Floor Statements

Madam President, I rise for the customary farewell address.

I would like to begin by thanking our colleague and our leader, Mitch McConnell, for his very, very kind words.

I appreciate that, Leader McConnell. I would also like to say that I appreciate the confidence you have repeatedly placed in me. Your recollections have brought back many memories.

One was the supercommittee. I served on the supercommittee, but what most of you probably don't know is that Leader McConnell had great reservations about putting me on the supercommittee. Oh, yes, he grilled me for what seemed like hours over several occasions.

Here is why: He grilled me because he wanted an outcome. And his concern was, will this firebrand from the Club for Growth be willing to compromise, be willing to reach an agreement that couldn't possibly be exactly what he wanted?

Mr. President, so I am going to reserve the right to object, and let me say I am doing this somewhat reluctantly because I fully acknowledge the Senator from Maryland is correct, that corruption is a scourge. There are many countries going the wrong direction. It is fully in the national interest of the United States to combat the corruption that we see, and he has proposed a completely good-faith, thoughtful approach to dealing with some aspects of the corruption that we find.

But I have concerns about the particular way in which he does this, and I would like to work with him and see if we can find common ground on this.

Let me explain my concern.

The bill would task the State Department with annually ranking every country in the world, including our partners and allies and friends and even, maybe, countries that aren't necessarily so friendly but, at the moment, are maybe working with us. It requires that this ranking of countries, based on how corrupt they are, be then made public. That is for good intentions, but I am concerned that in the process of naming and shaming countries that are deemed to be in the wrong place, it could complicate efforts that we are making, whether it is our Treasury or our State Department, with very legitimate objectives that we have that are unrelated to the corruption problem that the country faces.

For instance, depending on the country, maybe we want them to be more cooperative in the global coalition against Russia to defend Ukraine. Let's be honest. There are corruption problems in Ukraine also, but we are defending Ukraine, quite rightly. Maybe it is about joining the administration's Indo-Pacific economic framework, which is very important for a variety of reasons, but maybe there are corruption problems.

This seems like a bit of a blunt tool that requires this labeling and naming and shaming, and it doesn't provide the discretion for the administration to say: You know, maybe right now isn't the right time to rub their noses in one of their problems because we need them for something else.

So I guess what I would say is, look, fighting corruption is absolutely important, and the Senator from Maryland has been consistent and thoughtful on this, but it is not our only--and sometimes it is not our most important--objective with another country.

I would like to continue to work with the Senator from Maryland, and I would be very happy to devote the time and energy to try to make sure we are able to get to common ground here before the end of the year; but at this moment, I can't support this, so I object.

Mr. President, as a proud member of the American Sikh Congressional Caucus, I would like to join my Sikh friends in Pennsylvania's Sikh community and Sikhs around the world in recognizing the 38th anniversary of the November 1984 anti-Sikh violence in India.

For those of you who are not familiar, Sikhism traces its nearly 600- year history to the Punjab region of India. With nearly 30 million followers globally and 700,000 here in the U.S., Sikhism is one of the world's major religions.

Historically, Sikhs have showcased a commitment to serving individuals from all religious, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds-- demonstrating their generosity and deep sense of community. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sikh communities across Pennsylvania and the United States came together to deliver groceries, masks, and other supplies to tens of thousands of families in need no matter their race, gender, religion, or creed. In my many years serving the Commonwealth, I have personally witnessed the spirit of Sikhs and have come to better understand the Sikh tradition that is founded on equality, respect, and peace. It is clear that the presence and contributions of Sikh communities have thoroughly enriched their neighborhoods across the country.

1984 marks one of the darkest years in modern Indian history. The world watched as several violent incidents broke out among ethnic groups in India, with several notably targeting the Sikh community. Today we are here to remember the tragedy that commenced on November 1, 1984, following decades of ethnic tension between Sikhs in the Punjab province and the central Indian Government. As so often in such cases, the official estimates likely do not tell the whole story, but it is estimated that over 30,000 Sikh men, women, and children were deliberately targeted, raped, slaughtered, and displaced by mobs across India.

To prevent future human rights abuses, we must recognize their past forms. We must remember the atrocities committed against Sikhs so that those responsible may be held accountable and that this type of tragedy is not repeated against the Sikh community or other communities across the globe.

Mr. President, I rise to discuss the PACT Act, on which we will be voting for several amendments and then we will have a final passage vote later this evening.

This could have been resolved months ago, as I suggested it would be, but finally we have gotten to the point where we can resolve this.

And I have to say we are witnessing a very old Washington trick playing out on what might be an unprecedented scale.

And what is that trick?

That trick is you take a very sympathetic group of Americans--it could be children with rare diseases; it could be victims of crime; it could be veterans who are suffering an illness after having been exposed to toxic chemicals while serving our country--you take this sympathetic group, craft legislation to address their problems, and then sneak in something that is completely unrelated that could never pass on its own and dare anyone to stand up and say a word about that because we all know, if you raise a concern about the unrelated provision, people in this Chamber and outside will stand up and make up all kinds of fabrications and falsehoods.

They will enlist some pseudo celebrities, they will get their accomplices

in the media to propagate the dishonest charge that: Oh, those mean Republicans don't care about those sympathetic figures. That is what has been going on here for some time now.

It is in the PACT Act. We have an exceptionally sympathetic, overwhelmingly popular group of Americans--and rightly so. They are veterans who put on the uniform, served overseas, took huge risks, and along the way were exposed to toxic chemicals that have resulted or could have resulted in their illness.

There is overwhelming consensus to provide the resources to at least cover their healthcare costs and provide them with disability benefits because of their service to our country.

In fact, the cause is so popular that the $280 billion of new spending contemplated by this bill is completely unoffset. It is mandatory spending. It is like OCO, and there is nobody I know of-- certainly not myself--who is asking that it be offset. It is like, this is what we need to do and people acknowledge this and we agree on it.

But that is not where the PACT Act ends. That is not all there is to the PACT Act. It also includes the old Washington trick. And the form the trick takes in this bill is a complicated change to budget rules that allows current spending--by which I mean spending that is going to happen under existing law unrelated to the PACT Act, that spending that is routine already--to be basically shifted off the books, so to speak, in such a way that is designed to make it easier for future Congresses to spend a whole lot more money on completely unrelated programs.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this clever little device will result--could result in up to maybe even a little more than $400 billion of additional spending over the next 10 years; again, totally outside of the veteran space, totally outside.

Now, the chairman of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs is my friend Jon Tester, a guy I know and like. He pretty much essentially acknowledged that yes, the legislation could be exploited this way. But he said: But you should have faith. You should have confidence and trust in your colleagues, future Congresses, that we wouldn't do a thing like that.

Seriously? I am supposed to trust this and future Congresses not to go on a spending spree--seriously? That is unbelievable. And, by the way, if I should have that trust, then why did they design this feature precisely so they could go on a spending spree?

This isn't the first time this has happened. A good example is the CHIPS program. That is an acronym for the Children's Health Insurance Program. It was created in 1997. It is a very popular program. It is mandatory spending, completely unoffset. It is a very good cause. That is why.

In 2009, Congress started providing more funding than was necessary to fund the program--much more than would actually be spent on the kids that qualified for it. Congress did this very knowingly and started doing it annually. Why, you might ask, would Congress provide more funding than the program requires? Because the amount by which this funding exceeds what gets spent can be spent on other programs.

It is a trick. It is a budget trick that allows for more spending in unrelated areas.

The Crime Victims Fund has a very similar dynamic. Criminal penalties go into a fund that is supposed to go to victims of crime, but they set up the rules so that, in any given year, if we spend less than the amount of money that went into this fund, they can pretend those are budget savings and then spend the money somewhere else.

So my point is that we have seen this before. It is being played out again, but I don't think we have ever seen it on this scale--$400 billion over the next 10 years.

We have budgets and we have budget rules for reasons. They are meant to try to provide some guardrails on spending. Now, Congress can always disregard them. Any Congress can always disregard budget rules for a good reason or a bad reason. If there are 60 votes, the budget rules can be waived.

By the way, there are five budget points of order against this bill. I am not aware that anyone has raised a single one. We are not going to have a vote on any one, and that is because people say the new spending for these veterans is so important that we are going to waive the budget rules that this bill breaks, and I think that is the right thing to do. But to think that the appropriations process is going to be a sufficient check on the abuse of this gimmick that is in this bill is very unrealistic.

You know, the Senate can always vote against a future spending bill that would take advantage of this. All right, so this is one of the arguments we have heard: Well, yes, you can always vote against this if Congress were to exploit this gimmick and start spending these $400 billion.

But here is the problem. In a given year, that would be about $40 billion, right? Four hundred over 10 years means $400 billion of this extraneous spending annually. Except, as the Presiding Officer knows very well, we typically fund the government with one giant bill--an omnibus spending bill that is over 1,000 pages long, usually. Nowadays, it is about $1.7 trillion. And $40 billion is a lot of money, but it is 3 percent of $1.7 trillion.

So if you object to exploiting this budget gimmick and exploiting this loophole and spending $40 billion that shouldn't be spent on who knows what, you can vote against the whole bill and that is your only option--vote to shut down the government and not spend any money at all. That is no disciplinary mechanism. That is no mechanism for proper oversight.

Now, you may hear that my amendment caps spending for veterans, and I want to be very clear about this. The chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee said my amendment would place a limit on the amount of funding Congress could provide to cover care and benefits to veterans made available by this legislation and could create a scenario where the VA runs out of funding.

That is completely, 100-percent factually false. It is very hard to believe that the chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee is not aware of that.

But here is the truth. The fund that is created in the PACT Act--the fund that the chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee is referring to, the fund where we cap the money that goes into this fund--that fund does not have the meaning that any normal person thinks a fund has. This is not a pool of money. This is not an account at a bank from which doctors are paid. This is nothing more than an accounting device. This is just a mechanism that the Federal Government uses to classify spending as mandatory instead of discretionary. That is all it is.

And there are no limits whatsoever. This is an important point. My amendment has no limits whatsoever on the amount that Congress can appropriate in any given year or in the cumulative total of years for veterans' healthcare or other benefits. My amendment doesn't affect that in any way whatsoever. Congress can appropriate a trillion dollars in a given year.

What my amendment would do is it would limit the amount of that appropriation that could be considered mandatory spending as opposed to discretionary spending. That is it. My amendment is 100 percent about how the government designates the spending. It has nothing to do with how much is actually spent.

Now, what matters to a veteran who is ill because of a toxic exposure? I think what matters to him is that the money is there to cover what he needs. That is what he should be concerned about, and that will be there.

What I am trying to limit is the extent to which they can use a budgetary gimmick to reclassify spending so that they can go on an unrelated spending binge.

So what would happen if the cost for actually caring for veterans in a given year is bigger than the cap we set? Appropriators simply appropriate the amount that is needed. My cap has no bearing on how much appropriators can spend. It only limits how much gets treated as mandatory spending.

If my amendment is adopted, spending on veterans' benefits would not be reduced by one penny. Spending on veterans' families would not be reduced by one penny. The $280 billion in new spending as a result of the PACT Act would not be reduced by a penny. It would not be offset.

We have no attempt to make any change to any of that. If anyone is suggesting that my amendment would, in

any way, reduce care for veterans or require rationing of care, they are either completely misinformed or they are being dishonest.

So why does this matter? Why did the authors of the bill want to create this device that shifts this spending that is going to happen anyway from discretionary spending to mandatory spending? Because we have a cap on total discretionary spending, and for any spending that gets pulled out of the discretionary spending category and goes to a different category, that creates a hole under the cap. Congress will fill that hole with spending on who knows what. That is the way this is going to play out. That is what is going to happen.

Now, some people have suggested that my amendment, if adopted, would kill the bill. Now, think about that. An amendment that does not cut spending on veterans' care or veterans' benefits by one dime but does make it harder for Congress to go on an unrelated $400 billion spending spree--that is going to kill the bill? Really?

Well, if that would kill the bill, then it speaks volumes about what is really important to the people who would vote no as a result of making it clear that unrelated spending is more important than the spending on the veterans--if my amendment would kill the bill.

So I don't think passage of my amendment would kill the bill. It would frustrate the efforts of those who want to have the skids greased for a massive spending binge. It would definitely do that. But it wouldn't cut one dime of spending for veterans' care, and I think in the end the bill would pass.

I have this very simple solution. It allows us to fully fund our vets. It eliminates this budgetary gimmick that greases the skids for unrelated spending. And I would just urge my colleagues that hiding unrelated spending behind the sacrifice our veterans have made is no way to go. I would urge support for my amendment.

Motion to Concur With Amendment No. 5186

Mr. President, I move to concur in the House message to accompany S. 3373 with amendment No. 5186.

I ask unanimous consent that the reading be dispensed with.

Mr. President, a lot has been said about my amendment that is completely false, mostly outside of this Chamber, so let me say very simply what it does. My amendment does only one thing, it would maintain the current policy of classifying currently authorized VA healthcare spending as discretionary spending, rather than change that classification going forward to mandatory spending as the PACT Act would allow.

My amendment does not cap any spending. It does not reduce veteran spending. It does not change the classification of PACT Act spending.

But by preventing this change in classification, we would prevent a budget gimmick that is designed to grease the skids for up to $400 billion in totally unrelated spending.

So let's pass the PACT Act, but let's pass it without enabling an unrelated $400 billion spending spree. Support my amendment.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I want to make just a brief comment about the cloture vote that just occurred shortly before the Senator from Rhode Island sought the unanimous consent agreement.

And, as you know, cloture was denied on that bill, and, as you also know very well, that doesn't mean the bill is defeated. It simply means that the opportunity to amend it isn't eliminated. There haven't been any amendments. That is unfortunate.

But I want to just stress that my concern about this bill has nothing to do with the purpose of the bill. It is not about the approximately $280 billion of new spending that is meant to be required under this bill for the VA to cover Medicare and other--healthcare, I should say, and other benefits for veterans who are exposed to toxic burn pits. What I want to change has absolutely nothing to do with any of that.

I see the chairman of the committee of jurisdiction. I think he understands that I have no interest in modifying the purpose of this bill, all the work that he and many others have done. And, by the way, I suspect there are 85 votes for this bill, for the underlying bill, if we fix this problem.

And here is the problem. Completely unrelated to the $280 billion of new spending, there is a mechanism created in this bill--it is a budgetary gimmick--that has the intent of making it possible to have a huge explosion in unrelated spending: $400 billion. This budgetary gimmick is so unrelated to the actual veterans' issue that has to do with burn pits that it is not even in the House version of this bill.

So, the fact is, we can fix this tonight. This is a relatively easy fix. There might be a few technical things we would iron out, and we could get this done tonight. And I know the chairman of the committee very much wants to get this bill done. This is the path to do it. And if we fix this--which, as I say, I would recommend we fix it tonight-- we could do that by a unanimous consent request. We could do it any number of ways.

But once that is done, this bill sails through this Chamber and goes to the President and gets signed into law. So I just want to urge my Democratic colleagues to join me in working this out. This is not what this bill was about. We can fix it. We can do it immediately.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would briefly and simply reiterate my request that our Democratic colleagues, including the chairman, who obviously is passionate about this, just engage with us to fix this, this problem that has nothing to do with the bill that he wants to pass, this problem that wasn't in the House version of this bill.

The chairman's argument that, well, it is always ultimately subject to appropriations--well, that is really an argument that says let's not have a budget at all, let's not have any rules because--it is true--a future Congress can always do whatever it wants. So, by that logic, we should have no rules, no guidelines, no budgets, no procedures, no pay- go, no effort whatsoever to have any management of our Federal budget because--what the hell--any Congress can come along and just waive it.

I don't agree with that. I think, especially at a time when inflation is running rampant, when we have been spending money like no one has ever imagined--if we have got an important need, OK; we do that. But this gimmick--and the chairman said people are sick and tired of games. I totally agree. This is one of those games where you have got a bill that is going to pass and so let's sneak in this change in the budget rule so that it will be easy to spend money on other things in the future.

That is ridiculous. That is just not defensible. So, again, I would stress there is a very easy path to a very big vote in favor of this bill that probably could happen later tonight but could certainly happen tomorrow. And if the path is there, let's fix this problem.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise because I want to express concerns that I have about a particular provision in the PACT Act. It is my understanding that the Senate is considering this later this week. We could be voting on cloture as early as tomorrow afternoon.

My concerns with the provision of the bill as drafted are--well, I and many of my colleagues share this concern. What we want to do is ensure that the PACT Act is not used as a vehicle to dramatically increase spending outside of the objective of the bill, which is to cover specific healthcare and benefits for veterans.

As it is written, as we are currently considering it, the PACT Act includes a budget gimmick that is designed to do exactly that. This gimmick was not in the House bill, but some Senators found it necessary to add this. This gimmick is not necessary to achieve the underlying purpose of the legislation. The purpose of the legislation is to expand VA healthcare benefits and certain other benefits for veterans.

I have a very simple proposed fix for this problem that will not reduce veteran benefits by a single dollar. It would allow the bill to fully achieve its original intent.

To explain this a little bit, I have to explain a little bit about how the Federal Government spends money around here.

As you know, Mr. President, we have two big categories of Federal spending. We have what we call discretionary spending, and that is the spending that is appropriated annually by Congress. That spending is limited every year. There is a cap on how much can be spent in that category. That is the first category.

The second category of Federal spending, we call mandatory spending. This is different from discretionary spending in the sense that it is kind of automatic spending. It occurs not by appropriation; it is driven by eligibility for various programs. People are eligible; so they get the payment. And it does not depend on a congressional appropriation. Those are the two big categories of spending.

Now, the PACT Act, as I said, addresses veterans' healthcare. Now, of course, as we all know, current law already obligates the VA to spend a great deal of money on veterans' healthcare and benefits, as it should. In particular, there is about $400 billion over the next 10 years that the VA will spend on veterans' toxic exposure care and benefits--about $400 billion. That is existing law. That is going to happen no matter what we do with this bill. That $400 billion has always been categorized in the discretionary spending category of Federal spending, and, therefore, it is subject to caps, limits.

Now, what the PACT Act does is it expands this obligation on the part of the VA. And it expands it a lot, by about $280 billion over the next 10 years. And it takes all of that new spending, the $280 billion of new spending that the VA will spend under the PACT Act, and it puts it in the mandatory spending category--not the discretionary but the mandatory spending category.

Now, we can argue about whether or not that was a good idea, but that is not my issue on the floor this evening. I have no quarrels with the $280 billion being in the mandatory category. That is not the issue at hand.

Here is the problem with this bill. Here is the budgetary gimmick. This is what is outrageous. The bill takes the $400 billion that I mentioned earlier, the $400 billion that is obligated to be spent by the Veterans' Administration, by legislation passed many years ago, money that is going to be spent; it enables that spending to be shifted from the discretionary category to the mandatory category of spending.

You could say: Well, so what; the government is still going to spend the money either way. That is true. It is going to go for the same purpose, to the same people who need it. That is all true.

So why does it matter? Why did the Senate authors of this bill, unlike the House, decide it is necessary to take this big category of spending that is already in existing law and move it from the discretionary spending category to the mandatory category?

Well, here is the reason. As I said earlier, there are caps on how much discretionary spending can occur in any given year. By moving this big category of spending, this $400 billion, out of the discretionary category and putting it into mandatory, you create this big hole under the cap. That is what is going on here. Now, when you create that big hole, guess what happens with that big hole? It gets filled with spending on who knows what. That is what is going on here. This is unbelievable.

Now, again, I want to stress that my quarrel here is not with the underlying purpose of the bill or the substance. And, sure, we could talk about ways it could be improved, but that is not what this is about. It is about a budget gimmick that is designed to allow hundreds of billions of dollars in additional, unrelated spending having nothing to do with veterans. It could be anything. It is this big, gaping hole that some folks around here created by design in our discretionary spending category.

You know what it really comes down to. It is about Congress hiding behind an important veterans' care bill a massive, unrelated spending binge. That is what this amounts to. Now, that would be objectionable at any time, under any circumstances, as far as I am concerned, but it is unbelievable that this provision is snuck into this bill at a time like this.

What I am referring to is the obvious fact that our entire economy-- American families, virtually all of them, are being racked by out-of- control inflation. Inflation is at a 40-year high--40 years. I mean, roughly half of all Americans have never been alive with inflation this high. And there is no avoiding it. It is at the gas pump. It is at the grocery store. It is at the rent. It is everywhere.

Well, how does inflation come about? Well, a big part of it came from too much government spending and lax, easy-money monetary policy. That is

always a very dangerous combination. And sure enough, it gave us this out-of-control inflation. Well, this gimmick is going to make it worse. It is going to add $400 billion over 10 years in totally unrelated, unnecessary spending.

Again, we are not talking about veterans' healthcare. That is not what I am here to talk about. We are talking about the other $400 billion that we haven't seen exactly what that is going to consist of. Who knows. But you can be sure that a big hole under the spending caps is not going to left as a big hole.

So this is terrible policy. So, here, I have got a simple suggestion. Here is all we need to do. We leave the $280 billion, the new spending for veterans' healthcare that the bill contemplates--leave that in mandatory spending. That is fine. But we simply would modify the bill to keep the $400 billion that we are going to spend anyway in the category where it has always been, the discretionary spending category. This doesn't cut a dime in veterans' spending, but it would avoid creating this huge hole for all kinds of new and unrelated spending.

So, again, I will stress one more time for the people who might choose to listen, this doesn't reduce spending on veterans' healthcare or benefits of any kind by a single penny. And the change that I am looking for would not in any way impede the ability of veterans to get the healthcare that they are going to get under this bill as a result of toxic exposure. It is not about any of that. It is only about preventing this excessive, unrelated spending in we don't even know yet what categories, which was inserted in this bill.

So I think this is a simple fix. Unfortunately, it appears we are still not in the business of contemplating amendments in this Chamber. We were promised there would be amendments at the beginning of this process. Amendments have always historically been a fundamental way that we litigate our differences and iterate our way to solutions, but we are not allowed to do this. I have not been allowed to offer an amendment. Nobody has.

So I intend to vote against cloture, which, as you know, Mr. President, is the procedural vote that ends debate and ends the amendments and allows the body to get on to final passage. I am not going to vote for cloture because we haven't had this debate yet. We haven't had this vote on this outrageous budget gimmick that has nothing to do with the underlying purpose of the bill.

So I am going to urge my colleagues to join me in voting against cloture. And what will happen if we deny cloture? What if we succeed, and the Chamber, the body, is unable to achieve cloture? Well, then I think I know what happens. Our Democratic colleagues would work with us to fix the gimmick. That is what would happen. Then the bill would move forward with all the same benefits for veterans that it has and that it has always had as a bill, and we would do this without introducing this massive, unrelated spending.

Now, why am I confident that that is what the outcome would be? Because I think our Democratic colleagues are very unlikely to forgo passing a really important veterans health bill for the sake of their unrelated spending blitz. I think, as much as they want to go on that spending binge, they would take a pass on that if that is what they have to do to get this veterans bill done. So that is how this would end.

That is why, Mr. President, once again, I urge my colleagues, join me in a simple fix for a terrible budget gimmick, and let's do this quickly. And if we are not allowed to do this any other way, then let's deny cloture tomorrow on the cloture vote, and then we will be able to fix it promptly thereafter.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, and let me be clear that the nature of my objection is not about the fact that this legislation authorizes about $280 billion, I think, for healthcare for veterans that resulted from toxic exposure and it creates new categories of eligibility and it contemplates this and authorizes this $280 billion of additional spending over 10 years.

What everybody should be aware of is that absent of this legislation, existing statute already obligates the Federal Government, through the VA, to spend about $400 billion over the next 10 years on veterans' healthcare that results from veterans being exposed to toxic circumstances during their service. So there is $400 billion that preexisted this bill and $280 billion of new spending.

Now, the $400 billion that we were already going to spend--and we will spend--is put under the discretionary spending caps in that category of discretionary spending because, as you know, discretionary spending is limited. There is a cap every year on how much can be spent in this discretionary spending category. There is one other category of spending around here, and that is mandatory spending that is not subject to caps. That is just unlimited whatever is required.

The legislation puts the $280 billion in new spending in the mandatory spending category, and we can argue about whether that is a good idea or not. I don't think it is a great idea, but that is not what really is outrageous about what is going on here. What is really outrageous is in this legislation, they take the $400 billion that was going to be spent anyway that is already preexisting under existing statute--they take that out of discretionary spending and move it over to mandatory spending.

Why would they do a thing like that? Why would that be necessary to move $400 billion that is already authorized to be spent under current law and move it out of discretionary and into the mandatory spending? The reason is because that way you create a big gaping hole in the discretionary spending category, which can be filled with another $400 billion of totally unrelated spending. Who knows on what? That is why it had to be moved out of discretionary and into mandatory spending.

My objection isn't about the substance of this bill. It is about this budgetary gimmick that is designed to allow hundreds of billions of dollars of additional spending on totally unrelated, who-knows-what categories. We have inflation hitting a 40-year high. We have a government that has been spending trillions of dollars, too much money--printing the money to spend--and everybody sees it every day at the pump, at the grocery store, everywhere. And what this gimmick does is it makes it possible to spend yet another $400 billion.

This is terrible policy. I am going to suggest the modification to the unanimous consent request from my friend--and he is my friend--from Montana. And it is very simple. It says nothing about the $280 billion in new spending that is permitted under this legislation. It simply would keep the $400 billion that we were going to spend anyway, keep it right in the category that it has always been in--keep it in the discretionary spending category so that it doesn't create this hole that gets filled with another $400 billion on who knows what. That is what my amendment does.

My amendment wouldn't reduce spending on veterans' healthcare by a penny. It wouldn't, in any way, impede the ability of veterans to get the healthcare that they need as a result of toxic exposures. It has nothing to do with that. It is only about preventing huge, excessive spending in other categories--who knows what--that would be permitted under this bill.

Mr. President, therefore, I ask unanimous consent that the Senator modify his request to include my amendment to the Tester resolution; that the amendment be considered and agreed to; that the resolution, as amended, be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table without intervening action or debate.

I object.

Mr. President, I rise today to speak on the nomination of Professor Lisa Cook to serve as a Governor of the Federal Reserve Board.

Two weeks ago, Senate Democrats tried to cancel the vote that was scheduled on Professor Cook's nomination.

In his floor remarks, the chairman of the Banking Committee stated that Senate Republicans have been ``AWOL in the fight against inflation for months.'' The irony of that, of course, is that it was Democrats who wanted to cancel the vote. Republicans were ready to vote and not just on Professor Cook, mind you. We wanted to vote on the other Fed nominees as well. I objected to canceling the vote because we were ready to vote, and we wanted to vote, so the vote took place.

Professor Cook's nomination failed that day on a procedural vote by a margin 47 to 51. Then, immediately after that, I asked consent to vote on the two remaining Fed nominees who have been processed in the committee but haven't been voted on. Those would be Chairman Jerome Powell, who has been nominated to be Chairman again, and Professor Philip Jefferson, who both could have been confirmed to the Fed that day, as they could have been confirmed months ago.

But the Democrats objected to us having a vote a couple of weeks ago. It is really pretty amazing. Let me just be clear for the record. The Democrats hold the majority. The Democrats control the schedule on the Senate floor. And our Democratic colleagues have tied up for months the nominations of multiple nominees, including two--two--Fed nominees who have either unanimous or very nearly unanimous support. That is Jerome Powell and Philip Jefferson.

So if confirming Fed nominees is so important to our Democratic colleagues in the fight against inflation, it makes you wonder about this strategy of canceling votes and not holding votes when Republicans have been trying to confirm the nominees.

But I have a theory as to why this is, and I think it is because our Democratic colleagues know that Professor Cook is simply unqualified to serve as a Governor of the Federal Reserve Board. They don't want to leave her stranded as the final Fed nominee after all the other nominees get confirmed, so they are holding the nominations of Chairman Powell and Professor Jefferson hostage in order to push through their preferred candidate, their top priority.

I want to address this specific point that the chairman has made in the past because he has made this several times. He has suggested that somehow Republicans oppose Professor Cook's nomination because she is a Black woman. Let me just be as clear as I can. That is a very offensive charge to make. It is actually outrageous. It is also blatantly and demonstrably false.

In this Congress alone--a little over 1 year--Banking Republicans have unanimously supported eight Black nominees, six of whom were women: Cecilia Rouse, the first Black woman to serve as Chair of the CEA; Nuria Fernandez; Alexia Latortue; Adrianne Todman; Alanna McCargo; Ventris Gibson, the first Black woman to serve as Director of the U.S. Mint. Republican Banking Committee members voted unanimously in favor of confirming each of those six Black women, but we still hear this absurd and outrageous charge.

Philip Jefferson--if our Democratic colleagues ever allow us to have a vote on him--will be the fourth Black man to serve as a Fed Governor. He was voted out of the committee 24 to 0.

Let me just be very clear. Banking Committee Republicans didn't support these nominees because of the color of their skin; that is not the criteria by which we evaluate candidates. We supported them because each of them was qualified for the roles to which they were nominated. Frankly, that ought to be the criteria for evaluating any nominee, if you ask me, including Professor Cook.

So let me address some of the arguments you are likely to hear regarding Professor Cook's qualifications.

First of all, my Democratic colleagues like to point to Professor Cook's extensive educational attainments as evidence of her qualifications. She was a Marshall Scholar and a Truman Scholar, she was. She attended Spelman College, Oxford, and obtained a Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley.

There is no question, these are impressive credentials, but they do not, by themselves, qualify her--or anyone else for that matter--to serve as the governor of the Fed, especially at a time when we need a Fed that is able and willing to tackle 40-year-high inflation that is devastating American families every single day.

Now, our Democratic colleagues have claimed that Professor Cook is ``a leading economist'' with years of experience in ``monetary policy, banking, and financial crises.'' But those claims are simply untrue.

First of all, 75 percent of Professor Cook's assignment at Michigan State, including her tenure, is in the international relations department; it is not even in economics. Second, her experience in monetary policy is literally nonexistent. Not a single one of her publications concerns monetary economics.

When asked to highlight for the banking committee her top works on monetary policy, she provided one, a book chapter on Nigerian bank reforms published 11 years ago. According to the White House, her main qualification on monetary policy is her service as a member of the Chicago Fed's Board of Directors.

She joined the Chicago Fed's Board 2 weeks before President Biden nominated her to serve as a Fed governor.

Third, her experience handling financial crisis has basically been limited to writing a cursory overview of the Eurozone crisis during a brief stint working in the Obama White House and working in Africa over 20 years ago.

Now, you don't need to be a trained economist to serve on the Fed Board, necessarily; but if you are going to serve on the Fed Board, you do need to have some views on monetary policy. You would think that would be especially the case for someone who is an economist. Given Professor Cook's glaring lack of experience in monetary policy, it perhaps is not surprising that Professor Cook has been unable to articulate any opinion at all on how the Fed should tackle inflation.

Throughout the nomination process, she repeatedly refused to endorse the Fed decision to pull back its ultra-easy money policy. She also refused to suggest any alternative policy. And only on the actual day, while at her hearing, did she finally begrudgingly say that she agreed with the ``Fed's path right now as we are speaking.''

Professor Cook's answers to very basic questions about what the Fed should do to tame inflation--to paraphrase the late Justice Scalia-- amount to nothing more than logical applesauce. Professor Cook has continued to insist she would need to be confirmed to the Fed Board before she can have a view on inflation, because in her words: ``We don't have access to all the data that the Fed has.'' And she also said: ``We don't have access to the deliberations at the time they are being made.''

Now, these things are just bewildering for someone who has been nominated to address the most pressing inflationary threat in nearly two generations. And let's be clear, the Fed has no secret data as Professor Cook seems to believe.

In fact, monetary policy, including the recent 41 percent increase in the money supply is extremely transparent. Anyone who wants to know has all the data available to him or herself.

Just about every economist in the country right now has an opinion about inflation. Every other nominee to the Federal Reserve has an opinion about inflation, including what to do about it.

And since we know very little about her views on inflation, my grave concern is that Professor Cook will serve as an inflation dove on the Fed at a time when American families continue to be ravaged by these price increases.

But you don't have to take it from me, Bloomberg Economics expressed concern with Professor Cook's wishy-washy answers also, and they wrote:

Asked if she would endorse the current rates trajectory,

she did not provide a straight answer but said she would look

at data once the decision point arrives.

Another quote from their analysis:

When asked how she would get inflation under control, she

answered: By eliminating the risk of financial crisis.

The American people deserve better than this. They deserve a serious nominee who understands monetary economics, has a firm grasp on how to combat inflation and restore stable prices, and will serve without a political agenda.

So if Lisa Cook doesn't have any expertise in monetary policy, then why would Democrats want her on the Fed Board? Well, that brings me to my second point: Professor Cook's history of extreme leftwing political advocacy and hostility to opposing viewpoints, which I think make her unfit to serve on the Fed.

It is exceptionally important to keep politics out of monetary policy, but unfortunately, we have seen the encroachment of politics at the historically independent Federal Reserve.

There are people on the left, including in the Biden administration, who openly advocate that the Fed use its supervisory powers to resolve complex political issues, like what to do about global warming and social justice, even education policy.

These are all very important issues, but they are wholly unrelated to the Fed's limited statutory mandates and expertise. Professor Cook's record indicates that she is likely to inject further political bias into the Fed Board at a time when we need the Fed to be focused on fighting inflation.

In her statements or tweets, retweets, Professor Cook has supported race-based reparations, promoted conspiracies about Georgia voter laws, and sought to cancel those who disagree with her, with her views. She specifically and publicly called for the firing of an economist and colleague who dared to tweet that he was opposed to the idea of defunding the Chicago police.

The fact is the Fed is already suffering from a credibility problem because of its involvement in politics and its departure from its statutorily proscribed role and its failure to keep inflation under control. I am concerned that Professor Cook will further politicize an institution that really needs to get back to being apolitical.

I urge my colleagues to vote against the nomination of Lisa Cook.

Madam President, I call up my motion to instruct, which is at the desk.

Madam President, my motion would simply instruct the Senate conferees to USICA to keep a provision of the Wyden-Crapo trade amendment that passed the Senate 91 to 4. Specifically, it is the provision that requires the administration reestablish an exclusion process for current and future section 301 actions.

This does not repeal 301 tariffs. It doesn't preclude new 301 tariffs. But, remember, when the Trump administration imposed 301 tariffs, they created an exclusion process for the simple reason that it was important to exclude from tariffs those circumstances in which it would do more harm to an American manufacturer and worker than those targeted by the tariffs. But the exclusion process has expired. It has not been fully restarted. So many U.S. manufacturers are not able to get the relief they need.

The USICA language that passed the Senate would reestablish this exclusion process. The language grants considerable flexibility to the U.S. Trade Rep, even to the point where the exclusion process could be waived altogether if the Trade Rep concludes that, otherwise, it would diminish American leverage.

The bipartisan language simply helps ensure that American manufacturers remain competitive. Nearly every one of us submitted letters of request from constituent companies asking for exclusions.

There is no exclusion if there is no exclusion process.

Madam President, reserving the right to object, I want to be clear about what this unanimous consent request is about and what it attempts to do. It is an attempt not to vote, to not have the vote on Lisa Cook, the nominee. I have to say it is a reminder of how short memories are around here.

The irony of this situation we find ourselves in is that the vacancy on the Federal Reserve Board is only a vacancy because, when Republicans had COVID absences, our Democratic colleagues would not extend the courtesy of rescheduling the vote to confirm Judy Shelton. Instead, the vote failed, and she was not confirmed. Then, lo and behold, we have this vacancy that has been proposed to be filled by Lisa Cook.

I should also point out how persistently we tried in good faith and on multiple occasions to process Fed noms throughout this entire year. We could have confirmed Chairman Powell in January. We could have processed four out of five of the Fed noms in the Banking Committee very quickly, including Ms. Cook, but our Democratic colleagues refused to allow us to process those four out of five because we did not want to process Sarah Raskin.

Now, Ms. Raskin ended up having to withdraw because there was bipartisan opposition to the radical views that she had espoused that the regulatory apparatus of the Fed ought to be used to allocate capital throughout our economy. Fortunately, there was bipartisan opposition to this idea.

Now it appears--and I guess it is the logic of my colleagues--that we can proceed as long as we are confirming everyone but Chairman Powell first. I don't understand why that has to be, but they filed cloture before the Easter break, on Professor Cook, and now they find themselves in this awkward position.

Here is what it boils down to. It is very simple. I want to vote on all of the noms. Republicans are ready to vote on all of the noms. Our Democratic colleagues have complained about not having votes. We want to vote. We want to vote on Lisa Cook. We want to vote on Chairman Powell. We want to vote on Mr. Jefferson.

We are ready to vote, not to cancel a vote, so I object.

Mr. President, the chairman of the Banking Committee spoke before this vote and made the point that he wants to have a vote on all three Fed noms. I want to have a vote on all of the three Fed noms who have been under consideration and in the exchanges today. Republicans want to vote on all three.

We just voted on one of the three our Democratic colleagues had filed cloture on. The cloture ripened--it came due--and we had the vote. So the obvious thing to do here is to set up votes on the other two. The other two are Chairman Powell, who is currently the Chairman and has been nominated by President Biden to another term as Chairman, and Philip Jefferson, who has also been nominated by President Biden. I think he would be the second African-American man in, maybe, the history of the Fed. I am not positive of that, but I think so.

It makes a lot of sense to go with both of them because there is overwhelming support for them. In fact, in the committee, Chairman Powell, I think, was reported out successfully. I think there was only one vote in opposition to Chairman Powell. He was overwhelmingly supported in the committee, and I think, very likely, overwhelmingly would be supported on the floor. Mr. Jefferson was unanimously reported out of the committee. In other words, every single Republican and Democrat on the Banking Committee supported Philip Jefferson, and I am pretty sure still does, as I do.

My point is, I think we ought to go ahead and set up the votes. We don't have to have the votes right this minute, but we should set them up, and we should do it soon. So I have a unanimous consent request which is identical to the unanimous consent request that was just proposed by our chairman but for the reference to Lisa Cook. Since we just had that vote, obviously, it doesn't make sense to include her in the unanimous consent request.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at a time to be determined by the majority leader, following consultation with the Republican leader, prior to April 29, 2022, the Senate proceed to executive session to consider the following nominations: Calendar No. 807, Jerome H. Powell, and Calendar No. 809, Philip Nathan Jefferson; that there be 60 minutes for debate, equally divided in the usual form, on each nomination; that upon the use or yielding back of time, the Senate proceed to vote, without intervening action or debate, on the nominations in the order listed; that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate; that no further motions be in order; that any related statements be printed in the Record; that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action; and that the Senate then resume legislative session.

Mr. President, I have to say it is sad and shameful to hear the chairman suggest, which he has done repeatedly now, including on the Senate floor, that there is some kind of racial bias against Black women that is a motivation for Republicans.

I would like to point out, for the record, the fact that on the Senate Banking Committee, every single Republican Senator has voted in favor of confirming five different Black women to different posts in just this Congress, President Biden's nominees who are Black women, and they include Cecilia Rouse, Nuria Fernandez, Adrianne Todman, Alexia Latortue, and Alanna McCargo. And yet we hear this preposterous notion that somehow the race of the candidate is what is going on here.

The fact is, we have a difference of opinion about what qualifies a person to serve on the Fed. And it is not some tiny, obscure minority that is concerned about Lisa Cook's qualifications to be fighting inflation when she refused to articulate any plan for dealing with inflation; it was the majority of the Senate who just voted. We just had the vote.

I should also point out that what is the difference here? The difference is, we want to vote, and you just heard the chairman block a vote on President Biden's nominee to Chair the Fed, Jerome Powell, and Professor Philip Jefferson. The chairman doesn't want votes on either of them, apparently, and certainly not on both of them; he just objected.

I would remind everyone that for months now, we have been trying to process the Fed nominees, and our Democratic colleagues refused. What we said was, there are five nominees. Only one of them we are going to object to processing. The reason was because of her radical views about using the supervisory powers of the Fed to allocate capital throughout the economy. That was a pretty radical idea. And guess what? The majority of the Senate agreed with us, and so she withdrew her candidacy.

We had offered for months now to process the other four. Earlier today, we were willing to do all three, but I think the record should show our Democratic colleagues refuse to allow us to have a vote today or tomorrow or this week--that is what we asked for; we used the exact same language the chairman had used earlier--on the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and Professor Philip Jefferson.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today to discuss the nomination of Judith Pryor to serve as First Vice President of the Ex-Im Bank of the United States. Now, the Ex-Im Bank was established to help U.S. exporters by providing financing to foreign buyers of U.S. products.

I have always been very skeptical about the merits of this mission, and I remain skeptical to this day. Ex-Im claims that it only takes risks that private lenders are unable or unwilling to take. That is a central message of the Ex-Im Bank.

We should stop ourselves right there and ask ourselves a question: If private lenders are unwilling or unable to take a particular risk, why should taxpayers be forced to take that risk?

And, at the same time, Ex-Im also claims it only makes safe bets. Mr. President, that is a complete contradiction. It is impossible to do both. Ex-Im can't only take transactions so risky that no one else will do them and, at the same time, only be doing safe transactions. It doesn't make any sense at all.

The fact is, Ex-Im wins business by systematically underpricing risk. That is why borrowers go to Ex-Im instead of any number of private institutions that wouldn't offer deals on the same terms that Ex-Im offers. That is why our largest banks go to Ex-Im for loan guarantees. The Ex-Im terms are too good to be true--at least too good to be true in the private sector. And that is evident by the kinds of transactions that Ex-Im approves.

Consider just last year: Ex-Im financed a deal guaranteeing an $82 million loan from JPMorgan to Qantas airline for the purpose of buying jets made by General Electric. Now, let's think about this. JPMorgan is the largest bank in America, one of the largest banks in the world. Qantas is the largest airline in Australia. And General Electric is one of the largest industrial companies in the world.

Why did these companies need the American taxpayer to subsidize a deal among the three of them? The obvious answer is they don't. These are some of the biggest, most sophisticated companies in the world, and they have complete access to global capital markets every day of the week. They didn't turn to Ex-Im because they were unable to secure private financing. They turned to Ex-Im because they got a better deal than they would get in a strictly private transaction.

Now, as if that isn't galling enough, Ex-Im has now decided that American markets can't meet our domestic financing needs--purely domestic. I remind you, the U.S. capital markets are the largest, deepest, most sophisticated capital markets in the world by far. Anyone with a bright idea and a business plan can raise capital in the United States. They do it every day.

According to the Securities and Exchange Commission's Office of Small Business Capital Formation report for fiscal year 2021--last year-- there were $2.2 trillion in private offerings of debt and equity and $1.7 trillion in initial public offerings and other registered securities. So that is almost $4 trillion of capital markets activities in the United States. That is how big our capital markets are.

And then, separate from that are the banks. According to the Fed, there are about $2\1/2\ trillion in outstanding commercial and industrial loans as of March 16.

My point is, the United States is not an economy that is starved of capital. It is awash with cash. Nevertheless, despite that, the Biden administration has instructed Ex-Im to develop a new Domestic Financing Program to expand the reach of the Bank into a whole new direction.

This proposed Domestic Financing Program would support creating or expanding domestic manufacturing businesses and infrastructure projects as long as there is some expectation that some arbitrary portion of the goods produced will be exported. And this can even include indirect exports. So, in other words, an Ex-Im finance manufacturer won't have to export a thing if he can claim that his customers will.

This is unbelievable. This is well beyond mission creep. As George Will observed in the Washington Post today, this is ``mission gallop.'' And a program like this clearly subverts congressional intent and strains--and ``strains'' is a polite way to put the interpretation of Ex-Im's charter. And it does so to such an extent, really, I think, to make the charter basically meaningless.

There is no need--there is no reason--for Ex-Im to be providing domestic financing, none. As I said, we live in a highly developed market economy, like the most developed market economy in the world, and promising businesses have access to capital on competitive terms.

And just like all of Ex-Im's other programs--maybe even more so--the only way Ex-Im is going to win business in the domestic financing is if it either finances bad deals that the private sector wouldn't touch or it underprices the risks so that it is more attractive than the private financing.

So, earlier this month, I sent a letter to Ex-Im's President and Board Chair Reta Jo Lewis, and I requested that Ex-Im respond to a series of questions I have about this unprecedented new direction the administration wants to send the Ex-Im Bank. I also asked to withhold Board consideration of this Domestic Financing Program at least until there is a comprehensive framework that is published for notice and comment.

Before the Board votes to launch this whole new category of business at Ex-Im, shouldn't we all see: How is this program actually going to work? How expansive will it be? How expensive will it be? How many private lenders will be elbowed aside so that Ex-Im could be doing loans private banks would otherwise be doing?

And none of this has been spelled out. We don't have any answers to these important structural questions about this program. Yet my understanding is they are going to go ahead and launch this.

So I sent this letter. Ex-Im responded to my questions, but they remained completely silent on my request to withhold Board consideration until there has been public discussion and debate about the specifics of this framework.

Only 3 days after I got the Ex-Im response to my questions, they noticed a Board of Directors meeting for April 14, at which they intend to consider and probably approve this Domestic Financing Program.

Now, this leads me to the reason that our Democratic colleagues want to push Ms. Pryor's nomination through urgently. See, it is my understanding that the Ex-Im Board needs at least three Senate- confirmed nominees in order to change its existing policies--certainly a policy as big as this one. Ex-Im only has two Senate-confirmed Board members now. So without Ms. Pryor, they couldn't launch this whole new program, which is a terrible idea in the first place.

So that brings me to Ms. Pryor. My concern with her is that she will continue to support, first, what I think is the unacceptable practice of Ex-Im providing taxpayer-funded subsidies to some of the world's largest and most well-capitalized companies, and I fear that she will move Ex-Im in the direction of supporting this whole new Domestic Financing Program.

Ms. Pryor has previously served on Ex-Im's Board, and during that time the JPMorgan-Qantas-General Electric deal that I mentioned earlier was a deal that she supported.

I asked Ms. Pryor a simple question during her nomination hearing, by the way. I said: Do these large, sophisticated American companies have access to private capital? She acknowledged that that is a simple question, and she refused to answer it. Now, why would she refuse to answer such a simple question for which the answer is obvious? It is because she didn't want to admit that these giant multinational firms obviously do have access to private capital, to alternative financing, and she didn't want to acknowledge that, despite that, Ex-Im still did the deal.

I am also concerned about another issue, which is the weakening of one of the very few taxpayer protections that is built into Ex-Im's charter. The charter includes a 2-percent cap on the permissible default rate. So no more than 2 percent of the assets on the books of Ex-Im can be in default at any point in time without precluding future lending. It puts a brake on Ex-Im expansion if they hit that 2-percent threshold.

Well, guess what? Ex-Im's's default rate has trended toward that 2- percent cap. It is not quite there yet, but it is getting very close. That is why the President's budget requests that Congress temporarily waive the cap. Rather than address the problems with Ex-Im's deteriorating book of business, Ms. Pryor and the administration support this deeply flawed request to just double the statutory permissible default rate from 2 percent to 4 percent. How is that good for taxpayers? It doesn't sound good to me.

Congress laid out a clear corrective measure in the event the default rate cap is breached. That is, you freeze the book of business. You acknowledge something is not going right. We have to fix that problem. Is Ex-Im or the Biden administration proposing to fix the problem? No. They just want to ignore it and just raise the cap, pretend it is not there.

I will be the first to acknowledge Ms. Pryor is clearly a competent person and well-qualified. She has a lot of experience. That is not my concern about her candidacy. My concern is that nothing in the entire nomination process--nothing in my discussions with her--has alleviated my concern that she would advance this badly flawed agenda, which is badly flawed in multiple ways, as I have laid out. It is also the case that the Biden administration and its supporters need Ms. Pryor now in order to advance this Domestic Financing Program.

For all of these reasons, I cannot support her candidacy, and I encourage my colleagues to vote against Ms. Pryor.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I rise today to speak on the nomination of Professor Lisa Cook to serve as a Governor of the Federal Reserve Board.

At stake with Professor Cook's nomination is really how the Fed will respond to one of the most pressing challenges facing Pennsylvania and the Nation.

Earlier this month, we learned that inflation hit a four-decade high of almost 8 percent. Prices are skyrocketing for just about everything: gasoline, food, rent. The amount of money Americans have to pay for basic goods and services that they need every week are going up, and they are going up much faster than their wages. That means working Americans are falling further and further behind.

Under the guise of fighting this inflation, my colleagues across the aisle on the Senate Banking Committee have urged the swift confirmation of President Biden's slate of nominees to the Federal Reserve Board. The chairman of the committee said that President Biden's nominees are ``ready to get to work fighting inflation.'' And yet we could have confirmed nominees many weeks ago.

We still haven't voted on two of the nominees who have unanimous Republican support and near-unanimous Democratic support, which makes you wonder about our colleagues' commitment to this urgency. Maybe it is because our Democratic colleagues know that even if we don't confirm these nominees, the Fed has 9 out of 12 voting members on the FOMC in place. That is more than enough to raise rates if they decide they should raise rates to fight inflation.

How do we know for sure that that is more than enough? Well, at their last meeting just 2 weeks ago, the Fed did, in fact, raise interest rates. So it was never the case that the Fed is somehow unable to fight inflation until the nominees are confirmed.

What we really should be asking ourselves is, Are these nominees going to be the inflation fighters that we need that the White House claims they are? In my view, one of these nominees in particular, Professor Lisa Cook, dramatically fails this test.

First of all, Professor Cook has nearly zero experience in monetary policy. Now, she does have a Ph.D. in economics, but not a single one of her publications concerns monetary economics.

The White House cites as her main qualification on U.S. monetary policy her appointment as a Chicago Fed director. That appointment was made in January of this year, 2 weeks before President Biden announced Professor Cook's nomination to be a Fed Governor.

And Professor Cook made very clear in her conversation with me that she had not participated in any policy or decisionmaking so far in her term at the Chicago Fed. In fact, she described her role as limited to ``filling out paperwork''--that is her quote--for her new position, which is understandable. She had been there for 2 weeks before she was nominated to the Fed governorship. So that appointment to the regional Fed certainly doesn't count as a qualification to serve as a main Fed Governor.

Professor Cook herself has acknowledged that her academic work on monetary issues is, let's say, sparse. When asked to list her top few works on monetary policy for the Banking Committee, she provided only one, and that was a book chapter about Nigerian bank reforms in 2005.

What is even more troubling is that in addition to having no monetary policy experience, Professor Cook also appears to have no opinion at all on how the Fed should address inflation.

Professor Cook repeatedly refused to endorse the Fed's decision to pull back its ultraeasy monetary policy and only did begrudgingly say that she agreed with the ``Fed's path right now as we are speaking''-- that is a quote--at her nomination hearing in February. Prior to that, she couldn't bring herself to acknowledge that maybe it was time for the Fed to change the policy that had contributed to the worst inflation that we have seen in 40 years.

Professor Cook's answers to basic questions about what tools the Fed should use and how should the Fed consider using them in order to get inflation under control, her answer was nothing more than an incomprehensible word salad.

Professor Cook has continued to insist that she would need to be confirmed to the Fed before she can have a view on inflation because, in her own words, ``We don't have access to all the data that the Fed has,'' and also, ``We don't have access to . . . the deliberations at the time they are being made.''

These statements are bewildering coming from someone who has been nominated to address the most pressing inflationary threat in nearly two generations. To be clear, the Fed has no secret data, as Professor Cook seems to believe. In fact, monetary policy, including the recent 41-percent increase in the money supply, is extremely transparent. And if Professor Cook is counting on Fed economists to guide her in making a prediction about inflation, then, first of all, they have been wrong on inflation consistently, very wrong; and, secondly, what is she going to do on the Fed and what is her role there if all she is going to do is take instruction from the Fed staff?

Look, just about every economist in the country has an opinion about inflation right now because the data is all readily apparent and extremely disturbing. Every other nominee to the Federal Reserve has an opinion about inflation, and certainly, every Pennsylvanian I talk to has strongly held views about inflation.

Professor Cook's claim made at her nomination hearing just last month that ``We have to be patient with the data''--and the data she was referring to was rising consumer prices--that certainly suggests, what is to me, an unacceptable toleration for the inflation that is ravaging American consumers.

That brings me to my second point, and that is Professor Cook's history of extreme leftwing political advocacy and hostility to opposing viewpoints, the combination which I think makes her unfit to serve on the Fed. As I have said many times, it is extremely important that we keep politics out of the money supply. The Fed is supposed to be independent. The Fed is supposed to be apolitical so that it can focus on its job. But unfortunately, we have seen the encroachment of politics at the historically independent Federal Reserve, and we have seen that the Fed is not doing such a great job.

There are people on the left, including in the Biden administration, who openly advocate that the Fed use its regulatory powers to address complex political issues, including things like what to do about global warming, social justice, even education policy. Look, these are all very, very important issues--very important issues--but they are completely unrelated to the Fed's limited statutory mandate and expertise.

Professor Cook's record indicates that these are the topics that interest her the most, and she is likely to inject further political bias into the Fed's work at a time, exactly the time, when we need the Fed to be hyperfocused on getting inflation back under control.

We discovered that Professor Cook sent out, in recent years, over 30,000 public tweets and retweets--30,000. Included among them, she supports race-based reparations; she has promoted conspiracies about Georgia voting laws; she sought to cancel those who disagree with her views, such as she publicly called for a colleague of hers to be fired because he dared to tweet that he was opposed to defunding the police of Chicago.

After Banking Committee Republican staff highlighted these tweets and brought them to public attention, Professor Cook blocked the Banking Committee Republican Twitter account 1 day before her nomination hearing.

Apparently, Professor Cook not only realizes how inflammatory her own tweets are but also has pretty little regard for the Senate's constitutional responsibility to vet her public statements.

See, the Fed is already suffering from a credibility problem because of its involvement in politics, its departure from its statutorily prescribed limited role, and, frankly, the not-very-good job it has done in keeping inflation under control.

I am concerned that Professor Cook will further politicize an institution that must get back to being apolitical, so I urge my colleagues to vote against the motion to discharge Professor Cook.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I want to thank the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the work he has done on this for years.

I just want to make a couple of points here. One is--it is a very hard point to make, but I think we ought to be candid, and that is, there is a very real danger that the Russian military will eventually prevail. Let's be honest. They are much larger. They have far more resources. The Ukrainians are putting up an absolutely historic and heroic fight, but it is not clear that they can hold on indefinitely.

So what should we be doing in light of that fact and the circumstances we have? I completely agree with Senator Risch. We have an obligation, in my mind, to provide the resources that we can. We are doing that. This legislation would go further.

There is one other thing we can do that I think is extremely important as well, and that is, establish as a goal that as soon as possible, Vladimir Putin come to regret this decision. It is extremely important, in my mind, that Putin and all of the other authoritarians and bullies and dictators around the world see this invasion of Ukraine as a terrible, strategic mistake for Russia to have made because if they don't conclude that this was a mistake, then it doesn't end with Ukraine.

So how do we ensure that this is universally recognized, including by Putin and those who would like to emulate him? How do we make sure they see it as the mistake that we believe it is? There is one way to do this: We bring the Russian economy to its knees. And we have the ability to do that, but we have chosen not to do so thus far.

Now, I am pleased to see the administration moving in the direction of sanctioning. I am pleased that many of our European allies have taken steps to go in this direction. But until we shut down the main source of revenue for Putin and his war machine, we will not have accomplished what we need to accomplish.

This legislation does that. Among other things, it directly imposes the sanctions on the oil and gas industry--the industry that is 60 percent of all Russian exports, 40 percent of government revenue, and more than 20 percent of the entire economy. It goes after this source of cash to fund the war-fighting machine directly with sanctions, but it also does it in an indirect fashion that is very important, and I want to touch on this.

This legislation imposes what we call secondary sanctions on the Russian banking sector. Why is that important? We have all heard that some Russian banks are going to be excluded from the SWIFT system. That is true, and that is constructive; however, it is not dispositive by any means.

The SWIFT system is just a communication system. There is no money actually transferred on SWIFT. Payments aren't made. If we deny Russian banks access to SWIFT, we don't deny them the ability to conduct business, the ability to move money on behalf of oligarchs and the oil and gas industry. We don't cut off the flow of revenue to Putin, not just by kicking them off SWIFT. We make it inconvenient for them, but there are workarounds that you can use to get around the obstacles.

What we need to do and what we do in this legislation is we make a very simple proposition to the entire world. Banks all around the world will understand that if this legislation becomes law, they have a choice to make: They can do business with Russian banks or they can do business with the United States of America, but they can't do both. That is not a tough decision for the world's banks. The overwhelming majority and all of the significant ones will choose to do business with the United States. That shuts down the Russian banking industry. That shuts down the revenue stream for Vladimir Putin. That shuts down the money that is funding this appalling, atrocious military campaign.

Are there any consequences to us? It is possible that for some period of time, there would be somewhat higher energy prices. We don't import very many Russian energy products. We shouldn't be importing any at this point. We don't import much. But the fact is, we can make up for a disruption in supply by enhancing our own production and encouraging an increase on the part of swing producers who are much more closely allied with us than with the Russians.

The Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian people's elected leaders have been absolutely heroic. They are fighting for their very lives. And, as I say, if Putin does not conclude that this was all a very big mistake, then it doesn't end with Ukraine.

I join my colleagues in urging the adoption of this legislation.

I yield the floor.