Floor Statements

Madam President, the hour is late. I want to thank the Presiding Officer for being here.

I am glad to be here with my colleague from New Hampshire and my neighbor from New Mexico.

I want to thank the floor staff that is here tonight. And I would like to suggest--but it is not the purpose of my speech--that the next time Senators

make the suggestion that the floor staff should spend the entire night reading a bill here, that the Senators actually read that bill instead of imposing that on the staff that is here. I think that would be a just thing for us to do and the appropriate and proper thing for us to do.

Madam President, the last time that we were headed down this road, which was when Republicans were passing President Trump's 2017 deficit- exploding tax cut, it didn't take a mathematical genius to figure out what was about to happen. I told the Senate at that time that, as our debt grows, we will spend billions more not on schools, roads, and innovation but on interest costs. Worse, we were about to blow another hole in the debt without really helping the middle class, and 8 years ago, I said: On top of that, we know that, when deficits swell, as they surely will, cuts to Medicaid and Medicare will be sure to follow, further burdening working families struggling to make ends meet.

Well, here we are. That is exactly the story of this bill. Utterly predictable is this bill which massively increases our deficit when our children can least afford it. The Republican Senators who will be passing this bill tonight or tomorrow morning, if they do, know they are doing it when we have already hit a new milestone for the first time in American history.

Our interest payments exceed the amount that we spend on our national defense. For the first time, the American people, because of the irresponsibility of those in this Chamber, are going to pay $1 trillion in interest. That is a massive number. That is essentially the same as what we spend on Medicare; as what we spend on children and higher education together; as what we spend on housing, bridges, broadband, ports, and highways combined.

I want to be very clear tonight that over the years, Democrats and Republicans have pursued policies that have led to that $1 trillion in interest payments--there is no doubt about it--and it is worth thinking about what we could do if we hadn't made such fiscally irresponsible choices: expand the child tax credit, as my colleague from Georgia said; cut childhood poverty in half and hunger by a quarter; build a modern energy group to meet our expanding energy demands so Americans in cities and rural communities can enjoy affordable, reliable energy at home; establish a healthcare system that the American people deserve--a modern system that people in other rich, industrialized countries take for granted, a system that does not cost twice as much with worse outcomes like in the United States of America, the richest country in the world, that forces parents to choose between their children's prescriptions and school supplies and that exhausts the American people who, day after day after day, have to fight endless negotiations with their insurance companies just to keep their children covered; that constantly threatens rural hospitals and clinics with closures in this country. No other rich country in the world puts up with that craziness. And we are spending twice as much as any other country in the world to get worse healthcare, worse outcomes, and more scarcity.

Every Senator on this floor might make a different choice about the policies that they would enact, their preferred policies, but I doubt that there is anybody here who is willing to go home and defend the virtues of wasting $1 trillion of the American people's money on interest payments.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and outside groups like the Penn Wharton Budget Lab tell us that by the end of the next 10 years, we will have the highest debt ratio ever, eclipsing the debt our Nation had in the 1940s.

What was happening in the 1940s? That is when the ``greatest generation'' had borrowed money to defeat economic misery at home through the New Deal and European fascism by becoming the arsenal of democracy. Those were their receipts. Those were the receipts of a generation that understood its commitment to the next generation--to us.

When we contemplate from this broken Senate the patriotic accomplishments of the ``greatest generation,'' what has always seemed particularly egregious to me has been the tax policy Republicans have passed four times since Ronald Reagan passed it in 1981. Every single time, they made the same promises--every time. Look it up. They made the same promises that their trickle-down tax policy would drive economic growth, cut our deficit, pay for itself. Every time, including the recent Trump tax cut in 2017, these promises have been false. They have been false. That was 8 years ago. That wasn't a century ago. We know what the math is. Everybody in this room knows the deficit is far worse today than it was when Donald Trump passed those tax cuts.

President Trump has had a very rare thing happen, which is he got to take 4 years off and come back and be President. The effect of the tax cuts he passed the last time that he said were going to pay for themselves clearly have not. There is nobody in this Chamber who can deny that.

I always find it amazing, when I hear these promises, why people make them if they know they are so false--over and over and over again. I think the reason is that it is a way that politicians in Washington can avoid the objections that you could never get away with at home.

Imagine for a minute if there were a mayor in America, any mayor in any town--in Santa Fe, NM; or in Limon, CO; or in Los Angeles, CA--it doesn't matter--a Republican town or a Democratic town. Imagine if a mayor came to join you and said: This town is going to borrow more money than we have ever borrowed before.

That would worry you. That would worry me. I think our first question to that mayor would be: OK. That worries me. What are you going to spend the money on that you are going to borrow? Are you going to spend it on schools?

No.

Are you going to spend it on parks?

No.

Are you going to spend it on the water infrastructure that so many communities in New Mexico require? Are you going to spend it on the mental health crisis that our teenagers are facing because of our failure to address it? Are you going to spend it on infrastructure?

The answer to all those questions would be no.

What are you going to spend the money on, Mr. Mayor?

Well, the answer is, I am going to give tax cuts to the two richest neighborhoods in town and hope that those trickle down to everybody else.

That is the Republican tax policy.

There is a reason why no mayor in America has ever done that. There is no mayor in America who has ever pursued trickle-down economics because you would get run out on a rail. You would get run out on a rail if you went and said: We are going to borrow the most money that has ever been borrowed from our children to finance tax cuts for the richest neighborhoods in town.

It makes no sense. It is preposterous. Yet that has been the argument since Ronald Reagan first said that these tax cuts will be paid for, that the economy will grow, that there won't be a deficit.

There is a reason we are paying more than $1 trillion in interest today, and that is because our deficits are enormous.

Fortunately--and this is really important for the American people to understand--we still live in the strongest country in the world. We are in the world's richest economy. We have the most lethal military. Apart from our President, we have a national commitment to an independent judiciary, the rule of law, and low levels of corruption in our economy and in our society. We have unparalleled capital markets, cutting-edge innovation, and world-leading universities. We have all those things going for us partly because the folks who came before us invested in those things and built those things and tended those things.

But what we struggle with in our time is a sense amongst most Americans that they can't get ahead, that the American dream is further and further out of reach for themselves and for their families. In my view, that is the biggest challenge our country faces and in the face of this bill's ill-considered tax cuts and cuts to our healthcare system, which is going to throw millions of people off of their healthcare and make healthcare more expensive for everybody else.

By the way, what is the logic of that? The logic of that is that when you throw people off their healthcare, they end up going to the emergency room to take care of themselves and take care of their families, just as anybody would. That is the most expensive care that anybody could have. That expense is then put in our insurance policies, and all of us are going to pay more. You can't wish away people just because you throw them off health insurance.

When other countries in the world--other wealthy, rich countries in the world--have a system of insurance that basically guarantees healthcare and mental health care to their citizens, it is worth asking why we would throw our people off the not-so-great health insurance that they have. That is a good question. But it is particularly crazy when it just drives up the cost for everybody else.

We need to deeply think about the challenges that our country is facing today. It is more unequal. The top 1 percent own 30 percent of our Nation's wealth, and the bottom 50 percent own 2\1/2\ percent. The top 1 percent of Americans own 50 percent of the value of the stock market. The top 1 percent of Americans own 50 percent of the value of the stock market while the bottom 50 percent own just 1 percent of its value.

Something that is really affecting my State is that the Nation's median home price is now five times higher than the median family income. As a result, the average first-time home buyer is now 38 years old--38 years old--versus 29 just a generation ago. Reading scores in our Nation have hit a 20-year low. And perhaps most damning and perhaps most upsetting is that our lifespan has declined since the 1980s. We are now, on average, likely to die 6 years sooner than other people who live in wealthy countries around the world. If you are African American, your chance of dying is, on average, 12 years--12 years-- sooner than people living in the industrialized world.

If we don't shift course soon, we will be the first generation of Americans whose kids and grandkids will be worse off than we are. That has never happened before. We are on track for that to happen to our children.

Many young people today can't afford to live on their own, and they may never be able to afford a house. They can't afford healthcare or childcare. They can't count on a quality education for their children in too many parts of America. Some are really worried about whether they are going to be able to afford a child at all. If you haven't heard a family say that to you in your townhalls or in your meetings, you haven't been paying attention.

But instead of addressing any of these challenges, we are debating a bill tonight that will make the wealthiest Americans even wealthier and the poorest Americans even poorer--half a million of whom live in Colorado--while adding millions more to the debt, which working Americans are going to have to pay back. That is what this Republican trickle-down economics comes down to. No matter how you dress it up, that is what it comes down to.

Our generation has made some very bad choices when it comes to our children's future. This bill only makes matters worse for them. And all this debt will constrain the choices they are going to be able to make for themselves. That is a shame because, unlike us, perhaps they will aspire to follow in the footsteps of the ``greatest generation'' and build a country where lifespans are growing, not falling; where economic mobility is rising; where poverty and economic anxiety are falling; where energy exports are increasing and emissions are decreasing; where quality healthcare and childcare and education and affordable housing are abundant, not scarce.

It seems obvious to me that our child's ambitions should be ours as well. Unfortunately, tomorrow, the Republican majority may pass a bill that takes us further in the wrong direction. In its wake and in its wreckage, Americans who do feel an obligation to the next generation are going to have to fight even harder to fulfill our duty.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise to recognize Scott Fitzwilliams who recently retired after 15 years as forest supervisor of the White River National Forest and 34 years of service to the U.S. Forest Service.

Scott led the most visited national forest in the country, covering more than 2 million acres. While supervising the White River, Scott balanced enormous visitor demand with thoughtful stewardship, earning the trust of communities across Colorado's mountains.

Scott brought steady leadership to some of Colorado's most complex land management challenges. He managed the visitors at Hanging Lake and the Maroon Bells, navigated the first-ever partnership between the Forest Service and Colorado Parks and Wildlife at Sweetwater Lake, and helped communities recover from the Grizzly Creek and Lake Christine Fires.

Scott was a critical source of guidance and expertise for my work. He helped ensure the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument was established with the care and coordination it deserved. On the Thompson Divide, he helped navigate intricate land-use and community concerns and oversaw the implementation of the 20-year mineral withdrawal.

He also helped shape practical solutions for the housing crisis affecting mountain towns. His work identifying Forest Service sites suitable for workforce housing informed legislation that

we passed in the 2018 farm bill and in the 2024 EXPLORE Act.

When we wrote the SHRED Act, a bill designed to keep ski area fees local, Scott made clear why the legislation mattered, pointing to the daily challenges of managing a forest that supports more than a dozen ski areas and sees tens of millions of visitors each year.

Throughout his career, Scott was a thoughtful partner and a trusted presence to a wide range of stakeholders, including ranchers, local governments, ski areas, conservation organizations, recreation advocates, and many others. He listened and brought them into the process. His collaborative approach made better outcomes possible across the forest.

Even in retirement, Scott has continued to advocate for the Forest Service and for Colorado's public lands. He has made sure the national conversation about conservation includes the people who manage these lands every day. At a time of historic staffing and budget shortfalls, Scott has been a clear and credible voice for the Agency he served for more than three decades.

We are grateful for Scott's years of service and leadership. His work leaves a lasting legacy for our State, and I wish him well in whatever comes next.

Mr. President, I rise today to recognize and honor the remarkable public service of Erin Minks, my senior advisor for rural affairs and regional director for the San Luis Valley. Erin dedicated two decades to Federal service--most of it in Congress--where she has been a tireless advocate for the San Luis Valley.

Erin's Congressional career began in the offices of Senator Ken Salazar, Congressman John Salazar, and Senator Mark Udall. Her public service continued with the U.S. Forest Service, where she helped craft a forest plan for the Rio Grande National Forest that will guide land management for decades to come. For the past 7 years, I have had the great privilege of working alongside Erin in my office, where she brought extraordinary knowledge, dedication, and compassion to her work.

There is hardly a person in the San Luis Valley who doesn't know Erin. Whether it is a veteran trying to access benefits, a water district applying for a grant, or a local official working on a new idea, Erin is the one they call. She picks up the phone. She shows up. And she gets results.

Erin played a central role in delivering real progress for the Valley and rural communities across our State. She led the successful reauthorization of Colorado's three National Heritage Areas--South Park, Cache la Poudre River, and Sangre de Cristo--helping preserve Colorado's history and culture. She developed major pieces of legislation, including the Groundwater Conservation Easement Act--based on local requests to conserve the Rio Grande Basin's aquifer--and the RESILIENT Act to cut redtape for rural communities.

Thanks to her advocacy, we have secured millions of dollars in critical Federal funding for community driven projects in the San Luis Valley. Whether through the congressionally directed spending process, grants, or other Federal funding opportunities, Erin knew how to navigate the intricacies of government to get her communities the resources they needed. She has been a relentless champion for the Rio Grande Basin, Rocky Flats workers, Adams State University, Colorado's potato farmers, and the communities that define the valley's identity.

Beyond the policy wins, Erin exemplified what it means to be a public servant. She showed younger staff how to lead with empathy, build lasting relationships, and fight for the people they serve. Her work helped ensure rural voices are heard in Washington, and her presence has left a lasting mark on our State.

As Erin moves on to her next chapter, I want to express my deepest gratitude and thank her family for sharing her with all of us these many years.

Erin, we will miss you. Thank you for your extraordinary service. We wish you the very best in whatever comes next.

Mr. President, I rise today to recognize the extraordinary career and well-earned retirement of John Whitney, my senior adviser for Public Lands and Tribal Affairs and regional director for the Western Slope.

John spent two decades serving in the U.S. Congress, including the last 14 years in my office and previously in the office of Congressman John Salazar. Throughout his career, John has been one of the most effective advocates for rural communities and conservation efforts in Colorado and the American West.

There is no corner of the Western Slope that John doesn't know--and very few people west of the Continental Divide who don't know John. He built deep, lasting relationships with local elected leaders, State and Federal agencies, Tribal governments, and community members--regardless of party or background.

John never hesitated to jump in with both feet. Whether advancing landmark legislation or organizing a community meeting in a remote town, he always brought his full self to the work. He organized countless trips for me across our State, from camping on Kebler Pass, to rafting the Dolores River, to hiking the high country of the San Juans.

Over the years, John helped shape and deliver some of the most consequential conservation accomplishments in Colorado's recent history. He played a central role in establishing three National Monuments in Colorado: Chimney Rock, Brown's Canyon, and Camp Hale- Continental Divide. He led our work to pass the Hermosa Creek Watershed Protection Act and secure a 20-year mineral withdrawal to protect the Thompson Divide. John also helped establish the Camp Amache National Historic Site and expand Rocky Mountain National Park, Mesa Verde National Park, and Yucca House National Monument.

John was also instrumental in developing the Colorado Outdoor Recreation and Economy (CORE) Act, the Gunnison Outdoor Resources Protection (GORP) Act, and the Dolores National Conservation Area and Special Management Area Act. Additionally, he led efforts to help Western Slope communities through the SHRED Act, the Flexible Partnerships Act, the Gold King Mine Compensation Act, and efforts to expand Tribal access to clean water.

But John's legacy is not just the legislation he shaped, it is the coalitions he built and the way he encouraged people across the State to find common ground. His work is a model for what is possible when democracy works as it should, when people listen to one another, stay at the table, and pursue progress without sacrificing principle.

John has also been a mentor, a counselor, and a constant source of good humor to our staff. He helped train a new generation of Western Slope leaders and public lands advocates. His influence will echo through their work, through our office, and throughout the State for years to come. I also want to thank John's family; his achievements would not have been possible without their support, generosity, and sacrifice.

As John sets off toward new horizons, he leaves behind a legacy that will stand the test of time. Colorado's lands, communities, and civic institutions are stronger because of his service. On behalf of a grateful State and an appreciative team: Thank you, John. You will be deeply missed--and we can't wait to see where your journey takes you next.

Mr. President, I rise today to discuss the so-called GENIUS Act, which we are going to vote on in a few minutes here in this Chamber.

It is a bill that I think could have gotten to a place where it makes sense, but I am not going to be supporting the legislation because, among other things, we haven't had a real debate on it. We have had no opportunity to offer amendments to make the bill better, and it is still falling short in some really fundamental ways that I am really worried about.

I am really worried about the risk to money laundering that I don't think is well addressed in this bill. I am really worried about the regulatory structure, which looks absolutely nothing like the structure that is required for our banks and for foreign banks that want to do business here in the United States.

I think we may come to rue the day that we didn't put guardrails in place to protect the American people from what could be a catastrophic effect on our economy just because we had the failure to have the foresight to see the potential risks that we could face.

For example--just one example--we commonly require financial institutions like banks to have a subsidiary here in the United States that is regulated by the laws of the United States before they are able to offer banking services to my constituents in Colorado and to all the 330 million Americans whom we have. There is nothing like that in this bill. There is nothing like that in this bill.

If some administration official deems a foreign jurisdiction is somehow good enough without it actually being good enough, without it having the benefits of the best regulatory environment in the world, which is ours, then people can do business here issuing crypto; in this case, stablecoins. I think that is a big mistake.

As a member of the Intelligence Committee, I think it is a huge mistake that we didn't take on the issues of money laundering that cryptocurrency are presenting and the challenges that it is causing to law enforcement. I think that is a big problem. It is not that we couldn't have fixed it, but we chose not to fix it.

As I mentioned earlier, there has not been an effort to make the bill better. There has been no amendment process. Unusually, I had an amendment in this bill for one brief shining moment. I came down to the floor and offered an amendment, and it actually was accepted. It has been decades around this place, I think, since that has happened.

All that amendment said was the President and the Vice President and the Members of Congress should not issue crypto; in this case, stablecoins. I would be surprised to learn that 90 percent of the American people think the President or the Vice President or the Members of Congress should issue their own crypto coins while they are in office. That would be shocking to learn.

The American people clearly would like a legal regime here that prevents their elected officials, including the people in this body, including in the House of Representatives, including, and most particularly, in the White House should not enrich themselves while they are in office.

That was my very simple amendment. That was referred to as the ``Bennet amendment.'' I am proud of that fact.

This is not even hard. There is no reason the President--any President--should be issuing crypto while they are in office or a Vice President. There is no reason any person on this floor should do it or anybody in the House of Representatives should do it.

And, now, in a partially regulated regime, where we are not dealing with that question, we are sending a signal to the American people that this digital currency has the seal of approval of the entire U.S. Government, of our regulators. That is potentially very dangerous to the financial institutions that may participate in this and to the American people themselves.

I have nothing fundamentally against crypto. I have nothing fundamentally against stablecoins. But I think it is fundamentally wrong that elected officials should be able to enrich themselves in this new digital environment. Maybe it is not 98 percent, but I bet you 9 out of 10 Americans agree with me.

I will say that this is just one more indication of the U.S. Senate not doing the people's business, of not living up to the expectations of the folks who designed this Chamber to begin with.

This bill is going to pass with votes from the Democratic Party, even though there was not a single amendment voted on as part of this bill. I object to that as a Democrat. I can't stop it because there are 60 votes for this legislation, but I think we would have been a lot better off on this bill--just like with almost any bill that comes to the floor of the Senate--to have an open amendment process. I would have loved to have the opportunity to see people vote on a bill that bans Members of the Senate and the House and the President and the Vice President from issuing their own crypto credits.

I would have liked to have had a debate that said, Is it a good idea to have foreign governments or foreign investors speculating publicly in the cryptocurrency that a President has issued? Is it a good idea to have foreign entities making $2 billion investments in currency that is issued by American politicians? That is crazy.

We could have fixed that in this legislation. Not only did we not fix it, we didn't even have a debate on it. We didn't even have a single amendment come to the floor, we were in such a hurry to do the bidding of the proponents of this legislation.

I would urge all my colleagues to vote no on this procedural motion, to go back to the drawing board to have a proper negotiation, to write a piece of legislation that actually would provide the seal of approval in a meaningful way to American investors and to American consumers, and when it comes to the issuing of cryptocurrency and stablecoins, that we would have heeded the common sense of the American people who would have said: Do not ratify the corruption that is going on in our Capitol.

I don't think that is too much for the American people to ask for.

I hope my colleagues will reconsider their position, and we will have the chance to have a proper debate and a proper negotiation on this bill.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I was necessarily absent from rollcall vote No. 297, confirmation of Brett Shumate, of Virginia, to be an Assistant Attorney General. Had I been present for the vote I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent from rollcall vote No. 298, the motion to invoke cloture on David Fotouhi to be Deputy Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Had I been present for the vote I would have voted nay.

I was necessarily absent from rollcall vote No. 299, confirmation of David Fotouhi to be Deputy Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Had I been present for the vote I would have voted nay.

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

Mr. President, on June 1, the Boulder chapter of Run for Their Lives gathered at the Pearl Street Mall for their solemn weekly routine. Every week since Hamas's October 7, 2023, terrorist attack, they have shown up to march peacefully in solidarity with the hostages that Hamas kidnapped and continues to hold, over 600 days after that fateful day. They come to sing songs, tell stories, and read the names of hostages to affirm for them and for us and for the world that those hostages have not been forgotten, that they never will be forgotten.

June 1 started like any other early-summer Boulder Sunday--cool and clear and promising the kind of bluebird day we love in Colorado.

The group gathered on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot for their memorial march. One man, however, was thinking only of violence and hate. Amid his yells of ``End Zionists,'' he unleashed a makeshift flamethrower and launched Molotov cocktails to burn the marchers. He inflicted his terror directly on at least 12 innocent people, including a Holocaust survivor in her late eighties who survived the unfathomable war in Europe only to face anti-Semitic evil once again--only this time in the United States.

If there is any doubt that this was an anti-Semitic hate crime and an act of terror, the attacker has told investigators that ``he wanted to kill all Zionist people and wished they were all dead.'' He said he specifically targeted this group and that he researched and planned the attack for more than a year.

He did not have some intellectual point that he was trying to make about Israel's politics. He was not trying to improve the lives of Palestinians. He simply wanted to kill Jews by burning them in the most painful way possible, and he knew where to find them--at the Pearl Street Mall, marching peacefully on behalf of hostages a terrorist group stole from their families.

America's Founders built this country on the tenets of religious freedom and tolerance. In 1790, George Washington wrote to Rhode Island's Jewish community that the America he was building would give ``to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.'' This letter affirmed that the Jewish people had a place in the United States--a rare refuge amid Europe's thousand-year pogrom.

The United States, like all countries, has never always lived up to our lofty ideals, but it is our commitment to trying, to striving to become the city on the hill we proclaim to be that has long made this country a beacon to the world and different from almost all other countries in the world. That is why my mother immigrated here rather than somewhere else in Europe or the Western Hemisphere. It is why the world's weary dreamers still give up everything they have to seek a better life in the United States rather than crossing the Gobi Desert for China or the Eurasian Steppe for Russia.

But in recent years, American anti-Semitism has reached unprecedented levels. The Anti-Defamation League tracked over 9,300 anti-Semitic incidents across the United States last year--the highest number in 46 years of tracking. In 2024, anti-Semites made bomb threats against and vandalized synagogues, including in Colorado. They assaulted congregants at Jewish institutions. They targeted Jewish students with anti-Semitic threats. They protested Israeli policy and Zionism at synagogues as if American Jews are responsible for decisions made by a foreign government thousands of miles away.

American anti-Semitism tends to spike when Israeli-Palestinian conflict flares up, such as following Hamas's May 2021 and October 2023 attacks. But we cannot forget that anti-Semitism is the world's oldest hatred. It long predates the Holocaust, let alone the October 7 or the recent DC and Boulder attacks.

As Ukrainian Jewish author Vasily Grossman--the first journalist to see the Nazi death camp Treblinka--wrote in the mid-20th century, ``Antisemitism has been as strong in the age of atomic reactors and computers as in the age of oil-lamps, sailing-boats, and spinning- wheels.''

Anti-Semitism--even American anti-Semitism--is an ancient prejudice indeed; it is not some kind of knee-jerk response to Israeli policy.

Anti-Semites in America do not aim to make profound points or philosophical points about Israel by throwing Molotov cocktails at elderly Coloradans or gunning down a young couple leaving an event about Middle East peacekeeping in our Nation's Capital. No. These anti- Semites use events in the Middle East as an excuse to express their latent anti-Semitism, their medieval hatred of Jews, who they blame for some swath of society's ills. They want to harm Jews, to add more tragedy to the family histories of the people whose collective chronicle is already overstocked with victims, to say the least.

The Boulder attack, the recent DC shooting, and the thousands of anti-Semitic incidents across the United States over the last few years are a direct result of anti-Semitic rhetoric that has been left unchecked.

Even before this attack, American Jews wondered whether they should hide their Star of David necklaces before leaving the house, whether Friday Shabbat service will be safe, and whether their synagogues will have to hire still more security officials.

This omnipresent fear of anti-Semitic violence makes it impossible for Jews to feel safe in a non-Jewish America and in a non-Jewish world. And this fear produces behaviors like hiding one's Star of David or avoiding Jewish events on a college campus where a dean says the school can't guarantee Jewish students' safety. That amounts to what the historian Simon Schama has called a ``passive deprivation of basic civil rights.''

Yet how else are American Jews supposed to react when American anti- Semitism has reached record levels? When a terrorist massacres congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue? When elderly women in Boulder, CO, can't march on behalf of innocent hostages without being targeted by fire?

It is long past time that all American political and community leaders come together to affirm that this fear is unacceptable and that we must fight together the anti-Semitic hate behind it. We must use our voices and our power, whether in the Halls of Congress or in our own communities, to counter anti-Semitism in both words and action. We must speak up because we know the dangers of failing to do so. We must stand with the Jewish community for freedom of speech and religion and against fear, because as Grossman knew and as he wrote, ``life can be defined as freedom. Life is freedom.'' And ``freedom is the fundamental principle of life.''

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, you never know what you are going to find these days when you are reflecting on the Trump administration and our oversight responsibilities as the Congress.

It is true that things have changed. Some people might call me old- fashioned for thinking this way, but I think we were a lot better off when we had Presidents who took it as a matter of course that they shouldn't use their office to enrich themselves, and they should put behind them conflicts of interest that raise questions about whether or not they are serving their own interests or their families' interests or the interests of the people of the United States.

That is why Ronald Reagan put, I think, his wealth, which was considerable, into a blind trust. Jimmy Carter, I think, sold maybe his farm or put that in a trust.

I realize it is part of Donald Trump's political charm that he wants to wear his corruption on his sleeve, but that doesn't mean that we have to go along with it, even if some people are entertained by it, which I am not.

And we have a great example of thinking about our responsibility versus his complete lack of integrity when it comes to the service of his public duties and his private interests.

That is the bill--the so-called GENIUS Act--that is on the floor of the Senate right now, where we are considering whether or not to regulate stablecoins, which are part of the cryptocurrency universe that is new to all of us, certainly in this Chamber and across the country.

I believe very strongly that no President and no Vice President, no Member of Congress, no high-ranking official of our government should be in the business of issuing cryptocurrency, including the stablecoin. And they shouldn't be in the business of pumping them up like some sort of speculator, which is what we are seeing happen, sometimes outside the White House or in the White House.

I saw, the other day, that the President was having a dinner at Mar- a-Lago to reward the people who had been bidding up his meme coins, and they even came to dinner, although he apparently didn't really show for that dinner.

But the legislation we have in front of us would be the first regulations of stablecoins that have ever been done. I think, as part of that, it would be very appropriate for us to say that the President should get out of this business and that any President should be out of the business of issuing their own coins.

It is a weird part of the nature of this asset--this new digital asset--that it is very volatile. The meme coins rise and they fall as part of their price, and the stablecoins are used as a way of transacting around that volatility. But the volatility, every single day, is still captured in this market, and it just seems like a crazy moment when we are living in a time when a President could influence his own net worth to the tune of billions of dollars, just based on pumping up the value of digital currency that he has put out there in the world with his name or that somebody else has put out there in the world with his name.

That is why, yesterday, I offered an amendment to the bill, to the GENIUS Act, that would preclude any President--this President or any other President or any Vice President--from issuing stablecoins. I hope we will consider that amendment on the floor of the Senate. I hope we will vote to pass it, if we are, indeed, going to pass this legislation. And I hope we will have other amendments we consider as well.

I think that the questions that are at issue here from an ethics point of view, from a corruption point of view, go far beyond just the stablecoin. They go to cryptocurrency, generally, and what the President is doing to inflate the value of coins that are issued in his name, whether he has issued them or whether he hasn't.

I look forward to the debate that we are going to have. I think this is an opportunity for us to say that we want to elevate the requirements that each one of us has agreed to live under, as Members of this body and people elected to act in the public interest. I believe the President and his Vice President should face the same standard and the same scrutiny. That is why I offered the amendment that I have.

I hope that, as our colleagues consider the debate that we are going to have, that others will come to the floor with their ideas to strengthen this legislation and make sure that people don't abuse their public office for their own personal economic gain.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

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

Mr. President, I call for the regular order.

Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk.

Mr. President, I offer my amendment to prevent the President and the Vice President from using their public office for personal enrichment.

Donald Trump has already benefited enormously from his ability to issue stablecoins, as everybody in the world knows. His World Liberty Financial, in which he and his family have an overwhelming stake, issued a stablecoin just the other month.

This stablecoin was chosen by companies throughout the Middle East to facilitate a $2 billion investment in Binance. The President's company will now reap interest in trading fees on billions of dollars while also raising concerns about undue influence and our national security. We shouldn't have to wonder if the President of the United States is favoring the interests of a foreign nation or a private crypto exchange like Binance because he stands to personally profit.

While this amendment specifically addresses the issuance and endorsement of stablecoins, I believe this prohibition should extend to all digital assets, including the President's meme coin. In other words, I believe the President and the Vice President and everybody who is a Member of this body and in the House of Representatives should not be in the business of speculating and issuing cryptocurrency-- stablecoins, meme coins, any of them.

The Senate should not continue with the GENIUS Act unless the opportunities for corruption and conflict of interest on the part of executives are fully addressed.

Boulder, Colorado Attack

Mr. President, I want to thank my colleague from Iowa very much, Mr. Chairman, for your acknowledging the horrific terrorist attack in Boulder yesterday. I will be out here later with my colleague Senator Hickenlooper to talk about it at greater length.

People were there week after week after week to mark the horrendous hostage taking that has occurred in Gaza and that Hamas has refused to address--hostages only Hamas can release. This war could end tomorrow if Hamas released the hostages.

People all over this country and all over the world have marched in solidarity for our hostages. Yesterday, the people in Boulder, CO, were savagely attacked by a terrorist while they were expressing their First Amendment rights. That should never happen in this country.

Again, I thank the chairman, my colleague, and my friend from Iowa for coming to the floor to discuss that today.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I just want to thank the leader on behalf of the people of Colorado and the people of Boulder for his remarks of concern. I share his commitment to making sure these sorts of terrorist attacks don't happen in our country when people are expressing their free speech rights.

It is not surprising to me that the leader would be one of the very first people to the floor to raise the voices of the people of Colorado in this moment and the people of his State.

Thank you, Leader.

Mr. President, I, too, am here on the floor today to oppose the SAVE Act.

Today, Americans register to vote in a variety of ways, typically set by each State in this country, but Federal law requires that Americans attest to citizenship under penalty of perjury.

In Colorado, you can register online; you can register in person; you can register through the mail. It can be as easy as providing your Social Security number and signature, which every American has, through the secretary of state's website.

Alternatively, the SAVE Act would change that by requiring that all American citizens, whether registering for the first time or updating their registration, to present proof of citizenship in person, largely in the form of a passport or a birth certificate. In other words, government issued driver's licenses and military and Tribal identifications would not satisfy the bill's requirements.

The SAVE Act would severely restrict online voter registration and mail-in registration and eliminate voter registration drives altogether. It would make it harder or even impossible for up to 69 million married American women who have changed their names, because their last name doesn't match the one on their birth certificate.

Meanwhile, half of Americans don't even have a passport. How are they going to register under this law? They can't.

Over 60 million Americans who live in rural areas--now they are going to have to drive miles and miles and miles, hours out of their way, to stand in line at a local election agency.

The SAVE Act does nothing to make it easier to cast a ballot; it only succeeds in making it harder for Americans to register to vote and to exercise their rights.

This is not theoretical. Kansas tried to implement its own State- level SAVE Act in 2013, with disastrous results. The law blocked over 30,000 potential registrants in just 2 years--about 12 percent of all voter registrations during the period. State officials acknowledged in court that over 99 percent of affected voters were U.S. citizens.

Now, even Kansas's Republican secretary of state, who championed the bill when he was a State legislator, has warned against it, saying:

It didn't work out so well.

I would say so. About 12 percent of the people who tried to register couldn't.

Compare those 30,000 Kansans who attempted to register and were denied to the 30 people--30 people--the 30 noncitizens who reportedly voted in the 2016 election nationwide. That is about 0.0001 percent of all votes cast.

If there ever was one, this is a solution in search of a problem, and the only solution doesn't even work. It only makes it harder for law- abiding Americans to register to vote or patriotic Americans to register to vote.

Perhaps it would be better if this bill were modeled after the system that we have in Colorado.

We have set the gold standard in my State. It is a system that actually encourages people to vote in a fraud-free system. In Colorado, we are the first State in America to complete a risk-limiting audit, the gold standard for verifying the integrity of election results to begin with, and it entails counting and comparing a representative sample of ballots to the reported result.

To prevent hacking, none of our voting machines are attached to the internet. We require county clerks to use two-factor authentication to access voter databases.

And once a vote is cast, a bipartisan team of election judges in each county checks every signature against the copy in the database for any discrepancies.

All election officials and judges with access to the tabulation process must pass a Colorado Bureau of Investigation background check. Colorado has spent years implementing top-tier cyber security measures and audits to prevent hackers from interfering with our electoral process.

We have one of the most secure election systems of any State in the country, and because Coloradans have trust in our gold standard system, we have some of the highest voter turnout in America. That is the model we should be using across the country, in my view. Instead of wasting time and taxpayer dollars on the SAVE Act, Congress should be implementing Colorado's practices all across the country.

I yield the floor to my colleague from Rhode Island. Thank you very much for his leadership in bringing the Nation's attention to this issue today.

Mr. President, before he leaves the floor, I want to thank my colleague from Arizona for his incredibly wise remarks this morning and for his indignation at the insanity of this so-called tax bill that we are considering on the floor.

What he was saying was about the benefits of this bill and how they are all going to go to the wealthiest people in America, and I sat here wondering: Why? Why? Why would we pass a bill like that on the floor of the Senate when the American people have so, so many needs? Why, when we have had an economy that for 50 years, because of the trickle-down economic policies that have been pursued by Republicans and sometimes Democrats in this Chamber, we see that the country has less economic mobility than it has had, which is a fancy way of describing a situation where people in America no longer feel that if they work hard, they are going to get ahead or that if they work hard, their kids are going to get ahead. That is the American dream, is to know your kids are going to do better than you did.

For the first time in American history, as I said last night on this floor, for the first time in American history, if you are 30 years old in this country, you have a 50-percent chance of earning a salary as good as the one your parents had. That has never been true before.

Incomes are down for young men in their twenties in this country by 40 percent since the mid-1970s, and we continue to see the distribution of wealth and the distribution of income make it harder and harder and harder for people to stay in the middle class, to afford the middle class, to be able to afford childcare, healthcare, higher education, a vacation for themselves and their families, to say nothing of the families that are living in poverty in America.

I used to be the superintendent of the Denver Public Schools before I came here. The parents and grandparents in my school district, which was mostly kids of color, mostly kids living in poverty, were very often working two and three jobs just to feed their families. No matter what they did, no matter how hard they worked, they couldn't get their kids out of poverty.

That economic dislocation, I think, is one of the reasons why the American people elected Donald Trump again, because they were so frustrated with an economy that seemed to have no benefit for them or their kids that they were willing to take the risk of chaos to try to have some sort of breakthrough.

While I wouldn't have wanted that chaos, I can understand the impulse since neither party has done a very good job of delivering for working people in this country in a long time.

We are going to see how that chaos theory works itself out because the chaos is raining down on our country right now. The chaos is raining down on the American people right now.

One of the things that are really interesting to me about this tax bill is that I don't think there is any mayor in America who would propose what has been proposed here. I don't think there is any mayor in America that would say ``My plan for my community is to borrow more money than we have ever borrowed in the history of our community.'' The debt adds up to another $4.6 trillion--I guess it is $5.5 trillion if you count interest. ``I am going to borrow more money than I have ever borrowed, but we are not going to spend it on roads or bridges or parks, the desperate need for mental health treatment across our country, especially among kids but also among seniors as well and everybody else. I am not going to spend it on parks or schools. I am going to take that money, and I am going to give it to the richest neighborhood in town and hope that somehow it is going to trickle down to everybody else.''

That economic theory, when you put it in the terms of any community in America, makes no sense at all. And America is a community.

It makes no sense for our Nation to go into debt, to force the children and grandchildren of our teachers and police officers and firefighters to pay back this debt, to pay back this interest. For what? To finance tax cuts for the wealthiest people in America when for the last 40 or 50 years, almost all of the benefit of the economy has accrued to the people at the top.

We need an economy in this country that when it grows, it grows for everybody, not just the people at the top. That is what we need to do to save our democracy. You can't run a democracy successfully if people feel like their kids aren't going to live a better life than they lived. You can't make a case that the rule of law is important or that our checks and balances are important or that our exercise in self- government is important if people feel like their kids aren't going to do better than they did.

Show me a time in history when that has been true--in human history when that has been true. It would be unreasonable to expect that that is going to be the case here, and you can feel the strains of that. You can feel the strains of that every day I go home to Colorado and I see people in every single county who are worried that their kids are not going to be able to afford to live in Colorado. They are worried that their kids are never going to be able to afford the housing that they have been able to afford.

I could imagine a set of tax policies that made a lot of sense to America. I have fought for years and years and

years to expand the child tax credit in this country. In fact, we did it during the Biden administration for 1 year. We were able to expand the child tax credit. Over 90 percent of families in Colorado benefited, and 90 percent of kids benefited. We cut the child poverty rate in America in half.

In the richest country in the world, we demonstrated that we did not have to accept the level of childhood poverty that we have as a permanent feature of our democracy or a permanent feature of our economy. We could fix it on this floor. We could pull a lever that actually mattered to the American people. And it did matter. That was a tough time during COVID. That was a tough time for families.

Not only that, we were able to take that tax credit and pay it out monthly. There were a lot of people in this city who said that would be impossible, that the IRS could never do that. Well, they did it, and families had a little bit of an extra benefit at the end of the month to pay for schoolbooks or afterschool programs or clothes to go back to school at the beginning of the year. That is the time of year it was.

You could feel the compression literally lifting off the chests of working people that I represented who could for a moment feel like they could make the rent and also buy a few extra hours of childcare so they could stay at work, so they could make more money to support their children.

That is a glimmer of what it would look like to have an economy that, when it grew, it actually grew for everybody, not just the people at the very top; where people felt like they could work hard and get into the middle class, that they could work hard and get out of poverty--get their kids out of poverty, most importantly--and get into the middle class.

We could expand the earned income tax credit, which rewards working people, again. That also would be a tax cut for the middle class. In fact, if you take those two tax cuts together--which we did during the Biden administration, but now that has gone away--those were the largest tax cuts for middle-class people, for working people I think in the country's history, certainly in modern history. It was the biggest reduction in childhood poverty in modern American history and probably in American history.

I actually think we should end childhood poverty in this country. That is what I believe. I think the richest country in the world should see it being in our interest to end childhood poverty and reduce all of the ancillary problems that occur in our society because kids are living in poverty through no fault of their own. Everybody knows that. Better investment in early childhood education. Better investment in kids to get them out of poverty. Let's put them on the right path.

We are going to pay for it one way or another, and I would rather pay for it with productive citizens as a benefit of a Tax Code that is actually investing in the American people. But here we are finding ourselves in a place where what we are being told is that we are going to pass a tax bill that blows a massive hole in our deficit that is about the size of all the money that we borrowed to get here to begin with. And for what? To give tax cuts to the wealthiest people in our country, to the wealthiest neighborhoods in America, and expect that somehow that is going to trickle down to everybody else.

Why? Why would we do something that irrational when the needs in America are so great, when we have the lack of economic mobility that I was talking about? I can think of a lot of reasons for it, but one of the ones that I keep coming back to is the campaign promises that some people seem to make around here as a result of the distorted campaign finance system we have.

Over the last couple weeks, there have been articles day after day after day and reports on television about the $20 million that Elon Musk spent in Wisconsin to try to elect one supreme court justice there. He was unsuccessful. The people in Wisconsin rejected Elon Musk's three-ring circus that he brought to Wisconsin. They rejected his $20 million.

But one thing that is so amazing to me is how cavalierly we accepted the idea that he was spending $20 million to begin with. He is proud of that. He is proud of that.

He spent roughly $290 million on Donald Trump's campaign. I think it is inarguable that he might have made the difference in Pennsylvania, for example, where he was practically handing money out. It is like it was a portrait of the Senate in the gilded age, where the Senate was dominated by special interests with cartoons of dollar bills falling out of their pockets.

He wandered around Pennsylvania with dollar bills falling out of his pockets--hundred-dollar bills, thousand-dollar bills. In Wisconsin, million-dollar bills he was giving away for the benefit of Donald Trump and to keep the tax system as distorted as it is, as unhelpful to the American people as it could be.

Now, here is the thing: He is so wealthy--I think he is worth something like $378 billion, something like that. I will check that. But he is so wealthy that that $20 million to him is such a small fraction of his wealth that it is like somebody in Colorado buying one hamburger from McDonald's.

Would somebody in Colorado spend the money on one hamburger at McDonald's if they thought they controlled the outcome of the election in Wisconsin?

That $290 million that he spent in the last Trump campaign--a big part of that in Pennsylvania but other places as well--that sounds like a lot of money to anybody here. And $290 million--that is a lot of money. If you look at that in the context of, you know, a teacher in Colorado, it is about $50. That is the cost of a steak dinner for a teacher in Colorado. That is not nothing. That is not nothing.

But if you knew you could control the outcome of America's future by spending the equivalent of what a steak dinner costs, even if you were a teacher in my old school district where I was the superintendent, you might do it, which is a reminder about why we have to change the campaign finance laws in this country. We cannot accept Citizens United as a permanent state of affairs, as a permanent feature of our democracy.

And sometimes people say: Well, what are you going to do about it? The Supreme Court made a constitutional ruling about it. There is nothing you can do to fix it.

There are plenty of generations of Americans that have confronted problems with a constitutional ruling like the Supreme Court, and they have done something about it. They have amended the Constitution in their time.

There are probably a number of things we should do to make our democracy work better, but one of those would be to make sure that the wealthiest people in the country can't buy elections and can't do it with dark money either. So we can understand what is actually going on here, and we can explain why we have got such a preposterous proposal in front of us right now. It cuts taxes for the wealthiest people and threatens healthcare for the most vulnerable people in our country.

I will close just by saying, there are some crazy things in our tax law. Crazy. Crazy. There is this thing called step-up basis, where people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the wealthiest people in our country--and I don't begrudge them their success, but the wealthiest people in our country are evading all taxes on the money that they have made because what they do is they hold their shares, the stock in their company. They never sell. They borrow against that, which allows them to finance their lifestyles.

But for their entire lifetime, no tax is ever paid on their stocks, on their shares. And then they die, and then those stocks go to their very, very, very fortunate ``nepo'' babies who get to inherit it at the original price that the stock was valued decades ago and pay no taxes as a result of that.

No one else in America gets that treatment. No one else in America gets that tax treatment--and in our country today because of that unbelievable concentration of wealth, in our country today because we have found ourselves, frankly, living in a new gilded age, which is reflected in the tax bill that is in front of us.

These guys are willing to spend a tiny fraction of their net worth to make sure that the Tax Code continues to serve them and not the rest of the

American people. That is why we have a tax bill, even putting aside stepped-up basis, where 50 percent of the benefit goes to the top 5 percent, and 10 percent of the benefit goes to the top 0.1 percent. That is when we live in a time in American history when the bottom 50 percent of Americans own 2 percent of the wealth of our country; at a time when young men in their twenties are seeing their pay cut by 40 percent since 1976; at a time when half the 30-year-olds in America are going to earn less money, for the first time in American history, than their parents did.

We have a job to do here. We have a job to do in this Nation. We have to create an economy that when it grows, it grows for everybody again-- and not just on the coast but throughout the entire country. That is what we should be focused on today. That is what the American people need. They should have a tax bill that reflects the interests of their kids, a tax bill that reflects the interests of the American middle class, the most significant invention of our democracy in modern times. That needs to be reinforced. It needs to be strengthened.

We have got to drag our economy into the 21st century in a way that will produce those sorts of outcomes for everyone in our economy, not just the people at the top.

And we need a campaign finance system that reflects the values and the principles of a majority of Americans to make sure that our democracy can continue to function as well.

I see my friend from California. I will yield the floor, and I look forward to the opportunity of hearing his speech.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am sorry it is the misfortune of the Presiding Officer to be in the chair again when I am speaking. I don't actually speak that often on the floor.

Thank you, Mr. President, and thank you to the staff who is here as well.

This actually is the third time I have been down here in the last couple of days to talk about some of the things we are confronting at this moment when we are passing the budget. I have spent a couple of speeches talking about how problematic I think, to be kind about it, this budget is--in many ways, devastating. But today I want to join my friends that are here to talk about our national security and our intelligence.

Since President Trump took office as President just over 70 days ago, he has treated the American people to a dangerous parade of incompetencies that put our national security at risk.

Most egregiously, he has repeatedly sided with Russia and Vladimir Putin

rather than standing with the Ukrainian people as they defend themselves against Vladimir Putin's aggression.

After President Trump and Vice President JD Vance embarrassingly berated Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in their February Oval Office meeting, the Trump administration temporarily halted all security assistance to and intelligence sharing with Ukraine. This outrageous decision resulted in losses for Ukraine on the frontline and emboldened Putin and other dictators around the world, like China's Xi Jinping, undermining Ukraine's bargaining position and ours and American national security.

Given the stakes for the United States, democracy, and the West, this was, in my estimation, the worst decision the Trump administration has made so far, and that is a long, long list. Near the top of that list is the now-infamous Signal chat that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz created to share what was clearly classified information related to U.S. strikes on Yemen and Waltz's accidental invitation of Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg to that chat.

If that weren't enough, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sent precise war plans for the U.S. strikes on Yemen--specific times and weapons types--in that chat.

I am a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. I see classified information every day. I wish I could say that we saw, you know, anything more secret than what was related in that Signal chat by Secretary Hegseth. But the truth is that what he sent--that targeting information, the precision with the timing of that--actually required more security than anything that I see on the Intelligence Committee on a daily basis. I would say 99 percent of what we see in the Intelligence Committee, which is meant to be confidential and is meant to be classified, is far less significant than what Secretary Hegseth sent in his Signal chat. In fact, I would say if that information is not classified, I don't know what information is.

Signal is encrypted, and it is acceptable for some government use. That is true. I use Signal but never ever for sharing sensitive or classified information.

The intelligence community and national security Agencies across the government have clear protocols to protect the kind of information that Secretary Hegseth sent. All of the people in that Signal chat, which included the Secretaries of Defense and Treasury, know this. They have ultrasecure rooms and platforms where they are legally required to discuss classified information.

People at home might not know this, but when you go into one of those rooms, you have to leave your cell phone outside. You have to leave your cell phone in a box when you go into the room because you can't know and we can't know whether an adversary has placed malware on that phone.

I think there are a lot of reasons to throw our phones into the Potomac River, but that is one good one--to not bring it into meetings where you are going to have classified information because you can't know who is on it.

These people know better than to use Signal or any platform the way they did, but they were reckless, and they were lazy, and they put our national security at risk.

By the way, they won't admit to this day that what they did was wrong. Not a single one of them will say that what they did was wrong. They are denying that they passed classified information on that call, when anybody who is reading it knows that. The people of Colorado certainly know that.

China and Russia and others are surely monitoring these officials' unclassified phones, and Signal is not immune. In fact, in late March, just a week before Jeff Goldberg exposed the Trump Signal chat, the Department of Defense itself sent a Pentagon-wide email warning of Signal's vulnerability, noting that Russian hacking groups were trying to spy on Signal conversations. It is remarkable that the Secretary of Defense couldn't even follow his own Department's guidelines.

Now credible media reports indicate that Mike Waltz used his personal Gmail for government business and that his team created as many as 20 Signal chats to communicate about crises around the world.

This utter incompetence and recklessness in the handling of sensitive and classified information is inexcusable, and it is a threat to our national security. When the truth comes out, that will be the judgment.

They are putting the men and women of our Armed Forces and our intelligence officers and our allies at risk. They are eroding our standing around the world.

They are going to make even our closest allies question whether they can even share intelligence with the United States. Why would MI6 or Mossad share their secrets with the United States if Pete Hegseth is going to post them in Signal for Jeff Goldberg to publish in The Atlantic?

The Trump White House tried to declare ``case closed,'' they said, on their poor handling of classified information, but since then, the Department of Defense's acting inspector general saw through the lies, and they launched an evaluation of this administration's use of classified information.

The acting inspector general is a senior civil servant with a strong record of nonpartisan public service, including Active Duty in the Army, and I am confident he will conduct an independent and thorough investigation.

It is worth remembering, too, that the inspector general is only acting because President Trump fired the former inspector general in February, along with the inspectors general of 16 other Agencies because he felt he couldn't control them. He was worried that they were going to blow the whistle on what he was doing.

Clearly, the Trump administration wants to hide their sloppiness and their incompetence, but unfortunately for them, Waltz was incompetent and sloppy enough to accidentally add The Atlantic's editor-in-chief to their Signal chat in which Pete Hegseth was sloppy and incompetent enough to share classified information.

After Jeff Goldberg reported on the evidence of this chat, the administration's first action was to pretend like it had never happened. Then they lied about the information they shared--information that they never should have disclosed anywhere but in a classified space.

It is an insult to the American people's intelligence to say that not only was this not classified but that nothing they did was wrong, that it was perfectly normal to have a discussion about targets in Yemen on a Signal chat that was made available to the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. I mean, how about apologizing to the American people for that?

Jeff Goldberg didn't put himself on the chat; he was put there by Mike Waltz. By the way, he had the decency and the patriotism not to disclose the information that he was worried was classified and that might put at risk the troops that were doing that dangerous mission.

These are issues of life and death, particularly for our troops and for our intelligence agents and professionals. And now the White House has fired several members of the National Security Council on top of all of this and the head of U.S. Cyber Command after Laura Loomer, a known conspiracy theorist and close Trump ally, told the President to do so.

Why is the President taking national security advice not from the generals that have become the head of the NSA but from a dangerous conspiracy theorist who says 9/11 was an inside job and who has never abandoned it? How is any of this remotely acceptable to the American people--of course it is not--or to my Republican colleagues?

The Trump administration's lies and incompetence are an insult. With their recklessness, they have already put Americans in danger and alienated crucial allies and partners around the world, making the world even more dangerous and weakening U.S. national security in the process.

Otto von Bismarck, the 19th century German Chancellor, famously said that ``God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.''

We are, indeed, blessed by our size, our abundant natural resources, and our relative distance from adversaries that wish to do us harm. Our advantages are so great that the only country that can destroy the United States, as Lincoln told us, is the United States.

No wonder why Xi Jinping thinks that the United States is in decline,

that there are great changes unseen in the country, as he put it, and that he can simply wait for President Trump to accelerate our decline by tearing down the bedrock of America's national security and our prosperity.

No wonder Xi and his strongmen friends like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un believe that the global order is up for grabs, that they are on the rise and that we are on the collapse, on the fall. Thanks to President Trump's wanton and self-harming recklessness, incompetence, and isolationism, that is how they feel.

No wonder why Xi continues to ramp up pressure on Taiwan, with live- fire exercises around the island earlier this week, and Putin continues to wage his unjustified war on Ukraine while threatening NATO allies like Poland and the Baltics.

Emboldening these dictators, as President Trump's administration has, will make the world more dangerous to the United States.

I can see the leader is here, so I am going to bring my comments to a close, but let me just say that nothing has been more contrary to the national security interests of the United States, our allies, and the Ukrainian people than the undermining of the Ukrainian soldiers on the frontline by this President--nothing--from his telling the American people that Ukraine started the war to his constant coddling of Vladimir Putin.

This is a generational moment for the United States of America to step up for democracy and for freedom around the world, and we are going to do it notwithstanding what President Trump said.

This moment demands sober, careful, and calibrated policymaking on the international stage, not the Trump administration's recklessness. Their failure to meet this moment will be our shared failure. We will not let it happen.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 1646 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, with Russia rejecting President Trump's proposed 30-day cease-fire and continuing to attack Ukraine and with the administration briefly pausing military and intelligence assistance to Ukraine last month, the Senate must send an unequivocal message. The Ukrainian people did not ask for this war. They did not invite this war. They have fought with everything they have and with the American people's support. They have suffered 400,000 casualties and caused more Russian casualties than in all the wars that Russia has had since World War II.

Those of us serving in this Chamber have a duty to the American people to demand moral and strategic clarity by making clear that any steps by this administration to cut off military and security assistance to Ukraine is unacceptable.

This is a simple question; it is not a partisan one. And the answer is clear: This fight is not just for Ukraine. It is for democracy. It is for freedom.

I urge my colleagues to stand with the Ukrainian people and vote yes.

I ask for the yeas and nays.