Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise to honor the life of Anita Ehlers, a constituent member of the Barrington, Illinois, community I represent and, more importantly, a friend.

I never knew Anita when she didn't have cancer. But for a long time, I didn't know that she did. She just never let it define who she was.

I knew her as a wonderfully kind, hardworking woman who was committed to making the world a better place.

Our Speaker often reminds us: ``We don't agonize. We organize.'' Every time she says it, I see Anita's face in my head.

I never saw her feel sorry for herself. Every time I was with her, it seemed like all the thoughts in her head were on how to make the world a little better for everybody else: her husband, Gregg; her daughters, Julia and Lindsay; her friends and neighbors; me and all the folks she was motivating.

As a women's marcher, a climate protector, an ally for the LBGT community, a universal health coverage champion, a union member, a teacher, and a lung cancer support advocate, she never agonized. She organized.

The world, and our district, is a sadder place without her. But I take inspiration because she always made our community a better place.

May we all find the strength to follow her example, to make the world around us a little easier for everybody else, no matter the adversity that we may personally face.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of my legislation, the Climate Risk Disclosure Act, H.R. 1187.

I would like us all to imagine for a moment that you had all of your wealth tied up in a single company, and you knew that that company was on track to lose nearly 20 percent of its value thanks to a known and avoidable threat. You call the CEO, and the CEO responded by saying: We have it taken care of, but I am not going to explain how.

That is the reality that the climate crisis is creating for our global economy.

Swiss Re recently found that global GDP will decrease by 4 percent if we meet the Paris climate accords, and if we stay with business as usual, 18 percent.

Domestically, the CFTC has come to roughly the same conclusion, estimating that for every 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature, we can expect a 1.2 percent reduction in annual GDP growth.

Mr. Speaker, I say to my friends that that is material. It is a big deal.

Those economic losses are due to the wildfires, droughts, blackouts, and superstorms that have already caused $500 billion of damages in the past 4 years, and investors understand this.

The fossil fuel industry has spent 10 years slashing prices. And do you know what? They are still losing market share to lower-cost renewables and efficiency.

ExxonMobil didn't write down $20 billion because they are woke. They wrote down $20 billion because the free market is beating them.

Investors want to know how to reallocate their capital in response to that risk. They want to know how to allocate it to more productive uses. That is why there were over 140 climate-related shareholder proposals at U.S. companies during the 2020 proxy season. But we, in this body, have not done our job to protect those investors.

Let us be very clear. When we talk about investor protection, every company in the world would like to have asymmetry of information. Our job is to make sure that if you love free markets as much as I do, as much as those of us on this side of the aisle do, then you have to make sure that they have full transparency of information. Right now, public companies have no obligation to disclose their exposure to climate- related risks, nor is there a consistent format for those disclosures. This bill would fix that.

It directs the SEC to issue a rule requiring every public company to disclose its direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions, the total amount of fossil fuel-related assets that it owns or manages, how its valuation would be affected if climate change continues at its current pace or if policymakers successfully restrict greenhouse gas emissions to meet the Paris goals, and its risk management strategies related to the physical and transitional risks of the climate crisis.

Mr. Speaker, I want to reassure my friend from Arkansas that the bill does direct the SEC to tailor those disclosure requirements to different industries to make sure that the burden is borne most heavily by those companies with the greatest contribution to that risk.

When it comes to making this transition, markets are some of the most

powerful tools we have, but efficient markets depend on transparent information. It is on us to provide that efficiency, to unleash the power of our entrepreneurs and our capitalists to create jobs and economic growth, and to leave a better planet than the one we inherited--but only if we act.

This is a win for capitalism, a win for consumers, and a win for the planet that we will pass on to our grandchildren.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote in support of this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the subject of our Special Order.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Castor), my friend and the distinguished chairwoman of the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for her words and her leadership.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Bonamici).

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Carbajal), my friend and one of the funnier Members of Congress, but heartfelt today.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Levin), my friend and a distinguished member of the Select Committee on Climate Crisis.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur), whom I am delighted was able to make time in a busy appropriation season to come down and join us today.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to take some time now to rise to talk about something that I have talked about--some would say too much--on this floor. To yet, again, discuss the grave threat and the massive opportunity that is the climate crisis.

Even as we talk right now about the necessity of limiting global warming to less than 1\1/2\ degrees Celsius, let's follow the math; the planet has already warmed by 1 degree, we only have \1/2\ degree to go. The last 7 years were the hottest ever on record. Even in spite of the pandemic, global levels of carbon dioxide have hit record levels. In fact, the last time CO2 levels were as high as they are right now was 4 million years ago. Sea levels were 50 feet higher. That is the reality of what happens when heat melts ice, ice dumps water. This is the reality we have made.

If we are to be judged by our works and we do nothing more in this moment, that judgment will not be pretty. That is our challenge and it is our opportunity.

But this change in CO2 levels didn't happen over a million years, it didn't happen over a thousand years, it didn't even happen over a hundred years. Half of all the CO2 we have ever emitted as a species since that first fire that some upright hominid built in a cave a million years ago, half of all the CO2 we have ever emitted was since 1990. That is within my lifetime. It is within the lifetime of almost all of the Members of this body.

That is nearly a century after Svante Arrhenius discovered the greenhouse effect, since the science was basically settled; 100 years after the photovoltaic effect that was invented that powers solar panels today; and more than a decade after the fossil fuel companies knew about climate change and decided to promote misinformation instead of acting.

In 1989, when the U.N. formed the IPCC, when Ronald Reagan's EPA said, we need to create a global cap and trade program to reduce a global pollutant--to protect the ozone hole, chlorofluorocarbons. When that same EPA and the subsequent George Bush--both Republican Presidents, I would add--they said, let's take that same model and apply it to a domestic pollutant, acid-rain forming compounds.

We have sugar maples in New England because of their leadership. We have a shrinking ozone hole because of their leadership. When they did that at the end of the 1980s, we were on the right track 30 years ago. What do we have to do now to turn this ship around?

The heck of it is, we know what we have to do to reduce our emissions and we know how to do it, building out clean energy infrastructure, creating and building wind turbines, solar panels. Building big things is what America is good at. We do not need to be constrained by our ambition, my goodness.

When the New Deal was passed, we electrified 80 percent of rural America in just 15 years. I would like to think our capabilities are even greater now. Let's embrace that opportunity. The hard questions in this line of work are the zero sum ones.

How do you allocate wins to some parties when they imply a loss to another? That is not climate.

The hard questions in clean energy policy are not how we allocate the pains of this transition; they are how we allocate the gains of this transition. Clean energy is cheap energy. If you don't believe me, ask anyone with a solar panel on their roof how much they paid for electricity yesterday. Ask anybody with a coal plant, they know that number.

The clean energy transition means it is a win for the folks who get to go to work building more efficient buildings and wind turbines and solar panels. It is a win for every American.

I've polled this. 100 percent of Americans like to pay less for energy. They would all win. 100 percent of Americans like cleaner air. They will all win. 100 percent of Americans do not want to live on a coast that is flooding or forests that are on fire or derechos that are coming across the Midwest.

Our obligation is to seize this chance and to make sure--this is a hard problem, but it is a good problem--to make sure that those gains are equitably distributed throughout our society.

The President's infrastructure proposal is just that. It isn't just a chance for clean energy, it is a make-or-break

opportunity to finally do what is scientifically necessary before it is too late.

Proposals like a clean energy standard, a build-out of electric transmission lines, requirements for purchases of clean energy will help send our emissions from the electric sector to zero and will be the bedrock of a new clean economy.

Cutting some or--let's be ambitious--all of the $650 billion a year that the IMF has said that we currently subsidize the fossil fuel industry, will finally give us efficient markets in our energy sector. $650 billion--that is about how much we spend on Medicaid--subsidizing an energy that can't compete under a free market.

So help make lives better for hundreds of millions of Americans now and in the decades to come.

Now 12 years ago, when Waxman-Markey was the debate du jour, we let an opportunity to act on the climate crisis pass us by. Since that time, we have kept emitting and temperatures have kept rising.

I told you, I have given this speech a few too many times. I don't want to be giving this speech a year from now. I don't particularly want to be giving it tomorrow. I certainly don't want to be giving it 12 years from now.

We have a chance now to act while our planet can still afford it, and we can embrace that because our wallets are going to love it.

Before I took this job, when I was running a clean energy company, I had a board member who gave me a piece of advice that has always stuck with me, he said: In the end, the only thing that really matters in this life is whether your grandchildren can say they were proud of you. Let's be clear. Our grandchildren are not going to be proud of us. They are not going to pat us on the back for doing only what was politically possible. They don't care.

What matters is, did we do what was scientifically necessary? And I have a lot of colleagues on both sides of the aisle, on both sides of this building, who will say, You are naive, Casten, what is necessary is so far in excess of what is politically possible, we just can't do that.

If that is your approach to this moment, the only thing I know for certain is you are not cut out for leadership. Our moment, our challenge in this moment, is to make what is necessary possible, it is all that matters. Because while the best chance for climate action was 30 years ago, our last chance is now.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Schneider).

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from the great State of New Mexico (Ms. Stansbury), whose reputation has preceded her during her short tenure.

Mr. Speaker, I yield again to gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Castor), who is the chair of the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.

Mr. Speaker, I am reminded as I listen to the gentlewoman speak--I know our whip always likes to quote George Santayana who said that those who don't study their history are doomed to repeat it.

We are at the cusp--it has probably already started--of the third great energy transition we have had as a species. The first one was when we transitioned from depending on muscle power to mechanical power. The second was when we transitioned from mechanical power to electric power, and this transition from dirty energy to clean energy. Every one of those transitions has been a massive boon in labor productivity. It takes a lot fewer people to run a steam shovel than it does John Henrys to dig a hole in the ground, and it takes a lot fewer people when you can electrify the country to build all the industries that we have grown accustomed to than it does when you have to live within a pulley's length of the waterwheel.

With those opportunities have come all that we think of as great and truly American. We have freed up people's time to invest in whole new ideas and take away the drudgery of work. But the history we have to acknowledge is that every one of those transitions has also been extremely disruptive for the people involved.

I like to tell folks back home that only a Luddite would say we never should have invented the steam shovel. But you have to be deeply evil not to empathize with John Henry.

As we go through this transition that we are in right now, we are going to create a tremendous amount of wealth because we are going to grow labor productivity again. We are going to have the opportunity, as many people already do, to generate electricity without depending on coal mines and coal railroad lines and natural gas pipelines, and, Mr. Speaker, you are going to be able to do this on your roof from the sun or from the wind or from more efficient geothermal. That is going to free up a whole lot of time to do a lot of innovative things. But it is going to be disruptive for a lot of communities.

There is no doubt that there is a rising tide of wealth that is already upon us. There is also no doubt that not all rising tides lift all boats. Tsunamis tend to swamp them out sometimes, and in the tsunami of wealth creation that is coming down, let's make sure that we look out for the least among us.

Mr. Speaker, I think there is a refreshing change coming in our energy structure primarily because all of those old power plants--that some of the utilities in Florida that we are fighting because they still have all that capital they wanted to amortize--those plants are getting old, and they are making the decisions that intelligent businesses always make: I am going to invest in the stuff that is clean and that generates a high return.

Florida Power & Light Company is a utility that, frankly, has been one of the leaders in deploying wind energy. It took them a little while to do it in their own district, but they certainly did it all over the country, because they knew that was a good place to put their investors' money to work. And we have seen that leadership, I think, throughout the business sector in this country. There is a reason why we are creating so many more solar jobs, and so many more wind jobs. Jobs in the energy efficiency sector I think is the largest supplier of new labor.

But I don't think that absolves us as regulators.

I am remembering when you and I formed what I think we thought was going to be a vary small delegation to Madrid a little over a year ago; and we had our pins that said ``We're Still In,'' because we knew, of course, that the prior administration had pulled out of the Paris accord. And I still have a picture that I carry around and show to people of the two empty seats in front of the United States delegation sign when every other country in the world was there.

But I remember there was a--and I wish I could remember the name-- European parliamentarian that came up to me and said: You know, we know from experience that when the United States doesn't lead, bad things happen.

And I said that we thought we were alone out there. But you remember when we got there, there were a lot of businesses that were there and there were lot of cities that were there. We spent a long time at a lot of university booths. And we were still in because we were still in, not just because it was a slogan on a pin; because all those companies that made zero carbon commitments and are committing to it because their shareholders are demanding it.

One-third of all of the assets under management in global equity markets right now are in ESG funds. People care. They don't--whether they care for moral reasons, whether they care because they are greedy, it doesn't matter. They care.

We have had over 1,200 State and local officials call on Congress to pass the American Jobs Plan because they care. Environmental and labor organizations across the country have pushed for us to act now because they care.

I am reading in the Tampa Bay Times. Recently, Dr. Rich Templin says: ``Everyone who stands for fair, union jobs and climate action can come together. In this plan, pro-workers and pro-environment voices can sing in unison.''

We know that is true.

Now, the challenge--you started by asking about the energy sector. If we are really honest, what we all know in this line of work that we are in is that losers always cry louder than winners cheer.

People who have got a loss of investment in this space know exactly what they have to lose. Future generations aren't here yet.

Our job here today is to look around the room and see who is not in the room and make sure we advocate for them. The rest of them are doing a pretty good job on their own, I think.

Mr. Speaker, when we deregulated our power industry in 1992, with the energy policy act, that was never presented as being an environmental bill, as far as I can remember. It was designed to encourage people to build cheaper power.

And what did they build?

The nuclear industry went from running 60 percent of the time to running 90 percent of the time. We started building a whole lot of wind and solar. We basically stopped building inefficient gas plants, and the only new gas plants were combined cycle plants that are almost twice as efficient.

Since that bill was passed, the CO2 emissions in our power sector have fallen from 1,300 pounds a megawatt hour to 900, and the price of power has fallen by 6 percent.

Now, there are those who say that is because of the fracking revolution. And there are people who say a lot of things, I guess. It happened because economics drives clean energy.

You know what people didn't build since 1992?

Coal. It is a really lousy investment.

In just those 10 years, after 1992, we built 200,000 megawatts of new gas turbine capacity. Twenty percent of the entire U.S. power grid, which was twice as efficient as what it displaced, was built in response to economic signals and drove down the CO2 emissions of the grid. That is a start.

For us to do what we have to do from this point going forward, we have to electrify everything. We have to figure out how to electrify our transportation fleet; electrify the way our factories make goods and services, how our homes keep us warm.

In order to do that, we need to build at least 1,000 gigawatts; 1,000 megawatts; 1,000 kilowatts--whatever unit you would like--of new generation. That is about as much as generation as we already have in this country.

We are then going to need to build the wires to connect that up to all the new loads. And I think as we heard at a climate hearing, they said that is going to take at least $350 billion of investment. And those investments are going to make money because people are now connecting up a cheaper energy source that is giving people what they really want, which isn't electricity.

What people really want is a hot shower and a cold beer, and it is going to give them that cheaper.

It is going to help us build out electric vehicle charging stations. We are talking about massive amounts of public--and private-sector investments that are not only going to put people to work; is not only going to give us a more sustainable economy; it is going to leave more money in people's wallets.

The single best thing we can do to disadvantaged communities is cut their energy bill. That is what we are going to do. All we need is the ambition. And I am so glad that we are in this moment and with this President and this Congress that is rising to that challenge.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to close, as I often do, by observing that there are really only three things we have to do as a country.

The first thing we have to do is cut the energy--double the efficiency with which we convert energy into economic activity. If we were to cut our energy use per dollar of GDP in half, we would almost be at the level that Switzerland has already achieved. I think we are

better than Switzerland, personally, but let's at least aspire to be as good as Switzerland; double our efficiency.

The second thing we have to do is do the research and development to figure out how to decarbonize industries like steel- and cement-making because we don't know how to make silicone; we don't know how to make steel; we don't know how to make cement; we don't know how to make fertilizer without fossil fuels today. That is an R&D challenge we have to figure out.

Then we have to get to zero CO2 emissions; not by 2050, not by 2030, by 1990. We have to get back to 350 parts per million in the atmosphere because that is the point that we can say to our children: We are leaving you a better planet than the one we inherited, where wildfires are not the norm, where droughts are not the norm.

And is it going to be easy?

No. But we know how to do it.

The first thing we ought to do is take our hand off the emergency brake. Stop subsidizing yesterday's technology. Embrace markets. Embrace innovation. Embrace all that makes us American. Stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry by $650 billion a year.

Unleash the power of our innovators. Unleash the power of our entrepreneurs. Unleash the power and the innovation of all our great universities and national labs who will figure out how to do these hard things.

And then, yes, even after we do all that, make significant Federal investments in the things that the private sector is not very good at, like transmission, like coast-to-coast broadband, like EV stations. We have done it before. That is how we built the railroads. It is how we electrified the country.

It is not going to be easy, but it will be necessary. It will be inspiring, and it will be a story that we will tell our grandchildren about because we will be able to tell them that we were there, in this moment; we saw what was necessary, and we made it possible. I think that is something worth doing.

It is our opportunity. It is our moment.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to recognize Pleasantdale Middle School in Burr Ridge, Illinois, and, specifically, Jennifer Lauermann's fifth grade science class.

Mrs. Lauermann is an educator, but more importantly, she is a rock star. Her students spent this semester studying rocks, interviewing geologists and other scientists across Illinois. They learned a lot, but something troubling emerged: Illinois does not have a State rock. Iowa has the geode, Wisconsin has red granite, but Illinois has got nothing.

So as good citizens do, the class held an election. Sandstone, limestone, and dolostone emerged from a heated primary, and 1,200 Illinoisans then voted in the general election, including me. I voted for limestone.

My candidate didn't win, but it was a free and fair election, and it is now my privilege to introduce the winner of the Pleasantdale Middle School 2021 State rock election.

Mr. Speaker, dolostone. I hope my colleagues in the Illinois delegation will join me in supporting the effort to make dolostone Illinois' State rock, but, more importantly, I couldn't be prouder to represent such great teachers and students committed to science and to democracy.

Madam Speaker, wildfires, flooding, and superstorms are the most tangible signs of a warming planet, but the climate crisis is not just about weather. It is about wealth.

A recent study by Swiss Re found that if we remain on our current trajectory, global GDP will fall by 18 percent by 2050. Investors understand this. They care about climate change because it is in their economic self-interest.

As BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said, ``Climate risk is investment risk.'' Main Street investors have put $37 trillion, roughly one-third of all assets under management, into climate-focused ESG investments.

Unfortunately, our regulation has not kept up with that demand. There is no consistent definition of how to quantify a firm's contribution to, or protection from, a warming globe. Left to choose from a menu of methodologies, companies often just pick what is most favorable to them.

We don't allow companies to pick their own financial accounting standards. Investors are asking us to provide the same consistency for their climate accounting. That is why I introduced the Climate Risk Disclosure Act, which directs the SEC to create consistent mandatory climate reporting standards for all public companies.

This will allow companies to compete for capital on a level playing field, providing investors with the certainty they need to hedge their financial risk. Yesterday my bill passed committee and will now come to the floor.

The right time to safeguard our financial system against climate change was decades ago, but our last chance is now.

Madam Speaker, the time for action is now. No longer can we substitute slogans for solutions. The protection of the environment offers America its best hope. Achieving the goal of a clean and healthy environment must be done by every American. We can reach this goal in this decade. And in reaching it, we can trigger a chain reaction of confidence and hope.

Those are the words of Bill Ruckelshaus on this day 50 years ago; a Republican; the first Administrator of the EPA under Richard Nixon, and then again under Ronald Reagan; the man who implemented the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990.

His successor under George H.W. Bush was Bill Reilly, who implemented the Acid Rain Program and the Montreal Protocol, a global, market-based cap and trade program. These men knew that science and our obligations to future generations are not negotiable. They tolerated no conflict between conservatism and conservation.

Sixty percent of all the greenhouse gas emissions we have ever emitted as a species have been released since that speech Bill Ruckelshaus gave 50 years ago today.

Madam Speaker, the time for action is now.

Madam Speaker, earlier this month I visited Teen Parent Connection in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. It is an organization that serves young mothers, offering everything from diapers and formula, to doulas, counseling, and domestic abuse support services.

They were extremely grateful for the recent $1,400 economic impact payments that, in many cases, helped these new moms cover critical expenses like housing, food, and healthcare. But as we talked, it became apparent that they were not taking advantage and didn't even know about the larger $3,600 per child Child Tax Credit. And why would they? These are new moms that have never filed taxes before. They don't follow the tax policy changes nearly as closely as we do here in the Capitol, but here is this fantastic need.

Our office is now working to connect them with free tax filing services, but to the rest of American parents--young and old--please make sure to take advantage of this program. Even if you don't have any taxes due, the credit is fully refundable, and once you file, we will start sending checks to 70 million American families on July 1.

This tax credit will cut child poverty in half, help close the racial wealth gap, and help ensure more kids can live up to their full potential. In Illinois alone, it will lift 153,000 children out of poverty. It is, in short, a really big deal.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute and express my gratitude to Anne Wick and Gail Kalinich.

Anne and Gail were instrumental in convincing me to first run for office, helping to build a campaign team, and then served as my co- district directors for the last 2 and one-half years. For that, I owe them my eternal personal gratitude.

But I am ultimately a side story. Anne and Gail share my belief that the office is bigger and more important than the officeholder, and never shied away from reminding me of my

relative insignificance. They did not seek public office, nor even to become district directors. But they were called to it. Anne is a 27- year Navy Veteran. She's also a mother and a community leader. We met her when my own wife joined the local PTA, came home and said ``you've got to meet Anne. She gets stuff done.'' Gail is a retired law partner, volunteers as an organ courier and has been active for years with the local League of Women Voters.

These are necessarily incomplete resumes, highlighted here only to illustrate that they did not need to become politically involved. But the times found them. They wanted a government that worked. Not just for them, but for all Americans. Not just in times of crisis, but before crises to avert them. And so, after the 2016 election, they heeded the words of our own speaker. They did not agonize, they organized.

In their capacity as my co-district directors, their commitment to good government has never waned. First when they set up a district office. Then when they helped senior citizens get their social security checks. When they helped a World War II ``Atomic Veteran'' secure long- overdue veterans benefits. When they organized events to draw attention to unsung women in our district who provide full women's health services in a church basement in the pre-Roe era. When they helped young high school students to learn about, and ultimately secure admission to our Nation's great service academies. In these examples, and so many more, public service came first.

Anne and Gail are emblematic of the millions of under-appreciated, unsung women who got engaged and stepped up to protect our democracy in 2017. They are a part of that crucial slice of the American electorate who have proven William Seward's observation that there has always been ``just enough virtue in this nation to save it--sometimes none to spare, but still enough.'' They are, in short, two remarkable women who deserve more recognition than they seek, and certainly more than I can provide in these few words. To loosely paraphrase former Saturday Night Live actor Harry Shearer ``Give me a Wick and a Kalinich, and there is nothing I cannot do.''

I am grateful to them both for their friendship, for their service to the people of Illinois' 6th Congressional district, for their patriotism. Our office, this body, and our nation will forever be in their debt.

Mr. Speaker, during my first month in Congress, I visited Family Shelter Service, an organization that provides lifesaving counseling, victim protection, and a 24/7 hotline to women and children in northern Illinois. They provide nearly 11,000 nights of shelter for abused women and children every year.

To their staff, to their clients, and to the one in three women in the United States who experience domestic violence and the one in five women who are raped, the Violence Against Women Act has been a lifeline since 1994. But it needs to be updated and renewed, and that is what we have done today.

The Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2021 makes crucial updates to this landmark bill to address its gaps, expand protections, and meet increased needs. We have expanded protections to make the law more inclusive of our LGBT communities. We have closed loopholes to better protect victims from gun violence, improved victim services to help survivors heal and access justice, and increased funding for programs to help children who are exposed to domestic violence in the home.

We have made vital new investments in prevention and victim services, including an amendment that I introduced to train healthcare providers on college campuses so they can better meet the needs of the one in four undergraduate women who are victims of sexual assault.

This is for our mothers, our sisters, our daughters, and our friends. But it is also for Americans, regardless of their gender, who aspire to live in a country that truly provides equal protection and equal opportunities for all.

We have done our work here today. It is now crucial that the Senate do theirs and send this bill to the President's desk.

Mr. Speaker, for the one in eight Americans who will go to bed hungry tonight; for the 60 million Americans out of work and the 40 million who fear they might be evicted tomorrow; for the 2.3 million women, a million mothers, who have left the workforce, the American Rescue Plan is for you.

It will put money directly in your pockets; expand access to affordable healthcare and childcare; extend unemployment insurance and housing and nutrition assistance; and support 27 million children with an expanded child tax credit.

Mr. Speaker, for the 1.4 million public-sector employees who are out of work--our firefighters, our teachers, our frontline public health workers, our first responders--we are going to provide $350 billion for States and localities, including $13.7 billion for my State of Illinois, to get you back to work, too.

We can't fix everything. 524,000 American lives lost to COVID are never coming back. But tomorrow, when we vote to pass the American Rescue Plan, we will honor their memory. We will make things a little easier for their loved ones. We will get their kids back in school safely, their family businesses back in the black, cut child poverty in half, create 4 million new jobs.

Most importantly, we will emerge from this crisis with an economy that is stronger, more equitable, and poised for growth for years to come.

Mr. Speaker, I thank all of my colleagues in the House and Senate who made this possible. Let's get this done.

Mr. Speaker, for months I had calls coming into my office about delays in the U.S. mail. Some of these delays had to do with cold weather, some are because of COVID, but most are the direct result

of the failures and slowdowns deliberately imposed by Postmaster DeJoy. His efforts to eliminate overtime, close mail processing facilities, and remove mail sorting machines have taken all of the cushion out of the system.

Our postal workers are demoralized, they are seeing mail pile up as they are blamed for the delays. Seniors have gone for days waiting for medications. Constituents and local mayors are sounding the alarm.

The truth is that our Postal Service has survived this assault from its own leadership, only because those letter carriers and mail handlers have doubled down in spite of the challenges through rain, through sleet, and snow. And, yet, DeJoy has failed them. He has failed the American people.

He has not failed by accident. He has a mission to weaken and ultimately privatize the post office to make people who depend on the Postal Service angry enough to finish the destruction that he has started. He hasn't succeeded yet. But every day he stays in office is another day closer to him realizing that goal. The Postal Service needs a leader who is committed to public service. DeJoy must go.

Madam Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Madam Speaker, climate change is an existential treat to our species. Atmospheric CO2 levels are now higher than at any point in the last 3 million years. Half of all those emissions were released since 1985. We are in trouble, and that trouble is accelerating, but addressing that trouble is a massive economic opportunity.

Rather than being paralyzed by fear, let's inspire Americans toward that opportunity, because virtually anything we do to reduce CO2 emissions makes us wealthier. Making heat and power without burning fossil fuel means you don't have to pay for fossil fuel. Clean energy is cheap energy.

For those who still like pollution, all that future generations ask you is to love being rich a little bit more. And that is why I was so heartened to see President Biden's recent executive orders procuring clean energy for the Federal Government, phasing out market-distorting fossil fuel subsidies, incorporating the social cost of carbon into our decisionmaking, to name just a few, and that is just the start.

Madam Speaker, let us all in this body now build on that leadership. Let us build back better and build back greener. Let us leave our children a better planet than the one we inherited. Let us embrace science. But most of all, let us lead.

What happens if we get this wrong is written in Lincoln's second inaugural, when one party would ``make war rather than let the Nation survive.''

On September 11, we came together against an enemy without. On January 6, we were attacked by an enemy from within, the President who would make war with malice for all and charity for none.

We must come together in unity today against that domestic threat to our Constitution. The alternative is too unbearable to contemplate.

We must impeach bipartisanly, unanimously if you have the soul.

Madam Speaker, I rise today in support of H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act.

Among the many disturbing revelations in the Mueller report, we learned that Russian intelligence officers successfully infiltrated the computer network in my home State at the Illinois

State Board of Elections. They accessed the personal information of millions of voters and stole thousands of voter records before being detected.

As far as we know, this breach has not affected the results of any subsequent elections, but it desperately underscores the need for much greater election security moving forward.

Now, officials in my home State and others around the country have worked tirelessly to secure these vulnerabilities over the past 3 years, but without the help of the Federal Government, they can only do so much. It is past time that we step up and give States the resources they need to ensure our elections and our voters are safe in the upcoming election.

Our democratic system depends on the consent of the governed. That is far too fragile to take lightly. And our constituents' trust and the independence of our democracy depend on it.

Madam Speaker, for these reasons, I urge my colleagues to vote for the SAFE Act on the floor today.