Floor Statements

Mr. President, this is the 289th time that I have come to the Senate floor with my increasingly battered ``Time to Wake Up'' chart, to stir this Chamber to act on climate change.

Since 2016, I have been talking about the zettajoule. The zettajoule is the measure of how much fossil fuel emissions are heating up our oceans. In this season of extreme, record-smashing heat touching all 50 States, it is wild that elected representatives in Washington still choose to insulate themselves from reality, a reality measured in zettajoules.

A zettajoule is a number almost beyond comprehension in its size. One joule--J-O-U-L-E--is our standard unit of energy, and it applies to heat energy. A zettajoule is 1 joule with 21 zeros behind it. It is a truly massive number.

In a 2019 ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, I reported that more than nine zettajoules of heat energy was being added to the ocean annually. Since then, I have come to the floor with an updated number. Our oceans are absorbing around 14 zettajoules of excess heat every year.

Let's put that in context. The total energy consumption of all humankind amounts to about one-half of a zettajoule of energy per year. That means that for the fossil fuel component of that one-half of a zettajoule of energy, we pay the price of 14 added zettajoules of heat into the ocean every year.

Said another way, we load into our Earth's oceans every year nearly 30 times the entire energy use of the entire species on the entire planet. That is a big magnification.

If this is the zettajoules of excess heat absorbed into the oceans every year, that dot is the average annual energy consumption of the human species on the planet. For the price of the fossil fuel component of that, mankind's entire energy consumption in zettajoules, we suffer that load of heat energy going into the oceans.

That is a bit hard to comprehend, so consider one other unit of measure: the energy released by the detonation of the nuclear bomb America dropped on Hiroshima. In Hiroshima bomb terms, last year the ocean absorbed the equivalent of seven Hiroshima bombs detonating every second in the ocean. Every second of every day for the entire year, seven nuclear detonations' worth of heat into our oceans--per second.

This unfathomable amount of heat has been somewhat offset by La Nina, the cool phase of a recurring climate pattern called the El Nino Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. That is the acronym for the El Nino Southern Oscillation. The ENSO cycle consists of variations in sea surface temperature, rainfall, surface air pressure, and atmosphere circulation located over the Pacific Ocean near the Equator. And in that oscillation, La Nina is the name for the cooling period.

Well, in June, we left La Nina and moved into an El Nino period. El Nino is the warmer side of the ENSO cycle. We saw it raise temperatures in previous cycles in 1998 and 2016. All those zettajoules of excess heat being dumped into the Earth's oceans, and now we are headed into the warming part of the cycle. Watch for more heat records to fall.

One major consequence for us of hotter oceans is stronger hurricane activity. Hurricanes are powered up more by hotter water as they move over the Atlantic. This June, sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean are the hottest in 170 years--the hottest in 170 years-- 9 whole degrees Fahrenheit above normal.

This is what is considered by science an ``extreme'' oceanic heat wave. And certain parts of the ocean are reaching the rare designation called ``beyond extreme.'' That is actually happening. On a scale from 1 to 5, the North Atlantic's heat is either category 4 or category 5, depending on where you are.

Bring it home to Florida. Water temperatures in Florida have hit records reaching as high as 101 degrees. That is not the air temperature, that is the ocean temperature. That is actually the recommended temperature for a hot tub. Indeed, that is the midpoint of the Jacuzzi Company's recommended range for its hot tub temperatures for healthy adults.

Now, doctors recommend that children under the age of 5 avoid hot tubs over 95 degrees, and pregnant women are advised to stay out of water once it gets much above 100 degrees. So the ocean off Florida is almost too hot for many humans.

``Almost too hot for humans'' means definitely too hot for many ocean creatures, particularly ocean corals. Coral reefs matter because they support a quarter of all known marine species.

Florida has the largest coral reef ecosystem in the continental United States, the third largest living barrier coral reef in the world. If you don't care about creatures and only care about money, well, Florida's protected waters contribute billions of tourism dollars to the Florida economy.

All of that is in jeopardy in this heat. According to NOAA, when temperatures reach 1 degree Celsius or about 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal, corals cross what is called their bleaching threshold. That is where they turn white as they evulse the living creatures that keep them alive, and that is a step on the way to death.

That is bad news, considering the temperatures around Florida have been running 5 degrees above normal. And the longer this goes on, the more trouble corals will have recovering.

We hear sometimes about 100-year or even 500-year storms. These are storms that are so extreme they are expected to occur only once every 100 or 500 years. Well, scientists have put this Florida heat wave off the charts. Ben Kirtman is the director of the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies at the University of Miami. He said:

If you just wrote a statistical model and said what are the

chances of this level of warming, it would be 1 in 250,000

years.

Not 1 in 100 years, not 1 in 500 years, 1 in 250,000 years. If that is not a warning that it is time to wake up, I do not know what is.

Ultrarare weather events are not so rare anymore in this climate- changed world. This is not just happening in the United States, it is worldwide. This summer, most of the oceans on planet Earth have at least a 70-percent chance of experiencing what are called marine heat wave conditions.

The effects of marine heat waves read like Biblical plagues: decreased oxygen, dead zones, fish die-offs. And then come the weather effects: droughts in some places and increasingly deadly and dangerous storms in others because our oceans drive our weather on this planet.

Over the course of a weekend last month, thousands of dead fish washed up along the Texas gulf coast.

They died of lack of oxygen. Warm water holds much less oxygen than cold water. The ocean, through heat, becomes anoxic, and this slaughter results.

Again, if you don't care about creatures and only care about money, in the United States last year alone, there were 18 separate billion- dollar weather and climate disasters, exceeding $175 billion in total cost and, by the way, costing nearly 500 Americans their lives.

Aside from those sudden disasters, comes the slow and insidious changes ocean warming brings, like the accelerating creep of sea level rise across

your coast and mine. As ocean temperatures increase, two things happen: 1, ice in the Arctic and Antarctic melts, adding water to the ocean; and, 2, seawater expands--remember those zettajoules. Combined, the effects of melting ice sheets and expanding seawater volume increases sea levels along our coasts. That slow creep of sea level rise is not as slow as it used to be. The ocean rose more than twice as fast this decade as it did the previous decade. Last year, it set a new record high.

The news gets worse. There is a centuries-long time lag in the natural systems causing sea level rise, meaning we are only seeing the leading edge of what we have caused. Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, ocean levels would continue to rise for decades.

NOAA has predicted that the acceleration will continue; that sea level rise along the U.S. coastline will rise 10 to 12 inches just over the next 30 years, as much as the entire rise measured over the last century.

One way to help deal with this is through the National Coastal Resilience Fund, a grant program that restores, increases, and strengthens natural infrastructure to protect coastal communities and to protect habitats for fish and wildlife. The fund invests in conservation projects that restore or expand our natural protections: coastal marshes and wetlands, dunes and beach systems, oyster and coral reefs, coastal forests, rivers and flood plains, and barrier islands that minimize the impacts of storms and sea level rise, as well as other dangerous events like lost fisheries from ocean warming.

This program is so direly needed that it is vastly oversubscribed. In 2022, over $600 million of projects went unfunded because there simply wasn't enough money in the program. Nearly half a billion dollars in unfunded protections for vulnerable coastal communities requesting Federal assistance.

I will give you one example of where this program is important. In 2019, the fund awarded $1 million to the Alaskan Native village of Shaktoolik to restore coastal dune habitat and to construct a natural storm surge berm. Well, last year, along came Typhoon Merbok and devastated parts of the Alaskan coastline. Shaktoolik was at the epicenter of the typhoon. The berm successfully protected the community from devastating coastal flooding. As one resident noted, ``The berm saved our lives.'' That is the value of resiliency, planning, and investment.

But more than just brace ourselves for the baked-in effects of fossil fuel emissions poisoning our planet, we need to head off climate change at the oil spigot. That means taking on the fossil fuel industry's increasingly desperate lies and its well-funded political juggernaut that does such evil in this building. We know how to solve this problem; we just don't do it, because fossil fuel fingers creep through so many corners of the Capitol.

In the time it took me to deliver this speech, around 6,000 Hiroshima bombs of excess heat energy were put into our oceans. Every day, it is getting worse. We completely underestimate how bad things are going to get--completely. Even people who care about climate change and believe that it is real and aren't in tow to the fossil fuel industry and its dark money, they still completely underestimate how bad this is going to get. And the tragedy is, it has always been preventable simply by moving to a productive, economically valuable, clean energy future and stopping our indulgence of fossil fuel pollution and obstruction. If what is going on with climate change heat going into our oceans is not enough to wake us up, I do not know what will. It is certainly-- certainly--time to wake up.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would like to go through some of the materials that would ordinarily be in the evening wrap-up, but nobody watching should think we are in evening wrap-up. We are still expecting a great number of votes this evening when everything gets worked out.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 86, S. 546.

I further ask unanimous consent that the committee- reported amendment be agreed to.

I ask unanimous consent that the motion 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 immediate consideration of Calendar No. 87, S. 994.

I further ask unanimous consent that the committee- reported amendments be agreed to.

I know of no further debate on the bill, as amended.

The bill was ordered to be engrossed for a third reading and was read the third time.

I ask that the motion 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 immediate consideration of Calendar No. 88, S. 1387.

I further ask unanimous consent that the committee- reported substitute amendment be agreed to.

I know of no further debate on the bill, as amended.

The bill was ordered to be engrossed for a third reading and was read the third time.

I ask that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged from further consideration of S. 2051 and that the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time.

I know of no further debate.

I ask that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be discharged from further consideration and that the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 166.

I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to; that the Cruz amendment to the preamble, which is at the desk, be considered and agreed to; that the preamble, as amended, be agreed to; and that the motions to reconsider to be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged from further consideration and that the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 288.

I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed, the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

I now ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the en bloc consideration of the following Senate resolutions, introduced earlier today: S. Res. 313, S. Res. 314, S. Res. 315, and S. Res. 317.

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

Lastly, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 316, which was submitted earlier today.

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

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I always consider it good fortune when I come to deliver remarks on the Senate floor and get to follow Senator Sullivan's Alaskan of the Week speeches.

His discussion of his constituent Elverda reminds me of a very, very dear person in my life, Florence Kerins Murray, born just a little bit ahead of Elverda--1916--but like Elverda, served in the U.S. military. She was a WAC--Women's Army Corps--lieutenant colonel and then broke, essentially, every glass ceiling you could break in Rhode Island politics and in the Rhode Island judiciary, becoming a very respected Rhode Island Supreme Court Justice.

So I will take the liberty of joining my colleague Senator Sullivan in wishing his constituent a happy birthday, but I also wanted to share the memory of a very dear Rhode Islander who I think would have gotten along very well--I would like to be a witness, a fly on the wall, to the conversation between Florence and Elverda.

Mr. President, I rise this evening, now for the 22nd time, to keep unmasking the far-right scheme to capture and control our Supreme Court. This scheme is funded by creepy rightwing billionaires who stay out of the limelight and let others--namely, Leonard Leo and his crew--operate their scheme.

How are they benefiting from the scheme? It is hard to track which rightwing billionaires are involved--and that is by design--but thanks to intrepid reporting from ProPublica and others, we are learning more all the time. And every day it becomes harder for the billionaire- friendly Justices and their political allies to pretend, with a straight face, that all is kosher at the Court.

I have previously described the noxious cocktail of this court capture scheme: creepy rightwing billionaires, phony front groups, amenable Justices, large sums of money, and secrecy. I don't know whether they take that shaken or stirred, but those seem to be the common ingredients.

To chill that Court-capture cocktail, we can add one more ingredient: Alaskan glacier ice. But I will get back to that later.

First, let's review the origin story of Justice Samuel Alito. It begins with the bipartisan Senate rejection of Judge Robert Bork, which infuriated Bork's far-right backers. On the Court were Justices Souter and Stevens--both Republican appointees--but they wouldn't help the billionaires, so the angry chant went out from the far right: No more Souters. No more Stevenses.

Then President George W. Bush got an appointment and nominated his

friend and trusted White House counsel, Harriet Miers. A Republican President nominates a personal friend and rock-ribbed conservative Republican--a woman to replace Sandra Day O'Connor. And the attack on her comes from the right. The far-right billionaires won't have it. And their operative--the aforementioned Leonard Leo--oversaw the project of taking her down. And in her place came the ever-so-reliably billionaire-friendly Sam Alito.

This switch--Miers for Alito--gave Leo immense cred with the billionaires, who have since made him a very rich man and helped him launch his armada of front groups, of which this array is just a selection. These three groups are the groups from which he takes revenue for himself and through which he manages these two groups, a coordinated 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4). That is sort of the latest and greatest technique in dark money political manipulation, a conjoined 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4)--usually, common offices, common staff, common funders, common mail drop, all of that.

Around this common core are what are called fictitious names. That is the name for it under Virginia law. So 85 Fund is also the Judicial Education Project under a fictitious name. It is also the Honest Elections Project under a fictitious name. It is also the Free to Learn under a fictitious name. Concord Fund is also Judicial Crisis Network under a fictitious name, Honest Elections Project Action under a fictitious name, and Free to Learn Action under a fictitious name. That is quite a lot of confusion, and it is designed to be confusing.

Scroll on to 2021. By that time, I had been calling out obvious issues at the Supreme Court: published articles, delivered speeches, wrote law reviews, even wrote a book. Alito, speaking at the University of Notre Dame, bemoaned what he said were ``unprecedented efforts to intimidate the Court.'' He went on to say that the media was suggesting that ``a dangerous cabal is deciding important issues in a novel, secretive, improper way in the middle of the night, hidden from public view.'' That, of course, referred to the sudden surge under Trump in the Court's use of its ``shadow docket'' to quickly change the law without hearing full public arguments. Alito's speech then was considered a pretty extraordinary airing of grievance by a Supreme Court Justice.

In response, I wrote an op-ed explaining that Justice Alito had participated in a pattern of decisions, among them the shadow docket ruling leaving in place--pre-Dobbs--Texas's ``bounty-hunter'' anti- abortion law--a pattern of big wins for big rightwing donors with little regard for fact or precedent.

I argued that Americans' perception that the Court lacks independence and the resulting drop in approval isn't some leftwing figment. The evidence showed a clear pattern: When big rightwing donor interests came before the Court, the Federalist Society Justices on the Court would regularly trample precedent and contort the facts and the law to deliver the donors' political victories--not a figment, a pattern.

Then, of course, came the Dobbs case, which actually took away a constitutional right from women. For five decades, women had the right to choose when to have children. That constitutional right appeared safely protected in Supreme Court precedent.

Then, from a list mysteriously prepared by Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, President Trump appointed three Justices to the Court. Now, I say ``mysteriously'' because the Federalist Society, evidently, never had any formal proceedings to develop any list, but it offered no correction when Trump kept calling it his Federalist Society list.

Well, the next thing you know, that constitutional right was taken away by Justices who, in their confirmation hearings, had told the American public and the Senate Judiciary Committee that Roe was settled law--settled, that is, until they had the votes to unsettle it and make up their own.

As Justice Elena Kagan observed: If there is a new member of a court and all of a sudden everything is up for grabs, all of a sudden very fundamental principles of law are being overthrown, are being replaced, then people have a right to say: What's going on there? That doesn't seem very lawlike. And she was right.

Years after he had assured us Roe was settled law, it was Justice Alito who wrote the decision in Dobbs. Alito's draft opinion infamously leaked well ahead of the decision, causing rampant speculation about who leaked the opinion and why.

Chief Justice Roberts directed the Marshal to investigate, interviewing clerks and Court staff and even searching employees' personal phone records. But with the Justices, the Marshal undertook some other, also mysterious, iterative process, and the investigation proved inconclusive.

Curiously, days before the opinion leaked, the Wall Street Journal editorial page had predicted the Dobbs decision, raising the suggestion that someone had a source in the Court. The editorial correctly predicted what Alito knew: that Alito would write the decision for the majority so long as Chief Justice Roberts couldn't pull another Justice to join a more moderate, middle-ground decision.

Then, this past April, Justice Alito was featured in a highly sympathetic interview on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Alito spoke about his opinion's leak and said:

I personally have a pretty good idea who is responsible,

but that's different from the level of proof that is needed

to name somebody.

Any major newspaper would have put an exclusive interview with a Supreme Court Justice on the front page, but it would then have been subject to fact-checking. This opinion piece looked like an article, but it appeared in the Journal's notoriously fast-and-loose-with-the- facts opinion section under a double byline. One was a Wall Street Journal editorial staffer, and the other was David Rivkin, a rightwing lawyer who represented the States challenging the EPA's Clean Power Plan before the Supreme Court.

A quick detour about the Wall Street Journal editorial page's ties to the rightwing ecosystem: Rightwing bizarro-land likes to ape the legitimate world. In the legitimate world, there is a Pulitzer Prize, so rightwing bizarro-land has its own Bradley Prize, which--guess what--has provided hefty prize money to several Wall Street Journal editorial page writers, a million dollars cash in all.

This editorial piece quotes Alito saying:

We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in

a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is

defending us.

In the piece, Justice Alito declined to talk about the Clarence Thomas ethics problems reported by ProPublica: extravagant vacations worth as much as $500,000, paid for by rightwing billionaire megadonor Harlan Crow and not disclosed.

That report was later followed by an additional ProPublica story detailing the billionaire's purchase of properties from Justice Thomas and his family members, also not properly disclosed, and payments for years of tuition for the Justice's grandnephew whom the Thomases were raising, also not disclosed.

Justice Alito's silence on the Thomas bombshell became all the more notable when, 2 months later, ProPublica published another bombshell-- this one about Justice Alito--same cocktail ingredients. In this case, a rightwing billionaire, an amenable Justice, undisclosed private jet travel, an exotic vacation--all very expensive, all secret. Justice Alito's private jet travel to this all-expenses-paid Alaskan fishing vacation was paid for by a hedge fund billionaire, Paul Singer, who contributed over $80 million to Republican political organizations and whose Elliott Management group is one of the largest donors to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. This is a politically involved rightwing billionaire.

Later, the billionaire's firm had business before the Court and, in that case, won billions of dollars--no disclosure by Alito, no recusal. Charles Geyh, an Indiana University law professor and leading expert on recusals, had this to say:

If you were good friends, what were you doing ruling on his

case? And if you weren't good friends, what were you doing

accepting this?

But wait. There is more. The tab for Alito's stay at the salmon lodge in Alaska was covered by a different billionaire. If you are keeping score, we are now up to three billionaires. This one is named Robert Arkley, and he

funded the launch of Leonard Leo's advocacy group the Judicial Crisis Network, also heavily engaged in rightwing political influence focused on the Court.

Leo, the operative behind the current rightwing Supreme Court supermajority, not only organized Alito's trip, he gallivanted off to Alaska with the Justice and the billionaires.

By my count, after yet another story about Justice Thomas, we are now up to six rightwing billionaires attending to the care and feeding of two Justices: Thomas and Alito. And there are all sorts of links among them and with the ubiquitous Leonard Leo. So many Justices, so many billionaires, so many gifts.

But there is even more. Alito was not the first Justice to stay at this particular lodge. Justice Scalia also took a private jet to the lodge, courtesy of billionaire Arkley, and also did not disclose the gift. In one memorable bit of color from that ProPublica story, Scalia was described as mixing martinis made with ice chipped off of a glacier.

There. You thought I had forgotten that, but I didn't.

The evening before the Alito billionaire travel story ran, the Wall Street Journal comes back into the picture again. Alito tried to preempt ProPublica's reporting by taking to the Wall Street Journal editorial page. In the op-ed, Alito argued that he didn't need to disclose the private jet travel under Federal law because the private jet should be considered a ``facility'' and that his seat on the private jet would have otherwise been empty so it was free and there was no gift.

I won't go into how laughable these arguments are. That is a separate case. What is important is that these arguments were printed on the Wall Street Journal editorial page without investigation or comment by the page, taken at face value.

Oh, and, by the way, the cost of that charter--the private jet travel would have cost over $100,000 each way.

In that Wall Street Journal editorial page piece from the spring, Alito had said about the Court's collapsing approval:

Well, yeah, what do you expect when you're--day in and day

out--``They're illegitimate. They're engaging in all sorts of

unethical conduct. They're doing this, they're doing that''?

Justice Alito's complaining has it completely backward. The problem is not that Americans are pointing out the ethical lapses at the Supreme Court. The problem is the ethical lapses at the Supreme Court. The Roberts Court Justices' behavior is crashing public trust in the institution--and justifiably--first, with preposterous judicial behavior that no other judge would indulge; second, with outrageous violations of quite clear rules and procedures judges are supposed to follow about reporting those gifts; third, with preposterous excuses for the bad behavior and the reporting violations; and fourth, with no process to ever even try to get to the truth to establish the facts.

It is a mess.

Ideally, the Justices would start fixing that mess on their own. The Court and the Judicial Conference, which Roberts chairs, have the ability to fix this, but so far, they won't. I suspect there is a lot more to be found out about this mess, and they don't want those further disclosures so they would just as soon pull a rug over the whole thing, but that won't work.

Congress also has the ability to write ethics rules for the Justices. Remember, Congress created the judges' financial disclosure requirements in the Ethics in Government Act. And Congress created the judicial recusal law, which the Justices are also required to follow. And Congress created the Judicial Conference, which administers financial disclosure and code of conduct matters. Clearly, the article I legislative branch can legislate in this area. Clearly, we can oversee Agencies that we have created and laws that we have passed, and indeed we have for decades.

In the coming days, the Senate Judiciary Committee will mark up my Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act. This is a very important step forward in this process, and I thank Chairman Durbin for his leadership. This bill would put basic ethics guardrails and transparency measures in place to help ensure the American people that they can get a fair shot at the Supreme Court, even if they don't have a private jet.

Today, in the Court that dark money built, the honor system has flagrantly failed. We need to legislate; we need to investigate; and we need to fix this mess for the American people.

To be continued, Mr. President.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, and now for the wrapup.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to legislative session and be in a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.

Madam President, I have 11 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, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the en bloc consideration of the following Senate resolutions: S. Res. 291, S. Res. 292, and S. Res. 293.

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.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand adjourned until 10 a.m., Thursday, July 13; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and morning business be closed; that following the conclusion of morning business, the Senate proceed to executive session to resume consideration of the Kotagal nomination; finally, that if any nominations are confirmed during Thursday's session, the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.