Floor Statements

Madam President, I am sorry I didn't have the chance to say thank you to our colleague from Connecticut for his speech tonight about loneliness in the United States. I was grateful that he gave it and grateful that he is in the Senate and grateful to know that another parent of young kids has the perspective that he has shared tonight because I think it is so important. And strangely enough, I am here to talk about something similar tonight.

First, Madam President, I will put it away because it is not supposed to be on the floor, but I wanted to come here tonight to talk a little bit about this smartphone and the world of social media, the world of machine learning algorithms and generative AI that has now been put at our fingertips.

The rise of smartphones and social media is one of the most rapid, profound, and, I would argue, poorly understood transformations in American life in our entire history.

If you had asked me when I was the age of the pages who are here, when I was growing up, and you had said to me: Someday, Michael, there is going to be a device--well, here is the device--there is going to be a device that looks like this; it doesn't even have a wire next to it, that would have been astonishing in and of itself. How can an electronic device not have a wire? But it does not have a wire. Not only does it not have a wire, but you can FaceTime anybody on Earth the way Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock FaceTimed each other.

The Presiding Officer knows what I am talking about. These folks may not know who Captain Kirk was or who Mr. Spock was. But the idea that you could reach somebody and communicate with them on video, on a telephone, or a device that had no wires, that alone would have been shocking.

If you had said: Well, let me tell you something else about that device, I would say: OK. What else can you tell me about that device?

And you said: Well, you can buy any book that has ever been written by humans, basically, on that device. And if you want it, you can make a choice. You can have it digitally, and it will just download immediately on your device, or you can order it, and it can be at your house by tonight, if you would rather have a print version of the book rather than getting it digitally. And I will tell you something else, Michael, it will translate any language that you care to hear.

I was, today, with the CEO of Google who was in my office talking about how one of their projects now is to help recover and sustain lost languages or languages we are in danger of losing in this country and around the world, which I think is a worthy project. We definitely, in my State, are at risk of losing Native American languages that really are at risk.

But in any case, if you said to me: You can translate any language or you can translate yourself into any language, and somebody would ask: What do you think that device is worth? In 1983 or 1987, when I was graduating from high school or college, I think I probably would have said that is probably--I can't imagine what it is worth--millions of dollars. Millions of dollars. To have every book that has ever been published that is in every library in the world? Millions of dollars, to be able to translate every language that you can translate? Millions of dollars.

And if you told me that it actually only cost a few hundred dollars, which it does, and that everybody on planet Earth would have one, which is almost in many ways the case, I would have asked what you were smoking. But it is true. It is true. And that is the world we have inhabited for almost 20 years. It is not new: the digital age, the information age, the age of ubiquitous smartphones, social media, and a handful of digital platforms that control them.

And for all of the extraordinary convenience and extraordinary productivity and entertainment that these technologies have allowed, as a country, we still haven't come to grips with the profound cost to our economy, to our society, and to our democracy, and that is before we even consider AI.

This is what everybody around here is talking about, what some would call the most consequential technology for humanity since the invention of fire. But unlike fire, this technology can improve itself, and it has the potential to move faster and transform more than any innovation in our history, for better or for worse.

Even in its early days, generative AI has already demonstrated the power to write the code to animate and even compose in ways that would have been absolutely unimaginable 20 years ago or 10 years ago, to say nothing of when we were in school.

It is easy to forget how different the world was just 20 years ago. Twenty years ago, General Motors topped the Fortune 500 list. Apple was 285, and Amazon didn't even make the cut. Twitter was still an idea somewhere in the recesses of Jack Dorsey's head. Mark Zuckerberg was barely old enough to vote, even though he likely already acquired the undeveloped view of the First Amendment that he seems to hold to this day. No one on this planet had ever heard of Gmail or TikTok or ChatGPT. That was only 20 years ago, but it might as well have been 200 years ago.

Today, Americans spend over 2 hours a day on social media, more time socializing online than in person. The average TikTok user in our country spends 90 minutes a day on the app--more than 3 weeks a year.

Facebook now hosts 2.7 billion friends--a half a billion more souls than Christianity.

Twitter has fewer followers, but they include every single politician--probably almost every single person in this Chamber--every journalist, every TV producer in America, withering our political debate to 280-character effervescent posts.

In just two decades, a few companies--less than a handful, really-- have transformed much of humanity's daily life: how we amuse ourselves, how we discover, how we learn, how we shop, how we connect with friends and family and elected representatives, how we pay attention, how we glimpse our shared reality. This transformation is a staggering testament to American innovation.

And we can all think of a dozen ways that platforms have improved our lives. I, for one, have been entirely relieved of the stress of sitting in rush-hour traffic, wondering if there is a better route. I am now confident that Waze is guiding me like my own personal North Star, and that has made an enormous difference to my sense of well-being.

But this dramatic shift from our analog to our digital human existence has never been guided and has never been informed by the public interest. It has

always been dictated by the unforgiving requirements of a few gigantic American corporations and their commercial self-interests. And what are those interests? To make us better informed citizens? To make us more productive employees? To make us happier people? Of course not. It is to turn a profit and protect their profits through their own economic dominance, and they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

This is the market capitalization of some of the largest industries in America. You can see at the top here that this is Apple and Microsoft and Alphabet and Amazon and Meta combined. They are at $9 trillion in market cap. To get to $9 trillion, you basically have to add up our entire banking sector, our entire oil and gas sector, and our entire pharmaceutical sector just to give you a sense of the size of the market cap of these companies alone and the reason they have become so dominant.

Through it all, unlike almost any small business in Boulder, CO, or in any town in New Hampshire, these digital platforms have remained almost entirely unregulated--moving fast and breaking things, as they have famously said, and forcing the rest of us to sweep up the wreckage.

There is another way these companies are different from the brick- and-mortar companies in Boulder, CO, or in New Hampshire. Digital platforms aren't burdened by the fixed costs of an analog world. Beyond the blinking lights of their energy-intensive server farms, their businesses are on the cloud, a place where no one works and that requires little physical investment. They have no need to use their profits to invest in America by building the kind of infrastructure these other industries do or had.

Unlike their industrial forbearers, today's platforms have devised a new digital barrier to entry to protect their profits. It is different from the way it was in the past. They have figured out how to protect their profits and economic dominance, and we know that digital barrier as the network effect.

The network effect means that platforms become exponentially more valuable as more people join and spend more of their waking moments there--more valuable to users because their friends and families are on it; more valuable to the platforms themselves, which hoover up our identities for their profits and train their machine-learning algorithms; more valuable for advertisers, who pay the platforms for our identities to barrage us with ads; and so valuable--so valuable--to the markets, where the top tech companies now equal, roughly, a quarter of the entire S&P 500.

In the name of building this barrier to entry--this network effect-- they have stolen our identities and our privacy, and they have addicted us to their platforms. The platforms' imperative to grow big and stay big poses a very basic question: How do you get people on your platform, and how do you keep them there?

For platforms like Apple and Amazon, it is to sell products that people want, to offer subscriptions, and, if they are lucky, to enmesh them in your closed ecosystems. For social media platforms with free services, like Meta and Twitter and TikTok, the answer is more sinister, I am afraid--to harvest as much data on your users as you can, to feed that data to your algorithms to serve up whatever content it takes to keep people hooked so you can keep selling ads.

That is the core business model. That is the model that has led to these market caps. Although this particular business model has bestowed enormous value on a few companies, it has imposed profound costs on everybody else, even in places we don't necessarily expect it.

A senior law enforcement official just told me, within the last couple of weeks, that social media is the ``last mile of every fentanyl and meth transaction in America.'' The Presiding Officer knows that in being from New Hampshire. It took my staff 20 seconds to find illegal drugs for sale on Instagram.

I would ask the pages, please, to avert your eyes here. The image on the left appears to be pills of MDMA. The image on the right shows you how to contact the dealer through Whatsapp and pay him through another app called Wickr. Below that are all of the places you can purchase this stuff, including in Denver, CO, where we are having a terrible, terrible problem with fentanyl and with methamphetamines.

Even though the vast majority of Americans never interact with content like this, we all pay a price. Millions of Americans have surrendered to private companies an endless feed of data on their lives, all for the convenience of being served up self-gratifying political content on YouTube, less traffic, or better movie recommendations. Most Americans have made that trade without ever really knowing it.

The young people who are here today don't know a world where that trade was something that wasn't automatically made. Any suggestion that we have made that trade fairly, I think, is ludicrous. It mocks any sense of consent. These are contracts of adhesion, really. As a society, we have never asked how much of our identity or our privacy we are willing to trade for convenience and entertainment. We have never had a negotiation with Mark Zuckerberg about that. Until today, these questions have been resolved entirely to the benefit of the platforms' bottom lines.

I suppose it would be one thing if the only consequences of the digital platforms' use of our data were to sell better advertising-- although even that would be a fairly pathetic concession, I think, of our own economic interests and of the precious value of our data and our privacy and our identities. But, as every parent knows and as every kid suspects, better advertising is not the only consequence of this model.

Over the years, digital platforms have imported features from gaming and from gambling--from brightly covered displays to flashing notifications, to likes--and they unleash secret algorithms to reverse- engineer our most basic human tendencies, which are to seek out tribe approval, conformity, and to create an almost irresistible feed of content.

Americans now spend a third of their waking hours on their phones, which we check an average of 344 times a day. In speaking as a parent who has raised three daughters in this era, we certainly have not agreed to run a science experiment on our children with machine- learning algorithms and generative AI chatbots that the companies themselves barely understand at all.

While we are still coming to understand the specific role social media plays in the epidemic of teen mental health, the early evidence gives us plenty of reason to worry. Here is what we do know:

In 2006, Facebook became available to the general public. The following year, Apple released the iPhone. By 2012, just 5 years later, half of Americans had a smartphone. Today, everyone has one. Everybody has got one, I think, except for Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, who is still using a flip phone.

A similar story unfolded with teens and with social media. By 2012, about half of teens used social media. Today, 95 percent of teens use it. When my parents excoriated me--and they did, just like your parents excoriated you for being glued to the television in the 1970s--the average American teen watched TV for 4 hours a day. Today, teens are on their screens for twice as long. Half are online almost constantly, they say. More than one in five 10th grade girls spend 7 or more hours a day on social media. That is 35 hours a week. In France, that is a full-time job.

As our children retreat into the digital world of someone else's making, they pay for it. They are paying for it with less sleep and exercise and time with their friends, as my colleague from Connecticut was talking about. All of this has contributed to an epidemic of teen anxiety, to depression, and to loneliness, especially among teenage girls.

Today, girls who use social media heavily are two to three times as likely to say they are depressed, compared to those who use it less often or not at all. And since the introduction of smartphones and social media, we have seen a dramatic and unprecedented rise in serious depression among Americans under 25.

To be fair, I am not saying social media is the only cause of this. But as the father of three daughters who have

grown up in its shadow, I know it has played a role.

Kids are in despair in our country. Today, almost half of teens believe they can't do anything right. Almost half of teens say: I don't enjoy life, and my life is not useful.

All of these numbers began to rise around the time that smartphones and social media began to pervade the country and hook a generation to their screens.

Over this same period, we have tragically seen the suicides of young people increase 60 percent compared to 2007.

I see this crisis of teen mental health everywhere I go in Colorado-- everywhere I go in Colorado. Parents tell me about how social media has undermined their children's sense of well-being and especially-- especially--a girl's body image and sense of self.

A teenager recently told me that the ``electronic bullying follows me home.''

``There is no escape,'' she said, ``at any hour, on any day.''

And I felt the panic. I felt the panic of a parent who can't fix it and make it better. It felt like there was nothing that I could do. It was beyond my control to make it better.

It has become common now, at the end of my townhalls, for parents to come up to me. They are usually not people--or they are often not people--who have come to the townhall to listen to the townhall; they are people who might be working the slide projector or who might have set the chairs out for people to sit in. They come to me after the talk is over, the conversation is over, and they will say something like: My daughter is 5 feet 10 inches, she is 105 pounds, and her confidence is in tatters because of the way she has interacted with social media and the way it has shredded her body image.

All of my young staff and my two eldest daughters universally say how lucky they are to have avoided middle school in the age of social media or to have gone to middle school before there was social media. Their younger siblings aren't so lucky, and they know that about their younger siblings.

Maybe the most poignant expression of this concern were the moms whom I met in the Mississippi Delta, in my wife's hometown of Marianna, AR, which is the county seat of Lee County, AR. One after the other of these moms told me that their kids in this rural, poor county in America just don't read because no book can compete with their phone-- even as the Silicon Valley executives who designed these phones send their kids to social media detox camps every single summer. That is not something that is available to these parents in Marianna. These parents work two or three jobs. They can't afford childcare. And they have to compete for their child's attention against algorithmic poison. They have never stood a chance, and neither have their kids. Now these parents also have to compete with generative AI, virtual reality, and the power they bestow to fully immerse yourself in the digital world.

My constituents in Colorado are most worried about what digital platforms have done to their kids and their families. I will tell you, I don't have a bunch of data tonight about the causal link between social media and the phones and the mental health epidemic that is going on in America, especially among American youth, but there is no doubt that we are having that epidemic. There is no doubt that it correlates to the advent of the phone and social media. There is no doubt it has been compounded by COVID and the effects of that.

This has been a hard time to be a young person in our country, to be a high school student, to be a college student, to have your life interrupted by a once-in-a-generation, once-in-100-years pandemic on top of everything else. I just think about all the kids like my daughter Anne, who spent so much of that time in her room at home on that phone.

When I was superintendent of the Denver public schools 15 years ago, we were working, focused so much on student achievement. It is amazing the way things have changed. When I was asked about this--about education in America--long after I had been superintendent but before COVID happened, I had an easy answer back then. My answer was mental health. Mental health. Mental health. And that was pre-COVID. There isn't anybody in America who thinks things have gotten better since then.

This is a tough time to be a kid in our country. It is a tough time to be a kid because of this dynamic. It is a tough time to be a kid because we haven't, as the Senator from New Hampshire has told us here over and over again, figured out how to stop this epidemic of fentanyl in this country, so that we are living in a time now, unlike when I was superintendent, where kids have to lobby their school nurses to be able to put antidotes in the nurse's office so their friends don't die because they took one pill that was labeled a prescription drug, and that pill killed them or almost killed them. We didn't do that--worry about that when I was superintendent 15 years ago.

This is off-topic tonight, but add on to that the fact that in America--this is the only country in the world where the leading cause of death for kids is guns, and two-thirds of that is people killing people, other people, assaults or suicides. Only 5 percent are accidents.

This is a tough time to be a kid in America.

I would argue that a lot of what we are dealing with here is manmade, human-made. It is not just a natural occurrence out there, somehow, in the world. We have to come to grips with it. We have to understand it.

Among other things, we need these companies, like other companies in the past, to share their data so that independent researchers can help us make the assessments we need to make in order to make the judgments we need to make to provide oversight--kind of like the tobacco companies finally had to cough up the data way back when.

As I say, my constituents are most worried about this, these issues, about their kids and about their families, but they also worry a lot about the effect on our democracy, and they have a lot of reason to be concerned about that too.

When I first joined the Senate, it was around the time of the so- called Twitter revolutions in Egypt and Libya and Tunisia that we then heralded as the Arab Spring. At the time, people in Washington and around the world hailed social media as a powerful tool for democracy. It didn't take long, though, for tyrants to turn those tools against democracy. The dictators who once feared social media soon harnessed it for their purposes--to track opponents, to dox critics, and to flood the zone with propaganda.

Vladimir Putin understood this better than most. He saw the vast and unregulated power of social media over our democracy, and he wielded social media as a digital Trojan horse to inflame our divisions and undermine trust in our democracy. The damage inflicts us to this day.

Ahead of the 2016 elections, Putin flooded our social media with disinformation. According to the Mueller report, the Russians ``conducted social media operations . . . with the goal of sowing discord in the U.S. political system.'' We know that, of course, now.

They sought to fracture our country along every conceivable line-- race, religion, class, sexuality, politics--playing both sides. They didn't care. Half this stuff is pro-immigrant, for example; half is anti-immigrant. Half of it is pro-Muslim; half is anti-Muslim. What they wanted was to divide this country, to divide this democracy.

By the way, it took us more than a year to figure out this was Russian propaganda and not just our own political discourse, which says a lot about our own political discourse, where we might want to reflect on that.

The Russians played both sides over 10 million tweets and nearly 4,000 fake accounts. Imagine what Putin would have done with generative AI or could do with generative AI and the power to create fake images and videos that most of us would fail to distinguish from reality.

Back in 2016, as I said, we let it all happen because we couldn't tell the difference between this discourse and our discourse.

I published a book during my not-very-well-noticed campaign for President about this because I kept running into people--I can remember I ran into a senior at a nursing home in New Hampshire who was repeating stuff that I knew was Russian propaganda.

He was saying: What are you going to do about it?

I am not saying that you couldn't find something on the internet that is true. Obviously, there is a lot there. But he was repeating Russian propaganda, and he didn't have any idea.

When I joined the Senate Intelligence Committee after that, I began to realize that this problem extended far beyond our borders and that it was serious. That is why 3 years ago I wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, warning him--warning him--that Facebook had become authoritarians' ``platform of choice'' to suppress their opposition around the world.

The consequences have been horrific. In Myanmar, the United Nations named Facebook ``a significant factor'' in stoking communal violence against the Rohingya after it repeatedly ignored calls to remove hate speech and hire more staff who actually knew the country.

Around the world, we have seen fake stories on these platforms spark violence--in India, in Sri Lanka, in Kenya, and on January 6, 2021, here in the United States of America.

In the weeks before January 6, President Trump--our first President who ran his campaign and administration through Twitter--incited a mob to invade this Capitol. I remember sitting in a windowless room with the Presiding Officer in the Capitol on the 6th. We watched CNN as our fellow citizens invaded the U.S. Capitol with their racist banners and with their anti-Semitic t-shirts to ``save'' an election, they said, that had not been stolen.

In these moments, we cannot bury our heads in our digital feeds. All of us are called upon to defend this democracy and to burnish our example at home. We can help--the people in this body can help by reining in the vast power of digital platforms and reasserting the interests of the American people and our public interest.

The Americans who came before us would never have known about algorithms. They wouldn't have known about network effects. But they would recognize the challenge that we face, and their example should guide our way.

The Founders themselves designed one of the most elegant forms of checks and balances to guard against tyranny.

After Upton Sinclair exposed ghastly conditions in meatpacking facilities, in 1906, Teddy Roosevelt joined Congress to create the Food and Drug Administration. As broadcasting became more central to American life, in 1934, FDR and Congress created the Federal Communications Commission. After the 2009 financial crisis, President Obama and Congress established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In each case, Congress knew it lacked expertise to oversee complex new sectors of the economy, so it created independent bodies to empower--to empower--the American people.

Today, we have no dedicated entity to protect the public interest, and we have been powerless as a result. That is why last year, I introduced a bill to create a Federal Digital Platform Commission. I reintroduced it earlier this month with our colleague Senator Welch from Vermont.

We have essentially proposed an FCC for digital platforms--it is not really more complicated than that--an independent body with five Senate-confirmed Commissioners empowered to protect consumers, to protect competition, and to defend the public and the public's interest. The Commission would hold hearings, conduct research, pursue investigations, establish commonsense rules for the sector, and enforce violations with tough penalties. Most important, the Agency would finally put the American people in a negotiation with digital platforms that have amassed vast power beyond our imagination and over the American people's lives and the lives of our children.

Previous Congresses knew they would never have the expertise to approve or disapprove new drugs, for example.

We didn't have a debate on this floor about that because we knew that expertise would better lie with the FDA. We don't write the safety guidelines for airlines on this floor either. We have a commission that will do that.

Why would we expect Congress to be able to regulate technologies that are moving at quantum speed like AI? It is not possible.

And perhaps this is why Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT, testified that we urgently need a new regulator--assuming that he wasn't a deep fake.

Some may say: We don't need a new government Agency. We already have the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice.

These Agencies are staffed by hard-working public servants, but they don't have the expertise or the tools or the time to regulate this brandnew sector. And that was before generative AI.

And I want to say, on that note, I am very grateful to Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, for his remarks earlier today. I completely agree that we need to chart a responsible course between promoting innovation in AI and ensuring the safety of our children and our democracy.

And while I think a dedicated, expert Agency is the best solution, and I believe others will come to that judgment as well, I welcome the debate that we are going to have on this. And I am the first to admit that I don't have a monopoly on wisdom on anything but certainly on this.

But whatever we do, we cannot accept another 20 years of digital platforms transforming American life with no accountability to the American people. We are still coming to terms with the harm from 20 years of unregulated social media. And we haven't come to grips with that. Every parent knows that. I shudder to imagine what our country will look like if we allow the same story to work its way out with AI.

That particular technology may be new, but we face a familiar American juncture. We have been here before. In the late 19th century, when Gilded Age robber barons abused their dominance of the coal, steel, and railroad industries to stifle competition, to exploit workers and undermine democracy, government stepped in to assert the public interest.

And, looking back, it is hard to imagine American life without the victories of that era--from basic antitrust laws and consumer protections to the direct election of Senators and the income tax. And I think, looking forward, we have similar questions to answer.

What will our response be to the digital robber barons of our era that addict our children, that corrode our democracy and plunder our privacy, our identity, and our attention? Will we allow them to continue transforming American life according to their self-interest, or will we step up to safeguard the interests, civil liberties, and the freedoms of the American people?

You know, especially for young people that are listening to this who might say: There is nothing you can do; the cat is out of the bag; you can't hold back the ocean--my answer to that is not very helpful because it is to recall something that young people here won't remember, but it is in my mind when I am talking to families and to young people in my State and I am listening to them talk about the mental health impacts of what they are facing.

It reminds me of when the Cuyahoga River caught on fire in Cleveland. And that moment, for those of us who were around then, was so extraordinary because that unbelievable image of a river in America burning, catching on fire, flames shooting into the sky, that is what finally forced us to come to grips with the pollution that we were allowing to flow freely into our watersheds and into our communities. The same thing with our air. And we finally did something about it, and the country is better as a result.

This is another case, by the way, just like those environmental regulations, where I think it is critically important for the United States, with our set of values and our commitments to democracy, to help set the international standards here and to not take standards from authoritarian regimes like China, for example.

And that is a big risk if we don't act here. But I think we will, and I think we can. And I think that is going to not only give the American people a chance to negotiate with these companies but give America the chance to lead on questions that are fundamentally important for humanity.

None of this is going to be easy. It never is. But when the stakes are nothing less than the health of our children and the health of our democracy, we have no choice but to try. And we

should try. I think we have a unique responsibility to lead here, not just for the reasons that I just said but also because, after all, it was American companies that blazed the trail into the digital age and invited all of humanity to follow. And we now live in the world that they created, for better and for worse, with its wonders and with its conveniences but also with its risks and dangers and difficult questions.

The same platforms that amplify a protester's cry for freedom in Iran also equip tyrants around the world to suppress democratic movements. The same technologies that liberated anyone to say anything also unleashed a perpetual cacophony, leaving all of us screaming louder to be heard. The dazzling features that brought the world online have also trapped us there, more connected but more alone, more aware but less informed--enthralled to our screens, growing more anxious, more angry and addicted by the day.

Overcoming all of this will not be easy, but we can't simply hide under our covers or scroll through TikTok and hope these problems are going to solve themselves. That is our job. The health and future of our children lie in the decisions that we make or the decisions that we fail to make.

Our objective, my objective to being here tonight, is not to hold the world back. In Colorado, we have always welcomed innovation, but we also understand that not all change is progress and that it is our job to harness these changes toward a better world.

We are the first generations to steer our democracy in the digital age, and it is an open question whether democracy can survive in the world that digital platforms have created. I may be wrong, but the evidence so far does not fill me with confidence. It fills me with urgency--urgency to reassert the public interest; to reclaim our public square and exercise in self-government; to level the playing field for America's teens, for our parents, for teachers and small businesses who, for 20 years, have battled alone against some of the most powerful companies in human history.

This is a fight worth having. This is a fight worth winning. And if we succeed, we may help save democracy not just in this country but around the world.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to legislative session and be in a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.

Madam President, I have 16 requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders.

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

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the en bloc consideration of the following set of resolutions: S. Res. 261, S. Res. 262, S. Res. 263, and S. Res. 264.

I ask unanimous consent that the resolutions be agreed to; the preambles, where applicable, be agreed to; and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, all en bloc.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the President of the Senate be authorized to appoint a committee on the part of the Senate to join with a like committee on the part of the House of Representatives to escort His Excellency Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of the Republic of India, into the House Chamber for the joint meeting at 4 p.m. on Thursday, June 22, 2023.

Mr. President, I understand that there is a bill at the desk that is due for a second reading.

The clerk will read the bill by title.

In order to place the bill on the calendar under the provisions of rule XIV, I would object to further proceeding.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand adjourned until 10 a.m. on Thursday, June 22; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and morning business be closed; that following the conclusion of morning business, notwithstanding rule XXII, the Senate proceed to the consideration of Calendar No. 100, H.J. Res. 44, and that at 11:45 a.m., the joint resolution be considered read a third time and the Senate vote on passage; further, that following disposition of the joint resolution, the Senate proceed to executive session to resume consideration of treaty document 112-8, postcloture, and that at 1:45 p.m., amendment No. 136 be withdrawn, and all time be considered expired.

Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask that it stand adjourned under the previous order.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the motion to reconsider with respect to the Rikelman nomination be considered made and laid upon the table and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of the following nominations en bloc: Calendar No. 46 through No. 52, No. 82 through No. 107, No. 110 through No. 113, No. 130 through No. 139, No. 180 through No. 205, No. 224 through No. 234, No. 236 through No. 246; that the nominations be confirmed en bloc; that the motions to reconsider to be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate; that no further motions be in order to any of the nominations; that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

Mr. President, this is now the sixth time that I have been on this floor asking for unanimous consent so that the U.S. Senate can do its job to ratify, to approve the nominations of flag officers' promotions at the Department of Defense.

That is something that we have done as a matter of course in the U.S. Senate for the last 230 years. No Senator in the history of the United States has ever prevented the Senate from proceeding with these nominations of flag officers.

I certainly don't have to tell the Presiding Officer how important these promotions are, how critical they are. And observer after observer after observer has said that it is in the national security interest of the United States, not surprisingly, for this Senate to confirm these promotions, to ratify these promotions.

We are compromising our national security when one Senator out of the whole 100 people decides that they are going to do something that no Senator has ever done in the history of the United States. No Senator has ever put a blanket hold on the promotions of flag officers, and there is a good reason for that, because if people are willing to play politics with that, they are playing politics with our national security. If they are willing to play politics with that, they are playing politics with the expectations of people who have spent an entire career defending the national security of this country, serving the public, serving in the Department of Defense, and who now have been promoted to a position of trust and responsibility.

By the way, this doesn't just affect those people who are getting that promotion. It also affects the people who are below them who can't get the promotion that now is no longer vacant because they are stuck in the job that they are in.

And I am shocked that somebody here would do this and pretend that this is just common: You know, this is the Senate. This is the way the Senate functions. This the way the Senate, as my colleague from Alabama has said, just does its business.

This is not how the Senate ever does its business. It is not how the Department of Defense does its business. And it, particularly, I think, should be particularly grieving to the American people because of the reasons the Senator from Alabama is doing what he is doing.

Tonight, we are here on basically the 1-year anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision. If you told me when I was in law school that a majority of the Supreme Court would join the majority opinion by Justice Alito that would say, if it wasn't a right or a freedom in 1868, it is not a freedom today-- if you told me that was the basis on which they were going to strip a fundamental freedom from the American people, I would have said that will never happen; it is never going to happen.

That is what is happening, and that is the result of a 50-year crusade to overturn a woman's right to choose in the United States of America. It is the first time since Reconstruction that we have given up a fundamental right here. It is first time since Reconstruction that we have been stripped of our fundamental rights and our freedoms have been diminished, that they have grown smaller in the hands of a 50-year campaign that was waged to put four people on the Supreme Court--a majority on the Supreme Court--who subscribe to the best named doctrine I have ever heard named in American political history or anybody's political history, and that is the doctrine of originalism, a doctrine that was dressed up to create a scenario or a legal set of arguments that somehow there were a group of people in this society with such mystical powers that they were capable--unlike anybody else in America, they would be capable of divining the originality intent of the Founding Fathers, putting aside the fact, tonight, that everybody in this Chamber who studied the Constitution even for 10 minutes knows that the Founders had fundamental disagreements among themselves and that the Constitution itself was a product of these fundamental differences--not their fundamental consensus but the fundamental differences. There was consensus on some issues. There was compromise on other issues.

But I dwell on that for a moment just to say, especially to people around here--maybe the age of the pages in the Senate--that you shouldn't give this theory of legal interpretation any great weight just because they dressed it up and called it something called originalism or they said somehow they could divine what the Founding Fathers said.

Fundamentally, what it came down to in the case of the Supreme Court was that because abortion wasn't a freedom, as they said, in 1868--a country where women didn't even have the right to vote in the United States yet--that it was not going to be a freedom today, and they stripped the American people of this freedom.

And there are people on this floor, people, you know, in the other party who spent 50 years trying to create a Supreme Court like this, basically since Ronald Reagan was our President. I think Ronald Reagan would be shocked by the extreme nature of the opinion that was rendered by Justice Alito, but who knows.

What we do know is this has been a 50-year campaign that has been waged. And the second that the Supreme Court did what they have been shooting for the last 50 years, what they started to say was: Don't worry about it. It is not a big deal. This is just reverting to States' rights. This fundamental constitutional right, this fundamental constitutional freedom, it is just being reverted to the States.

What has happened since then? Twenty States have banned abortion since that decision was made or restricted access. Nine of those States have no exceptions for rape or incest, like the State of Alabama, I think, which has an exception for the life of the mother.

So there is a lot to worry about in this decision. There is a lot to worry about for our men and women in uniform.

Before Dobbs, women in the military had at least some assurance that wherever the Pentagon sent them, they would have minimal access to reproductive care, a protected constitutional right, a protected freedom. That is no longer the case.

One of the very first calls I got after Dobbs was decided was from a woman whom I know in Colorado who was an Air Force officer. She was a pilot. She told me her personal story, and then she said: I don't understand how they could have possibly made the decision they made because this is a fundamental readiness issue.

Well, they didn't have to deal with that. They didn't have to deal with that fundamental issue of readiness. They didn't have to deal with the fundamental fact of how people every single day would be dealing with the loss of this right or the loss of this freedom because nothing in their interpretive doctrine requires them to do that. It only requires them to ask: Was it a freedom in 1868? Not a freedom today.

And in response to this shocking development--and it is shocking. You know, if you are the age of the pages who are here, if you are my daughter's age--my oldest daughter is 23 years old--you are wondering how it is possible. We were having this conversation the other day. We were driving by a billboard in Colorado advertising some stuff in Colorado. Amazing thing that we could be, on the one hand, legalizing marijuana in this country and on the other hand, banning abortion. If you told me that when I was a teenager in America, I would have said: What are you smoking? That is impossible. That is impossible, and that is where we are.

What the Supreme Court did in this case is fundamentally unpopular with the American people. The American people are angry that this has happened. It didn't happen by accident. This is a war that has been waged on a woman's right to choose. It is a war that has been waged for that doctrine of originalism.

And a lot of people and a lot of institutions in America are having to make adjustments in the wake of this shocking development, and the Pentagon is one of those places.

In the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, the Pentagon extended two policies that already exists for servicemembers if a medical procedure is not available near their duty station. One was the travel allowance. If you are not--if you can't get that knee operated on close to your duty station, we are going to pay you to travel. That is what the rules say today.

By the way, that is not a law that Congress passed. That is the DOD making regulations, which is how this works, to ensure that people serving our country are able to get the medical care that they need. We say: You know what, you will have to travel and because you have to travel to do this, we are going to give you paid leave to do that, to go get that knee surgery.

And what the DOD said in the wake of the Dobbs decision reversing Roe v. Wade is that if you are doing that because you made a decision to seek reproductive healthcare, you made a decision to have an abortion, we are going to apply the same rules to you that we apply for these other surgeries. We are not going to treat you differently. We are going to treat you exactly the same. That is what we are going to do. And if you need to travel because it is not available, you can do it.

So if you live in a State like Alabama, where my colleague who is blocking every single appointment or promotion in the DOD, where he lives--where, if you are a doctor and you perform an abortion, you can go to jail for 99 years--if you are living in a State like Alabama where abortion is banned, and there are very limited exceptions, if any exception, that you can go somewhere else to do it or the DOD will actually pay for you to go, and the DOD will give you paid leave. That is true whether you are seeking women's reproductive healthcare or you are going for knee surgery. But knee surgery isn't banned in 20 States in this country.

And there was one other thing that the Department of Defense said. They said: You know what, in the case of a pregnancy, you can tell your commanding officer, you can tell your command 20 weeks after you learned of your pregnancy. You don't have to tell people right away because things might happen in the early stages of pregnancy or you might make a decision to have an abortion in that time. This was an attempt by DOD to harmonize the rules at DOD for healthcare with the changes of the Supreme Court. It would be difficult, in my mind, at least, to imagine a more modest set of changes to the rules by DOD.

I thought about what could be more modest than saying: OK. If we are going to pay people who are getting

knee surgery or pay them paid leave, then we are going to do this for everybody else--for women who need reproductive healthcare. If we are going to pay people to travel for these other things, then we are going to let people travel.

I would think most people who have disagreements about abortion in this country might say: Well, that is fair. People have the right to be able to make this decision on their own--or they should have the right to make this decision on their own--and we shouldn't discriminate against people just because we might have a disagreement about abortion.

One thing this set of rules does not do in any shape or form is pay for an abortion. The Senator from Alabama has almost admitted as much on this floor. He said it is sort of tantamount to that. It is sort of this, and Senator Lee from Utah was saying it is sort of, but they know that it is not. That is not what the rules do. That is a debate that we are going to need to have here, but that is not what is happening here. What is happening here is the rules, as I stated.

The Senator from Alabama was so enraged by this, so infuriated by this, so angered by this, that he has now put a blanket hold on 249 military promotions to unwind those rules, to change those rules, to force the DOD to retreat and for the DOD to say: OK. From here on out, here is what we are going to do. We will pay for your travel for every single operation that you can't get at your duty station except if you are a woman who is seeking reproductive healthcare. If you are a woman who is going to have an abortion, we are going to discriminate against you. We are going to treat you differently than anybody else for every other purpose.

And we are going to give you paid leave because we understand that it is inconvenient to have to go somewhere else from your duty station. By the way, you haven't asked to be at that duty station. We are going to give you paid leave except if you are going because of reproductive healthcare, in which case, we are going to discriminate against women and say, uniquely: You do not get paid leave. And, I guess, you have to inform your commanding officer--somebody does--that you are pregnant sooner than the 20 weeks.

That is the world that the Senator from Alabama is trying to pursue here on this floor by holding every single military promotion, every flag officer promotion in the United States of America when Putin is invading Ukraine and China is sailing their shiny new navy all over the South China Sea. And I know he knows. He can't think it is a good idea.

He has come out here and said: Don't worry about it. There are acting people who are doing those jobs. Don't worry about it. The generals don't actually make decisions. It is the enlisted people who are doing all the work. Don't worry about it. Somehow this is going to help with the recruiting quagmire that he has pointed out.

I don't think, by the way, it is going to help with the recruiting quagmire that he has talked about out here; that women who are thinking about joining the military are going to know that their life, their lives, are in the hands of politicians in Washington, DC. Their very lives are in their hands. Their destiny is in their hands. And DOD can send them to a place where abortion is banned and doctors go to jail for 99 years if they perform an abortion or they might be lucky enough to serve in a place like Colorado where we codified Roe v. Wade anyway. We are the first State in America to do it.

And I don't have to tell the Presiding Officer, who, by the way, served and has been on the Armed Services Committee, how important these jobs are we are talking about: the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown; the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the Chief of the National Security Agency; the next military representative to NATO. You think that is an important job?

Soon this hold is going to include the next Commandant of the Marine Corps, the Army Chief of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations, putting our national security at risk.

Mr. President, I asked unanimous consent at the outset of tonight's proceedings if we could have unanimous consent on a number of these promotions.

I ask unanimous consent that those names and ranks and positions be printed in the Record.

Former Defense Secretary Gates, who, by the way, for those who don't know, was appointed by George W. Bush, said that the Senator from Alabama has made the military ``a pawn.'' That is a guy who served in a Republican administration. We have had Secretaries of Defense from both sides of the aisle who said the Senator from Alabama is hurting our national defense, hurting our national security, is playing politics with our Department of Defense.

What is his justification again? Well, it is no different than what I already said. He uses different words. He says that the DOD has made-- the Department of Defense--by making these rules, into an abortion travel agency. Those are his words: abortion travel agency. Well, that is not true.

We have already talked about the travel allowance and the absence without leave and more time to notify. I am sure there are some people--a handful of people in America--who couldn't see the wisdom in that, who would disagree with that. But I will bet you that the vast majority of people in this country, including people who have a different view on a woman's right to choose than I have, would say that women ought to

have the right, in the Department of Defense, to get travel paid for just like anybody else and to get paid leave and to be able to have 20 weeks to be able to tell their commanding officer that they are pregnant.

This is an effort to punish women who are seeking reproductive healthcare and forcing them, for reasons I don't understand, to tell their commanding officer the minute that they are pregnant.

This is reminiscent to me of the States after Dobbs--after the Court overturned Roe v. Wade--that started to look at bills to try to prevent women from traveling from States that had banned abortion to States that had made abortion legal.

It is kind of a shocking place for us to be in to hear people--a party--embrace freedom and talk about freedom all the time and still live in a place where we are talking about trying to ban Americans from traveling from one State to another or not allowing the Department of Defense to pay money or to use paid leave for women's reproductive healthcare the way they do for anything else.

I mean, I do believe strongly--I believe strongly in a woman's right to choose, and I believe it should be a decision that is made between a woman and her doctor. Most Americans agree with that. I know that there is profound moral disagreement on this question, and I respect that. But I think it is fair to say that the Senator from Alabama's position on this to not allow paid leave, to not allow paid travel, to not allow women to get 20 weeks before they have to tell their commanding officers that they are pregnant--the vast majority of Americans, I think, would agree that those rules are appropriate.

By the way, one of the other reasons the Senator from Alabama has objected to this is that he has said that if the Senate wanted those rules, it should have passed those rules. Well, the Senate doesn't write the rules like that. We didn't pass the rules that exist today that pay for people to be able to go get surgery or get paid leave in the military. Those are rules that the Department of Defense makes, having been delegated that authority by the Congress.

But, man, he is in a totally different place on this. He says that he is going to keep this hold until the Pentagon follows the law or Congress changes the law; that is the way we do it here in the Senate. That is a reference to what I was just talking about in terms of the rules.

By the way, this is not how we do this in the Senate. It is just not. It is not. And the evidence is that no one in the history of this body has ever done this--ever in the history of the country. Nobody has done this. Nobody has done it. And I would say that not only has nobody done it, nobody has done it and taken a political position that is so far outside the mainstream of conventional American politics.

I think the American people should be asking their Senators where they stand on this. There are only 100 people here. It is not hard to find our telephone numbers or our addresses. They should be asking them: Do you agree that we should be holding up every single flag officer's promotion because one Senator thinks that we shouldn't have paid leave or paid travel for women who need reproductive healthcare?

He says he is going to relent only when that is true. He is only going to relent when there is a DOD policy that pays for every other surgery that somebody could get, that has paid family leave for any other procedure that you could get, but bans that for abortion. That is an extreme position. That is an extreme position.

It is an extreme position to say that we are going to not allow people to have 20 weeks to make this decision.

There are no exceptions in Alabama for rape or incest. That may be part of the reason why he has the perspective he does. It is a State where, if you are a doctor and you perform an abortion, you could go to jail for 99 years. But that is not what the majority of Americans believe on this issue. It is not. It is not. I don't even think the majority of Alabamians believe that. But the majority of Americans certainly don't. The majority of Americans believe in a woman's right to choose. The majority of Americans believe that these questions are best decided between a woman and her doctor or her family and her faith if she has one.

That is what my State believes. We were the first State that decriminalized abortion before Roe was even decided and were the first State to codify a woman's right to choose. That is, I think, what freedom actually looks like.

Our State, Colorado, is the first State to codify Roe since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. And other folks were saying: You don't need to worry about the States. Now one of the largest States in America--a large State where something like 65 percent of the people support a woman's right to choose--the Governor of that State, the State of Florida, has banned abortion after 6 weeks. He signed that law at 11 at night when nobody would be around to see the way he was trampling on the freedom of his constituents.

Most Americans, if they knew this debate was happening, would be shocked, I think, to hear that what we are trying to do here is prevent women from getting paid leave; that we are trying to prevent women from having paid travel; that we are trying to prevent women from having 20 weeks to tell their commanding officer. That is what the Senator from Alabama is saying, that until that happens--until we are preventing women from those things, until we are discriminating against women who are seeking reproductive healthcare--he is going to continue to hold all these nominations. Forever?

I don't know how anybody can take that position and say they stand for freedom, but that is the position the Senator from Alabama has taken. I hope he will reconsider what he is doing because of the damage it is causing our national security at a moment when, as I said, Putin has invaded Ukraine and China is pressing, you know, its advantages in various places around the world.

We need the Senator to lift these holds, and I am going to keep coming to the floor until he does.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to legislative session to be in a period of morning business with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.

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

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

Mr. President, I understand there is a bill at the desk, and I ask for its first reading.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand adjourned until 10 a.m., on Wednesday, June 21; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and morning business be closed; that following the conclusion of morning business, notwithstanding rule XXII, the Senate resume consideration of the veto message with respect to S. J. Res. 11 and that the Senate vote on passage of the joint resolution, the objection of the President to the contrary notwithstanding, at 11:30 a.m.; further, that following the disposition of the veto message, the Senate proceed to executive session to resume consideration of the Merle nomination, and following the cloture vote on the Merle nomination, the Senate recess until 2:15 p.m. to allow for the weekly caucus meetings; further, that at 2:15 p.m., if cloture has been invoked, all time be considered expired and the Senate vote on the confirmation of the Merle nomination; finally, that if any nominations are confirmed during Wednesday's session, the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask that it stand adjourned under the previous order.