Floor Statements

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the en bloc consideration of the following Senate resolutions submitted earlier today: S. Res. 577, S. Res. 578, and S. Res. 579.

I ask unanimous consent that the resolutions be agreed to, the preambles be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, all en bloc.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand adjourned until 10 a.m. on Thursday, March 7; 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; further, that following the conclusion of morning business, the Senate proceed to executive session to resume consideration of the Noti nomination; further, that the cloture motion with respect to the Noti nomination ripen at 11:45 a.m.; further, that if cloture is invoked on the Noti nomination and notwithstanding rule XXII, the Senate resume legislative session to execute the order of February 29, 2024, with respect to S. 3853, and that the Senate vote on passage of that bill at 2:15 p.m.; further, that upon disposition of S. 3853, the Senate resume executive session and all time on the Noti nomination be considered expired; that if the nomination is confirmed, the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's actions.

Madam President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask that it stand adjourned under the previous order, following the remarks of Senator Sanders.

Madam President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I move to waive all applicable sections of that Act and any other applicable points of order for the consideration of H.R. 815.

And I ask for the yeas and nays.

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I am back now for the 28th time in my series of speeches on the special interest scheme to capture the U.S. Supreme Court. What I would like to do today is to talk a little bit about the Judicial Conference and what the Judicial Conference has been doing to help clean up the mess at the Supreme Court.

I suppose I should start with ``What is the Judicial Conference?'' The Judicial Conference is a body created by Congress around 100 years ago as the chief governing and policymaking body of the Federal judiciary. It basically supervises the administrative side, not the adjudicative side--the administrative side--of the judicial branch of government. It is chaired by the Chief Justice, and its membership is composed

of the chief judges of each circuit and of the Court of International Trade. So it is a very distinguished group of very senior appellate judges and a district judge from each circuit--typically, a chief judge or a senior judge. Again, it is a pretty distinguished group.

The Conference is responsible for, among other things, enforcing ethics rules, overseeing financial disclosures, and setting other policies across the Federal judiciary, which it mostly does through committees. It has committees on issues ranging from financial disclosure to things like courtroom security.

The Judicial Conference has a very important role enforcing judicial ethics rules. Ethics rules are within its ambit of responsibility. Now, bearing in mind the recent ProPublica story concluding that the Judicial Conference has, to quote the story, ``often protected, not policed, the judiciary,'' I wanted to share my experience as I have conducted this investigation and how we have been able to work with the Judicial Conference.

First, let me say, as a general matter, that the Judicial Conference is very reticent--very reticent. Getting even basic information, like which judge serves on which committee, is an uphill struggle.

Last year, Business Insider, the publication, sought the list of members of the Committee on Financial Disclosure, and the Conference initially denied the request--what can I tell you--saying that the ``names of the members of the committee are not public,'' which is kind of a strange position to take when they are paid by taxpayers to do that work, and all you are asking is who they are.

But, thankfully, later, the Conference reversed course. I requested the Judicial Conference disclose information, like who sits on its committees and what rules they operate by, but, so far, I have not yet received a formal response to that, and I very much hope that the members of the Judicial Conference will make this information public. Transparency is not a bad thing in this area.

Anyway, through all of its established reticence, when I have brought issues to the attention of the Judicial Conference through correspondence or through remarks that I deliver at the Conference's twice-annual meetings in Washington, which I am invited to in my capacity as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Courts Subcommittee, the Conference has generally produced positive results. My requests have covered four areas, and I will give you a quick overview of where those matters stand.

First, I will talk about the disclosure rules for amicus curiae briefs, or ``friend of the court'' briefs. Dark-money front groups send flotillas of amicus briefs to the Supreme Court. The Justices and their clerks read these briefs. They often cite them in their official decisions. But it is basically judicial lobbying.

The problem is that this flotilla of amicus briefs doesn't have to disclose the true source of the funding behind the briefs. So neither the Justices nor the other parties nor the public gets to know who is really paying for these arguments to be presented to the Supreme Court, nor do we know the interconnections among the front groups. To what extent are they single web of front groups masquerading as a great number of individual entities?

We know for sure one thing: There was a brief filed under a ``fictitious name'' of another organization. It wasn't even a real entity that filed the brief. It was the ``fictitious name'' under Virginia law of a completely different group, and that was done without disclosing the name of the actual group to the Court.

That means it is left to offices like mine to track these groups and then explain to the Court, which we do in our amicus briefs, how all of this flotilla of briefs is coordinated.

Very often we see common dark-money donors. Very often we see the fingerprints of the rightwing billionaires' Court fixer, Leonard Leo, time and again. Dark-money groups pay huge sums to support rightwing Justices' confirmations onto the Court and then turn around and file amicus curiae briefs to signal to those Justices, whom they helped get on the Court, how they should rule.

So, since 2019, I have asked the Supreme Court to strengthen its amicus disclosure rule. After much badgering, the Court, to its credit, sent this matter to the Judicial Conference for consideration, where, at the Judicial Conference, it was, in turn, referred to an advisory committee. Although that advisory committee hasn't yet formally proposed a rule change, things look promising. These judges who make up the Judicial Conference well recognize the importance of, as one judge said, knowing what she called the ``real power behind the throne'' in these flotillas of amicus briefs.

It is also encouraging to hear judges on the committee recognize that there is a ``broad agreement,'' which they said, on the need for better disclosure. As always, the devil will be in the details, but, thus far, the Judicial Conference is on the case. It has announced that it is examining the matter.

Another issue that I have raised with the Judicial Conference is what I call the ``Scalia trick,'' misuse of the ``personal hospitality'' exception in the financial disclosure rules. Justice Scalia got this trick named for him by taking dozens of high-end hunting trips for free, and he used this rule to avoid disclosing them. He pretended that a ``personal invitation'' from a resort owner, whom he had perhaps never met, made it ``personal hospitality'' protected by the rule.

Senator Graham and I first sent a bipartisan letter to the Supreme Court about abuse of the personal hospitality exception back in 2021. This letter can be found online at https://www. whitehouse.senate.gov/download/2021-02-04-letter-with-graham-to-scotus- hospitality-and-code.

After that, I sent several more letters asking the Court to address the ``Scalia trick.'' Those three letters can be found online at https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/download/2021-08-30-letter-to- circuits-hospitality, https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/download/2022- 04-18-letter-to-circuits-hospitality-follow-up, and https:// www.whitehouse.senate.gov/download/2023-02-21-letter-to-judicial- conference-personal-hospitality.

The good news is that, in March of last year, the Administrative Office of the Courts wrote to me to say that the Committee on Financial Disclosure ``would clarify its regulations on `personal hospitality.' ''

I will quote that word again, ``clarify,'' because it matters later.

Sure enough, when the clarification came out, the Judicial Conference slammed the door hard on the ``Scalia trick''--so no more secret flights to and from hunting trips across the country on someone else's dime; no more secret ``personal'' hospitality paid for by a third party; and no more secret ``personal'' hospitality, so-called, at properties owned by a corporation.

I count these clarifications as a win. So I will put that into the ``win'' column.

There is a related question still pending from that. Justices Thomas and Alito claimed, last year, this same exception--the ``personal'' hospitality exception--let them accept their secret gifts of jet and yacht travel from rightwing billionaires without reporting it.

In his most recent financial disclosure report, Justice Thomas claimed that he could keep those past gifts secret because what he called the committee's ``new rules''--his description--didn't go into effect until March 2023. And there I disagree. The disclosure law was always clear. It was the Judicial Conference's guidance that hadn't headed off the ``Scalia trick,'' likely because nobody imagined that any judge would be so bold as to have intermediaries ask resort owners to send them invitations for free travel and then call that ``personal'' hospitality.

Anyway, the judiciary's letter to me said that the change was a ``clarification.'' And that word choice matters a lot here, because if it was, in fact, a ``clarification,'' then Justice Thomas and all the rest of the Supreme Court must amend their past filings to comport with the law, because it had always been that way, and they would have to disclose all the freebies kept secret in previous years. So pending at the Judicial Conference is my request that the Conference clarify whether the revised guidance constituted a ``clarification'' or a rule change. I do not have a response to that yet, but the end of the ``Scalia trick'' was a considerable win.

I have also contacted the Conference about how omissions in Justice Thomas's financial disclosure report were handled by the Conference back in 2011. That correspondence can be found online at https:// www.whitehouse.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/05.02.2023%20-%20 Supreme%20Court%20Ethics%20 Hearing%20-%20Exhibit%2010.pdf and https:// www.whitehouse.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2023-08-31_letter_to_ judge_mauskopf_financial_disclosure_ committee.pdf.

Back then, Justice Thomas failed to disclose $700,000 that the far- right Heritage Foundation had paid his wife over several years. Justice Thomas's undisclosed yacht and jet travel, paid for by the rightwing billionaire Harlan Crow, also became public for the first time. So Members of Congress and a watchdog group sent the 2011 omissions to the Judicial Conference's Committee on Financial Disclosure for review. Under the law, the Conference is required to refer the matter to the Attorney General for further investigation if there is reasonable cause--reasonable cause--to believe that the violations may have been willful.

Last year, my Courts Subcommittee heard testimony from a judge who was then on the Judicial Conference, who raised serious concerns about the Conference's ``reasonable cause'' inquiry. There is actually no indication that a ``reasonable cause'' inquiry was made, so in August, I wrote to the Administrative Office to find out more about what really happened. The Administrative Office acknowledged my request, but I have not yet received a response to my questions.

The Judicial Conference is also considering Justice Thomas's more recent financial disclosure omissions. Congressman Hank Johnson, who is my coordinate as the top Democrat on the Courts Subcommittee on the House side, and I wrote to the Judicial Conference several times, along with other Members of Congress, asking for a review of these ethics violations and a determination as to whether referral to the Attorney General is required for this second round of yacht and jet travel from Republican billionaire Harlan Crow, for the real estate sale from Thomas to Crow, and for various gifts from other ultrawealthy individuals, including Paul Novelly and David Sokol.

Madam President, those letters can be found online at https:// www.whitehouse.senate.gov/download/letter-to-judicial-conference- referral-to-ag_04142023 and https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/imo/ media/doc/2023-08-11_letter_to_judge_ mauskopf_ thomas_gifts1.pdf.

As in 2011, the current matter has been sent to the Committee on Financial Disclosure. We don't know exactly how the committee's review is going, but the Judicial Conference's report on its September meeting--its most recent meeting--included this interesting note on the committee's activities. The note said the committee was ``updated on the status of the ongoing review of public written allegations of errors or omissions in a filer's financial disclosure reports that were referred to it since the Conference's last session.'' So it seems like that is this matter, and it seems like that investigation is an ongoing review.

The final issue I have raised with the Judicial Conference is my complaint against Justice Alito for what I thought was a pretty blatant ethics violation last summer. I addressed this complaint to Chief Justice Roberts both in his capacity as Chief Justice and as Chair of the Judicial Conference.

Madam President, that letter can be found online at https:// www.whitehouse.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2023-09-04_ complaint_from_ senwhitehouseenclosure.pdf.

The Supreme Court, unlike every other Federal court, has no procedure for receiving or investigating ethics complaints, so that is why I sent it to him wearing both of those hats.

The first thing I asked the Chief Justice to do was to change that. There should be a place where, with a complaint like that, I could go and file it and somebody would pay attention.

I also asked that either the Conference or the Court conduct its own investigation into Justice Alito's comments in the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, made in an interview with David Rivkin, where Justice Alito offered his legal opinion that ``[n]o provision in the Constitution gives [Congress] the authority to regulate the Supreme Court--period.''

Well, it seems to me that is a slam dunk ethics violation for a couple of reasons. First, Justice Alito was opining on the constitutionality of my Supreme Court ethics bill, which the Senate Judiciary Committee had recently advanced, and the legitimacy of related oversight requests from the Senate Judiciary and Finance Committees.

We have heard time and time again from Supreme Court nominees, including Justice Alito himself, that it is improper and a disservice to the judicial process--those were Justice Alito's words in his nomination hearing--for them to express opinions on a matter that might come before the Court. Well, boom. This was a matter that might come before the Court--indeed, it was actually likely to come before the Court--and there he was opining at will in the pages of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

But it gets worse. He made his comments in the context of a specific ongoing legal dispute--a dispute involving Court fixer Leonard Leo, who had arranged for an undisclosed free jet trip and fishing excursion for Justice Alito and himself.

When the Senate Judiciary Committee requested information about the gifts Leo arranged, we got a letter back from his lawyer, David Rivkin--the same person who conducted the interview that recruited the comment from Justice Alito. Justice Alito's comments in the Wall Street Journal echoed the exact argument that Rivkin had made when he refused to give us any information--i.e., that Congress has no authority to legislate on or oversee Supreme Court ethics, which is a weird position to take when you consider that the Judicial Conference, which oversees Supreme Court ethics, was created by an act of Congress.

Anyway, the cherry on top of this whole mess, which I flagged also for Chief Justice Roberts in a followup letter--which can be found online at https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/ alito_complaint_ addendum.pdf--came a month later when another billionaire, who is also alleged to have provided Justice Thomas with undisclosed gifts, cited Justice Alito's comments as support for his argument that this billionaire didn't have to answer our questions about those gifts. I sent that letter to Chief Justice Roberts as an addendum to my complaint, and I have not yet heard back.

But it really does seem wrong that a Justice of the Supreme Court would offer an opinion on a matter that might come before the Court that actually relates to a specific, ongoing legal dispute in which the lawyer for a party in that ongoing legal dispute is doing the interviewing; that the person that lawyer represents is a friend and associate of the Justice himself; and that the result of that activity is that gifts to that very Justice are kept from public view, orchestrated by the client. It is a mess.

The last thing we have is a letter that Senator Wyden and I just sent to the Acting Director of the Judicial Conference that relates to the recreational vehicle loan that Justice Thomas received. It appears from the Finance Committee's investigation that the principal on the loan was never repaid--not a dollar of it; that for a period, interest on the loan was repaid but then interest stopped being repaid.

When you stop paying both principal and interest, that amounts to an act of forgiveness of the loan. Yet the forgiveness of that loan was never declared on his judicial ethics filings, suggesting that it might not have been disclosed even in his tax filings, which could lead to a whole second set of legal concerns.

Madam President, that letter can be found online at https://www. whitehouse.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/ 2024-02-07_wyden_whitehouse_letter_ to_ao.pdf.

It is not fair to expect the Judicial Conference to have done anything about that because it was just sent to them, but with respect to the other things, I would sum it up this way: The score at the Judicial Conference so far is one clear win on getting rid of the Scalia trick; major progress on disclosing who is really behind front

group amici; an ongoing review of the billionaire gifts program at the Court as it relates to Justice Thomas in particular; and so far no response on the Alito-Wall Street Journal mischief.

Like I said, it is a very reticent place. They move very slowly and have a lot of process. So I am just going to continue to press along in bringing information before the Judicial Conference so that they and the public can get clear answers on these issues. Certainly, the American people deserve transparency when it comes to fairness and gifts from interested billionaires to Justices of the Supreme Court.

With that, to be continued.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, let me start by thanking our Finance Committee chairman, Chairman Wyden, for his strong leadership. Chairman Wyden was able to secure the cooperation of the wealthy donor who gave Justice Thomas the $\1/4\ million-plus RV loan. The chairman doggedly followed the facts to get the truth for the American people, which takes guts, particularly when you consider the many special interests rooting for this investigation to go away.

And while I am thanking the chairman, let me also thank Chairman Durbin for his persistent and dogged pursuit of the truth through the Judiciary Committee. Both the Judiciary and Finance Committees are working to get to the bottom of this.

Keep in mind, in all the ethics mess engulfing Justice Thomas, that for every ethics issue, there is also likely a tax issue; perhaps, two sides of the same coin. If a Justice isn't reporting income on his legally required financial disclosure, there is a good chance that something is amiss with his tax reporting as well.

When a Justice receives something of value from a benefactor, the presumption is that it needs to be disclosed under the ethics law either as income or as a gift. Generally speaking, if it is income, the Justice must also report it as income for income tax purposes; and if it is a gift, the donor needs to report it for gift tax purposes--which is why when you are looking at possible ethics violations in situations like this, it is important to know if that income showed up on the tax side or if that gift report showed up on the tax side. That is why Chairman Wyden's leadership here is so essential.

If this went unreported, that could be a tax law violation. Again, if it is a gift, the Justice needs to disclose it under the ethics law unless it falls under a narrow definition for ``personal hospitality''--spending Christmas with your in-laws, for instance, or going on a trip with your college roommates. So either way, the tax question becomes for donors, for gifts, did the benefactor or did the donor report it for gift tax purposes? So you have the income tax reporting issue, the gift tax reporting issue. And then you have a third issue, which is that these tax filings can also test the veracity of what Justices claim.

Justices Thomas and Alito claim they didn't have to report free jet and yacht travel gifted by billionaires because those gifts, they claimed, were personal hospitality. There were no college roommates or in-laws involved. It is a heck of a stretch to call this personal hospitality. But one of the ways you could test whether it is personal hospitality would be by looking at how the donor of the hospitality treated it on their taxes. It would be a pretty good tell that all that hospitality those Justices received was not so personal if the yacht and jet travel gifted to Justices Thomas and Alito was written off by these billionaires as a tax expense--as a business expense. So there is a lot to be learned from tax filing.

Two other reminders as we go through this. One, it is a crime. It is a crime under 18 U.S. Code section 1001 to file a false sworn statement with the Federal Government. Both judicial disclosures and tax filings are filed under oath.

No. 2, the law requires the Judicial Conference, if there is any question about whether an improper judicial disclosure filing might have been willful, to refer the question of willfulness to the Attorney General for investigation. It is not under the law of the Judicial Conference's job to decide the question of willfulness; it is only to decide if there is a question of willfulness and then refer that to the Attorney General for investigation.

So this can get serious fast, which brings us to Justice Thomas and his RV. When it comes to ethics requirements, there is no question about what the law required here. If part of Justice Thomas's debt was forgiven, he had to report it. The state of the facts based on the documents the Finance Committee has obtained and reviewed is that Justice Thomas never paid back a dollar of principal on $\1/4\ million loan and that the donor long ago stopped collecting even interest on that loan.

So let's take a look at the law. Justice Thomas likely didn't have to report the loan itself. Justices don't need to report loans secured by a personal vehicle as long as the value of the loan isn't worth more than the vehicle itself.

If Justice Thomas put up the RV as collateral for his loan and didn't obtain more money than the RV was worth, there was no need for him to disclose the loan. But all that changes if any part of the loan was forgiven later on. As the chairman has said, when you collect not $1 of principal and stop collecting interest, that sure looks like forgiveness of a loan. And a loan you don't pay back is a form of income.

The law requires officials to disclose any income they receive outside of their government salaries, which makes sense if you are trying to expose or prevent corruption. Under the law, if you receive more than $200 of income from any one person in a year, you have to disclose that.

Here are the regulations on financial disclosure. These are regs adopted pursuant to law, and they say that income ``includes but is not limited to'' income from ``discharge of indebtedness.'' And down here, it further says that you must report ``discharge of indebtedness.''

And if you go to the Tax Code--specifically 26 U.S. Code, section 21, which defines income for tax purposes, subsection 11(a) describes that ``income from discharge of indebtedness counts as income.'' Income from discharge of indebtedness--it is the identical language in the Tax Code and in the judicial reporting regulations.

So a loan whose principal is not repaid is reportable income both under judicial ethics law and under tax law. And the law is crystal clear on this point.

Even Justices are told what the law is on this point. So if you go to the ``Filing Instructions for Judicial Officers''--this is what the judge gets that tells them how to comply with their filing requirements regarding these disclosures. Here is what it tells them:

Income . . . The disclosure of the gross amount and the

type of income--dividends, rent, interest, or income from

discharge of indebtedness--is required.

Disclosure of income from discharge of indebtedness is required.

There is nothing very subtle or complicated about that. It couldn't be more straightforward.

If Justice Thomas failed to report a loan that was no longer being collected with a big balance still due and hence was, as a practical matter, forgiven, he likely violated these requirements.

If he failed to file his taxes accordingly, he also likely violated our tax laws. Either of these--either the tax filing or the filing under the judicial disclosure rules--could amount to a false statement under the Criminal Code.

In the first instance, as to the judicial disclosure filings, the law requires the Judicial Conference to determine if there is reason to believe that Justice Thomas's violation may have been willful, in which case it has a legal obligation to report him to the Attorney General for further investigation to settle the question of willfulness.

I have asked the Judicial Conference to consider exactly these facts, and I hope they will do so. It looks like they are. As they do so, here are some things they should consider:

First, this is not Justice Thomas's first brush with this law. A previous episode of yacht and jet travel gifts to him from Harlan Crow actually went to the Judicial Conference for investigation years ago.

In my subcommittee on the Judiciary Committee, we held a hearing about this with a judge who served on the Judicial Conference at the time and could relate to us what transpired

back then with the Crow to Thomas yacht and jet travel undisclosed gifts.

That episode I would describe as a decent burial, but it is not clear now that, with Thomas back as a repeat offender with the same types of gifts from the same billionaire, that he will get the same courtesies from his fellow judges as he did in episode one of Crow to Thomas yacht and jet travel gifts. Indeed, the latest report from the Judicial Conference--they put out two reports a year. This is their report of proceedings for this past fall; i.e., this is their most recent report of proceedings, dated September 12 of last year. It has this rather Delphic sentence in it:

The Committee was also updated on the status of the ongoing

review of public written allegations of errors or omissions

in a filer's financial disclosure reports that were referred

to it since the Conference's last session.

I don't know of any other judge or Justice who has received public written allegations of errors or omissions in that filer's financial disclosure reports other than Justice Thomas. So although there is no name mentioned here, it looks very much like the Thomas investigation is alive and well in the Judicial Conference. If they should determine that there is a question of willfulness in his failure to file, particularly to the extent that it may involve similar failures in tax filings, it is their legal obligation to present that question to the Attorney General.

So it appears that the matter remains under active review, and I would conclude by saying that this is to be continued.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, let me get to the point at hand. I

am back now for the 27th time to call attention to the rightwing billionaires' scheme to capture and control our Supreme Court and connect it to things that are going on at the Court right now.

The billionaire elite that captured our Supreme Court wants to use it to attack Americans' ability--our ability as a people--through regulation, to protect our own health and safety, and the goal, mostly, is to benefit the big polluters in their midst.

A word on regulation: As modern innovations have raised the standard of living in the United States and around the world and corporations have grown to international behemoths and billionaires have claimed for themselves a larger and larger share of the world's wealth, regulation has come to have a very important role.

Big corporations' well-known motive to maximize profits, I should say, inevitably causes dangers to society. If you think of a big industrial plant that without oversight would leach chemical byproducts into the soil and water, poison wells, and spread cancer, you have got an idea of why regulation is needed.

Over many decades, Congress created administrative Agencies to perform this task, staffed by scientists and other experts to use their expertise to manage and rein in these industrial dangers. The American system of regulation made our society safer and more prosperous. Period.

As heavy equipment and dangerous chemicals came to mines and factories and construction sites, regulators implemented workplace safety standards. The meatpacking jungle led to sanitation requirements in production facilities. Automobile highway carnage produced seatbelts and airbags. Stockjobbing ``boiler rooms'' and insurance fraud provoked regulations to protect investors and insureds.

What has been the result? Workplace illnesses, injuries, and deaths declined. Foodborne illnesses that used to kill thousands of people per year have been practically wiped out. Highways are no longer carnage; boilers rarely explode; and medications and stock offerings and insurance policies are all safer for consumers.

And, by the way, in this environment of safety, corporate profits soared. The S&P 500 has returned an excess of 7,800 percent. Clean air and clean water and safe food and cars are actually good for business. Regulation is good. Regulation is a public good.

But a gang of recalcitrant polluters is in the crew that captured the Supreme Court. And they want not only to pollute for free, they want to pollute without expert regulation.

Well, even Republican Congresses wouldn't go for that so they turned to their captured, unaccountable Court.

First, they got the Court to create a brandnew, so-called major questions doctrine, basically a too-big-to-regulate escape hatch for big polluters. And now they are using their captured Court to attack another precedent, the legal doctrine known as Chevron deference, which is pretty simple: Unless the law is clear, on technical matters courts defer to the Agency experts.

This arrangement makes sense. Congress isn't suited and usually hasn't the expertise to make fine, technical determinations. So to prop up their attack on this commonsense principle, polluters have invented some fake arguments.

A few years ago, these industries and their rightwing front groups began arguing that Chevron deference has a separation-of-powers problem. It may make all the sense in the world, but it has a separation-of-powers problem that courts must attend to because they say it gives unchecked and disproportionate power to the executive branch.

The problem with that argument is that it is just not true. It is flatout false. Congress's legislative grant of administrative authority to Agencies comes with significant checks and balances. I am not going to go into all the details, but for starters, Agency heads are appointed by an elected President and confirmed by an elected Senate. And Agencies may not promulgate rules willy-nilly; they have to take public notice and comments.

And Agency rules are subject to judicial review to make sure they are consistent with the rules and the Administrative Procedures Act and the public information and comment and the evidence. That helps make sure that regulations by law have to be both reasonable and consistent with the evidence and the facts.

And in Congress, when all that is going on, we exercised direct oversight over these administrative Agencies. We do it through our oversight committees that have specific jurisdiction on specific Agencies. We do it through the appropriations process. Very often you see appropriations riders to control Agency behavior.

And we do it through the expedited review of the Congressional Review Act, which we are seeing a lot of now in the Senate, and it allows for a very quick review by Congress of a challenged Agency rule. And, in fact, Congress has used that process to overturn Agency rules 20 times since 2001.

The legal vehicle for the polluters' attack on Chevron comes in a case called Loper Bright Enterprises. As usual, where polluter interests are involved, this case brought out a rogue's gallery of what I would call the ``usual suspects''--front groups that have spent decades trying to dismantle the government's ability to regulate the big industries that secretly fund the front groups.

They arrived at the captured Court at the end of a long process that began with industry-funded think tanks that reverse-engineered fringe ideas and legal theories that will serve rightwing donor interests. Then those fringe ideas and legal theories cooked up in the doctrine factories get taken into other think tanks and around captured trade associations and bounced around and put more and more into the public debate and, ultimately, once they have been credentialed by this echo chamber of front groups, they get pushed--these manufactured legal theories get pushed into courtrooms around the country, very often, through coordinated flotillas of secretly funded amicus briefs.

There is a whole ecosystem of secretly funded corporate front groups that manage this whole process. It seems complicated, but it is less complicated than a piano and people know how to play pianos.

Now, much of this is funded by the Koch Brothers--now one is deceased--but the Koch Industries, a political influence operation, which is a powerful, rightwing, dark money political network.

Look at this Loper case. The lawyers who represent the petitioners in this case are working for free--supposedly--ostensibly for a public interest law firm called Cause of Action.

This supposed public interest law firm discloses no donors and does not report any employees. As the New York Times discovered in this article, those lawyers actually work for Americans for Prosperity, the central battleship of the Koch Brothers' political front group armada.

That armada, by the way, is very cozy with some of the far-right Justices of the Supreme Court. Indeed, ProPublica has reported that Justice Clarence Thomas has repeatedly flown out to serve as the celebrity draw for the Koch political operations fundraisers, including funding that landed at Americans for Prosperity. As is now standard practice in these cases, a flotilla of dark money front groups appeared as amici curiae--purporting to be independent but actually with enormous common funding and orchestration. These front groups are frequent flyers that spout anti-regulation arguments before the Supreme Court regularly, like, for instance, the major questions doctrine I mentioned earlier. From the creation of these doctrines in rightwing hothouses, through their amplification via rightwing front groups, to their insertion into legal arguments by rightwing amici, the common thread through the whole process is massive, secret funding from billionaire special interests.

The amici supporting petitioners in the Loper case include the Buckeye Institute, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Landmark Legal Foundation, the Mountain States Legal Foundation, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, the Pacific Legal Foundation, and, of course, our friends at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. All of them have received hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of dollars from these rightwing donors--from DonorsTrust,

from Donors Capital Fund, from the Koch family foundations, from the Bradley Foundation, and in some cases, from good old ExxonMobil itself.

These two--DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund--are donor-advised funds that allow ultrawealthy interests to direct funding anonymously to their pet projects. They are essentially identity laundering operations. The money comes in from the donor who wants to be secret. It lands at DonorsTrust. They in turn give it under their own name. The recipient gets it, and there is no record of who the true donor was.

DonorsTrust has been described as the ``dark-money ATM of the right,'' and, with Donors Capital, it has laundered over a third of a trillion dollars--a third of a trillion dollars--into climate denial operations.

Many of these same amici also received Koch Family Foundation funding and Bradley Foundation funding. Those are two other top-10 funders of climate denial. Fossil fuel corporations like ExxonMobil have also directly funded some of these amici.

This is an operation. This is a part of a scheme.

ExxonMobil has given significant money to the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Landmark Legal Foundation, and the Mountain States Legal Foundation, as well as the Pacific Legal Foundation--and that is what we know. There could be other money that went through DonorsTrust, for instance, and into these groups and the ExxonMobil name was laundered off the funding.

Some of these amici also received funding from groups affiliated with Leonard Leo. Leonard Leo has been the operative for the billionaires in the Court-capture operation.

This is a chart of some--some--of the front groups that Leo coordinates.

This question of capturing the Court in order to undermine public safety regulations? Trump White House Counsel Don McGahn actually called these two operations ``two sides of the same coin.'' We have it from inside the White House that these schemes are coordinated.

The Loper amicus, Advancing American Freedom, received $1.5 million from Leonard Leo's Concord Fund--this group--between 2020 and 2021. Leo's Concord Fund operates under the fictitious name Judicial Crisis Network and, operating under that fictitious name, spent millions of dollars on Court capture--for instance, on advertisements for the rightwing nominees to flood the airwaves with TV ads supporting them.

By the way, it also supports Republican State attorneys general, who then challenge Federal regulations the billionaires don't like before the sympathetic judges who were put on courts through this operation.

Just to give you an idea, the Concord Fund and the 85 Fund are the two kind of base entities. They operate out of the same location with overlapping staff and funders and directors. I would argue that the corporate veil between the two could be pierced with a banana.

The operation of these two entities--a conjoined 501(c)(3) and 501(c)4--then has these different legs. Each one of these six legs is a fictitious name--a fictitious name filed under Virginia corporate law-- through which these entities operate. It is not a separate thing. It is just a fictitious name for--in this case, Judicial Education Project for the 85 Fund.

So these eight organizations are, in effect, the same organization, and out of it, money gets pumped up to these entities, which are Leonard Leo's means of extracting wealth for himself for his services provided in making sure that this piece of his operation can go forward and help capture the Court.

So that is the background of all of this.

So when the Judicial Crisis Network shows up here, it is a pretty significant tell that there is more going on here than just independent organizations bringing their views to the Supreme Court.

It is not enough to flood the Supreme Court with this fake onslaught of coordinated amici curiae; there has also been a coordinated editorial campaign. In fact, it has been hard to miss the editorial campaign launched to create favorable ideological terrain for the captured Court's Justices to end Chevron deference.

The rightwing apparatus has cranked out op-eds in just about every major publication across the country in the past week. It has been a surge of propaganda pushing that falsehood about unaccountable bureaucrats.

One particularly odious editorial appeared in the pro-polluter Wall Street Journal editorial page. I refer to it just generally as ``the polluter page'' because that is its reason for being. It was written in the Wall Street Journal editorial page by Mr. David Rivkin.

Mr. Rivkin is described as follows by the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Rivkin served at the Justice Department and the White

House Counsel's Office in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush

administrations.

But he has done so much more. For instance, he is Leonard Leo's personal lawyer. This guy, with what my office refers to as the ``Leo bug'' of phony front groups, has this guy, who authored the Wall Street Journal editorial, as his personal lawyer.

By the way, Rivkin is the same guy who several months back gave Justice Alito a very friendly interview right in this Wall Street Journal editorial page to justify Alito's undisclosed travel on a private jet on a freebie trip accompanied by--oh--Leonard Leo, no less. He is the same guy who, in a current case before the Supreme Court, before Alito, who has not recused himself, is attempting to secure an enormous tax giveaway for billionaires.

Rivkin's cosigner, Mr. Grossman, Andrew Grossman, is described as ``a senior legal fellow at the Buckeye Institute and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.'' OK, that is a pretty fair description.

By the way, if you go back here--there is the Buckeye Institute, and there is the Cato Institute. They have already briefed the case. The lawyer who writes the brief is now just pumping his own amicus brief in the Wall Street Journal editorial page with the lawyer for Leonard Leo, who did Justice Alito the big favor of trying to head off a Senate investigation into Alito's travels. So it is a pretty rich mix.

If you look at all of this, what you discover is that this whole scheme is actually pulled off by a very small number of people on the billionaires' payroll. They are very busy constantly switching hats and running multiple front groups out of the same enterprise so that it looks like there is more, filing multiple briefs in a Supreme Court case so it looks like there is more, but it is actually a pretty small, billionaire-funded operation. It has just been diabolically effective, and it has begun to pay off for the billionaires.

In West Virginia v. EPA, the Supreme Court hobbled Agency authority to regulate for our public health and safety by adopting what they called the major questions doctrine--the same one I mentioned earlier-- and that in turn has prompted an onslaught of challenges to administrative regulatory authority from which the administrative law legal landscape is still reeling. There is enormous upheaval from that novel doctrine imported by the billionaire-selected Justices of the Supreme Court into American law.

It would actually add insult to that injury for the Court to break even more precedent by attacking Chevron. Frankly, they may not really even need to because the major questions doctrine is such a powerful weapon in their hands against administrative safety regulation that they may not actually need to do much damage to Chevron. They have a weapon. But it looks from the argument like the Court is actually poised to attack Chevron deference. If it does, it not only will add to the dangers to Americans' health and safety, against which regulation protects, but it will also move the unaccountable Supreme Court further into the policymaking function properly left under the American system of government to the elected political branches.

In short, it is a power grab by the unelected judicial branch at the behest of and for the benefit of polluter billionaires, and they have done this on the specious grounds--the false grounds--that these administrative Agencies are unaccountable.

Well, even if that claim were true, it is hardly solved by moving the locus of decision to the least accountable part of the government--to the U.S. Supreme Court. If your problem is that

decisions are being made in unaccountable fashion by bureaucrats, then moving it to even less accountable judges is not a solution to the problem.

But the fact of the matter is that they are wrong about the bureaucrats because of the CRA, because of the Administrative Procedures Act, because of the appropriations process, because of congressional oversight, and because of executive appointment to the control of these Agencies. It just ain't so, but it is a lie that is repeated and repeated and repeated and begins to be echoed by the Justices of the captured Court.

To sum up, by all appearances, a Koch operation-funded legal theory supported by Koch operation-funded amici is about to be deployed by Koch operation-funded lawyers to convince Koch operation-funded Justices to achieve a longstanding goal of Koch industries: the ability to pollute more easily and more cheaply.

To twist American law through those techniques for that purpose is a deeply degraded thing. It would be a tragedy for the American people. But do you know what? It is the scheme in a nutshell. It is why all the effort was put together--the hundreds of millions of dollars were spent--to capture and control the U.S. Supreme Court for the benefit of a small cabal of creepy billionaires.

To be continued.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I am here today for the 26th time to detail the special interest billionaire-funded scheme that has overrun the U.S. Supreme Court. This evening, I would like to discuss some things about Republican Judiciary Committee members' performance in the Senate Judiciary Committee recently as we voted on authorizing subpoenas for billionaire Harlan Crow, some of his holding companies, and the court-fixer, Leonard Leo.

At the end of last month, we voted, through the authorization for Chairman Durbin, to issue subpoenas, and it was greeted with a barrage of talk about a whole variety of things. But one was how Democrats were destroying the Judiciary Committee. We were absolutely totally going to destroy the Judiciary Committee. It was on us that the Judiciary Committee was going to be destroyed.

Well, all the talk about destroying the Senate Judiciary Committee came, rather, in the nature of a threat. It was actually more like, if we did something that we are perfectly entitled to do to pursue subpoenas after being persistently obstructed, then Republicans would destroy the committee, would undo any good will or any bipartisanship or any collegial effort.

Somehow that Republican threat to destroy the committee morphed into Democrats destroying the committee. But that doesn't make any sense. If you think of a kidnapper shooting his hostage and then blaming the family for the murder of the hostage because the family hadn't yielded to the kidnapper's demands, that is kind of backward logic.

Also backward logic is the argument that the subpoenas were an effort to destroy not the committee but the Supreme Court. The subpoenas would destroy or damage the Supreme Court.

OK. Let's think about that for a minute.

There is only one possible way that it could be true, logically, that these subpoenas could do damage to the Supreme Court--only one--and that is if the information the subpoenas would disclose is so damaging that it would damage or destroy the Court. Subpoenas that turned up nothing would be no harm, no foul. If there is nothing evil to see in the information the subpoenas are pursuing, there is no harm. The necessary logical predicate of the destroy-the-Court argument made by our colleagues is that subpoenas would reveal that something truly horrible happened at the Court that now needs to be covered up--covered up.

But that is not how ``appearance of impropriety'' works. Justices of the Supreme Court are supposed to avoid doing things that might create even the appearance of impropriety. The appearance-of-impropriety issue is not that you do impropriety and then go out and cover up its appearance.

We also heard a lot that day about the problem of subpoenaing ``private citizens,'' as if that were something unusual. If that is a problem, it was a very new problem because just days before, the committee had subpoenaed private citizens in the tech sector on a bipartisan basis without anyone's objection.

As always, our Republican friends persisted in the argument that this committee has no business looking at Supreme Court gift disclosures. That argument was, is, and will always be a phony. The Judiciary Committee has every right to oversee how an Agency that Congress created--the Judicial Conference--is implementing a law that Congress passed, the judicial disclosure law. It is within the jurisdiction of the committee; it is a congressionally established body; and it is a statute passed by Congress.

If Congress can't oversee how Agencies it creates oversee laws it passes, there is no oversight left. Obviously, understanding what gifts went undisclosed is essential to that inquiry.

We then heard that you can't have subpoenas because a related bill is out of the committee. But Congress has every right to oversight and subpoenas at any stage in legislation--and even at no stage in legislation. Because the bill in question has not passed here in the Senate--it has come to the Senate floor, but it has not passed in the Senate--and because the Republicans not only stonewalled our investigation but threatened very plainly a partisan blockade of the bill here on the floor--``not a single Republican vote'' was, I think, what they threatened--that makes it all the more obvious why continuing to build the factual case for reform is appropriate. There is precisely zero basis for the theory that a Senate committee can't look into a subject of legislation once some related legislation is out of committee. Preparing for a successful floor vote on that bill is only one obvious reason why that theory is painfully wrong.

If you look at all of that noise and fuss that was put up, it is hard not to deduce that maybe something else is going on here. Here is my theory of the case, as I have said in previous speeches: Very powerful rightwing billionaires spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars on a scheme to influence--and even control--the Supreme Court. Those very powerful rightwing billionaires are also massive funders of Republican politics, including Republican Senate politics.

The problem is that those very powerful rightwing billionaires got sloppy,

and their gift program to take care of certain Supreme Court Justices started breaking gift and disclosure rules--very likely tax rules, as well, with a few of the amenable Supreme Court Justices whom they were rewarding with lavish entertainments.

What we already know about that gift program is bad enough. How far the billionaires' hands are in the cookie jar and how coordinated and orchestrated this secret gift program was is information that they desperately want to suppress. So they do what megadonors do and pressure Members of Congress to do what they want, and, in this case, it was help the billionaires suppress the truth of what went down here.

I will close by observing that the argument that Democrats are behaving improperly in our work to clean up the mess at the Supreme Court is an argument that has some very powerful rebuttals.

The first rebuttal comes from the billionaires who are actually cooperating with our investigation.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks as exhibits several letters reflecting that cooperation: the first, dated July 25, 2023, to Chairman Durbin and Senator Whitehouse; the second, dated Octobers 18, 2023, to Chairman Durbin and Senator Whitehouse; the third, dated October 31, 2023, to Senators Durbin and Whitehouse; the fourth, dated November 6, 2023, to Senators Durbin and Whitehouse; and the fifth, dated November 7, 2023, Dear Committee.

I would also note that another--yet another wealthy donor, not one of these in the letters--yet another wealthy donor has cooperated with the Finance Committee's investigation into the tax ramifications of all these secret gifts and what was disclosed and what was not disclosed. And that donor revealed to the Finance Committee compelling evidence that he collected only interest--only interest--on a quarter-million- dollar-plus loan to Justice Thomas; that the donor never collected any--any--principal payment; and that he ultimately stopped collecting either interest or principal on that quarter-million-dollar-plus loan.

So the cooperation of people with our investigations rebut the argument that we have no business. The second rebuttal comes, actually, from within the Judiciary itself because this is not the only avenue we are pursuing to get to the bottom of the mess at the Supreme Court.

When I got the Judicial Conference to review the Scalia trick, which was to have intermediaries solicit dozens of personal invitations from hunting resort owners, whom Scalia had often never even met, and then failed to disclose the free vacations because, in his view, the personal invitation made it personal hospitality, within the terms of the disclosure statute--well, the members of the Judicial Conference-- the chief judges of the circuits and of district courts who together comprised the Judicial Conference--those chief judges blew that trick to smithereens. They didn't criticize me for being a bad Senator asking bad questions and going places I shouldn't be going. They dropped the hammer on the Scalia trick. They put a dead finish end to it.

And later, when I got the Judicial Conference to look at the billionaire-funded flotillas of amicus briefs that they send in through phony front groups to tell the Justices what it is that they want them to do in cases and the phony front groups were not disclosing their true funders or their true interconnections or their true commonalities, again, this array of very distinguished chief judges didn't look and say: Well, here is a Senator on an improper rampage. We can't have any of this. No. They announced that they were revisiting the amicus brief disclosure rule because it needed fixing, and they are in the process of finalizing that right now. So two for two. When questions related to this investigation have been taken up by the Judicial Conference, they have actually been handled perfectly consistent with the thrust and tenor of our investigation.

The third rebuttal that you will have to trust me on, I am afraid, is that over and over, I have heard from Federal judges that this investigation is important; that we are doing good work; and that we should keep the pressure on and don't let up and get to the bottom of this mess. I don't mean my home State judges, either. From all around the country, I am getting messages of support from judges appointed by Democratic and Republican Presidents that what has happened at the Court is a disgrace and that I should keep at it; that the Judiciary Committee should keep at it for the good and the health of the judiciary itself.

By comparison, when you look at the frantic complaining about our work, it mostly comes from a small handful of dark money mouthpieces actually linked to the Court-capture scheme. Obviously, Mr. Rivkin, who is Leonard Leo's lawyer, is out to blockade our investigation. So there is one. He represents Leonard Leo against our investigation, and he summoned Justice Alito to offer an opinion to his and Leonard Leo's benefit in the pages of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Another voice is Leonard Leo's painting pal--you may remember this painting that was done at Harlan Crowe's Adirondack estate with billionaire Crowe, Justice Thomas, and Leonard Leo, the Court fixer. Well, also there is painting pal Mark Paoletta. He is another persistent voice; and he couldn't be more in the scheme than that painting shows.

Also, Carrie Severino turns up. She is Leonard Leo's dark money sidekick-successor at the dark money funded Federalist Society and the dark money funded fictitious name group, Judicial Crisis Network.

And then, of course, there is the Wall Street Journal editorial page whose people have received a million dollars in personal cash from the dark money Bradley Foundation at the middle of that dark money amicus flotilla. At attorney Rivkin's request that I mentioned, Justice Alito even provided a cameo performance in the Wall Street Journal editorial page that defended the position of his friend Leonard Leo in plain violation of multiple judicial ethics guidelines.

All that Rivkin-Leo-Alito stunt--Wall Street Journal editorial page stunt--needed was Paoletta and Severino to make it a clean sweep of all the major mouthpieces.

Steering away from troublesome facts is a constant theme in the mess we are trying to dig into over at the Court. In the January 6 and Arizona cases, what Justice Thomas knew about his wife's insurrection activities and when he knew it is the salient question about recusal. He has never been asked. What made Justice Alito say that in that Wall Street Journal editorial, attorney Rivkin was acting just as an interviewer and not as Leonard Leo's lawyer, even though Rivkin was under contract to Leonard Leo as his lawyer at that time? That question has never been asked. What became of Thomas' quarter-million-dollar loan, and why was it not reported? That question has never been asked. What made Justice Alito think that he should suddenly start answering legal questions likely to come before the Court in the pages of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, despite every Justice in their confirmation hearing saying: That is inappropriate? That question has never been asked.

What made Thomas think the Judicial Conference action that I described--blowing the Scalia trick to smithereens--was a change in the rules and not a clarification of the rules? That question has never been asked. But it is a question that matters because the Judicial Conference actually called it a clarification and Thomas' lawyers treated it as a change. And the difference is this: If it is a change in the law, you don't have to go back and clean up your prior incomplete and false filings. If it is a clarification, you have to go back and clean up your prior defective filings.

So to say that this was a change despite the fact the Judicial Conference said it was a clarification is a very significant legal leap; and no justification for it was offered at the time or has been proposed since.

In all of these matters, the common theme is that factfinding--the very basis of due process--factfinding is not performed around the Supreme Court Justices. Factfinding, despite being the essence of due process, this Court avoids like the plague.

All of this--the behavior of our friends in the committee, the cooperation and support from billionaires and judges and others, the mischief of not

answering basic fact questions--all of it signals that there is a lot going on here; that there is a lot to investigate; and that our investigation must and will continue.

To be continued.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, well, first of all, congratulations to Chairman Cardin for his fifth COP delegation that he led. I have been on all five of them, and I am really grateful that he has organized them and organized them well.

A couple of topics on this one: Going in, we had acquired from the UNFCCC the requirement that people showing up would have to disclose their fossil fuel affiliations--like who are you really working for, if you have come to the COP--and we have worked since then with the environmental community to put some real teeth into that disclosure so that you actually know what the questions are and you have to answer them, and you can't just send it to the PR department and get a bit of fluff to file. We have sent that in to Professor Raskin, who is the intermediary on the subject of transparency with the UNFCCC.

So we didn't get it done for this one, and this one was swarming with lobbyists and undisclosed mischief makers. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for instance, was present. We know, particularly in this building, that they are constantly up to no good. But we are hoping that, by the next COP, there will be far better transparency and people who are actively working to defeat climate legislation, to defeat climate progress have to disclose that they are up to that. They can still come, but everybody needs to know what jersey they are wearing.

The other thing that happened was that the nations of the world agreed that we are going to transition away from fossil fuels. For many of us, that seemed pretty obvious going in. So I am not too excited about that. But what is good about it is that every country signed off on it, like Saudi Arabia. Countries that have long been part of the fossil fuel kleptocracy apparatus had to go along with this.

So while the standard may not be all that exciting--everybody knew going in we are transitioning away from fossil fuel, for Pete's sake-- the unanimity is new, and I give John Kerry a lot of credit for being extremely patient and determined to hold through all that and at least move the worst performers, the worst nations, to catch up with everybody else who already knew that transitioning away from fossil fuels is necessary.

There was some good work done on methane. There were international efforts to focus on methane and, particularly, methane leaks, and that is going to be good because working with what we are doing in the United States on methane--the methane regulation that just passed out of EPA; the methane fee that was brought into the IRA with the good work of Chairman Carper; the methane task force that the Biden administration has stood up to spot methane leaks from satellites and go right at them the way a fire department would and make sure they are put out, they are snuffed out, they are stopped, and moved quickly--you put that together with an international package, and you can begin to make a real dent in methane emissions.

And methane emissions are less dangerous than carbon dioxide because they don't last as long, but they are immensely powerful while they are in the atmosphere. So they are really dangerous in the short run, and knocking them out in the short run will be a good outcome.

The last thing I will say is that we talked a lot about the CBAM, or the carbon border adjustment mechanism, while we were there. The European Union has passed a CBAM that will tariff goods that are imported into the EU from more carbon-intensive countries, including us and including China and including Russia and including everybody in the world.

And, to my mind, that EU CBAM is the most promising emissions reduction strategy anywhere--arguably, even more than these COPs. It is a big, big deal. And one of the things we heard from our EU folks is that they are not budging. No matter what pressure is put on them, they are not budging. They are not going to give exceptions. They are not going to give waivers. They are not going to let people weasel out. They are going to stick to their guns and make sure that their proposal goes forward. And I encourage that because I think, as soon as they are really locked down and everybody knows it, others will begin to join.

And guess what today's news is? The UK is officially joining the EU CBAM. Now, those two big economies are joined, and they will not have to pay internal tariffs to each other. And, as my friend Philip Dunne, the conservative MP who leads the Environmental Audit Committee of Parliament, said, their version of the UK CBAM will ``keep the U.K. at the forefront of the group of leading economies . . . introducing comprehensive and effective measures to tackle global emissions while promoting growth.''

The EU is in, rock solid, not budging. The UK is joining. Now it is time for the United States to step up and join the carbon border tariff policies that are probably our very best step to avert the horrors of uncontrolled climate chaos.

With that, let me yield the floor back and, again, thank Chairman Cardin for his leadership of this very busy and hard-working delegation.

Mr. President, I submit to the Senate a budget scorekeeping report. The report, which covers fiscal year 2024, was prepared by the Congressional Budget Office pursuant to section 308(b) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. This information enables the Senate Budget Committee to determine if budgetary points of order lie against pending legislation.

CBO's report shows the effect on spending and revenues of congressional action through December 10, 2023, as compared to the levels that I filed on June 21 as authorized by section 121 of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, or FRA. Since then, Congress has passed six pieces of legislation with small effects on direct spending. These include two continuing resolutions that were eligible for adjustments to enforceable levels as permitted under the FRA.

Tables 1 and 2 show that current budgetary levels are above allowable amounts for budget authority and within allowable amounts for outlays. The government is currently operating under a bipartisan short-term continuing resolution that extends the previous year's discretionary funding levels through early 2024. The budget authority level shown in the tables is artificially high because it reflects CBO's estimate of the continuing resolution, which for technical reasons is higher than the statutory limits. Enactment of full-year appropriations for fiscal year 2024 consistent with budget agreement surrounding the FRA would bring total budget authority in line with the allowable limits. These tables also reflect that there has been no change to Social Security.

Table 3 shows the Senate's pay-as-you-go-scorecard, which reflects $44 million of net deficit reduction over 10 years.

The Democratic staff of the Budget Committee prepared an addendum table to supplement CBO's report, which compares the mandatory spending of each authorizing committee against the enforceable allocations under section 302 of the Congressional Budget Act. It shows that 15 of the 16 authorizing committees are complying with their allocations, either because no legislation with significant budgetary costs was enacted, the legislation was deficit-neutral and qualified for an allocation adjustment that was subsequently filed, or the legislation reduced spending.

I ask unanimous consent that CBO's letter, accompanying tables, and the addendum be printed in the Record.

Madam President, I am happy and proud to join my senior Senator in congratulating our friend Mark Hayward, the District Director of the Small Business Administration in Rhode Island, on his very well-deserved retirement after serving at SBA for more than 40 years. It is a really remarkable career.

In that time, as Jack said, Mark strengthened small businesses all across the Ocean State and created economic opportunity for Rhode Islanders from every community and background.

He was so well regarded within the SBA that he was actually called down to Washington for a detail to help break in a new Small Business Administrator who needed to learn the ropes. The person that the organization trusted to get her going and working in a good way was Mark Hayward. Of course, he came back to New England and back to Rhode Island.

Jack mentioned Mark's role in the pandemic. He had actually told us he was planning to retire before the pandemic, but he couldn't walk away from what was happening. So he went to

work to make sure that Rhode Island did a good job in the pandemic.

It was not easy. These were big new programs that we had created, and implementing them and getting the money to flow smoothly through the banks and undoing the clogs that emerged and the different errors that were experienced was a big project.

Mark made Rhode Island a model of good implementation of our pandemic response. Other SBA offices around the country looked to what he was doing and modeled on that.

It was just a pretty gallant and wonderful thing that he was willing to remain at the helm through that difficult period, to work through these big programs and make them succeed and to help small businesses across our State through a period of real financial uncertainty and peril. Mark and his team delivered much needed Federal funding to businesses in every community, often providing a lifeline that allowed small business owners to keep their doors open and to keep their people on the payroll.

That pandemic reinforced what we already knew about Mark. He knows Rhode Island's small businesses better than anybody, he is determined to be helpful, and he will stand up and rise to the occasion when the demand is there for his skills.

So I join Jack in congratulating our friend Mark on an incredible run. We thank you, sir, for your dedication to lifting up small businesses across Rhode Island and for your commitment to public service. We have loved working with you.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I am delighted to have the chance to follow my senior Senator to add a few words about Bill Middendorf and celebrate the fact that the newest Arleigh Burke-class missile destroyer of the U.S. Navy will be named the USS J. William Middendorf.

Bill was Secretary of the Navy and U.S. Ambassador--a very distinguished career. If you go back to the time that he was Secretary of the Navy, the sequence was Paul Ignatius, who went on to become President of the Washington Post and an Assistant and Under Secretary of the Army; followed by John Chafee of Rhode Island, who went on to serve with great distinction in the U.S. Senate; followed by, if I recall correctly, John Warner, who became a very distinguished Senator representing Virginia; and then in that line came Ambassador Middendorf. So, clearly, the name selection follows an impressive tradition of service by some impressive Navy Secretaries.

Ambassador Middendorf was born in Baltimore, actually, and served in World War II as a naval engineer officer and navigator, and, after a successful business career, he was appointed U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands in 1969 and then served as Under Secretary of the Navy.

In 1974, Ambassador Middendorf was appointed by President Nixon to serve as the 62nd Secretary of the Navy, and, in that capacity, he did something very important for Rhode Island, which was to champion the Navy's submarine program, including overseeing the creation of General Dynamics Electric Boat's Quonset Point location, a facility which Senator Reed has done so much to make a powerful economic engine in Rhode Island and a powerful shipbuilding facility to make sure that America's power overseas is at its apex.

This Quonset Point facility is a very important legacy, and I am delighted to join my senior Senator in wishing Ambassador Middendorf-- Secretary Middendorf--congratulations on the keel laying and, very soon, a happy 100th birthday.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I am delighted to join my colleagues today from the Finance Committee. Our chairman is here. We did, I think, remarkable work to expand the

child tax credit during the COVID epidemic, and it made a truly remarkable difference in children's lives--nearly 50 percent reduction in child poverty. Why would you not want more of that? Yet we let it expire in 2021, and, sure enough, child poverty climbed back up again.

There was a lot of fearmongering, when we did it, that this was going to discourage people from working, that they would sit at home and sop up the tax credit. But the fact of the matter is, if you can't get childcare, you can't get to work. And if you can't get reliable, quality childcare, you can't move up into the kind of job where you don't have to worry about being called away because your childcare just fell apart.

So in Rhode Island at least, we saw families do more work as a result of this, and 174,000 Rhode Island children benefited. Families got $264 million--low-income families--to pay for childcare, get to work, or step up to a better job.

At the same time, we also provided additional funding for childcare providers in that same American rescue plan, and that was another win. And you put the two together, and it really lifted families.

Right now, without Congressional action, 3 million children are projected to lose access to childcare, and 70,000 childcare programs could close.

Bring that to Rhode Island, and it is 21,000 kids in my State who could lose access to childcare, 680 childcare workers could lose their jobs, and 419 different childcare providers could close.

We simply cannot let that happen. It is wrong. It is dumb. It is penny-wise and pound-foolish.

We need to do three simple things: Make childcare a priority, encourage work and earning, and reduce child poverty. We can do those three things by reestablishing the child tax credit and continuing to support childcare providers.

Madam President, H.R. 6363, a continuing resolution to avoid a shutdown, was enacted into law this month. Division B of the bill contains several authorizing provisions, such as a 1-year extension of the farm bill and a 2-month extension of Federal funding for community health centers that are paid for over 10 years. Section 121(c) of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 contains a reserve fund that authorizes the Budget Committee chairman to revise budget aggregates, committee allocations, and the pay-as-you-go ledger for legislation that would not increase the deficit over the period of fiscal years 2024 to 2033. Division B of H.R. 6363 meets the conditions of that reserve fund. However, the legislation directs that these budgetary effects are not to be entered on the PAYGO scorecard. As such, I am revising only the budget aggregates and committee allocations to accommodate H.R. 6363.

I previously revised the pay-as-you-go ledger for H.R. 5860, the September continuing resolution. As the legislation has now been signed into law and directs that its budgetary effects are not to be entered on the PAYGO scorecard, I am reversing the PAYGO adjustment I made in October.

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