Floor Statements

Madam President, I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 162, on passage of the joint resolution, H.J. Res. 24. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

Before he leaves the floor, I just wanted to thank my colleague from Georgia for the moral clarity of his remarks tonight.

It is interesting to think for a moment of what we are dealing with and what the context of this budget is. We are living in the wealthiest country in the world, but unlike almost any other industrialized country in the world, we don't provide healthcare to everybody in the United States. This is the wealthiest country in the world. Per capita, we are far wealthier than any other country in the world. And, yet, we made the decision not to provide healthcare to everybody.

And, shockingly, not only are we doing that, we are spending twice what any other industrialized country is spending on healthcare--for worse results.

Do you know that, today, in the United States of America, our life expectancy is 6 years shorter than if you live in an industrialized country in the world that has a universal healthcare system that costs half of what this healthcare system costs?

If you are African American in the United States of America, your life expectancy is 12 years shorter than if you live in a country that has a universal healthcare system that costs half of the one in the United States of America.

And those systems, by the way, are very different. Some of them are all public systems. Some of them are a combination of for-profit and nonprofit and government healthcare. But the thing they share in common is that everybody is covered and that they cost much less than the healthcare that is delivered in the United States of America.

I am sure my colleague from Georgia has the same experience I have in Colorado, which is to notice that every year it seems like healthcare actually becomes more scarce in America--less abundant--even though we are spending all that money. And don't even ask me about mental healthcare, which our families desperately need in the United States of America now. And as a former school superintendent, I can tell you our kids are facing a raging epidemic of mental health issues that are related to COVID, that are related to other challenges they are facing, that are related to the social media algorithms that are ripping their childhoods apart with absolutely no response from this place.

So that is the starting point. And I think I heard my colleague from Georgia talking about how Martin Luther King had said that inequality in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane of all. And I wonder if one of the things he was thinking is that it is shocking and inhumane, in the richest country in the world, that not everybody is covered, even though in every one of these other industrialized countries, people are covered.

And everybody in this room knows that no matter whether you are covered or whether you are not, if you have a sick child, you are going to try to get them a doctor. If you have a sick child, you are going to try to get them to the hospital, whether they are covered or whether they are not.

And one of the reasons why our healthcare system is so expensive is that people don't have primary care; that is to say, they don't have the ability to go in to see a doctor in a timely way, just to get a wellness checkup for themselves or for their kids, just to make sure that everything is OK, so they don't develop a chronic healthcare condition that makes the healthcare much more expensive on the other end and shortens their life.

That is why we have a 6-year life expectancy that is shorter than people in

the rest of the industrialized world--unless you are African American in the United States. Then it is 12 years, more than a decade.

And that is why this budget is so astonishing and so amazing. And I agree with my colleague from Georgia that every budget is a moral document. This document is an immoral document. This budget is an immoral budget. You would think that we lived in the poorest country in the world, not the richest country in the world, if you saw this budget.

There is no way that any mayor in Georgia or any mayor in Colorado, whatever party they are in, Democrat or Republican, would put a budget like this in front of their people. There is no way they would come to them and say: We are going to make life even harder for people who are even hanging on by their fingernails just to get the healthcare they get because, as my colleague from Georgia said, we are all sicker if kids don't get inoculated. We are all sicker if this country of ours doesn't have people that have primary care. It just gets more expensive if families have to go to the emergency room to get care for their children because they have no other way to get healthcare. That is what is going to happen.

Most of the people who are on Medicaid are children and senior citizens. That is who is on Medicaid--and disabled people and people who have spent their entire lifetime--they have spent their entire lifetimes working, and now they have spent their lifesavings down just for the privilege of spending the rest of their days in a nursing home, often in rural parts of our country, on Medicaid.

So this budget has these cuts to healthcare. It is a way of saying it. I mean, we call it Medicaid, but it is healthcare for poor children, for poor seniors, for working people, for disabled people, for people that are living in nursing homes that have no other options. It is their healthcare.

If you take this healthcare away, people are just going to get sicker. It is going to cost the society more. People are going to fill up these emergency rooms. We know that because people will try to get healthcare wherever they can, even if it is the most expensive way of doing it.

We would be a lot better off having a conversation about how to cover everybody in a way that costs us as little as it costs in other countries around the world.

But not only are we not having that discussion with this budget, we are having a discussion about a budget that cuts taxes and blows this massive hole in the deficit, no matter how much the healthcare cuts are, of about $4.6 trillion. And that is to extend the tax cuts that Donald Trump came here and passed in 2017.

This is another shocking part of this budget. You know, we have very significant problems in our economy.

This country relied, when I was growing up, on the idea that if you worked hard, you could get ahead; if you worked hard and your kids worked hard, they could live a better life than the life you lived. That was the American promise. That was the American promise.

Today, for the first time in American history, half the people that are 30 years old are going to make less money than their parents. Think about that. Half the people that are 30 years old in the country today are going to make less money than their parents did. If you look at young men in the United States of America, they are earning 40 percent less income today than they earned in 1976.

We tell ourselves that we are the land of opportunity. We need to be the land of opportunity, but we are seeing our economic mobility slide behind competition, from Southeast Asia to Europe. There is a lot of discussion these days about what the threats to our democracy are or the fact that our democracy is threatened. I don't think there is a greater threat to our democracy than the lack of economic mobility we have, than the fact that too many families in Colorado and across this country feel like their kids are not going to live a life as good as the life they live. In Colorado, there is not a county anymore where people feel like their lives are going to be better, where their kids' lives are going to be better than theirs.

When you lose that sense of opportunity, when you lose that sense that if you work hard, you are going to get ahead, that is a danger to democracy because, inevitably, somebody shows up, as President Trump did, and says: I alone can fix it. You don't need a democracy. You don't need the rule of law. You don't need this exercise in self- government. I can fix it. You should expect your private sector and your public sector to be hopelessly corrupt, hopelessly bankrupt.

That is a dark vision, but that is the dark vision that he was elected on twice.

I think we would be a lot better off trying to figure out how to create an economy that, when it grows, it grows for everybody, not just the people at the very top; and an economy that, when people work hard, they feel like they know they will be able to propel their kids forward. It was an economy that reestablished the American dream for this entire country. We better do that. We better do that if we are going to have any hope of saving this democracy.

But here comes a budget where a massive hole is being blown into the deficit and is causing a proposal to cut healthcare for the poorest people in the country and the poorest children in the country--here is what it is doing. It is cutting taxes for the wealthiest people in America. Fifty percent of the benefit of this tax bill will go to the top 5 percent of Americans. Fifty percent of the benefit of this tax bill will go to the top 5 percent of Americans.

I have said it on the floor before. I am not going to dwell on it again. This is analogous. It is the same if a mayor in Denver or Grand Junction or Limon or Durango or Springfield came to see the citizens of those communities and said: I am going to borrow more money than we have ever borrowed before.

You ask them: What are you going to spend it on? I am worried about that. What are you going to spend that money on? Parks? Public safety? On the mental health challenges that I described earlier? On our infrastructure? Our roads? Our bridges? Our schools?

And the answer is: No, no, no.

Well, what are you going to spend it on?

We are going to give tax breaks to the two wealthiest neighborhoods in town and let it trickle down to everybody else.

That is the Trump tax policy. That was the Trump tax policy in 2017, and it is the Trump tax policy this year.

It is very unusual, by the way, to have a President who has been here twice with an interruption, but that is the case with President Trump. We now know the facts of the math that he claimed the last time.

He said last time that the tax cuts would pay for themselves. We know that they cost the country $4 trillion; that the sons and daughters of teachers and firefighters and police officers all over this country who are not going to benefit in a material way from the tax cuts are going to have to pay back the debt that is incurred to give them to people who, as the Senator from Georgia said, aren't even asking, really. Many of them know we are in this situation where we have the worst income inequality that we have had since the 1920s and that we should be thinking about how to build that middle class again, give people the chance to get into the middle class, which is what we should be focused on.

So there is a set of priorities here that somehow makes sense when it gets to Washington, DC, but surely doesn't make sense in the towns and cities of this country. There is a choice that would never be made--a choice to hurt the people that now are going to have to go without healthcare; a choice to blow a massive hole in the deficit--not to invest in the country but to cut taxes for the wealthiest people.

Why don't we have a tax cut for working people? Why don't we have a tax cut for the middle class? Why don't we expand the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit for working people here?

Mr. President, I am going to finish. I do want to read some letters that have been written to me from people in Colorado who are deeply concerned about these cuts to Medicaid.

I want to also say a word of thank-you to the people that have come to my townhalls--sometimes with their children, sometimes with their children with disabilities--to advocate on

behalf of their children, to advocate on behalf of children all over our State and all over the country whose lifeline is this healthcare program that is being cut in this budget.

There were so many people that wrote in. The No. 1 issue--when we have these townhalls, we write down the questions that are asked. The No. 1 issue is Medicaid because the people that have loved ones who are on the program know it is going to be cut, know that they have nowhere else to turn. That is why they are there at 8 o'clock or 9 o'clock at night with their children when their children should be home in bed, because they want people here to understand what it is going to mean to their families if these cuts go into place.

The first letter is from Barbara of Greenwood Village:

We are 86 year old parents of our 53 year old, nonverbal

autistic son who we had become physically unable to care for

him in our home anywhere. We were able to place him in a host

home May 29, 2024, where he is being provided a safe and

caring environment. He requires 24/7 supervision, to be given

his needed daily medication, and seeing that he gets to all

needed doctors and dental appointments and continues to do

so. Without continuing Medicaid's current level of support,

we are terrified that these needs may not continue to be met!

As aging parents--

Eighty-six-year-old parents--

--we are greatly concerned about these proposed huge cuts

to Medicaid . . . It's so important for us to know that all

these supports will still be in place after we are gone and

unable to advocate for him. Please help us to do this by not

cutting Medicaid benefits!!!

The next letter is from Michell in Thornton:

I am writing to urge you to protect and strengthen Medicaid

for individuals with disabilities. My daughter, who was

adopted at age 10, is now 21 but has the cognitive level of a

five-year-old. She has Fragile X Syndrome, ADHD, PTSD,

anxiety, and possible fetal alcohol syndrome. She requires

constant supervision, behavioral support, and medical care

beyond what private insurance covers. Medicaid is essential

for her survival and quality of life. It provides funding for

adult programs that give her purpose, medical equipment, and

living assistance--expenses that most families simply cannot

afford.

No family could afford.

Without Medicaid, she and many others like her would be

left without critical care, increasing the risk of

institutionalization or homelessness.

Medicaid also plays a vital role in adoption. Many children

with disabilities, like my daughter, find forever families

because Medicaid provides the financial support needed to

care for them. Without it, fewer families would be able to

adopt, leaving more children to age out of the system without

the care they desperately need.

Please support Medicaid funding and policies that ensure

individuals with disabilities receive the care and dignity

they deserve. Thank you for your time and dedication to this

critical issue.

The care I say that all of us deserve.

Erica from Johnstown:

My son has Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. His care alone

without Medicaid waivers will cost us at least $1 million per

year. Medicaid allows me to be paid to take care of my child

and not rely on nursing care. Medicaid has really helped him

get the best care possible without having to worry about the

cost.

And to be able to have his parent there to take care of him.

Samuel from Denver:

My name is Samuel. I moved to Denver with my wife Cynthia

and our son Joaquin just over a year ago--

Welcome--

in order to have his complex medical issues treated at

Children's Hospital of Colorado. Medicaid has without

exaggeration saved our lives; my wife is paid as our son's

caregiver when she would otherwise be unable to work.

Joaquin has received services ranging from medications that

prevent constant pain to (before our move) air ambulance

flights from Albuquerque to CHCO, including several life-

saving surgeries.

Losing funding for Medicaid directly translates to

unnecessary suffering and even loss of life for Joaquin and

countless children like him. Please do not allow that to

happen.

Mr. President, I can't tell you the number of parents I have met who have spent 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in care of their own children but who are able to do it because of the small payment that is made by Medicaid. What are these parents supposed to do if this is cut? How are we going to meet the moral obligation of this country to our children with this cut?

A letter from Brittny in Denver:

My son has autism, a developmental disability, and a speech

delay. He cannot be in a typical daycare or even go to

preschool due to the high level of support he requires.

Medicaid pays for his speech therapy and occupational

therapy. After just 6 months of ABA therapy, occupational

therapy, and speech therapy, Jackson is now speaking. He's

not as aggressive and is getting better with managing the

sensory issues that he struggles with daily.

Without Medicaid, we would not be able to pay for our home

or food as I am his paid caregiver through Medicaid. I cannot

work a typical job. It is important that he receives these

therapies and supports for Medicaid as well as me so that our

family can survive and he has the brightest future possible.

If anything is taken away from him or us, it will be

detrimental. Please give my son and our small family a

fighting chance. Thank you.

Barbara from Greenwood Village:

Our son Derek is autistic and nonverbal. His dad and I are

86 plus, and it became hard for us to take care of him. We

wanted to be sure he would be in a safe and secure situation

and happy there. On May 29 of this year, we were able to find

a host home for him to live in. He is doing well there.

He has people that take him out in the community 6 days a

week to enjoy being out and about, which is so very important

to his happiness and well-being. We pray that Medicaid will

continue to support him in continuing this new way of life

for him.

Our community of people with disabilities desperately need

help!

Sasha from Fountain:

I have a 9-year-old, wheelchair-bound daughter with

cerebral palsy. She depends on me 100 percent. She depends on

me 24/7, morning, day, and night.

I change her, dress her, get her out of bed, feed her,

bathe her, drive her to therapy and other appointments,

exercise, massage, and physical therapy at home, give her her

medications, get her ready for bed, and help her in the

middle of the night if she wakes up. Because she depends on

me, I'm unable to get a job outside of the [house, and that]

is why I depend on this waiver. I would rather care for my

daughter, give her the quality care and love she deserves,

than hire a stranger and depend on them to take care of my

child. Without the waiver, I wouldn't be able to afford to

stay home and make sure she is safe and happy. Thanks to the

waiver, she [has] the therapy she needs.

It's a crisis, and we need Congress to ensure that everyone

has access to home- and community-based services right now.

It is a crisis. It is a crisis. It is a crisis in the richest country in the world. Now we are going to provoke this crisis. We are going to make it even worse. We are going to destabilize these families. For what--so we can give tax cuts to the wealthiest people in America? Why don't you just not do that part of the bill? Why don't you just not do that part of the bill?

This economy has shoveled benefits for 50 years on the wealthiest people in our country. Do we want to compound that unfairness with a set of tax policies like the ones that are being pursued here and turn around and cut healthcare for the most vulnerable people in America?

If you are concerned about waste, fraud, and abuse, go after waste, fraud, and abuse, but don't make people's lives even more painful. Don't make people's lives even more difficult. Don't force parents to actually leave their households when there is no one else to take care of their children.

No one would make these choices in one of our communities at home. I would like to hear a city council meeting where these were the choices that were being made: Cut electric for the poorest people in the country. Borrow as much money as we have ever borrowed. Give the benefit to the two wealthiest neighborhoods in town. It doesn't make any sense.

Here is a letter from Bryce in Denver:

When I sustained a cervical spinal cord injury from a

shallow water diving accident at age 20, the only thing I was

certain of was that my future aspirations and independence

were finished. I had plenty of time to think about what I had

lost as a quadriplegic during my 45-day stay in the ICU.

But as I began my rehabilitation, I learned about Medicaid

and home- and community-based services. By the time I

returned home, I had set up home health care services that

allowed me to receive the needed care to be independent

throughout the day and enabled my parents to continue

working.

By the time 1 year had passed after my accident, I was back

living on my college's campus and taking a full slate of

classes. As I write this, I am a staff attorney at the

Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition--an organization I

dreamed of contributing to professionally when I was a

volunteer advocate here over a decade ago. I continue to

benefit from daily home health care through a consumer-

directed program available through Colorado Medicaid, and can

pay for medical appointments and services, physical therapy,

and occupational therapy services, which keep me healthy

enough to [continuously]

contribute to disability rights advocacy across the state and

[the] Nation. In no uncertain terms, Medicaid's home- and

community-based services has repeatedly opened the door of

opportunity for me to live a meaningful, independent life.

Without these services, I would be unemployed, living either

with my parents or in a nursing facility.

Home- and community-based services represent American

values of equal opportunity to pursue life, liberty, and

happiness. They represent our societal commitment to

providing and promoting those opportunities to all citizens,

and these values and commitments--manifested in Medicaid

services--are the sole reason that I have been able to

overcome quadriplegia and live a purposeful, beautiful life.

My name is Kalyn Rose--

She is from Denver--

--and I was born with a rare condition: osteogenesis

imperfecta. My mother lost count of all my broken bones at a

young age, but it is certainly over 100 fractures and likely

50-plus surgeries now. Because of my access to Medicaid, I

have been able to get life-supporting surgeries, emergency

room visits, and wheelchairs that I would not otherwise . . .

receive.

Thanks to Medicaid, I live a full life as an artist,

educator, mentor, and community advocate based in Denver, CO.

I would certainly not be who I am today without lifesaving

medical expenses I would never be able to afford myself. I am

currently caring for my now-disabled mother, who also relies

on Medicaid and support services.

Without Medicaid, I, my family, and millions of others

would be left to die. Medicaid is a lifeline for so many of

us, and we all deserve access to healthcare in the richest,

most powerful country known to humankind.

I couldn't have said that better myself.

Nearly 1.3 million Coloradans like Kalyn rely on Health First Colorado and CHIP to get health coverage. Half a million of them are children. These cuts would affect more than half of Colorado's seniors who rely on Health First Colorado to help pay for nursing homes because they literally can't afford to die anywhere else. From birth to death, our Medicaid Programs are a lifeline for my constituents and for millions of Americans.

My colleague from Georgia started his speech by saying that a budget is a moral document. I could not agree with him more.

I think we should reconsider, in the face of the advocacy that we are hearing, whether these are the best choices we can make, and of course, they are not. In a rational world, we would be figuring out how to get everybody healthcare in this country and do it for less money than these other countries are spending, just as they are doing, and we would be able to use the savings from that to pay down our deficit if we wanted to do that or invest in our military if we wanted to do that or invest in our roads and our bridges if we wanted to do that or in the mental health of our children if we cared to do that. Those are the choices that we should be making tonight.

I want to finish this by thanking again the people who have come to my townhall meetings; to the people who have brought their loved ones, especially their children, to those townhall meetings; to the people who took the time to write, who have not given up on the idea that they can have a voice in this democracy and that the decisions that this place can make can actually align with the priorities that they have.

They are not asking for anything here except the chance to continue to take care of their children, to take care of their parents, to take care of their loved ones, and to be contributing members of our society. We should support their ambitions for themselves. We should support their ambitions for our country. We should find a better way of supporting them, and we should shelve this budget, which is going to do nothing but harm the American people.

I thank the Presiding Officer for his patience. I thank the staff for being here so late tonight even though tonight's lateness is going to be nothing compared to tomorrow night's lateness.

Mr. President, with that--if I can find my glasses--I ask unanimous consent to amend the previous order and that the Senate stand adjourned until 8:30 a.m., with all other provisions of the order remaining in effect.

Senator Booker, would you yield for a question?

That is what I wanted to talk about.

Sir, will you yield for a question?

Let me ask you, Senator Booker--can I ask you directly how long a question you would like? I am happy to provide you with a 5- minute question or a 5-hour question. It depends entirely on you.

My wife Susan--

That is why I came down here.

I say this to the Senator of New Jersey and the Presiding Officer: Thank you very much for being here, for enduring this.

When I started here, I was sitting in the chair all the way to the right of where you are today, Senator Booker. I can remember the day you walked in to be sworn in. You came through those doors right there. I had a huge smile on my face because I knew when you were walking through those doors, when you were walking into this Chamber, you would bring with you the kids that you used to work for in Newark, NJ. The reason I knew that was that when you were working for the kids in Newark, NJ, as the mayor of Newark, NJ, I was working for the kids in Denver as the superintendent of Denver Public Schools.

At that time in our country's history, we were engaged in a pretty profound effort to try to make better the schools in our respective communities--not that everything was perfect, but we were trying to drive achievement for the kids in Newark and the kids in Denver, and we talked about it over many years.

And here you walked into this Chamber, a place where it would be easy to imagine has long had the habit of treating America's kids like they are someone else's kids, not like they are America's kids.

I know that because if the kids in America were represented by the 100 desks that are in this Senate, roughly 9 of them would be graduating with a college degree in our country, 9 of these desks.

If we thought about the rates of literacy, the failure in our country to be able to teach people how to read or do mathematics decade after decade after decade, the proficient students would consume just a few desks in this place and everybody else would not be able to do basic levels of reading and basic levels of math.

But here you were, somebody who understands that, and here you are, somebody who understands that.

One of the very first projects you and I worked on--this is coming to my question--was the child tax credit. This was an effort to turn back 30 or 40 years of trickle-down economics that said that what we are going to do is cut taxes for the richest people in the country and just have it trickle down to everybody else. Some people don't know what that means. Let me, if I could--

Let me just say what that actually means.

For you to understand that what tax policy is, that tax policy that Donald Trump has pursued now twice--once when he was President before and now again--you have to imagine that there is a mayor in Newark or there is a mayor in Denver or a mayor in San Diego or in Miami who is saying to the people that live in his community: I have an idea. I am going to go out and borrow more money than we have ever borrowed before as a community. I am going to go out and borrow a ton of money.

Your constituents and my constituents would say: Wait a minute, Mayor. Wait a minute. That makes me nervous. What are you borrowing all that money for?

Because I am worried about the fiscal condition of my city and my town.

This conversation would happen in every city and every town in Colorado or New Jersey, whether they are Democratic or Republican mayors. You have to answer the question: What are you spending the money on? What are you going to borrow all this money for? Is it for our parks? No. Is it for our schools? No. Is it to give mental health services to kids who desperately need it? No. Is it for our roads and bridges, our infrastructure? No. Are you going to do something important for our water systems? No.

What is the answer? What are you going to do with that money that you are borrowing, that you are mortgaging our kids' future? What is this important thing you are going to do with it?

The answer is, we are going to give it to the two richest neighborhoods in New Jersey or Newark or Denver, and we are going to expect that it is going to trickle down to everybody else.

That is the theory. That is what trickle-down economics is. That is what the Trump tax plan is. And there is a reason why no mayor in America has ever done it--because you would be run out on a rail because you couldn't explain it.

You are going to borrow money from the kids of our police officers, our firefighters, our teachers in order to cut taxes for the richest people in the community in the hope that they will buy a little bit of an extra--I don't know--luxury, and then that is going to somehow generate economic activity for everybody else. It is demonstrably true that has never worked.

By the way, these tax cuts, I say to the Presiding Officer and everybody else within the sound of my voice, have literally never ever come close to paying for themselves. That is a complete lie. That is why the Congressional Budget Office says this is going to blow a $4.6 trillion hole in our deficit. And for what? To give tax cuts to the richest people in America when they need them least and when the income inequality is as great as it has been in our country since the 1920s? Which brings me to my question.

My cherished colleague from New Jersey, what was it we were trying to do with the child tax credit? There were a lot of people who believed that we couldn't even get it passed, that we couldn't even get the IRS to administer it. Then we did get it passed during part of the Biden administration, and lo and behold, more than 90 percent of the families in New Jersey got a tax cut. Lo and behold, more than 90 percent of the families in Colorado got a tax cut--not waiting for a trickle down from the wealthiest people, but they got a tax cut directly that did what? Cut in half--cut in half--the childhood poverty rate in America.

In the richest country in the world, for one moment, we said we don't have to accept this level of childhood poverty as a permanent feature of our democracy or a permanent feature of our

economy. We can do something different than that.

Senator Booker, that is what you said when you were mayor of Newark. We don't have to accept these generational outcomes of poverty or of poor schools or of lead in water. We can do something different. And that is what you brought to the U.S. Senate as well.

The tragedy, from my perspective, is--there are many tragedies about the election of Donald Trump--by the way, I will say again on this floor that I don't blame him for getting elected President. He ran, and he won. Those of us that were trying to offer a different vision have something to explain about why we were not successful.

But one thing I am certain of is that the kids in Newark and the kids in Denver are completely invisible to our current President, that he is not concerned with their welfare or even loses a minute's sleep over the next generation.

So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about--this isn't a numbers and cents question because I know--even though you don't look tired, I am sure you must be tired after all these hours and hours and hours. But can you talk a little bit, Senator, about how a society should be judged with respect to how we treat the next generation of Americans; how a tax bill should be judged by how we treat the next generation of Americans; how almost nothing else matters except what we do with respect to the next generation of Americans?

I can tell you that my daughters Caroline, Halina, and Anne understand better than most your commitment to them and your commitment to their generation because you have been such an inspiration to them, not just today--not just today but thank you for what you are doing-- but for basically their entire lifetime.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to speak for up to 6 minutes, Senator Tillis for up to 10 minutes, and Senator Sanders for up to 20 minutes prior to the scheduled rollcall vote.

Mr. President, I would like to thank Senator McConnell for his constancy over the last 3 years. We have been out on the floor together many times to speak about the need to support Ukraine.

I also want to thank my colleague Senator Shaheen from New Hampshire, the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, for organizing this bipartisan gathering.

Senator Tillis from North Carolina is here as well. It is nice to be here in a bipartisan way with people from both sides of the aisle to work on something of this critical importance to my State of Colorado, to the country, and to the world.

Senator McConnell, not surprisingly today, talked about that very, very famous lesson that Ronald Reagan taught all of us, and that was his pursuit of peace through strength. I was on the floor talking about that last week. Today we have a corollary to Ronald Reagan's rule of peace through strength from Senator McConnell, which is, don't mistake surrender for peace. Don't mistake surrender for peace.

The lesson Ronald Reagan was teaching when he said ``peace through strength'' was a lesson that history had taught him and history had taught the free world.

Dust off your reliable 10th-grade Western civics textbook and look up President Woodrow Wilson's attempts to achieve ``peace without victory'' for either side--that is how he described it--as an example of the failure that weakness invites, the kind of weakness that Leader McConnell was talking about.

Before the United States even had entered World War I, President Wilson tried to force both sides to accept a peace deal they didn't want by depriving them of weapons and depriving them of funds.

In 1916--again, before the United States was directly aiding the allies--financiers from the United States were financing the UK, which was at war, and also funding their allies in mainland Europe. So Wilson's government cautioned U.S. investors against issuing short-term bonds to the UK and to France.

This Presidential expression of disapproval had the effect of cutting off U.S. private assistance to Europe altogether, and the record is painfully clear. President Wilson's decision created a financial crisis in the United Kingdom, but it did nothing to end the war. Instead, Germany, in 1917, only escalated their attacks on civilian shipping from the United States, prompting Congress finally to declare war and approve a $3 billion loan to France and to England.

By the way, just to amplify what the leader has already said this morning, that $3 billion loan was about $81 billion in today's dollars, when you think about the roughly $120 billion that we have invested in Ukraine.

In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain even more famously than Wilson tried to appease Hitler with the infamous Munich Agreement, through which the UK, France, and Italy allowed Nazi Germany to annex part of peaceful Czechoslovakia. As our history textbooks show, Hitler never stopped in Czechoslovakia but continued his war throughout Europe.

Just as Wilson and Chamberlain failed, friends of freedom in Ukraine and around the world should not pressure Ukraine into accepting an unjust peace that will never, ever last. Only with security guarantees from Europe and the United States can we have some assurance that Putin will not invade Ukraine again at a moment when he thinks the world is not watching. That is a guarantee. That is a guarantee.

I visited Ukraine last month with my friends Senator Shaheen and Senator Tillis, who are both here today. We saw the courage of the Ukrainian people up close. We saw the courage they have forged to save their country and the suffering they have endured--43,000 deaths and another almost 400,000 casualties--not just on behalf of Ukraine but on behalf of Europe, the West, democracy, freedom, our national security.

In cemeteries all across Ukraine, fresh graves are piled high with dirt and flowers, testifying to the Ukrainian people's sacrifice. To put it in American terms, Coloradoan terms, there is not a county in the entire country where somebody hasn't lost somebody to this war.

But the Ukrainian people have not had to fight this fight alone. The American people have steadfastly and generously backed this fight to the tune of, as I mentioned, $125 billion.

I won't go through all the reasons why that has been good for the United States, as Senator McConnell said--and that is a lot of money, but it is just about 0.53 percent of our GDP. That is about $365 an American.

Our European allies and far-flung ones, like Australia and Japan, have stepped up as well because they know that supporting Ukraine means standing with people willing to do anything to fight for their country. They know that with American weapons and those of our allies, the American people have literally kept Putin's army at the gates of Europe while forcing him to squander more than $200 billion and staggering casualties of 700,000 people.

We learned while we were in Ukraine that the Ukrainians are killing more Russians today than they were 6 months ago.

We all want this war to end, which is why I was glad to see the United States commit today to resuming intelligence sharing and security assistance to Ukraine as part of the potential U.S.-brokered, 30-day cease-fire with Russia. But for the sake of Ukraine and the rest of the free world, we must not pressure Ukraine to silence their guns

unless Russia commits to doing the same. We cannot force Ukraine to accept an end to this war that is anything other than a just and enduring peace.

This requires that the United States, our allies, and Ukraine continue working together to establish terms of the peace and negotiate with Putin while the Ukrainians continue their brave fight. They are not asking to be relieved of this terrible burden.

I couldn't even imagine the other day when we were in Kyiv how cold it must have felt to people who were on the frontlines of that war. It was cold enough just in the streets of Kyiv. It was cold enough just getting on the train from Poland to go to Kyiv. But they are embracing their responsibility because they know that any cease-fire without credible security guarantees will allow Putin to rebuild his army and attack again, and they know that how this war ends will determine whether Putin sets his sites on our NATO allies like Poland and the Baltics.

To conclude that any other result is possible is to completely ignore history, is to completely ignore what Putin has said and whether dictators like China's Xi Jinping test our resolve by invading Taiwan, whether the post-World War II international order the United States and our allies created persists, and whether the United States continues to provide the leadership our parents and grandparents supplied since the end of that war. That is what Senator McConnell calls on us to remember.

Throughout history, it has been too easy for some to ignore the moral responsibility we have to people who are sacrificing their lives a continent away on behalf of our shared values and interests. It is harder in these moments but important and, I would say, necessary for the living to stand for freedom and democracy and those willing to give their last breaths to make those values eternal.

We in this Chamber have to demand moral and strategic clarity by continuing to support Ukraine's fight to secure a truly just peace through strength because, as the Ukrainian-born author Vasily Grossman wrote nearly 70 years ago, ``In the cruel and terrible time in which our generation has been condemned to live on this earth, we must never make peace with evil. We must never become indifferent to others or undemanding of ourselves.''

With that, I thank my bipartisan colleagues again. I look forward to the day when we are out here not with 8 Senators but 80 Senators in support of freedom and in support of the fight Ukraine is leading.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I am sorry. The Presiding Officer seems to have the misfortune of being out here every time I come to the floor to speak. I regret that, and I feel sorry for him.

I am glad to be out here with my colleagues, today, on both sides of the aisle. We have heard the Senator from Mississippi refer to what he described as the greatest words of wisdom that came from Ecclesiastes. Those were words of wisdom.

I think another set of great words of wisdom came from Ronald Reagan, who said, ``Peace through strength.'' Peace through strength is what Ronald Reagan represented.

I know the President, last night, had a less clear message to the American people. I know that he said that he was the greatest President in American history. George Washington, I think, was second on his list.

For most of us in this Chamber, I think we probably would say Ronald Reagan earned a place there, even those of us who disagreed with him. One of the reasons was that he did what he said when it came to the national security interests of the United States of America. Because we have been following that path of peace through strength in a bipartisan way, the American people have been extremely generous in their support of the Ukrainian people since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

The American people have earned a profound debt of gratitude from free people all over the world, including in the United States. Their courage and our weapons and the weapons of our allies have held Putin's army at the gates of Europe. Nothing else has. They have shown that democracies will stand up to defend themselves and will not roll over to dictators, whether they are in Moscow or Beijing.

But unlike us and unlike the rest of the world, the Ukrainians actually have paid a huge human toll. They have had almost 400,000 casualties. They have had over 40,000 deaths in this war. Their cemeteries are bulging with new graves that are piled high with flowers that testify to the sacrifice of the Ukrainian people in every community in Ukraine. Anybody who has been there has seen them. It is impossible to avoid the cemeteries that have piled up with soldiers who have been willing to pay the ultimate sacrifice on the frontlines of this war in Ukraine.

I delivered a speech just a few days ago, which the Presiding Officer may have had the misfortune of hearing, discussing President Trump's false accusation that Ukraine started this war with Russia.

To my colleagues who say it doesn't matter what the President says, that it is only the outcome that matters--be patient about this great negotiator who learned everything at the heels of Mr. Cohen while he was doing commercial real estate in New York--some of us are worried about it because words do matter, especially the words that the President utters.

Could you imagine anybody on this floor defending a President who said that Taiwan had invaded China when China had invaded Taiwan? That would be ridiculous. That would be absurd. But that is the situation that we face today. It is no different than that. It is identical to that.

He has called President Zelenskyy a dictator--the freedom fighter who is leading this battle and who has led this battle at Ukraine.

Ronald Reagan would turn over in his grave if he knew that the President has invited Russia to rejoin the G7, which is a group of the world's most powerful democracies--democracies--that suspended Russia after Putin invaded Ukraine for the first time in 2014. By the way, are we supposed to believe that he didn't invade Ukraine then; that he was invited in somehow to Crimea? Is President Trump really fooled by the little green men that Vladimir Putin sent there after his administration held supposed peace talks in Saudi Arabia without even the decency to include Ukraine, which has had more than 400,000 casualties?

Every single one of these statements and decisions have emboldened Putin. You can see it in the newspapers in Russia. You can see it on TV. And they have weakened Ukraine's negotiating position, profoundly undermining our own national security.

How this war ends will determine whether Putin sets his sights on our NATO allies, like Poland and the Baltics; whether dictators like China's Xi Jinping test our resolve by invading their neighbor, Taiwan; whether the post-World War II international order that the United States built and is today frittering away under this President's leadership remains intact; whether the United States can continue to provide the leadership on behalf of free nations all over this world and democracies all over this world that our parents and grandparents had the decency to sacrifice and build for us; whether we are going to face another conflict in this world that is actually started by a tyrant but ended by democracies.

The last thing we should be doing is undermining Ukraine's negotiating position and ours when we have this much at stake.

I know the Presiding Officer has spent his life in negotiations in the private sector. I have spent time--not as much as the Presiding Officer. I certainly have spent time in these negotiations as well. Our discipline, when I was in the private sector negotiating these deals, was that we would let every deal die at least three times because our theory was no deal worth doing could be done the first time or the second time. I can see the Presiding Officer probably--he probably said it is five times before you can do it. But the point is, you wouldn't undermine your own negotiating leverage while you are going into a deal.

Today--today--the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency went on FOX News and told the world that we had shut down our intelligence- sharing with Ukraine. We met--I don't know if I can say. I am on the Intelligence Committee, let me be careful what I say. Today, the United States of America has said we have cut off Ukraine.

I don't know what anybody is doing in this Chamber if they are not coming here saying the United States of America should not be cutting off Ukraine's intelligence in midstream, in the ramp-up to a negotiation. If you come out here on this floor and say it is the right thing to do; that you, in the private sector, would make an equivocally idiotic, compromising, self-defeating move in a negotiation like this, come and defend it out here. Come and tell us how that is peace through strength.

We shut off our offensive cyber with respect to Russia and got nothing back from them. Ronald Reagan is turning over in his grave at a national security strategy that, I guess, has been concocted in the realm of social media and cable television but has nothing to do with the national security interests of the United States. It can't be defended.

I want to also say, while I have the floor and for the record--and I hope people will look it up--I have never met President Zelenskyy where he hasn't started the meeting by thanking the American people and ended the meeting by thanking the American people. He has done it in every meeting that I have been in. But I don't want us to lose sight of the fact that we also hold a profound debt of gratitude to him and to his soldiers and to the Ukrainian people.

The President doesn't seem to understand that. The President seems to think: Oh, my gosh, they are doing us a favor by using our weapons.

You are in tough shape; your country is in tough shape, he stated the obvious in that embarrassing interaction in the Oval Office the other day, where he couldn't even keep his temper for 5 minutes on the global stage.

The Ukrainians are not just fighting for Ukraine; they are fighting for democracy. They are fighting for Europe. They are fighting for freedom. They are fighting for the international order that we created, that we led after the Second World War.

Should NATO pay its share? Yes, it should. But we are not some charity case. We have benefited from the casualties that Ukraine has suffered. We have benefited from the exposure of the weakness of Putin's corrupt army. We have benefited from Xi Jinping's new knowledge that if a dictator tries to invade another country, the free world will stand together, until Donald Trump became President of the United States.

I want to say again, Mr. President, to you and to all of my colleagues here today, the United States has turned off our intelligence to the Ukrainian people. They are not in retreat. They are on the frontlines of this war today, in the middle of winter, on the steps of Europe, where 16 million people were killed by Hitler and Stalin, when my mother was born in Warsaw--a Polish Jew in 1938, the year before Hitler invaded Poland. And we turned off their intelligence.

They are killing more Russians there every month than they were 6 months ago. This is a catastrophe.

The other night when we had the budget reconciliation, I had a request for an amendment that simply would have said that it was the sense of the Senate that Russia invaded Ukraine; that Russia had started this war. I wanted to ask my colleagues just the basic question: Can we agree that Russia started the war in Ukraine? That seems like a shocking question to ask. I hope every schoolchild in America knows that that is true. Yet the President of the United States has said that Ukraine started this war. There are people around this city these days who are suggesting that Russia didn't start the war; that Ukraine started the war.

And I am not even talking about people like the new head of Intelligence for the Trump administration who has taken the view that Ukraine had what was coming to them, who tweeted out at 11:30 the night that Putin's tanks invaded Ukraine, a peaceful country--for the first time in Europe since World War II, a dictator invading a peaceful country--who took to social media to say that Ukraine had it coming to them. I am not even saying that; I am saying people who are unwilling to say that Russia invaded Ukraine when it launched an unprovoked, an unjustified, full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, following their already illegal annexation of Crimea and their illegal occupation of parts of the Donbas. So that is all my resolution says, and that is it.

That may seem like a basic and remedial task. I am sorry it is necessary.

I want to remind every schoolchild in America who started this war and whose side we are on and what the legacy of Ronald Reagan's peace through strength is all about.

This is a measure that will not in any way disrupt the progress in negotiations. I think quite the opposite. I think quite the opposite. I want us to assure ourselves that we are all clear here about who started this war.

I want us to fulfill our responsibility to the American people. We are not

here to repeat untruths from the Oval Office. We all have a patriotic responsibility to live up to. The President does as well.

I want us to demand, on behalf of the American people, that the United States lead for the sake of the Ukrainian people and for our national security and for the security of the world.

That is why this is not just a matter of how worried people in NATO are; it is how worried people in Southeast Asia are because they know if we don't get our act together here and support Ukraine, support our allies in Europe, the same thing could happen there. And China could invade Taiwan, and we could have an American President who claims he is the best President in American history, with George Washington second, saying that Taiwan invaded China.

I want us to avow, as Ronald Reagan proclaimed 40 years ago, that ``freedom is America's core'' and ``[w]e must never deny it nor forsake it.'' That is what we risk today by withdrawing our support for Ukraine, allowing the President to promulgate falsehood after falsehood about who started this war and what is going on with this war.

If we abandon Ukraine, we are going to abandon the core of who we are.

This is a simple question. It is not a partisan one. And the answer couldn't be clearer.

So, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 114, which was submitted earlier today; further, that the resolution be agreed to and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, let me say--I know my colleague from Vermont is here, so I am not going to go on, but I would just like to respond to my friend from Wyoming by saying that it is shocking to me that tonight, in the Nation's Capital of the wealthiest country in the world, the place that we think of as the freest country in the world, our intelligence sharing with Ukraine, which has been one of the most effective means of their ability to prosecute the war in Ukraine against Russia, has been shut off by the United States of America. And our arms have been shut off to some degree as well, in the middle of winter, while they are sacrificing on the frontlines for freedom and for democracy.

It is shocking that we are in the position that we are in, and I hope, for the sake of our kids and for our grandkids, for the sake of the allies that we have all over the world, for the sake of democracy and freedom in this world, that we pull together as a Senate and articulate the importance of pursuing this negotiation out of a position of strength and not of weakness.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, before I speak on the matter in front of us, I wanted to say that on rollcall vote 89, I voted aye. It was my intention to vote no.

Therefore, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to change my vote since it will not affect the outcome.

Mr. President, I wanted to come down here and talk a little bit about energy with my colleagues in the Senate today, and part of the reason why is that as you know, Mr. President, and others know, the President of the United States has declared an energy emergency, and he did it on the day he was inaugurated here in the Capitol, on a day when he had lots of comments about the fact that God had saved him so that he would be there to be inaugurated--that this was going to be the greatest moment in American history, and that we had an energy emergency because there was an insufficient production of oil and fossil fuels.

As anybody who reads the newspaper in America knows--and there may not be anybody left who has access to a paper, but I encourage you to do it; it is a lot better than what you are reading on Twitter these days--the United States has actually produced more oil than we ever have produced in our history. In fact, last year, with the Biden administration, we produced more oil than any country in the history of humanity.

The same is true for natural gas. The same is true for LNG exports. The United States produces more oil than any other country in the world. We produce more natural gas than any other country in the world. We are the leading exporter of liquefied natural gas, which, by the way, has been incredibly important recently because we have allowed our allies in Europe to get off the Russian oil that they were on and replace that with liquefied natural gas produced by American citizens, exported by American citizens, to break the back of Putin's ability to restrain Europe's participation in the war, because we were able to replace half their energy. I am so glad that we were able to do that.

And we are also the world's leading producer of renewable energy, as well, and we have seen a huge amount of growth in solar, a huge amount of growth in wind, and I like to think of Colorado as the place that started an awful lot of that.

We are both a producer of fossil fuels and a producer of renewables. We know it takes everything to drive this economy, but we want to do all of this in a way that is cognizant of the very real climate issues that our globe faces and that our country faces.

The good news for the United States is there is no country in the world that is better positioned to lead the transition of our energy economy in this world than the United States of America. We are the wealthiest country in the world. We have the biggest and most abundant supply of fossil fuels and nonfossil fuels. We are less corrupt than almost any country on the face of the planet, and especially less corrupt than economies that are dominated by petrochemicals and by oil and gas around the world. We are the innovators in the world. We have a commitment to the rule of law. All of that puts us in this incredible position to lead.

I believe, 30 years from now or so, we are going to be in a place where we are able to say, not just to the American people but to the world, that we are at net zero from a carbon point of view and that we were able to get there through American technology and through American leadership and American ingenuity and American exports; that we took a strategic approach; that we had a plan that made sense; and that we captured, along the way, every--every--molecule that we could find of fugitive methane from oil and gas and from agriculture and from landfills; that we said yes to wind and solar; that we said yes to nuclear and yes to geothermal; that we said yes to investing in emerging technologies, like hydrogen, like carbon capture, and like the carbon dioxide removal bill that I have with my friend Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, which just goes to show you that you can have a bipartisan approach; that we can move to a position of real leadership that can help us create an economy again that America, when it grows, it grows for everybody, not just the people at the very top--because we have got good energy jobs that are concerned with the production of oil and gas and the production of all those other forms of energy.

By the way, just on that point--and I will be brief here because I know my colleague from Massachusetts wants to speak. On that subject, this Senate is about to get rid of the commonsense methane regulations that were passed in the last administration that are based on the work--that fee based on the work--that we had done in Colorado, working with industry, as the last administration did to create certainty, to create predictability, to send a message to the world that we want American gas to be the cleanest gas of any gas in the world.

And having us capture that fugitive methane is a hugely important part of that. We are saying no to that now. We are saying yes to the air pollution that is going to result. We are saying yes to the climate pollution that will result.

I say to my colleague from Massachusetts while she is here, I take no pleasure--and the President knows this--from the fact that Donald Trump is our President. I regret that he is our President, but he is our President. And one of the ways that he got to be our President is that he was elected twice.

And, in fact, more people voted for him this time than voted for him last time. I regret that. I am sorry for that, and I think there are lots of reasons for that.

But I think one of the reasons for that is that there is a mythology out there that the Democratic Party believes that we are going to turn fossil fuels off yesterday; or that we are going to turn fossil fuels off next week; or that we don't respect the men and women who work in our energy fields or in our energy processing across the country.

If there are Democrats who feel that way, I disagree with them, because the worst thing we could do at this moment when we have the energy abundance that we have, when we have the economic freedom we have, when we have the lack of corruption that we have--the worst thing we could do is elect a climate denier to be President whose most creative approach to energy was Sarah Palin's shopworn ``drill, baby, drill,'' which is what he announced under the dome of the United States Capitol the day he was inaugurated President and said--completely untruthfully--that we were in an energy crisis, when what we have is an energy abundance and no excuse--no excuse--for not leading the rest of the world in making sure that this transition on net-zero carbon is accomplished and that we do it in a way that protects our economy; that we do it in a way that protects our national security; that we do it in a way that recognizes the contribution that people have

made for generations in Northwest Colorado and all over our economy to be able to drive this economy forward.

And to the extent that the failure is a failure of the Democratic Party to make clear our position, I want to own that failure and that responsibility. It is not Donald Trump's fault that he was elected. He ran; he won. We own some of the fact that he got elected. And I think on this issue, we have not communicated clearly to the American people what we believe.

And as a result of that, once again, our children and grandchildren have a climate denier in the White House, even though a majority of the American people believe that climate change is real and that we should be doing something about it.

And those of us who are advocates on this, on this side, have to be very clear--much clearer, he said poorly and unclearly--but let me say again--have to be much clearer about what we stand for, which is for a transition that makes sense and that science commands and for the respect of people that are working in the energy industry no matter what part of the industry they are working in.

And the fact that Donald Trump--even when oil is at $73 a barrel at his inauguration and we are producing more than we have ever produced in the history of mankind for the United States--thinks we are in an energy emergency or he claims that we are surprises me not at all.

Since he said he was going to drive prices down, the price of eggs are so high today as we meet here, you need a mortgage practically to buy a dozen eggs in the United States of America.

We can do better than that, and we can do better than his ``drill, baby, drill'' energy policy.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I appreciate the opportunity to speak.

I returned from Ukraine earlier this week, where I saw both the suffering that the Ukrainian people have endured over the past 3 years at Putin's hand and the courage they have forged to save their country and their children--the suburban town of Bucha, where Russian troops tortured and massacred hundreds of civilians in the first day of Putin's unprovoked invasion; the shattered children's hospital Putin's missiles nearly destroyed; apartment buildings in central Kyiv struck by Putin's drones; and lawyers searching for the thousands of Ukrainian children who have been kidnapped from their parents by Russian soldiers.

By most estimates, at least 40,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed in battle and another 380,000 have been wounded since Putin's invasion. A draft of the general population in that country means that war has scarred nearly every neighborhood in this massive country. In cemeteries all across Ukraine, fresh graves piled with dirt and flowers testify to their sacrifice. At least 12,000 civilians have been killed.

Amid this torment, the Ukrainian people continue to send troops to the front in the dead of winter and to mobilize to keep their businesses and their homes and their kids in school. They did not ask for Putin's thuggish invasion.

From the very beginning, our intelligence Agencies have told us something that Putin never has understood--that the Ukrainian people will never submit to him; that if every weapon were denied them, they would fight with sticks and stones and their bare hands to protect their country from any invading tyrant but especially from Vladimir Putin of Russia.

Fortunately for Ukraine and for the rest of the free world, they have not had to fight this invasion with their bare hands. The American people have steadfastly supported them. We have sent $66 billion in military aid and $51 billion in nonmilitary aid. That is a lot of money, but it represents just 0.52 percent of our GPD. Unlike the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, not a single American soldier has been sent to fight.

Our European allies have stepped up as well. Together, they have actually committed more than the United States. But their sums represent a much larger percentage of their economy--which makes sense because they are closer to the danger that Russia poses. At the same time, even farther allies, like Australia and Japan, continue to support Ukraine as well.

Our allies and our partners know the stakes of this war. They know that supporting Ukraine means standing with people that are willing to fight for the country they love. They know that rolling over to Putin will embolden other dictators around the world, especially Xi Jinping of China.

The rest of us may not need this reminder, but the people sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue apparently do since they seem to be the only ones in the free world who do not understand the stakes of this war.

Over the last few days, President Trump has chosen the side of tyranny of Putin, of Xi, and profoundly undermined our national security. Like someone reading Russian Twitter bots, he deliberately and falsely accused Ukraine of starting the war. He called Zelenskyy-- the freedom fighter who is leading the fight in Ukraine--a dictator.

Mr. President, he invited Russia to rejoin the G7, a group of the world's most powerful democracies that has met regularly since the 1970s and which threw out Russia after Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014.

Before negotiations have even started, President Trump's Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, took Ukraine's potential NATO membership off the table. And just this week, the Trump administration held talks with Russia in Saudi Arabia without the decency of even inviting Ukraine to the table. It pains me to say it, but our old colleague Secretary of State Marco Rubio even suggested that the United States should lift sanctions on and bolster economic collaboration with Russia while Russia shells civilians in Ukraine.

Some of our Republican colleagues believe that it doesn't matter what President Trump says, only what he does; that it doesn't matter when he says that he is going to send American troops to Gaza or seize the Panama Canal or falsely accuses Ukraine of starting this war. But a President's words matter more than most, and President Trump's harmful words and policies will only embolden Putin. They will further convince Putin that he is winning, that time is on his side, and that he has no reason to accept a peace deal that is anything less than overwhelmingly favorable to his maximalist desire.

In literally every one of his comments on Ukraine, President Trump has undermined our national security. Every time he opens his mouth, he weakens our bargaining position and makes the world more dangerous.

We all want this war to end. On that, the President and I agree. But for the sake of Ukraine and the sake of the free world, it must only end with a just and enduring peace.

While the United States and our allies and Ukraine work together to establish the terms of the peace and get ready to negotiate with Putin, the Ukrainians are going to have to keep fighting throughout this winter season--this freezing winter--where the civilian population is just doing everything they can to keep their houses and their businesses and their schools warm and livable. The Ukrainian soldiers are not asking to be relieved of this terrible burden. They are embracing it because they know that any cease-fire without meaningful security guarantees will allow Putin to rebuild his weakened army and attack again and again and again.

Obviously--obviously--everyone in this Chamber knows that any meaningful negotiation has to include Ukraine. Doing anything else, as the Trump administration just did in Saudi Arabia, would be an insult to the memory of every soldier who has laid down their life in this war.

I cannot claim to know Donald Trump well. It is obvious that I deeply regret his election, but I don't blame him for winning the election. He beat my party, the Democratic Party, badly in two elections. He even found a way to get elected after he was the first President in American history to take away a fundamental civil right from the American people--a woman's right to choose. He still got elected again. That is extraordinary, and it is a testament, I am sorry to say, to the Democratic Party's weaknesses and to his own skills and talents, particularly in this era.

I don't doubt that his experience as a reality TV star taught him things that helped him get elected. I am much less certain, however, that his checkered commercial real estate background prepared him to negotiate a hotel deal with Vladimir Putin, much less a deal that concerns the fate of the free world.

Donald Trump is not the only person with private sector experience in our

government. I can tell you from my experience from working in Denver, when someone is having a negotiation who has deal fever, you can see it. You can smell it when they are so desperate for a deal on any terms. The people who I negotiated with in Denver had a lot more discipline than that. We told each other that we would never agree to any deal that hadn't cratered at least three times, because that was the only way you could tell whether you were getting the best deal. If you didn't have the guts to walk away, you were never going to get the best deal that you could.

I have never seen a worse case of deal fever than Donald Trump's approach to the coming negotiation with Vladimir Putin. Never in my life have I seen it, and it has never been more important. I doubt the world has seen such an ill-conceived pursuit of negotiation since the infamous 1938 Munich Agreement in which the UK and France and Italy allowed Nazi Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia. The damage he is doing is not only that we will get a worse deal; it is that we will undermine Ukraine's position on the frontlines. Without security guarantees from the United States and from Europe, Putin will only bide his time, regroup, and invade again.

After the fictions that President Trump has spewed about who started this war, not to mention the chorus of defeatism from his Vice President, his Secretary of Defense, and the Director of National Intelligence, does anyone--does anybody--including Putin and Xi Jinping, doubt what would happen if Putin invaded again? This is less the ``Art of the Deal,'' I am afraid, than it is the ``art of defeat.'' After all of these years, after all of these battles, it would be truly pathetic for the United States, the world's most powerful country, to accept a fever-induced deal with Russia, like the Munich Agreement.

Look it up--not, perhaps, on Twitter but in your much more reliable 10th grade Western civ textbook. After that deal, Hitler did not stop at Czechoslovakia but continued his war on Europe. Left unchecked, Putin will do the same thing, as Putin's propagandists have told us repeatedly.

To make matters worse, anyone concerned about Beijing's potential takeover of Taiwan knows that there will be no better test of how the free world will respond to Xi's potential invasion than how we respond to Putin. Come to think of it, if China does invade Taiwan, how would we evaluate the leadership capacity of an American President who claimed that it was Taiwan who had invaded China, not the other way around? That is the level of duplicity that we are seeing from Donald Trump right now.

So why the deal fever? That is a good question. President Trump's aspiration for a Nobel Peace Prize is well known. He can hang it next to his gold-plated faucets and his first editions of the ``Art of the Deal.'' But if he heard from people in this Chamber, even he might think twice if he understood that walking down this path of appeasement makes him more likely to be remembered like Neville Chamberlain.

Negotiations can end this war in a just manner only if Ukraine can negotiate them from a place of strength.

The American people have been incredibly generous in our support of Ukraine, but, even so, this war has cost us less than 0.6 percent of our GDP while allowing us to send Ukraine old weapons when we invest in our own cutting-edge replacements, permitting us to learn from Ukraine's extraordinary innovation on the frontlines and its world- class use of new warfighting technologies, such as drones, and boosting our economy without costing a single American soldier's life.

We and our European allies have to continue surging military assistance to Ukraine, not forever but so Ukraine is best positioned to make this deal not just for Ukraine but for us and for free countries all over the world. Contrary to what many people believed at the outset of this war and what President Trump apparently believes today, Putin's invasion of Ukraine has been costly to him--very costly to him. Three years of the Ukrainian peoples' tenacity and courage have degraded the Russian military. As we speak, Russia is losing twice the number of soldiers every month as Putin's war continues. In total, Putin has squandered more than $200 billion and suffered a staggering 700,000 in casualties at the hands of Ukrainian patriots. It is three times the number of soldiers Russia lost in Afghanistan--a country famously regarded as the graveyard of empires.

We didn't ask for this war, neither did Ukraine, but Putin is in a weaker position to threaten Europe today than when he first swung his iron fist at the Ukrainian people. The last thing we should do now is weaken our negotiating position when we and Europe have so much at stake--when the world has so much at stake.

Putin believes he can beat Ukraine not because he thinks Ukrainians are weak but because he thinks we are weak, and he thinks President Trump is a pushover and a sucker. At the beginning of his invasion of Ukraine, Putin, who was surrounded as tyrants are and as dictators are by yes-men who are scared to tell them the truth about their own weaknesses and, in this case, Russia's weaknesses, made three fundamental miscalculations going into the war.

One was about the strength of his own army. He had invested billions of dollars planning for the invasion, but much of it was siphoned off because of Russia's endemic corruption.

The second miscalculation was about the Ukrainian people's patriotism and willingness to fight to the death. No matter how President Trump tries to undermine this sacrifice, the honor roll of history will forever--will forever--record Ukraine's courage.

Putin's third miscalculation was that the world would roll over and allow him to invade his peaceful neighbor. Unlike the other two mistakes, he had evidence for the final point. After all, when he began his invasion in 2014 by lawlessly sending his ``little green men'' to occupy Crimea, which is part of Ukraine, the world did nothing. The United States did nothing. He thought the world would do nothing when he invaded again.

It turned out, unlike Putin, we actually learned from our mistake. The free world has stood up to Putin this time around. We have supplied arms and other support while the Ukrainian people have died on the frontline of their country and for the West. Their cemeteries are bulging with fresh graves. They have earned the free world's support.

But even more important to us and our allies, we have protected our national security and affirmed our commitment to the post-World War II rules-based international order. How this ends will determine whether that order persists and whether the United States continues to provide the leadership our parents and grandparents supplied since World War II. World War II was another war started by a tyrant, but it was ended by the world's democracies.

Many Americans inside this Chamber and outside understand the stakes. They know, as Ronald Reagan proclaimed 40 years ago, in advancing freedom, Americans carry a special burden: a belief in the dignity of man and that freedom is America's core and that we should never deny it nor forsake it. This is what we risk today by withdrawing our support of Ukraine. We will abandon both the Ukrainian people and the core of what America stands for, and we cannot do it.

This is personal for me and so many of us. My mom was born a Jew in Warsaw in 1938. She and her parents and an aunt were the only ones who survived the Holocaust. The Nazis killed everyone else in her family. Authoritarian aggression left an indelible mark on my family and countless other families in Ukraine and Poland in the 1930s and 1940s, where Stalin and Hitler killed together 16 million human beings. These victims of fascism died, believing that they were invisible to the rest of the world, forgotten people in unforgettable years.

The lesson I learned from my mom is that the United States can never let that happen again by trying to appease a dictator the way that Chamberlain did. That is not apocryphal, or a made-up story. I had dinner last night with my mom. She is 86 years old. She can't believe that she has lived long enough--I am happy that she has, but she can't believe that she has lived long enough to see another tyrant's invasion of their peaceful, democratic European neighbor. But she hasn't

lived long enough to forget her generation's searing lessons. She knows the eternal truth--that the greatest enemy of fascism is man.

Even if President Trump continues to ignore reality, my mother and millions of Americans who make up the ``greatest generation'' understand the United States has a special responsibility.

It has always been far too easy for some in high office to ignore their moral responsibility to people sacrificing their lives a continent away on behalf of our shared values and interests. History occasionally records their names--like Chamberlain's--in blood.

It is particularly easy today to play to self-defeating isolationist tendencies in the daily headlines, to make rash comments that are foolish and unpatriotic and that Russian trolls spread like wildfire across social media platforms. It is far too easy to do the wrong thing. It always has been.

It is a lot harder, but necessary, for the living to stand for freedom and democracy and those willing to give the last measure of themselves for those eternal values. At this moment, the United States is the only country who can lead the free world against these dictators, against these tyrants.

The Americans who serve in this Chamber must fulfill our responsibility to the American people and demand the President fulfill his patriotic responsibility in the days ahead. Everything now is in our hands. The moment demands that the United States of America lead-- for the sake of the Ukrainian people, for our own national security, and for democracy around the world. Our failure will not just be damaging; it will be devastating.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 540 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, this amendment reinstates the thousands of fired National Park Service, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Land Management employees.

Our public lands are the crown jewel of America. With drought, wildfire, and record visitation, our public lands are facing more pressures than ever before. Now is not the time to fire dedicated public servants who perform wildfire mitigation, manage visitors, clear trails, permit grazing and mining and oil and gas operations.

Fewer boots on the ground means more wildfire risk and less access to our public lands and puts enormous burden on communities across the country, from Alaska to North Carolina, to Maine.

Do I have any time left?

I urge my opponents to vote for this amendment.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

I yield back my second.

Vote on Amendment No. 540

Mr. President, we may not be in a quorum call, but I can tell you this, we are in the midst of a 1,200-year drought in the American West that challenges us in extraordinary ways--from vast new insect and disease outbreaks to catastrophic wildfires. Instead of having fire seasons, there are many people now who observe that it has become trite, I would say, to observe, as the fire season lasts all year.

Our national forests in Colorado and throughout the Rocky Mountain West are the headwaters of America. In those forests is the origin of the streams and rivers that flow to the rest of the Western United States. In the case of just the Colorado River Basin alone, 40 million people rely on it. It is the lifeblood of the American West, the lifeblood of the Western United States, and of every town and every community no matter how big and no matter how small. In Colorado and on every farm and ranch across the American West, they depend on this water, and they depend on the forests where this water stops. The critical aspect of this, I think, is that everybody who is downstream from us needs to care about the health of our forests and also our public lands.

As many people know, since COVID ripped through the United States of America, our public lands have become a place for the American people to find refuge, for the American people to be able to get away from each other, for families to have the time to also be together on America's public lands. And as many people now say, our public lands are being loved to death. We have had Americans from all over the world come and discover the public lands in Colorado and throughout the West, but it has created new pressures on our communities, new pressures on the lands themselves and also on the communities that are surrounding them.

Now, when we find ourselves in a place where we are facing these challenges and where we have done a little bit of work just over the last few years because of the money we were able to get into the bipartisan infrastructure bill, it is not the forests that we are thinning; it is the Forest Service staff that has been clearcut by what the Trump administration is doing and has proposed to do.

Even before the Trump administration began their across-the-board cuts on the Forest Service, the Forest Service had 30 percent less of a workforce than it had 30 years ago. Think about that. While the stresses and strains have grown, while the effect of that 1,200-year drought and climate change has grown, now we find ourselves in a place where the Forest Service is getting whacked by the administration.

Last year, even before the Trump administration came back to town, I met with Forest Service employees in Colorado--actually, not just the Forest Service but the other western public land Agencies from the Western Slope of Colorado to the Eastern Plains of our State--who told me that they can't hire anybody to work for these Agencies because Federal pay has not kept up with the cost of housing.

They were the best jobs in our communities years ago. You could live on one person's salary. You could have a household. You could raise kids in a community. You never had to leave the community you grew up in if you had one of these jobs. Today, nobody can afford housing in Colorado. That is a huge problem for America, not just for my State, but it is certainly true of the public employees in the Forest Service. To add insult to injury, it takes months and months and months of bureaucratic nightmares to hire people.

Now, Donald Trump has come here without any understanding of the needs on the ground of the American people and of our States and of our watersheds, and he has decided to impose across-the-board cuts that, I suppose, he is going to use in the end to try to justify the $4.6 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. You heard that right. At a time when we have had the worst income inequality than we have had since the 1920s, Donald Trump wants to extend his tax cuts for the wealthiest while he is doing things like cutting the Forest Service across the board. Forty-five percent of the benefit of that bill goes to the top 5 percent of Americans. I never understood the priority the last time he cut taxes for the wealthiest people and claimed it was a middle-class tax cut, but I especially don't understand it when he is slashing the Forest Service.

This isn't about the Forest Service employees, although I think they should be treated better; it is about the people whom they serve. They are public servants who are doing the work we need them to do in our forests. It is already challenging enough to do it without these cuts. To level an across-the-board cut--terminating 3,400 employees, including at least 90 in Colorado--is the wrong thing to do.

These unfounded layoffs are just the latest offense to an Agency that is already working, struggling to keep up with the demands of the American people and the reality on the ground.

In the last few days, my office has heard from a number of Forest Service employees who were fired last week. We heard from a Forest Service program manager whose first Forest Service job was as a wildland firefighter at just 19 years old. That is a very, very common way for people to come into the Forest Service. And she recently returned to the Forest Service to manage high-priority recreation and restoration projects for one of the busiest national forests in the United States and help the management plan process for the Camp Hale National Monument, which honors our World War II veterans.

I have also heard from a 40-year career civil servant who has worked for multiple Agencies in rural Colorado, including over 25 years in the Forest Service. As a result of her vast experience and years of service, she was recently promoted which put her in probationary status, not because she was a new employee but because she was--with all of her vast experience, she had been elevated, she had been promoted. But she was, nevertheless, a probationary employee because of the way the bureaucracy works. Over the weekend, she was let go; and she worries that she will never have her well-earned position. These people have done absolutely nothing wrong.

We heard from a lifelong Coloradan who is a national leader for forest conservation and deeply respected in our community. This person moved across the State for a position with the Forest Service. Their work informed local efforts to reduce wildfire risks and restore forest health, creating a safer landscape for wildland firefighters to work in when a fire does break out, which, by the way, is almost all the time these days.

Ironically, the administration fired a member of a Colorado National Forest leadership team--get this, Mr. President--who was actually involved in planning for staff reduction. But it wasn't the across-the- board reduction that came from Washington, DC; it was the thoughtful reduction that you can only do if you are close to the local level.

Our forests look nothing like Central Park, and I am not sure President Trump understands that.

This person was responsible for teams of people working on energy production, wildfire prevention, and the responsible use of our public forests. And there are countless other stories already of people who recently signed up for seasonal work to help manage recreation, rangeland, and wildlife habitat who are now unemployed.

Trump and Musk's actions aren't about increasing efficiency or repaying American taxpayers. These cuts don't root out fraud or government waste, but these actions do place an immense burden on the citizens of Colorado, on the citizens on the West. We are hanging out communities to dry all over--all over--the American West.

I am glad my colleague from Oregon is here, the former chairman of the Finance Committee, who also has had to watch these crazy tax cuts-- which by the way, Mr. President, I will say to my colleague: That is not even a speech I was supposed to give. It is about the across-the- board layoffs of people in our forests who already are totally undermanned and aren't able to keep up with the demands of the public. But, really, for what? So you can pass a tax bill--not you but these guys on the other side--where 45 percent of the benefit goes to the richest people in America, or more?

Cutting staff that put out unattended campfires, that manage timber sales and support wildland firefighting efforts means that our communities will face much more wildfire risk come spring.

These cuts undermine businesses that require permits to operate on our public lands--from outfitters and guides to oil and gas companies-- and mean fewer boots-on-the-ground staff to manage visitation--from clearing trails to cleaning bathrooms. That means we the American people risk losing our access to our most cherished public lands. Our Federal workers have devoted their careers to making our communities and our country better. They put the American people first, and I am grateful for their service.

Does that mean they couldn't do their job better? No. Does that mean they couldn't do it in a more efficient manner? No. In fact, that is one of the reasons why we have fought to put more money in the budget for fighting fires themselves, because waiting until the fire happens is the most expensive way you could possibly deal with it; but the second most expensive way would be to lay off the very people who help prevent the conditions from arising that are going to lead to those fires, which, by the way, cost $50,000 an acre to fight.

The Forest Service employees throughout the West are fundamental to our economy and to our communities in Colorado. In fact, the fact that it has been hard to hire them has compromised our communities in really fundamental ways, and we ought to double down on the Forest Service's mission, investing in wildfire resilience, watershed health, recreation management, rooting out waste, and cutting redtape to make the Agency a better partner for rural communities across the country. That is what we would be doing.

Instead, President Trump and Musk's actions to eviscerate the Federal workforce take a torch to that approach and tear at the fabric of our communities. It is an insult to Colorado and all Americans. There is no reason they should do it, and they should rescind these cuts.

With that, Mr. President I thank my colleagues for their indulgence.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I was here to speak on the across-the- board cuts that the Forest Service is facing in Colorado, but I was so glad to hear my colleagues from Connecticut and Virginia and Oregon talking about this tax bill. I want to add just a couple of thoughts to it.

First of all, I appreciate so much what they were saying because the American people are struggling, and it is not just with inflation. It is with an economy that, for 50 years, has worked incredibly well for the wealthiest people in our country and hasn't worked for anybody else.

It used to be the American dream. That is how we knew our country was working--when, if you worked hard, you could get ahead. Even more important to most Americans, when you worked hard, you knew your kids were going to get ahead. And we are at a moment in American history, for the first time, when our kids, people that are 30 years old, are going to earn--half of them are going to earn--less than their parents. And people all over the country are looking at it and saying: That is not the America that I recognize. That is not the American dream.

And it is not the American dream.

Today, in the United States, the top 1 percent of people own 20 percent of our income. The bottom 50 percent own 10 percent. The bottom 50 percent own half of what the top 1 percent have.

Some people might say: Oh my God, that is just a natural feature of the way our economy works or the way capitalism works.

It is not, even in this country. Twenty-five years ago, that wasn't true; it was reversed. Twenty-five years ago, the bottom 50 percent earned twice as much income as the top 1 percent. And that has flipped since Ronald Reagan came here with his trickle-down economics that my colleague from Connecticut was talking about, with a tax policy that was all about rewarding the wealthiest people and the folks who were outsourcing jobs from the United States of America.

And now Donald Trump is here to do it again, as he did when he was President the last time. He went to the Mahoning Valley in Ohio, after passing that tax bill, and said: You are welcome for your middle-class tax cut.

But 50 percent of it went to the wealthiest 5 percent in our country. He gave a little tip, as the Senator from Connecticut was saying, to working people in our country to obscure the fact that what he was doing was giving massive tax cuts to the wealthiest people.

And I will finish just by saying this. Sometimes people say: That is not surprising, Michael. They are the richest people. So maybe they pay the most in taxes; maybe they should get the biggest benefit.

The reality is very different because somebody is going to have to pay for this bill. It is either going to be the cuts that they are going to make to Medicaid, which are cuts to a program for healthcare coverage for people in this country that are poor or working poor, or they are not going to pay for it at all.

And if they don't pay for it at all, the people who are going to have to pay for it are the kids of police officers and firefighters all over our country who are going to have to pay the debt that is incurred by Donald Trump's tax bill, which is what happened the last time.

The chairman will remember that. They didn't pay for it the last time. And when they didn't pay for it the last time, every working person in America is having to pay for it because of the interest rates that are on our national debt.

My friend from Virginia was the mayor of Richmond. This tax policy is

one--and I know my colleague from California wants to go; so I am going to stop. But this tax policy is equivalent to the mayor of Richmond waking up one morning and saying: I am going to borrow more money than we have ever borrowed in the city's history.

And I would say to him: I am worried about that. What are you going to do with that money? I am worried about what you might spend it on. Tell me what you are going to spend it on.

Are you going to spend it on parks?

No.

Are you going to spend it on infrastructure?

No.

Are you going to spend it on mental health, which we desperately need all over the country?

No.

Early childhood education, K-through-12 education, the university in our community?

No, no, no.

What are you going to do with all this money that you are borrowing?

Well, I am going to give it to the two richest neighborhoods in Richmond, VA, and I am going to expect that it will trickle down to everybody else in Richmond.

You would be run out on a rail for doing that, which is why no mayor in America has ever done that. No Governor in America has ever done that. And Donald Trump is about to try to do it for the second time-- for the second time.

And I hope that people in this body won't be fooled by it, because we saw it before.

And we could get a big bipartisan vote in this Senate to begin to reestablish a set of economic rules that is actually lifting the fortunes of the vast majority of people in this country, instead of giving these tax cuts to the people in America who need it least.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome the Presiding Officer to the U.S. Senate. I hadn't had a chance, really, to do that, as you sit in the chair.

We are now going to get somebody else, but I thank the Presiding Officer for being here.

(Mr. HUSTED assumed the Chair.)

I also want to thank my colleague from the Commonwealth of Virginia, Senator Kaine, for his heartfelt remarks.

I think we are through the looking glass in many ways, and there is a pattern here that is reflected in what you were talking about, this idea of being able to tell the difference between fact and fiction-- fact and fiction.

I know that when you were the mayor of Richmond, it was probably pretty important for people who were working with you to know the difference between fact and fiction. When you were the Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, it probably was pretty important for you to do that as well.

It does seem like, in President Trump's administration, he is really at war with the facts and trying to muddle what is fact and fiction, to be kind about it.

I can't think of a time in the history of this country when families have wanted to know more about what is real and what is false--with their kids, what is real and what is false.

I was the superintendent of schools in Denver, as the Senator from Virginia knows, and it is a great irony that at a time when parents want their kids to be able to distinguish between what is real and what is false--because of all the falsehoods that are coming over social media and other places--the President has decided to nominate the head of the WWE to be the Secretary of Education in this administration.

You were talking about the inability of Bobby Kennedy to pick which side he was on when it came to what happened on 9/11. It reminds me exactly of the situation with Congresswoman Gabbard, who decided over and over and over again that she was going to choose not America's side but our adversaries' side, whether it was the chemical weapons in Syria--I mean, it is hard to even contemplate that--or the fact that at 12:30 at night, or I guess it was 11:30 at night, literally the night that Putin invaded Ukraine, a country that was at peace, a crossing of a peaceful border--the first time a tyrant had done that in Europe since World War II when the United States had led the international and global order that created these incredibly important institutions, NATO being one of those. And she had to reach out at 11:30 at night to basically mimic the talking points from Vladimir Putin. And I am not saying that she was a Russian spy or anything; I am just saying that it is the same stuff that he was using. Two days later, the Russian propaganda television in Moscow was running that stuff on the TV in Moscow.

So I think it really does matter that people are telling the truth to the American people and that, where possible, where there are differences of opinion, that we try to get to the bottom of the truth. There are a lot of reasons to have differences of opinion. We live in a democracy, and we have the freedom to have differences of opinion. We have the freedom to have a different understanding of the facts, but we need to be pretty certain about that when it comes to public health, when it comes to healthcare in this country.

Mr. President, we live in the richest country in the world. We are blessed to live in the richest country in the world. If you look at our national wealth as a function of our population, there is nobody who is remotely even close to us. That is the reflection of an economy that has been much more dynamic than economies across the world, innovation that is much more dynamic, and, I would say, a culture that is not beset by corruption in the way many countries around the world are.

But even though we are the richest country in the world and the richest per capita, shockingly, we have some of the worst health outcomes of any country that is wealthy. We have the lowest life expectancy among large, wealthy countries. We have the highest maternal mortality rate of any other high-income country in the world, and it is getting worse every single year. We have the highest hospitalization rates for chronic conditions--like congestive heart failure and diabetes and asthma--of all our peer countries.

We spend twice as much per capita as any other industrialized country for worse results. It is a bad deal for patients, and it is a terrible deal for taxpayers.

This isn't just about our physical health. We have the highest suicide rate among high-income countries. We have the second highest drug-related death rate among high-income countries.

We have some of the lowest numbers of mental health practitioners per capita in many parts of the country. In my own home State of Colorado, there are entire counties that really don't have any mental health expertise at all. And at a time when there is an epidemic in our country, I would say especially among young people, that is a shameful failure on our part.

Americans in every corner of our country are getting sicker in 2025.

They are spending more on healthcare, they are traveling farther, and they are waiting longer to see fewer doctors.

The citizens of Colorado, I can tell you, are deeply, deeply unhappy with our healthcare system--deeply unhappy.

I will actually say I was here when we passed the Affordable Care Act during the Obama years, and it has not fixed the issues we are facing.

My constituents, when they think about healthcare, they think about scarcity; they think about the unavailability of drugs that their moms and dads have been prescribed but they either can't get or they can't afford even though they have been prescribed.

Unlike other countries around the world, this is a nation where our senior citizens actually spend their retirement going from pharmacy to pharmacy to pharmacy to get the drugs they have been prescribed by a doctor, to be able to get the inhaler that will keep them healthy so that they don't end up in the emergency room.

This is a country, unlike our competitors, where it is very common for moms and dads to spend 2 hours or 3 hours or 4 hours on the phone with an insurance company denying their claim--their legitimate claim-- for their kid.

This is a country, as I mentioned, where we do not have ready access to mental health care, which people living in other countries far less wealthy than we are have as a reasonable expectation of being a citizen of that country.

When we are in the midst of a physical and mental health care crisis like this, unlike many of the other Cabinet positions we are going to fill--and for some of them, it is true as well--the Secretary of Health and Human Services is a job of life and death. That is why Mr. Kennedy's confirmation, I think, would be so dangerous.

We are on the precipice of allowing a practiced trafficker of vaccine conspiracy theories--admitted, of these theories--to administer healthcare to over 29 million children in America who receive routine, lifesaving vaccines through Medicaid; a man who has made his fame and fortune by treating our most vulnerable children as his personal science experiment.

Mr. Kennedy has peddled bunk science that claims vaccines cause autism, sowing confusion and fear and causing heartbreak among parents who are now afraid to vaccinate their kids because they are so worried that it is going to cause autism--that they won't have a vaccine for their kid for fear of autism. But the failure to get that vaccine means their kids are exposed to profoundly important childhood and serious childhood illnesses.

He makes his claims with incredible conviction. He is not shy about it. He claimed that the measles vaccines ``poisoned an entire generation of children'' and went further to say that the ``only thing that cures measles is nutrition and clean water.''

Before the measles vaccine was developed in the 1960s, hundreds of American kids died every year, and measles is a completely preventable disease with two vaccines administered in childhood. Without it, measles can spread like wildfire, leaving behind serious complications like blindness and encephalitis. We don't know that. We don't remember that because the pages that are on this floor can't remember a time when we weren't having the measles vaccine in the United States of America. It would be a very different world if we hadn't had them, but we do.

Doctors in sub-Saharan Africa, where measles runs rampant, describe watching children die from this preventable disease in their dire warnings they are now sending to the United States.

The CDC warns that kindergarten MMR vaccine rates have dropped below the 95-percent threshold needed to prevent worldwide measles outbreaks.

As I stand here tonight, as the Presiding Officer sits here tonight, five States have reported measles cases. An outbreak in Gaines County, TX, has rapidly grown to 24 reported cases, all of them unvaccinated children. Nine are in the hospital. Nine of these children are in the hospital. Vaccine exemptions in Gaines County are among the highest in the State of Texas. Mr. President, 17.5 percent of Gaines County kindergartners have vaccine exemptions. That is almost 20 percent.

It is not just Mr. Kennedy's vaccine conspiracies that are of grave concern, however. He has spent 50 years muddying the waters of scientific consensus with half-truths and misinformation and bad science.

In his hearing before the Finance Committee, Mr. Kennedy showed an alarming inability to answer simple questions about his past statements. He appeared to have selective memory regarding some of his most outlandish claims.

I asked him point-blank about his claims that COVID-19 was a genetically engineered bioweapon--these are his words: genetically engineered bioweapon--that targets Black and White people but spared Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. He never denied this. He never denied that he said it and instead pointed to a debunked theory study as flimsy proof of his claims.

I asked him further, based on what he had said--again, quoting him:

Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily

engineered bioweapon?

To this he answered:

I probably did.

``I probably did'' say that Lyme disease was a militarily engineered bioweapon. How can we consider someone for the highest health office in the country who believes that America's own military engineered Lyme disease and uses it as a weapon against us? What could go wrong?

He said on his podcast that exposure to pesticides could cause children to become transgender--a statement he claims not to remember, but he said it. It is on the record.

He insisted he forgot writing in his own book that ``it's undeniable that African AIDS is an entirely different disease from Western AIDS'' and could provide no explanation for this false statement either.

Mr. Kennedy likes to talk about the need for more research. In fact, that was his answer to many of my colleagues' questions. He even told me to look at an NIH study when I asked him about some of his unfounded claims about COVID-19.

Now, the NIH, as you know, is under attack tonight as we are here, and all Mr. Kennedy has to say about that is that he will look into that.

The NIH is the gold standard worldwide for scientific research and innovation. The University of Colorado is telling me that the system could lose $85 million a year in research dollars to study Alzheimer's, brain injuries, mental illness, and heart disease. If confirmed, Mr. Kennedy would oversee NIH.

I guess I really think that we could do better than a known peddler of junk science to run the most important medical research in the country.

Is a vaccine denier the best we can do for our doctors who are working around the clock and our nurses, too, in the midst of the worst flu outbreak in 15 years? Is a man who became a millionaire many times over by claiming vaccines cause autism the best we really can do for our kids?

Do we really want parents making a choice that is unsafe for them and for their communities because people at the highest offices in the country are making false statements about science? Out of 330 million Americans, we can surely do better than this.

I appreciate the Presiding Officer's patience.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am grateful to be on the floor here tonight with my colleague from California, Senator Schiff, and others to talk about the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard--now the successful nomination, I guess, of Tulsi Gabbard--to be the Director of National Intelligence.

To say the least, I never thought that we would see a moment in the history of the United States, in the history of our attempt as a Congress to ensure that the American people and that the President get the intelligence they need. In all of these years and over all of these decades, I never imagined we would see someone like Tulsi Gabbard approved on the floor of the U.S. Senate for that job, and I wanted to speak tonight, just briefly, to say why I think that was the wrong direction for the Trump administration and, more importantly, the wrong direction for the American people.

Let me say, first of all, intelligence--and being a member of the Intelligence Committee, I know this is unlike anything else we do around here, because a lot of what happens--my colleague Senator King from Maine is here--is done in secret. One of the great privileges of being on the Intelligence Committee is that--I think, in part--because it is in secret, there isn't the kind of partisanship that you see on a lot of the other committees. There isn't the jockeying for position or for political notoriety; that people on that committee are very serious about our work. In part, it is because we all have a responsibility, on behalf of all of the Senators who are not on the committee, to be able to transmit, as well as we can, the intelligence needs of our country, the intelligence findings of the intelligence community, and to play a very important role in oversight, because if we didn't provide that role, the intelligence Agencies could run amuck without the American people ever knowing about it or their Representatives knowing about it.

In fact, the whole reason we have the Intelligence Committee in the Senate is because so many terrible decisions were made by the intelligence Agencies in the postwar period, in the 1950s and 1960s-- some of it well-intentioned, you know, during the Cold War, but a lot of it were really bad judgments--that included things like, you know, the attempt to assassinate foreign leaders and to plot revolutions around the globe. This Congress, this Senate, decided that we needed to have oversight for the American people, and we created the Intelligence Committee to do that. It means that we have an institutional structure that ensures that the American people get the best service out of the intelligence community and that the President gets the best intelligence. And that structure was put in place by people who thought it was important for intelligence Agencies not to run amuck and for the President to get the best intelligence possible.

Now we are putting somebody in the job of Director of all of the intelligence Agencies, in a sense, the ODNI, so-called--that is sort of the clearinghouse and the coordinator for all of the intel that the President gets--Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.

Now, look, she has had a record of public service in the Congress and in the military. I don't dispute that, and I am not calling into question whether or not she is serving the interests of other countries. But I do want to say--and I will be brief--that I think her judgment has been extraordinarily--I would say, exceptionally--bad.

I share her view that there were profound intelligence errors in the lead-up to the Gulf war and in the lead-up to the war in Afghanistan. In the Gulf, in particular, you will remember, you know, the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein was supposed to have had. He didn't have them. It was a terrible, terrible failure of our Intelligence Committee and a terrible failure of oversight from this Congress, and she is right about that.

The problem is she has, I think, learned the wrong lesson from that, and over and over and over again, when she has the opportunity to support the interests of the United States--I hate to say it--versus those of our adversaries', time and time again, she picks our adversaries or even our allies.

I have heard her say how worried she is about what she describes as the remilitarization of Japan, which, of course, Japan is doing because of the threat from China, with our very, very close cooperation. That is of concern to Tulsi Gabbard.

She went to Syria and famously came back disputing our own intelligence Agencies' findings about Assad's gassing of his own people. To this day, she hasn't really taken that back, and it makes no sense at all.

But the thing that drives me the craziest is that she has been an apologist for what Vladimir Putin has done since the day Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Ukraine was a peaceful country with a peaceful border, and Vladimir Putin was the first tyrant since World War II ended. We had set up all of these multilateral institutions across Europe and across the world to prevent the kind of hostility that we had seen break out in World War II, and Vladimir Putin decided he would invade a peaceful country next-door to him. In his mind, he had a right to do that because Ukraine has been viewed by czars--going back hundreds and hundreds of years--as Russian territory.

That is not the way the Ukrainian people look at this. They think of themselves as an independent country. They think of themselves as living in a place where history actually has moved on over the last 500 years or 1,000 years, and they were sitting there, peacefully, when Vladimir Putin invaded them with no provocation at all.

On the evening that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, Tulsi Gabbard tweeted out at 11:30 at night--her local time--referring to the war, Putin's invasion of Ukraine: This war and suffering could easily have been avoided if the Biden administration and NATO had simply acknowledged Russia's ``legitimate security concerns'' regarding Ukraine becoming a member of NATO, which would mean U.S.-NATO forces right on Russia's border.

Now, she gets mad when people read that stuff. That is what she said, and she says: Well, don't tell people that I am carrying propaganda for the Russian Government or for Putin. That is not fair.

I don't have to say that, but the Russian television put on TV, in the days after the aftermath of Putin's invasion, the very thing that Congresswoman Gabbard had said about his invasion because they saw it as something that ratified what they had done. And it was so consistent, so aligned with his position--and it continues to be his position today--that he thought it would muddy the waters with people around the world about what they were doing in Ukraine.

I believe Ukraine's battle, from the very beginning, has not been a battle for Ukraine. I think it is a battle for democracy. I think they are on the tip of the spear, you know, in a way that nobody has been since World War II.

The Ukrainian people have been unbelievable, and the Ukrainian soldiers have fought magnificently. There was a view, when Putin invaded Ukraine, that, in 3 days, they were going to be in Kyiv--the Russians-- and because of the bravery of the Ukrainian people, because of the bravery of the soldiers, many of whom have given up their lives, they have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of anybody on this floor, of any of the Monday-morning quarterbacking that has happened in this Capitol and in other capitols around the world. And our allies all around Europe--but also in the Pacific area, as well--all have seen what the Ukrainian people have accomplished.

When she had an opportunity to say something about the Ukrainians and when she had the opportunity to stand with the United States and stand with our allies, she made another choice. She is entitled to that choice. She is entitled to that choice, just as she is entitled to her views about the intelligence failures during the Gulf war. But the fact that she has the idiosyncratic views that she has, whether it is Putin's invasion of Ukraine or her writing a bill in the House to give Edward Snowden a pardon, doesn't qualify her to be the lead intelligence official for the United States of America.

As I said--and I will finish here--we work well in a bipartisan way on these issues. The American people need the President to get intelligence in a way that is trustworthy, that is not shaded in one direction or another, and we all need to be able to trust each other in the delivery of that intelligence.

I will say that I think the President, in nominating Congresswoman Gabbard for this position, has fallen short. I voted for the CIA Director. This is not an issue of his appointments to the intelligence Agencies. But in the case of Congresswoman Gabbard, I think he missed the mark.

I apologize to my colleague from California for going on for so long.

I will yield the floor to him.

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

Mr. President, I would ask unanimous consent of the Presiding Officer to set aside the pending amendment so I may offer my amendment No. 90; that there be up to 15 minutes for debate on the amendment; and that upon the use or yielding back of time, the Senate vote on the amendment without further intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Alabama for her work on the Senate floor and for coming over. I know this is a big day around the Senate. It is a big day for America, and it is appropriate, I think, that we should be here on this issue today because, over the coming months and years, we are going to be confronting a lot of choices to make. And I think it is critically important that, as we make these choices, we do it in a way that is consistent with our values.

Throughout our history, generations of Americans have tried to secure our heritage as a nation of immigrants and a nation committed to the rule of law. Both of those are important. And when we have fallen short, which we have from time to time, we have battled back to reclaim these moral values.

Our enduring commitment to this imperfect but principled work is why 21st century America has one of the most dynamic economies, vibrant cultures, and an important reputation throughout the world as a beacon of freedom. That reputation, by the way, is not assured. That is a reputation that has to be earned by our Nation every single day.

Although our Founders were famously suspicious of overreaching by the Federal Government, they recognized the obvious national imperatives-- the national security and foreign policy imperatives--and the problems that would arise if every State and county and city were to enforce its own immigration laws. And that is why the Constitution of the United States says that the Congress, working with the President, should administer those laws, and, therefore, logically assigned the responsibility to our national government--not to our State government, not to our local government--to enforce our immigration law.

Throughout our history, the American people have been welcoming to new immigrants--and sometimes less so. Understandably, chaotic and changing circumstances like the ones we face today sometimes raise alarms among the American people. Unfortunately, in

our time--and I would agree with the Senator from Alabama on this--we have not addressed the chaos at the southern border of the United States, and politicians have used this crisis for years to divide the American people on one side of the partisan divide and as another. And as a result, the failing immigration system that we have has only become more broken.

The thing that I want to make sure of is that, as we think about the chaos that we are facing, the complexity that we are facing, is that we don't--as we have occasionally in the past--abandon our values and our commitment to the rule of law.

In more inspired times, we have used these crises to actually burnish our great global advantage as a nation of immigrants that is committed to the rule of law.

In 2013, we had what was, in my view, an important chance to embrace those values with the Senate's work on the Gang of 8. The Senator of Alabama might remember it. To her, that seems like ancient history. I was one of the members of the Gang of 8. I was a lot younger than I am today and so were the other members of that gang too. But we seriously tried to take on meaningful immigration reform in this Chamber.

We had a tough but fair pathway to citizenship for those who could earn it in the United States. We included the Dream Act. We had a massive overhaul--massive overhaul--of our visa system so our farms and ranches and high-tech industries, even our ski industry, could continue to compete with the rest of the world. We had $46 billion of border security money in there--I hate to think what that money was in real dollars today, what that $46 billion would look like today; I bet you it is around $60 billion--that 68 people in this Chamber agreed to support together.

There was so much money in that bill that Lindsey Graham--Senator Graham from South Carolina, who was another member of the Gang of 8, used to say there were going to be so many border patrol agents that they could literally hold hands from one end of the border to the other across the United States of America.

I can see that the Senator from Alabama has heard that story before.

There has been a huge cost of inaction, not just the money that if we had spent it then would have made such a huge difference but the painful consequences the Senator from Alabama and others have talked about, I have talked about, for the American people and for our country.

In the end, after months of going through the legislative wringer, as I mentioned, we got 68 votes over here in the Senate. If it had been given a chance--read Speaker Boehner's book; he will tell you this. If it had gone to the floor, it would have gotten a majority vote on the floor of the Senate. But the Freedom Caucus killed that bill in a legislative back alley before it could see the light of day on the House floor.

And since then, like with so many of the American people's most fundamental concerns, the Federal Government and this Congress has been immobilized on the subject of immigration, for sure, under both Republican and Democratic Presidents.

In the meantime, transnational gangs have seized full opportunity of our inaction, raking in billions of dollars smuggling human beings and drugs and weapons to the southern border of the United States. These criminal syndicates have perfected their worldwide smuggling operations. They have trained people how to exploit our asylum system, and they have weaponized social media to enable thousands of people to travel all over the globe to present themselves at the southern border of the United States or to come through the southern border. And the result of that paralysis has been, at times, an overwhelmed southern border.

For this reason, in 2022, I urged the Biden administration never to lift title 42 without a plan and without the resources to execute it. They were unprepared for what was to come, and they were too slow to act.

It is clear to almost everybody today that our system isn't built for today's conditions. We need to fix it, and we need to give the American people confidence that we have a fair and secure system in place.

So how do we do that? Well, tonight, we are going to vote on the first response from the Congress, the Laken Riley Act, which I think is neither focused on driving resources to the border or establishing a more robust and rigorous system of immigration. Instead, contrary to our constitutional obligation, today's bill devolves authority away from the President and Congress to 50 State attorneys general, in ways that seem extremely counterproductive to me.

I hope I am not right about this; although, you can already see a battle brewing in the administration about this.

This bill provides State attorneys general the power to seek nationwide injunctions to completely block certain countries, like India and China and El Salvador, from sending immigrants here.

Imagine a Salvadorian farmworker on an H-2A visa living in Florida or Louisiana committing a violent crime leading to a deportation order.

He should be deported. I am not here to dispute that. I don't dispute that.

But with this bill, if El Salvador doesn't accept his deportation, Florida's attorney general could ask a court to force the Federal Government to ban all visas from El Salvador or all H-2A visas or all H-1B visas for high-tech workers for all that matters.

Nearly 5,500 people in Colorado today are working on an H-2A visa. Why should Florida's attorney general be able to dictate Colorado's need for these workers? Why should any State attorney general be able to hammer the economies of 49 other States? It doesn't make any sense.

It is because Congress and the administration have abandoned their responsibility here that we find ourselves in this position.

Second, this bill creates mandatory detention policies for immigrants accused of committing nonviolent and also violent crime. And as I said, I believe we should be going after transnational gangs, street gangs, and people who pose a threat to our community. When a brutal crime is committed, as in the case of Laken Riley, we should respond. We have to respond. And we should stand with her family--as the Senator from Alabama has done--and her community and ensure that something like that never happens again.

But in my opinion, this bill is not targeted enough. It would force ICE, working with local law enforcement, to detain immigrants who are accused--not just convicted but accused--of a very broad set of crimes, including shoplifting, without regard to how young they are or, more important, whether they are a threat to our community or a threat to public safety.

There is a good reason--and I know the presiding officer may not agree with this, but I know he knows the logic. There is a good reason why we seldom pass legislation with mandatory detention or jailing. We tend to believe that law enforcement is in the best position to determine in realtime who the threat to public safety actually is. And we know we don't have the resources--we never have the resources--to lock up every nonviolent offender without regard to whether they are a threat to public safety or not.

I know this sounds crazy, but this bill is so broadly drafted that it would compel law enforcement to put a mandatory detention on--you heard it--an 11-year-old immigrant in New York accused of stealing a soda from a gas station. I think most law enforcement agents across the country would tell you that their time would be much better spent tracking down and detaining, for example, a violent criminal who has bludgeoned their neighbor with a hammer. But this bill doesn't distinguish between those two cases. Instead, it strips law enforcement of their ability to make their best judgment about whom to arrest and not to arrest, whom to detain and not detain, and how to focus their precious resources on protecting our public safety.

The proponents of this bill do not deny that children will be swept up in its administration. This is not a drafting error. In this bill, every undocumented person accused--not just convicted but accused--of a list of crimes that is in this bill must be detained. That might sound like law and order,

but it is easy to see how this encroachment on law enforcement's ability to do its job could spiral out of control.

To make matters even worse, this bill does not provide ICE with the resources it needs to implement what is now a massive unfunded liability. And I know that the proponents of the bill say they are going to fix that problem. But just so you understand, ICE says this bill is going to cost $27 billion a year. That is their number. I have heard much higher numbers than that. Let's take their number: $27 billion a year. That is three times ICE's annual budget of $9 billion.

Many of us are used to Congress passing bills without ever paying for them, but this may be one of the worst cases that we have seen.

And I know there may be an attempt here through reconciliation--you know, a tax measure to try to fund this in some way or to pick some other place to do it--but choices are going to have to be made between the mandatory detention of people who may not be a threat to our community and other choices like the funding for border patrol or the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office at the Homeland Security, the disaster relief fund--just three that come to mind.

Put another way, every dollar that ICE spends incarcerating kids is a dollar the border patrol doesn't have to spend on the border itself. Wouldn't the American people be a lot better off if Homeland Security were left to focus on violent criminals and enforcing the border, not on kids accused of nonviolent crimes?

I assume no one here really thinks that mandatorily incarcerating children accused of nonviolent crimes is the best, most strategic way to fix our immigration system. We certainly don't want a repeat of the images of children caged in chain-link enclosures screaming out for their parents.

Federal law enforcement does not want a repeat of that, least of all, least of anybody, and I doubt any of us would want private prisons managing that outcome either. That episode was a shameful part of our history. It falls into that chapter of our history.

In another one of our more shameful immigration failures, Congress has never addressed the status of the Dreamers. The Senator from Alabama made this point when she said that there isn't a Dreamer in the country that is less than 17 years old. That is because notwithstanding the American people's overwhelming support for Dreamers who know no country other than the United States, that we have been unable to rationalize their presence in the country.

But 3 million Dreamers--who, after all these years, are now middle- age nurses and teachers and small business owners with families of their own--are also vulnerable.

Mr. President, I ask for 2 additional minutes.

We can make this bill better and stronger by focusing on the actual threats to public safety and protecting nonviolent kids from getting locked up, stripped away from their parents, schools, churches, and communities. We can make this bill better by protecting nonviolent Dreamers from mandatory incarceration in the only country they know.

I know my time is almost over.

The American people want us to fix our broken immigration system. They want us to feel safe in our own country. They want us to secure the border and cut down on illegal border crossings. They want us to strengthen rigorous legal pathways to support our economy and attract top talent. They want us to improve our partnerships with other countries so there is a reason for people to stay at home and not just come here. As we fix our broken immigration system, most Americans want people treated with dignity, especially if they are children.

Immigration is one of the many challenges facing our country today. It touches every aspect of our economy. It directly affects families and often implicates our core values. In their best moments, our parents and grandparents managed to navigate these tough issues by upholding the law and honoring our values. We must not abandon that aspiration in our time.

Mr. President, I am grateful for your patience. I apologize for going over a minute or two.

I yield the floor.