

I would say the world leader--

in all science, including the science of environmental

prediction. The Nation's strong support of science over the

past century is a foundation of our success. A strong NCAR

will lead to further forecast improvements that enhance our

national well-being.

We stand ready to work with the administration and leaders

in Congress to ensure that U.S. scientific preparedness,

including with respect to environmental prediction, remains

second to none.

And Colorado does as well.

Finally, from Arvada:

Thank you for defending NCAR and holding up the budget

unless full funding is included.

As you know, parts of the State are out of power right now

due to high winds and dry, warm conditions that put us at

fire risk. We need to continue to study climate and weather

to fight climate change but also to predict and respond to

weather emergencies. Shutting down NCAR will be bad for

everyone in the country.

Thank you, and please continue to fight for our State and

the environment.

I could not have said it better myself. Shutting down NCAR will be bad for everybody in the country, and that is a fact. And the people there obviously don't deserve it.

And we also need to set a standard for what we expect out of the leadership in the White House, which is that they are going to actually serve everybody in the country, whether they voted for them or not.

What is happening to Colorado today could happen to your State tomorrow.

(Mr. MORENO assumed the Chair.)

We also lost, to the President's first veto of his second term, the Arkansas Valley Conduit. That is a pipeline that I have been working on since the day I got here. It is the very first piece of legislation that I wrote. It was an effort to try to keep a promise that had been made to Colorado in 1960 by Jack Kennedy, who went out to Pueblo and said to the people there, to the farmers and ranchers--mostly Republicans then, in 1960, and still mostly Republicans today. That doesn't matter, but I just want to set the scene for what we are dealing with here, which is a group of people that have fought and fought and fought, generation after generation after generation, to supply their farming families, their ranching families with clean water that the United States, the richest country in the world, promised them many, many years ago.

And I have a constituent from Pueblo who wrote in. The letter says:

I am writing as a deeply disappointed, concerned, and

frankly angry constituent regarding President Trump's veto of

the finishing of the Arkansas Valley Conduit. This

legislation passed unanimously in both the House and the

Senate, an increasingly rare example of true bipartisan

agreement, because it addressed a fundamental responsibility

of government: providing clean, safe drinking water to

America.

Communities across Colorado's eastern plains, between

Pueblo and Lamar, have waited too long for this project to be

completed.

The AVC is not political theater. It is a public health

necessity. Using access to clean water as a bargaining chip

for punishment against a State is unacceptable.

Using access to clean water as a bargaining chip for

punishment against a State is unacceptable.

It is unacceptable.

My constituent from Pueblo writes:

The President is obligated to represent and serve all

Americans, regardless of party, State, or political

disagreements. This action falls short of that standard and

undermines trust in our democratic institution.

I could not agree with that more.

I urge you to do the right thing for the people of Colorado

by supporting and voting to override this veto. Clean

drinking water should never be held hostage to partisan

grievances or personal vendettas. Congress spoke clearly and

unanimously once. Now it must stand by that decision.

Please let me know what actions you will take to ensure

this vital project moves forward and that the needs of

Coloradoans are placed above political calculation.

Here is a letter in support of the conduit from the Otero County Commission:

Your public statements of opposition to President Trump's

veto to finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit Act are greatly

appreciated by those of us who have long supported this

project to ensure that residents in rural Southeastern

Colorado have access to a safe drinking water supply. The

challenges we face with naturally occurring contaminants in

groundwater are precisely why the Federal Safe Drinking Water

Act exists.

It is imperative that we work together to overturn this decision. We stand ready to assist you in any effort to override the veto or pursue an alternative path to enact this strongly supported legislation.

It is unanimously supported legislation. The conduit can't be viewed as a mere amenity or a frivolous investment. It is the most effective way to deliver safe drinking water to 50,000 people without creating harmful side effects that are associated with other treatment processes like reverse osmosis.

This is a public health issue, and shared investments by

Federal, State, and local governments are critical to

addressing it.

Indeed, H.R. 131 highlights the significant non-Federal investment-- 35

percent of the total cost--to say nothing of the blood, sweat, and tears that generations of South Coloradans in Southeastern Colorado have been willing to exert in this cause in their partnership with Federal Agencies to get this project built.

This is a classic case of Americans doing the work for the next generation of Americans and the generation after that--the county commissioners in Otero County who came and lived and died long before the ones that are here writing in about this right now without ever seeing their dream for clean water for their families or their communities realized in the richest country in the world. We are this close to having it done, and it was canceled out of spite.

In addition to pointing out the local share that the communities--and by the way, these are tiny farming communities. Every dollar they spend on a project like this is a hard dollar for them to spend, but they know why it is so important.

This bill--the bill that we passed unanimously, which the President vetoed--this bill adjusts the interest rate and extends the repayment period while also providing an option for economic hardship consideration, which is vital given the challenging economic conditions of our region.

The longstanding bipartisan support--

The commissioners continued--

for the Arkansas Valley Conduit speaks volumes about its

clear purpose: a safe--safe--clean drinking water supply.

Together, we must fight this attempt to stop the project and

diminish its critical importance. We respectfully ask you to

use all your tools available to overturn the decision and

ensure the enactment of H.R. 131. Thank you for your

leadership and commitment to the health and wellbeing of our

Southeastern Colorado community.

I have got one last letter that I am going to read from the Pueblo County commissioners:

Thank you for your public statements opposing President

Trump's veto to finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit Act. Your

leadership on this issue is deeply appreciated by the

communities of Southeastern Colorado who have worked for

decades to secure a safe and reliable drinking water supply.

As an elected body representing residents of Pueblo County,

we see firsthand the challenges posed by naturally occurring

groundwater contaminants. These conditions are precisely why

the Federal Safe Drinking Water Act exists and why Federal

partnership is essential. Access to clean drinking water is

not optional; it is a fundamental public health

responsibility.

It is critical that we work together to overturn this veto

or pursue an alternative path to enactment. We stand ready to

assist in any effort necessary to ensure this project moves

forward.

The Arkansas Valley Conduit should not be characterized as

discretionary or a nonessential investment. It is the most

effective and sustainable way to deliver drinking water to

approximately 50,000 people without the long-term

complications and unintended consequences associated with

other treatment methods.

H.R. 131 appropriately recognizes the significant

commitment already made at the local and at the State level

with other non-Federal partners covering approximately 35

percent of the total cost. The bill's modest adjustments to

the interest rate and repayment period, along with provisions

for economic hardship, are especially important given the

economic realities facing rural Southeast Colorado.

I can see that my colleague from Colorado has arrived at the floor, which means that I am going to have to wind up in a minute. Before I finish, I just had a few more closing remarks, and then I will turn it over to my friend.

Political decisions in America are not supposed to be made this way. I know they are sometimes in other countries. I know there are many countries around the world where there is corruption, and the way decisions are made is, might makes right, and whoever happens to get elected to a certain term--that person gets to reward their friends and punish their enemies.

I can guarantee you that every one of those places has a less successful economy than the United States of America. Our economy is based on the rule of law, not might makes right. Our economy is based on the idea that the citizens we represent and their futures are far more important than the political scorekeeping that any President or any chief executive officer should maintain.

This is not, I have to say, what the American Government is supposed to look like or what the American Government has ever looked like. Making these kinds of partisan decisions, like the one that is underlined, the cancellation of the Arkansas Valley Conduit or NCAR or the other hundreds of millions of dollars that are being taken away from poor families in Colorado who are just trying to raise their children, who are now not going to have access to food or access to schooling--which, by the way, just for political reasons, this strikes at the heart of the constitutional system that was envisioned by our Founders. That is not an exaggeration. The men who framed our founding document were raised in and were some of the greatest exponents of the scientific revolution and the fundamental shift in human thought and reason that we now call the enlightenment.

That tradition prioritized--and by the way, they weren't just politicians; many of them were scientists themselves. That tradition prioritized freedom of thought and considered debate. It held that truth was best drawn out from the contrast of opposing views and beliefs or disagreements.

The Founders understood that this philosophy could only reach its full potential within the framework of a constitutional republic. It had never existed before anywhere. They drew up the Bill of Rights, with its freedom of speech and its freedom of press, in order to protect that ability to face each other in the public square with our disagreements, and they ingrained their belief in the overwhelming power of reason to discern truth from falsehood and science from superstition in the original text of our Constitution.

In article I, section 8, they charged Congress with the responsibility to ``fix the Standards of Weights and Measures'' and provide for policies that ``promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.''

The Founders understood how fundamental these responsibilities were to the country they hoped to create. These directives are in the very same section as the power to lay and collect taxes, to borrow money, and to declare war.

NCAR is a modern embodiment of the Founders' intent--the careful and objective collection of data to inform public policy and political debate free from restriction or censure or political punishment. And that is what is at stake today. That is why this should matter to everybody on this floor.

NCAR was founded in 1960, and it has operated over 13 Presidential administrations and 32 Congresses, Democratic and Republican alike. NCAR's work benefits Americans, as we have heard, from every State, from disaster forecasts, to aviation fog warnings, to drought predictions that guide crop planning and water management, to weather intelligence for military operations, to early detection for solar storms that threaten our electric grid and communications systems.

When it comes to NCAR, the President's effort at political retribution threatens the health and safety of communities all across the country--all across this country.

The entire implication of what the Founders were writing about in this context was that nobody has a monopoly of wisdom--least of all, a President. The Founders' greatest fear was to have a demagogue in that office unconstrained by the rule of law. And they knew how fragile all of this experiment was. They knew how easily, under the wrong direction, it could collapse.

Now we know this is not some temporary bump in the road; it is a reflection of what the Founders understood is a fundamental aspect of human nature: that there would always be somebody who would reach out to grab the kind of unconstrained power that this President has reached for.

In moments like this, what the Founders expected was that it would be up to all of us--the rest of us--to prevent exactly what they were worried about. There was no self-reinforcing mechanism. Nobody was riding to our rescue, because, as I mentioned earlier, what can happen to our State can happen to any other State. The Founders understood that the American people would know that and that they would rally to support the rule of law, they would rally to support their democracy.

What is happening today under a Republican President could happen with the wrong kind of Democratic President.

Our children and future generations have a reasonable expectation that their government should be designed to

work for them--all of them; all of them--regardless of their political leaning. We have a responsibility as legislators, as Americans, and an obligation to the Constitution, to our respective States no matter what color they are on the political map.

I urge my colleagues to reject these partisan games and to stand up for scientific integrity and the rule of law. It is what the people of Colorado and all Americans expect, and it is what they deserve.

As I come to a close, I am going to read what I have to read for the amendment. I just want to say how proud I am to be here today on the floor with my colleague Senator John Hickenlooper, whom I have known for more years than I would care to actually admit to you, Mr. President.

But one of the things that I know about John is that he embodies the hope, the aspiration that our Founders had for citizen legislators. He is somebody who came to politics with a business background but, I would say in the context of the discussion we are having today, with the background of a geologist, somebody who came to the West to begin with to be able to apply his scientific imagination to the challenges that we were facing at the time and was able to then use that in business but then also in politics and who has brought that intellect and scientific commitment to the Commerce Committee, where he sits.

I think all of Colorado has been incredibly well served and the country has been incredibly well served in this debate by that scientific background. If I dare say it--I am not saying that he is exactly who Ben Franklin was envisioning, but I will say that John Hickenlooper and Ben Franklin would have gotten along extremely well had they had the chance to serve with each other.

Amendment No. 4153

With that, I ask unanimous consent to call up and make pending amendment No. 4153 to H.R. 6938 to maintain operations and capabilities at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.