Floor Statements

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, I feel like, in fact, I have been here on a weekly basis to talk about this issue. And the reason I feel that way is that I have been here on a weekly basis to talk about what is happening in the wake of the Dobbs decision, which stripped the American people of the first fundamental freedom, the first fundamental right, that we have lost since reconstruction.

This was a 50-year effort on the part of certain people in this country, with an ideological commitment to overturn Roe v. Wade, who used every single mechanism that they could of our democracy and, now, ultimately, our judiciary, to enforce a legal outcome that the vast majority of the American people have never supported and, today, don't support.

We find ourselves on the floor today, I dare say, facing a resolution by the Senator from Alabama, whom I have been out here arguing with for the last 6 weeks--a resolution that would be decried by, I would bet, 9 out of 10 Americans. I will be fair: 8 out of 10 Americans. This is an effort in the wake of the Dobbs decision, which stripped the American people of this fundamental freedom, this fundamental right that families have relied on for 50 years.

Millions of veterans now live in States where abortion is banned. I will come to that in a second.

In an attempt to deal with the catastrophe in the wake of Dobbs, the VA has promulgated some rules to make it allowable in the Veterans' Administration. When a veteran or their family member has been raped, is the victim of incest, or when the life of the mother is at stake, what the VA has said--because we are dealing with the overturning of Roe v. Wade--in those cases, those three limited cases, we are going to allow people to get access to care at the Veterans' Administration.

That has set off the Senator from Alabama, who is now trying to get the Senate to pass a resolution to ban that so that veterans and their families who are the victims of rape, who are the victims of incest, or where the life of the mother is at stake, cannot get medical care at the Veterans' Administration. In a State like his, which has banned abortion, that is what is at stake this week.

A month ago, we were on this floor because the same Senator from Alabama was putting a blanket hold on every single flag officer's promotion in the U.S. military. Think about that. That sounds impossible. That sounds like an exaggeration.

Madam President, the reason it sounds that way to you is because, first of all, you are a reasonable person, but, second of all, it has never happened in the history of this Senate before--that somebody has held up the promotion of every single flag officer, put a blanket hold on.

Now, that is not because of what the VA is doing. That is because of what the Department of Defense is doing, because the Department of Defense, again, in the wake of Dobbs--the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade--in the wake of that, DOD has said: If you are serving in a State where abortion is banned, we will pay for your travel from that State to another State. We will say that you don't need to use unpaid leave to get to that other State.

And we have said--DOD, not me, has said: If you want to take a little longer to talk to your commanding officer about one of the most personal decisions anybody could make, any family could make, any woman could make, we are going to give you a little bit of extra time to do that.

Those are the three things. I bet 80 percent of the American people support those things, and I guarantee you more than 80 percent of the American people

do not support the idea that we are going to hold up every single flag officer who is coming here for a promotion, at a moment when Putin has invaded Ukraine and China is rattling their saber over their idiosyncratic view of how the world ought to work.

I heard that somebody today said: Well, this veterans rule violates the Hyde amendment.

First of all, the Hyde amendment, as is well known, doesn't even apply to the VA. And, if it did--guess what--there are three exceptions to the Hyde amendment: rape, incest, and the health of the mother.

So they are even trying to turn back Hyde. That is what they are trying to do on the floor of this Senate, and they are messing with the readiness of the American Armed Forces to do it.

What brought us here?

What brought us here was the Dobbs decision. What brought us here was a Court packed--packed--with a wish list of people who, for 50 years, have been fighting for an originalist--so-called originalist; made up, made up--but an originalist conception of constitutional law, and they finally found a guy in the form of President Donald Trump who was willing to put these people on the Court.

And they gave the Court the majority they needed to eviscerate Roe v. Wade, to strip this fundamental right, to strip this fundamental freedom, and to do it with contempt; to not wrestle with the question of what is going to happen to people serving in the Armed Forces of the United States if they are unlucky enough to need an abortion and they live in a State like Alabama, for example, where, if you are a doctor and you perform an abortion, you can go to jail for 99 years--although, admittedly, admittedly, there is an exception in Alabama for the life of the mother.

This end point--I hope it is an end point. This end point of that 50- year war on freedom, war on Roe v. Wade, war on a set of expectations that women, in particular, have in this country, but that families have in this country--that war was brought to a conclusion, in some sense, by a majority opinion written by Justice Scalia that, essentially--read it, read it--essentially came down to this: If it wasn't a right in 1868, it is not a right in 2023. If it wasn't a freedom in 1868, it is not a freedom today.

Forget that, at that time of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, Black people and women didn't even have the right to vote. They didn't even have the right to vote. But in the 21st century, when we are meant to compete in a global economy, in a society that, by any measure, is still profoundly unequal but far more equal than it was in those days, where women do have the right to vote, where Black people do have the right--thank God--in this country to vote, we are reading the language in 1868 and saying: Well, was it a right or a freedom then? That is how we are going to decide whether it is one today.

In the early 1990s, when I was in law school and when we knew that it was at the dawn of originalism--I mean, that was happening right then. It was part of the Reagan revolution. It was part of law and economics. It was part of making the shareholder the supreme being in the United States of America--part of that whole measure, that whole time period in the country's history. That is when some genius--and they were a genius--came up with the word ``originalism'' to describe a legal ideology that says: We are only going to look in the rearview mirror to figure out what our rights are today--as if they could divine the intent of the Founding Fathers on a question like abortion, who, by the way, had massive disagreements among themselves.

Anybody who has ever read even a signpost or a tourist--you know, some sort of signpost on the side of Independence Hall in Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia--knows how many disagreements the Founders had with themselves. The idea that somehow you are going to divine their one view about what the Constitution should say is preposterous. But here we are. Here we are.

And we were told when this happened: Don't worry about it. You know, this is just a matter of the Supreme Court sending this right, sending this fundamental freedom--this fundamental freedom--back to the States. That is all. It is just an exercise in federalism.

Well, since this happened, since Dobbs was passed, 18 States have banned abortion. I have one kid who is about the age of the pages now. Two others are older than the pages now. I am telling you, I was with my daughter Caroline the other day, riding through Colorado, looking at the billboards as we went by, and I said to her: Man, Caroline--she is now 23--if you had told me 20 years ago that in 2023 we would be living in a country that was legalizing marijuana and banning abortion, I would not have believed you. I would not have believed you.

She doesn't believe it either.

As my friend Jon Tester, my friend the farmer from Montana, says, his daughter is having to fight for rights that her mother never had to fight for because her grandmother won these rights. And now we are rolling it all back because the Supreme Court majority that Donald Trump made possible after all these years, after all this effort to strip the American people of this freedom, has decided, if it is not a right in 1868, it is not a right today.

So 18 States have banned abortion. Nine have no exceptions for rape or incest. There have been now restrictions on freedom to travel. Texas famously has put $10,000 bounties. It is like the Wild West, all of a sudden, where if you are a friend or a neighbor who is driving somebody to access abortion services and somebody catches you, says you shouldn't have been doing it, you can get a $10,000 bounty.

In Florida, in the Sunshine State--I think Florida is the third largest State in the country--one of them, the third largest State in the country--in broad daylight--actually, to be honest with you, it was at 11 o'clock at night--the Governor has now signed a 6-week ban on abortion.

One in three women don't even know that they are pregnant. A third of women don't even know that they are pregnant at 6 weeks.

I don't know whether the Governor of Florida knows that or doesn't know that, but it is an interesting question: Which would be worse, him knowing it or not knowing it?

And, now, all of a sudden, 9 million veterans and their families, including 2 million female veterans, live in States that have banned abortion or restricted it in ways that would have been unimaginable to my daughter Caroline, to families all over the country.

And, as I said, in some limited way of dealing with it, the VA announced these rules. But these narrow rules that have to do with rape and incest and the life of the mother, they are not enough for the Senator from Alabama, and, this afternoon, he is forcing a vote to strip away the VA policy and impose a position on every veteran in America that is more extreme than his own State.

Hyde doesn't apply to the VA, and, even if it did, there are exceptions for rape, for incest, for the life of the mother. That is not extreme enough for them. His resolution would ensure that veterans who have been raped, who are victims of incest, whose life is at risk, can't seek an abortion at the VA, along with their spouses and their dependents.

Even in Alabama there is an exception for the life of the mother, and they have one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country.

I am going to come to an end because my colleague is here from Nevada. I have two colleagues here from Nevada. So I am confused. I said I am going to finish, but I will take a couple of minutes and then finish, but by saying that it is tragic that we have to have this vote in 2023. It is.

This is a tragedy. It is a tragedy. It is a spectacle. It is an embarrassment. But at least people will have the opportunity to know where every Member of the Senate stands, and they are going to understand what a 50-year political effort to strip America of this freedom looks like.

You know, there was a survey in a poll last month in Florida, and my colleague won't be surprised to know this: 75 percent of Florida opposes a 6-week ban; 61 percent of the GOP in Florida opposes a 6-week ban. Let that sink in.

I don't know. I am not a great politician, unlike some people. But, maybe, that is why he was signing it at 11 o'clock at night. Maybe that is why, when the Governor of Florida signed it,

he sent out a tweet that didn't say he had signed a 6-week ban on abortion in Florida, because 75 percent of the people there oppose it, just like the majority of Americans.

And so I think we should defeat this resolution. I think the American people should take note of every single vote that is cast here by these Senators.

But, really, as important as that, we need to understand what has happened to our politics, what has happened to our Supreme Court through this 50-year war on American freedom and this 50-year war on a woman's right to choose.

And we need to come together as a country and codify a woman's right to choose so the next generation of Americans has the benefit that the last 50 years of Americans have had.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I appreciate so much the Senator from Hawaii's perspective on this really important issue. And it is a really important issue.

I mean, there has been some discussion on the other side about how for 50 years, there has been a consensus in this Chamber about how we treat these issues, ignoring completely what the Dobbs decision has done to this country, which is to strip a 50-year constitutional right--to strip a 50-year constitutional freedom--from the American people. It is the first time since Reconstruction that a right has been stripped from the American people by the Supreme Court. It has been a 50-year crusade--an agenda by the allies of the people across this aisle to accomplish that.

It was a lot earlier today that I heard: Well, I didn't learn that in law school, I didn't learn that in law school, about the First Amendment in their debate about TikTok. Well, when I was in law school, that is when originalism was injected into the bloodstream of conservative legal thought in this country. It had not existed before. It was something that was invented by Justice Scalia when he was a law professor, and it was grabbed onto by a lot of people on the other side of the aisle to justify a deeply conservative view of economic history in America.

I would ask my colleagues to allow me to give the rest of my speech before they use profanity on the floor of the Senate to describe what I am talking about.

I thank the Presiding Officer.

I am not offended by that. I just think some of the people at home may not want to hear that kind of language on the floor of the Senate-- but that is because they know what I am saying is true about originalism.

Because of their efforts and because they were able to elect Donald Trump, who was not actually read in on the joke, we ended up with three people on the Supreme Court who subscribe to that originalist view and who decided, following Justice Scalia, that if it were not a freedom in 1868, then it is not a freedom in 2023, even though it has been a freedom and a right for the last 50 years in this country.

So don't come here and say that there was somehow a consensus here when that freedom and that right has been stripped from the American people by the Supreme Court.

To my colleague from Alabama, who has left the floor--by the way, just on that point, he has now twice misrepresented my actions on this floor. So I ask unanimous consent that this article from Politico, which my colleague from Alabama put in the Record the last time he was here, misrepresenting my record, be printed in the Record. I would like to put exactly the same article in the Record so people can actually see the truth of my record

I want to thank--he is gone--the Senator from Alabama for finding an article about me in Politico because it is so seldom that any article is written about me. I am grateful that he has called attention to it. He is not here for me to say thank you for that.

But he is now on the floor, doing something that no Senator has ever done--holding up every single flag officer's promotion in this country--180 of them or so, now maybe 600 of them. We have the head of the Seventh Fleet and the head of the Fifth Fleet. These are vital offices that he is holding up.

He just said: We have got enough generals. We have enough generals.

Why is he doing it? Why is he doing it? He is doing it because he is offended by a regulation that the Department of Defense has promulgated in the wake of the Dobbs decision of reversing Roe v. Wade--stripping the American people of this fundamental right, stripping the American people of this fundamental right. In the wake of that, the Secretary of Defense had the nerve to say: If you are serving--through no decision that you have made--in a State like Alabama which banned abortion and you have to travel to another State to get an abortion, we will pay for that travel--travel.

If you need a little bit of extra time, the regulations say, before you go to your commanding officer and tell them that you have to have a medical procedure, like abortion, it gives you a little extra time to do that.

The third thing it does is that it says that if you have to leave the State of Alabama because you can't have access to abortion there, then you don't have to use paid leave.

Those are the three things this rule does. I am coming to an end, Mr. President. That is all it does. That is all it does.

In his world, he would like to have a place where people did not have their travel paid for, they had to use their paid leave, and they had to tell their commanding officer immediately. That is the America he wants to live in because he lives in a State--

I would ask the Senate for 30 more seconds.

Thank you.

He is entitled to his opinion, certainly, and the State of Alabama has a totally different approach to a woman's right to choose than Colorado does, and I respect that even though we differ. But in Alabama, there are no exceptions for rape or incest. In Alabama, if you are a doctor who has committed an abortion, you could go to jail for 99 years. In Alabama, they are trying to say that those women who use chemicals that many women use--

--to end their abortion--all we are saying is--

--we need to recognize what has happened since Dobbs, and we need----

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I have nine 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, this week, the Senate debates whether to end two authorizations of the use of military force against Iraq. Congress passed the first authorization in 1991 for the original Gulf war, a strategic and narrowly scoped campaign to liberate Kuwait and punish Saddam Hussein's unlawful aggression.

Congress passed the second one in 2002, paving the way for the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq and the biggest blunder in the history of American foreign policy.

We have spent far too little time on this floor considering the legacy of both wars, and I want to thank Senators Kaine and Senator Young for this long overdue debate about the constitutional responsibility of Congress in our foreign policy.

Most Americans, I think, would be surprised to learn that Congress has much of a role in foreign policy because for virtually my entire time in the Senate, there has been very little evidence that we have played one.

The Founders envisioned a very specific role for Congress, and it wasn't to micromanage foreign policy. They knew matters of war and peace required a level of coherence and action at odds with a legislative branch that, by design, often moves slowly and encourages disagreement and some would say sometimes even incoherence.

But if the Founders had a reason for giving the Executive broad flexibility to conduct war, they also had a reason for giving Congress sole power to declare war.

They wanted to make it hard to start a war, not easy. They knew that Presidents would often find war tempting as a means to amass power, run roughshod over our constitutional checks and balances. From their study of ancient times, they also understood the ways in which endless war threatened and undermined democracy.

Here is what James Madison wrote in 1795, just 6 years after ratification of the Constitution:

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the

most to be dreaded. . . . No nation could preserve its

freedom in the midst of continued warfare.

The Founders understood this because they studied history. They knew our history better than we know it ourselves, and they sought to apply its lessons to decisions in their time. For example, they read about how the 27-year war between Athens and Sparta corroded Athenian democracy from within by straining its economy, by feeding unrest, and creating a vacuum for strongmen who were peddling easy answers to difficult questions.

That is why they gave Congress--not the President--the sole power to declare war, but also to ratify treaties, confirm our military and diplomatic leaders, and approve our budget for national security. And they expected Congress to oversee foreign policy actively on behalf of the American people.

If we look back over the last 30 years--twice the length of time that the pages on this floor have even been

alive. If you look at the last 30 years from when Congress first authorized the use of force against Iraq until today, what can we say about how Congress has lived up to its responsibility? Has Congress fulfilled the responsibility that the Framers gave it? I am afraid there is not very much that is good in that record.

For 30 years, I would argue, this body has been derelict in its responsibility, and it has come at a terrible time and with a terrible price--a terrible price. If we go back three decades to the early nineties, I had just started law school. The first President Bush was in the White House, and we were living in the early years of a post- Cold War world. President Bush had inherited what he called a new world order following the collapse of the Soviet Union. We didn't really appreciate it at the time, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States lost a fundamental organizing principle that had been with us, really, for decades.

The Cold War was not just a fight against the Soviets; it was a fight against tyranny. For Americans of my generation, the Cold War defined our foreign policy for good and for ill. It also defined us as a people and defined who we were not. It gave us purpose. It unified us. It made us deliberate about our role in the world.

The Presiding Officer may have read today--I did--a new poll from the University of Chicago where, for the first time, there is a vast minority of Americans who say patriotism is important to them; for the first time, there is a vast minority of Americans who say religion is important to them. You know, the vast majority of people are worried that they are not going to provide something better for the next generation, which is where I think a lot of that comes from.

But think about that change--that change--from when we were being raised to how people feel about it today. It is dramatic. I would say we can't give up. There is a lot of patriotic business for us to do, not just on the floor of the Senate but in America today. I would argue--and I will in a minute--there is as much for us to do now as when we were in the Cold War and we were having our fight with the Soviet Union.

Those principles of sort of engagement and disengagement, of agreement and disagreement, but a way of thinking about the world also had an important effect in terms of constraining our actions, limiting, to some extent, our behavior abroad and disciplining our politics at home.

In the fight against communism, we made more than our fair share of egregious mistakes, to be sure. Among them--the worst--the Vietnam war. But I would say, still, our foreign policy in those days and the values that underlay it in total, in sum, strengthened our democracy at home and advanced U.S. interests abroad--not perfectly but mostly.

The fall of the Berlin Wall disoriented us. Could America continue to lead the world without the moral and political organizing principle of an ideological foe? That was the question. One answer was to reject the question, to sort of assume it away; that to imagine that the triumph over Soviet communism meant that the liberal order--our democracy and capitalism--had prevailed. And there were people writing books about the end of history, if the Presiding Officer will remember, saying that is exactly what had happened.

When Saddam Hussein threatened that new world order by invading his neighbor Kuwait, the U.S. rallied the world to drive him out. In just 7 months, our military routed the Iraqi Army, liberated Kuwait, and effectively put Saddam Hussein in a box. George H.W. Bush showed restraint. The first President Bush showed restraint. No country in the world--no tyrant in the world--was more locked down by our no-fly zone than Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

We had built international support from all over the world for what George Bush had done. You think it wasn't a hard decision for him to say we could go into Baghdad--we could go in and get that terrible dictator--but he knew we didn't have an answer for the sectarian violence that would break out in the aftermath of toppling Saddam Hussein, so he showed restraint.

I think, at the time, our total and swift victory gave confidence to those who believed that our political project was done; that history had ended; that we had finally swept tyranny into the dustbin of history; and that all we had to do was clap our hands, sit back, and watch democracy spread.

Unfortunately, as is often the case in human events--as is always the case in human events--reality turned out to be far messier. That naive optimism ended when al-Qaida flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and crashed a plane in Pennsylvania, murdering 3,000 of our fellow Americans.

So the first decade of the 2000s was characterized by a single-minded focus on responding to the pain, to the shock, and to the tragedy of 9/ 11.

All of this, I think, had an incredibly disorienting effect. Since those times, since those days, we have been fighting not a Cold War against a single rival power but a perpetual Global War on Terror that finds enemies everywhere and has led to catastrophic decisions; a perpetual war on terror that has terrorized us. And this endless war led Congress to cede vast authority to the President to wage that war, surrendering our constitutional responsibility to set the boundaries, to debate the wisdom, and oversee the use of lethal force in the name of the American people, which is one of the reasons that we were sent here in the first place.

In the first Gulf war, Congress's deference to the executive had no significant consequences because the first Bush administration actually had a coherent strategy based on limited and achievable objectives: liberate Kuwait, defeat the Iraqi Army, contain Saddam.

After 9/11, congressional deference cost the American people and our leadership in the world dearly.

In Afghanistan, what began as a limited mission to destroy al-Qaida metastasized into a 20-year campaign to transform the country into a liberal democracy, something Afghanistan would never become--certainly not over that time period and probably not in our own lives--and a cost of over 2,300 American servicemembers, nearly 4,000 contractors, and over 46,000 Afghan civilians.

In 2002, when the second President Bush came to Congress and misrepresented the threat of weapons of mass destruction--which Saddam had destroyed years before and which many of our allies and our own intelligence Agencies doubted that he had--when they claimed that Saddam's secular regime was somehow tied to al-Qaida, a terrorist group driven by religious fanaticism, when they said the war could pay for itself with Iraqi oil, conclude in months, not years, and that we could somehow turn a Nation whose sectarian rivalries Saddam had prevented from exploding through violence and oppression into yet another pluralistic democracy; most people in Congress went along for the ride--except, I should say, for a few of my colleagues still in this body, including Senator Durbin; Senator Murray; Senator Reed; Senator Stabenow; Senator Wyden; my former senior Senator Mark Udall, then a Member of the House--I say to the pages that are here: Mark their names into history books for the vote that they took. That was a courageous vote that they took. I believe the Presiding Officer's--he is not here--but I believe the Presiding Officer's predecessor, Chairman Leahy from the great State of Vermont, took that courageous vote as well.

Except for the handful of them and my colleague Mark Udall, then a Member of the House--except for them, almost no one here asked if there was even a strategy or what it was. They didn't ask how toppling a Sunni dictator in a Shia majority country would strengthen Iran. And I can assure you, they didn't ask what China was doing, as we committed ourselves to a second nation-building project in the Middle East.

And by acquiescing to the President, Congress essentially cut off the American people from the vital debate about the true cost and consequences of the war.

And in the end, the cost was terrible. The Iraq war killed over 4,600 American servicemembers and over 3,600 contractors. Over 50 times--50 times--more troops were killed or injured in the post-war insurgency than in the original march to Baghdad. The war killed

200,000 Iraqi civilians and displaced over 9 million people. It left the country in ruins and its identity in tatters.

Twenty years later, Iraqis are still trying to pick up the pieces. Since the war, corruption has stolen $150 billion of Iraq's wealth. That is over half of the country's entire GDP last year. Twenty years later, Iran is also in a stronger position than ever, seizing on the vacuum we created with proxies from Iraq to Syria to Lebanon to Yemen, threatening our troops in the region and vital allies like Israel.

China is cutting deals today. Having avoided those 20 years of bedlam, they are now showing up and making peace agreements between the Iranians and the Saudis, not having paid the price that we've paid. And 20 years later, America's global leadership and credibility have yet to recover as a result of the decisions that we made.

In the name of spreading freedom across the globe, we, instead, spread images of chaos and civil strife, of torture at Abu Ghraib, of waterboarding and black sites--all violations of the values that we claimed to serve; that I believe we do serve.

And to pay for it all, we borrowed $8 trillion from our children--$8 trillion--from the next generation of Americans.

In fact, we were so committed to not paying for that war, to not sacrificing the way our parents and grandparents did when they were engaged in wars, we were so committed to not bearing the burden that we cut taxes twice and borrowed another $10 trillion from our children to pay for those.

Imagine what we could have done for this country if we had spent that $18 trillion here at home, the good-paying jobs we could have created, the 21st-century industries and infrastructure we could have built, the opportunities we could have created for the next generation of Americans. Instead, from their perspective, we would have been better off lighting that $18 trillion on fire.

I bring this up not to relitigate the past but to remind us of the profound cost to America and the world of giving Presidents a blank check in foreign policy, of shirking our constitutional responsibility, our duty to provide real oversight and hold the Executive accountable to our democratic values, to the rule of law, and to the voices and opinions of the American people.

We should acknowledge that there will be moments when doing so will be inconvenient for us in the short term. There are countries around the world that are not inconvenienced by the set of values we purport to live by. The fact that they are inconvenient doesn't mean they are not right.

As the Founders understood, there is always going to be a temptation to trade freedom for the illusion of security, to act instead of consult, to ignore our commitment to human rights and the rule of law for expediency, or to turn a blind eye to corruption or incompetence by a President of your own party--especially of your own party. But over the long term, our willingness to resist those temptations I think is what makes America different. It is what makes our foreign policy different at its best. It is what has made us a beacon to the world even if our light has flickered at times. It is why the world doesn't look to China or to Russia for moral leadership; it looks to us. Because American foreign policy at its best has never been about serving the whims of a tyrant or a party boss; it is about serving the American people and offering a better vision for humanity through the power of our example and our partnership with the world. And it is why we in Congress have to take our roles seriously in this democracy--we really do--to take our obligation to the American people just as seriously and not simply honor our constitutional balance of power in the breach but every single time.

So my hope is that this modest vote we are going to take is the beginning of a new commitment by Congress to fulfill our constitutional responsibility, to bring the American people back into this conversation about what our global leadership should look like in the 21st century, and to work in partnership with the President to define a new organizing principle for our leadership because we don't have another 30 years to wait, and the whole world is watching.

I, for one, know that--I think when we pick up the enduring values that reflect our foreign policy at its best, that reflect a sense of justice here at home as well, when we can stand for both freedom and for opportunity, which we have decade after decade after decade, there is a coalition of countries all around the world that would rather sign up to that vision than sign up to the tyranny that is on offer from other societies.

But we have to remember what the Founders told us. In our time, we have to exercise this responsibility that we have here in Congress, and we need to do the work faithfully that the American people sent us here to do.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to executive session to consider the following nominations en bloc: Calendar Nos. 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, and 52; that the nominations be confirmed en bloc; that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate; that no further motions be in order to any of the nominations; and that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action and the Senate then resume legislative session.

Mr. President, I appreciate very much the Senator from Alabama coming back down here, and I am sorry for inconveniencing him, but I think that we have had a difference of opinion about this that really matters and is real.

First of all, I appreciate the fact that he read a rare headline about my work here, but he mischaracterized what I did, which is to hold only two civilian nominees at the Defense Department--two civilian nominees. He has held every single--all flag officers, promotions of uniformed flag officers from the Department of Defense. That has not happened in the history of the U.S. Senate since 1789. And certainly my hold of two civilians is not precedent for what he is doing.

He talks about how the Defense Department can't change the rules on its own. Nobody said the Defense Department changed the rules on its own. I didn't see him come down here when the Defense Department said they would pay for travel for LASIK. I didn't see him come down here and complain when they said they would pay for travel for bunions. That is not in the statute either. That is not our responsibility; that is DOD's responsibility.

DOD, with a set of reasonable rules, is trying to deal with the aftermath of Dodd, trying to help women in uniform access care. And I believe the aftermath of Dodd created a real threat to our national security and to our readiness. Women are the fastest growing population in the military.

The Senator from Alabama said it exactly right: They are having huge recruiting challenges. It is very hard for me to see how American women who have had access for 50 years to a fundamental constitutional right and have now had it stripped away by the Supreme Court of the United States are going to enlist if they have no way to know whether or not they are going to have access to reproductive care. And that is not me saying it; the last time the Senator from Alabama and I, my friend, were on the floor, he said there would be thousands and thousands of people who would be affected by this--thousands and thousands. That is a readiness issue.

As the Senator from Alabama knows very well, when people volunteer to serve in our Armed Forces, they don't get to decide where they are going to serve, but before Dodd, they had at least some assurance that their fundamental rights would be protected, that their right to reproductive health care or to abortion would be protected--not anymore because the Supreme Court has ripped that right away. After Dodd, we have seen the effect of that.

Eighteen States have banned abortion. Eighteen States have banned abortion; 9, even in cases of rape and incest.

They passed or they have introduced restrictions to travel.

Alabama doesn't have exceptions for rape and incest, and a doctor can go to prison in Alabama for 99 years if they perform an abortion.

There are even State legislatures down there that are trying to use chemical endangerment statutes that are meant to deal with methamphetamines to charge women who have accessed abortion.

In Texas--my friends in Texas--there are $10,000 bounties that are being put out there to try to stop friends and neighbors from driving their loved ones to the clinic.

Florida is trying to ban abortion at 6 weeks. One in three women in this country who are pregnant don't know they are pregnant in 6 weeks. I don't know if the Governor of Florida understands that--or maybe he does understand it. I don't know which is worse.

After Dodd, it is not hard to see why women might think twice about signing up.

Rand has said that there is going to be more attrition, that it is going to hurt readiness. To help address these challenges, the Pentagon announced three policies: a travel allowance so that people could actually have help being paid to go from a State they hadn't asked to go to, to one where they could have access to care; absence without leave so they wouldn't be charged--you know, they are paid leave to be able to address something that other people in the military don't have to address; and more time to notify their commanding officers of what happened. That is it. Those are the three things.

Those policies are so unreasonable in the mind of the Senator from Alabama that he has done something that no Senator has ever done, which is to put a blanket hold on all flag officers and their promotion in the Department of Defense. And that is just the three modest things. That has nothing to do with basing. It has nothing to do with how DOD is going to address Dobbs in the future.

I don't think that people in these States who have not volunteered to be in these States should have to be subject to the draconian laws of these States and not have the opportunity, if they want to have the opportunity, to travel and have their travel paid for, just as we do with LASIK surgery. That is what he calls an ``abortion travel agency''--the Senator from Alabama.

Again, we didn't hear about this when it was about LASIK. We didn't hear about it when it was about bunions. We heard about it when it was about a 50-year fundamental right on behalf of the American people.

This hurts our security. It hurts our readiness at a time when Russia and China are combining together.

So I beg the Senator from Alabama to relent. We can have a disagreement about--we will have a disagreement. I come from a State that was one of the first States--the first State in America--to codify a woman's right to choose before Roe v. Wade was decided. I come from a State that was the first State in America to ratify a woman's right to choose in the wake of the Dobbs decision. And he comes from a State that views it very differently.

I respect his position on this, just like I do everybody in America who disagrees with my position on this. What I don't respect is the idea that we can't move past this blanket hold on every single flag officer that is up for promotion just because the Senator doesn't agree with the majority position that is reflected in the Department of Defense's modest rules.

I know that the vote is coming, and, at this point, I will relent and yield the floor.

I will just say to my friend from Alabama: I wish him luck, and I wish Alabama luck tomorrow night. I look forward to the next time that we are here addressing this fundamental disagreement because I believe the American people are staggered by what the Dobbs Court has done. I believe the American people are staggered by what has happened because an originalist majority of the Supreme Court--something that was unimaginable when I was graduating from law school, not that many years ago--has now decided, if it was not a right in 1848, it is not a right in the United States of America today.

I don't believe that is where the American people are, and I don't believe that is where the Department of Defense is.

I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, I wanted to come down here because a single Senator in this Chamber, a colleague from Alabama, has put a blanket hold on every pending nominee and promotion of flag officers at the Department of Defense.

As far as we can tell--and this might be the intention of the Senator from Alabama; I don't know whether he knows this or not--there is no precedent for what the Senator from Alabama is doing. There is no precedent for what he has done. It has never been done, stopping the U.S. Senate from taking up promotions for uniformed military officers. These are promotions that happen to people as a group. These are flag officers at the Department of Defense that we have to ratify here in the Senate.

And we asked the Senate Armed Services--I couldn't believe it when I heard it. I couldn't believe it. But we asked the Senate Armed Services Committee if this had ever happened in the history of America, the history of the Senate; and the answer was, they have no record of that ever happening before.

And it is happening at an incredibly unusual and difficult time in the world's history with the biggest land war in Europe since the Second World War, China's saber-rattling in the Pacific. We just had an hours-long open session of the Intelligence Committee to hear the report from the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the head of the NSA, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. All of these folks were coming together to say: This is what the threat looks like. This is the global threat that America faces--a geopolitical landscape more unsettled than at any point in my lifetime, Madam President.

My understanding is that the Senator from Alabama has placed this unprecedented blanket hold because he objects to the Department of Defense's new policies to help our servicemembers access reproductive care. And I will have more to say about that in a minute; but I don't think I should wait any longer to advance these personnel. We should get this done today.

Therefore, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to executive session to consider the following nomination en bloc: Calendar Nos. 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52; that the nominations be confirmed en bloc; that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate; that no further motions be in order to any of the nominations; that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action, and the Senate then resume legislative session.

Madam President, I appreciate the words of the Senator from Alabama and his conviction. I will say he said I am mistaken on the facts.

I think one thing you didn't hear was any dispute at all that this is the first time in American history that a U.S. Senator has held up the promotion of flag officers--the first time. It is the first time in American history that any of the more than 2,000 people that have served in this body--but less than 3,000 people--have seen fit to hold up the promotions of people at DOD. That is not a fact that is in dispute, Madam President, as we sit here today on the floor.

You know, I have spent a lot of time when I come down to this floor-- and I am on the floor listening to people's speeches, or I am thinking about my own--thinking about the history of America. And broadly speaking--it has not always been true at every moment or at every juncture--but broadly speaking, the American story has been a story of expanding freedoms and expanding opportunity for the American people. It is the story of one generation after another putting their shoulder to the wheel to make our country more democratic, more fair, and more free.

It can be easy, when you are on this floor, to think about those victories as ancient history, as old as the marble in this Chamber. But it was only 100 years ago, our grandmothers' generation--our grandmothers' generation--when women in America didn't have the right to vote. That is just 100 years ago. It took 100 years for the people that were fighting for women to have the self-evident right to vote to vote, and they didn't get it until 100 years after they fought. And it was only 100 years ago that they got it.

It was only when I was born in the middle of the 1960s that we attempted, finally--finally--after the Civil War in the United States, after Reconstruction and then the redemption that came after that, after the Jim Crow

laws and the redlining that had happened in the United States of America--it was only after that that we finally tried to secure the rights of African-American citizens to vote, a promise that had been made after the Civil War was over and never fulfilled. I would argue it hasn't been fulfilled to this day.

By the way, when I was born in 1964--I was at the African American Museum the day before I got sworn into this body, this time with my family, and I said to one of my nephews--we were walking through the slavery exhibit--I said, I was born in 1964, which, to him, admittedly, that seemed like ancient history. But the year I was born was just 100 years since the people in this country still enslaved human beings. Just two short lifetimes divided when I was born from when we still enslaved human beings.

It was even more recent in our country's history--just 50 years ago, Madam President--before we secured the constitutional right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade, putting an end to the days when women in this Nation--when our mothers and our grandmothers--were forced into back- alley abortions in the United States of America, forced to carry pregnancies to term, and forced to live without any freedom to chart their own course about their lives or their families' lives. That was just 50 years ago when the Court in Roe v. Wade said there is a constitutional right at stake here; there is a constitutional right that we are going to protect here.

And in all of these cases, in my judgment, our fellow citizens have sought to broaden the horizon of freedom and equality in America. And our progress has never been in a straight line. The pages here should know that. We have always been in a battle. We have always been in a battle in this country between the highest ideals that have ever been expressed on the page by human hand, the words in the Constitution of the United States and the worst impulses in human history--the worst impulses in human history--in our case: human slavery and the genocide that was perpetrated on the Native American population that was here at a time when those incredible words were etched into the Constitution that are etched all over the walls of this beautiful building--a building, by the way, that itself, I say to the pages that are here, was built by enslaved human beings. And we are in that fight today.

Today, we face a decades-long campaign that stretches back, at least, to when Ronald Reagan was elected President. It is a battle that has been mostly invisible until recently to the American people, even though it has transformed American life. While that campaign had many objectives over its 40 or 50 years or so--those four decades--one of those objectives was to confirm a majority of Justices on the Supreme Court who subscribed to a radical constitutional interpretation called originalism, a legal document that was invented in the 1970s.

My colleague from Louisiana is here today. He is a distinguished lawyer. He might disagree with some things that I would say, but I was there at the origin of originalism. I was a lawyer trained a decade or so after this was something that was perpetrated by the Federalist Society and Anthony Scalia and the law-of-economics guys and Mark Feldstein and all these folks, as part of what they were trying to do with the Reagan revolution. And a huge part of that was originalism. It is the most amazing name. It is the most amazing name, I think, in political history. I don't think there has been greater branding in the history of mankind than ``originalism'' because it makes you think immediately: That is what the Founding Fathers must have set. It is their original intent, as if that could be divined across the decades, across the centuries, or across the ages, as if they even agreed with each other.

You don't have to go to a musical like ``Hamilton'' to see the disagreements that these people had with one another. That is the beauty of the founding of our Republic, which is to see the disagreements that they had with each other and the way they sorted through them and the compromises they made as a result of this disagreement--some of them, American tragedies that we live with to this day.

But they called it original. I just want the pages to know this and the law students that are out there today that might want to dispute this to just look up the history. There is a beginning of this. There is a beginning of this, and it does not start with John Marshall. It does not start with George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, who himself--Jefferson would be absolutely shocked to believe that there are people in the 21st century who think that we should be dictated to by the hand of the 18th century or the 17th century. There should be a revolution even less than in every generation.

If you had told me--I mean, we all knew about originalism when I was in law school. We certainly did. I did. We had professors who subscribed to it. Certainly, there are political people who subscribe to it. But if you had told me when I was in law school that I would live to see the day when a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court would subscribe to the originalist position of the Federalist Society, I would have said: That is not believable. That is preposterous.

I am not saying there wouldn't be people who wouldn't have fundamental constitutional disagreements with me on all kinds of things, but the idea that you would have a Court that would say originalism is where it is at? But that is what has happened, and it has been a 40-year campaign to do it.

I actually had a moment on the floor of this Senate once when I congratulated the leader of the Republican Party for having achieved his dream, having achieved his vision. I wasn't congratulating him because I agreed with him or that I felt positive about what he had done, but he had set out to carry that water, and he did it decade after decade after decade.

I said earlier that this wasn't really noticed by the American people, this battle. In many ways, it wasn't until 8 months ago. Eight months ago, we saw that majority take its most radical decision yet when it overturned Roe v. Wade, stripping the American people of a fundamental constitutional right to make their own reproductive choices--a right that Justices appointed by Republican and Democratic Presidents had upheld for half a century, for 50 years.

I have a colleague in this Chamber whom I love named Jon Tester, who is from Montana. He is a farmer. He is one of the last farmers in this place. He said to me--this was even before this happened--he said to me: My daughter is having to fight for things her mother never had to fight for because her grandmother won these freedoms. Her grandmother won these rights, and she won these freedoms and these rights when Roe v. Wade was decided half a century ago.

I read on the way home to Colorado--well, I guess in honesty, I read the decision--I am sure my friend from Louisiana read it earlier, too, when it got leaked by the Supreme Court somehow--something that should have never happened--something that should have never happened. That is when I first read Justice Alito's opinion. I had a chance, again, to read it on the plane back to Colorado, and I was hoping that it would be different because the opinion that I had first read as a draft opinion just dripped--dripped--with a cavalier dismissal of the right that it had destroyed. And when I reread it on the airplane, that is what I saw again.

Justice Alito's opinion doesn't even have the courage to grapple with the fundamental nature of the right it was stripping the American people of. It didn't contend with the simplest questions like what it would mean for millions of Americans, including for millions of American women like my three daughters.

Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor expressed this in their dissent. They wrote:

[The majority opinion lacked] any serious discussion of how

its ruling will affect women. . . . It reveals how little it

knows or cares about women's lives or about the suffering its

decision will cause.

That is a quote of the dissent in that opinion.

Instead of grappling with the consequences of his ruling--which would have been, I am sure, painful even for Justice Alito to deal with, just as it is for women all over this country and their families to deal with the aftermath of this decision every single day since it has been rendered--Justice

Alito essentially wrote that if it wasn't a right in 1868, it is not a right today.

I mean, you have to give him credit. That is originalism, although he is not going back to the Constitution; he is going back to the 14th Amendment. If it wasn't a right in 1868, it is not a right today.

We ratified the 14th Amendment in 1868. That is the depth of the analysis in that opinion, which, if you were guided only by originalist ideology, I suppose that would be what you would say. The dissenting Justice pointed out that Justice Alito completely ignored that the men who ratified the 14th Amendment in 1868--and all of them, obviously, were men--did not perceive women as equals, did not recognize women's rights.

Quoting them now in the dissent:

When the majority says we must read our foundational

charter as viewed at the time of ratification . . . it

consigns women to second-class citizenship.

Of course it does. Women had no right to vote. Black Americans had no right to vote. The dissent continued:

Because laws in 1868 deprived women of any control over

their bodies, the majority approves States doing so today.

Because those laws prevented women from charting the course

of their own lives, the majority says States can do the same

again.

And that is exactly what we have seen with one State after another treating Dobbs as a green light to obliterate access to reproductive care for millions of American women and families. Many of us have spoken about how the ruling has harmed the privacy, the health, the freedom of our fellow Americans, and all of those are important.

Let me say also, this is a difficult issue in my State. I want the Senator from Alabama to know that and everybody to know that. It is a difficult issue for all of the families across America. It is difficult for anybody who has been through this. And I am certainly not cavalier about how difficult this decision is and the fact that different people have different points of view, different people have different religious perspectives, different people come from different parts of the country.

I thought about these things a lot over the years, and my conclusion is that it is best to leave this decision in the hands of a woman and her--well, whomever she chooses to consult--her doctor, her family. That is my opinion. I respect the opinion of other people who disagree about that. I realize that this is a heartfelt decision.

But there is a reason why people have been out on this floor and other places talking about the effect on freedom, the effect on the right to privacy, the effect on the health of our fellow citizens because it has an unbelievable effect on all of those dimensions.

But I don't think we have focused nearly enough on how the ruling will harm our national security, and that is what brings us here today. That is what brings us here today at this unprecedented moment, when a Member of this body, for the first time in American history, has said: No, I am not going to let a single person go through. I am not going to let any of these flag officers go through because I am upset with the policy that the DOD has pursued, that the DOD is pursuing a massive subsidy on abortion here, the abortion travel agency that the DOD has become. And because I don't like that--I am not accepting those characterizations of what the DOD is becoming--but because I don't like that, I am going to hold hostage the promotion of the flag officers at the Department of Defense.

Over a million men and women serve in our Armed Forces, supported by over 700,000 civilians in the Department of Defense. These are obviously moms and dads, sons and daughters who volunteer to risk their lives to protect ours. But when our men and women in uniform volunteer to serve, when they heed the call and they say, ``Sign me up,'' they don't get to decide where they serve. When our men and women in uniform volunteer to serve, they don't get to decide where they are going to serve; the Pentagon decides that. You can't sign up and say: Well, I would like to be in Colorado, or, well, I would like to be in Alabama, or I would like to be in a State where my reproductive healthcare is going to be covered or a State where it is not.

Before Dobbs was decided, our troops had at least some assurance that wherever the Pentagon sent them, they would have minimal access to reproductive care as a protected constitutional right. They knew that for 50 years--for 50 years, for 50 years--no matter where they served. That is no longer true. The Supreme Court stripped that right away, again, without even bothering to consider what it would mean for our troops based in States with no access to reproductive care. Justice Alito doesn't deal with that in his decision.

After Dobbs, one of the first calls I received was from a woman who once served as a senior officer in the Air Force. She immediately grasped how Dobbs is going to affect our military readiness. And that is what this is about--our military readiness. She understood, as, I would say, thousands of women in this country understood, how disruptive it is to force women in uniform to travel from their duty station to access care, to say nothing of the cost to her privacy when every single person in her unit finds out about it, knows about it, unlike any other medical procedure that we give people leave for, that people can get paid travel for. The privacy issues here are seismic, and the military readiness issues as a result are seismic, too.

Women are the fastest growing part of our military. They are about a fifth of our total force and over one-third of our civilian workforce. It is not hard to see why they might think twice before enlisting if they know they are going to be stationed somewhere that doesn't respect their reproductive freedom.

(Senator MURPHY assumed the Chair.)

The Senator from Alabama talked about how the DOD is having the worst recruiting they have had for generations. She is right. That is true. It is hard to see how this is going to help.

You don't have to take my word for it. A recent study from RAND concluded that Dobbs could increase attrition, decrease readiness, and hurt national security. And that is after the Pentagon had its worst recruiting season, as the Senator from Alabama suggested, since the Vietnam war.

In an attempt to deal with these issues 2 weeks ago, the Pentagon announced three new policies, and here is what they were.

By the way, I apologize to my colleagues who are here because I know you are here to give this other speech. I delayed for 24 hours or more, so I am going to just continue, and I will beg your forgiveness.

But these are the three things that have brought the Senate to a halt. These are the three things that have created an unprecedented objection to flag officers of the Department of Defense being approved in the common way that they have been approved in this body for 230 years.

The first of these policies authorizes travel allowances for servicemembers to access reproductive care if it is unavailable at their duty stations. That is important because they may not be able to afford to travel, which is why we pay for other procedures, like LASIK eye surgery or to remove a bunion, none of which seem to have gotten the objection of anybody in this body.

The second allows servicemembers to take absences without leave to access reproductive care. This recognizes, I think, the difficult choice a woman has to make in incredibly, profoundly challenging circumstances. LASIK surgeries aren't banned in Alabama or Connecticut.

The last policy extends the time before servicemembers have to tell their commanding officers about a pregnancy. It gives them just a little bit more time to deal with the shock that can come when somebody has an unexpected pregnancy and is trying to make a decision about what to do. This says that rather than get you in a position where you might find yourself feeling like you can't tell your superior officer the truth, this says take a little bit more time so you can think of it.

That is what these three provisions do, these guidelines do, these rules do, about giving the women in uniform the time and the privacy to decide if they want to carry a pregnancy to term or not--a decision that anybody on this floor, no matter what they think about this, surely can understand has become more complicated in the wake of Dobbs.

So I applaud the Secretary of Defense, Secretary Austin, for taking

these steps to protect our soldiers, our sailors, and our marines. He is in a difficult position. It is hard to do because, you know, I don't think many people were expecting that this would actually happen, and yet it has.

Instead of welcoming this leadership from the Secretary of Defense, some of my Republican colleagues have attacked these proposals. They call them--I am now not quoting the Senator from Alabama; I am quoting others who have written about this. They have called them ``disgusting.'' They have called them ``heavy-handed.'' They have called them ``disastrous.''

I could be wrong--I have certainly been wrong before--but I don't think the American people would consider it disgusting or disastrous that women in uniform don't have to dig into their own paycheck and use their limited leave to seek care that is unavailable because of where our government required them to deploy. I think fundamental fairness would say that is a reasonable reaction to the disruption that has been caused by the Supreme Court.

Now I am quoting the senior Senator from Alabama when I say:

The Secretary of Defense is following through with his

radical plan to facilitate thousands of abortions a year with

taxpayer dollars, so I will follow through with my plan to

hold all DOD civilian, flag, and general officer nominations

that come before the U.S. Senate.

OK. Let's just hold up here for one second. Thousands. The Senator was down here the other day saying this is not a readiness problem because it is only 20 abortions that DOD paid for last year. Well, I don't know the facts of every one of those abortions. I do know the facts of the DOD policy with respect to abortion on paying for it, and that is in cases where there has been rape, incest, or the life of the mother is at stake. And maybe that is what those 20 were.

But the Senator from Alabama himself said that what we are talking about here in the context of the rule are what he calls thousands and thousands of abortions that he is saying are subsidized by DOD because the DOD is willing to pay for the travel of women to go from a State that has banned abortion to a State that hasn't. I don't see how--how could that not be a matter of readiness when you are talking about thousands of people?

The Senator from Alabama said:

The American people want a military focused on national

defense, not facilitating a progressive political agenda.

I could not agree more--could not agree more--with the Senator from Alabama. The American people want a military focused on national defense, and for that reason, that is why I find it so hard to imagine that the American people would tolerate any Senator holding up critical national security personnel to impose their ideology.

The Senator from Alabama correctly says that abortion is illegal in his State. I read the polling data that shows that 55 percent of Alabamians actually support a woman's right to choose. But that is neither here nor there. In terms of the law in Alabama, the Senator from Alabama is right about that--abortion is banned there. In Alabama, abortion is banned at any stage of a pregnancy. It has no exceptions for rape or for incest.

Under Alabama law, doctors can face up to 99 years in jail if they perform an abortion. Last month, an Alabama State legislator announced a bill to treat abortion as murder. The State's attorney general suggested using a chemical endangerment law--a law designed to protect kids from methamphetamine--to prosecute a woman for taking a pill to terminate her pregnancy. That is the law. That is the debate that is going on in Alabama.

I recognize that Alabama has made certain decisions about this issue that are different from the ones that Colorado has made. We were the first State in America to decriminalize abortion in 1967. That was the State of Colorado, a Western State, 5 years before Roe v. Wade was ever decided.

In Colorado, we believe these decisions belong between a woman and her family and her doctor, and we don't accept that the government should impose itself on that private decision. And of course, that is not just what I believe; it is not just what Colorado believes; that is what the large majority of the American people believe. That is what the American people believe.

I acknowledge that Alabama has made a different choice, but what I can't accept is that its Senator would impose that choice on every woman and family in our armed services who happened to be stationed in his State or any State that doesn't protect access to reproductive care, because it is not just Alabama. It is not just Alabama. Eighteen States have banned abortion. Nine of them--nine of them--have no exceptions for rape or incest.

Many States have only begun their war on a woman's right to choose. Just yesterday in Florida, which is home to 22 military bases--22 bases, where men and women in the United States who signed up to fight or to join our military have no choice about where they serve. Governor DeSantis committed just yesterday to sign a 6-week abortion ban. He may be unaware--I haven't talked to him about it. I don't know. He might be unaware that one in three women doesn't even know that she is pregnant until around 6 weeks--or maybe he does know that. I don't know which would be worse.

Texas is posting $10,000 bounties to any resident who successfully sues a doctor or nurse for performing an abortion after 6 weeks or even someone who just drives their friend or relative or neighbor to have a procedure--a procedure that for the last 50 years--until this radical, originalist majority came into the Court--for the last 50 years, for almost my entire lifetime, has been a constitutionally protected right in this country.

All of us who are in this Chamber can remember how, in the aftermath of Dobbs, State legislators all around the country wrote laws restricting the freedom of female citizens to travel from States like Texas or Alabama that had banned abortions to States like Colorado that had ratified a woman's right to choose.

Now we have Senators here who aren't content to merely deprive servicewomen of reproductive care if they are based in a State where abortion has been banned; they want to make it even harder to travel to another State to avail themselves of that care.

From the vantage point of my daughters, the nearly 6 million people who live in Colorado, and the vast majority of Americans who support a woman's right to choose, I think there is a real question here about whose position is radical.

When the military pays for servicemen to travel from one State to another if they need LASIK eye surgery or a sinus procedure or to remove a bunion on their foot, is it really radical to imagine that servicewomen should have the right to travel--to have the price of that travel defrayed so they can get reproductive care?

That is just the debate we are having. That says nothing about why we are actually here today, which is the vehicle that the Senator from Alabama is using to delay the vote of every pending nominee and promotion at the Department of Defense at a moment when we have the biggest land war in Europe since the Second World War and China saber- rattling in the Pacific.

If you told most Americans that a single Senator in this place was delaying every nomination and promotion at the DOD, all for the privilege of making it harder for servicewomen to travel for reproductive care or take leave for that care or shorten the time a woman has to make a choice about her reproductive health before she has to tell her commanding officer--and those are the facts of what these rules do. If you told Americans that is what was happening on the floor of the Senate, I don't think they would believe it. I don't think they would accept it. And maybe that is the reason why it has never happened. Coloradans wouldn't accept it.

Like the Senator from Alabama, we in Colorado are honored to host a strong military presence in our State, from the U.S. Air Force Academy to Fort Carson, to Schriever, to Peterson, and to Buckley and Space Command, and we are honored to protect the reproductive care for the men and women who protect us.

In the case of Space Command, we have a live example, I am sad to say, of how the Supreme Court's decision could harm our national security. I will not go through the whole story today. I will spare the Senators from Alabama and Louisiana and everybody else who is here this painful and, as I describe it, saddest story I know.

Here is the essential point: In the waning days of the last administration--I think Donald Trump, President Trump, had 9 days left--our top generals recommended Colorado as the top choice for Space Command's permanent headquarters, but President Trump overruled them and said it should go to Alabama. He later went on the radio and said: They all were against me. They all said it ought to go to Colorado, but I overruled them, and I said it should go to Alabama.

Now, look, I do not think that is how we should be making basing decisions in this Nation. Every single person who has looked at this Space Command issue knows what the generals recommended, and they know they were overruled by the President of the United States for his own political purposes. We need to make these decisions according to the national security interests of the United States, not in the political interests of a President.

That is why, over and over, I called on the Biden administration to restore integrity to this process and honor the generals' original recommendation. They should have made that decision 2 years ago after President Trump made this decision, in the last few days of his administration, overruling these generals, the experts who know where Space Command should be.

But my specific issue with Space Command has led me to a much broader concern as I have studied this issue. In the wake of Dobbs, we literally have no policy to account for the harm of moving a base from a State that protects access to reproductive care, like Colorado, to a State that does not, like Alabama. We are now living in a world where the Pentagon makes basing decisions according to criteria like the number of parking spaces or the quality of schools or the availability of childcare. All of those are relevant decisions, important decisions, questions to ask. But one question they are not asking is about basic reproductive healthcare in a country where it has been legal, where it has been a fundamental constitutional right for the last 50 years, that the majority of the American people and the majority of the people in Alabama supports.

They are not asking whether a State prosecutes women who seek an abortion or imprisons doctors for 99 years for performing abortions or turns residents into bounty hunters against women. It is ridiculous that they would be counting parking spaces and not reflecting on what this world looks like for the people in our armed services, especially women and their families, post Dobbs. I can't agree that the Pentagon should care about how much it costs to house a family when it makes basing decisions but not whether the family has the freedom to plan its future.

The Supreme Court, because of its ideology, may not have had the courage to grapple with the consequences of its ruling on our men and women in uniform and on our national security, but that doesn't give us the ability or give the Department of Defense reason to shirk its responsibility. We have to stand on the side of expanding rights and expanding opportunity for Americans, not restricting them.

So, today, I am calling on the Pentagon to codify the policies it announced last month and develop a new framework that accounts for access to reproductive care in its basing and its personnel decisions.

I call upon my colleague from Alabama to lift his holds so the Senate can advance these national security personnel, because if our men and women in uniform can spend every day defending our freedom, surely, we can defend theirs.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, first of all, I would say, with respect to my colleague from Alabama, I appreciate his arguments here.

He first says that he clearly doesn't have the ability to do this; that, somehow, this is up to Congress to pass a law to make sure that servicemembers who need to travel for reproductive healthcare have it paid for them, not the abortion, by the way, which is what the Senator from Alabama said--that is inaccurate--but the travel is his argument.

The reality is that the DOD, it is clear, can pay for servicemembers' travel for LASIK eye surgery, but current law doesn't say that. It can pay to have a bunion removed, but current law doesn't say that either. All of that has happened without complaint from this body because it makes sense that the DOD has the discretion to provide the care it believes its servicemembers require. And they are making those regulations as part of the law that they have been granted from our branch of government to make sure they care for our servicemembers. I think that is point 1.

Point 2, the Senator from Alabama talked about, you know, this being about who is paying for abortion. This is not about who is paying for abortion. This is about those three changes to the law I mentioned earlier. I won't go into them because I know my colleagues are going to lose their minds over my staying here. But those are the three things. One is travel. One is, you know, being able to take a little bit of a longer time to talk to your supervisor, and those kinds of things. So it is not about paying for abortions.

Although, I will say that the Senator from Alabama has another piece of legislation that he has introduced that objects not to the DOD but to the VA. He says this is radical. The VA has said: We have noticed that our policies that allow us to pay for abortion when the life of the mother is at stake don't also include exceptions for rape and incest, and we are going to add those exceptions for rape and incest. The Senator from Alabama has brought that to the floor and said he wants to have a vote.

I want to have a vote on that too. I can't wait to see how every single Senator in this Chamber stands on the Senator from Alabama's position that

having the VA add cases of rape and incest to the exception to allow it to pay for abortion is not somehow abortion-on-demand or abortion--as some people say, abortion after people have already had the child but is simply adding two things that probably 80 percent of the American people agree with.

On the last point, on Space Command's being decided on the facts, let me tell you something. Here are the facts as I understand them: The generals said they thought Space Command should stay in Colorado. The generals and the Secretary of the Air Force went to the White House with the recommendation of Colorado. The President of the United States, Donald Trump, overturned that recommendation on their advice. He went on the radio--the Rick & Bubba Show, I think it is called--in Alabama, where he said: Everybody was for Colorado, and everybody was against me on Alabama, but I made the decision to send it to Alabama.

Those are the facts on Space Command. And it is not off-topic. You know, it is not off-topic. That was a political decision that should never have been made. If the politics had not entered into that decision, the generals would have gotten their way, and Space Command would be in Colorado, and we wouldn't be having the conversation we are having today because no one in Colorado would be having their abortion rights stripped from them and being sent to another State that has banned abortion, where doctors can go to jail for 99 years because they perform an abortion, where laws that are meant to bring down folks who traffic in methamphetamine are being threatened to be used against women who use a chemical version of abortion.

This is not a complaint I have with the Senator from Alabama. This is my complaint with the White House. You should have dealt with this 2 years ago. And now I hope this administration will deal with, in the wake of Dobbs, this daily gray area that is tearing at the emotions and the well-being of members of our Armed Forces, who don't get to decide where they are stationed.

Alabama can have whatever law it wants. That is not up for me to decide. I respect that there are differences in this country, but people in this body have a duty and a responsibility to the men and women of the armed services, and we have a duty and responsibility to fulfill our duty and responsibility, which is not to hold up the promotion of flag officers at the Department of Defense because I have a position that is different from what others may think. That is what I think.

I yield to the Senator from Louisiana.

Mr. President, I wanted to come to the floor and share a few words about an upcoming vote we are going to have this afternoon, I guess it will be now, on Gordon Gallagher, President Biden's nominee for the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado.

Judge Gallagher comes to this floor with a stellar reputation in Colorado and nearly 25 years in service to others, as a defense attorney for both indigent and paying defendants, a prosecutor in Mesa County, and as U.S. magistrate judge for the District of Colorado.

The judge credits his devotion to public service to his grandfather, who served as an air navigator during the Second World War and was shot down over Eastern Europe on his 49th mission. After the war, Gordon's grandfather came home to continue the fight for America's highest ideals, working to integrate housing in his local community.

And his example stuck with Gordon. So when he did a family trip to Colorado when Gordon was just 8 or 9, like everybody who comes to our State, he fell in love with it and fell in love with the Rocky Mountains. And years later, as a student at Macalester, he fell in love with a Coloradoan, his wife Christine. Gordon would eventually follow Christine back to Colorado, where he earned a law degree from the University of Denver.

After graduating, Gordon practiced at a law firm representing small businesses and served for nearly 4 years as a deputy district attorney for Mesa County, CO. Later, Gordon launched his own firm as a defense practitioner and began working with the Office of the Alternate Defense Counsel, representing clients who couldn't afford their representation. He spent over a decade in this role, fighting for the American ideal that everyone, no matter what their means, deserves equal representation before the law. In 2012, Gordon was appointed as a part- time magistrate judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, a position he holds to this day.

Senator Hickenlooper and I recommended Judge Gallagher to this position because, unlike anyone currently on the district court, he has spent the majority of his career on the Western Slope of Colorado, a rural, mountainous part of our State with a specific perspective on issues that range from public lands to natural resources, to Federal regulation.

We need that perspective on the Federal bench. It has been too long. We haven't had an appointee from the Western Slope of Colorado in over 30 years, and Judge Gallagher is the perfect nominee to bring that perspective to the bench.

Over his career on the Western Slope, Gordon's work ranged from representing a young man charged with the manslaughter of his best friend to securing rehabilitative services for members of the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute Tribes, to hearing traffic complaints in smalltown courts because sheepherders had blocked the local highway.

I know I am not saying anything that the Presiding Officer hasn't seen in New Mexico.

And, as a presiding judge, Gordon has presided over most stages of a felony docket, from substantive motions through pleas, postconviction proceedings, and sentencing--a level of participation in Federal criminal cases far beyond a typical magistrate judge.

He has also worked on a vast array of issues including criminal, civil, patent, pro se, and environmental litigation, including many cases with difficult tradeoffs between natural resource extraction, conservation, and recreation.

These issues are common for the U.S. District Court for Colorado, and they require someone with Judge Gallagher's deep and direct experience. More than that, everyone we have spoken with tells us how much Judge Gallagher enjoys being on the court and how he cherishes the opportunity to serve our country, just like his grandfather.

Judge Gallagher's entire career has prepared him for this position. He has proven his character, his integrity, and his legal acumen over a distinguished 25-year career. He has my full and enthusiastic support.

I want to thank my fellow colleagues on the Judiciary Committee for advancing his nomination with overwhelming bipartisan support. They saw what an exceptional judge he would make, and I wholeheartedly agree. I hope we will have a large bipartisan vote to support Judge Gallagher in his confirmation.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, before I speak on what brings me to the floor, let me thank Chair Murray for her incredible advocacy on behalf of not just the women of her State and not just the women of my State but of women and their families all across the United States of America. I want to say how grateful I am.

Thank you.

Mr. President, we have had, over the last 10 days or so, or 2 weeks or so, in the Senate, briefing after briefing that our constituents never get the chance to see. These are briefings by the intelligence community, by the Department of Defense, about what the nature of the global threat is to the United States and the state of our national security--what they call the net effect between where we are as a strategic force and where our competitors are as strategic forces.

Without revealing anything that I have heard in any of those classified sessions, either in those sessions or as a member of the Intelligence Committee, I can tell you that I have found these briefings to be very sobering over the years. I would be surprised if there isn't a single Member of the Senate who doesn't feel the same way as I do. We have our work cut out for us. It is time for us to move from a 20th century mindset when it comes to our national defense and to our national security to a 21st century mindset. That is not going to be easy. We are going to have a lot of choices to make as a body to do that, but I am confident we will do it.

One of the places we have a lot of ground to cover is in space. My colleague from Colorado is on the floor this evening. I am very glad that he is here because he was the Governor of Colorado, and he knows this issue as well as anybody in this Chamber, and I have seen it from the Intelligence Committee.

You know, I deeply regret the fact that, for many years, among other things, we have enabled the Chinese--in particular, Beijing, and I should say it specifically--to steal a lot of our technology to be able to benefit their national security in the space race that we have. So I am really focused on this because we have had, based in Colorado for many years, something called a Space Command, which is the unified combatant control for space in the United States of America. The home has been in Colorado, and it has always been in Colorado.

I am not going to bore you with one of the saddest stories that I know about a process run completely awry that resulted in the top generals in the Air Force walking into the White House with a recommendation that said we ought to leave the Space Command in Colorado. By the way, the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force in the Trump administration was part of making that recommendation to the last White House. They walked into that White House with, as I said, the recommendation that it stay at the Peterson Air Force Base--now the Peterson Space Force Base--in Colorado.

There were three principal reasons they were arguing that it should stay there. One was that it would reach full operational capability in Colorado faster than if it were moved anywhere else,

between 4 and 6 years faster; that it would be cheaper to repurpose assets in Colorado for the Space Command than to move it across the country or to move it somewhere else; and that there would be massive attrition if the Space Command were moved. Of course, roughly 60 percent of the personnel who are part of the Space Command are civilians. They are not people who are in the Department of Defense, although 40 percent are people who are in the Department of Defense. That worries me a lot. All those things worry me a lot.

But nothing was of more concern to me--especially in the wake now of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, nothing is more important than making sure that we get to full operational capability and that we do it in a way that makes sense. That is where the generals were on this issue. That is where the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force was.

In fact, the people who went in to see President Trump said: If you are going to make a decision other than--other than--leaving Space Command in Colorado, you should delay the decision because nowhere else in America is ready to do the work that needs to be done. Instead, President Trump overturned their recommendation.

As Senator Hickenlooper would tell you, that has never happened before in the history of our country, that we can find the President of the United States overrule the recommendation of the generals who knew the subject best. He went on the radio, and he said to these radio hosts in Alabama--which is where Donald Trump preferred to send Space Command for reasons that I suppose only he could know--but he went on a radio show and bragged that he single-handedly had overruled everybody else who had looked at this and said it ought to stay in Colorado, to put it in Alabama instead. The GAO and DOD's own inspector general have confirmed the facts that I just related to you.

Instead of removing the stain of politics, I am sad to say that the Biden administration may be close to ratifying a decision that can't be ratified, a decision that was made in the face of the recommendations of the generals, a decision that was belied by all the relevant facts, and a decision that the GAO, the DOD's own inspector general, and Donald Trump on a radio program all confirmed, which is that politics played into the decision about moving Space Command to Alabama, not the national security interests of the United States.

I know it is easy to think--and I will just confess in front of the pages and everybody else--that it might seem like this is just a parochial interest on the part of the Senators from Colorado because Space Command happens to be in Colorado. I will admit that fact. We have been a great home to Space Command. But I will also say that the months and months and months that we have dedicated, the years that we have dedicated to analyzing this decision, I think it is fair to say that we are here not representing the parochial interests of our State but representing the national security interests of the United States and the incredible importance of this Biden administration not ratifying a political decision that was made in the last few days of the Trump administration, because decisions of this importance shouldn't be made this way. It should be made in the interests of our national security.

The Biden administration has the opportunity to restore the integrity of this process, and I think if they do restore the integrity of this process, they will find that this Space Command belongs in Colorado, and it shouldn't be moved anywhere else.

I am on the floor today to remind people here of the importance of this issue, the urgency of this issue, not just for Colorado--not even for Colorado--but for the country as a whole and for our national security as a whole. This is a decision that should be made in the interest of the national security of the United States of America, and that decision will lead the Biden administration, I think, to reverse Donald Trump's political decision--a decision that he went on a radio show to advertise for the people of Alabama, demonstrating the political spoil that he was holding up in one hand instead of saying he had done the right thing for the people who work at Space Command and had done the right thing for the mission that we all care about so deeply.

That, in the end, is what the American people, of course, deserve here, because our opponents and our competitors in space are not waiting for us to get out of our own way. It is critically important for us to give the people who are serving in this capacity a sense of security and a sense of stability about what the choice is going to be.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise to honor the life and career of my dear friend Scott LaBarre on the sad occasion of his death after a battle with cancer. Scott passed away surrounded by his family on Saturday, December 10, 2022.

From his days as a college student until a few months before his death, Scott, who went blind as a youth, fought tirelessly for the rights of blind people and other people with disabilities.

Born and raised in Minnesota, Scott attended the Colorado Center for the Blind, a world-renowned rehabilitation training program for blind people, and ultimately established his law practice and his family in the Denver area.

His legal work focused in the areas of employment law, disability rights, and international copyright policy. He held several leadership positions within the American Bar Association and the National Federation of the Blind--NFB--most recently as NFB's general counsel.

He served as chair of the board of the Colorado Center for the Blind, led the National Association of Blind Lawyers, and helped establish and guide the Jacobus tenBroek Law Symposium, the premier conference for practitioners and students of disability law.

His impact will continue to ripple across the world because of his leadership in securing the Marrakesh Treaty, an international agreement permitting the cross-border sharing of books in Braille and other accessible formats, which was ratified by this body.

Scott conducted all of his work with confidence, humor, and a joyful spirit. Going forward, I will miss his presence in the halls of the Senate when the National Federation of the Blind visits Washington each year, as well as my many other interactions with him.

I am sure that many of you also encountered Scott, and I know you will join me in lifting up his wife Anahit and their children, Alex and Carter, as they cope with this devastating loss.

I take comfort in the knowledge that Scott leaves a legacy encompassing not only his many accomplishments, but his impact on the hundreds of blind people whom he personally mentored and the millions who will benefit from his efforts for generations to come.

Mr. President, this weekend, families all across America will sit down in their dining rooms for a holiday meal, and they are going to have to pay more for that meal than they ever have before. They are going to have to pay more for bread and more for butter, potatoes, eggs, vegetables. Literally, almost everything that is going to be on America's tables this holiday season is going to be more expensive than it has ever been.

Although there are several reasons for that phenomenon, somewhere at the very top is the profound labor shortage that exists in American agriculture. Today, America's farmers and ranchers are short more than 100,000 workers all across this country to plant seeds, to pick berries, to raise cattle, and to do the hard, essential work of feeding this country.

It is why growers all across America are banging down the doors of this Capitol, pleading with us to fix the broken H-2A system for farmers.

It is obvious to everybody who has had anything to do with this system that it is completely broken. There is no argument that can be made that it is not. To start, the H-2A program is not even open to year-round jobs. That is just the beginning of the trouble. That is every dairy in America who has to milk their cows two or three times a day, including the holidays. It is

every mushroom grower, livestock producer, horse breeder that needs those year-round visas.

The H-2A program is also hopelessly and embarrassingly outdated. To qualify for a visa, this ancient program requires farmers to put a physical advertisement in a local newspaper, if there is a local newspaper, if they can find one. They can't advertise online. That is prohibited in the year 2022.

And you have to reapply for the H-2A visa every single year, which is an incredible burden on farmers and on farm workers. It is the last thing they need.

And, finally, the existing program does nothing to protect farmers from dramatic spikes in labor costs from year to year. They can't plan for the future. They have no idea what kind of uncertainty they are going to have to deal with when it comes to wages.

I am thinking of farmers like Bruce Talbott, who grows peaches in Palisade, CO. The labor shortage hurts Bruce in two ways: One, he doesn't have enough people to pick everything he grows, so he is forced to leave money on the table every single year; and, second, this labor shortage is driving up labor costs, which are now 80 percent of the total costs of his operation. And we are seeing this all over the country.

You see it right here: H-2A wages up almost 50 percent in the last 10 years. By the way, this is all wages down here. And this is what has happened to wages in farming and ranching in this country. It has grown so much faster than the rest of the workforce, and it is pushing family farms and ranches to the edge of a cliff, and, sadly, a lot of them are going over that cliff or considering moving their operations from the United States to Mexico.

Since 2007, America has lost 190,000 farms, almost all of them small family farms. That is nearly 10 percent of the farms in this country, and some industries, like dairy, have been hit even harder. Between 2003 and 2020, the number of dairy farms in America fell by over half, by 55 percent.

That is not just bad for dairy farms. It is bad for the communities that they are in and that they support, and it is bad for this country. If we don't deal with this, this country is on track, believe it or not, to become dependent on foreign food imports.

You can see it here. This is the export line, and here is the projected import line. We are right at the point where we could be a net importer of food for the first time in my lifetime, maybe the first time in forever. I don't know.

I don't want us to rely on other nations to feed America. We have the most productive agriculture sector in the world. And yet, because of this labor problem, we are going to accept the idea that we should be a net importer of food from other countries? That is terrible for our economic security, for our food security, and, I would argue, for our national security as well.

Just on the economic point, Colorado's agriculture generates over $40 billion a year for our State's economy. Nationwide, there are nearly 20 million jobs in food and agriculture-related industries. That is 1 in every 10 jobs in this country. And over $1 trillion of our GDP is agriculture.

And I think people--especially people who don't work in agriculture, don't think about agriculture, don't live in maybe a rural area--they tend to forget that literally every single sector of our economy depends on agriculture. You can't have an economy without food. There has never been one.

So when we talk about the crisis in American agriculture that I am here on this floor to address today, we have to understand that the stakes could not be higher. At the same time we have that issue, there are hundreds of thousands of undocumented farm workers living in the shadows in this country. These men and women are breaking their backs every single day to feed America--women like Lulu Guerrero, who lives in Weld County, CO.

She gets up at 3 o'clock in the morning every single morning to plant crops like watermelons and tomatoes and pumpkins. She has been doing that for 20 years. I have met people in my State who have been doing it for 30 years, who have been doing it for 40 years--with no status, with no protections, with no legal recourse if somebody tries to take advantage of them--many of them with U.S. citizens who are their children, people who can't go back and forth to see their relatives south of the border when somebody dies.

This has been going on for decades, and we have ignored this problem in part because the food keeps showing up somehow, miraculously, in our grocery stores, as if somebody waved a wand to put it there.

These workers have broken their backs to support their families, to support the United States of America, to make sure that we are fed. The least we can do for our own country is to bring them out of the shadows of the law.

The status quo is terrible for workers, it is terrible for businesses and farms, and it is terrible for American families who have seen their grocery bills go through the roof.

Look at this. I am not saying all of that is the labor shortage, but a huge amount of that is the labor shortage. In the last year alone, grocery prices have shot up about 12 percent--faster than at any time in 40 years, as you can see from this slide.

And it is everything. I won't read all of these, but it is everything. The price of apples is up 7 percent. The price of milk is up 15 percent. And I guarantee you that is as a result of people unable to find people to do that work. And eggs are up almost 50 percent.

These aren't nice to have. None of these are nice to have for the American people. These are essential to a well-balanced meal to a family being able to feed itself in America. That is why Congress has to finally fix this H-2A program, and we have the opportunity to do it.

There is good news. We have a plan to fix it, the Affordable and Secure Food Act. Our proposal builds on legislation. This is an important point. You know, sometimes people over here blame the House of Representatives for not getting done what needs to get done for this country. In this case, they have passed this bill twice--or a version of this bill twice--in a bipartisan fashion. There were Republican Members of Congress over here last week imploring Republican Members of the Senate to please pass this bill, which from the grower's perspective, by the way, is an improvement over the bill that passed in the House.

The Farm Workers Union and many of the growers in this country have come together to support this legislation, and there is a good reason why it had bipartisan support in the House. And now, from the perspective of the other side of the aisle, in many ways, it is actually a better bill. Our bill opens the H-2A program to year-round jobs for the first time ever, and that is going to mean dairy farmers and mushroom growers can finally access the labor that they need, that they can't access today.

It creates wage certainty for farmers, saving them $23 billion over the next 12 years. I want to say that again: $23 billion over the next 12 years, because now people are going to know what the wage increases are going to look like. They are going to be predictable. They have been agreed to. And that results in the savings of $23 billion. That is $2 billion more over that period of time than the savings that were achieved in the House bill for growers.

It requires E-Verify for farm workers nationwide. That is going to help with the chaos at the border because people are now going to know that they are not going to be able to come here and work illegally or in an undocumented fashion in agriculture. So they will be less likely to want to come.

And, finally, the bill establishes a pathway for undocumented farm workers to apply for a green card after they have worked in agriculture for at least a decade, passed a background check, and paid a penalty.

That is not amnesty. It is a recognition that anybody who has spent a decade breaking their back to feed America should have the opportunity to apply for lawful status.

Are we really going to accept as a definitional matter for this country that we want fields filled with indentured servants in the United States of America? Is that really where we are as a nation?

I don't think so. That is not what people in Colorado believe. No matter what party they are in, they don't believe that. They think we should fix this problem. They know how hard-

working the people are who are working in our fields and on our ranches and at our dairies.

And that is why this bill is broadly supported not just in Colorado but all across the country--by farmers and labor, by immigration advocates, by businesses, by the American people. The vast majority of the American people know we need to fix this.

And this morning--this isn't meant for anybody to read; I will get to that in a moment--but over 240 groups from all across America, including from New Mexico and from Colorado, sent a letter supporting this bill. And I am not going to read all--I am tempted to read all 240, and there isn't anybody here tonight. But let me just give you a sense of the breadth and the depth of the support of this bill.

The signers of this bill include the International Fresh Produce Association, the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, the National Milk Producers Federation, the National Farmers Union, the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, the American Honey Producers Association, the American Mushroom Institute, the American Sugarbeet Growers Association, the California Apple Commission, the California Association of Winegrape Growers, the Colorado Potato Legislative Association.

Let me just tell you how hard it is for our potato producers in Colorado to deliver that incredible crop when we finally have created a situation where Mexico has to import our potatoes and can't just keep them out, which is what they have been doing for years and years and years, but they can't find folks to do the work. With the rise in input costs that farmers and ranchers have to deal with, with the drought that the Colorado potato growers are dealing with in the San Luis Valley that I know the Presiding Officer knows so well--you know, you would think that the least we could do is solve a problem that could be solved. That is a major headache for them and for their colleagues all across the country--like the Food Producers of Idaho, the Georgia Blueberry Commission, the Idaho Hay and Forage Association, Land O'Lakes, the Lone Star Milk Producers, the Maine Potato Board, the Michigan Nursery & Landscape Association, the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture.

As I read this list, do you know the one thing these people don't have in common? They are not Democrats or Republicans. They are just trying to deliver agricultural products to the American people. That is all they are trying to do. And they live in red States, and they live in blue States. They live all over the United States of America.

The National Pecan Federation, the New York Apple Association, the North Carolina Potato Association, the Ohio Dairy Producers Association, the Pennsylvania Vegetable Growers Association, Premium Peanut, the Society of American Florists, the National Asparagus Council, the United Dairy Farmers of Florida, the Utah Tart Cherry Marketing Board, the Virginia Apple Growers Association, the Washington State Tree Fruit Association, the Western Growers--and let me say something about the Western Growers.

In 2013, I had the privilege of being part of the Gang of 8 that negotiated the comprehensive immigration reform bill that passed this floor with 68 votes. It was led on the Republican side by John McCain and by Jeff Flake and Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham. We had four Democrats on our side. And, I have to say, in the 14 years I have been in this place, that was the best work we have done as a body. We dealt with this tough issue of immigration, and we dealt with all aspects of it--11 million people who were undocumented had the chance to earn a tough but fair pathway to citizenship in this country and come out of the shadows.

We dealt with all the visa issues that have been driving the country crazy all this year--business visas and agriculture visas.

I negotiated the agriculture provisions of this bill with Senator Rubio and Senator Feinstein and Senator Hatch.

And we had the most progressive Dream Act that had ever been conceived, much less voted on, as part of that bill.

It also had $40 billion border security in it. People forget that part. Every single Democrat voted for a bill that had $40 billion of border security. That is a heck of a lot more money than Donald Trump ever spent to build his wall--that medieval device.

That $40 billion, which was a bipartisan effort, again, was meant to spend--was meant to spend the money on 21st-century technology so we could see every inch of the border so border crossings could actually be much better policed than they are today.

I will come back to this later in the speech, but I am not somebody who believes we should have a border that is not secure. I believe we should have a secure border. I think we should. I think the American people expect that we will. And I came to this floor--I think it was in May--to say that I thought it was wrong for the Biden administration to lift title 42 without a plan to address the border, and we are seeing the effects of that, I think, today.

That shouldn't be an excuse for making lives more miserable for people working in American agriculture. It shouldn't be an excuse for driving food prices up for families. It shouldn't be an excuse for compromising our economic independence, our food security, and our national security.

We have in front of us a negotiated agreement that passed the House of Representatives with a bipartisan vote. We have an agreement that has been negotiated over here that is more generous to producers than the one that passed the House of Representatives, and it has all this support from all these people all over the country. I am not going to read every single one of these names, but you get the idea. These are people who probably, I would guess--many of them probably agree on nothing politically, but they agree on this. They agree on this. Part of that is because the situation they are confronting is so dire, and part of it is because they have helped produce a good piece of legislation that should get its chance.

(Mr. SCHATZ assumed the Chair.)

(Mr. HEINRICH assumed the Chair.)

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the letter with all these names be printed in the Record so I can spare you listening to all the names.

I will end with this. There is a vegetable farmer in Brighton, CO, whom I have known for many, many years. His name is Robert Sakata. His dad started Sakata Farms in 1944 after he was released from a Japanese-American internment camp, where he was interned during World War II. For almost 80 years, Sakata Farms has been a critical ingredient of our Colorado economy--a staple of Colorado, to put it in food terms, but when Robert visited my office in the last couple of years, he handed me fliers advertising his equipment for sale.

I said: Robert, why are you selling your implements? Why are you doing that?

He loves what he does. He is so passionate about what he does. He is so passionate about the people who work side by side with him to produce incredible fruits and vegetables in Colorado. But he told me that he was selling because he didn't have enough labor to harvest his vegetable crop. Today, they no longer grow vegetables at Sakata Farms; they only grow row crops. Is that the future we want for American agriculture? It is not what we want in Colorado.

I have heard stories like that, like Robert Sakata's story, all over my State and all over this country for the last decade. We don't have to accept the loss of the next 10 percent of America's family farms. We don't have to accept hundreds of thousands of people living in the shadows when they work every single day. They are breaking their backs--I don't use that term lightly--working in some of the worst conditions that there are to work in to feed the American people, to give us economic security and food security and provide for our national security.

We shouldn't accept crushing food prices for families just because this Congress can't reform an antiquated H-2A program. We can do something about it this week before we go home, with this proposal.

Sometimes the politics of an issue like this seems so hard that you are defeated on it before you even get started. That has not been the case with this coalition of people from all over America. They have all they can contend with every single day.

As I said, with rising input costs, with the trade issues that we have been dealing with, they have every reason in the world not to spend a moment trying to actually pass this piece of legislation, but it is so important because this labor issue is so critical to the future of American agriculture, and they know it, and they have a sense of urgency about it. They want us to overcome our fears and our political concerns, to come together and do what the House of Representatives did, which is pass a bipartisan bill. I guarantee you, if we do that, if we do that here in this Chamber, when people go home, what they are going to hear is this: Thank you. Thank you for listening to us. Thank you for respecting our work in American agriculture. And thank you for standing up for our country during a difficult economic moment in world history.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, before the Thanksgiving break, I planned to use my time today to talk about the Respect for Marriage Act, with which the Presiding Officer has had such an important role playing, and I want to congratulate her on the incredible work that she has done to get this over the finish line, because we are on the verge of passing the Respect for Marriage Act in the U.S. Senate. It is a historic piece of legislation to ensure that if a same-sex or interracial couple marries in one State, that every State has to honor that marriage. The Federal Government has to honor that marriage as well.

There may be no right closer to the heart than marrying the one that you love, and Colorado understands that. And I was going to come down here to talk about how, over decades, my State has led the way on equality. We recognized civil unions in 2013. We banned conversion therapy in my State. We passed our own version of the Equality Act in Colorado.

I was going to come down here and tell you about how Colorado understands what equality has come to mean in America in 2022, but in the last week, I have been reminded again just how far we have to go.

Last Sunday, Coloradans woke up to the news that Club Q--a loving, accepting, 20-year old LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs--had been the target of a mass shooting. Five Coloradans were killed, and at least 22 were injured.

In the days since, Coloradans have described Club Q as a center of community building, a place where everyone could be their true selves and live without fear.

Club Q's owner, Nic Grzecka, said he founded the club to ``be that safe place for people to come and feel and understand that they are normal--that the way they feel is normal and there are people just like them.''

As a father, that is what I hope for my three daughters, and, as a former school superintendent, that is what I wish for the children that I worked for. We want our kids to feel normal and loved and like they belong.

But on November 19, these feelings of safety and acceptance that Club Q had built over two decades were shattered. On the same day that we recognized Trans Day of Remembrance, we added more names to the solemn toll in this country, when a violent young man, radicalized by hateful and divisive rhetoric, killed five people and forever changed a community, forever changed my State.

In minutes, he robbed from us brothers and sisters and daughters and sons, friends, and loved ones, who were there just being themselves, not bothering anybody.

He took from us Derrick Rump, a 38-year-old bartender and co-owner of Club Q, who bought groceries for others during the hardest 2 months of the pandemic; Daniel David Aston, 28 years old, a bar supervisor known as the ``master of silliness'' because of his contagious happiness and joy; Kelly Loving, 40 years old, who had just moved to Colorado and was trying to enjoy a weekend trip to Colorado Springs; Ashley Paugh, 35 years old, a devoted mother and nonprofit worker, who loved hunting and fishing, like so many other Coloradans, and was there to support the community; and Raymond Green Vance, 22 years old--22 years old--who grew up in Colorado Springs and had just started a new job and was saving up for his own apartment.

I am thinking of them and their families and all of those who survived this terrible tragedy in Colorado--people who imagined that there was one space that you could go to feel safe, and then this happens.

It fills me with rage that it happened. It fills me with sadness. It should fill the entire Senate with rage and sadness.

And if it weren't for the courage of people like Richard Fierro and Thomas James, the list of names I read, already too long, would have been longer.

Thomas James, a petty officer second class in the Navy, used his military crisis training to help subdue the

attacker. He said he jumped into action because he ``simply wanted to save the family [he] found'' at Club Q.

And Richard Fierro. Richard Fierro, an Iraq and Afghanistan combat veteran, was watching a friend's performance with his wife, daughter, and friends inside the club when the gunfire started, and his protective instincts--Richard's protective instincts from four combat deployments--kicked in. He said he went ``into combat mode.''

No one enjoying a night with their friends and their family should have to go ``into combat mode'' in the United States of America. That is not the country that I grew up in.

It is our country today. It is the country that the pages in this institution are inheriting from us. My daughter's generation and the children I used to work for in the Denver Public Schools, they bear a burden that I never bore growing up in the United States. They have grown up living with a reasonable fear that they could be shot in their classrooms or in their churches or in a grocery store or in a bar that is the one safe place in their community that they could go to.

In 2020--the pages that are here may not know this. In 2020, the leading cause of death for kids in America was guns--guns--not car accidents, not drugs, but guns.

In one study of 29 industrialized countries, the United States accounted for 97 percent of firearm deaths among children 4 years old and younger. That is almost 100 percent of the kids who are dying on planet Earth from gunfire who are 4 years old and younger. What a disgrace. What a disgrace.

We shouldn't need to count on a stranger's bravery when we go to a birthday party. We shouldn't need to count on a stranger's bravery when we go to the grocery store.

It was just last year when I spoke on this floor to remember the lives we lost in Colorado at a King Soopers in Boulder, and it is with unimaginable pain that I am here once again on this floor with a list of names of people who have lost their lives senselessly.

Colorado is hurting. We are tired of this. For more than two decades, we have had to grieve over one incident after another.

So while we stand here on the verge of taking a historic step toward equality--a vitally important step toward equality--we are reminded once again of just how much work is left to do to give our children the safe and accepting future that they deserve, that they want to have, that we are obligated to give them. We haven't finished that work in the U.S. Senate.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court stripped away the first fundamental right since Reconstruction by overturning a 50-year precedent in Roe v. Wade, and in that decision, the majority took aim at the fundamental right of privacy and, with it, the right of every single American to marry whom they love.

It is a profound reminder--once again, a reminder--to everybody in this body and to the country, that our history has been from the very beginning a battle between the highest ideals that humans have ever written down on the page--the words in the Constitution of the United States--and the worst impulses in human history.

And when a Justice of the Supreme Court writes that if it wasn't a freedom in 1868, it is not a freedom today, we are in that struggle today.

When a 22-year-old can walk into a club and kill 5 people and wound more than 20 people, we are in that struggle today.

The reason we are here today doing the important work that we are doing in the marriage act that we are passing today is that Americans understand that no good comes from hoarding freedoms and equality. They know that when we take the opposite view, we act against our best traditions, against our highest ideals. As a nation, we will never flourish if we choose to depend on a permanent underclass, deprived of some or all of the rights and freedoms others enjoy.

Free people do not remain free by denying freedom to others. Today, the Senate of the United States stands on the precipice of advancing freedom, of advancing equality, of moving us closer to our highest ideals.

But, tomorrow, we have more work to do to live up to the words of our Constitution and to realize the promise of equality for all of our citizens.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I rise to pay my respects to Phil Hanceford, a tireless and broadly respected advocate for public land conservation. Phil unexpectedly passed away on August 14, 2022.

Phil served more than 15 years as an attorney, policy expert, and conservation director at The Wilderness Society--TWS--in Denver, CO. He began his career with an internship at TWS while a student at the University of Colorado School of Law. Across a distinguished, 15-year career, Phil played a significant role in protecting some of the most important public lands in the West, from Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, to conservation areas in the Pacific Northwest, the Mojave Desert, Nevada, and Colorado.

Phil was an expert in land management planning, specializing in the management of national monuments and other Bureau of Land Management-- BLM--conservation lands. He inspired and mentored countless individuals at TWS and across the conservation community, contributing his deep expertise and humble spirit to all who sought his advice or support. Over the years, his guidance helped shape a new cohort of effective advocates for America's public lands.

Phil's greatest accomplishments include helping to create the National Landscape Conservation System; the adoption of the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan that conserved wildlands and promoted renewable energy development across nearly 11 million acres in southern California; the restoration of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase- Escalante National Monuments that protects over 3 million acres of stunning desert wilderness in southern Utah; and the establishment of Browns Canyon National Monument in Colorado.

Phil was a champion of the BLM and earned the lasting respect of Bureau staff across the country for his warmth and expertise. He often went out of his way to connect with employees across the organization and fiercely advocated for getting staff into the field to see firsthand the places they worked to protect.

Phil grounded his work in humor, kindness, determination, and grace. He genuinely believed in the promise of public lands as a legacy for everyone--an issue that could bring Americans together regardless of where you lived or which political beliefs you held. Phil's

distinguished career was cut too short, but he leaves behind a legacy that will endure for generations to come. I extend my deepest condolences to Phil's wife Keenan and their young daughter Hazel, along with the rest of Phil's family, friends, and colleagues.

Madam President, last year, we demonstrated to the American people that we don't have to accept this outrageous, shameful level of childhood poverty in our Nation.

We have 38 out of 41 industrialized countries in the world in terms of childhood poverty. The poorest people in our country are our children. And because we passed this bill last year, we demonstrated that doesn't have to be a permanent feature of our economy or our democracy.

We have to fight to make this enhanced child tax credit permanent, and that is what I will do with people on both sides of the aisle. But this does not advance that cause because we

could lose the underlying bill. Therefore, we should vote against the amendment.

Madam President, I rise today to recognize Mile High Early Learning for 50 years of service in support of children and families in Colorado.

Mile High Early Learning is Denver's largest and oldest provider of subsidized high quality early care and education and is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2022. Since the organization's founding, Mile High Early Learning has provided high quality early care and education to more than 50,000 children.

Mile High Early Learning had its beginnings when community child care providers created a consortium, incorporated on January 19, 1972, to provide affordable, accessible quality early childhood education and care for children from working families with limited resources. Today, Mile High Early Learning serves more than 1,500 young children every year.

As a Head Start and Early Head Start provider, Mile High Early Learning leverages these Federal resources to partner with numerous local early childhood providers to offer comprehensive health and family support services to families and expand access to high quality early education and care across Colorado.

Mile High Early Learning incorporates cutting-edge knowledge in early childhood, using a Montessori inspired approach that supports a love of learning, social-emotional development, and critical skills that lead to lifelong success.

As a leader in the field of early childhood, Mile High Early Learning has developed continuing education and professional learning programs designed

to grow, strengthen, and sustain our early childhood workforce including family, friend, and neighbor caregivers who care for the majority of children under age 3 years. Mile High Early Learning has created a workforce pipeline with on-ramps through its professional learning center that includes a child development associate training program for teachers who are beginning their profession in early childhood.

Mile High Early Learning's quality programming informs state and national leaders and continues to be at the forefront in advocating for children and families across Colorado and promoting systems-level impacts that support and improve the field of early childhood education.

Mile High Early Learning is guided by a mission to enable all children to succeed in school by providing resources and education to inspire a lifetime of learning and a vision that all are joyfully welcomed into a learning community that prioritizes equity.

I congratulate Mile High Early Learning on reaching this important milestone of 50 years of caring for our children and ensuring high- quality early care and education.