Floor Statements

Mr. President, I rise to put the leadership of the House, the Senate, and the President of the United States on notice. I will not consent to any expedited passage of any spending bill that provides any more American aid to Ukraine.

It is as if no one has noticed that we have no extra money to send to Ukraine. Our deficit this year will exceed $1.5 trillion. Borrowing money from China to send it to Ukraine makes no sense. It is not as if we have some sort of rainy day fund sitting around with trillions of dollars, a pot of money, and we are just going to send it to Ukraine. We are going to borrow it. When we borrow it and create new money to pay for that borrowing, we create the inflation that is plaguing our economy.

Since the beginning of Russia's war on Ukraine, the American taxpayers have provided Ukraine with $113 billion. Over the 583 days of war, between February 24, 2022, and the end of the month, that averages $6.8 billion per month or $223 million per day. There are a lot of things that we need to fix in our country before we borrow money to try to perpetuate a war in another country.

When will the aid requests end?

When will the war end?

Can someone explain what victory in Ukraine looks like?

President Biden certainly can't. His administration has failed to articulate a clear strategy or objective in this war, and Ukraine's long-awaited counteroffensive has failed to make meaningful gains in the East. With no clear end in sight, it looks increasingly like Ukraine will be yet another endless quagmire funded by the American taxpayer.

That is why public support for the war is waning. A CNN poll from August shows that a majority of Americans now oppose Congress authorizing additional funding to Ukraine. Now, there are those in the Senate who would refuse to listen to these voices, voices coming from a war-weary nation, and who would hold the Federal Government hostage by inserting $24 billion more for Ukraine. They are talking about saying the only way government stays open--the only way we avoid a shutdown-- is by shoveling more American taxpayer dollars to Ukraine. They are going to link keeping the government open with more money to Ukraine, and I am here to say that I am not going to agree to it, and I will not let them shut down the government simply because they want to send more of your hard-earned tax dollars to Ukraine. Either the American people fund an endless war in Ukraine or the ``uni-party'' threatens to shut down the government.

This is a clear dereliction of duty, and I will not stand for it. Colleagues, as representatives of the American people, you should not stand for it either. The bill that comes before us should be about funding our government, not somebody else's government. I will not give consent to a bill that includes funding for Ukraine in keeping our government open.

As elected officials, we have an obligation to pursue a foreign policy that advances the security and prosperity of our country. Funneling billions of dollars that have to be borrowed into the meat grinder of eastern Ukraine does neither. The longer this conflict continues, the greater the risk that miscalculation or purposeful escalation draws the United States into direct conflict with Russia. Russia's military may have a bloody nose, but Moscow still maintains the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Let's not pretend that the U.S. involvement in this war comes without risks.

If that is not bad enough, we lack effective oversight mechanisms to ensure that the hard-earned American tax dollars don't fall prey to waste, fraud, and abuse. For over a year now, I have been asking for a special inspector general to make sure they are not stealing our money. We have had one in Afghanistan, and his team of economists and technicians have overseen and found billions of dollars' worth of waste that they have saved. We need the same thing in Ukraine, a special inspector general to make sure they are not stealing our money.

When that has come before a vote in the Senate, the majority party here says: No, we just want to spend the money. We don't care. Some Republicans have gone along with this as well, and they have voted against an inspector general. It is a terrible abuse of our spending authority to spend money overseas in a war and not make sure that they are not stealing it.

So in addition to the colossal cost of the war, we end up paying a corruption tax. Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries on the planet--maybe second only to Russia. Corruption runs deep through Ukraine, and there is plenty of evidence that it has run rampant since Russia's invasion.

As President Zelenskyy landed in New York earlier this week, we learned that corruption concerns in Ukraine's Ministry of Defense resulted in the firing of six Deputy Defense Ministers. This comes 2 weeks after the firing of Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, who was removed after it was discovered that the Ministry of Defense had mishandled military contracts.

Last month, Zelenskyy fired all 24 regional military recruitment chiefs because they were ``involved in illegal activities, including enrichment.''

Last October, we learned that U.S. shipments of grenade launchers, machineguns, rifles, bulletproof vests, and thousands of rounds of ammunition were ending up in the hands of criminal gangs and weapons traffickers posing as humanitarian organizations. And what did the Senate do? They voted against a special inspector general to make sure they are not stealing our money.

What are we doing? Is this fair to the American people?

Millions of Americans are struggling each day to make ends meet. Millions of Americans are struggling to provide for their families and put food on the table.

Can we honestly look our constituents in the eye and tell them that this is a good investment of their dollars?

Some say the war in Ukraine is a fight to save democracy, but those who

say that need to be honest with themselves. Ukraine is far from a shining example of democracy. And while the strain of war can make for questionable government actions, we have to live with them when the war is over.

For all the platitudes about America supporting democracy and making the world safe for democracy--the Woodrow Wilson advocates among us-- the biggest recipient of American welfare, Ukraine, canceled its next Presidential election. You are telling me we are sending $100 billion to a country that is not going to have elections? We are going to send $100 billion to a country that now has, what, a President for life?

They say: Well, we could, but it is difficult.

Does anybody remember the American Civil War, where 600,000 people died and yet we didn't miss an election?

They canceled the Presidential election. We should cancel our aid as a response.

This is not the only concerning development in Ukraine. Despite Zelenskyy's charm offensive this week, his actions also deserve scrutiny. Citing national security concerns, Zelenskyy has banned Orthodox churches oriented toward the Russian Orthodox Church and has ordered Ukrainian law enforcement to raid churches and arrest priests.

He has banned the political opposition. How do you have a democracy if you are not going to have elections and you ban the opposition? He suspended 11 political parties, including the Opposition Platform--For Life, the second largest party in Ukraine's Parliament and the one which held 44 seats.

He has attacked free speech by banning opposition media and increasing his government's regulatory power over journalists. It hardly sounds democratic to me.

Earlier this year, he signed into law a bill that allows Ukraine's state broadcasting council to regulate all media in Ukraine. The council can impose mandatory orders, fines, restrict content from search engines, and even outright suspend media outlets without a court decision. It hardly sounds very democratic to me.

If these actions sound like the actions of an authoritarian regime, if you suspect these do sound like an authoritarian regime, you are right.

This past July, a Swiss intelligence report observed ``authoritarian traits'' in Zelenskyy, as he tries to push the mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, out of contention for Ukraine's 2024 Presidential elections. Citing martial law, Zelenskyy stated that those elections will not take place.

Martial law, no elections, banning opposition parties, this is where your $100 billion has gone, and they are not done.

We don't have the money. The money is being borrowed. We borrow the money from China to send it to Ukraine.

In 2021, Zelenskyy fired multiple government officials, including his Prime Minister, for investigating a Ukraine oligarch who just happened to be a key backer of Zelenskyy's Presidential campaign. The United States placed sanctions on this oligarch for his involvement in significant corruption, and earlier this month, he was finally arrested. Clearly, Ukraine and the regime are not paragons of democracy.

But this is not just about what Ukraine is or is not with respect to government. This is about American interests in our national security. Every day this war continues is another spin of the roulette wheel with another chance of it stopping on Armageddon, and we are paying for the privilege.

We cannot continue with business as usual. We cannot continue to put the needs of other countries above our own. We cannot save Ukraine by dooming the U.S. economy, and we certainly cannot save Ukraine by fighting a war with Russia.

As we go further and further into debt, we become weaker. It is not just that this is not helping our national security; the very threat to our national security is our debt. The more we send money overseas, the more we deplete our munitions, the worse things get.

No matter how sympathetic we are to the Ukrainian people, we must put the American people first; and to that end, I encourage my colleagues to oppose any effort to hold the Federal Government hostage for Ukraine funding.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the Senate still mandates a COVID booster vaccine for pages. The Senate COVID vaccine mandate for pages continues despite the fact that the Senate voted 83 to 11 to repeal the military COVID vaccine mandate. So why in the world would we continue a mandate on pages that we have repealed for our soldiers? Is there any science to support continuing this mandate? The answer is an emphatic no.

The science has been clear since the early spring of 2020. Healthy children are not seriously affected by COVID. In fact, several large studies show that healthy children are rarely hospitalized and that deaths from COVID in healthy children are virtually nonexistent.

Dr. Martin Makary of Johns Hopkins describes a large, nationwide study in Israel that found that the risk of COVID death in people under 30 with two vaccines was essentially zero. A nationwide study from Germany showed zero COVID deaths among children over 5 who had no comorbidities. Even the head of the WHO, Soumya Swaminathan, concluded that there is no evidence right now that suggests healthy children and adolescents need boosters. Yet here we are, with Democrats desperately clinging to COVID vaccine mandates for young people who have essentially zero risk of dying from COVID.

Common sense should prevail, and the Senate should repeal this mandate, just as we did for our young soldiers. We shouldn't allow politics to infect and cloud commonsense judgment.

The vaccine committees that make recommendations for vaccines actually don't recommend COVID boosters for young, healthy individuals. The FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee voted to limit COVID vaccines to adults over 65. They wanted, because of the risk profile of the COVID vaccine, to limit it to people who were at risk for dying from COVID. A CDC vaccine panel also voted against recommending boosters for young, healthy individuals. But these committees that have lifelong scientists on them who voted not to advise the booster vaccine for adolescents were overruled by a political appointee, Biden appointee Rochelle Walensky.

Dr. Paul Offit, who is the director of the Vaccine Education Center and professor of pediatrics and infectious disease at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, wrote that ``a healthy young person with [two COVID vaccines] is extremely unlikely to be hospitalized with covid, so the case for risking any side effects--such as myocarditis--diminishes substantially.'' Dr. Offit, a lifelong proponent of vaccines, even advised his own son not to get the COVID booster.

The argument against mandating COVID boosters on young, healthy people is not just that they are unnecessary but that the COVID boosters may actually harm young individuals. Reports of heart inflammation or myocarditis after COVID vaccines have been consistent and worldwide.

A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Cardiology examined 23 million people across Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden and found that the risk of myocarditis increased with COVID vaccination, particularly after the second dose. This is exactly why several European countries, including Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, restrict the use of COVID vaccines among young, healthy people. Some countries, such as South Africa and England, recommend only one COVID vaccine to avoid the risk of myocarditis.

A study in the Journal of Medical Ethics similarly found about 1.5 cases of myocarditis per 10,000 COVID vaccines but with 80 percent of the kids who suffer from a heart inflammation still having symptoms 3 months later.

Drs. Prasad and Knudsen looked at 29 studies across 3 continents and also found an increase in myocarditis after COVID vaccines. The studies reviewed by Prasad and Knudsen showed a little more than 2 cases of myocarditis per 15,000 vaccines.

Even the CDC admits that myocarditis occurs about once per 15,000 vaccines.

Dr. Tracey Beth Hoeg looked at the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and found 1.62 adverse cardiac events per 10,000 vaccines. Now, that doesn't sound like a high number, but we are talking about a perfectly healthy kid. How would you feel if your perfectly healthy young football player or band member is given the vaccine and comes home with a heart inflammation? It is actually diagnosed with rising heart enzymes the same way that a heart attack is diagnosed. Hoeg found that the risk of myocarditis was five times greater than the risk of hospitalization from COVID.

So you are asking yourself, well, could my kid go to the hospital or could he get a heart inflammation? Both are rare, but the chance of your kid getting a heart inflammation from the vaccine is five times greater than your kid being hospitalized from COVID.

The Vaccine Safety Datalink similarly found a little over 2 cases of myocarditis per 15,000 vaccines.

This is across the scientific literature, across all the continents, across the world, and is a consistent finding that even our government admits to. But the Democrats want submission. They don't want you to have the choice to keep your kid safe and make a decision whether or not your kid, who may well have already had COVID, needs yet another vaccine.

Why are we forcing these kids to do something that I would say is against medical advice to be a page in our program here? The Senate continues to look away from all the evidence of myocarditis. In each of these studies, the risk of myocarditis increases with each vaccine. About 90 percent of the myocarditis or heart inflammation occurs after the second vaccine. Yet, inexplicably, the Senate pages are being mandated to take three vaccines. There are all kinds of compromises. You could say one; you could say two; but three--you are increasing the risk with each successive vaccine. Not only are three COVID vaccines unwarranted for young, healthy individuals, this mandate actually risks their health.

It is the height of malpractice to subject young, healthy kids to three COVID vaccines. In fact, nowhere in the examination or discussion of whether they should have the vaccine is there any discussion of whether they have had COVID.

So what is a vaccine? It is meant to simulate having had the infection. Shouldn't they tell us the data on children or adults? If you have had the infection, what is your chance of getting it again? What is your chance of going to the hospital? What is your chance of dying from COVID if you have already had it? They won't tell us for adolescents because the answer is zero.

Originally, the logic of advocates for the COVID vaccine mandates argue that the vaccines were not necessarily for the children but to protect their parents and grandparents. This argument now holds no water, as even the zealous advocates of mandates, such as Biden's CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, admit that COVID vaccines do not anymore prevent transmission. So the side of the people promoting these mandates admits they don't stop transmission. Now, they may well still reduce hospitalization and death if you are in the target category--the elderly or those with health disease--but for young, healthy kids, there is no effect other than to increase their risk of a heart inflammation.

A Danish study confirms that by December 2021, the COVID vaccine's effectiveness was less than 10 percent. The virus had mutated on, and the vaccine had not been changed.

A study from January 2022 of over 1.2 million children in New York shows that the vaccine effectiveness was 10 percent. It wasn't stopping transmission, it wasn't stopping them from getting the disease, and it wasn't protecting their health.

No serious scientist now argues that COVID vaccines stop transmission--no one. Yet here we are, with Democrats saying: You are not smart enough to make your own decisions. We will make these medical choices for you.

When we look at the effectiveness of the COVID booster, we ask, what is the science toward whether or not a booster is effective? Isn't this booster now formulated against the newer variants? Yes, the booster is directed against newer variants, but about every 3 months or so, the virus changes enough that the latest vaccine is no longer effective.

In fact, the CDC has largely given up testing the boosters and the new vaccines for effectiveness. Instead, in pushing for all children to get COVID booster vaccines, the CDC doesn't argue that the booster stops transmission; it doesn't argue that it prevents hospitalization or death. So what argument does the CDC have for continuing to promote boosters on our children? The CDC readily admits the vaccines don't stop transmission in any group.

As to hospitalization and death, the CDC can't show any evidence that the booster lessens hospitalization or death among young people. Why? Because the rate is already virtually zero. It is hard to prove that the booster is helping anything when no healthy kids are dying from

Mr. President, the accusation has been made that my purpose is somehow to undermine vaccines and have people question vaccines. But, obviously, the arguments were not listened to because in no part of my arguments or any of my public statements have I ever said anything in general that vaccines are bad. In fact, as a physician, I am most fascinated by the development of vaccines. The stories of the development of the smallpox vaccine and the polio vaccine were all tremendous scientific successes, and there continue to be. My argument is simply for medical freedom.

Now, there has been a disingenuous argument made by the other side. They say that I am proposing a mandate, that this will be a legal mandate and that there is no mandate.

If you want to be a page, there is a mandate. Now, they say you can just choose not to be a page, but this affects the rest of our society.

So if your kid gets into Yale or Princeton or Harvard or the University of Chicago, many of those schools follow the lead of the Senate, follow the lead of the Senate doctors, and say your kid has to have three vaccines. But if you look at the evidence carefully that I have laid out, you will find that the scientific studies across all continents, across the world, across the United States--studies of millions of people--show that the vaccines have some downside and danger, particularly for children.

Not once have I said that the elderly shouldn't be vaccinated. In fact, for my 92-year-old and 86-year-old in-laws, we suggested and tried to get them the vaccine as soon as we could. My wife was vaccinated. Now, I chose not to be vaccinated because I had the disease in the first couple weeks of COVID and had immunity.

And the studies turned out--and these are studies of over a million people in California and New York. The studies turned out to show that actually having had the disease does give you immunity, and it is actually twice as potent as the vaccine.

When I say that, the left gets apoplectic, and they say: Oh, my goodness, you are saying people should just get sick to get immunity.

I am not saying that at all. But I am saying that, if you have gotten sick, you have immunity. And we should be honest with people because some people have had two vaccines and they want to know: Do I need a third one?

Well, let's release the data on people who have had two vaccines plus COVID, and tell us how many people are subsequently getting it again, going to the hospital, or dying. Wouldn't you want to know that before you take your third, fourth, fifth, six, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth vaccine? Release the data. But, in a free country, we make these decisions.

The other side argued that, well, what if one of the pages has health conditions. No part of our resolution says anything about them not getting a vaccine. Anybody in this country can freely get a vaccine. If their parents and they decide to get a vaccine, by all means, do it. Nothing in my resolution would prevent pages or anyone else from getting a vaccine. What I am arguing for is freedom.

As far as the idea that this will be permanent and unwavering and won't be able to recognize what new diseases come upon us, every new disease requires reevaluation--every new disease. It doesn't mean the concept of freedom changes. What would happen is everyone will still evaluate this.

The evaluation of this vaccine when it first came out at the end of 2020, early 2021, was different than it is now, frankly. It is also different if you have had it. People should just be honest with you.

I am not saying don't take a booster or that you can't take a booster. Go take all you want. I am saying the government's job should be to give you information, and I am saying the opposite of what he actually made a point of.

Vaccine hesitancy or people undermining the belief that vaccines work comes from people who tell you things that are dishonest and untrue. There is no science--and I am adamant about what I am saying here. There is no science that the booster for your children reduces the transmission of the disease. There is no reduction in your child's ability to get COVID if they take a COVID booster--zero. The other side accepts this. Rochelle Walensky, Biden's nominee, accepts this--no change in transmission with the vaccine.

How about hospitalization and death? There is still some data that people at risk for this can have reduced hospitalization, not transmission. They can still catch it, but maybe reduced hospitalization and death.

Most of this data came in the previous iterations, when we had the wild variety in 2020. Then we got Delta. Then we got Omicron. But we have now advanced two or three iterations out. And the one thing we are lucky about that the government should be honest with you is that with each successive iteration, with each successive mutation and variant, the good news is this: It has become less deadly. It has become less deadly because the virus is now less deadly but also because the community has more immunity. So immunity has developed; the virus has evolved to become less deadly, and we are in a much better situation.

But government medicine and government health policy shouldn't be about telling Americans what to do. It should be about giving information. The government should never be in the business of mandating, whether it is masks or vaccines or any of this other stuff. You wear it. You do it if you want--your body, your choice.

But there is a lot of conflicting data here, and you really need to be informed to make an informed choice. There is some data the government is still preventing from being released so you can't tell.

With regard to the masks, we now know that there was a meta-analysis of 78 different randomized controlled studies called the Cochrane analysis, and they found that masks did not prevent the transmission in public. In fact, what they found was there was no evidence that more significant mandates or more significant use changed the transmission at all.

This had been the accepted conclusion by all of the medical world before 2020. We had never advised masks in public for influenza because with influenza, the size of the virus--the same as the size of COVID-- is much smaller than the pores of the mask. We found people really cannot wear the masks without touching them. We found that air goes around the mask. But, ultimately, we looked at public, large populations, and we found that they just didn't prevent the disease.

Does that mean you can't wear a mask? No. Wear a mask if you think it makes you more healthy. In the hospital, they said: Well, doctors wear them.

Of course we do. If you go into a COVID patient's room--and I volunteered in the hospital after I got COVID. I got it very early, and I felt comfortable going in there because I had already had the disease. But wearing a mask made sense to go into the room of someone with COVID. We wore the N95 mask because it actually, if worn properly, will protect from the particles. We also washed our hands, wore gloves, and wore gowns. And as we came out, we took off the gloves, the gowns, and the masks and threw them away immediately. And we did it again into the next patient's room.

Done properly, there can be some--it still doesn't work completely because, still, a lot of doctors and nurses got COVID, but it is probably worth a try.

In the public setting, it just doesn't work, frankly. Nobody can do that. A lot of people don't know this, but the N95 mask--in which, actually, the pores are small enough--works with something called an electrostatic charge. And after you breathe into it for about 4 hours, the moisture from your exhaled breath actually changes the electrostatic charge, and it is not as effective in preventing the ingress or egress of the COVID virus.

But, really, what we are arguing here--there can be two sides to every argument. What we are arguing about, what we are discussing is who should make the choice. The Democratic majority believes that they should make the choices for your healthcare and that kids belong to them.

This is the same argument we had in education in Virginia, when you had the parents in Northern Virginia saying, ``We want to be involved in our children's education,'' and you had the Democratic nominee for Governor in Virginia come out in a debate and say that kids don't belong to their parents; the school will make these decisions; it is none of your business; stay out of it.

That is what they are telling the pages and their parents--that it is none of their business, their healthcare.

And it could be different for any of them. If a page had a kidney transplant or has leukemia and their parents want them to have the vaccine, it is probably a reasonable thing to do. But if they are young and healthy and have no medical problems, it turns out, if you look objectively at the data, that they have five times greater risk of getting a heart inflammation than they do of being hospitalized for COVID. These are the statistics. People should just be aware of that.

And good, honest people could still disagree on this. But what happens in a free country is you make your decision. You make your decision of which doctor you take them to. If you don't appreciate the opinion of that doctor and you don't trust that doctor, you go to another. And sometimes, it is complicated. Sometimes, mothers and fathers don't agree.

But who wants to give a political party the power to make these decisions for your children? How would you feel if your young, healthy football player or band member or choir member got the COVID vaccine and then has a heart problem that permanently impairs them for the rest of their life, when they had zero chance of dying from COVID and virtually no chance of being hospitalized?

Wouldn't you want your government to release the data on what it means if your kid has already had COVID? Let's say your kid has already had one or two vaccines and they have already had COVID. What does that mean? Don't you think having COVID might replace the need for more vaccines?

Your immunity is also broader. The vaccine gives immunity to one protein on the surface, the S protein on the surface of the cell. When you actually get infected, your body destroys the cells that have the virus in, and, as the virus empties out its inner contents, nucleic capsids and nuclear proteins, you actually get a broader immunity.

Now, the left misinterprets this. The left says: You want everybody to get sick, and people are going to die.

I don't want anybody to get sick. All I am telling you is people should be given the information. Most of us have had COVID. What does it mean? What does it mean if you have had two vaccines and COVID? What does that mean toward your future? What does it mean toward your need for more vaccines?

But, ultimately, what we are talking about here is freedom. What we are talking about is who should make the medical choices: the government, the Democratic Party, or whether or not we should leave this to parents and their kids. And I, for one, say that we ought to have medical freedom. In a free country, every individual should be free to make those decisions.

Mr. President, I rise in opposition to Democrats' mandates that forced our young Senate pages to be vaccinated three times. In a free society, no one should be forced to take an injection; no one should be forced to have a surgery; no one should be forced to submit to a medical procedure--particularly a medical procedure that was approved under emergency-use authorization.

Democrats' support for medical choice when it comes to vaccines appears to be inconsistent and selective. But I fear they won't be persuaded by any arguments towards liberty, so I would like to direct the majority of my remarks to the actual science about whether or not adolescents should have to be forced to have three COVID vaccines.

Initially, there were arguments made saying: We must forcibly vaccinate these kids or they will infect the older folks, the antiquarian Senators. But it turns out that argument fails because the science in the end showed that the vaccine didn't prevent transmission of the disease.

In fact, in August 2021, CDC Director Rachel Walensky admitted for COVID-19 that the vaccine does not stop transmission:

Our vaccines are working exceptionally well . . . But what

they can't do anymore is prevent transmission.

So the government, the proponents, those for the mandates argue: Well, we have to do it; it will stop the disease and we won't have any more spread.

Well, it turns out that wasn't true. The vaccine does not stop transmission. With that, it should have been the end of the arguments for mandates, because you are no longer talking about your health versus someone else's health. The only argument that those who are for the mandates argue now and those who argue for taking the vaccine is that it reduces your health risk--the individual who chooses to get vaccinated. However, when you look at the data, that appears only to be true for targeted populations.

If you are at risk for being hospitalized or dying from COVID, over age 75, immunocompromised, have other health concerns, there is some argument for a vaccine. But for a young, healthy person, there is no logical argument. If you look and ask yourself will taking a booster reduce transmission, the argument is no. Whether you are at risk or not, it does not reduce transmission.

If you are at risk for hospitalization or death, it may well reduce that. But the young pages we are talking about are not at risk for that. In fact, when we look at it, throughout Europe, there was a study of 23 million folks--young folks--and they found the death rate was zero. Israel looked at this: Death rate zero for young, healthy people. Germany looked at this, ages 5 to 17: Death rate for young, healthy people, zero.

And people say, well, what is the big deal? The vaccine is not that big a deal. You know, certainly, it is not going to hurt them. It has to be better than having COVID. Well, it turns out when you weigh the risks versus the benefits for a particular age group, it is actually not true. If you look at the risks of side effects from the vaccine-- and the main worrisome side effect that we are concerned with is an inflammation of the heart called myocarditis or pericarditis--a study by Prasad and Knudsen looked at 29 different studies and found that the incidents, averaged out, was a little over 2 per 15,000.

The Vaccine Safety Datalink looked at this again and found also it was about 2, 2.5 out of 15,000. Even the CDC admits that the risk of myocarditis for young people is about 1 in 15,000. Tracey Beth Hoeg looked at a retrospective study of those who have been injured by vaccines and found the incidence of adverse cardiac events was about 1.62 per 10,000. So it's not like every kid is going to get myocarditis, but you have to weigh the incidence of 1 or 2 or 3 out of 15,000 getting a serious disease that could affect their health or even debilitate them.

The risks and benefits are different for every individual. That is why in a free society, the individual or the individual and their parents make this decision with their doctor; sometimes they get more than one opinion. But we don't mandate--in a free society, we don't just tell them: Do what you are told or else. But that is what is happening.

It is not just happening here in the Senate--although, the Senate is setting a terrible example for the country. Many universities are still doing this. It is actually medical malpractice to require these vaccines for kids. It turns out when you look at the incidence of myocarditis, over 90 percent of the heart inflammation that occurs in young people occurs after the second dose.

You can get rid of 90 percent of--admittedly, not a real common problem--but you can get rid of 90 percent of the risk of this vaccine by not requiring more than one. But we are not talking about just the second dose, where 90 percent of the inflammation comes from the second dose. We are talking about Senate Democrats--because Republicans would like to get rid of this--Senate Democrats are requiring three vaccines. There is absolutely no scientific evidence. In fact, when this went to the committee studying this, the first committee that looked at this was the FDA Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, and Dr. Paul Offit sits on this committee.

They voted not to advise giving the booster to anyone unless they are over 65. They said: Let's look at the risks and the benefits. The disease COVID appears to be affecting the older generation. They are more at risk. We can put up with some risk for the vaccine; but for the kids, it is not worth it. The committee voted.

So then it went from the FDA's committee to the CDC's vaccine committee. Guess what? They voted against recommending the booster also. They said, reserve the booster for those who are at risk, for at- risk populations.

So how did we get a booster mandate? How did we get a booster advice from the CDC saying everybody from the age of 2 months should get a booster? How did we get it? The CDC political appointee of the Biden administration overrode the FDA vaccine committee and overrode the CDC committee.

Dr. Paul Offit was and still is on the Vaccine Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, and he voted to reserve the booster for those at risk. He is the director of Vaccine Education Center and professor of pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

He is not someone who is opposed to vaccines. He spent his whole life advocating for vaccines. He is on a committee that has approved the COVID vaccine. He just simply said the vaccines should be targeted, and it should be extended and advised--not even mandated but advised--for people over 65 but not for kids. His committee voted no. The FDA committee on vaccines voted no; don't give the vaccine to kids.

The CDC committee on vaccines voted no; don't give it to kids.

What do Senate Democrats want? Put their heads in the sand and make a political decision because they love central authority to mandate that these kids get three vaccines, even though the science goes against all of it.

Paul Offit, when asked whether or not his son who was 24 would get the vaccine, he said:

He shouldn't get the vaccine.

So we are stuck with a situation where there is no evidence and no historical precedent for mandating this kind of treatment. There is no historical precedent for mandating that the Senate and Senate Democrats intervene between the doctor of these children and making their own medical decisions. It is taking away the idea that risk and benefit are debated and discussed based on your risks and benefits. So what we find is that advice that actually probably is good, if you are over 65, to consider getting a booster--although it still should be voluntary--we are going against the best advice to actually promote that these kids get a vaccine that may well be harmful to them.

The CDC has admitted it doesn't stop transmission. But then you want to ask yourself, what are other countries--what are they doing around the world? They looked at 23 million people, ages 12 and up, in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. What did they find? They found that after two doses of the mRNA COVID vaccine, the risk of myocarditis was higher than compared with those who were not vaccinated. This is exactly why much of Europe is now limiting the vaccine and not giving the vaccine to certain age groups.

What they found in these studies is that adolescent males, particularly between the ages of 12 and 26, are at a heightened risk for this. In fact, Tracy Beth Hoeg, in her study, looked at the possibility of adverse cardiac events versus a possibility that someone their age could go to the hospital over a 120-day period. They found that the possibility of an adverse cardiac effect was about five times greater than any of these kids even going to the hospital.

But what we did find is--and this is why several countries have actually limited this--Germany, France, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway now restrict the mRNA vaccine and don't advise giving the vaccine to this age group, particularly don't advise giving them three vaccines.

A study in December in the Journal of Medical Ethics found about 14.7

cases of myocarditis--actually, 1.47 cases per 10,000 in ages 18 to 29. They also found that those who had the heart inflammation, 3 months later were still suffering from the inflammation of the heart.

Dr. Offit, who sits on the committee that voted against recommending this for adolescents and for children, wrote in an op-ed that ``[a]healthy young person with two mRNA vaccine doses is extremely unlikely to be hospitalized with covid, so the case for risking any side effects--such as myocarditis--diminishes substantially.'' That is why they did recommend against the third vaccine, which is exactly the opposite of what the Democrats are doing. They do and want to mandate three vaccines on these kids.

As one editorial put it last year, if being boosted becomes a prerequisite for participation in normal life, the vaccine's diminishing efficacy means the boosting campaign will never end.

Dr. Marty Makary, professor of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. government is pushing Covid-19 vaccine boosters

for 16- and 17-year-olds without supporting clinical data. A

large Israeli population study, published in the New England

Journal of Medicine . . . found that the risk of Covid death

in people under 30 with two vaccine shots was zero.

Germany showed zero deaths among healthy kids ages 5 to 17.

There is no scientific rationale for mandating three COVID vaccines for healthy kids. Even World Health Organization Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan said last year that ``there's no evidence'' that suggests healthy children and adolescents need booster shots--no evidence. This is the head of the WHO. These are not opponents of vaccines. These are people saying that there is no evidence and that it might harm these kids to get vaccinated, and yet Democrats will vote today, the lot of them, to say that basically we must force these kids to get three vaccines or they can't be up here.

Now, you might say: Well, gosh, we are just so worried and we don't know everything and so what do we do?

Well, how about all the other people who work up here? At any point in time, the other 10 or 15 people in this room, are they required to get vaccines? No. We are only requiring one group subset to do it. These kids have to get three vaccines. They are the least likely to get sick from COVID. They get COVID, and they don't even know it. The vaccine doesn't stop them from getting COVID. They have naturally acquired immunity as well. If you don't ask yourself what that means, you are not paying attention to any science.

Wouldn't you want to know whether they have had it? Even if you really thought a vaccine mandate was great, what if I have already had COVID? Do I need three more vaccines? Because I have already had COVID, I developed natural immunity.

Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard Medical School says that mandating people who have already had COVID that they still get vaccinated makes zero sense from a scientific point of view, and it makes zero sense from a public health point of view. A study in Lancet supported this view, stating that current evidence does not appear to show a need for boosting in the general population.

That is why the FDA committee and the CDC committee both voted against advising it. It is not only bad advice; it is a horrific mandate. It would be one thing if you want to give advice to tell people that we think it is a good idea, but it is another to tell them they have got no choice. Do you want to participate in the elite program here in the Nation's Senate? You can't come unless you do what Democrats want, submit to three vaccines, even though it may increase your risk of heart inflammation. They don't care. Mandates are fine.

A study at Lancet looked at this and said that it was a bad idea. It says: Currently available evidence does not show the need for widespread use of booster vaccination in populations that have received an effective primary vaccine or who have already been infected with the disease.

When we consider the rules for the pages, we ought to ask: Will these policies be expected to continue indefinitely? The virus mutates about every 3 or 4 months. You have got a brandnew virus. You have got a virus now you didn't have 3 or 4 months ago. The vaccines also lose their potency. Are you going to mandate until the end of time? It is also not the same.

Are you going to stick your head in the sand and say this is 2020? No, the virus in 2020 actually was more lethal.

One of the good things about viral evolution is they typically evolve to become less dangerous and more transmissible. You can catch COVID by looking at somebody wrong, but fortunately it is not as deadly as it once was.

Are there still some people dying from COVID? Yes, people who are at high risk. If you go to a doctor and you have chest pain and you are 12 years old, he doesn't or she doesn't treat you the same way as if you would go in and you are 60 years old.

If you walk into an emergency room and you are 15 years old with chest pain, they usually might think of asthma or other problems but typically not a heart attack. People are treated differently based on their age. Doctors think of what is common in that age group.

If I go in with chest pain, they are going to do heart enzymes. They are going look for a heart attack. That is the first thing they are going to look for. But they don't treat everyone the same.

This is blindly what we are being told by the Democrats; that everybody is the same, submit or else. But it is not just the pages whom they are hurting here. It is not just the pages that they are increasing their risk for this heart inflammation. They are setting an example and other universities are doing it. Still, tens of thousands of young American kids are being forced to take three vaccines.

You say: Well, they are not being forced. They can choose not to go to Yale or Harvard. What if your dream had always been to go to one of these schools? You have to give up your medical freedom and your good judgment just simply so you can do exactly what Democrats tell you to do?

Multiple scientific studies have shown a heightened risk of this heart inflammation or myocarditis for children and teenagers after taking the vaccine. Ninety percent of the myocarditis comes after the second or the third vaccine. If you simply went to one vaccine, you would get rid of 90 percent of the problem. And yet, they are still insisting that we do something that is actually medical malpractice, that these kids be forced to take three.

Multiple countries have begun restricting the vaccine for certain age groups. Germany, France, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden all have restricted Moderna's vaccine for young people. Norway, South America, and the UK all chose to recommend only one dose of Pfizer due to the risk of cardiovascular side effects for boosters in children. And yet what we would get today is not a discussion, not we are open to compromise, no maybe the science has changed and we will reevaluate it; you will get from the Democrats: No, get three boosters or you can't come to the Senate.

Why is the U.S. Senate choosing to ignore the risk other countries have acknowledged when mandating these vaccines for young people who are in peak physical condition? What happened to a belief in medical choice? What happened to a belief in medical freedom?

Public health measures should be backed up with proof that the benefits outweigh the burdens, and if you want to treat everyone the same--you want to say that teenagers are the same as 75-year-olds--that is not good medicine; that is not good science.

There is no evidence that when it comes to vaccination and booster mandates, especially for teenagers who as a group are less vulnerable to the virus than any Senator, that is why I am asking unanimous consent today that we pass my resolution to get rid of this ridiculous and unscientific mandate.

So, therefore, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 336, which is at the desk; further, that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, in no way, shape, or form have I opposed vaccines for those who are at risk. Back when my in-laws, who are 92 and 86, first became eligible for the vaccine, the first thing we did was call the health department to see if we could get them a vaccine. Unfortunately, the health department wouldn't answer the phone, but they did have a useful message. They said, if we knew anybody who was not wearing a mask, we could report them to the police, but they didn't do anything about vaccines.

But I have never been opposed to vaccines. In fact, a lot of the vaccine hesitancy that we have in our country comes from the unscientific, unfounded, and half-baked ideas of the Democrats on this. When Democrats tell you that we should force 15-year-olds to be vaccinated--because that makes no sense and because their parents know it makes no sense and they know it makes no sense--that leads to the distrust of the government on other fronts.

So I mentioned earlier--and this, apparently, was lost and not necessarily received by the other side--that the FDA committee, in looking at boosters, advised not to give boosters to teenagers. Now, they hide behind that by saying: Oh, there is no mandate. Ask these kids if there is a mandate. Ask their parents. Ask the media. Call them up. Ask them: Is there a mandate? No, they can't be here unless they have three vaccines. There is a mandate. We have the chance to undo the mandate, and that is what the vote would be about.

The FDA didn't even advise giving it. The FDA didn't even advise giving it to them, but they definitely didn't advise mandating it. The CDC said the same thing. The only reason we got any kind of approval for this booster is that the political appointee of the Biden administration overrode both of the vaccine committees in order to approve it.

Normally, you would have to prove efficacy--a reduction in hospitalization. Well, transmission would be one. The Senator came to the floor and said this is a vaccine-preventable disease. Well, this isn't a vaccine-preventable disease because it doesn't stop transmission; it doesn't stop you from getting it.

But here is the thing: If you look at kids and boosters and you want to prove whether they are good for kids--and this is all we are talking about. We are not talking about the elderly or the infirm or people who have risk factors. We are talking about these kids. If you look at these kids and you ask, ``Do they have any risk factors or are any of them dying?'' we will refer to some statistics here. Well, the statistics aren't accurate. If you look at healthy kids--there was not one healthy kid. The answer wasn't a few. It was zero. In Germany, zero healthy kids died. In Israel, zero healthy kids died. A handful of unfortunate cases of children in our country did die. I think it was a little over 100 kids in a country of 330 million, and, sadly, every one of those cases had a severe medical illness and a problem.

I think it is an abomination that they want to say, ``Oh, we are the only ones who care about the million people who died,'' when we are the only ones who have been trying to figure out where this virus came from. For the last 3 years, I have been asking every day: Did this virus escape from a lab?

And not one Democrat will stand up and say: I will help you find out. We will look at it together.

Every Democrat has said: We don't care. We don't know, and we don't want to know where the virus came from.

But if it came from a lab, maybe we should quit funding this research. Should we quit sending our money to China, to a lab that operates in an unsafe manner? That would be a way to show you care about a million people.

But this is, make no mistake, a mandate on these young pages. It is wrong. It is malpractice. It shouldn't happen. There is no scientific evidence, and the government's own vaccine committees don't advise it. Yet Democrats, today, have said they don't care about the pages. They don't care about their parents. They don't care about their medical privacy. They don't care about their ability to discern the risks and benefits of having a medical procedure. So medical choice be damned. Democrats are going to tell you what to do, and just remember that. Just remember that they don't care at all about your own choice about your own body.

Mr. President, the Flat Earth Society is champing at the bit to bring back masks even though the Cochrane analysis has looked at 78 randomized controlled studies and shown that masks didn't stop transmission, didn't stop hospitalization, and didn't lessen deaths. In other words, the masks on a population level had no influence over the spread of COVID. Again, the Flat Earth Society cannot listen and absorb these facts. They want the masks to come back.

In addition, the Flat Earth Society also wants to mandate three COVID vaccines for kids despite no evidence that COVID vaccines reduce transmission, hospitalization, or death for adolescents. Yet, to this very day, Senate pages are required to get three vaccines in order to participate in the program.

I rise today out of a desire to protect the health of the young men and women who serve as Senate pages. I think we can all agree that the Senate wouldn't function very well without the pages.

The very first page was a 9-year-old boy named Grafton Hanson. He was appointed by Daniel Webster back in 1829. In those days, the pages had to refill the inkwells and clean out the spittoons. Things have changed a little bit around here since then. The work isn't quite as messy anymore, but it is still a high-pressure job for a high school student.

From day one, our country's response to the pandemic made the comfortable more comfortable while the working class had to keep on working. And now, in the Halls of Congress, a privileged class can choose whether to get vaccinated while an underclass must abide by COVID dictates. Think about it. The antiquarians of the Senate are not required to be vaccinated, but the young, healthy people--at zero risk for death from COVID--are being forced to be vaccinated three times.

To become a Senate page, you must get a COVID-19 booster shot, but study after study demonstrates that for young and healthy people, the risks posed by the vaccine are greater than the risk from COVID. Let me be clear about that. This is for young, healthy adolescents; the facts are different.

If you are elderly or infirm or have other risk factors, the risks of the disease outweigh the risks of the vaccine, but for young, healthy people, none of them will die from COVID. Almost all of them have either had a vaccine or had the disease or both, but we are mandating that they have three vaccines.

Study after study shows that it makes no sense to mandate COVID vaccinations for teenagers who are healthy and that such a mandate actually may be dangerous to adolescents. A study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association Cardiology examined 23 million people ages 12 and up across Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. It found that after two doses of mRNA vaccine, ``the risk of myocarditis was higher within 28 days of vaccination.'' So they had a risk of developing a heart inflammation within 28 days of the vaccination compared with the group who was unvaccinated and that the risk increased with each successive dose.

So there is a risk, particularly for the ages between 16 and 24, of an inflammation of the heart, and it increases with each successive dose. So if you are going to mandate three vaccines on a group of kids who have zero risk of dying and the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission, protects no one, all you are doing is adding a risk to their health. And for goodness' sake, in a free country, couldn't we let them make their own medical decisions?

This is exactly why European countries, including Germany, France, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, restrict the use of mRNA vaccines for COVID. There are rules for young people. Yet the policy for the Senate pages blindly commands three vaccines for young, healthy people.

A study published in December in the Journal of Medical Ethics found that per million third doses, booster doses, of COVID vaccine, up to 147 cases of myocarditis may be caused in males ages 18 to 29; up to 80 percent of those diagnosed with vaccine-induced myocarditis or pericarditis continue to struggle with cardiac inflammation more than 3 months after receiving a second dose.

Yet, remember, this is a group of people who have zero deaths--zero deaths. There are no deaths of young, healthy people from COVID, and we are mandating that they take three vaccines. We are supposed to be the leaders in this country. What science are we looking at? What science are we obeying? We are reacting in an emotional way. We are promoting hysteria and leading with the wrong example.

Recently, Dr. Vinay Prasad and Dr. Benjamin Knudsen published a review in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation that examined 29 studies across three continents. Six of the 29 studies showed that after two doses of mRNA vaccine, more than 1 in 10,000 males between the ages of 12 and 24 would experience myocarditis.

Think about it. To be a page up here, you send a perfectly healthy young man or woman up here, and then you give them the risk of a serious heart inflammation over a disease that is evolving every 3 or 4 months--such that the vaccine is good for about 3 or 4 months, until it is no longer good--for a disease that was never deadly for children.

Initially, the argument was: Oh, we have to stop the children from transmitting it to the old people. It doesn't

work that way. The only thing even the proponents of the vaccine argue is that the individual vaccinated may have a reduction of hospitalization and death, but those statistics only hold for at-risk populations: the elderly, the immunocompromised, the ill. For young, healthy people, there is no health advantage to being vaccinated, and there is actually a health disadvantage the more vaccines you give them.

It is actually medical malpractice to continue to mandate three vaccines, whether it is in the Senate or in a university, and unfortunately, the example that is being set here in the Senate is being followed in other universities around the country of mandating three vaccines.

A study published recently in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that regardless of sex, among those ages 5 to 39, myocarditis or pericarditis occurred in 1 in every 50,000 after a first booster. With statistics like that, why would we think it is a good idea to insist on boosters for our young, healthy pages who are in their early teenage years?

We are taking the rights of the individual, their parents, and their physicians to make a decision based on their risk factors and their individual parameters, and we are making a blanket rule that says they need to get vaccinated. Yet study after study is showing that the risks of the vaccine exceed the risks of the disease for this particular age group. It is the height of malpractice to subject young people to the greater risk of vaccination simply to satisfy mandates designed to protect bureaucrats from accountability.

Now, I am told that the Democrats will object to this today. The Democrats will stand up and say they know better than your parents. The Democrats will stand up and say they know better than these kids' doctors and that, by golly, if you want to be on the Senate floor, you have to have three vaccines.

Well, guess what. I have got zero. I am standing right here. I have got zero vaccines. I had COVID in the first month of the disease. And, actually, I would have gotten vaccinated, but I got the disease early on, and then all the evidence pointed toward immunity being gained from having the disease. So I didn't bother getting the vaccine. Members of my family got the vaccine. We recommended that my elderly in-laws get the vaccine. But the thing is, we made that choice.

And so here I sit without a vaccine, and I won't wear a mask because they don't work either. Yet then we are telling them. In a month, are we going to be putting them back in masks? The Democrats want everybody in masks. They want the hysteria to return. Why? Because they don't think any of us are smart enough to make our own decisions. They want to make the decision for us. The common man be damned. The working class be damned. Americans be damned. The Democrats are going to tell you to wear a mask, and the Democrats are going to tell you how many vaccines to get.

Well, the vaccine goes out of style. The virus evolves away from the vaccine within a couple of months. How many mandates are there going to be? Why not six mandates? Why not 12? Why not mandate the newest booster that may be more effective than the last booster? Which one are we mandating? They just have to get three vaccines. But it goes against the science.

Let's say you even grant the Democrats that there might be some science on the other side of it. Good. Let the individual make the decision. Whatever happened to the idea of individual choice? Whatever happened to the idea of choice with regard to your body and your medical decisions? The hypocrisy is astounding.

Recently, Drs. Vinay Prasad, Tracy Beth Hoeg, and Ram Duriseti shed light on some of the science surrounding this, on some of the efforts to manufacture studies that artificially bolster the case for mandates. In a letter published this July in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Prasad and his team question an Israeli study that the FDA and our government--Democrats--are trying to use to justify forcing people to take boosters.

This study, they said, shows a 90-percent reduction in death if you take the COVID booster vaccine. And they kind of scratched their heads, and they said: Well, almost nobody is dying anymore because the virus has become less dangerous as it has evolved. More people have immunity, either natural or vaccine immunity. To have a 90-percent reduction in a death rate that is already very tiny just seems a little bit unbelievable.

So they looked at the data from the study, and what they found was that, actually, there was a 90-percent reduction in the booster category for all diseases: cancer, a variety of--diabetic, heart attacks, you name it; people died 90 percent less of the time if you were boosted. It is like: Wow. A booster cures heart disease; it cures diabetes; it cures cancer. No. It turned out the study was flawed and that the group that had been boosted died 90 percent less of the time just because you have got to select it out for a group that was very healthy versus a group that was less healthy.

The study was flawed, and it took scientists with the courage to stand up to the New England Journal and say: Look at the data.

The original authors of the data finally released and said: Whoops. We made a big mistake here. Our study doesn't really prove what we said it proved.

When the FDA approved boosters for kids, did they show that it reduced transmission? No. When they approved vaccines for adolescents, did they show that it reduced hospitalization? No. Did they show that it reduced deaths? No, because no kids are dying from COVID. You can't be less than zero deaths.

How did they approve the vaccine at all for adolescents? How did they approve the booster? They said: If we give them a booster, they make antibodies.

I confronted Anthony Fauci on this, and I said: Well, I can give you a hundred vaccines. Every individual I give it to will make antibodies. That doesn't prove you need it. You need to prove that it does something.

If you give them three vaccines, will they transmit the disease less? No evidence of it. Will they be hospitalized less? No evidence of it. Will they die less often? No evidence. There is no evidence other than the laboratory tests saying they make antibodies but no evidence that they need to make more antibodies.

But one thing we know: If you are a young person who has had COVID recently--even the CDC admits this: If you have had COVID within 3 months and you take a vaccine, you have a profound risk of getting an overly exuberant immune response and having the myocarditis because you have had the vaccine in the middle of an immune response that you are making against the disease.

Yet do you recall anyone at one of these pharmacies that are all handing out the vaccine and pushing it--have you had any example of them saying: Well, have you had COVID recently? Maybe you should wait 3 months. No. Nobody is paying any attention to natural immunity. Nobody is paying any attention to the natural course of the disease. And nobody is really paying any attention to the danger the vaccine presents to young people.

This is not a benign situation. This is a situation where the Democrats are in favor of mandating a vaccine that puts their health at risk. We are telling kids all across America: You cannot come up here unless you get what the Democrats tell you is the best thing for your health. And even though there are some scientists who say that it may actually imperil your health, you don't get a choice; and you can't be part of the nationwide Senate program, you can't be part of this elite group, unless you submit, unless you bend the knee to the Democrats, unless you say: My body belongs to the Democratic Party; my body will be injected with whatever the Democrats tell me I need to do because I don't have control over my medical decisions; the Democratic Party does.

This is obscene, and the Democratic majority should be embarrassed that they are here today telling us that American parents and American families are not smart enough to make their own decisions.

In the letter, Dr. Prasad and his colleagues wrote that the ``[u]nderlying health plays a substantial role in COVID-19-related mortality'' and ``[i]nclusion of mortality not related to COVID-19 in all observational . . .

studies would provide important context.''

So, in other words, it looks like the studies that may have shown any indication that boosters might help were incorrectly performed, but the vast majority of the studies have shown no effect on transmission, hospitalization, or death. They do not exist.

I would love for the Democrats, when they stand up and talk about forcing kids to do this, if they would present the studies for us that show why or show that the booster vaccine actually aids in reduction of transmission, hospitalization, or death of adolescents.

Even from within the government, though, some have resisted the ever- expanding booster mandates. In 2021, the Director and Deputy Director of the FDA's Office of Vaccine Research and Review--not someone who is opposed to vaccines, someone who has been involved with the development and promotion of vaccinations his entire career--resigned, two of these guys resigned, citing White House pressure to approve third doses for all adults, writing damning op-eds critical of the FDA's subsequent decision to do so.

One of these op-eds ran in the Washington Post and was coauthored by Dr. Paul Offit--once again, not an opponent of vaccines, not an opponent of the COVID vaccine, a professor of pediatrics and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, a longtime advocate of vaccines who has been involved in the mainstream pro-vaccine community--objected.

As a member of the FDA's Vaccine Advisory Committee, Dr. Offit did not support widespread boosting. He and two former FDA officials wrote that ``healthy young person[s] with two mRNA vaccine doses is extremely unlikely to be hospitalized with COVID, so the case for risking any side effects--such as myocarditis--diminishes substantially.'' Dr. Offit even advised his own son not to get a booster because he was already well protected against severe disease.

So here we have advocates of the vaccine, mainstream scientists who work in the vaccine community, who have been promoting vaccines for the health of the community. These are not people opposed to vaccines, saying they would not give a booster to their child; they would not give a third COVID vaccine because the risks of the vaccine outweigh the risks of the disease.

This really encapsulates the debate here. Your healthcare is about you. You are not a statistic. The Democrats somehow feel you are a cog in their wheel, and you are just supposed to do what everybody does and do as they say. But really, your healthcare decisions are based on your risks of getting COVID, your risk of dying, being hospitalized, or transmitting it. It is about you. That is why you make the decision. Instead, they want a blanket mandate. And by doing it to the pages here and forcing them to submit to this, what they are doing is setting a terrible example for the country.

One editorial put it this way last year:

If being ``boosted'' becomes a prerequisite for

participation in normal life, the vaccine's diminishing

efficacy means the booster campaign will never end.

What does that mean? The virus is evolving. It is like the flu. It is changing every 3 or 4 months. The vaccine becomes outdated within 3 or 4 months. So if you are at risk, by all means, keep getting the updated vaccine. We are not even mandating the updated vaccine; we are mandating a booster and often a booster that is a year or two old and has no effect at all on the vaccine, even for people who are susceptible to this. But we need to let the individual kids and their parents make this decision.

Dr. Marty Makary is a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He wrote in the Wall Street Journal that ``[t]he U.S. government is pushing COVID-19 vaccine boosters for 16- and 17-year-olds without supporting clinical data. A large Israeli population study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine . . . found that the risk of COVID death in people under 30 with two vaccine shots was zero.''

So there is no science behind this. A large study of the entire country of Israel, which keeps great records on this, found that kids that had been vaccinated twice had zero deaths. Germany showed the same thing--not just a few, not a small number, zero deaths among kids aged 5 to 17.

There is no scientific rationale for mandating three COVID vaccines for healthy kids. Even the World Health Organization's chief scientist, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, said last year that ``there's no evidence right now'' that suggests healthy children and adolescents need booster shots. Even the WHO--one of the most pro-vaccine mandate groups you can find in the world--has said they don't recommend booster shots.

Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard Medical School says that mandating people who have already had COVID still get vaccinated ``makes zero sense''--zero sense--``from a scientific point of view, and it makes zero sense from a public health point of view.''

A study in the Lancet supported this view, stating that ``[c]urrent evidence does not . . . appear to show a need for boosting in the general population, in which efficacy against severe disease remains high.''

What does that mean? Why do they have efficacy? Why can they fight it? Because they are young and healthy, and the disease seems to have a predilection for the elderly. They are young and healthy, but they have already had COVID. They have immunity. And many of them have all been vaccinated. But we aren't demanding even just basic vaccination; we are demanding three vaccines. And what we know is that with each individual vaccine, the risk for heart inflammation goes up. It is less if they have one. It is less if they have two. It is even more, though, if you get to a third.

When we consider the rules for the pages, we ought to ask: Will these policies be expected to continue indefinitely? COVID is with us forever. COVID is now the new flu. Fortunately, it has become less deadly over time. It was quite deadly in 2020, and each successive evolution of the virus has made it less deadly. The death rate is dramatically reduced.

Even at its peak, the death rate was about .3 percent, about three times greater than the seasonal flu. It still meant a million Americans died either from COVID or with COVID, but it is now lessened in severity. Are they going to continue to tell us how to make our healthcare decisions forever? Are Democrats so insistent that they know better than everyone else that we will be beholden to bending the knee and asking their permission to live? Are we going to ask permission whether or not--they will come to us and say: To participate in life, you have to be vaccinated three times. There is no science to back this up.

When it comes to vaccines, although they can benefit the vaccinated person if that person is in a risk category, in Denmark, vaccines were not shown to have any impact on household viral transmission or secondary attack rate.

Even the proponents of the mandates will admit, if forced to admit, the vaccines don't stop transmission. The only thing they can hang their hat on is there is reduced hospitalization, but that only exists if you are in a category of increased risk.

Over a certain age, over a certain weight, have some diseases, immunocompromised, there is some evidence of reduced hospitalization if you have immunity. But actually, it is less so with each subsequent one and really hasn't fully accounted for the natural immunity that people get from having the disease, which still needs to be studied.

Multiple scientific studies have shown, though, that there is a heightened risk of myocarditis--heart inflation--for children and teenagers after taking mRNA COVID vaccine. That is why multiple countries began restricting it for certain age groups. Germany, France, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden all restricted Moderna's vaccine for young people. Norway, South America, and the UK all chose to recommend only one dose of Pfizer due to the risk of cardiovascular side effects for boostering kids.

But what we are going to find out today is the Democratic Party doesn't care about the science, doesn't care about choice with regard to your medical decisions, can't even allow a debate whether you get one, two, or three vaccines, but it is going to insist that, to be part of the U.S. Capitol, the U.S. Senate Page Program, you must bend the knee to the Democratic Party and

do what they say about your vaccines or you can't be a participant.

Why is the U.S. Senate choosing to ignore risks other countries acknowledge when mandating these vaccines for young people who are in peak physical condition?

Public health measures should be backed up with proof that the benefits outweigh the burdens. There is no evidence of that when it comes to vaccination and booster mandates, especially for teenagers, who as a group are less vulnerable to this virus than any Senator.

That is why I ask unanimous consent that the Senate pass my resolution to end all COVID-related mandates for pages who serve in this Chamber.

Mr. President, as in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to S. Res. 332, which is at the desk; further, that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon table.

Mr. President, the argument has been made that we should leave these decisions up to a doctor. Well, the thing is that in America we don't appoint like a doctor as dictator. We don't appoint one doctor. You get a choice. You get to choose your doctor. If you don't like your doctor's advice, you think your doctor's advice is invalid, such as it is in this case, you go to another doctor.

In a free country, the decisions are made by individuals, and each individual will assess their risk.

Now, the argument has been made that there is overwhelming evidence on the record. That is just, frankly, untrue. There is no evidence--and I don't say that lightly--zero--there are zero studies in any of the scientific literature that show that a booster for adolescents reduces transmission, hospitalization, or death--zero.

They only approved the booster to allow you to make the choice of using it by saying that you make antibodies. Making antibodies proves that vaccines work, which no one disputes. Vaccines work to induce the production of antibodies. But the question is, If you have already had COVID, do you need three vaccines if you are a 15-year-old kid? The answer in all the literature is, you don't need that vaccine.

What we found today--he says: Oh, this isn't partisan. Certainly, it is partisan. Do you see any Republicans over here objecting? The Republicans unanimously support getting rid of this mandate. The Democrats are objecting because the Democrats don't think that

individual Americans are smart enough to make their own decisions. The Democrats don't think that these kids and their parents and their doctors can make their decision. They don't believe in choice when it comes to medical decision making. They believe that they know better.

But in this case, it isn't just a matter of taking something that is ineffective; it is mandating a vaccine that threatens the health and well-being of these kids--not just a vaccine, mandating three vaccines with no mention of even whether the kids have already had COVID, which is essentially another inoculation.

So this is a disappointing day, but this is consistent with what we have seen time and again, whether it is having a nationwide emergency mandating that you wear masks in school, masks on planes, vaccines here, vaccines there. This is a desire by the majority party to control your life, to control your medical decision making because they know better.

They want to beg off and say this is about the science. I recited 15 different studies for them. They didn't recite one study because no study exists saying that three vaccines for kids reduces hospitalization, transmission, or death. There is no science. Large, nationwide studies of this problem have gotten a dozen countries to say we shouldn't be giving three vaccines to kids. Half of Europe won't allow you to do it. They won't allow the mandates.

The argument is made, oh, well, we have to do what everybody is doing in schools. Even the colleges--90 percent of the colleges aren't requiring this. This was a bad mandate from the beginning. Most of the colleges have woken up and understand now, one, that this is America and you ought to be able to make your own medical decisions, but, two, that the science points towards booster vaccine mandates actually being a threat to the health and well-being of adolescents.

I am very disappointed, but I think this illustrates where we are in America, where one party thinks they are smarter than every American, smarter than every individual, and they will make your medical decisions for you.

I rest my case.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I rise today to object to the quick passage of H.R. 4470, which seeks to extend the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards Program.

How could anybody be against that? I am actually for it. We should have terrorism standards. But--you know what--we always had these before 9/11. How did it work before the government got involved?

Well, companies had to insure things. If you had a $100-million electric plant and it was at risk for sabotage or a fire or a disruption to the community, you had insurance, and insurance required that you have a fence. I mean, these things happen. It is not as if safety for our utilities and public chemical plants didn't exist before 9/11. So there are ways that the marketplace would take care of this.

This measure, though, which would reauthorize this regulatory program for another 2 years, I think is being rushed through the Senate without due consideration or, really, any consideration at all. The Homeland Security Committee has jurisdiction over the program, yet we have not had any hearings to discuss this program or its effectiveness.

This is part of the problem of government is we tend to reauthorize things without ever examining whether they work, what works, what doesn't work. Some programs might need more money; some programs might need less money. And we might ask ourselves: Do we have any money?

We are $31 trillion, $32 trillion in debt. We borrow about $1 trillion every year. It is easy to be for stuff. Everybody has got something good. Everybody is for something, but where does the money come from? We haven't really had any hearing to discuss this program or its effectiveness since the last time it was authorized, nor has the committee considered any legislation to reform the program.

This program is a regulatory program. It is hundreds of regulations, and it was established to prevent the misuse of hazardous chemicals. But it also fails to understand that every company has a self-incentive to protect hazardous chemicals that is built into the nature of the way they do business.

Facilities that store certain quantities of designated chemicals of interest, though, under this legislation, must undergo a risk assessment inspection every 2 years.

If it is not reauthorized? It has been going on for 20 years. My guess is that the vast majority, if not all, of the utilities and chemical plants in this country have undergone this. My guess is, if the program didn't exist, they would still all have fences and barbed wire and protections against terrorism because they want to protect their investment.

The requirement, though, through government places a burden on business, impeding their potential growth and creating unsurmountable barriers to entry for those who find the regulatory compliance too cumbersome and expensive to even attempt to break into the sector.

This is why, a lot of times, big businesses like regulations. Regulations become a formidable barrier to new companies coming into the business. Why not have a ton of regulations, sort of like banks. All the banking regulations--guess who likes the banking regulations: the big banks, because they can hire more compliance officers. Your local bank in your town can't afford to do it. So the local bank gets gobbled up by the bigger bank because of regulatory burden.

The monetary resources required to implement and maintain these standards are substantial, and the cost implications impact not just private companies but also the Department of Homeland Security.

The United States is trillions of dollars in debt. We cannot continue to just pour money into nonessential government programs. We should have a discussion of what are the private incentives for people to protect their chemical plants, to protect their utilities. There is a long history of this. In fact, it was the history of our country until fairly recently.

The Department of Homeland Security has a consistent track record of creating duplicative programs. Over the past 12 years, the Government Accountability Office--the GAO--has documented over 1,100 cases of duplicative programs created by Congress.

Everybody has a great idea--we are going to fix this--but they don't ever take time to look up and find out that somebody had the idea 3 years before, and they already created a program to fix this. So sometimes we have as many as 80 different programs to fix a problem that has already been fixed previously 80 times.

It should come as no surprise to any of us that our government has grown into a $6.5 trillion leviathan, and this body seems more interested in passing bills than understanding the contents of the bills, the programs, or whether the programs are working.

We saved, though, over $550 billion by removing just half of GAO's identified duplicative programs. Five hundred and fifty billion dollars was saved by taking the time to find out that we already have other programs doing what the new program proposes to do.

I have already expressed a number of concerns about this program, but what should alarm us the most about this reauthorization is that GAO already found much of this program to be duplicative of other Agencies in a report from 2021. That is why I will be introducing and attaching to this bill and letting the bill go, frankly, if we can agree today to attach a small bill, but I think it could have profound implications over government.

This is called the Duplication Scoring Act. What would happen is, every time someone gets a genius idea how they are going to fix your life or fix your business with another law, there would have to be a duplication score, and government would come forward and say ``Well, we have 32 programs that already do the same thing'' or ``We have 32 programs that aren't working that do the same thing.'' It would be what a government should normally do before creating a new program--find out if we already have existing programs.

So I will be asking consent to pass this bill. I will let the program continue, even though I think it has many problems, if we will add a duplication scoring system to all programs in government so we can review whether they already exist and are working. This program would be produced for each bill.

I think all of us can agree that there is no point in passing a bill that already exists in another fashion or already has Agencies that do the same job. Before we unknowingly pass a thousand more of these duplicative, fragmented programs, I urge my colleagues to support my amendment, which would continue the program, allow it to be reauthorized, but at the same time begin having a duplication score on every new proposal.

So I would ask the Senate to modify the current request; that my amendment, which is at the desk, be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

I object, Mr. President. I object.

I call up my amendment No. 438 and ask that it be reported by number.

The United States sent $113 billion in aid to Ukraine. It is impossible to send this much aid this fast into war-torn Ukraine without waste, fraud, and abuse. Yet we are told by the departmental inspectors general that they have not substantiated any cases of fraud. That is not good news. Zero cases mean our oversight is failing.

What our government can't find was uncovered by Ukrainian journalists who uncovered a scandalous contract to buy food for soldiers at grossly inflated prices that led to the resignation of Ukraine's Deputy Defense Minister.

Fortunately, a successful independent oversight body already exists. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction conducted hundreds of audits in Afghanistan and saved over $3 billion for the taxpayers. We already have a war-tested inspector general in Afghanistan who is ready and able to take on the task of oversight of aid to Ukraine.

Let's not waste any more American treasure. A vote for my amendment is a vote for real oversight.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the following interns from my office be granted floor privileges until August 18, 2023: Kate Micallef, Sydney Windhorst, Linden Shelby, Spencer Woodall, and Chloe Truett.

How much time do I have remaining?

Yes.

Could I ask unanimous consent to have one additional minute?

It is unconstitutional for the legislature to change the Congress. While the Constitution provides a role for both the President and the Senate when entering a treaty, it is silent regarding how to exit a treaty.

When the question of treaty determination first arose in 1793, President Washington and his cabinet endorsed the view that the President's Executive power included the ability to unilaterally terminate a treaty, withdraw from the treaty obligations, permitted the U.S. to maintain neutrality in a war between France and Great Britain, and it was done unilaterally by President Washington.

The power to enter treaties is found in article 2, which vests the President with the Executive power. Unlike a legislative body, the President can act with unity and dispatch, precisely the qualities needed to negotiate a treaty. And so the Founders grounded this authority in article 2.

Passing this amendment is tantamount to altering the Constitution, because the amendment would authorize the Senate to infringe upon the Executive powers of the President. The Senate has no voice when exiting a treaty. This would amend the Constitution and is unconstitutional, and that is a good thing.

The Founders wanted it to be difficult to commit the United States to international obligations and easy to get out. We should follow the Constitution and vote ``no'' on this amendment.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 222, and I ask unanimous consent that the debate of 4 minutes be equally divided.

Mr. President, my amendment reasserts that article 5 of the NATO treaty does not supersede Congress's power under article I, section 8, clause 11 of our Constitution to declare war.

According to our Constitution, we resort to war only after the people's elected representatives deliberate and determine that it is in our best interest.

My amendment is also consistent with the NATO treaty. Article 5 of the treaty commits allies to respond to an attack, but it allows each ally to determine whether to engage in military hostilities.

Article 11 of the NATO treaty states that its provisions are to be carried out by each country's constitutional process. We cannot delegate our responsibility to NATO, nor are we expected to.

Let's reaffirm that article 5 does not supersede Congress's responsibility to declare war.

How much time do I have remaining?

I think it should be an easy vote to affirm the Constitution. To vote against affirming the Constitution actually places doubt in the Constitution.

The power to declare war is the most important power and the most important vote that any legislator will ever entertain. Why is this important? Because in 2001, people voted to go to war, and this body still thinks that vote binds us to war with no further vote.

We do need to reaffirm the power and the necessity of declaring war because we are ignoring it by continuing to be involved in military activity and war around the globe without ever having voted on it as we are mandated by the Constitution.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that we proceed to the previously scheduled 1:45 p.m. vote now.

Mr. President, today I rise to pay tribute to the remarkable life and enduring legacy of Maxwell ``Max'' Emerson, a cherished teacher, coach, mentor, and dear friend to many whose compassion, kindness, and dedication touched the hearts of all who knew him.

Over the recent Fourth of July weekend, Max, a vibrant 25-year-old teacher and coach at his alma mater Oldham County High School, traveled to Washington, DC, for his upcoming professional development hours at the Library of Congress. He was assigned these hours to fulfill the requirements for a grant he had been awarded, which would afford him the opportunity to immerse himself in Vietnam's educational system. With both his father, a retired principal of South Oldham High School, and his mother, a dedicated teacher at Oldham County Middle School, education was truly in his blood.

On the morning of July 5 in Washington, DC, Max set out for his professional development hours, but he never reached his destination. Instead, his light was tragically extinguished. Max fell victim to a senseless act of violence, robbed at gunpoint on the campus of Catholic University, ultimately losing his life.

Max was the true representation of a champion to the Oldham County community. He was a beacon of inspiration and led his very accomplished life through kindness, dedication, and faith. Max was a natural-born leader and a talented athlete who was admired by all who had the privilege of crossing paths with him. His unwavering dedication and genuine care for his students, athletes, friends, and community were evident in every action he took. Countless individuals can testify to Max's willingness to lend a helping hand a put a smile on their face.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Max took on the responsibility of overseeing the credit recovery program, ensuring that no student fell behind and that everyone remained on track academically despite the school closures. It is worth noting that Max achieved an outstanding 100 percent pass rate.

Max devoted his life to serving others, and his extraordinary impact will forever remain etched in the Oldham County community. Anyone who had the privilege of meeting Max can attest to the profound positive influence he had on their lives. His legacy will be remembered by the very phrase he lived his own life by: ``Champions Find a Way!''

While his untimely departure has left an immense void that will be challenging to fill, his students and athletes carry his memories and legacy forward. Today I stand in solidarity with his grieving family, friends, and the entire Oldham County community as we mourn the tragic loss of a remarkable soul.

Mr. President, the Kentucky Chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners--NAWBO--connects women to resources, people, information, and organizations that can help them achieve their personal, business, or political goals. It is composed of women of all ages and levels of experience from all sectors of the marketplace.

Each year, NAWBO Kentucky recognizes women for their achievements in business and this year is no exception. In addition to their annual recognitions, they have added a new award, the Legacy Award, which will be presented at this year's ceremony. The Legacy Award is to be given to a woman who is a role model to other women, has achieved excellence in her field, has promoted other women, has broken barriers for women in her field, and has held leadership roles in her community. The inaugural recipient of this award is Ann B. Bakhaus, former president of Kentucky Eagle, Inc.

Ann Bakhaus served as the president of Kentucky Eagle, Inc., a total beverage and spirit distributor based in Lexington, and ran day-to-day operations for the company for 20 years before passing the business to her daughter. She still owns the company and serves as the chairman of the corporation board. This company has been in the Bakhaus family since 1948, and Ann is glad to be able to carry on the family legacy.

In her role with Kentucky Eagle, Inc., Bakhaus achieved many goals including the expansion of product distribution and the construction of the company's new headquarters which was the first official Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Anheuser Busch distributorship in the country.

Beyond serving on the board for Kentucky Eagle, Bakhaus is also heavily invested in community development. One of her biggest passions currently is the addition of Town Branch Park to downtown Lexington and the benefits it will provide to the community. Her desire is to see the Lexington community continue to flourish and is committed to being a part of that progress. I am proud to recognize the Kentucky Chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners and to honor Ms. Bakhaus for her many achievements.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, far too often, Congress operates under the delusion that we know what is best for the American consumer. Instead of allowing market participants to determine the information they want, we seek to manipulate the free market to impose our preferences on private actors.

As I am sure my colleague will readily agree, the Federal Government is far too large in size and scope. In this case, the additional Federal regulation and the associated potential penalties and costs are not appropriate. This is not a case of industry committing fraud or making willful misrepresentations about their products. This bill simply mandates what manufacturers must tell consumers because it assumes that consumers are not sophisticated enough to make the judgment themselves.

If American consumers want more information about a product, they can be sure they will make it known. If a manufacturer wants to sell more of their products, you can be sure they will listen to the consumers. Congress doesn't need to insert itself into every equation.

I object.

Mr. President, across our Nation, thousands of law enforcement officers make great sacrifices to preserve our freedoms and keep the peace. These law enforcement officers not only serve at great risk but also start every shift with a sense of uncertainty.

On April 10, 2023, Louisville, KY, was fortunate to have two heroes respond to the call of duty. A gunman began shooting innocent citizens at the Old National Bank and took the lives of five individuals. Within minutes of being dispatched, Officer Nickolas Wilt and his training officer Officer Cory Galloway were the first to arrive on the scene. Officer Wilt was on his 10th day of patrol following his graduation from the academy. But the actions of Officer Wilt were that of a seasoned veteran.

Without hesitation, the two officers left the cover of their patrol car and approached the bank while the shooter fired at them with a rifle. Body camera video shows the officers acted with remarkable heroism, bravery, and dedication to save innocent lives. Knowing that each passing second could result in further loss of innocent lives, Officers Wilt and Galloway proceeded toward the gunman. Officer Galloway was struck by rifle rounds in his ballistic vest, causing him to be knocked to the ground and seek cover from further gunshots. During this time, Officer Wilt was struck in the head by one of the assailant's rounds.

At this point, disregarding his own safety, Officer Galloway proceeded back toward the gunman and was able to eliminate the threat as he continued taking fire. Officer Galloway continued into the bank through the shot-out windows and told other responding officers to care for Officer Wilt, who was critically injured.

Today, I stand to honor Officer Nickolas Wilt and Officer Cory Galloway, as well as a multitude of fellow officers, fire, and emergency medical personnel who responded to this chaotic scene. Each of them displayed the true meaning of service before self. The actions of these individuals as well as the dispatchers taking the frantic calls, saved countless lives, including the life of Officer Wilt.

May the actions of each responder be forever remembered as a clear display of heroism in action.

Mr. President, our national debt now stands at about $32 trillion.

How did we get here? Whose fault is it? Republicans? Democrats?

Well, the answer is, yes, both parties are at fault for different reasons. Republicans come to this floor and will come to this floor today saying: We need unlimited military spending.

And Democrats will come to this floor and say: We need unlimited welfare spending.

And guess what happens. They compromise. People say Washington doesn't compromise. They compromise all the time. That is what this debt deal that is before us is, a compromise. But the compromise is always to spend more money.

How do we know that? The debt deal that has been crafted by Biden and McCarthy is an unlimited increase in the debt ceiling. Historically, when we raise the debt ceiling, it would be $100 billion or $200 billion or--God forbid--$1 trillion. It was a dollar amount.

This debt ceiling will go up until January 2025. How many dollars will be borrowed? As many as they can possibly shovel out the door. It will be how much money can you shovel out the door until January 2025. That is how much we will spend. Is there a dollar amount? No. How much can you shovel it out and how fast can you shovel it out? There will be no restraint from this debt deal.

There is a pretense. There is a playing around the edges as if, oh, there might be a cut here or there might be a cut there.

There are no cuts. Why? Two-thirds of your spending is entitlement spending. The on-budget entitlement spending is Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs. They are called mandatory, and no one ever looks at them. They go on in perpetuity. This is what drives the deficit.

Who took them off the table? How come there is no discussion of this? Actually, Republicans took them off the table because they feared being criticized by the Democrats.

It is being used in the Presidential campaign: Let's not talk about the entitlements. But that is two-thirds of what gets spent every year. If you don't talk about the entitlements, if you don't talk about mandatory spending, you, frankly, are not a serious person, and you will not make a serious dent in this problem.

So we have taken off the table all mandatory spending--no discussion of it. Does this mean they are in good shape? Is Medicare and Social Security and all these programs in good shape? Heck no, they are not in good shape. They are all running out of money. They are headed toward bankruptcy.

Is anybody brave enough to reform them? No, not a damn thing is going to be done for any of them. But when you take them off the table--take all the entitlement spending off the table and do nothing about it, now we are down to one-third of the budget. So now you are going to try to do budgetary reform, while excluding two-thirds of the spending, on one-third.

But it is worse than that. The one-third they call discretionary spending. It is about $1.6 trillion. Half of that is military. So they took that off the table.

So mandatory spending--entitlements--is going up 5 percent under this deal because that is what it has been doing for years and years. It is going up 5 percent. The military is going up 3 percent.

So what is left? What are we left looking at? We are looking at one- sixth of the budget, somewhere between 15 and 20 percent--a small sliver of the budget. It is called nonmilitary discretionary, and they think we are going to do some type of fiscal reform on that small sliver of government.

Well, guess what. You can't do it. You can eliminate all of the nonmilitary discretionary money. Leave the mandatory in place. Leave the military in place. Increase them. Eliminate all this other chunk of money, and you still never balance the budget.

There was a time when there was a conservative movement, and the conservative movement had a voice in Washington. There is still some voice but not much. But there was a time when people on the conservative side of this said: Well, in order to be a thoughtful, rational, realistic, strong response to the budget deficit, you would have to balance your budget in 5 years. In fact, we voted on a constitutional amendment in this body, and every Republican voted for it. But it said you had to balance in 5 years.

Why 5 years? Well, because most of the plans that lasted longer than that, most of the plans that balanced in years 9 and 10 were basically somebody fudging the numbers and hoping something good would happen in year 9 or 10, but the only years they actually had any power over were the first year or two, and there weren't very many cuts. And they always had unrealistic expectations in year 10.

So what I have done? I said: Let's look at 5 years. What would it take?

So about 5 or 6 years ago, I began introducing something called the penny plan. And what would it do? It would cut one penny out of every dollar. It actually would balance. Actually, the first year I did it, I didn't even cut 1 percent. I froze spending for 5 years, and the budget would have balanced. But the trick is--or not the trick but the truth is that you have to cut all spending or freeze all spending. You can't just freeze a sliver of spending.

So people talked about: Oh, there is a 1-percent trigger on the discretionary spending. That is $16 billion.

They are going to add $4 trillion in debt over the next 2 years, and they say: ``But by golly, we might save $16 billion,'' which even that is not going to happen because the trigger isn't real, doesn't have muscle, and will be evaded.

But the thing is that if we were to balance the budget over 5 years, what would happen is there now needs to be about a 5-percent cut of all the spending each year for 5 years and then the budget would balance.

You say: Well, isn't that just a number? What would that mean to real people? Why do I care whether the budget is balanced?

Well, go to the grocery store, go to buy gas, go to buy anything, go to pay your rent, look at your cost of living and look at what inflation is doing to you.

Who does inflation hurt the worst? Those on fixed incomes and those of the working class because they don't have extra expendable income. Most of their income goes to things that they have to purchase each month.

But where does inflation come from?

The Senator from Indiana described it accurately. We run a debt. This place spends money we don't have, and where is the deficit made up for? We sell that debt to the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve buys it. And it is like: Wow, this is a great system. We spend money we don't have. We print up these things called Treasury bills. The Federal Reserve comes over and buys them. Wow. We can just do anything we want. We have the printing press. But when they create new money and that new money enters into circulation, that is inflation.

Inflation is an increase in the money supply, and when you increase the money supply and you chase the same amount of goods, you are going to chase the prices right up. That is where inflation comes from.

So the debt is not just a number. The debt is about the value of your paycheck. It is about how far your paycheck goes.

So right now we are in a bit of a spiral. We have had 9 percent inflation. It is a little lower now, but we have had as high as 9 percent, and I think the cost of living increase for Social Security went up 9 to match that. But you will actually find people who say: You know, even with the 9-percent increase, I still can't buy everything I need. I am actually still being squeezed.

But it is a bait and switch. It is because your government isn't honest with you. If your government wanted to be honest with you, and they say: We are going to be everything to everyone, and we are going to give you stuff--it is funny because we have this comparison sometimes with Sweden. People say and many Democrats will say: We want to be Sweden. We want to be Sweden, and we are going to give you everything. And we are going to have a big government that coddles you from cradle to grave.

But do you know how they do it in Sweden? With a balanced budget. I am not advocating we become Sweden, but they balance their annual budget every year.

Do you know how they got to have all that free stuff to give everybody, how they have a safety net that includes everything including college, free healthcare, everything? They tax everybody an enormous amount of tax.

Over here the bait and switch is they will say: We are just going to tax the rich people. It is easy. Just tax the rich people.

They don't do that in Sweden, though. In Sweden, they tax everybody. It is a 60-percent income tax beginning at $60,000 a year. Everybody pays. The middle class pays.

So if we wanted to be to honest and we were to say, ``We are going to give you this massive safety net. You don't have to work. Everybody can have a basic income, and do all this,'' we would be honest or we should be honest and say it would take massive taxes.

Instead, there is a dishonesty, but the dishonesty is on both sides of the aisle. The Democrats say that welfare is free and the safety net is free and Social Security is free and all these things are free.

What do the Republicans say? The military industrial complex is free. You can have all the weapons you want. You can give hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons to Ukraine, and it won't cost anything because we will just print it up.

See, there were times in our history when you went through a war or with the devastation of war in World War II, the people actually suffered, and you could see the suffering and people felt like they had to pay something. But now we just put it on the tab.

But there is a point at which the tab gets so large that there can be something precipitous happening. The question has always been, Is this a gradual problem where we will just have to deal with a little inflation, 5 or 10 percent here, or is there a point at which there is a calamity?

If you look at the stock market for the last 100 years, some people will point to 7 different days in which like 80 or 90 percent of the downturn occurred in 7 days in the last century.

Is there a possibility of calamity when we are so destructive to our dollar, when we are so destructive to good sense?

I think the American people want more from us. Recent polls have said 60 percent of Americans say don't raise the debt ceiling without significant reform. Forty-three Republicans--forty-four of us, actually, said: We want significant reforms before we raise the debt ceiling.

But then the devil is in the details. The devil is in concluding what is significant and what is not significant. So what will end up happening--my prediction here--is almost every Democrat will vote to raise the debt ceiling and about half the Republicans will vote. It will be a 75-25 vote, and in the end, the debt ceiling will go up.

The people will say: It is good. We didn't have a calamity. The stock market didn't crash because we didn't pay our debt.

But you might want to ask yourself: Is this really a contrived controversy? Is there really a reason in which we would ever default? Is there a reason why we wouldn't make our interest payment? We bring in $5 trillion, and our interest payment is $500 billion.

So that would be like you make $100,000, and your mortgage payment is $10,000. If you made $100,000 and your mortgage payment is $10,000, is there any chance you would ever default? Is there any reason you wouldn't cut your other expenditures to prioritize your interest so you don't get kicked out of your house? That is what every American family would do, but we don't do it up here.

So we threaten default. We scare the markets and say: Oh, no, we will default if the debt ceiling doesn't come up.

No, we would default only if we refused to cut spending. So we spend a trillion dollars more than comes in every year. That is the problem.

If we simply said: We are going to pay the $500 billion, 10 percent of our revenue for next year. We are going to pay the interest no matter what. And guess what. We will tell the marketplace we are never going to default. We are never going to default. We will always do that. That would be great. The market would go gangbusters and say: We no longer have to worry about those knuckleheads. They finally decided they would pay their interest, and they always will.

Then what would happen?

Well, we wouldn't have enough money for everything. So then we should look at where we can save money.

The problem has always been this. Republicans point at Democrats and say: We don't like your programs. Let's cut your programs.

Democrats look at Republicans and say: No, no, no. Don't cut our programs. Cut yours.

Everybody is ``Don't cut mine, cut yours.''

That is why I have taken the approach and continue to take the approach that we cut everything across the board. In the past, there were always conservatives who said: Let's get rid of Public Television. Let's get rid of ``Sesame Street'' and Big Bird, and they would get so much grief over that. It is like, why do that? You are not balancing the budget over Big Bird. Take 1 percent of Big Bird's budget. Take 1 percent of everybody's budget.

What would that bring about? It would bring about more conservation of the dollar. It would bring about more restraint and more reform.

I will end with this. People ask: Where would you cut? I would say everywhere. But I can give you on the tip of my hand, ridiculous stuff that should have a 100 percent cut, but it is never cut, and it goes on and on. In the early 1970s, William Proxmire, a conservative Democrat, pointed out that the National Science Foundation was spending $50,000 to study what makes people fall in love. Now that is a better, I think, topic for Cosmopolitan magazine than it is for a government study.

Nowadays, it has gone up. We spent a million dollars having young people take selfies of themselves while smiling and then looking at it later in the day to see if looking at pictures of yourself smiling makes you a happier person. That cost you a million bucks.

We spent $1\1/2\ million studying the mating call of the Panamanian frog to see if the mating call of the country frogs is different from the city frogs.

We spent nearly a million dollars studying the Japanese quail to see if they are more sexually promiscuous when they are on cocaine. I think we could have just polled the audience on that one.

This is the kind of ridiculous stuff--but does it get better? I complain about this every year and all the time and everybody shakes their head and says: No way. Why are we doing that? For the National Science Foundation, we increased their budget 50 percent last year. People said: Oh, we have to compete with China. So let's give the National Science Foundation more money.

We almost increased their budget by 50 percent--the people who are studying why you go on dates, why you are happy, what the male frog's mating call is. This is the craziness, but it never gets better because we always spend more money.

So my amendment would do this: My amendment would reduce the spending in real terms. We would actually spend less money next year than last year. It would be a 5-percent reduction in money. You would spend less each year, and, over 5 years, you would balance your budget. Then it would be on course to balance.

People ask: Who can do this?

Half of Europe does it. Sweden balances their budget. Germany balances their budget. Over half of the countries in Europe run on an annual balanced budget.

Our profligacy and our spending are catching up to us. I say we act now. I recommend a ``yes'' vote on my amendment.

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

Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 107 and ask that it be reported by number.

The Biden-McCarthy debt deal will do nothing to avert the looming debt crisis. A debt deal that creates no limits to the debt accumulation over 2 years is not fiscally responsible and should be rejected.

My amendment replaces the spending caps with caps that balance the budget in 5 years and limits the extension of debt to $500 billion, and I urge a ``yes'' vote.

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