Floor Statements

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, I feel as though the Presiding Officer has the misfortune of being the Presiding Officer every time I come out here to speak. So I apologize for that, but I thank you for your patience and for your indulgence.

Madam President, when I was in the second grade, we were asked to line up in our classroom by the people whose family had been here the shortest period of time and whose family had been here the longest period of time, and I turned out to be the answer to both of those questions. My father's family went all the way back to basically before the founding of the United States, and my mother had recently arrived, having survived the Holocaust in and around Warsaw with her parents, John and Helena Klejman, who came to this country to rebuild their shattered lives. So one person going back to the beginning; another person recently arrived.

That is not an unusual story for this country. That is a usual story for this country. It is an unusual story in the world because a lot of other countries aren't like the United States of America in this way. There is literally no other country on the planet for which immigration is so central to its history and identity as the United States of America.

People all over the world want to come here because we live in a country that respects human freedoms and respects human rights. They want to share in the American dream. They want to be part of the oldest democracy in human history. We should celebrate that on this floor. We should celebrate that fact on this floor. People aren't lining up to go to Russia. They aren't crossing the Gobi Desert to go to China. They want to come here. That should give us enormous pride as Americans. I feel proud of that. I am proud of that.

My grandparents were filled with joy to be Americans. I have never met anybody--I have traveled my State extensively and the United States extensively. I have never met a person who has a stronger accent than my grandparents had. And they are the greatest patriots I ever knew-- not because they thought this country was perfect but because they believed we had a way of correcting our imperfections and that they could be part of that even though they came from someplace else and spoke a different language.

Over our history, immigration has been a uniquely American strength. Today, immigrants lead one in four startups. They are more than half of all STEM workers with Ph.Ds. They are nearly 3 in 10 physicians in this country and nearly 4 in 10 home healthcare aides. And they are more than 70 percent--70 percent--of all farmworkers, the men and women who work tirelessly day after day after day, late into the night, to keep us fed and were doing that during the pandemic without rest.

While other industrialized nations have seen their populations decline and their economies stagnate, immigration has been vital to the American economy. If you look at the history of the United States for the last 150 years or so, what you see is that there are variations. Sometimes we grow; sometimes we don't. But, roughly, it is 3 percent a year of economic growth. Two percent of that is organic. One percent of that is immigration. If you cut off immigration, that is a third of our economic growth over the years.

I think most of America understands this. I think people in Colorado understand this well. They know that immigration is fundamental to our history and to our identity, to our economy, but they also have a reasonable expectation that the government is managing immigration in a responsible way, in a way that is consistent with our best traditions as a nation and upholds the rule of law.

After I was first elected to the Senate, one of the first things I worked on was something we called the Colorado Compact. I stole the idea from a Republican. I think he was the attorney general of the State of Utah. He created the Utah Compact. I went out with my friend, a former Senator, a Republican from Colorado named Hank Brown, and we developed something called the Colorado Compact. I spent 18 months working on it. We traveled 6,300 miles around the State of Colorado. We had 230 meetings. We talked to farmers and business owners, with law enforcement, educators, faith leaders, ski resorts, Latino leaders. All of them were struggling with different pieces of our broken immigration system.

Not surprisingly when you have conversations like that around people's kitchen tables or in the county courthouses, we found that there was a lot more agreement on what immigration reform should look like than you would ever think possible if all you did was listen to the cable television at night or read your social media feed--neither of which I recommend anybody spend their time doing.

We developed a set of principles in a bipartisan way, in rural parts of Colorado as well as urban and suburban parts of the State. We had some of the most conservative organizations in Colorado--Club 20 comes to mind--that endorsed this and some of the most aggressive immigrant rights groups who supported this. And the principles that we developed included a commitment to the rule of law, our heritage as a nation of immigrants, and a secure border. That is how you get a broad coalition together on immigration.

One thing we agreed on was that the issue needs more than piecemeal reforms. No State effort is a substitute for a commonsense national strategy to overhaul our immigration system. That is why, a few years later, I was one of four Democrats who served on the Gang of 8 here in 2013. We had four Republicans and we had four Democrats, and we worked for months on a piece of legislation that became known, I guess, as the Gang of 8 bill. It was the first comprehensive immigration bill in years in this place, and the elements of it were aligned exactly with what we had said in the Colorado Compact: the tough but fair pathway to citizenship; the most progressive Dream Act that had ever been conceived, much less written or voted on, on the floor of the Senate; a massive overhaul of our visa system; $46 billion of border security-- not a medieval wall but state-of-the-art military technology so we could see every inch of the border. We doubled the number of border agents in that bill. We had 300 miles--I think even more than that--of new fencing as a result of that bill.

In a moment that today almost seems unimaginable--but this is why I wanted to come to the floor today, really, was to remind people of this; the pages who are here won't even believe it--this came to the floor, and it passed with 68 votes. It almost got 70 votes in 2013.

Then it went over to the House of Representatives, and tragically-- tragically--instead of just putting the bill on the floor and letting the House work its will, the Freedom Caucus got to exercise a veto, and they said: If you can't get a majority of the majority, we are not going to let you pass this bill--even though a majority of the House of Representatives wanted to pass the bill because there were enough people from both parties who could see the benefit of this comprehensive immigration bill.

And I realize, you know, now we are in a different day. That was then; this is now. It was a different negotiation, a different deal. And it was a different Senate, for that matter. It was a Senate, thanks to John McCain, that occasionally worked--and others like him.

I think that we have got to figure out a way to get past this logjam and toward a solution where we honor our heritage as a nation of immigrants, we secure the benefits to our economy of a working immigration system, we comply with the rule of law, and we give the American people confidence that our border is secure. None of that is an unreasonable expectation, but we are nowhere near meeting that expectation today. Instead, politicians have used our broken immigration system as one more issue to bludgeon the other side, to not make progress. That was the theory of the people who killed the bill in 2013, was that they could get more out of the politics of not passing the bill than they would by passing the bill.

I actually think--I think they got more than they were even bargaining for. They couldn't have imagined when they voted against that bill that they would end up nominating a Presidential candidate who rode an escalator down in his building talking about how Mexicans are rapists and that that guy not only was nominated; he went on to become President of the United States. Staggering. Staggering.

I think there is some question about whether American history would have changed in really profound ways if we had been able to pass that comprehensive bill, and the cost has been just terrible for the country for our inability to do it.

Our businesses are desperate to hire computer scientists and engineers, but because our visa system is broken, we are literally training Ph.Ds and sending them back to countries like India or China or to Canada. We have Dreamers who are living in perpetual fear, unable to plan for their future in the only country they have ever known. This Senate has been unable to deal with the issue of the Afghan interpreters who are people who fought side by side, worked side by side with our soldiers in Afghanistan because of our broken system and the politics around immigration.

In Colorado, we have a $47 billion agriculture industry. It is lifeblood of our State. I have met vegetable growers in Brighton and peach growers in Palisade who don't have enough labor to harvest the crops. And the system is broken.

We fixed that in 2013, too. I negotiated that with Orrin Hatch, God rest his soul, and Marco Rubio and Dianne Feinstein. That is who negotiated the agriculture provisions of the bill.

In Colorado, it is not just farmers. We don't have enough workers for our steer. Across the country, we don't have enough doctors. We don't have enough nurses or childcare providers or home health aides. We have 11 million unfilled jobs in this country right now because the economy has come back, but we haven't been able to fill these vacancies. You can draw a straight line from our broken immigration system to the country's labor shortages to some of the high prices that we see in this economy.

So Americans--once again, no one around here bears the burden of not getting the job done, but Americans are paying the price for an immigration system that doesn't work. The last time we reformed our immigration system in a comprehensive way was 1986. For those keeping score, I was a junior in college then; I am 57 today. So that is an incredibly long period of time, and that was when Ronald Reagan was President.

But a lot has changed in 36 years. Today, we are in an era of mass migration propelled by COVID, global instability, and climate change. And it is only going to get worse. Our immigration system, including our asylum system, isn't built for today's conditions. It is one reason why we have a perpetual humanitarian crisis at our southern border. And that crisis should not be an excuse to not act. That crisis should be a reason for us to act.

Right now, the administration has the resources to process 3,500 migrants a day at the border, but they are receiving 8,000 a day, and we could see up to 18,000 a day by this summer. If that happens, the money is going to run out in July, overwhelming any border infrastructure and deepening the humanitarian crisis that is there.

None of this should surprise us. There is a surge at the border every summer; and since we know it is coming, we need a plan. I am sorry to say this, but the administration doesn't have one. I read what they put out last month. I didn't see any benchmarks, any timelines, any accountability on implementation. I did see a lot of what I think is wishful thinking about everything being under control when they aren't under control. That is not what the American people believe. That is not what public servants and organizations at the border report.

And now the administration wants to lift title 42, which is going to make a bad situation even worse. We can't keep title 42 forever. It is no substitute for a comprehensive plan, but lifting it now before we have a plan, I think is a mistake and it is going to erode the American people's confidence that we have the situation at the border under control. And it is going to deepen the humanitarian crisis at the border. It is going to deepen the humanitarian crisis at the border.

By the way, part of that plan--if we had a plan--should be having a conversation--leading a conversation--with leaders across Latin America to see how we can come together as a region to help people that have been dislocated by violence and by corruption.

Until we solve this in a comprehensive way, these issues are going to keep coming up and they are going to keep dividing us here. Today, it is title 42. And in the last administration, we literally shut the government down--literally shut the government down--over a debate about whether Mexico would pay for the wall, which, by the way, they were never going to do and they never did. We created DACA under one President only to see it canceled in the next Presidency.

We could have spared America all of this. We could have spared America all of this if we had passed the Gang of 8 bill in 2013. We could have spared the harm to our communities and our economy, but also the harm to our democracy from the mindless political fights over the past decade when people in the Senate turned immigration into political napalm instead of lifting it up as part of our history, a central part of who we are.

If there is any silver lining to our failure to pass comprehensive reform in 2013, it is that we clearly demonstrated that Democrats cannot fix

this by themselves. We are going to need two parties working together to do it. The good thing about immigration is that there are a lot of different issues, there are a lot of different constituencies, and there are a lot of ways to construct a deal.

The former chairman of the Judiciary Committee is on the floor, Senator Leahy, from Vermont. If I am not mistaken, Senator Leahy would chair the Judiciary Committee when we were considering the 2013 Gang of 8 bill. That was an extraordinary process, an open amendment process--I will yield for the chairman to speak.

I thank the chairman for his historical recollection, which is 100 percent correct. I just want to make it clear, again, how extraordinary the process was.

You know, when people--I think people in this country are entitled to believe that the way this place works is the way that old ``Schoolhouse Rock'' cartoon said it worked about how a bill becomes a law. I think people ought to be entitled to believe this is the way this place works. It almost never works that way, but it did in the case of this bill and in the case of the chairman's leadership in the Judiciary.

We just need people who are willing to work together here. I have continued to work with Mike Crapo from Idaho, a Republican, working on a deal to try to create a pathway to legalization for farmworkers. If we can do that, I don't see a reason why we can't raise our sights and come together as a Senate to finally fix our broken immigration system.

There is no one else to address this but the 100 Senators that are in this Chamber. I am prepared to work with any one of them--anybody here--to get it done because we don't have to choose between our heritage as a Nation of immigrants and our commitment to the rule of law. We do not have to choose between a medieval wall and the Statue of Liberty.

We can end the partisan warfare over immigration that has hurt our economy, our communities, and our standing in the world. We can give a real pathway to citizenship for those willing to invest in the American dream. We can secure the border. We can make immigration the wind in our sails once again and give the American people confidence that we have a fair system in place to welcome people--like my mom and her parents--who want nothing more than to contribute to this Nation and to our democracy.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 160. Had I been present for the vote I would have voted yea.

Madam President, I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 148. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 149. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 150. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 151. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 152. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 153. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 154. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 155. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 156. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 157. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 158. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 159. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

Madam President, I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 144. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 145. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 146. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 147. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

Mr. President, I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 143. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted yea.

Mr. President, I rise tonight to support Ketanji Brown Jackson's nomination to serve as an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Judge Jackson comes to this floor with impeccable credentials. She graduated from Harvard magna cum laude. She graduated with honors from Harvard Law School, where she edited the Harvard Law Review.

After graduation, Judge Jackson worked at top firms in private practice and secured three prestigious clerkships, including one for Justice Breyer on the Supreme Court of the United States. Later, she served as a public defender, representing people who couldn't afford a lawyer.

I can't think of better evidence of her commitment to equal justice under the law, where everyone, regardless of their means, has the right to fair representation.

Judge Jackson is clearly qualified for this position. There is nobody who doubts that. My colleagues know it because the Senate has confirmed her three times with bipartisan support: first, to serve as Vice Chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission; second, for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia; and, last, for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.

Taken together, Judge Jackson comes to this floor with the best legal training America can offer: a decade of experience on the Federal bench and a consistent record of bipartisan support here on this floor.

I had the opportunity to meet with Judge Jackson 2 weeks ago, after she had been rolled around in the barrel--that is one way of saying it--during the confirmation hearings that people all over the country watched. And in our conversation, after she had been through all of that turmoil, she told me about how her parents had attended segregated schools in Miami before working as public school teachers here in Washington, DC. Her dad went on to be a lawyer, a lawyer for the Miami school district, something I appreciate, having been a superintendent of schools.

Unlike her parents, Judge Jackson grew up in America after the civil rights laws of the 1960s and remembered how hard her parents worked every single day to give her opportunities they never even dreamed of for themselves. And she seized those opportunities. She earned top grade. She was elected student body president.

And when she told her guidance counselor she wanted to apply to Harvard, the counselor warned she shouldn't set her ``sights so high.'' Fortunately for America, she set her sights high. She set her sights where they should have been set. She followed the high example of her parents, working hard and impressing everyone along the way, friends and colleagues and mentors, who are virtually beating down the doors of this Capitol to tell us what a thoughtful, fairminded, and principled Justice she would be.

That hasn't stopped some colleagues from distorting her record, trying to say to the American people that she is soft on crime. That would come as news, I think, to the Fraternal Order of Police, who has endorsed her candidacy for the Court. It would come as news to the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Both have endorsed her nomination. They see what is obvious to anyone who fairly reviews her record, which is that Judge Jackson has spent her entire career devoted to the rule of law.

Her brother and two uncles served as police officers. So law enforcement isn't some academic abstraction for her. It is literally her family.

The Presiding Officer knows something about that, I think, in his family history as well.

In our meeting, I asked Judge Jackson what makes a good judge. We had a long talk about that. One of the things she said was communication, because judges have to explain their reasoning in every decision, which is a lot more than I can say for the U.S. Senate.

She also said that it is the unique role of the judge to identify and to extract their bias before every case. And if you look at her more than 570 written decisions, it is clear how seriously she takes that responsibility.

I was just on the phone with some people from Colorado before I came over here. And I said to them--I told them I was coming out here to give this speech. And I said to them--these are old, old friends of mine--that I can't remember a time when I sat down with somebody and had a 30-minute conversation where I came away more impressed than I was by Judge Jackson.

I found her to be both brilliant and completely down-to-earth, which is, I think, a particularly important combination for a judge at any level--at any level--to have both the intellect to grapple with the nuances of the law and the experience to appreciate how it affects real people.

It wasn't that long ago that Judge Jackson would have received over 90 votes on this floor, just like her mentor, Justice Breyer, did; just like qualified judges when I was in law school myself. The Senate confirmed Justice Breyer 96 to 3, just like we confirmed Justice Scalia 98 to 0, and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor got 91 to nothing. Somebody was out that day. I guarantee you they would have voted for her if they had been here.

Each time that happened, the Senate reinforced the independence of the judiciary, set aside our partisan politics, and stood up, I think, for integrity and for the rule of law.

I am sad. I am sad tonight that Judge Jackson won't get 99 votes tomorrow, even though she deserves it. And that is not a reflection on her. As I said, if this were an earlier day in the Senate, she would get 99 votes. She would have gotten 99 votes if she had come in a different era. It is a reflection of how we, as Senators--and I among them--have shredded our constitutional responsibility to advise and consent.

It is my hope that by the time--I was going to say, when my children are adults; they almost are adults; they

are adults--but by the time they are running the country, with everybody else in their generation, that we will have figured out a way to return the Senate to a place where we take our responsibility--our constitutional responsibility--to advise and consent seriously, and we find a way to make it, once again, a bipartisan effort in this place, and find a way to stitch ourselves back together again. I am prepared to work with anybody on the floor to try to do that. But in the meantime, this really, in my view, is a moment to celebrate. It is a moment to celebrate.

In the last few weeks, my office has literally been flooded with messages from Coloradans telling me what an extraordinary Justice Judge Jackson would make. And they don't have to persuade me. Judge Jackson is an inspiration to me and to so many Americans, to millions and millions of Americans.

In the past few weeks, I couldn't help but imagine what it would mean to the students I used to work for in the Denver Public Schools to see Judge Jackson on the Court, the same Court that once ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that her ancestors were little more than property, a Court that codified in Plessy v. Ferguson the segregated schools that her parents were forced to attend and the segregated hotels and buses and movie theaters they endured every single day, day after day.

And it is a reminder that change is possible in America. Our country isn't perfect--far from it. Our history has always been a battle between the highest ideals expressed in our Constitution and our worst impulses as human beings.

And if you look at our history, if you really look at our history, the path from cases like Dred Scott and Plessy to Brown and Obergefell was cleared, as it always is, by Americans who refused to give up on our highest ideals; who insisted, as Dr. King once said, that we make real the promise of our democracy.

This week is a victory for our highest ideals and for the promise of American democracy. It is a moment to celebrate a nation that, as Judge Jackson said, in one generation went from forcing her parents to live under Jim Crow to elevating her to the highest Court in the land.

After carefully reviewing her record, I believe that Judge Jackson will join the ranks of Earl Warren, Thurgood Marshall, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justices who have helped bridge the gap between the words written in our Constitution and their reality in America today, and I hope she will join the Court's great dissenters, Justices like Justice Harlan, who opposed decisions that outlawed the minimum wage, or Justices Roberts and Murphy, who refused to condone the internment of Japanese Americans in Colorado and across the country. All of those Justices stood not for an ideology but for the American values etched in our Constitution: freedom, equality, democracy, and the rule of law.

I am confident that Judge Jackson will stand for those values fairly, impartially, and without prejudice; and tomorrow I will enthusiastically vote for her confirmation. I would suggest that everybody in this Chamber would have a good reason to vote for her confirmation, and I hope they will consider it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I appreciate the opportunity to address the Senate on an issue of real importance to our country and to families in Colorado and all across the United States.

Today, 120 economists wrote an open letter--in the face of the inflation that we are now facing as a nation, as a result of the economic growth that we are having coming out of this very deep recession, and the supply chain interruptions that have caused inflation, 120 economists sent an open letter saying:

The expanded Child Tax Credit is one of the easiest, most

effective, and direct tools currently at our disposal to help

families deal with the impact of inflation on family budgets.

The exert opinions about the causes of and solutions to

rising inflation are as varied as the authors of this letter,

but we agree on this: the expanded Child Tax Credit is too

small to meaningfully increase inflation across the whole

economy.

That means that that $100 billion a year that the child tax credit costs to lift half the kids out of poverty isn't going to drive inflation in a $21 trillion economy. That is one of the points these economists agreed on.

``[B]ut,'' they wrote, ``it will make an important difference for family budgets, especially families in the bottom half of the income spectrum. Monthly Child Tax Credit payments are a proven success at helping families keep up with the everyday costs of keeping a family afloat.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the open letter signed by 120 economists.

Mr. President, this is no surprise to me. I was for the child tax credit before we had COVID because for the last 50 years, as I have said before on this floor, we had an economy that has worked really well for the top 10 percent of Americans and basically hasn't worked for anybody else.

We have some of the lowest economic mobility in the industrialized world. We have got some of the greatest income inequality in the industrialized world.

Stunningly--stunningly--in the last two economic downturns, economic inequality has only gotten staggeringly worse in this country because of the massive asset inflation that has benefited the wealthiest people in the economy who are in the position to make money on their money or, in the case of a lot of people, on real estate. In Colorado, it is making it harder and harder and harder for working people to find a place to live.

And I can tell you that our kids pay the highest price from this.

I was the superintendent of the Denver Public Schools before I was in this job. A majority of kids were kids of color; a majority of kids were kids living in poverty. And their families were working--contrary to what some people around here think, their families were working two and three jobs. The problem wasn't that their families weren't working. It wasn't that they weren't working hard. They were killing themselves, and no matter what they did, they couldn't get their kids out of poverty, and that is not a consequence of anything that is their fault. They are doing everything they can. For that matter, their kids are doing everything they can--going to schools that ought to do a better job for the kids living in poverty all over this country.

And some people think that we have to just accept this as a fundamental aspect of our economy or our democracy or our society; that somehow the United States of America is such a failure as a community that we have to accept being 38 out of 41 industrialized countries in terms of childhood poverty; that we are willing to permanently accept the idea that the poorest people in our society are our children.

I think there is something we can do about it. I know there is something we can do about it. I know there is a lot of skepticism about the Federal Government's ability to do anything well. I share that skepticism sometimes.

We fought two wars in the Middle East that lasted for 20 years, that cost about $5.6 trillion--seems like a set of bad decisions.

We have cut taxes on the floor of this body by $8 trillion since 2001. Almost all of the benefit of that has gone to the wealthiest people in the country, when we have got the worst income inequality that we have had since 1928.

It has been staggering to watch--it has been staggering to watch people stay here at the end of a legislative year, at the end of a Congress, and burn the midnight oil to make sure that we can extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country and for the largest corporations in America.

That is how you know it is 2 o'clock in the morning in the U.S. Senate. It is when we have to extend tax cuts for the richest people in this country during a time of devastating income inequality that is perpetuated by the economic cycles that we continue to have.

But last year, Mr. President, as you know, because you were a big part of this, we did something different. We adopted the expanded child tax credit; we adopted the expanded earned income tax credit. Those bills were Bennet-Brown and Brown-Bennet, respectively--my friend Sherrod Brown from the great State of Ohio.

And here on this, ahead of tax day, I wanted to come down to the floor just to give you a little report, kind of a book report, a status report on what has happened.

And what I want to tell you is it worked. It worked. It worked. We discovered we didn't have to live in a society that was 38 out of 41 industrialized countries. We discovered that we didn't have to accept the world where the poorest people in our country were our children.

We benefited 61 million kids in the United States--90 percent of the children in Connecticut, 90 percent of the children in Colorado, and 90 percent of the children all across this country directly benefited from a bill we passed here.

We cut childhood poverty nearly in half. We cut hunger by a quarter for families with kids during a pandemic, which feels like a worthy thing to have done. We did it without adding a single bureaucrat to the Federal Government. We did it without adding one more Federal Agency. We proved we could do it.

And then we didn't extend it at the end of the year. And now, predictably, childhood poverty is shooting up in the United States of America. Hunger is shooting up in the United States of America.

I was on the phone with the leaders of the food banks across Colorado who have done such an incredible job during this recession and during the last recession making sure people are fed. I have visited some of those food banks. I know that people are saying to me that there are, you know, two-thirds of the people who are showing up were people who didn't show up before we had this catastrophe of COVID.

But guess what is getting longer now, as a result of our failure to extend the child tax credit. It is the lines in these food banks. It is the people coming to get food for their kids instead of being able to go to the grocery store with the dignity of the expanded child tax credit.

There is a shred of good news here that I wanted to just speak about for a second because this will be my chance to do it, and I just want to remind people that as families file their tax returns, they will receive the second half of their child tax credit, which is worth up to $1,800 per child. That is still available. It is not coming in a monthly form anymore. It is not coming into your bank account anymore in that automatic way, but when you file your tax returns, you will receive it.

And the other thing, because of the EITC work that we did--the earned income tax credit work--workers without children will receive the expanded EITC, which we tripled last year--we tripled last year.

We finally decided we are not going to tax people into poverty anymore in this country, which is what we were doing before we expanded that.

So I wanted to remind families to claim their child and dependent care tax credit as well.

We expanded that last year to a maximum of $4,000 per child, and in my view we have to continue to come down here and fight to make these credits permanent. And it is my goal for us to end childhood poverty in this country.

I think cutting it in half--that was an exciting thing. It has been a long time around here--decades, generations--generations since we have seen a reduction in poverty in this country like the reduction in childhood poverty we saw last year, generations since we have seen a reduction in hunger like we saw last year.

And the good news is, we now know that it is a fact that we can do it. There are a lot of countries in the world that have an expanded child tax credit or child benefit like the child tax credit, and in all those countries, fewer of their kids live in poverty.

And their workforce participation rates are actually higher, which doesn't surprise me at all, based on the stories I heard from families about what they were spending the child tax credit on, which was everything that had to do with their kids, from buying back-to-school clothes to paying for a bicycle so a young man in Colorado Springs could stay at school late so he could have extracurriculars that he otherwise wouldn't have had the ability to achieve, so that his mom could stay at work for a few more hours so she could provide for the family.

There is literally no data in America or anywhere else that doesn't support the idea that this is a pro-work policy, the child tax credit.

We didn't have any trouble, as I said earlier, extending the $8 trillion of tax cuts that we have cut for the wealthiest people in this country since 2001.

For that money, we could have extended the child tax credit for 50 years. We could have doubled it for 25 years, and we could have ended childhood poverty in the United States of America. I guarantee you that would have been a better investment than sending money to people who need it least in our economy.

I would say to my own party that I am really grateful that we passed this last year, but I am deeply, deeply disappointed that we couldn't come together and extend it.

I am deeply, deeply disappointed that we haven't fulfilled our promise to reverse the Trump tax cuts for the richest people in America. It doesn't make any sense. It is completely upside down, but that is where we find ourselves.

I wish I could express how different it felt at the end of the year when it was

kids, many of whom were living in poverty and their families who were getting, on average, $450 a month--when the lights were going out on them, and we just went home. We just went home. There was nobody burning the midnight oil here to make sure that the kids got the benefit of this.

And, by the way, even if you don't believe that living in a society where the poorest people are your kids and that it ought to be a purpose of a nation to lift kids who, through no fault of their own, find themselves in poverty; who, through no fault of their own, find themselves living in a country where we have less economic mobility than almost any other industrialized country in the world and therefore don't have the opportunity to rise that generations had before them-- and, hopefully, generations that will come after them--and that are attending a system of education in this country because of the lack of early childhood education in the United States, because of the lack of quality K-12 education in this country, because of the incredible expense of higher education--who are attending a system that is actually reinforcing the income equality we have rather than liberating people from their circumstances.

(Mr. MARKEY assumed the Chair.) The best predictor of the quality of your education in this country is your parents' income, to the point of ruthlessness--to the point of ruthlessness.

I want to mention that Senator Romney, who is a Republican from Utah, has a very similar bill to my bill to expand the child tax credit. In fact, it is basically the same bill. He is a little more generous with kids under the age of 6, and we have a difference of view on pay-fors, but I think that is a bridgeable difference. And I have no doubt that in the long term, we will come to a bipartisan agreement in this Chamber to make the enhanced child tax credit permanent; to decide that even if you don't care about the kids, which you should, that the country can't afford this level of childhood poverty, that our democracy won't be sustained with this level of income inequality. That is what I believe. That is what I know.

Childhood poverty costs the United States of America $1 trillion dollars a year. That is why it is not surprising that Columbia University did a study and found that we get an 8x return--that the child tax credit would pay back the United States eight times what it costs. Again, what it costs is $100 billion a year, but childhood poverty costs us $1 trillion a year.

Instead of accepting the idea that we are going to be at the bottom of the cellar when it comes to kids living in poverty, what we said was: No, we are going to cut it in half.

And let me assure you, as a former school superintendent and--well, as a former school superintendent--the cost of mitigating for childhood poverty far exceeds the cost diminishing it.

It is an amazing thing to me, on top of everything else that we are talking about today, that when families are in the grip of the kind of inflation that they are in the grip of--which costs them somewhere between $270 to $300 a month, depending on where they live and depending on who they are--that it wouldn't occur to us that the easiest thing to do would be just to reinstate what we were doing last year and allow people to have the benefit of $450 on average to raise their children, to pay for a little bit of extra childcare, to pay for a little bit of transportation to fix a car that is broken so they can stay on the job.

I know there are some colleagues here who think that this policy disincentivizes work. Even before we passed this last year, every study that looked at this that I was aware of, with the exception of one outlier that I think had terrible data--every single one--said that this was not going to negatively affect work.

And guess what. Now we have had a 6-month experiment in the United States of America, and every study, including the one by the American Enterprise Institute, which was a doubter about this policy--and I think probably still is a doubter about this policy--found that it had no effect on people's work habits.

The problem in America is not that people don't work hard. That is not the problem that we have in this country. People are killing themselves. And it is true that wages are up by about 5.6 percent since the Biden administration went into office, which is great, awesome. It is great, but we have had the effects of inflation, and we are a long way from having an economy that, when it grows, it grows for everybody, which, by the way, that is what we need to do. That is what we have to achieve.

This democracy will not survive another 50 years of an economy that, when it grows, it grows for the top 10 percent, and everyone else's wages are flat or everyone else is effectively in a recession. There is no evidence in world history that with that level of income inequality, that lack of economic mobility, that, over 100 years, you can sustain a democracy.

And we don't have to do that. We don't have to do that. We can make it permanent, put it back in place--pay for it, by the way. I believe we should pay for it by raising taxes on the wealthiest people in the country, like we said we were going to do by reversing the Trump tax cuts--the Trump giveaways which were sold as the middle-class tax cut. They were so smart because they gave people in the lower levels of the income ladder a little bit, to say: There is your Trump tax cut--so he could go out to the Mahoning Valley, go out to Youngstown, and tell people: You got your tax cut. You are welcome.

What he didn't tell them was that 52 percent of the Trump tax cuts went to the top 5 percent of Americans; that after he left the people of the Mahoning Valley and Youngstown, an old steel town, and then he went on to Mar-a-Lago, where people were having a New Year's Eve dinner, or whatever it was they were having, and the first thing he said to them was: You are welcome. That was a lot closer to the truth.

You are welcome. You are welcome that I cut your taxes at a time when income inequality is greater than at any time since 1929. You are welcome that I cut the corporate rate to 21 percent, even though no one in corporate America was asking for a 21-percent tax cut. ``You are welcome'' is what he said.

I said earlier, Mr. President, before you were here, that there are people in the country that are skeptical of the Federal Government doing anything well and that I have my own skepticism for the reasons I said earlier. But there are people in terms of the child tax credit that said it would never work. You know, 6 months before we did it or 4 months before we did it, I was getting stopped by reporters everyday asking: Do you think they are really going to be able to do this? Can the IRS, can the Department of Treasury--can they really administer this?

And the answer is yes, they did. They did a fantastic job. They didn't get everybody at first. They didn't get everybody at first, and we knew that would be a problem. We enlisted people all over the State of Colorado who worked with folks, who worked with working families and worked with families who are living in poverty, because, remember, this wasn't just about kids living in poverty.

Ninety percent--90 percent--of America's children benefited from this. That is why some people have called it Social Security for kids. Some people have called it universal basic income for kids. I think it is a good thing because I can tell you that 90 percent of the kids in Colorado can use the help; because 90 percent of the people in this country and in my State have not benefited from economic growth the same way the top 10 percent of Americans have for the last 50 years.

And, as I mentioned--I just want to say again on this floor because there were people out there saying, ``People are going to drop out of the workforce,''--it did not happen. It didn't happen in other countries that have a tax benefit like this, and it didn't happen during the 6 months that we were here.

I understand that, maybe, we would have a different debate. People would say: Oh, my God, Michael, all these people dropped out of the workforce. It didn't work the way you said that it would.

It did work the way I said it would. It did work the way that data said that it would, and moms and dads--very unsurprisingly to me--who were working hard to begin with, probably just

worked harder because now they had the chance to pay for a little extra childcare. Now they had the chance to fix a car or, as I said, let their kid go to extracurricular activities so they could stay at work. And that is what all the studies have shown.

So I suppose one good thing has come out of this, which is--or maybe it is more than one good thing--it is that we now know that America is no different than any other place in this respect: that when parents get a marginal, incremental amount of money, they don't quit their jobs; they feed their kids. But as a society, we are able to say that we cut childhood poverty in half and we cut hunger in half--by 25 percent.

What good is it that now there are families that are lined up in soup kitchens, today, who weren't there 6 months ago because they had the benefit of the child tax credit?

As I said, parents spent this credit on all kinds of different things. I mentioned childcare. I mentioned the bicycle for extracurricular, but, I will tell you, the thing that I heard from every single parent that I talked to--and there were a lot of them in Colorado over the last 6 months, over the last 6 months of last year-- was the stress that it had relieved for their family--that grinding stress of being in a recession, the grinding stress of being in the middle of a pandemic, the grinding stress of having your kids out of school or having interrupted schooling, the grinding stress of living in an economy where people are saying to you, no matter how hard you work, that somehow it is your fault that you can't give your family that; and that the decisions that we have made over many years in this Chamber and in the Chamber across there, and that some of the largest institutions have made as well, unfortunately, have created real headwinds for working people and for their families.

We are in the middle here of considering the China COMPETES bill, which I think gives us a real opportunity to reassess what we have been doing for the last 40 or 50 years.

Every single thing we set and we told the American people we were doing in their name with respect to China and its presence in the World Trade Organization and what China would do as a result of that--none of that turned out to be true. And when I say ``China,'' I don't mean the Chinese people. I mean Beijing. And we realize now that they weren't going to follow the rules of the road. We realize now that they were engaged in state-sponsored capitalism, and that is very hard to compete with; and that instead of just privileging the people in our society who want to make stuff as cheaply as possible in China, maybe we ought to be thinking about other things, like our supply chain--protecting our supply chain--or our national security or whether we are creating good-paying jobs in the United States so that when the economy grows, it grows for everybody.

We have an opportunity to do that now, and that is what I want. That is what I really want: It is an economy that, when it grows, it grows for everybody, because that is the American dream, that is the story we told ourselves about who we are as a people, and that is the way to strengthen our democracy. That is what I really want.

In the meantime, what I would like us to do, since we now know how to do it, finally, is lift half the kids in this country out of poverty so they have a chance to pursue the American dream themselves. I used to say that this Chamber treated America's children like they were someone else's children because of the education system that we have provided for them. And when we did the child tax credit, I came out here and I said: I can finally come to this floor and say: We are now treating America's children like they are America's children.

But, for the moment, that is no longer true, and, for the moment, we are treating them like they are someone else's children, and we will rue the day that we did this. We will rue the day that we did this.

This is a pro-work policy. It is a pro-family policy. It is a pro- democracy policy. We now know it worked, and it worked well. We have got to fight to make it permanent, and that is what I will do.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I strongly believe women should have the right to choose. That freedom is under attack in many States across the country. For this reason, I voted to move to the Women's Health Protection Act. I will continue to fight to codify Roe v. Wade, as I have since coming to the Senate, so that no matter where you live in America you can access the full range of reproductive health care. I know that many Coloradans have a moral difference of opinion on this matter, and I respect their beliefs. In the end, I believe the value of individual liberty demands that people, not governments, make these most personal decisions.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the cloture motions filed on Thursday, February 10, ripen at 5:45 p.m. today.

Madam President, reserving the right to object, I strongly disagree with Senator Lee's proposal amending what has been agreed to--not agreed to but what has gotten every single Member of the Senate but for one. I want to also say that I was on the floor about 10 days ago, I think, on the subject of this. I want the Chair and the Senator from Utah to know I didn't even mention who had objected while I was here, but it was 1 out of 100 Senators. This bill passed the House of Representatives with all but two votes. It passed with every single vote from the Colorado delegation, and we have this gamut of people in from Colorado.

The bill is strongly supported by my friend Ken Buck, whom I ran against in 2010. And if Ken were here, he would say there is very little upon which we agree. I hope there is more than he thinks we agree on, but we definitely agree on this.

So let me just explain why we wrote this bill. In 5 days, as the Senator from Utah has said, we are going to mark the 80th anniversary of Executive Order No. 9066, which began the forced dispossession and internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. Two- thirds of them were citizens of this country, American citizens, forced out of their homes into camps by our own government--by their own.

One of those camps was Amache on the Eastern Plains of Colorado, where the Federal Government detained nearly 10,000 Japanese Americans against their will. Most of them had less than a week--most of them had less than a week--to get rid of virtually everything they owned and crowd onto buses and trains with no idea where they were going or what was going to happen to them.

Some of the first arrivals at Amache were kids younger than the pages who are on the floor here today with us, who were forced to build the camp where their own families were interred during the duration of the war. The conditions were horrible. Walls didn't always reach the ceilings. The windows weren't always sealed. It meant that snow blew in during the winter, and dust blew in during the summer.

This is what our government did to our fellow Americans, to children, forced to work in the fields to grow their own food in the jail that the United States of America had committed them to. And what is even more remarkable is that despite this treatment, 1 out of 10 of the people at Amache still volunteered to serve during the war--a higher rate than any other camp in America. Think about that. They were willing to defend the very government that was detaining them, that had locked up their children. That is how much they believed in America, even when America turned our back on them.

And I had the opportunity to visit Amache a few years ago with John Hopper, a high school principal in Grenada who worked with his students to create the Amache Preservation Society. They have been taking care of this site themselves all of these years, collecting items from all over the world that former prisoners have sent back because they want people to remember. They want a memorial to their captivity. Year after year, these high school students and their teacher have worked to restore this site so that the next generation of Coloradans can learn about what happened there.

If it were up to me, every student in Colorado and throughout the American West would go there--throughout our entire country--and learn about the Americans of Amache, the men and women who held on to hope year after year, who supported one another, who forged a community behind the barbed wire of this site, who never gave up on the United States of America, even as it was interning them on their own soil.

After I visited this site, I introduced a bill with Senator Hickenlooper to make Amache a part of the National Park System so it would have the resources and recognition it deserves for years to come. We have to get this done because the survivors of Amache are growing fewer and fewer in number each year, and we have to keep the memory of what they went through alive for the next generation.

That is what Colorado wants. I have a list of over 70 groups that support it, from the Asian Chamber of Commerce to the Colorado Council of Churches, to the town of Grenada, which owns the site today.

So, Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have this list printed in the Record.

Madam President, this bill wasn't controversial in Colorado,

and it wasn't controversial in the House, where Republican Congressman Ken Buck, whose district this is, took up the bill with Joe Neguse, a neighboring Congressman. Amache is in the 10th District in Prowers County, and I said that the bill passed the House by 416 to 2.

It wasn't controversial in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, where it passed with bipartisan support from the chairman and ranking member, and that is why I came here 2 weeks ago to pass the bill by unanimous consent. But now there has been an objection.

And I should mention, by the way, that this site is less than 1 square mile. It is a tiny, tiny fraction of even the county that it is in. It seems to me that if we believe in federalism at all, we shouldn't be blocking Colorado's right to preserve less than 1 square mile the way we see fit; that we shouldn't have to reduce the public lands of the United States by an equal amount. And I will say, in that connection, that I formally object to the Senator from Utah's motion for this reason. The land here is owned by Grenada. It is already public land. The town has said it wants to donate it to the National Park Service.

I have a letter from the town making this intention perfectly clear.

So it is not even private land that is becoming public. It is public land transitioning from a local government to the Federal Government at the request of the community.

And they are not asking for anything in return. And I think that is an important point that the Senator from Utah has raised. And we have worked with the town to show that they are not asking for an exchange. They want to donate the land as their patriotic contribution to America to protect this part of our history.

I would think all of us here should agree that, unless it is hurting somebody else, the town can do whatever it likes with its own land, just like a private landowner can do with their own land.

Let me stop there and see whether the Senator from Utah has any reaction to that.

I will formally object to his motion, and I will stop there. I have got other things to say, but I hope that maybe we can get to an agreement based on what I would offer. So I object.

I thank, through the Chair, the Senator from Utah.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 255, H.R. 2497. Further, I ask that the Bennet amendment at the desk be considered and agreed to; that the committee-reported amendments be agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Madam President, this is all happening on the fly right now, so I am actually going to withdraw that in the spirit of what Senator Lee has said. Hopefully, we can do this later today. We need to make sure that everybody has the benefit of seeing the language, and then we will be back later to do this.

I thank the Senator from Utah, and I will spare him the rest of my speech except that I think he deserves to hear this, and I think everybody here deserves to hear this, which is, when the ENR Committee took this legislation up this fall, here is what the survivors from Amache wrote to the committee, and I just want to put their words into the Record before I withdraw:

During World War II, we were forced to live as prisoners in

our own country. Along with our parents, we were forced from

our homes, tagged like animals, and sent to the desolate

prairie of southeast Colorado, where we lived in trauma, a

constant presence of armed guards, barbed wire, and suffering

too large to describe in one correspondence. Our families

suffered a loss of jobs, homes, property, and businesses, and

many of us lost family members. Many of our parents went to

their graves without even an apology from their country. Our

nation still has a long way to go to learn from this mistake,

and our community, both old and young, continues to suffer

from anti-Asian hate crimes, increasing to this day. Our

national parks and the stories they honor reflect our values

as a nation. Adding Amache to the National Park System would

allow us to protect a unique story that has largely been

forgotten and can only be told through the power of place.

With each year that passes, there are fewer of us. We are

counting on you to see us through.

Because of the discussion we have had tonight, we are going to have the chance later to be able to do that.

I thank my friend from Utah.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I would ask through the Chair how long the Senator from Texas might be.

Madam President, I defer to the Senator from Texas.

The Senator from Texas was yielding patiently, and just for clarity of the record, I yield to the senior Senator from the State of Texas.

Madam President, first I would like to congratulate the senior Senator from Texas for his leadership on this incredibly important issue with Senator Warner, the senior Senator from Virginia.

It really is important that we get this passed. Our national security depends on it. I think the American economy depends on it.

The Senator mentioned that there was a time in our country's history not long ago--I am going to use my words, not his, but I will paraphrase it--where I think we thought that making things as cheaply as possible was the same thing as making things as efficiently as possible. And I would argue that we privileged the people in our economy who wanted to make stuff as cheaply as possible in China when there are a lot of really other important values at work, including our national security, the supply chains that we rely on, making sure that communities in our country have jobs and wages being created.

I think we have an incredible opportunity as a nation to come together and build an economy that, when it grows, grows for everybody once again. And in my mind, that is what this bill represents.

So I just want to say to the Senator from Texas how grateful I am for his leadership, and I hope that it won't be long before we pass it.

Madam President, I thank the senior Senator from Texas who, in fact, is a noncombatant in this effort. And I am sorry that he has had the misfortune of having to come out here and object.

I will say that Colorado and Utah are right next to each other, and I faced the same travel issues that the Senator from Utah faces, I guess. I hope he gets where he is trying to go, but I stayed here this evening not because I objected to this but because I thought it was so incredibly important for us to get this work done.

And I want the record to reflect that I actually didn't name the Senator who objected, but the Senator from Texas did.

My fervent hope is that we can work this out because, really importantly, we are having the anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt's decision to inter these young people this month. And if we don't get this back to the House of Representatives, we may miss that anniversary, and people in Colorado would miss the chance to be able to demonstrate that they are carrying this really important legacy forward.

When I think about my mom's experience and the experiences here and the country that these young men and women are growing up in who are with us today, it just makes me think even more about how important all of this is. And, Madam President, I can't think of anybody I would rather have this discussion with than with you presiding in the Chair.

With that, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I appreciate the clarification from my colleague from California.

Mr. President, let me say what a privilege it is to have the opportunity to make this speech in front of you, the fifth longest serving Senator in the history of the U.S. Senate--somebody who has been in the Senate for 46 years. I was 11 when you came to the U.S. Senate, and I am not a young man anymore. I am 57 years old.

Somebody said: ``You are young.'' Only in the U.S. Senate would that be true.

But I know the Presiding Officer, who is the chair of the important Appropriations Committee, is retiring this year. I was sitting here as I was getting ready to speak, thinking that you have seen it all, Mr. President. You have seen it all.

Unlike almost anybody else in this Chamber, you have actually seen a functioning U.S. Senate. You have seen the Senate where the floor was filled with people having a debate; where filibusters actually had to happen out in public, not in secret in a Senator's office; where people were not spending 80 percent of their time in call rooms fundraising instead of being out here on the floor doing the American people's business, as Senators will see; that actually passed important pieces of legislation that made a difference to the American people and made our country more competitive, made us stronger. You are one of the last people here who saw a Senate that worked like that.

The Republican leader has been here long enough to have seen a Senate that worked like that.

You were here, I am sure--I know you were, Mr. President--in 2006 when you were passing the Voting Rights Act here with 98 votes. Ninety- eight to zero the Voting Rights Act passed in 2006.

The Republican leader of the Senate then, the senior Senator from Kentucky, Senator McConnell, voted for that bill. It wasn't even close, from his perspective. I have a number of quotes from him, but one was ``The Voting Rights Act has proved to be a success for America'' and has ``brought about greater justice for all.''

Amen, Leader McConnell, taking that principled position in 2006. It was part of an honorable tradition that the Republican Party has had in this country going back really to Abraham Lincoln and the votes that were taken here to put Reconstruction in place, to fight the redeemers. It was true in 1965 when they passed the Voting Rights Act by 77 to 19 on this floor. Lyndon Johnson could not have done that without Everett Dirksen, a Republican, the Republican leader, who was for that.

As you know, I say to the Presiding Officer, because you saw it--you probably were there--four Republican Presidents--Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and George W. Bush--all signed versions of the Voting Rights Act. They showed the country every time they did it that there is nothing partisan about voting rights.

Senator McConnell said:

[O]ur country will and must continue its progress toward a

society in which every person, of every background, can

realize the American Dream. With the passage of the Voting

Rights Act, we are reaffirming that Dream.

He was right back then when he said that, but today, he is leading the blockade.

There are 16 Republican Senators here who voted for the Voting Rights Act back then in 2006, and today, they are all part of this blockade. What has changed? What has changed?

One of the things that changed was the Supreme Court's decision in the Shelby case that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act by getting rid of preclearance for States that had historically discriminated against African-American people, among others.

But do you know what is interesting about that, I say to the Presiding Officer? The Supreme Court said in that decision that Congress can fix this problem. We have a constitutional problem, but Congress can fix this problem.

That is exactly the same thing they said, by the way, when they wrote that horrendous decision in Citizens United. They said that Congress can fix this problem. But they may not have detected the paralysis that now exists--not in Pat Leahy's Senate from when the Presiding Officer got here but in Mitch McConnell's Senate today, in the modern-day Senate where people are willing to let a decision like Shelby

just lie, not address it; where people are willing to accept a decision like Citizens United that says that we are going to let billionaires buy elections in this country instead of favoring people's right to vote. And we, the Congress, won't do anything about it even when the Supreme Court tells us we could do something about it.

I think it is worth quoting the Notorious RBG in her dissent in that case, in the Shelby case, when she said that ``throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.''

She was 100 percent right. State after State after State started to adopt restrictive voting statutes.

Last July, the Supreme Court issued another opinion that makes it harder to challenge State laws that disproportionately hurt certain voters.

By the way, none of this could have come at a worst time because we have a former President traversing the United States of America, perpetrating the Big Lie that he didn't lose the election, that the election was stolen from him, that Joe Biden is not the legitimate President of the United States. There are politicians, I am sad to say, elected leaders all over this Nation, who are parroting--including in this Chamber--that Big Lie when they know that it is a lie, when they know that it is false, who are unwilling, as Mitt Romney said, to respect their own voters enough that they actually tell them the truth.

In every State except one--I say to Senator Leahy, it is your State, Vermont--in every State except yours, people are introducing legislation to take away the vote of other people. There are 500 such bills.

Arizona has adopted changes that would purge up to 150,000 voters from the rolls.

Montana has gotten rid of same-day voter registration to make it harder for students.

Texas is down to one drop box per county. In Harris County, a county--I am sorry to say to my friend Sheldon Whitehouse--that is actually larger than Rhode Island, that means there is a drop box for 2.5 million voters.

I am glad to use Rhode Island as a unit of measure. It is also smaller than a number of Colorado counties, but it has its charm. It has its charm. It has water, which we don't have in the State of Colorado.

But just let me say--because I am here with my colleague from Colorado who, when he was Governor, did a lot to make sure that people would have the right to vote in our State--in contrast to Houston, where there is 1 drop box, in my hometown of Denver, where there are 500,000 registered voters, we have 40 drop boxes in Denver. We are a lot smaller. We have 40 times the number of drop boxes that they have in Houston.

After Georgia's Republican secretary of state refused to buckle to President Trump's demand to find, somehow, another 11,000 votes--you remember the phone call. I am not making it up. You heard it with your own ears.

He called him up, and he said: Well, find 11,000 votes.

The guy said: No, I am not going to do that.

Now the legislature has removed him from the State election board.

So this isn't just about making it harder for people to vote, although it is making it harder for people to vote; this is shoring up the soft spots that prevented Donald Trump from being able to assert, credibly, that somehow the election had been stolen from him.

So 1 year after January 6 happened--1 year after this Capitol was invaded, 1 year after there was a guy in horns standing up on the top of that Gallery behind me--the majority leader who once came to this floor to proclaim the importance of the Voting Rights Act is saying that this is all a ``fake panic.'' That is the language he used today.

Boy, given what we are seeing in this country, if we ever needed him to summon the principle that he articulated or espoused in 2006, Mr. President, when you were here, it is now. It is now. That is an important principle to defend.

So he comes to the floor today and says: I am going to defend the Senate. That is what I am here to do. I am here to defend the Senate.

Let me say something that might offend you, Mr. President. And I don't mean to offend you, and I apologize if it offends you. But no one in America knows what the cloture rule is. No one. No one in America. My mom doesn't know what the cloture rule is, and she is a pretty close watcher of the Senate. No one knows what the cloture rule is.

No one in America knows, I would assert, what the filibuster is. But let me tell you what it is--not what it says; what it is. It is a rule that was created to let 60 Senators cut off debate so 51 Senators could make a decision that has been warped into a rule that allows 41 Senators to stop any debate and prevent the Senate from ever having a vote.

That is what the cloture rule is. That is not what it says, but that is what it is, which is why every time you turn your television set on at home, you see a crawl at the bottom of your screen that says ``Quorum Call,'' and you can't find a U.S. Senator anywhere because they are probably back in a phone booth making fundraising phone calls.

Until this century, there was virtually not any filibuster used.

By the way, I should say how much I appreciate Senator Thune coming to the floor here today and saying that President Trump lost the election. I appreciate it. I really do. He is an honorable person.

But it is important to know that one place the filibuster does not exist is in the U.S. Constitution. For most of the country's history, we never had the filibuster. It was almost never used until the modern era.

When I got here in President Obama's first term, the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, used the filibuster a record number of times. He filibustered everything in his attempt to first make Barack Obama a one-term President and then basically to bring down his Presidency.

He came out to the floor the other day and he said: ``Sometimes the effect of the filibuster is to block bills outright.'' Sometimes? Sometimes? It happens all the time. This is why we never do anything. This is why we can't make decisions. This is why we can't even have debates.

The American people have no idea whom to blame. They don't know because no one in America knows what the cloture rule is. And when they elect a majority and they expect things to get done, they don't get done.

Senator McConnell argues that the filibuster ``gives all kinds of citizens and all kinds of States a meaningful voice in nearly everything we do.'' We have heard that over and over again today--the voice that somehow we are shutting out.

I haven't met anybody who thinks that their voice is meaningfully represented in the U.S. Senate instead of special interests or the most powerful people--nobody--and it is because we can't have a debate on anything they care about.

Take background checks. Eighty-four percent of voters, including 77 percent of Republicans, support them. We can't even have a debate on the floor.

Let Medicare negotiate drug prices on behalf of people. Seventy-seven percent of the American people support that. We can't even have a debate here.

Seventy-four percent of people support the Dreamers--something Senator Durbin has been working on for a million years since you have been here?

And we can't get a vote on that.

The Freedom to Vote Act. Seventy percent of all voters, including 54 percent of Republicans, support it.

All of them have been blocked by Senator McConnell and his abuse of the Senate rules--not some great, venerable tradition of the U.S. Senate but his modern-day abuse, his caricature of the Senate rules. And it has created a minority veto--something that the Founders of this country would never ever in a million years have imagined that this place would be perverted into. They knew the trouble that would cause because they had had the Articles of Confederation, which is what they were trying to replace at the Constitutional Convention.

I am coming to an end, so I apologize to colleagues. But let me just say, none of this has stopped us from cutting

taxes by $8 trillion, mostly for the wealthiest people in this country, and none of this has stopped us from putting lots of rightwing judges on the court when Donald Trump was here because you can do those things with 51 votes. That is about the extent of Senator McConnell's legislative agenda, so I am not surprised that he prefers the status quo. But for the majority of Americans who believe that the next generation actually demands something greater than that from the Senate and from all of us, from each of us, we need a Senate that works.

Mr. President, think about this. Think about this. It is easy to forget. The Clean Water Act of 1972 passed 74 to 0.

By the way, I worked with the Senator from Louisiana on that surprise medical bill. I am proud of that bill, but it is not the Clean Water Act of 1972.

The Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, 91 to 6; the children's health insurance plan, 85 to 15 in 1997; comprehensive immigration reform--we were part of that effort--68 votes in the Senate before it completely collapsed into smithereens; and, of course, the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. Does anybody think--Mr. President, do you think that any of those bills would pass with a bipartisan majority like that today? Not a single one. We wouldn't even get to the vote.

We are still on a temporary budget. I don't need to tell you, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, that we haven't passed any of the 12 appropriations bills this year. We have taken three times as long to confirm President Biden's nominees--103 days--compared to President Reagan. This is no way to compete in the world, Mr. President. This is no way to compete with the Chinese Government's totalitarian approach to humanity.

I know we can compete, but we have to restore the Senate, and the most basic part of our job is protecting the right to vote. That is why we are here. Every American should be able to vote like we do in Colorado, thanks to my colleague from Colorado, Senator Hickenlooper, and what he did when he was Governor.

As Dr. King said, ``The history of our Nation is the history of a long and tireless effort to broaden . . . the franchise of American citizens.'' That is what this bill is about--to broaden the franchise of American citizens.

If we look back at our history, this is only the latest example of how the Senate has impeded American progress, and it wouldn't be the first time that the Senate rules were changed in response to that.

Before the Civil War--a time even before you were in the Senate, Mr. President--the Senate sheltered the minority interests of slaveholders on this floor. After the war, it enabled monopolists and robber barons and isolationists to profit from the misery of the conflict and its aftermath.

Each time in our country's history, crises forced the Senate to fundamentally change the way it worked, and each change has led to meaningful progress, including clearing the way for the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments to emancipate and enfranchise former slaves, sweeping antitrust reforms, and long-delayed legislation to protect civil rights.

The bottom line is that the Senate rules are not suspended in amber, especially when they are being abused the way they are being abused today. They can and they always have changed with the times.

Finally, let me say this: As we consider these reforms, the last thing we should do is make another House of Representatives. That is not what I want to do. I want to have a Senate where you have to come out here and debate; where you can't filibuster in secret in your office but you have to be out here to persuade the American people of the righteousness of your cause; where the minority has the right to offer amendments; and where, in the end, 51 Senators can actually make a decision so that we can move this country forward and so that each one of us, whether we are in the majority today or sometime in the minority, can live under the rules that we have constructed to make the Senate actually function for the American people.

That, Mr. President, I think is why most of us have been sent here, and it is what I hope we are going to accomplish today. If we don't, we have to keep fighting.

The Senator from Louisiana mentioned that this isn't 1965. Let me end by saying this: The economic gap between White Americans and Black Americans is as great today as it was in 1968. That is a brutal fact about the state of our economy, and it is why we need a Senate that actually can respond to the needs of the American people.

With that, Mr. President, I thank you for your patience and your indulgence. I apologize that you are having to consume part of your last year listening to a yearslong speech.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President.

Thank you, I appreciate that from the Senator from Arkansas.

Just along the lines of what my colleagues have said, I would also say that I want to be very clear that I don't want this place to turn into the House of Representatives. I think that would be a huge mistake. But it is not behaving the way that the Founders designed it to behave.

And the history, admittedly, is opaque, but it is very clear to me that the modern abuse of the filibuster represents very little in the way of traditional Senate practice or what the Framers were considering.

So I can imagine finding ourselves in a place where we actually have extended debate, where we actually have a public filibuster like we used to have--everybody remembers the movie version of that; they actually did that on the floor of the Senate--versus the secret filibuster that acts as a perpetual veto by the minority on the majority, something that the Framers clearly were trying to avoid and, at the same time, gives the minority the chance to hold the floor, persuade the American people of their point of view, amend legislation in ways that is unimaginable in the House and then, in the end, gives the majority the chance to actually make a decision so we can effectively compete with countries all over the world that aren't held up by the kind of veto we are talking about.

There is not a legislative body in the world that I am aware of, in any of the other countries with which we compete, that has a filibuster.

So I would say that other piece of this, the idea that we are going to seesaw back and forth and back and forth and back and forth--I think the reality is that is not the reality of what happens in other places that don't have the filibuster. And I believe we have the opportunity, if we are actually having a public debate--not sitting in our office or off fundraising but, instead, having a public debate on the floor of this Senate--that the American people can actually begin to hold people here accountable again for their position on healthcare or guns or whatever it is.

We don't ever get the chance to do that here because we never even have a debate in the world's most deliberative body.

So if we have a disagreement tonight about the form of all this, my hope is that, in the wake of this, if we are not successful, we actually do the American people a favor by creating a set of rules that actually will make this place work.

I have been here now for 12 years. It is hard to believe. I can tell you, the Senate doesn't work. It can't get its basic business done, much less make hard decisions. I think we can do better than that, and I hope we will.

Mr. President, I feel grateful to have the chance here to join my colleagues to mark the anniversary of January 6. I thank the chair of the Rules Committee, Senator Klobuchar, for her leadership in all of this.

We had an insurrection here a year ago that could have very easily turned into a conflagration if it had not been for the incredible bravery of the Capitol Police and the other law enforcement who were summoned to the Capitol too late but nevertheless here. The National Guard, as my colleague from Virginia was talking about, kept this place from being burned down. They kept people from getting killed. They lost their lives on that day and in subsequent days because of the trauma that they were exposed to. They suffered racial epithets that nobody in America should have to suffer, shouted in the halls of this Capitol--T- shirts with the most racist, holocaust-denying slogans on them.

And there are people here, as my colleague from Wisconsin said, who were claiming that they were acting like tourists. That is a really big lie too. This was an incredibly dangerous situation, and we were saved, not just us but the staff all over this Capitol and everybody else.

I just heard somebody downstairs in the basement walking by, and they were pointing out one of those pictures that is down there of newsboys standing in front of the Capitol when they were kids. And the guy said: Those were my great-uncles. Because this place and the people who work here--not talking about the Senate but the people who work here who are the staff whose grandparents worked here, whose great-uncles who are on the pictures downstairs--to them, this was a family, and it was attacked. It was assaulted on behalf of people who came summoned here by the President, who claimed that the election had been stolen from him, who was perpetrating a big lie about what had happened in the election.

There shouldn't have even been a surprise about the results in the election. There was little reason for suspense. And it is tragic that a year later, we still have to come here and say Joe Biden won the election--and he did by any fair study of what happened that day--on election day. He won Arizona by 10,000 votes. He won Georgia by 11,000 votes. He won Wisconsin by 20,000 votes. He won Pennsylvania by 80,000 votes and Michigan by 150,000 votes. In every one of those swing States, he won by more votes than Donald Trump won in his election against Hillary Clinton. So this wasn't some razor-thin margin. This margin was bigger in those States, except Arizona, than the margin that Donald Trump had won when he won the election against Hillary Clinton. Joe Biden won this election by 7 million votes.

Donald Trump actually lost the popular vote when he won the election by 3 million votes. But his election wasn't seriously contended by anybody, and it shouldn't have been because he had won the electoral college, just as Joe Biden had won the electoral college. And he still claims the election was stolen, even though there is no evidence that that is true. His own Attorney General said it is a lie. His lawyers-- Donald Trump's lawyers--had been thrown out of more than 60 courtrooms by State and Federal judges, some of them appointed by President Trump, himself, saying that there was no evidence that there was fraud.

A year later, there has been another incredibly expensive audit or review of the election--this time, the election in Georgia. Do you know what? There were four people down there who were dead who voted--four people. They didn't actually vote. They were dead, but people cast ballots on behalf of them. Four people out of 5 million, and one of those cast a vote for Donald Trump. But President Trump continues to say that there were dead people voting all over the United States of America.

The Associated Press did a review of all those swing States that I was mentioning earlier, and they found that if you just looked at the disputed ballots--so these aren't even fraudulent ballots because they haven't been identified as fraudulent; they are just disputed ballots. In all these cases, the disputed ballots came to about 1.5 percent of the margin in any one of these races. In other words, in not a single one of these swing States where there is a dispute that President Trump has brought would it make a material difference, even if it were true what he alleges, which it is not.

He has still doubled down on the Big Lie, and the result is, as my colleagues have said here today, there are more than 400 bills nationwide in the name of that Big Lie, making it harder for the American people to vote, making it harder for them to register, making it harder for people to vote early or to vote-by-mail because of a myth, because of a lie.

Slashing the number of polling places and drop boxes. In Texas, they are down to one drop box per county. In Colorado, I can practically cross my street and vote at a drop box. This is an effort to subvert elections to cling to power. That is what is happening

here, and it is based on a massive falsehood, the Big Lie.

I think one needs to ask oneself, even people who support President Trump: What future does the ``stop the steal'' movement imagine for our country? What future do they imagine for this democracy--where every election is going to be contested; where political violence replaces the ballot box; where elections are decided by strongmen, not votes, turning us into Russia or China.

Is that really what we want our legacy to be here in the country? Do we want to be the first generation of Americans to decide that it is just too hard to do our duty to the people who founded this country, the people who fought from the time this country was founded until today, who died for the sake of democracy; that it is just too hard; that somehow our differences are unique or so important that we are going to give up on our shared commitment to the democracy in favor of those disagreements?

I think we need to ask ourselves at a moment like this what we owe the generations of Americans that have fought to make this country more democratic, more fair and more free. What do we owe the 158 million Americans--a record--who showed up during a plague, this COVID pandemic, to cast their votes for Donald Trump and for Joe Biden? What are they owed and what do we owe our kids and our grandkids? I think the answer is very clear, which is a stronger democracy and economy that works for everybody, not just the people at the very top.

And where do we begin? You know, Colorado, I think, is a great example where we have made it a lot easier for people to vote. We have one of the highest voter turnouts in the country. I always have to say, especially when the Senator from Minnesota is around, that we are No. 2 in terms of voter turnout. Minnesota is No. 1, but we are coming for you. And that is the spirit we should all have. We should be trying to get more people to vote, not fewer people to vote. We should have vote- by-mail. We should have early balloting. We have all of that in Colorado and one of the highest turnout rates in the Country and no fraud--no fraud.

I am going to just finish by saying we should distrust politicians who can't seem to win people's votes with their argument, just as we should distrust politicians who attack the free press to avoid accountability, even though that free press is enshrined in our Constitution. And we should recommit to each other and the democracy.

Let me tell you something, Mr. President. Last week, we had another tragedy in Colorado, another disaster. Pueblo, CO--or Boulder, CO, started out this year with a mass shooting in a grocery store. Some of you may remember that. And, basically, on New Year's Eve, we had a massive fire that ripped through neighborhoods in the Front Range of Colorado in Boulder County. A thousand people--a thousand houses were burned. More than 30,000 people lost their homes. I sat there thinking to myself, as I was with my daughters watching those fires on the television set, how much we actually need each other, you know? And there is a lot of evidence out there in those 2 days that the law enforcement who got those 30,000 people out had almost literally no fatalities because of what they did and what they sacrificed. Coloradans stepped up that night and said: You can come to my house. We will put you up in my house. So out of those 30,000 people, there were fewer than 300 people in a shelter that night.

The reporters, the journalists were out there long into the night reporting on that fire so that people might have some sense of whether their house had been lost or their house had been saved. Local county officials have worked tirelessly after flood and after fire and after natural disasters to come together to make sure that we build back stronger, which we always do in Colorado--and even, let me say, the Federal Government's contribution, the Federal Emergency Management Agency--because if there is one reason that we should be one Nation under God, it is for a natural disaster like the one that just occurred in Colorado.

This is our choice: We either save this democracy, which I believe we will, or we let it go. And it is going to be on us. If we let it go, generations of Americans are going to indict us. If we save it, I think they will celebrate the work we did here, just as we celebrate the work of the people who came before us who made our country more democratic, more fair, and more free.

With that, I yield the floor.