Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 290, S. 2116.

I ask unanimous consent that the committee-reported substitute amendment be agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

The committee-reported amendment, in the nature of a substitute, was agreed to.

The bill (S. 2116), as amended, was ordered to be engrossed for a third reading, was read the third time, and passed.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 664, submitted earlier today.

I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 665, which is at the desk.

I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand adjourned until 10 a.m. on Wednesday, May 1; that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and morning business be closed; that upon the conclusion of morning business, the Senate proceed to executive session to resume consideration of the Alexakis nomination, postcloture; further, that all time be considered expired at 11:45 a.m., and that following the Alexakis confirmation vote, the Senate resume legislative session to resume consideration of the motion to proceed to Calendar No. 211, H.R. 3935; further, that the Senate recess following the confirmation vote on the Alexakis nomination until 2 p.m. to allow for the weekly caucus meetings, and the cloture motion with respect to the motion to proceed to H.R. 3935 ripen at 3 p.m.; finally, that if any nominations are confirmed during Wednesday's session, the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon table and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask that it stand adjourned under the previous order.

Mr. President, today the Senate passed H.R. 815, the National Security Act of 2024. This bill supports Ukrainian victory against Putin and his war machine, bolsters Israel's security, and reiterates our longstanding commitment to Taiwan and its democratic values. This legislation also provides needed humanitarian resources for Gaza, Ukraine, Armenia, Haiti, Sudan, the Rohingya, and others. And H.R. 815 contains my bipartisan Rebuilding Economic Prosperity and Opportunity, or REPO, for Ukrainians Act, co-authored with Senator Risch, which would provide additional assistance to Ukraine using assets from the Central Bank of the Russian Federation and other sovereign assets. Hundreds of billions of dollars of Russian sovereign assets have been frozen--including billions here in the United States-- since the start of Russia's murderous invasion. This legislation will help Ukraine rebuild after it beats back the Russian invasion, by seizing and repurposing the Putin regime's frozen funds. Because this legislation only uses confiscated assets to assist Ukraine, any increases in direct spending are fully paid for.

I previously adjusted budgetary levels on March 8, 2024, to accommodate the Senate-passed national security supplemental and am making further revisions for the current House-passed version. Because H.R. 815 is still deficit-neutral with the addition of the REPO Act, I am adjusting the committee allocations and aggregates to accommodate the legislation. Section 121(c) of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 contains a reserve fund that authorizes the Budget Committee chairman to revise budget aggregates and

committee allocations for legislation that would not increase the deficit over the period of fiscal years 2024 to 2033.

Additionally, I am revising the allocation to the Committee on Appropriations, colloquially known as the 302(a), consistent with the bill before the Senate. It contains slightly less emergency-designated spending than the version that passed the Senate in February.

Section 251 of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985, as amended by the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, establishes statutory limits on discretionary funding levels for fiscal years 2024 and 2025 and allows adjustments to those limits. Sections 302 and 314(a) of the Congressional Budget Act allow the chairman of the Budget Committee to revise the allocations, aggregates, and levels consistent with those adjustments.

I ask unanimous consent that the accompanying tables, which provide details about the adjustment, be printed in the Record.

Madam President, I am delighted to join my colleagues here to support the EPA's new tailpipe emissions standards. Rhode Island has long ridden along with California on its emissions standards, and we are delighted to see the EPA following along with strong anti-pollution emissions standards.

Among the many benefits of this is that we will start to head off the climate dangers that we are facing. There are enumerable reports about the economic threats that America faces as a result of unconstrained climate change.

I ask unanimous consent that both articles from the recent ``The Economist'' magazine that open with a lead, sort of editorial-type article, and then have the solid full article, be printed in the Record at the end of my remarks.

In talking about climate change--to use the article's words--it is shaking the foundations of the world's biggest asset class, and it is looking at, potentially, 25 trillion dollars' worth of global economic damage as homes become uninsurable because climate change makes them uninsurable.

But the real thing is that this will come home for American consumers. The quicker we can get off fossil fuel, the safer Americans will be in their pocketbooks as well.

This is the way gasoline prices have looked back since 1978. They have bounced all over the place. Why do they go all over the place? They go all over the place because the prices are not set by a market. The prices are set by an individual cartel--a cartel of international entities, most of whom are not friends of the United States--that can simply decide to stop production and juice prices, and you can see over and over again where prices have juiced. The last time was immediately after Putin went into Ukraine. On cue, the fossil fuel industry raised prices dramatically. American companies that were not directly affected rode along with the price increase. They just took the international price, and they made the biggest profits, I think, any company has ever seen. So consumers get gouged by an international cartel that manipulates our gasoline prices.

We can get off of that with American-made renewable energy--from the Sun, from the wind, from batteries, from geothermal, from nuclear--you name it. We get off of the international cartel's fossil fuel roller coaster, which we do not control. We will never ever ever, as a country, have energy independence while our prices for a product depend on how an international cartel behaves. So this is a really, really important step.

As Senator Stabenow said representing Michigan: The car companies support this; labor unions support this; consumers support this. It is expected to provide $99 billion in net benefits to consumers through 2025, and that includes $46 billion in reduced annual fuel costs. So, if you want to know who this benefits and who is on the other side, it is the people who are going to lose $46 billion in polluting dirty fossil fuel because people have gone to clean, efficient electric vehicles as a matter of their own choice.

Last of all, it helps people who breathe. It is estimated to save $13 billion per year in public health benefits. It is hard to put a dollar number on a public health benefit; it is kind of an awkward way to talk about a public health benefit. But when a kid can go to school instead of having to stay home because their asthma has been fired up by the atmospheric ozone or when a mom doesn't have to call in to work and say: I can't make it today because I can't get my baby to daycare because asthma has kicked in because of the pollution-driven atmospheric ozone--the $13 billion, that is just the price of the care. The price in people's hearts and in people's harms is far, far worse.

So the benefits of this wildly outsee any cost. This is a great rule that the EPA has done, and I support it fully.

On the national security front, I also ask unanimous consent that an article that I wrote with Senator Graham in pointing out the danger to the world of

the petrostates and how badly behaved they are and how they are propped up with fossil fuel dollars so they can go out and do things like wage war against Israel, invade Ukraine, and saw up correspondence that they don't like be printed in the Record.

I yield the floor.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, I have 12 requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders.

Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate:

Mr. President, for the first time in American history, a gentleman of Muslim faith has been nominated to serve on a Federal Circuit Court of Appeals.

What could and should have been a moment of pride has been stained by the nominee, Adeel Mangi, having been subjected to a series--a campaign--of baseless and gross attacks.

Senator Booker of New Jersey came to the floor yesterday and gave an eloquent and thorough rebuttal of those attacks, so I won't rehash that. But it is important that my colleagues understand where these attacks came from. It is not just that they were untrue; it is that the whole campaign is a fake.

These attacks are part of a coordinated campaign by the same dark money interests that helped Donald Trump pack our Federal courts and who now want to stop President Biden from confirming qualified nominees who weren't handpicked by those billionaire special interests.

You don't have to search long to see their fingerprints all over this smear campaign. We can start with the main culprit, the Judicial Crisis Network. Let me give you just an overview of what the Judicial Crisis Network is.

The billionaire operation to pack the courts had an operative who was the staff person, essentially, who directed it. His name was Leonard Leo.

Leonard Leo runs a whole array of front groups to obscure what is really going on, sort of like a pea and shell game, only with lots of shells.

This is a diagram that I use about one component of his front group armada. What this reflects is his own companies up here: CRC Advisors, CRC Strategies, and CRC Public Relations. They are the entities through which he extracts money for services, so-called, from this array of corporate entities.

To understand what it is, the real ones here--the real ones here--are called 85 Fund and Concord Fund. Those are twin entities. They share office space and funders and staff. They have around them this array of other entities, none of which are real, all of which are registered fictitious names--fictitious names under Virginia law--under which their real entities are allowed to operate.

In this case, there are six of them, and one of them is this Judicial Crisis Network. This thing is being run through a fake entity that bears the fictitious name of a completely different organization. Behind that are more anonymous funders and screeners of funding and, ultimately, behind all of that, a bunch of creepy billionaires.

The story of the Judicial Crisis Network is that it was the main group that the operative, Leonard Leo, used to help the billionaires pack the Supreme Court with their handpicked Justices. It spent, for instance, almost $40 million opposing Merrick Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court and, thereafter, supporting the Trump Justices' confirmations. It took in millions in dark money dollars and individual contributions as big as $15 million and $17 million. This is not a grassroots organization; this is a billionaire-funded, multimillion- dollar contribution outfit. And it continues to work today in the service of packing the courts.

It is an organization for the billionaires to work through from behind the scenes through their operative, Leonard Leo.

It launched against Mr. Mangi a $50,000 ad campaign called ``Stop Antisemite Adeel,'' in which a video plays saying the Senate should reject ``anti-Semite Adeel Mangi,'' and--just to make the point even more grotesque--showing a plane flying into the World Trade Center. Classy stuff.

It has tweeted and promoted the false attacks that Senator Booker described at length over the past 2 months. In recent days, as the attacks on Mr. Mangi ramped up, the organization tweeted out ``It looks like our ad campaign worked.'' This ad campaign had nothing to do with truth. It was all about using secret billionaire money to derail a circuit court nominee who had not been blessed by this outfit and the billionaires behind them.

Leonard Leo, as the billionaires' operative, had his fingerprints all over--smears by another dark-money group attacking Mangi. This one is run by a former Neil Gorsuch clerk who also oversaw the Kavanaugh nomination on the Republican side.

Because this is a dark-money group, we don't know all of its donors, but we do know at least two. And the first is--guess who?--the Judicial Crisis Network. It is the hand in the glove in the glove.

JCN--Judicial Crisis Network--helped get the second organization off the ground with more than a quarter of a million dollars in 2018 and 2019. When the new organization launched, its leader tweeted:

Excited to work hand-in-glove with [a person named Carrie

Severino, who is a Judicial Crisis Network lead operative] my

other long-time friends at JCN, and many others on the

outside who understand the critical importance of the

judicial fight.

And, specifically, he means the critical importance to billionaires to be able to control the judiciary and get things done that Congress would never pass through courts that will do their bidding.

The dark money ties don't stop just there with the Judicial Crisis Network front group and the front group for the Judicial Crisis Network. The front group organization's vice president comes straight out of the Koch brothers--K-o-c-h, not C-o-k-e--the Koch political dark money network. That guy helped run multiple Koch political organizations, including the dark money flagship of the Koch political machine called Americans for Prosperity.

While there, guess what. He helped oversee Americans for Prosperity's multimillion-dollar campaign to pressure Senators to confirm Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

Who is the other big donor? Donald Trump. Earlier this week, it was reported that Trump's PAC gave the organization $150,000 to keep up the dirty work. The leader of this group wrote an op-ed calling Mr. Mangi ``Hamas's favorite judicial nominee'' and included a picture of Mangi with the Hamas flag edited to appear over his face--classy stuff, again--and tweeted that Mangi should ``Go serve as a judge in Gaza, you antisemite''--just beautiful stuff.

Leonard Leo and Trump World are also propping up yet another dark- money group attacking Mangi and other Biden nominees, the Conservative Partnership Institute.

The New York Times recently called the Conservative Partnership Institute ``a breeding ground for the next generation of Trump loyalists.'' It has received millions of dollars from Donors Trust, which is widely known as the ``dark money ATM of the right.'' It builds no product; it offers no service. What it does is launders the identity of donors so that if you are a big donor and you want to send money into politics, you send it to Donors Trust first, and then the report sent to the 501(c)(4) says the source is Donors Trust and not whoever really gave it. That is what it lives to do, and hundreds of millions of dollars flow through it. It also received $1 million from Trump's PAC in 2021.

CPI is quite a cast of characters, folks like Mark Meadows, Steve Miller, Cleta Mitchell, and Jeffrey Clark. One of its projects has been to find bad-faith ways to sink qualified Biden nominees, and Mangi is just the latest of its targets. This same group was behind the false attacks on Ketanji Brown Jackson that smeared her as lenient on sex offenders.

These groups are spending millions in dark money from Leonard Leo, from Donald Trump, and from billionaires like the Kochs to keep the Federal courts stacked in their favor. They want to stop President Biden's nominees who weren't handpicked by them in some Federalist Society back room by billionaires and their fixers.

It is not just Mangi who is their target. They have tried to smear many other Biden nominees, and there is an unusual concentration in their targets of people of color. They seem to have a particular fixation with people of color.

They ran the despicable ads accusing Ketanji Brown Jackson of being ``more concerned about the well-being of

pedophiles than the safety'' of children. Judicial Crisis Network spent $1.5 million on ads attacking Justice Jackson during her confirmation. Again, that is the fake group with a fictitious name that actually is Concord Fund but purports to be something different.

Judicial Crisis Network also spent more than $1 million on a smear campaign against Vanita Gupta and $300,000 on a campaign attacking Dale Ho, both extremely qualified candidates of color.

JCN's president has written numerous op-eds calling nominees of color, like Judge Nancy Abudu on the Eleventh Circuit, the first Black woman ever on the Eleventh Circuit, ``ideologues'' and ``extremists.''

These groups have waged similar smear campaigns in other committees than Judiciary, with qualified nominees of color like Saule Omarova for the Department of the Treasury and Lisa Cook at the Federal Reserve getting the smear treatment.

Adeel Mangi is an eminently qualified nominee. He comes across with all the dignity and decorum of an Oxford don. He is as well-trained and intelligent as any candidate who has ever come before the Judicial Committee. He has been the subject of vicious, bad-faith attacks, and the attacks come from this billionaire-funded, rightwing apparatus.

It is a scheme. It is not just a smear; it is an op. It is a covert operation designed to prevent the Biden administration from confirming well-qualified, fairminded judges to our courts so that they can create a vacancy so that if they can get Donald Trump elected in November, they can then put another rightwing extremist who will do what the billionaires want onto the court.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the actual text of the application for this earmark says it is to develop a nationally accredited in-hospital birth center, a midwifery unit; to provide healthy birthing individuals the choice to give birth in protected, dedicated space for normal physiologic birth; reduce the risks and costs of instrumental births and surgical delivery; and reduce hospital length of stay, thereby reducing healthcare costs--also training midwives. It is one thing to be anti-abortion.

We are not anti-midwifery, and I urge that we oppose the Senator's amendment.

Mr. President, the Senate will soon consider H.R. 2882, the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2024. The legislation contains funding eligible for allocation adjustments including appropriations designated as emergency funding. Today, I am adjusting the allocation to the Committee on Appropriations, colloquially known as the 302(a), consistent with those appropriations.

Section 314(a) of the Congressional Budget Act allows the chairman of the Budget Committee to revise budget allocations, aggregates, and levels consistent with pending legislation. This bill contains $2.5 billion of emergency-designated discretionary funding, a decrease from the $20 billion that was contained in the versions of this bill originally reported out of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Together with the $10 billion of emergency funding in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2024 that was enacted earlier this month, these bills comply with the January agreement between the Senate majority leader and the Speaker of the House.

Division G of the bill contains several authorizing provisions, such as a further extension of the nuclear reactor liability policy known as the Price-Anderson Act and as called for by my nuclear bill, the ADVANCE Act, that are paid for over 10 years.

I ask unanimous consent that the accompanying tables, which provide details about the adjustment, be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I am here for what is No. 30 in my series of ``Scheme'' speeches, about the scheme to capture the Supreme Court. And I thought this would be a good time to give sort of a quick overview of where we have been since most of my speeches have been rifle-shot speeches at individual issues that the Court has caused us to have to face up to.

So the fundamental problem here is that we have a Supreme Court that has been captured by rightwing special interests, and we see this in decision after decision after decision. And it is affecting the lives of ordinary Americans all over.

When I say that this is a Court that has been captured by rightwing special interests, what do I mean? Well, there is considerable research out there and considerable literature out there about a phenomenon that is sometimes called Agency capture, and it is sometimes called regulatory capture. It is the same thing. It is the capture of regulatory Agencies. And you can look it up in your library. You can look it up on the internet, and you can get a sense of the extent to which this is recognized in the economic literature, recognized in the administrative law literature. And it is a frequent avenue, unfortunately, of corruption into government decision making.

And if you want an example to think about, you could imagine a railroad commission whose job is to set rates for the railroad, back in the era of the railroad barons, and the railroad barons have chosen who is on the railroad commission. So the railroad commission isn't serving the public. It is doing exactly what the railroad barons want. That, in a nutshell, is what ``Agency for regulatory capture'' is all about.

And one of the things that we have discovered in the course of this is that the effort to capture the Court has been a very expensive effort. This is no small or casual thing.

True North Research has done a lot of this research. And so far, they are up to finding $580 million that have been spent on this Court capture operation. It is not always easy to figure out because the money flows from one place to another through indirect sources and into entities that obscure who the original donor is. It is complicated. But $580 million is a lot of money, and even very, very, very rich rightwing billionaires aren't going spend that much money on a whim. They are going to spend that kind of money because they are going to get a return on their $580 million investment.

So that is the fundamental problem we are facing--a Court captured by special interests in the same way that, in the old days, Agencies and Commissions were captured. But that technique jumped the rails and was applied to our Supreme Court and with a very, very robust scheme behind it, with at least $580 million spent to accomplish these goals.

So there you go. You have got your captured Court. You have spent your $580 million. But can you really expect the judges that you helped put on the Court to remember exactly what it is they are supposed to do in every case? No. That is pretty hard, even for very bright judges.

So the next thing you have to do is figure out how you get the Court to do what it is told and pass on the message of what it is that you want. You have captured a Court. How are you going to tell it what the outcome is that you want?

So this is a Court that is doing what it is told, and the manner in which it is told is actually fairly plain view, in some respects, because what happens is that the dark money billionaires fund groups that file briefs. And it is not just one brief. They file briefs in little flotillas. Usually the number is 10 or 12. In a case really important to them, we have seen the number get as high as 50. But that is pretty rare. So amici curiae--Latin for ``friends of the court''-- are groups that are allowed to file briefs in the Supreme Court, even though they are not a party to the case.

And they come in. And let's say that there is a dozen of them. They are coordinated. They send the same common message, and that way the Justices who have been put on the Court through this Court capture scheme are kept up to date on precisely what it is that their big donors want.

Now, when I say ``fake amici,'' I mean that these are groups that don't very well disclose who is behind them. It doesn't say: We are here from Koch Industries. We are here from ExxonMobil.

It is intermediating groups that have mysterious sounding names. I will give you one example right here. This is a group of organizations managed by a guy named Leonard Leo, who was basically the fixer--the factotum--of the rightwing billionaires who spent the $580 million to capture the Court.

You need an organizer. You need the orchestrator. You need a guy who runs around and does this stuff, and Leonard Leo is the guy. And he has his own little group up here of companies that report to him and pay him. This is how he gets money out of this scheme.

But down here, he has this array of front groups that he and his allies control. So 85 Fund and Concord Fund actually exist. They are corporate entities under Virginia corporate law.

These other entities--Judicial Education Project, Honest Elections Project, Free to Learn, Free to Learn Action, Honest Elections Project Action, and the Judicial Crisis Network--actually don't exist. What they are, under Virginia law, is fictitious names. That is the legal term for what they are--fictitious names for these entities.

So in one of the cases in which these phony front group amici appeared to tell the captured Justices what it was that their donors wanted, Honest Elections Project filed the brief.

It did not identify itself in its brief as being a mere fictitious name. It did not identify itself as being a mere fictitious name of this 85 Fund group. It did not identify that 85 Fund group as a

corporate twin to this Concord Fund group. The 85 Fund is what is called a 501(c)(3) group. The Concord Fund is a 501(c)(4) group. It is customary in political influence operations to have a twin 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) sharing office space, sharing personnel, sharing donors, sharing board members. It is very hard to find a corporate veil between the two that is actually real.

What they also did not disclose is that the ``Honest Elections Project,'' as a fictitious name of the 85 Fund, tied it to the Concord Fund, which operates under the fictitious name ``Judicial Crisis Network.'' It is through this fictitious name that the billionaires spent huge amounts of money on TV advertising to stop the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court and to push for the confirmation of Justices Gorsuch and then Kavanaugh and then Barrett under the Supreme Court, with individual checks written to support the campaign as big as $15 million and $17 million.

These are serious people who are writing serious checks to try to have a serious effect on the Court, and they have, but it is hidden. Judicial Crisis Network ran ads for Justices who were reading Honest Elections Project briefs without explaining the connection between the two. So the whole thing is very slippery, and that is why I use the word ``fake'' about it.

Here is another thing about it. This is the appendix that I added to a brief that I wrote in the Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau case. It shows individual entities that filed amicus briefs in that case, and it showed their funders. If you look at it, it is basically one big blob through which billionaires send money from these entities into these entities.

Donors Trust has really no purpose in life other than to hide the identity of donors. It is an identity laundering machine to give to all of these things so that the Court doesn't know and the public doesn't know that, in effect, it is the same people behind this array of front groups. It makes it look like there are a whole bunch of different things.

New Civil Liberties Alliance and the Buckeye Institute and the Southeastern Legal Foundation, Pacific Legal Foundation--oh my gosh, they must be from all over the country. Not so much. They are fund groups for the funders who run money through these outfits to prop up these outfits.

So you have your captured Court, and you have your front groups to tell the captured Court what it is to do. What you end up with is that these fake amici propose a whole lot of factual findings for the Court, and you end up with fake factfinding.

If you look at some of the worst decisions that the Supreme Court has rendered--Citizens United and Shelby County--both of them stood on fake factfinding. They asserted things to be true that were not true, and those things were essential to the logic of the decision. The Court couldn't have gotten to the outcome it wanted to get to without those pylons, if you will, of fake fact.

They have opened up a whole new arena for fake factinding with a new so-called history and tradition analysis they brought to bear in Dobbs on reproductive rights cases and in Bruen on gun rights cases, because you can fake your way through history and tradition very easily. You just go back into history, and you cherry-pick the facts you like. Real historians will come in and say ``Well, that was ridiculous,'' but it doesn't matter--you got what you wanted. The ability to do that fake factfinding is going to get worse, not better.

Citizens United and Shelby County are the worst of all. These two decisions have really hammered our democracy--Citizens United by letting unlimited amounts of dark money into our elections. We are up to $1 billion in dark money now. Don't tell me those people are spending money just for the sake of the goodness of the country. No. They have specific things they want out of politics, and they are willing to spend $1 billion to get them and ordinary citizens be damned.

Shelby County basically gutted the key enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act, and a flood of legislation in formerly protected States flowed through, shutting down access to the ballot on behalf of mostly minority voters--in fact, in one case, targeting minority voters with what the Court said was surgical precision.

What are we doing about all that? That is a hell of a problem set. What are we doing to try to get to the bottom of that? Well, we are doing a couple of things.

First, we are trying to educate the public. We are trying to let people know what is going on. This is not a normal Court. This is not the way courts ordinarily behave, and this is certainly not the way the Supreme Court should be behaving.

Second, we are trying to investigate, trying to figure out what the heck is going on, to get to the bottom of this mess. How did this happen, and what are the problems?

Third, we are legislating. My bill to clean up the mess at the Supreme Court has cleared the Judiciary Committee, and we are hoping for a vote on that in this Congress. I doubt it will get much support on that side, but I think it is very important to have a recorded vote that shows who is on the side of the billionaires behind the Court capture operation and who would like to have a little bit of clarity and transparency and have Justices meet the same ethics standards that other Federal judges meet. It is not a peculiar standard; it is what is required of other Federal judges.

So the education piece is working tolerably well, I would say. People get it. I think we are down to 18 percent of Americans who have real confidence in the integrity of the Court.

I put a lot of work out there to document what is going on, and if anybody is interested, you can look up my name as an author in the Harvard Law & Policy Review and find my article there. You can look up my article that the American Constitution Society published. You can look up my Harvard Journal on Legislation article. You can look up my Yale Law Journal article. My most recent one was in the Ohio State Law Journal on this whole scheme of fake factfinding propping up Supreme Court cases and how they violated the rules of factfinding in order to violate factfinding.

There is a lot of research out there. These are all publications that get reviewed. They have all been cleared by the publisher, so it is not like I am making crazy stuff up. These have been out there in some cases for years, and everybody who wants to criticize them has had every chance. They seem to have stood up very well on their facts.

What are we doing on investigation? Well, the Finance and Judiciary Committees are looking into the problems with the Court.

Chairman Wyden of the Finance Committee has developed evidence that the motor coach loan to Justice Thomas was never paid back. In fact, not a dollar of principal was ever paid on that loan. For a period of time, Justice Thomas paid interest to the individual who made the quarter-of-a-million-dollar loan to him, and then he stopped paying interest, and he never paid any principal. So we are looking into what that means. What does that mean from the point of view of Justice Thomas's disclosure about gifts and income? What does that mean with respect to his tax filings because under American law, the forgiveness of a debt is income that needs to be declared. Was that done? That is what the investigation is looking to find out.

The second has to do with Harlan Crow's yacht--also famous from Justice Thomas's vacations. This is the yacht that took Thomas around Indonesia for 10 days or so in what has been valued at a quarter-of-a- million-dollar vacation. Not bad.

Well, it turns out that the Crow yacht has been going around the world declaring itself to be a pleasure yacht in some places and in other places, declaring itself to be a yacht for charter. Well, the difference between a pleasure yacht and a yacht for charter is that a yacht for charter gets to deduct expenses. Sure enough, it looks like Mr. Crow has deducted $8 million--$8 million--in tax deductions off what he often says and what the boat's shell corporation often says is just a pleasure yacht. You don't get to deduct the expense of your pleasure yacht. So it is an important distinction. They say both things, and we are investigating which is true and whether false statements were made.

Then in the Judiciary Committee, under the leadership of Senator Durbin, we had the authority to obtain

subpoenas. We were able to subpoena the shell corporation that owns the yacht. We were able to subpoena the shell corporation that owns the private jet. We were able to subpoena the shell corporation that owns the Adirondack estate where that famous painting was made of Harlan Crow, Justice Thomas, Leonard Leo, and the rest of the little crew hanging out together.

So that is all under active investigation, and that is not going to stop, I can assure you.

As I mentioned, the legislation passed the committee. It passed it on July 20, 2023. We are looking forward to having a robust discussion about Supreme Court ethics when this is brought up on the Senate floor for a vote in Congress.

Finally, we have had an interesting set of successes, I guess I would call them, at this point with the Judicial Conference. The Judicial Conference is the body that runs the judicial branch of government. It is its own sort of board of directors. It is made up of the chief judges of all the different circuit courts of appeals and a chief judge from a district court in each circuit. It is a very august body.

Here are some of the things they looked at. They looked at what I call the ``Scalia trick.'' The ``Scalia trick'' was to get someone to tell a resort owner to invite Scalia on a free vacation with a personal invitation on the free vacation and then not disclose it as a gift because it was ``personal hospitality.''

Well, when that was pointed out to the Judicial Conference, they blew that scheme to smithereens because it is obvious that arranging a personal invitation to a resort owned by somebody you don't even know does not amount to the kind of personal hospitality--like family trips--that is the basis for allowing nondisclosure of big gifts.

The question before them now is, when they did that, was that a clarification of the law or was that a new rule? It took Scalia's lawyers about a nanosecond to jump in and say: Oh, this is a new rule, and we are going to comply with it.

He doesn't usually talk about this stuff, so you think about, why did the lawyers pop up with that? Well, the reason they popped up with that is they wanted to say it was a new rule because if it was a clarification, which is what the Judicial Conference said it was, they would have to go back and amend all his previous filings that were filed in violation. That would be a fine mess.

So Justice Thomas has a lot at stake in that determination, and that determination is before the Judicial Conference right now.

You are looking at this problem of fake amici that I described. They have agreed that the rule is inadequate and that it is not appropriate for parties and the public not to know who is really in the courtroom but to have these masks--these front groups, these fakes--showing up without disclosing who is really behind them.

They are still investigating what I call Thomas-Crow 2.0. There was a first round of billionaire gifts from Harlan Crow to Justice Thomas back in sort of 2009, 2010, 2011 for yacht and jet travel. That was investigated by the Judicial Conference, and then the matter was closed. Then he went back and did it all over again. So they are still investigating the Thomas gifts from Harlan Crow, second round, 2.0.

Then I have asked them to look at something Justice Alito did, which was to offer an opinion in the Wall Street Journal editorial page about a matter that was not only likely to come before the Court but was virtually certainly headed to the Court. He offered an opinion, which is something they say in their confirmation hearings they are not allowed to do, but he did.

Worse still, it wasn't just about some free-range topic; it was about a specific dispute, an ongoing dispute. He took sides in an ongoing dispute. Worse still, he took sides in that ongoing dispute at the behest of a lawyer on the other side in that dispute. By the way, that lawyer represented his friend Leonard Leo, so there was a personal connection, and the gravamen of the dispute was our ability to find out about free gifts of travel to Justice Alito. So at the end of the day, his improper opinion protected him from public scrutiny for gifts he should not have been receiving.

So all of that is before the Judicial Conference. I want to express my appreciation to the Judicial Conference for their diligence in doing this. Obviously, this is not the way they would like to spend their time, but the Supreme Court has not given them much choice by continuing to engage in all of this bad behavior, and it is all related, and it is all part of the scheme.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, we are about to vote on final passage to confirm President Biden's nominee to the U.S. District Court of Rhode Island, Melissa DuBose, and I would like to say a few words about her.

My senior Senator, Jack Reed, will be following me shortly, and I want to begin by saying what a pleasure and successful effort it has been to work with Senator Reed together to make recommendations to several Presidents that have produced excellent district court judges in the District Court for the District of Rhode Island, a really terrific senior judge on the First Circuit, and a sitting judge on the First Circuit Court of Appeals. I think our nominees have proven themselves very well in the field after the nominations came and they were sworn in and joined the bench.

Melissa DuBose, I am confident, will join that roster of very successful Reed-Whitehouse recommendations. She has a few characteristics that I would like to mention.

One, she worked as a prosecutor in the Rhode Island Department of Attorney General, where I used to work and where I used to actually work as attorney general for a bit. She did very busy, active service there on the criminal prosecution side and was very well regarded by her peers. She spent nearly 10 years as a corporate in-house counsel at a Fortune 500 company, Schneider Electric, and learned the law from that side. Then she served on the Rhode Island district court, which is a very fast paced, busy court where your judgment is constantly called on. She has shown herself to be a very patient and well-regarded judge, having presided over maybe 250 or 300 cases that have either gone to trial or verdict.

She is a graduate of Rhode Island's own Providence College. She was a history teacher in Providence schools for 11 years before she embarked on her legal career. She was educated at the Roger Williams University School of Law, which not only graduated her but thought so highly of her that they invited her back to sit on the board of the law school. I don't know how many of my colleagues here who are lawyers have been invited to sit on the board of their law school, but the law school thought highly enough of Judge DuBose that they asked her to do that.

I would add that perhaps the most prestigious board in the State of Rhode Island is the board of the Rhode Island Foundation, a huge charitable organization devoted to the well-being and welfare of the Rhode Island community, and Rhode Island's community leaders invited her to be on the board of that as well.

This is a person, a lifelong Rhode Islander, who is exceedingly well regarded in our community.

I will close before I yield to Senator Reed by pointing out that the members of the district court could not be more excited about having her join the Rhode Island U.S. District Court.

We, as a matter of practice, very often check in with the judges to make sure they concur in the recommendations that we are going to make to a President about who is going to join them on the bench, so that if there are any problems that we are not aware of, we have a chance to do due diligence. In this case, judges on the court were affirmatively reaching out to Judge DuBose, saying: Please make sure you apply to Senator Reed and Senator Whitehouse. We really want you on the court.

This is a very special woman, a very accomplished lawyer, an experienced and proven judge, and I look forward to a strong bipartisan vote for her.

And with that, let me yield to my senior partner in this business of making excellent recommendations to Presidents for judges.

Mr. President, I am back again with the old battered ``Time to Wake Up'' graphic here. The Smithsonian can't have it quite yet.

This ``Time to Wake Up'' climate report starts with the unfortunate proposition that we are in terrible danger on climate. Obviously, a critical part and an essential explanation of the danger is that the Republican Party has been turned, by fossil fuel industry dark money, into little more than the political wing of the fossil fuel industry, slavishly dependent on the fossil fuel polluters to fill up its super PACs and shameless about parroting the polluters' obnoxious lies.

But all that happens in the political world; where the danger gets real is in the physical world. And a recent study suggests that we have, perhaps, already blown through the 1.5 degrees of world heating safety limit.

That 1.5-degree limit was always just an estimated upper bound. Unlike many estimates, it could have been too high. It could be that the true safety barrier was always below 1.5 degrees.

But in any event, assume that it actually is 1.5 degrees, which is sort of the midpoint of the estimates. Well, it is starting to look like we may be losing even against that metric.

Here is a chart that summarizes over a thousand different projections that have been done from different sources as to where our CO2 emissions are going to take us. It is actually more than 1,200 different scenarios.

Some of them take global temperature increase over 5 degrees of increase, which will lead to disruption on an astonishing scale that leaves many parts of the planet uninhabitable, as presently experienced.

So there are an awful lot of them. Some of them, we have already made decisions that make them impossible to achieve. Some of them are essentially dead letters. If you look at the ones that are still viable and at the ones that--this is the 1.5-degree safety barrier. If you look at those 1,200 scenarios and you look at the ones that are still viable and get us, at some point, back under 1.5 degrees, do you know how many of them there are? Eleven. Out of 1,200 predicted scenarios, 11 are all that is left to keep us at some point below 1.5 degrees. Almost all of them blow significantly over 1.5 degrees and then come back down, which makes investments in carbon capture extremely important.

But that is not a whole lot of shots out of 1,200 scenarios that we started with. And each of them is ranked by where we are on the different components that get us there: carbon removal technology, carbon removal with land interventions--planting trees and so forth-- carbon intensity reduction, energy demand adjustment, and less methane. In every single one of those categories, these are ranked as challenging. None of this is easy. All of it is going to require real effort, real diligence, and serious attention to the problem.

So we are not in good shape. And that is the sad and bitter news. We could have been in good shape. Back in 2007, 2008, and 2009, there was bipartisan work happening on climate change in this Chamber all the time. And then came the Supreme Court's wretched decision in Citizens United and the instantaneous response by the fossil fuel industry to flood politics with its money and the instantaneous response by Republicans to abandon all of their bipartisan climate work and pitch us into a lost decade-plus on climate action.

That is where a lot of these that could have gotten us out of trouble disappeared in that lost decade of fossil fuel dark money blocking American democracy's ability to respond to this problem.

So to stay below the 1.5-degree safety threshold requires two measures. Again, these are estimates. It could well be that we need to do more than this, but these are the ones we are working with. One is reducing emissions by roughly half by 2030. And the other is reaching net zero by 2050.

So here is the latest estimate of how we are doing with respect to the 2030 50-percent reduction goal. That is what this line is. That is 50-percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. And here is where we are. And here are a bunch of different scenarios and how they end up.

The only one--the only scenario that gets us to this goal by 2030-- here is 2030, if you can't see it from the television--the only thing that gets us there is a carbon fee, putting a price on carbon emissions so that it is no longer free to pollute.

Let's say we go ahead with a carbon fee but part of the IRA gets pulled away--that is this purple line--we miss by a little. Let's say we go with the clean electricity standard instead of a carbon fee; we miss by more.

Let's say that we expand the IRA--do more of that positive investment through the IRA but without a carbon price--we miss by even more.

Here is where we are under current law--this red line. Here is where we are under current law if the EPA's proposed emission rules go into effect. That is our current likely outcome. And as you can see, that is a long way from 50 percent by 2030. That blows through it sometime after 2035.

If there are no new emissions rules just under the IRA, we are all the way out to 2040 before we cross that safety threshold. And if we do what our Republican friends, at the behest of the fossil fuel industry, are threatening to do, which is to repeal the IRA and block the new emissions rules, you are out here. And who knows when you get to 50 percent.

So to hit that first target, we have to wrap our minds around carbon pricing--pricing polluter emissions. Polluters should pay for the pollution they cause. It is not complicated. But they have been able to get away with it.

Of course, if you are living in a polluter money la-la land, none of this is real to you. And the numbers that matter to you are how much money get poured into your super PACs by polluters, not what the scientists are carefully analyzing and saying and modeling.

But if you are out of climate-denial polluter la-la land, and you are trying to grapple with this as a real problem in the real world, carbon pricing is essential.

So where are we on that? Well, I have two bits of good news. One is that, just like many major corporations do, the Biden administration has put an internal price on carbon at a very respectable $190 per ton. And the Office of Management and Budget--the OMB--has given guidance to executive Agencies to build that internal price on carbon into all their relevant decisionmaking.

What is an internal price on carbon? It means that the government's decisions have to bake into their decisionmaking--the $190 per ton price on carbon. If you are buying fleets of cars,

you compare the emissions, and that goes into the cost equation. If you are setting the price on land use of various kinds--like drilling wells--you bake in the $190 per ton. In regulatory decisions, of course, you would do that.

So it is a big deal, and it is part of the good news. Of course, the question is: How will the executive Agencies comply? The OMB has issued its guidance--boom, done. It was issued in September of last year. The $190 per ton went active in December--boom, done. But it is time now for all the executive Agencies to react and respond and comply. And that is what we haven't seen yet.

So we are looking into that as an oversight matter to try to make sure that the executive Agencies are doing their best to comply with the OMB guidance as to the internal price on carbon. So that is good news item 1, assuming implementation is not ineffective.

The second good news item is that the European Union--our friends across the pond in our Atlantic alliance--are locked in to a carbon border adjustment mechanism, a tariff mechanism called CBAM, Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.

The further good news is that the United Kingdom has announced that it has made the decision to join the EU in that same CBAM program. Why is that good for us? It is good for us because this will create significant pressure here at home for a price on carbon in the United States because without one, if we don't have a proper price on carbon here in the United States, it will be very, very, very difficult for American companies exporting to the United States and to the UK to avoid those carbon tariffs. We will be paying tariffs to the UK and to the EU whenever our production of goods is more carbon-intensive than theirs. One of the ways you solve that is by adopting a carbon price. Then you get into the club, and you don't have to pay the tariffs any longer.

So the tariff pressure on American businesses ought to disrupt significantly the general political indifference of the American corporate sector about the fossil fuel industry's political hegemony over Republicans. That could open a potential pathway when the steel industry, the aluminum industry, the chemical industry, the cement industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and others are coming to their elected representatives and saying: Why am I paying this tariff? What is up with that? Why do I have to do that?

The answer from our Republican friends is that it is so the fossil fuel industry can keep polluting for free.

I don't think that is going to sell well in other board rooms. So that creates a little bit of industry-on-industry counterpressure. With any luck, that will be good enough to help us pass a proper carbon fee.

By the way, I happen to have a bill for that. It would do all of those things. It is called the Clean Competition Act. I would commend that to the administration's attention.

The Biden administration seems to be shedding what was initially anti-CBAM skepticism. It has seemingly abandoned an effort to undercut the CBAM with a weak so-called steel and aluminum arrangement that deservedly belongs in the bin as a climate response. I hope very much the administration will begin developing a positive response to the CBAM, and there is my bill as a model for them to take a look at.

If we do this right, it spares American exporters paying these tariffs. That is a good thing. It also supports a global pressure against carbon pollution that puts us on a potential path to climate safety that we are not on now.

Together, those two pieces won't match a full, proper price on carbon, as proposed in my separate pollution fee bill, which I also commend when we get to a full, proper price on carbon, but it will get us a good ways there.

While we are at it, we could add carbon pricing on luxury aircraft travel emissions to reduce those pollutants. There is no reason that somebody sporting around in a private jet shouldn't be picking up the tab for the pollution they are leaving behind. We could add carbon pricing on shipping, which many of the leading shipping lines actually support. So we have a constituency to get this done in the industry. Those two things would help make more progress, and, yes, I have bills on each.

But ultimately, we need to stop the fossil fuel industry's dangerous and fraudulent pollute-for-free business model by making them pay to pollute, which is what they should be doing as a basic economic market theory principle. But instead of obeying economic market theory, they are floating on a subsidy that the International Monetary Fund has estimated at over $600 billion with a ``b''--billion dollars--every single year. It makes it tough for renewables to compete against a $600-plus billion subsidy every single year. By the way, it also makes it easier to throw a few million dollars into controlling Congress if you are protecting a subsidy of $600-plus billion every single year.

So there is this conflict between free market principles and fossil fuel subsidies. Unfortunately, our Republican friends inevitably resolve that conflict in favor of fossil fuel subsidies, while conveniently taking billions of dollars in fossil fuel political money.

Let me close by turning to methane. This graphic talks about economy- wide CO2 emissions in various climate policy scenarios, but methane is over 80 times as dangerous in the short term as a greenhouse gas than CO2 is.

Folks, we have been disastrously bad at handling those methane emissions. Indeed, for years, EPA collected and reported artificially low methane numbers that were not real--were not even close to real. The EPA methane effort was half-baked, ill-informed, and hapless.

But something has changed. Now, we can spot methane emission sources from satellites. We can measure the intensity of the methane leakage. And there is a new methane fee on industry methane leaks from my bill, which got into the IRA, and there is a new methane reg from EPA. The administration has announced a methane enforcement task force to use that new technology and find and fix and finish major methane leaks. If we can do that in this country, then we can go to the next COP with a program to have all international methane leaks found, fixed, and finished. If we do that globally, that is a very big step towards a pathway to climate safety.

Like the social cost of carbon, this plan--the methane enforcement task force--is set, but the implementation is still unknown. A rapid, robust, and efficient enforcement group could really make a difference in getting dangerous methane leaks plugged. A sloppy and indolent group that follows the ``interagency process'' rule of moving at the speed of the slowest bureaucracy would be a real disappointment. So here again, we are doing oversight.

Put these things together--a proper and well-implemented internal social cost of carbon made effective across all relevant Federal Agencies for all relevant Agency decision making; plus a positive response, not a weak sister response, to the EU-UK CBAM carbon border tariff; plus a tough, multi-Agency crackdown on industry methane leaks--and this trajectory towards climate safety begins to get more possible.

Unfortunately, we just had bad news from the EPA on their powerplant pollution rule. If you can believe it, their rule, which has been months and months and months in the making, will regulate coal-fired powerplants, which are dying out on their own, under their own sheer dead economic weight, and they will regulate new gas-powered powerplants, which aren't built and therefore don't have any emissions, but they won't be regulating in this rule the part of the powerplant market that this year and in all future years will produce the majority of the emissions from that sector. It is the biggest piece of the powerplant emission sector, and they are simply not going to regulate it. That piece is the existing fleet of gas-powered powerplants.

It is really hard to see the logic of giving that free pass to the major polluting sector of the powerplant emitters, and it sends a terrible signal about the seriousness of the Agency. So let us hope that rule is a unique embarrassment and not a broader signal of weak, even pusillanimous, EPA administrative effort on climate.

The diligence with which the methane task force and social cost of carbon are implemented and the positivity of the U.S. response to the CBAM need to

send a much more serious signal, as should all future EPA rulemakings on powerplants, vehicles, and other large sources of carbon pollution.

We are at a tipping point right now. When you get down to 1,200 different scenarios where only 11 remaining ones still get you near a climate safety pathway, you have to cut the loaf mighty thin. Making sure that we get this right, that we get onto one of those pathways, is going to require a carbon fee. It just is.

By the way, that is what conservative economics tells you should be done. You can go to Milton Friedman, the high priest of free market economics, and he will say that if you are involved in making a product that involves polluting or some other what they call negative externality in economics-ese, you have to bake that pollution cost, bake that negative externality into the price of your product. If you haven't done that, you are being subsidized. If you are being subsidized, that ain't market economics.

So the principle is right for this. Fairness is right because you should not be able to pollute for free, particularly like the fossil fuel industry does, particularly creating the kind of harm they are creating. And, of course, there is this other question of making sure that our planet remains habitable in the manner that we are used to for our children and our grandchildren.

Again, all of that is doable. All of that is doable with a price on carbon emissions. And there are not scenarios to take us down that pathway to climate safety without that carbon price.

I yield the floor.