Floor Statements

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

Mr. President, there is no objection on our side. Through many trials, toils, and snares, we have come together at this moment, and we are delighted to proceed.

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.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 to speak about the so-called SAVE America Act, which I think probably would be better described as the ``Steal the Next Election Act'' because of the purpose that this bill has to throw the election and to throw political influence in America to the Republicans.

You can imagine why they would want to engage in special weapons and tactics to try to win the 2026 election when you see the political disaster that they are enmeshed in: the mess that the Trump administration has made of the economy, the stench of corruption pervading the administration, a war that is running up gasoline prices and has no end in sight and no evident plan. Wherever you look, you see a party in complete disarray with Americans angry, frustrated, and befuddled by the nonsense, and an election coming.

So, of course, they want to change things at the ballot box.

Now, where would you go to test that proposition, that the purpose of this bill is to throw elections to the Republicans? Who might have a view on this that we should listen to?

Oh, right. The President of the United States, the one who has caused the Republicans the political catastrophe that they have looming from the disastrous second term that he has inflicted on this country.

``Republicans have to win this one,'' he said. Get this bill passed is what he is talking about. ``Republicans have to win this one. We'll never lose a race for 50 years.'' That is how much the President thinks this bill will tank American elections in favor of him and his billionaire donors who already have way too much influence in our politics.

He is talking about us here, Democrats, ``we know.'' ``They know if we get this''--if Republicans get this bill--``they probably won't win an election for 50 years, maybe longer.''

This is the President of the United States, the head of the Republican Party, the person most responsible for the mess that Americans are rejecting, and he is being pretty candid about what the purpose of this bill is; it is to throw the election. It is to politically interfere with the coming election so that the Republican Party, and, more importantly, the billionaire backers who are pulling the strings and giving it its direction don't lose, don't see split government, don't see compromise, don't see Congress in the people's hands again.

``Republicans have to win this one,'' he said. ``We'll never lose a race for 50 years.'' And this isn't about political influence with comments like that, from the head of the Republican Party?

You may think he is thinking about some dim and distant future perhaps, that this effort on the floor of the Senate right now to throw the election to the Republican Party isn't immediate.

Whoops. There he goes. ``It will guarantee the midterms.'' The guy says the quiet part out loud. I will give him that.

He tells Republicans: You are going to win the midterms at levels that you can't even believe. How would you win the midterms at levels that you can't even believe? Well, you probably can't believe that you would win the midterms based on current polling as Americans reject the wars, the spending, the waste, the corruption, the cost increases. You can't even believe it, unless you get this bill--unless you are going to get this bill--and then you are going to win every election for a long time.

It is a conceded point by the head of the Republican Party--Donald Trump--the one who has caused this year of disaster, this year of change and disaster--that the whole purpose of the exercise we are going through is to lock in Republican control--more wars, higher costs, worse corruption--by making elections unwinnable for Democrats for 50 years by guaranteeing Republicans the midterms.

So let's not pretend there is some high-and-mighty, civic-minded motivation for this. That is just a screen. Behind the screen, Trump can't help himself. He admitted what this is all about: It will guarantee the midterms. You are going to win the midterms at levels that you can't even believe, and you are going to win every election for a long time.

We'll never lose a race [for] 50 years.

We will ``never lose a race [for] 50 years.''

We will have so fixed voting in this country--not enough with the gerrymandering, not enough with the dark money--we now have to fix elections so that Republicans will never lose a race for 50 years. He has admitted it. He has admitted it.

And how do they do that? Well, until recently, Director of Homeland Security former Secretary Noem said: We just want to make sure that the ``right people'' are voting. The ``right people.'' Gee, who might that be?

And so this whole scheme gets cooked up, marketed falsely as some civic safe voting proposition, when what it really is, is a scheme to influence elections so that the creepy billionaires behind the Republican Party can continue to control the decisions that get made in this town. That is what this is about, plain and simple.

My friends will say: Oh, this is just a voter ID bill. Everybody loves voter ID. You will hear 80-20 more than you can imagine.

Oh, voter ID. Just voter ID. People should have to bring their ID when they vote.

Well, we did that in Rhode Island. It was a bit of a pain. You can imagine an individual person--let's say an 80-year-old woman--widow-- living alone, living in, say, a senior high rise in Providence or in Pawtucket. She is not traveling. If she had a passport, it has lapsed. She is not driving. She hasn't had a car in 5 years. Her community is largely in that high rise and people who come to help and help bring her groceries. She has a Social Security card because she is on Social Security, but the Social Security card isn't a photo ID.

So when you bring in voter ID, you have now dumped on that lady a new hassle. She has been voting her whole life. She has been voting for 60- plus years, and now suddenly they have a problem with her voting--even when she comes downstairs to the voting machines that get set up in the senior center lobby to make it easier for seniors to vote, and everybody in the building knows her; but no ID, no vote.

So, in Rhode Island, we went through the hassle of helping people who needed an ID--who for perfectly legitimate reasons didn't have one--get an ID. It was unnecessary. We had essentially zero voter fraud, but we did it and we put in the work and it worked out fine.

So let's not pretend this is just a voter ID law. This points its attack at voter registration. If you move, you have to reregister to vote. If you are young and are registering to vote for the first time, that is where you run into the obstacles designed to prevent certain people--people who aren't the ``right people''--from being able to vote. That is where you run into the problem.

And worse than that, they are trying to take the voter information that we entrust to our secretary of state and to our elections board. They are trying to get the private information of voters in our voter rolls and put it into a national website controlled by, oh, the Department of Homeland Security, the ones who are running ICE around in neighborhoods, the one who ran their agents through the Rhode Island courthouse and threatened a judge with smashing his car windows when he tried to vouch for his high school intern whom the ICE agents wrongly thought was a 30-year-old person they were looking for. We are going to trust the entire country's worth of voter information to that operation?

Look at what just happened in Fulton County. In Fulton County, a Trump U.S. attorney from Missouri sent the FBI in Georgia into the election headquarters to seize all of the voter data that they had. I have separately explained what a completely fouled-up operation that was and how the way in which they did that search warrant left enormous holes for any defendant, who was later charged based on evidence obtained in that search warrant, to run a truck through that prosecution.

They violated really basic rules that prosecutors follow--prosecution 101--rookie, dumb errors. And that leads to only one of two conclusions: One is they are idiots. They are incompetent. They have no idea what they are doing. And there is some sense around that because the local U.S. attorney in Georgia wanted no part of this mess. It was being directed by Washington through Missouri into Georgia. The FBI special agent in charge in Georgia didn't seem to like it much. He got run out of his job--presumably for objecting to this nonsense.

But there is a worse theory than that this was a completely incompetent screw up of a search warrant execution, and that is: They didn't mind leaving

all these holes for a future defendant--somebody charged on the basis of that evidence--to exploit. They didn't mind opening these unnecessary vulnerabilities in a case for a defendant who might later be charged to exploit because they never thought there would be a defendant.

The point wasn't to do a criminal prosecution or even a criminal investigation; the point was to use the search warrant process falsely in order to get their hands on a massive amount of voter data in a swing State. That is being litigated right now, and we will find out.

But that is the kind of effort by this administration to use the Federal Government to seize private voter data. That would be exactly consistent with why we need to worry about DHS, which only wants the ``right people'' to vote, getting a massive amount of personal voter data.

In Rhode Island, our Secretary of State is fighting that right now because he understands that Rhode Islanders want their voter data to be private, to be safe, and not to be part of some massive political election interference operation run using ICE, using the FBI, using DHS, and using this voter information to hand out to political operatives, to make sure that a weaponized Federal Government is not used to try to throw the election.

It is no small thing to have the Department of Homeland Security want data on every voting American. In recent years, Republican heads would have exploded about that idea. It used to be a party that cared about voter privacy; that in the contest between an individual and the government, tried to take the side of the individual. But now that their billionaires control the government--flip. Now they are on the side of the government, and they want your data.

It is so bad that it seems they have even had one of their little ``Musk rats''--the ``doggy boys''--running around in government. Remember that operation when Musk was the President's close adviser, and there were DOGE people? Turns out, there may even have been your Social Security data taken. We will find out more about that.

So this is no small thing. And if you want to know what the motive is, just ask the people who are running this. We just want to make sure the ``right people'' vote. ``We'll never lose a race [for] 50 years'' if you pass this bill. ``It will guarantee the midterms.'' You are going to win the midterms at levels you can't even believe and you are going to ``win every election for a long time.''

That is putting the fix in. That is using the power of government to put the fix in to fix the elections, to choose who runs the government. That is about as un-American as it gets.

So why is it that they are so afraid about the midterms? What is it that makes them have to put in place mechanisms--from voter ID to registration restrictions to data control--that will give them the tools to guarantee the midterms? Why not run on the record? Because the record stinks--that is why--and voters know it.

This is where President Trump's approval rating has gone. He is down 15 percent. He is down more than 25 percent since when he came in. That is a crash in confidence. And I believe this ended before this Iran-- what did he call it?--``excursion'' that has driven up gas prices by about a dollar a gallon already, with no end in sight.

So they are looking at an election disaster, and for a really good reason. Here are Trump's job approval ratings. His disapprovals have been going up and up and up to nearly 60. His approval has been going down and down and down to below 40. There is a more than 20-point swing between his disapproval and his approval. That is a politically lethal place to be. That is a signal that you have made such a mess of your unified control of government that voters want something different, want something new, want a change, are sick of the nonsense. And when you are looking at that and you are looking just a few months down at November--man, time to make sure you change the law so that we can make sure the right people--the right people--are voting.

Let's take a look at a few examples of why it is that Trump's disapproval is more than 20 points above his approval. Why is it that they are in such trouble politically? Why is it that these approval ratings have dropped 15 points and 25 from before net zero? This is a real problem.

And we are not the only ones looking at this data. The billionaires who run the Republican Party these days--the billionaires who tell Trump what to do and boss him around and give him big gifts and super deals for his family and his cronies and his friends--they are watching it too. They have never had it so good right now. They can basically secretly, quietly run the U.S. Government through the Republican Party. What a deal. Poor men wannabe rich. Rich men wanna be King. And they get to be King from the shadows, with dark money and influence and a Republican Party that hops to their tune. So they are not happy either.

That is why they need emergency measures that will guarantee the midterms. That is what we are involved in today--trying to make sure elections are fair, trying to make sure everybody has a shot to vote, trying to make sure--for real--this is an election that reflects what the American people get to choose.

Why are these numbers so terrible for Trump and Republicans? Because things aren't so great for the American people right now. The annual cost of residential electricity is up in almost every State in the last year. In some cases, it is up a lot--$278, $210, $123, $159, $171 up in Maine. People understand that their electric bills are going up, and if they are paying attention--if they are paying attention--they understand that their electricity bills are going up because Trump and his administration are deliberately pushing clean energy away from the grid. They are deliberately keeping cheap, clean energy off the grid so that, for any given level of demand, the grid has to go where if it doesn't have the cheap, clean energy? It has to go to the polluting fossil fuel plants.

Those plants set the grid price when they are called up, and when they set the grid price, they are more expensive than clean energy, so everybody's costs go up. All that excess money--the billions of dollars that get sucked out of consumers' pockets, out of ratepayers' pockets when they have to pay the higher prices of fossil fuel compared to the lower prices of clean energy--that whole delta of billions of dollars flows where? Right to Trump's billionaire fossil fuel donors, to the ones that he went to in Mar-a-Lago and said: Give me a billion dollars, and I will give you everything you want. I need your money to win this race.

And what did they do? They coughed up hundreds of millions of dollars. Did they get to the billion? We don't know because so much of the money is so dark. But we know they got hundreds of millions to Trump. Now he is paying them back by stopping and slowing down clean energy, which would lower costs for people, and instead he drives the cost up. That is why so much of this is happening.

I will give you an example. The Trump administration has messed around twice with the offshore wind farm off of Rhode Island called Revolution Wind. Out of the clear, blue sky, for no cause, they dropped a stop work order on the project, stopping it dead when it was about 80-plus percent complete. Well, that caused them a little problem because the Trump administration had been in court defending that very project against fossil fuel front groups who were suing it to slow down its arrival on the grid.

So the lawyers--the regular, normal Federal lawyers who were in there defending this, defending their permit--suddenly had to pull a 180 about the same project, in the same courtroom, and suddenly say ``Oh, no. That project we have been defending until this minute is suddenly now all bad'' because of this ridiculous stop work order.

Well, the judge didn't take long to throw out that stop work order because it was illegal and even preposterous, and the Trump administration then let the appeal period expire. So there is no longer a time to appeal it. So it is like: OK, that is done. Back to work, everybody.

Sure enough, they went back to work. What happened 30 days later, 2 days before Christmas, without notice? Men and women going out to work on these projects were told: Nope. New

stop work order. Sorry about your Christmas. Not sure when you will ever come back to work. Too bad you were relying on all those nice wages. You are done now.

Well, fortunately for the project, that second stop work order crashed and burned in court just as badly as the first illegal stop work order had.

My point is they went to enormous, illegal effort to slow down that project. Why? Because, by contract, Revolution Wind is going to bring 9-cent kilowatt hours to our Rhode Island grid. Nine-cent kilowatt hours is what they sell for by contract. And how much does it cost on our grid, on average? Eighteen cents. Revolution Wind was going to bring 350,000 homes' worth of low-cost, 9-cent clean power onto our grid, so they wanted to stop it because then, without that clean, inexpensive power, the grid would have to go up, up, up what they call the generation stack, calling up more and more different units to burn gas and oil and make electricity. And all that extra money gets moved from customers' pockets to Trump's big donors, his big fossil fuel donors. It is a scheme. It is on purpose.

These people may not know it yet, but by November, I hope they will learn that the reason their electric rates went up was on purpose--on purpose--so that Trump and his cronies could pay off his big fossil fuel donors with all that extra revenue from their delay and their blocking of cheaper, cleaner energy--in the billions. In the billions.

Of course, it is not just electricity where people know that they have an administration that is not looking out for them but is looking out for the big corporations, the big polluters, the big donors. You probably can't read this, so I will read it.

``My cost of living has increased'': 80 to 16.

``My grocery costs have gone up'': 79 to 17.

``My utility costs like electricity have gone up'': 69 to 22.

These are huge numbers that match the dissatisfaction I showed already with where Trump is--more than 20 points in the hole with voters and going the wrong way, approval rating collapsing before the whole Iran mess has kicked into voters' budgets. It is a real mess.

Our electricity prices, look where they are going--up, up, up, up, up, for the exact reason I said: because the Trump administration is blocking clean, cheap energy to force the grid to have to spend more and more money on Trump's big fossil fuel donors.

When a really big clean energy plant comes onto the grid, the grid moves to it because it is the cheapest. They pull the cheapest power first to meet demand. So when a big wind farm comes on, when a big solar array comes on, that means there is a fossil fuel plant somewhere at the top of that generation stack that doesn't get to run anymore, and the owners of that fossil fuel plant don't get paid for running it, and the fossil fuel dealers who fuel that plant don't get paid. So they have a vested interest in blocking clean energy, and they are doing it because basically they have infiltrated and occupy the Trump administration.

Just look at the appointees and look at the behavior, and all of it drives costs up. Electricity prices are surging in the United States, and what people are going to understand by November is that those electric prices are surging on purpose. Ratepayers are being dragooned into a scheme to pay back Trump's big donors with their money.

Costs of housing: up, 69 to 21.

Healthcare costs: up, 61 to 26.

Medicaid has been cut. People already know that. Half of the Americans already understand that Medicaid has been cut even though the cuts were postponed until after the election. Wait until they actually land in people's pocketbooks.

Social Security and Medicare have been cut: 42 to 40.

That is where all that is.

But check all of these: cost of living, grocery, utility, housing, healthcare--60 to 80 versus 26 to 16.

The American people know what is going on, they know what is being done to them, and they know who has done it.

So that is why they have just got to make sure only the right people are voting.

We did some work on another big cost area for Americans when I was the chairman of the Budget Committee.

One of the biggest expenditures that a family has is home insurance on their home. It is very expensive, and it is going dramatically up. In some cases, not only are the premiums going dramatically up, but the insurance companies are finding that they can't insure the property any longer; it is too risky.

So the poor owner gets a notice of nonrenewal--that is what it is called. You have been a loyal customer for 15, 20 years, you have made your premium payments on time every time, and the company sends a letter to you in the mail, comes through your mailslot: Sorry. Sorry. We can't insure you any longer. You are going have to find a new insurance company.

This creates a huge hassle in the life of that family, which almost always ends up with a more expensive policy or one with a lot less coverage.

This is happening all over the country, and it is happening because of climate risk. It is happening because along our coasts, the rising sea levels, the warmer oceans, the worse storms, the bigger hurricanes that come ashore are making it impossible for insurers to provide insurance to homeowners.

It is also happening out West, although out West, it is not coastal storms and flooding that are making people's homes uninsurable; it is wildfire.

Whether it is wildfire or whether it is coastal flooding, the cascade is the same; the dominoes that fall are the same.

First is you have the climate risk. And why do we have the climate risk? We have the climate risk because the fossil industry, which is now running the Trump administration, has spent billions of dollars and decades in Congress making sure we let them pollute for free. And they have won. They have succeeded. It is still free to pollute carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. We have never put a price on carbon emissions.

Nothing else is free to pollute. Nothing should be free to pollute. You don't get to dump chemicals in a river and get away with it just because the river carries it away.

So this homeowners insurance problem is a massive, massive cost problem for homeowners across the country.

Here in Florida--you can see how acute the problem is down in Florida. In Florida, I think we are at $14,000 average homeowners insurance for a standard $400,000 policy, and it is predicted, depending on the county you are in, to double, triple, or quadruple.

What does it do to the value of your home when a $14,000 home insurance cost doubles or triples? What if you now have a $40,000 instead of a $14,000 annual carrying cost to own your home? Its value crashes.

That is the cascade. You go from climate risk; to uninsurability; to, oops, now I can't get a mortgage on this property because if you can't insure a property, no one will issue a mortgage on it, to its value crashing, to a recession.

Those warnings are all over the place--and not from Save The Whales, not from the League of Conservation Voters, not from the Sierra Club, but from the former risk manager of Goldman Sachs, from the former head of the Bank of England, from the international Financial Stability Board, from the former Chief Economist of Freddie Mac. The warnings are legion.

Here is another cost that families are more and more dealing with. This is the rate of nonrenewal increase, where the insurance company says: Sorry, your property is now uninsurable--at least by our standards.

Here are nonrenewal rates by State. Again, you see the coastal States hit pretty hard, but there is also wildfire coming in.

This was the work of my Budget Committee. Then some other groups followed up and did some more detailed work.

This is where home insurance premiums are changing. They are already up. What this did was to look forward, not to say ``OK, they are up; they have doubled in the last few years'' but ``Where are they going to go? Where do we predict they will go?'' The prediction here is that insurance premiums are going to climb as much as 300 percent in the 30- year period of a mortgage holder buying right now.

What does he have to look forward to? Well, if you are down here and you

are already paying 14,000 bucks a year--it is even more in Miami--and it is going to go up 300 percent, it is going to quadruple, these are people who have a real cost problem now, and they have a real cost problem coming, and behind that comes a real home values problem.

If you are a Palm Beach billionaire and you want to swap mansions, that is fine. You can do that. You don't even need a mortgage; you just pay with cash. But if you are living north of Tampa in a development and you bought your house with a mortgage and you want to sell it, the person you want to sell it to is going to need a mortgage. If your property is now unmortgageable because it is uninsurable, there goes your market of buyers.

We talked to people in Florida when we did this investigation who literally cannot sell their home at any price. It is not fancy enough for a billionaire, and it is not mortgageable and insurable for a normal person. They are just stuck. They are just stuck.

Here, what the map shows is where they expect to see changes in home value, again, in the next 30 years, in the period of a mortgage entered into at the time, and they are looking at changes in value, dropped 20, 40, 60, 80, and even 100 percent--a total wipeout of home value--based on that home insurance, mortgage, property values cascade because we won't take care of the climate danger that everybody in their right mind knows exists.

The fossil fuel industry has a big reckoning coming from that mess, and they do not want to be responsive to voters. They want the White House and the House and the Senate controlled by a party that they control. They want this election to keep Republicans in power so that they are not held to account for the fraudulent climate denial, for the dark money corruption, and for the looming catastrophe in home insurance rates. And the way they do that is making sure with this bill that ``we just make sure only the right people are voting.'' So the stakes are very high right now.

I will close, because I think I have the floor only for another few minutes, by talking just briefly about Kansas. Why would a Rhode Islander want to talk about Kansas? I will tell you why. Because they tried this in Kansas. They had a similar law in Kansas, and it went to court, and the court threw it out as unconstitutional. The SAVE America Act resembles a law in Kansas that was decided to be unconstitutional.

There are some other interesting things the court found. Across 19 years, the proponents of that law could only show 67 noncitizens registering to vote or even attempting to register to vote. Over 19 years, 67 people.

If you look just at the Presidential elections in that period, Kansans voted in this number: 5.5 million votes cast. So those 67 people are 0.0012 percent of voters.

For the pretext of trying to deal with those 67 attempts, the effect was to keep 31,000 legitimate Kansas voters from voting--31,000 kept from voting to solve a problem of 67 that didn't even exist because most of them were only attempts.

So this is a solution to a nonproblem. The solution that it provides is to the problem of Trump and Republicans having made such a hash of things that they are now in a 20-plus point hole.

So the billionaires who run the Republican Party and, through the Republican Party, run this body, run the House, run the Oval Office, make all the decisions for their own benefit--this is their clawing hand coming out of what seems like election disaster ahead to try to just grab back the power they are losing because their Republican Party has made such a hash of things. That is what this bill is. It is the dead zombie hand of the billionaires who are seeing the exact same approval rating as Trump taking the Republicans into a crash of an election and trying to solve that problem by guaranteeing the midterms by making sure that just the right people vote.

I yield the floor.

No.

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

Madam President, it was the spring of 2019. Public and media interest in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report into Russia's election interference operation reached a fever pitch.

There had been a steady drip, drip, drip of reporting on the Trump team's cozy and peculiar relationship with Russia since his surprise election victory in 2016.

Ahead of the Mueller report's release, Trump's Attorney General, Bill Barr, issued a letter to Congress, purporting to summarize the report's findings. The letter declared that Russia and the Trump campaign did not collude to steal the election.

The press, ravenous for any news of the long-anticipated Mueller report's conclusion, largely accepted Attorney General Barr's narrow, carefully worded conclusion and, not yet having access to the full report, blasted the Attorney General's summary around the world.

Trump himself declared--all caps: ``NO COLLUSION!''

He said he had been cleared of the Russia ``hoax,'' a term he reserves only to describe things that are true, like climate change.

Frustrated, Mueller wrote to Barr that the Attorney General's letter ``did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance'' of the investigation. But by the time the dense, voluminous Mueller report was issued, the month after Barr's letter, his message had been obscured.

The Mueller report actually concluded that the Trump campaign knew of and welcomed Russian interference and expected to benefit from it. That conclusion was later echoed and reinforced by an investigation led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio's Senate Intelligence Committee, a bipartisan report.

But Barr's scheme had largely worked. Many in the media and in the Democratic Party seemed to internalize that the Russia speculation had perhaps gotten out of hand and that perhaps we had been wrong to believe there was a troubling connection between Trump and Russia after all.

But were we? Let's take a look at a sampling of what Trump has done for Russia just lately, and usually at the expense of American interests. There are many, but here is a ``top 10.''

One, after Trump and Vice President Vance theatrically chastised the heroic Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in front of TV cameras in the Oval Office, last year, Trump paused our weapons shipments to Ukraine.

Two, in July, during the worst Russian bombing campaign of the war to that point, Trump paused an already funded weapons shipment for Ukraine, including the Patriot interceptors that protect civilians from Putin's savage attacks.

Three, that same month, Trump's Treasury Department stopped imposing new sanctions and closing sanctions loopholes, effectively allowing dummy corporations to send funds, chips, and military equipment to Russia.

Four, leaked phone calls show that White House envoy Steve Witkoff and Putin envoy Kirill Dmitriev have worked together closely behind the scenes on a peace deal favorable to Russia.

Five, last summer, Trump rolled out the Presidential red carpet for the Russian dictator on American soil, with a summit in Alaska that yielded, unsurprisingly, no gains toward ending the war in Ukraine.

Six, Trump's Vice President traveled to the Munich Security Conference, last year, to parrot Russia's anti-Western talking points, pushed by rightwing groups that Putin has long funded and used to create political strife in Europe.

Seven, Trump installed Russia apologist Tulsi Gabbard as his Director of

National Intelligence, much to the glee of Russian state media.

Eight, upon the confirmation of Trump's Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Department of Justice shuttered its anti-kleptocracy work that had successfully targeted Putin's Russian oligarchs.

Nine, late last year, Trump unveiled a new so-called National Security Strategy, which abandoned traditional alliances in Europe and favored a transactional foreign policy that the Kremlin praised as ``largely consistent'' with Moscow's vision and desires.

And, 10, the Trump administration is even paving the way for Russia's return to global sports competition, ending its isolation in those arenas, in the wake of the hostile Ukraine invasion and state-backed systemic doping programs in Russia.

That is a ``top 10,'' but the list goes on. If Trump were purposefully doing Russia's bidding, it is hard to see what he would be doing differently.

The United States is the most powerful nation in the world. Russia is a weak, corrupt regime. My old friend Senator John McCain used to say that Russia is a gas station, run by gangsters, with an army. It doesn't make sense that the President of the United States, who insists--insists--on being dominant in essentially every relationship, is so submissive to one person. And that one person is Russia's dictator Vladimir Putin.

So what is it about Trump and Russia? And could it have any connection with Trump's close friendship with the deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein?

Much about Epstein remains unknown. But the survivors who have come forward and the millions of emails released through the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act have shed some light on the operation of the late financier's global pedophile ring, and, over and over, it touches Russia.

When recently asked by a reporter about the Epstein files, Trump said in part:

It's just a Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.

Again, ``hoax''--the word he uses for when something is true.

But the most telling part is that Trump's mind, asked about Epstein, immediately went to Russia--``Russia, Russia, Russia.''

I should start by pointing out that Epstein's ties to foreign intelligence may never be fully known. It is a murky world. He had links to officials in the U.S., Russian, and Israeli Governments, and many others. But it is worth looking at those ties to Russia, a nation so hostile to the United States.

Epstein's career began in the mid-1970s at the prestigious Dalton School in New York City, where, despite dropping out of college, 21- year-old Jeffrey Epstein was given a position teaching high school mathematics to the children of some of New York's wealthiest families.

Perhaps of note, the outgoing headmaster at the time of Epstein's hire was Donald Barr, the father of future Attorney General Bill Barr and a former intelligence officer during World War II. The elder Barr was known for making unconventional hires at Dalton.

After a couple of years, Epstein was able to leverage the elite connections he made at Dalton to a job at Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns, where he rose quickly through the company. However, after getting caught fabricating his resume, using the company credit card on expensive gifts for his girlfriend, and, ultimately, providing privileged stock information to a girlfriend, among other unscrupulous behaviors, Epstein called it quits and started his own financial firm.

Those early scams were just the start. Shortly thereafter, Epstein fell in with a wealthy man named Douglas Leese, a British defense contractor with connections in the arms industry and the British Government. During this period, Epstein would tell people he was a ``bounty hunter'' who tracked down hidden money.

According to Steven Hoffenberg, a former business mentor of Epstein's who went to prison for a massive Ponzi scheme that he later said Epstein had designed, Leese introduced Epstein to Robert Maxwell.

Ghislaine Maxwell, who became Epstein's girlfriend and sex- trafficking accomplice after her father's death, was Robert Maxwell's favorite daughter, and he involved her deeply in his work.

An opportunist in pursuit of wealth, the Czechoslovak-born Robert Maxwell had complex, shifting ties to British, Soviet, and Israeli intelligence.

Initially bankrolled by MI6, he accepted secret payments from the KGB through his Soviet-friendly publishing company and was the rare individual who traversed both sides of the Iron Curtain.

In 1992, the British newspaper the Sunday Express wrote that a secret document, signed by the head of the KGB months before Maxwell's death at sea, showed that Maxwell was a political and intelligence asset for the Soviet Union. The newspaper claimed that the document indicated Soviet leadership had instructed the KGB to protect Maxwell's reputation and business activities.

Maxwell's UK foreign office file, released more than a decade after his death, described him as ``a thoroughly bad character and almost certainly financed by Russia.''

Journalist Vicky Ward wrote the following in Rolling Stone Magazine in 2021. She said:

Hoffenberg told me that Epstein had said he'd worked on

several projects with Robert Maxwell, including solving

Maxwell's ``debt'' issues.

The word ``debt'' is in quotes.

(Maxwell died in 1991, under very strange circumstances,

apparently having fallen off his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine,

in the middle of the night and it was discovered in the

aftermath that he'd stolen 100s of millions of dollars from

the pensions of his employees.)

The story continued:

Epstein had also told Hoffenberg that via Maxwell and Leese

he was involved in something that Hoffenberg described as

``national security issues,'' which he says involved

``blackmail, influence trading, trading information at a

level that is very serious and dangerous.''

The story concluded:

Four separate sources told me--on the record--that

Epstein's dealings in the arms world in the 1980s had led him

to work for multiple governments, including the Israelis.

Epstein's strategies for making money and working intelligence contacts seem to have some similarities to Robert Maxwell's.

For the record, Epstein, a profligate liar, once told Ward that he never met Robert Maxwell or Leese.

At some point in the 1980s, Epstein struck up a friendship with a fellow brash New York businessman by the name of Donald Trump. Author Michael Wolff has said of Trump and Epstein:

They shared everything. They shared their airplanes. They

shared women between them. They shared constantly business

and financial advice.

There are many photos of the two men together on the New York and Palm Beach party circuits throughout the 1990s. Trump, now famously said in 2002:

I've known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He's a lot

of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful

women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger

side.

Alan Dershowitz told the New York Times in 2019 that ``in those days, if you didn't know Trump and you didn't know Epstein, you were a nobody.''

Dershowitz is the well-known lawyer who served both on Epstein's defense team when he was charged with having sex with minors back in 2006 and on Trump's impeachment defense team in 2020.

The President of Trump's Atlantic City Trump Plaza Hotel in the late 1980s said he saw Trump and Epstein together so frequently that he believed Epstein was Trump's ``best friend.'' That same man described an incident where Trump brought Epstein and a 19-year-old girl to the casino gaming floor.

Epstein once took a model to Trump Tower, where she says Trump groped her while laughing with Epstein. She remarked that it seemed like ``a twisted game'' between the two men.

One survivor says Epstein summoned her to his offices late one night. Trump soon arrived. And according to the New York Times, ``[she] recalled feeling scared as Mr. Trump stared at her bare legs. Then Mr. Epstein entered the room, and she recalled him saying to Mr. Trump: `No, no. She's not here for you.''' After the men left the room, she said she overheard Trump commenting that he thought she was 16 years old.

In 1992, Trump hosted a ``calendar girls competition'' at Mar-a-Lago for

dozens of young women. The event organizer was appalled to learn that Trump and Epstein would be the only men present--a private showing.

During Maxwell's trial, one of Epstein's victims said he took her to meet Trump at Mar-a-Lago when she was 14.

Maxwell recruited 16-year-old Virginia Giuffre from the spa at Mar-a- Lago. Giuffre was abused by Epstein and trafficked to other men in Epstein's orbit.

Trump said in 2025:

I think [Giuffre] worked at the spa. He stole her.

``He'' being Epstein.

In 1997, the UK tabloid, the Daily Mirror, formerly owned by Robert Maxwell, claimed that Trump was dating a 20-year-old British model and Ghislaine Maxwell had introduced them at a party. The tabloid notes:

[Trump] met [the model] at a party in Manhattan. Several

American millionaires already had their eyes on [the model].

But she was there with Robert Maxwell's daughter Ghislaine,

who has introduced several of her attractive friends to the

property developer, [Trump].

According to the Mirror:

After their meeting, Trump flew Madam Maxwell and the model

south to the sunshine state, where they enjoyed a happy

weekend together. When they returned to New York, [the model]

was installed in one of Donald's many apartments there.

In an interview with BBC ``Newsnight,'' the model stated:

Ghislaine Maxwell did introduce me to him--

That is Trump--

and she introduced me to him with a clear message of my

being with him in the same way that she had trafficked me and

brought me to Jeffrey Epstein.

She also said:

I can only speak for myself, and this is in no way to

negate any other experience that anyone else might have had

with him, but, at no time did President Trump behave with any

impropriety with me.

The same woman accused Epstein of sexually abusing her when she was a teenager in a 2019 interview with NBC.

From NBC:

The abuse . . . spanned several years and locales. In

addition to the estate on his private island, [she] said

Epstein preyed on her at his homes in New York and Paris.

According to Craig Unger's book ``American Kompromat'':

Trump was often the center of Maxwell's attention, and

women who entered Trump's orbit sometimes ended up being

associated with both Trump and Epstein, spending part of

their time living in a Trump Tower condo and part in Florida,

at Mar-a-Lago or one of Epstein's homes.

Among them was a Russian model and beauty-pageant

contestant . . . whose journey from the world of beauty

pageants and modeling to Trump's Mar-a-Lago and Epstein's

island retreat is highly suggestive in terms of how Epstein

and his associates began manipulating young women.

The story continues:

In the early '90s, before coming to the United States, [the

woman] had placed well in a number of beauty pageants--coming

in second in Miss Russia 1993 and winning the 1994 Miss

Baltic Sea title that year. In 1995, she left Moscow, spent

six weeks learning English in St. Petersburg--

That is St. Petersburg, FL, not Russia--

and was profiled in the Tampa Tribune as ``reigning Miss

Russia.'' And before long, she met Donald Trump.

Notwithstanding the fact that Trump was still married to

his second wife, Marla Maples, [the woman] moved into a 30th-

floor condo in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.

There, according to an item in the New York Post, her

lavish accommodations were taken care of ``courtesy of an

unidentified sugar daddy.''

[S]he spent time with both Trump and Epstein. Flight logs

released by a federal judge in New York in 2019 showed that

in February 1999, [the woman], then 27, flew on board

Epstein's Gulfstream, the so-called Lolita Express, with

Maxwell and Prince Andrew, from Epstein's Little St. James

(a.k.a. ``Pedophile Island'') back to Florida.

Trump has tried to distance himself from his former friend, the monstrous pedophile who is believed to have abused at least a thousand women and girls. It is worth taking a look at how the friendship between Trump and Epstein allegedly soured. There are varying accounts as to whether Trump ever banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago over his recruitment of spa workers from the resort.

But we know the falling out was at least, in part, related to a bidding war between Trump and Epstein over a Palm Beach mansion in 2004. Trump won and purchased the property for $41.3 million.

Just 4 years later and after modest renovations, Trump sold the mansion to billionaire Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million. At the time, it was reported to be the most expensive residential property sale in U.S. history, pretty stellar investment for Mr. Trump. The oligarch, for his part, after paying the $95 million, never even moved in.

That brings us back to Russia. Epstein claimed to have given at least some insight on Trump to the Russians. Epstein met on many occasions with Vitaly Churkin, Russia's representative to the United Nations from 2006 until Churkin's death in 2017. Epstein wrote in an email:

Churkin was great. He understood trump after our

conversations. it is not complex. he must be seen to get

something its that simple.

Epstein wrote in 2018 to Thorbjorn Jagland, a former Prime Minister of Norway, who was then head of the Council of Europe:

I think you might suggest to putin, that lavrov, can get

insight on talking to me.

That appears to be a reference to Sergey Lavrov, Russian's Minister of Foreign Affairs. The email was sent prior to the Helsinki summit between Trump and Putin.

In another email to Jagland, Epstein wrote that he wanted to help Putin and Russia ``reinvent the financial system.''

A 2017 FBI report based on a confidential human source claims that Epstein was ``President Vladimir Putin's wealth manager.''

Epstein tried several times to meet with Putin, often via Jagland, although it is unclear if any such meeting took place. But Putin is named almost 1,000 times in the latest tranche of Epstein file documents, and there are almost 10,000 references in the documents to Moscow.

Epstein roped many Russian and Eastern European girls and women into his trafficking operation.

The New York Magazine profile of Epstein published all the way back in 2002 reads:

Indeed, at a party at Maxwell's house, her friends say, one

is just as apt to see Russian ladies of the night as one is

to see Prince Andrew.

In Ward's 2003 profile of Epstein, a guest described a ``cocktail party thrown by Maxwell that Prince Andrew attended, which was filled, she says, with young Russian models.''

In a 2010 email, Epstein suggested a young woman as a dinner companion to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince, assuring him that she was ``Russian, beautiful and trustworthy.''

The Daily Beast recently reported on an alleged classified U.S. intelligence document claiming that ``Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor . . . was drawn into Moscow's orbit thanks to his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, which the Kremlin allegedly used as a route into the British establishment.''

In another 2010 email to a person whose name has been redacted, Epstein wrote:

Tomorrow I'm organising a dinner for some new Russian

girls. . . . [S]ee you at 10.

He received an email from a redacted sender in 2012 that read:

I have 2 Russian girls for you to meet, one 21, another 24.

A message left for Epstein by one of his employees in 2005 claims French model scout Jean-Luc Brunel had found a ``teacher'' who could give Epstein ``free lessons.''

He has a teacher for you to teach how to speak Russian. She

is two times eight years old. Not blonde.

``Two times eight years old.''

According to ``American Kompromat'';

In addition to whatever legitimate careers Brunel may have

fostered, as a ``model scout,'' he also allegedly hired

``scouters'' to identify, procure, and transport underage

girls, many 15 years of age and under, hire them to give

``massages'' and traffic them.

Brunel was found hanged in his French jail cell in 2022 after being arrested on rape and sex trafficking charges.

Bill Gates appears. He has said he had affairs with two Russian women, which Epstein later discovered.

Somewhere along the way, Epstein struck up a relationship with Sergei Belyakov, Russia's former Deputy Minister of Economic Development and a

graduate of the FSB, Russia's intelligence academy. Epstein introduced him to contacts like Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who would go on to give $10 million to the super PAC that helped elect now-Vice President JD Vance to the Senate in 2022.

In 2015, Epstein warned Belyakov that ``a Russian girl from Moscow . . . is attempting to blackmail a group of powerful businessmen in New York.'' It was, Epstein said, ``bad for business for everyone involved.'' Belyakov responded back with information about the woman who he said worked in the ``sex and escort'' business. The FSB academy graduate said he would meet with someone who knows her.

The following year, Belyakov told Epstein he had a new position at the Russian Direct Investment Fund, the Russian sovereign wealth fund, headed by current Putin envoy Kirill Dmitriev--the same guy who was caught in those friendly leaked phone calls with Steve Witkoff that I mentioned earlier.

Masha Drokova, a former spokesperson for Nashi, the pro-Kremlin youth movement, was in regular touch with Epstein in the last couple of years before his death in prison. She was ostensibly helping Epstein with his public relations. According to the Washington Post, she was ``the subject of the 2011 documentary `Putin's Kiss,' whose title refers to a widely publicized award ceremony in which she received a medal from Putin and spontaneously kissed him on the cheek.''

In a 2017 email, Drokova asked Epstein to connect her with ``adequate Russian oligarchs.'' The Post reported in 2022 that her fundraising pitches highlighted her ties to wealthy Russians, although Drokova denied writing those emails and said she did not receive Russian funding.

Epstein advised Drokova as she launched her Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and she introduced Epstein to the contacts she had made in the tech world.

In one email interaction in 2017, Drokova, after claiming to meet billionaire Jeff Bezos, tells Epstein she is ``trying to understand what she is not understanding about him.'' Epstein writes back that Bezos is ``smart, fun, and visionary. He is a very nice person. Probalty [sic] the best in the valley among the Bs.''

The files also indicate Epstein had dealings with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire who the Treasury Department identified as a money launderer for Vladimir Putin. Deripaska also cultivated a friendship with Peter Mandelson, a senior figure in Britain's Labour Party. Mandelson tried to use Deripaska's contacts to acquire a last-minute Russian visa for Epstein in 2010.

Correspondence also shows Epstein's assistant trying to set up a meeting for Epstein and Deripaska in Moscow or Paris.

There is also audio of Epstein advising then-Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak to have dinner with Putin to line up work after he leaves government.

There is at least one itinerary for a lengthy trip across Russia and photos of Epstein and Ghislaine in what is believed to be Russia, including with people who appear to be Russian soldiers.

Umar Dzhabrailov, a former Russian senator who committed suicide in recent days, described Maxwell as ``a soulmate.'' Epstein had a series of Russian visas between 2011 and his death in 2019.

Epstein's crimes left a long money trail, and that trail winds back to Russia. Ranking member of the Finance Committee Ron Wyden has doggedly sought the truth about Epstein's transactions with Russian banks and Eastern European entities. One suspicious activity report filed by JPMorgan Chase after Epstein's death shows that between 2003 and 2019, Epstein conducted 4,725 wire transactions totaling over $1 billion. And that is just one bank. Epstein used multiple banks. According to JPMorgan Chase, the wire activity was flagged for the suspicious activity report for being ``consistent with . . . alleged sex trafficking of minors'' and for involving ``the high risk jurisdiction of the Russian Federation.''

CNN notes that two accounts included in the suspicious activity report were linked to now-sanctioned Russian banks Alfa-Bank and Sberbank. Also named in the suspicious activity reports were Maxwell, associated entities like Brunel's MC2 Model Management, and various women and girls.

Let's go back to the journalist Vicky Ward:

[S]ources, who range from former arms dealers to former

spies--and also Hoffenberg--suggest that Epstein, who lacked

any sort of moral compass, decided to . . . compromise

influential people by recording them doing things they

wouldn't want made public. . . . And once he got out of jail,

in the last 10 years of his life, Epstein bragged to various

people, including journalists, that he was advising a

whole assortment of foreign leaders who included Vladimir

Putin, Mohammed bin Zayed, Mohammed Bin Salman, various

African dictators, Israel, the British--and, of course,

the Americans.

He also told several of the same people that he was making

a fortune out of arms, drugs, and diamonds.

I am still reading the same quote:

He was known in the intelligence world as a ``hyper-

fixer,'' somebody who can go between different cultures and

networks.''

Epstein was, of course, known for his parties, which he insisted on hosting in his various mansions where he could completely control the environment. Many of Epstein's victims have said they believe they were recorded.

Virginia Giuffre wrote in her posthumous memoir that Epstein had a ``huge library of videotapes'' and a room in his New York home where monitors displayed real-time surveillance footage from his properties.

``He explicitly talked about using me and what I'd been forced to do with certain men as a form of blackmail, so these men would owe him favors,'' she wrote.

Another survivor said Epstein once walked her through his mansion pointing out pinhole-sized cameras. He boasted that they were in every room.

According to Epstein's emails, in 2014, he directed a staffer to procure hidden cameras, which were installed in tissue boxes.

The New York Times obtained photos of the interior of Epstein's New York mansion, which show a camera installed near the ceiling of the master bedroom and another along the molding of an adjoining room. The Times also spotted cameras near a suite of bathrooms on the same floor as Epstein's bedroom.

When police searched his Palm Beach home in 2005, they ``located two covert (hidden) cameras.'' Both cameras were located inside clocks--one by a desk and the other in a garage.

It is worth noting that Epstein often seemed to get tipped off in advance as to when the Palm Beach police would be dropping by. Epstein is said to have once told an ex-girlfriend:

I collect people. I own people. I can damage people.

The disgraced financier Hoffenberg allegedly claimed to the National Enquirer in a final account before his death that ``wherever Epstein was entertaining, he [and Ghislaine] were taping.'' That report was only released last summer, as Hoffenberg had asked the Enquirer not to publish his comments until 3 years after his death.

According to the Daily Beast, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Alex Acosta, is once said to have claimed Epstein ``belonged to intelligence'' and that the decision to let him off easy in 2008 was made above his ``pay grade.''

The Prime Minister of Poland, a country that has extensive experience with Russian intelligence operations, has opened an investigation into potential links between Epstein and Russian intelligence. Prime Minister Tusk said:

More and more leads, more and more information, and more

and more commentary in the global press all relate to the

suspicion that this unprecedented paedophilia scandal was co-

organised by Russian intelligence services.

According to alleged anonymous intelligence sources published in the British tabloid the Daily Mail last month, some believe:

Jeffrey Epstein was running ``the world's largest honey

trap operation'' on behalf of the KGB when he procured women

for his network of associates.

I want to stress that we don't have answers here. Epstein was an inveterate liar and criminal who often sought to exaggerate his own power and influence, and the Epstein files need to be viewed through that lens. He could have been working with an intelligence agency or several intelligence agencies. He could have just been what the Russians call a useful idiot. We may never know.

What we do know is that a significant number of powerful men--our current President, some of his Cabinet Secretaries, tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and others--were very mixed up with Epstein at different times, and Epstein seems to have been very mixed up with Russia.

We also know that there is a coverup afoot at the Department of Justice. The MAGA Department of Justice is trying to shield Trump from something in the Epstein files. We know that documents in the files about President Trump that should be released have not been released. The missing files--first discovered by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger--are alleged to detail claims by an Epstein accuser who said she was also sexually assaulted by President Trump when she was a young teenager.

One of the great forces that Washington runs on is normalcy bias. It is often in the interest of the bureaucratic establishment to look skeptically toward outlandish or extreme stories because, in most cases, the truth is more ordinary than what may first appear. What I have done here today is lay out the facts, as documented by the many brave survivors who have come forward at great personal risk, as well as the many journalists who have tried and continue to try to get to the truth.

As a lawyer, I know that you can prove cases with circumstantial evidence. You don't always need the smoking gun. Here, we have links with Russia, girls from Russia, money from Russia, people from Russia, deals and transactions with Russia, contacts with people with Russian intelligence, news reports exploring contacts with Russia, and an official investigation from the Government of Poland into an Epstein- Russia connection. Sometimes, with a little imagination, you have the chance to see what is right in front of your face.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that this document, which is a bibliography of all of the sources that I quoted from in this speech, be printed in the Record and appended at the conclusion of my remarks.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask that the quorum call be rescinded.

Here in this Temple of Mammon, we only seem to care about what we can monetize. So as Budget chair, I drilled hard into how climate change is coming at American family finances.

Some of it comes at families through grocery costs as climate disruptions disrupt agriculture. Some of it comes through construction costs as climate disruptions disrupt lumber markets and supply chains. Some of it comes through outdoor sports industries--hunting, fishing and scuba and skiing--as climate disruptions disrupt the natural environments that they need.

The first biggest shock will come through insurance markets as climate risks make real estate uninsurable. This disruption kicks off a cascade: Climate risk collapses insurance markets; insurance collapse cascades into mortgage markets; mortgage collapse cascades into property value losses; and the combination of insurance cost, mortgage collapse, and home value losses thrashes the entire economy.

Don't believe me. Believe the chief economist of the mortgage giant Freddie Mac who said exactly this. He said it would be as bad as the 2008 recession based only on coastal flood risk. And, of course, now we have wildfire risk as well. And by the way, investor David Burt, who predicted that 2008 recession, is now making bets predicting this one. In a joint editorial, Senator Sheehy and I warned of a ``torpedo to the hull'' of our economy from extreme weather, whether floods or wildfires, triggering exactly this cascade.

As the climate danger looms closer, more and more studies are monetizing that danger. Mammon Hall may have to wake up. Let's go through some of the recent reporting.

First off, this isn't later. This is now. On home insurance, look no further than Florida's teetering home insurance market where average premiums now have soared to over $14,000 or look westward from there where 92 percent of Texans now are worried about homeowners insurance costs. The insurance peril comes as no surprise because insurance, to quote First Street, ``directly prices expected loss.''

First Street describes how insurance is often the first transmission channel for climate risk into markets through premium increases, tighter terms, higher deductibles, nonrenewals, and I would add mandates like homeowners having to build a new roof on their home to get insurance coverage.

It matters what insurance companies think about this because those insurance companies have both a fiduciary duty and a financial incentive to predict well to make that an accurate transmission channel of climate risk into markets. And they are predicting storm clouds ahead, and they are battening down.

Other reports show climate change is already reducing Americans' wealth and income. One study estimated that incomes in the United States are already lower by around 12 percent since 2000 from where they would have been if fossil fuel emissions were not causing climate disruptions. That 12-percent estimated income reduction was a midpoint in an estimated range between 2-percent income reduction and 22-percent income reduction.

That study, by the way, looked at general temperature effects, not at the costs of specific extreme weather effects like hurricanes, sea level rise, or wildfires. So the actual number is obviously worse.

As to those uncounted extreme weather effects, First Street reports that natural disaster damages have risen more than tenfold since the 1980s and now cost the global economy over $200 billion per year. NOAA's 5-year average of billion-dollar disasters in the period from 1980 to 2024 averaged nine of them per year; 1980 to 2024 averaged 9 billion-dollar disasters per year. From 2020 to 2024, that segment, the average has soared to 23 per year.

Another report notes that the greatest impact of climate change is from ``the frequency, magnitude, and duration of extreme events.'' So if you start with 12-percent income reduction and then you add in the greatest impact of climate change on top of that from extreme events, well, it is not just obviously worse; it is obviously a lot worse counting those extreme weather effects.

The study notes that climate change has altered weather in all recent years and all places. It is everywhere, not just where storms hit or wildfires burn. So that is now. That is what is already here. What are we in for? A 2024 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that each added degree centigrade of warming results in a 12-percent reduction of GDP. Extrapolate that out, and the numbers get huge. The World Meteorological Organization estimates that the global cost of failing on climate, of letting the polluters continue to run roughshod over policy, is as much as $1,200 trillion by the end of the century--$1,200 trillion.

Another study has monetized ocean damages. Rhode Island is The Ocean State. My wife is a marine scientist. I tend to pay attention to ocean things. But we do tend to overlook ocean damage. It is worth looking out for the oceans, though, because 90 percent of the excess heat caused by fossil fuel emissions and 30 percent of the excess carbon dioxide from those fossil fuel emissions have all been absorbed by the oceans--90 percent of the excess heat, 30 percent of the carbon dioxide, all absorbed by the oceans. Without that ocean effect, fossil fuel emissions would likely have already made planet Earth unlivable for humankind.

When you account for ocean impacts, when you monetize those ocean impacts, it nearly doubles the social cost of carbon to humankind. The effects come through higher ocean temperatures, reduced ability of the ocean to hold oxygen, acidification of the ocean, increased severity of extreme weather events, and accelerated sea level rise. Specific dangers to God's creation include mass mortalities of organisms, large- scale bleaching of coral reefs, and the loss of sea grass beds and kelp forests.

Putting numbers to all of that gave this:

Market use damages are the largest in absolute terms,

totaling global annual losses of . . . $1.66 trillion in

2100, followed by damages in non-use values amounting to . .

. $224 billion, and non-market use values adding up to $182

billion in annual losses. That sums to over $2 trillion a year, and it is for sure an undercount.

Again, there is a lot here that is not yet included in ocean social cost of carbon calculations, damages that the EPA acknowledges as important but has not yet included in social cost of carbon calculations. It includes some pretty prominent impacts like on fisheries and mariculture and tourism and recreation and, of course, aesthetic values. That is a pretty big suite of harms.

At the end of the day, the oceans damage report prices 2020's ``blue social cost of carbon'' at $48 in harm per ton of CO2 emissions. By 2030, 4 years from now, it is up from $48 per ton to $72 per ton. The trajectory is not good.

Remember that these numbers are an attempt to monetize a looming natural systems disaster. As another report pointed out, some of the benefits that our natural systems provide to humankind ``are not substitutable, meaning they must be protected as they cannot be replaced by technology when they are gone.'' Irreplaceability is one danger; irreversible acceleration is another.

Some of the harms fossil fuel emissions cause hit tipping points that kick

off ``a cascade of accelerating and unmanageable damage''--``a cascade of accelerating and unmanageable damage'' leading to dramatic worsening for humankind in a worsening trajectory of damage.

Tipping points can have a profound effect on markets. Markets are built around expectations, and one of the main expectations around which they are built is the expected lifetime of assets. Well, as of today, the central case estimate for sea level rise is around 3 feet by 2100--not good for homes or businesses that lie around or below 3 feet above sea level, not great for homes or businesses that are within range of ocean storms swamping ashore above the 3 feet of sea level rise, but manageable with respect to considerable amounts of real estate.

Now, imagine that tomorrow we learn that we have permanently destabilized the Greenland ice sheet or the aptly named ``doomsday glaciers'' in West Antarctica. Suddenly, the expected sea level rise by the end of the century doubles or more, and we know that we are eventually in for between 12 and 36 feet of sea level rise. Market expectations around the valuations of trillions of dollars of real estate will suddenly change, provoking massive value destruction that will cascade through markets. It will make 2008 look like child's play.

On a more immediate scale, that is what is happening in insurance markets right now, as homeowners along the gulf coast in Florida and in wildfire country out West are finding out that the property that they thought had a certain value is not worth so much any longer. If they can afford insurance, but it has doubled or tripled, then the present value of that heightened insurance cost over the time that they hold the property suppresses the property's value. Their property values go down. Florida led the country in property value reduction last year--I think as a result of this.

If you can't get insurance at all, then you have trouble getting a mortgage on your property, which means, if you are not selling to a hedge fund or a billionaire, you have to mark your property down; you have to sell it for cheap because there simply isn't a mortgage available for it.

Jay Powell, who is useless on climate but knows a little bit about mortgages and markets and the economy, has predicted that whole regions of the United States will shortly be unmortgageable. And, of course, when insurance gets out of control and mortgages become unavailable and property values crash, that cascades into very a significant and painful recession.

What else do we know? We know that our estimates of the worst kinds of damage that fossil fuel emissions are causing humankind have been wrong. They have been too low. I quote:

The severity and frequency of extreme events are

unprecedented and beyond model projections.

It is worse than we thought, and it is going to get worse faster than we thought. Remember that, just by its nature, monetizing the human harm caused by fossil fuel emissions disrupting our climate and natural systems is an almost disgraceful undercount of the actual damage to what one writer called our ``planetary solvency.'' As another author wrote:

While the social costs--understood as costs to people--of

untrammeled pollution are colossal, the ecological costs,

those borne by nonhuman entities, are almost too vast to

grasp.

When you monetize things, you blind yourself to those costs that are almost too vast to grasp because looking at them through the lens of money blinds you to them. There are losses, massive losses--and I quote again here--that ``appear only in [nature], almost never in a form that capital can see.''

That is the defect of trying to monetize the harm we are causing to the natural systems that sustain us. Monetization, by definition, fails to acknowledge most of the harm and the danger. It fails to acknowledge most of the harm and danger to our species, and it fails by a mile to acknowledge the harm and danger to the rest of God's creation.

Even so blinkered, the numbers are colossal, and the threat looms. All this has caused the World Economic Forum to elevate ``ecosystem collapse as a mid- to high-level global risk.'' Other studies advance the concept of planetary insolvency. Others warn about our continued fossil fuel pollution: If left unchecked, ``then mass mortality, involuntary mass migration, severe economic contraction, and conflict become more likely.'' Heading into a world of more mass mortality, more involuntary mass migration, more severe economic contraction, and more conflict, it is worth paying a little more attention.

Existing modeling practices understate economic impacts, and further, as one study pointed out, at the extreme, they ``do not recognize the risk of ruin.'' They presume that this damage will fall into a predictable center-case scenario. But there are outer-case scenarios-- nontrivial ones, real ones--that create the risk of human ruin.

Researchers have not only looked at the costs of climate change; they have also studied the economic benefits of eliminating carbon pollution. An OECD--Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development--study suggests that the most advanced economies on our planet would enjoy an increase of 60 percent in GDP by 2050--those societies, 60 percent richer by 2050--from getting climate right. And they suggest that lower-income countries would enjoy an increase of 124 percent in GDP--more than doubling their wealth--from getting climate right. So this is a two-sided equation: Continue to fail and ignore it and these warnings of economic calamity become our future. Be responsible and get it right and greater wealth and prosperity become our future.

A third of global GDP lost in this century if the climate crisis and the polluters causing it are allowed to run unchecked is a pretty dire scenario to subject the people we represent to.

Anyway, back to Mammon Hall. Here we are, where none of this discussion is taking place, where these risks and dangers are simply treated as if they don't exist because of a different monetization--the monetization of our politics defending a $700 billion annual subsidy, powered by unlimited dark money spending. The fossil fuel industry and its vast array of front groups have used the power of money in politics to strangle this discussion.

In our new American petrostate, the power of petromoney and our corrupted petropolitics have turned this supposedly greatest deliberative body into a tomb of silence about this danger, a mortuary of democracy.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I have served as my State's attorney general. I have served as a U.S. attorney for Rhode Island. I used to lecture at the police training academy in Rhode Island. I know a little bit about police work, and I know bad police work when I see it.

What we are seeing in Minnesota is a level of violence, a lack of deconfliction, and flatout unprofessionalism that is dangerous.

Trust me, it is not just me. Let's start with Minneapolis's own police chief, who described ICE's behavior this way:

It looks very untrained. It looks unprofessional. It looks

very chaotic.

He described it as ``poor tactics and really unconstitutional practices.''

He put some good context on it. He said:

Minneapolis Police Department went the entire year last

year, recovering 900 guns from the street, arresting hundreds

and hundreds of violent offenders, and we didn't shoot

anyone. This is the second American citizen that's been

killed, this is the third shooting within three weeks.

It is not just up in Minnesota. In Maine, a sheriff said that this is ``bush league policing.''

Another Minnesota sheriff said:

I am seeing . . . people being stopped, questioned and

harassed solely because of the color of their skin.

A Philadelphia sheriff said that these agents are ``made up, fake, wanna-be law enforcement.''

A chief in St. Paul described ``traffic stops'' that are ``clearly outside the bounds of what federal agents are allowed to do.''

A former police chief said:

Their tactics are unsound. I question their training, if

any.

All the way in Montana, a police chief said:

We do not do business in that manner. . . . When you see

those types of tactics being used, we don't use those.

In Texas again, the former head of the Combined Law Enforcement Association said:

Newly recruited, masked agents no doubt damage and destroy

the reputations of our proud and professional officers.

A law professor and former police officer described their conduct as ``egregiously deviating from professional norms of policing.''

So what we are hearing out of law enforcement professionals around the country is disgust with the lack of professionalism with which ICE and CBP are discharging their responsibilities.

I will close by talking about deconfliction because that is probably the most dangerous mistake that law enforcement can make. That is how you get blue-on-blue violence. That is how things get dangerously out of hand.

With respect to deconfliction, a sheriff in Maine talked about ``unmarked cars'' and masked individuals, ``men with guns in the yard'' frightening residents, and his office had no idea it was taking place. They hadn't disclosed to local police that they were going to do a weapons-out, armed raid in their jurisdiction.

In Brooklyn Park, the chief said that his own officers were being pulled over, the deconfliction was so bad. He said:

If it is happening to our officers, it pains me to think

how many of our community members are falling victim to this

every day.

In Austin, TX, the chief described how they are not warned ahead of time by ICE when they are going around. That threatens to create dangerous misunderstandings between local and Federal law enforcement Agencies.

We are short on time, so I am going to end there. But nobody in this body should believe that what is happening, what we are seeing with our own eyes on the streets of Minneapolis, is legitimate or professional law enforcement. It simply is not. It has gotten out of hand, and nobody knows it better than real cops.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, let me first thank Senator Kelly for coordinating this unfortunate commemoration of a truly disgraceful decision by the Republican appointees of the Supreme Court 16 years ago.

This decision opened the floodgates of our politics to billions and billions of dollars in dark money, and those billions and billions in dark money have distorted our political process in ways that are obvious and evident to everybody who works in this building. Some are winners from that dark money spent, and some are losers from that dark money spending, but everybody sees it.

Billionaire spending in our elections is up 160 times. That is 160 times more billionaire spending in our elections now that billionaires can pump money in by the millions. Just 100 families poured a recordbreaking $2.6 billion into Federal elections in 2024. I don't know how democracy survives in an environment in which 100 superwealthy families are dumping $2.6 billion in special interest spending, influence spending, into our elections.

This is not a hypothetical problem.

I care a lot about climate change, and I see what is happening to our coasts, particularly in Rhode Island. I was here before the Citizens United decision, when robust, meaningful, bipartisan climate legislation was constant here in the Senate. I can think of four major bipartisan bills here in the Senate. And I remember my friend John McCain running for President, carrying the Republican banner into that Presidential election with a completely solid and respectable climate platform.

Well, right after Citizens United, all of that stopped. The barrage of fossil fuel dark money into our politics killed bipartisanship on climate change instantly.

It is still a problem today. Just yesterday, I asked to move a resolution that declared that climate change is not a hoax, that climate science is sound science, and that research into the effects of climate change should continue, and Republicans objected to that simple resolution.

The fossil fuel industry bought that obstruction of climate legislation for 16 years now with money. They poured $450 million into political influence spending during the 2024 cycle, and that is only the identifiable money. Then there is the dark money, and we don't know how big that number was.

We are already seeing the climate problem cascade into a homeowners insurance crisis, cascade into a crisis of mortgage unavailability and ultimately home value losses. It is already happening in Florida, for instance. So this is real, with real consequences for regular Americans.

There was a big flaw in the Citizens United decision. The Citizens United decision hung on two assertions of fact

by that slim Republican majority that warped our politics for the billionaires. Those two false facts were that all of this new spending was going to be independent of political campaigns--that was never tested, never vetted, never litigated. That was a fact that was invented behind the curtains of the Supreme Court by those five Justices. History shows since then that had a real factfinding effort been undertaken, it would have been clear that this spending is not at all independent of political campaigns.

But here is where it is indisputable. The Court also held--those five Judges--that all of this unlimited billions that they were letting loose into our politics would be transparent, that voters would know who was behind the money. Well, in 2024, $1.9 billion in money was spent in elections that we don't know who is behind. That is a $1.9 billion factual rebuke to the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. It simply isn't true.

So that decision hangs on a false fact that was found by a Court that shouldn't even be doing factfinding and which for 16 years those five Justices have scrupulously refused to correct even as the falsity of the fact upon which their decision depended has been proven over and over and over again.

I will close by pointing to the DISCLOSE Act--a bill that can remedy this by requiring contributions over 10 grand into a political race to be disclosed by the actual donor. No more hiding behind a 501(c)(3) that converts to a 501(c)(4) that sends it to a super Pac that sends it to the election. No, you go all the way back to the actual, real donor.

We should pass that bill. Every time we brought it up, every Republican has voted to defend dark money, and every Democrat has voted to rid our politics of this corrupting scourge. Every time, every Republican, every Democrat. It is a clear divide, a clear difference between us. And the public is with us. The public is infuriated that big, secretive special interests can control our politics from behind the scenes with massive dark money contributions.

Last point. If you can make an enormous dark money contribution, you can threaten or promise to make an enormous dark money contribution, and those threats and promises will never be seen. It is the core of political corruption to make decisions based on secret threats and promises about massive political spending.

We have to get rid of this. The decision was ill-founded, factually wrong, and needs to be corrected.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am here on the floor for the 36th speech in my ``Scheme'' series, calling attention to the rightwing scheme to capture our courts and justice system.

It has morphed from stacking the Court with billionaire-selected Justices to now putting pressure on sitting judges to try to get them to do what the Trump political operation wants. It turns out that the rightwing interests don't always like it when the courts they worked so hard to capture just don't deliver.

Last week, the Judiciary Committee's Federal Courts Subcommittee held a hearing on impeaching rogue judges, it was called. My Republican colleagues argue that Federal judges should be impeached and removed from office for ruling in ways that MAGA doesn't like.

Over the past year, there is a backdrop to this, which is that Federal judges and their families--and their families--have been the victims of a campaign to smear and attack judges who rule against the Trump administration. It is pretty clear that many of these calls for impeachment are just a tactic in that intimidation campaign.

There are some tells.

Tell No. 1: It is rare for a Senator to call for a judge's impeachment because the Senator would be a juror, and it is hard to be an impartial juror later if you already called the defendant guilty.

Tell No. 2: Impeachment isn't a remedy for judges getting decisions wrong. Appeal is that remedy, as the Chief Justice has clearly stated. Impeachment is a remedy for actual misconduct. Virtually everyone has agreed on that for almost 200 years.

When Senators start saying the almost 200 years of law history is wrong, that is a pretty big hint they may have another agenda.

Tell No. 3: If Republicans were serious about rooting out judicial misconduct, we probably would have gotten answers about Clarence Thomas paying his taxes. There is evidence that Justice Thomas may have broken criminal statutes. We know he failed to report on his financial disclosures more than a quarter of a million dollars in income from a forgiven loan, not to mention the undisclosed boondoggles of private jet and yacht travel.

Well, that raises a very obvious question: If income wasn't declared on his judicial disclosure report, did he also not report it to tax authorities? I have asked that question. Thomas has refused to answer it. Whether, when, and by whom his taxes on that income were paid are all unanswered questions. None of my Republican colleagues seem interested in that misconduct even though ordinary people are regularly prosecuted for tax violations and false statements.

Tell No. 4: My Republican colleagues don't seem at all interested in how their impeachment threats egg on more nefarious and dangerous threats against judges and their families. The campaign of threats under the shadow of which the Federal judiciary is now operating is unlike any time in memory.

Also, there is significant evidence that this campaign is being orchestrated. Yet the Marshals Service and our MAGA DOJ have repeatedly refused to confirm that they would investigate for orchestration or conspiracy or enterprise. That is worth looking into. That might have been a good subject for the hearing, but that is not what it was about.

Tell No. 5: This is a big one. One of the judges my Republican colleagues want to impeach--the prime target, in my view--is Chief Judge James Boasberg of the DC District Court. Few judges have been singled out more for MAGA attacks than Chief Judge Boasberg.

What are his sins? Well, he sentenced January 6 rioters who President Trump unleashed on this building 5 years ago. MAGA world has since decided that no crimes were committed that day. That is new. At the time, Senator Cruz, who called the hearing to impeach Judge Boasberg, described those crimes as a ``violent terrorist attack on the Capitol.'' That was then.

The campaign against Chief Judge Boasberg very much involves the MAGA DOJ. What are his sins there? Well, first, FBI Director Patel tried to scapegoat Chief Judge Boasberg as the person stopping Patel from being honest with the Judiciary Committee about his grand jury testimony in the Mar-a-Lago classified records case.

I asked him what he told the grand jury. It is black letter law that a witness is allowed to disclose his own testimony to a grand jury, and Patel had testified before that grand jury. He did so only after he had asserted his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and was given immunity from prosecution.

The obvious implication is that whatever Director Patel told that grand jury put him at risk of prosecution, and we wanted to know what crime Patel thinks he might have committed. It is kind of relevant when he is now the Director of the FBI.

Director Patel lied to us in the committee that he couldn't describe his testimony based on a supposed court order from what he called the DC district chief judge.

Guess who that is. Chief Judge Boasberg. Chief Judge Boasberg later exposed that lie in a related proceeding, saying that Patel could ``divulge the contents'' of his own testimony and ``nothing was preventing him from doing so before the committee.'' So he blew up Kash Patel's lie. That meant, when Patel came back, he had to invent a new lie to avoid answering that question.

Second is another MAGA DOJ sin.

When the MAGA DOJ wanted to illegally jet people out of the country in the dark of night to an El Salvadoran prison, Chief Judge Boasberg was on duty, and he ordered that stopped. This infuriated the MAGA DOJ. Then-Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove told DOJ lawyers that if courts stopped these deportations, they would need to be ready to tell those judges ``f you,'' using the full four-letter word. Chief Judge Boasberg became the target of that Bove ``f you.''

In that matter, considerable evidence of contempt of court by DOJ officials caused Chief Judge Boasberg to notice probable cause and schedule contempt proceedings. That, I think, is the heart of this whole messy situation.

One of the subjects of that contempt proceeding was now-Judge Bove. As that contempt proceeding went forward, two Trump judges on the DC Circuit stepped in, and they blocked that contempt hearing. They blocked it using something called an administrative stay, which is the procedure that usually lasts for hours, days, or at most a week or 10 days. They blocked that contempt hearing using an administrative stay for 4 months. Guess what happened during that 4 months. Republicans hustled none other than Emil Bove onto the Third Circuit Court of Appeals with no factual record from any contempt proceeding for the committee to see. Bove's judiciary hearing

was so important to MAGA that Bondi and Blanche, her Deputy, came over to the hearing to give the eyeball to Republicans on the committee.

Later, the administrative stay was lifted, and the full DC Circuit cleared Chief Judge Boasberg to resume his contempt proceedings. Well, that decision came down on a Friday. On Monday, a handful of Republican Senators sent a letter to the DC Circuit chief judge seeking District Court Chief Judge Boasberg's suspension while Republicans thought about impeaching him. Cleared to proceed Friday; the letter for suspension drops Monday.

The letter itself makes no sense. The judiciary just doesn't suspend judges because some random Members of Congress call for impeachment. But anything goes to stop the contempt proceeding into Trump's MAGA

Mr. President, the world is undeniably round; water undeniably freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit; and equally undeniably, the climate is changing, and the changes in the climate are human- caused by fossil fuel emissions. Fossil fuel emissions are the primary cause.

These are facts, and they are demonstrated by sound science. Not only is climate change a demonstrated fact recognized by all sound science on the topic, but human beings have been aware of this scientific fact for over a century. The fossil fuel industry has worked to suppress that fact for nearly 60 years, but it is still a fact.

One hundred thirty years ago, in 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius concluded that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities contributed to a global ``greenhouse effect'' driving global warming. That was 1896.

In 1968, at a celebration of the hundred-year anniversary of the fossil fuel industry, the physicist Edward Teller warned that greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels cause a greenhouse effect and that increased use of fossil fuels would cause global warming and severe sea level rise. His audience, obviously, was fossil fuel executives at that event commemorating the 100 years of the fossil fuel industry.

This chart is of the famous Keeling Curve, which shows the dramatic acceleration in CO2 in the atmosphere beginning around 1950. You can see it start up in 1850, but it really kicked off after 1950.

This data, actually, from back here comes from scientists who collect core samples in glaciers, date the core samples, and can test the bubbles that are preserved in those ice core samples from ancient glaciers. I have actually been to the lab at Ohio State where a married couple of scientists had this immense freezer in which they had core after core after core of samples from glaciers, and very often, the glacier is now gone.

This chart shows the rise in global average temperatures from 1860 to now. While it jumps up and down a lot seasonally, the red line shows the average. As you see the CO2 curve accelerating, you see the global average temperature also accelerating.

Between 1968 and 2003, fossil fuel interests, including American Petroleum Institute, Exxon, and Shell, commissioned scientific reports on climate change to look into this, all of which--all of which-- concluded that climate change was happening, that greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion were the primary cause of climate change, and that the impacts of this change in our climate would be severe.

The fossil fuel industry suppressed their own scientists' findings for decades, but in 2015, investigative journalists found and leaked the suppressed internal memos. These companies knew what their business was doing all along, and they chose to hide the evidence of their own scientists and do nothing.

Not only did they know, but their own scientists' work was stunningly accurate.

This is a chart from Exxon pulled from a 1982 Exxon memo. This line in black is the predicted rise, back when this was prepared, before 1982, in CO2 concentrations. They start at 1960 and work their way to 2100. This is what Exxon predicted for CO2 concentration increase, and this lower line is what Exxon predicted for temperature increase driven by the CO2 concentration increase. The blue line is what actually happened with respect to CO2 concentration. The red line is what actually happened with respect to temperature.

Those Exxon scientists pretty well nailed it. I mean, that is very, very close, to have actual results track the Exxon predictions. But that didn't get out even though Exxon knew because the fossil fuel industry suppressed all of this.

Today, NASA maintains that ``there is unequivocal evidence''-- unequivocal evidence--``that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate'' and that ``[h]uman activity is the principal cause'' of this warming. That is what NASA scientists say.

NASA scientists are pretty good. We are driving remotely controlled vehicles around the surface of Mars that got sent there by NASA, driving around collecting data and sending images back to Earth from Mars. When you can pull that off, you are a pretty good scientist.

This is what NASA said: ``unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming'' and that ``[h]uman activity is the principal cause.''

The United States has its own National Climate Assessments, which Congress actually mandated by law. They are the most comprehensive source for data on climate impacts in the United States. Five have been published since they were required by Congress--2000, 2009, 2014, 2018, and 2023. A sixth National Climate Assessment was due for 2028, but in 2025, the Trump administration fired all the scientists and researchers working on that project. They even shut down the website.

Why, you may ask, is the Trump administration suppressing science, firing scientists and researchers? Why won't the Trump administration protect the American people from greenhouse gas emissions? Why are they even trying to repeal the finding that these greenhouse gases are pollutants? It is pretty simple: fossil fuel industry pressure from fossil fuel industry front groups.

This is a graph I have used repeatedly on the floor before. It is put together by a scientist, Robert Brulle, who studies the science denial operation as a social and economic phenomenon. Each of these dots represents a group that propagates the fossil fuel industry's climate denial fraud campaign. As you can see, there are a lot of them. This is a big cloud of groups

whose job is to fool the American public, propagate climate denial fraud about what is really going on, and in some cases actually work on the political side to put dark money into our politics to corrupt America's response to this known danger. This web of denial, of fraud, of corruption costs American lives, and it costs Americans money, too.

By the way, voters are paying attention. A December poll found that 65 percent of American voters understand that climate change is increasing their cost of living. And we know that to be true. As chairman of the Budget Committee, I had hearing after hearing that demonstrated that.

What we see across the country is climate change driving extreme weather, sea level rise, heat waves, catastrophic wildfires, and toxic pollution. That not only drives illness and death, but it is right now as we speak undermining the insurance, mortgage, and real estate markets in places like Florida. Those parts are already in disarray. And when you can't get insurance on your home because the climate risk is uninsurable, nobody can get a mortgage on your home either, which means that when you try to sell that home, unless you are a millionaire swapping McMansions--if you are a regular person who needs a buyer who can get a mortgage on your property to sell it, it means your property becomes hard to sell. It means its value decreases.

And, in fact, in Florida you are seeing an insurance market that is in complete collapse, propped up by taxpayers to try to hold it together. You are seeing a mortgage market that is in disarray as people find they are unable to sell their properties. And Florida led the country last year in the decline in property values. It was the top State in property value decline.

This is coming at us, and it is coming at us hard. In other speeches, I have given surveys of the multiple, multiple warnings--not from green groups, not from environmentalists, but from people who understand the financial system and see this threat that is bearing down on us.

So fossil fuel's climate denial fraud is coming at American families' finances. It is real, and it is costing them.

So I have a resolution, and the punch line is very simple: One, climate change caused by fossil fuel combustion is not a hoax. I hope we can go with NASA on that. I hope we can go with Exxon on that. I hope we can go with real, measured observation of weather on that.

Second, the reality of human-caused, greenhouse-gas-driven climate change is sound science. That is essentially undisputed in the scientific community. There is a microscopic stable of people whose science usually means they show up here to testify for the fossil fuel industry to sow doubt. But once you get beyond that tiny stable of paid climate deniers, it is 99.9 percent. I mean, science is--that is as close to unanimous as science gets on this, and I urge that this body should reflect that.

And, finally, the third, Congress should protect legislatively mandated climate research programs. Science is the headlights for society. Science predicts and tells us what is coming at us. You would be a fool to turn the headlights out on your car driving onto a dark road. We are fools if we turn off the science headlights of our government as we move into increasing climate danger.

So, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Environment and Public Works be discharged from further consideration and the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 550; further, that the resolution be agreed to, that the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, let me just remind everyone who is listening what this resolution resolved--three simple points: One, climate change is not a hoax. Two, climate science is actually sound science. And, three, we shouldn't turn off our research headlights that tell us what is coming at us.

That was all. All we had to agree on was basic facts. So when my friends on the other side can't agree on facts that are so basic as climate change is real, the science is sound, and we should keep our headlights on as we drive into this unprecedented new hazard, it is hard to see how we move on from there.

I agree very much with my friend from Kansas that energy that is affordable, reliable, and clean is our common

goal. And I will give an example because the developers of Revolution Wind have told me that our offshore wind facility is going to send power ashore at 9 cents per kilowatt hour into a grid whose average price is 18 cents. It is literally half the price to get power off Revolution Wind than it is to pay for the primarily natural-gas-fueled power that drives the New England grid. It is a 50-percent cost reduction; so it is affordable. Reliable? The wind blows like crazy out on the ocean; it is highly reliable.

In fact, Iowa, which has the biggest wind component of its electric grid, has actually treated wind as reliable baseload energy because where one turbine might not be spinning, there are plenty of others that are. So the people who plan for making sure that the lights don't go out--technical people--actually treat wind as reliable baseload energy through formulas that that ISO has developed.

And clean? Yes, it is clean. It burns no fossil fuel.

And yet the Trump administration twice has tried to shut down that project--twice. Just yesterday, they got blown up in Federal court for the second time when they tried for the second time to shut down that project. After $5 billion had been invested in it, they wanted to shut it down.

So we have the way to go forward, but the administration doesn't want to go forward. They want to sabotage a wind project that will bring power onto the grid at about half the current grid cost.

Our attorney general in those proceedings proposed an affidavit and, in his pleadings, said that Revolution Wind would save hundreds of millions of dollars for New England customers.

The Trump Cabinet is running around pretending that that is not true. They pretend that it is expensive. They lie.

They had a chance to come into court, where it is a little harder to lie, and say: Oh, no, you are wrong. Your affidavit asserting hundreds of millions of dollars in savings when this comes online is wrong, and here is our case for why 9 cents is bigger than 18 cents or 9 cents isn't real--or whatever it is that they wanted to say.

They didn't. They didn't pipe up at all because they couldn't, because it is not true, and every grid operator proves that by calling up clean energy first because it is less expensive.

Again, these are technical people. They don't have a point to make. Their system calls the least expensive energy up first, and once you get through nukes and hydro, you are into solar, wind, and battery. And it is only once you are through all of that that you then get into the fossil fuel plants, because they are more expensive, and every grid operator can prove that to you in the way they actually operate our electric grids. They call up clean energy first because it is less expensive, period.

So it is unfortunate that here we are with this web of denial controlling so much of what happens in this building--fossil fuel industry dark money slashing through this building--and we can't get agreement that climate change is not a hoax, that climate science is sound science, and that we shouldn't turn off our research headlights as we go into the future.

Before I yield, let me just point out that the University of Kansas teaches climate science. The University of Kansas teaches climate science. It even teaches about this stuff. It has a course called ``Anti-Environmentalism and Climate Change Denial in America,'' in addition to a ``Climate and Climate Change'' course, a ``Climate Change and Hazards Planning'' course, and a ``Climate Science'' course.

When your home State university is teaching the science of climate change, you ought to be able to agree that climate science is real and that climate change is not a hoax.

I yield the floor.

Might the Senator be willing to retain the floor for a moment to yield for a question?

In Rhode Island, we have a grid. ISO New England it is called. It is through that grid that electrons get from powerplant to the grid and from the grid to people's homes, and it is run as a basically common utility.

I assume Hawaii, which is geographically quite distinct, has its own grid.

So on our grid, this Revolution Wind project, as I said, is going to come on at 9 cents per kilowatt hour into a market where the prevailing rate is 18 cents. So if President Trump and his minions at Interior and EPW and Energy can stop that plant, they are making Rhode Islanders, New Englanders, buy 18-cent power instead of 9-cent power. So that raises the price for everybody.

By the way, for those of you who are listening, the ISO grid, like almost all the others--the price at any given minute on the grid for electricity is set by the highest cost plant that has to operate to meet that level of demand. So if you can get that 9-cent cost to be the highest cost, that is it for everybody, but if you got to go back to 18, that is also it for everybody. That plant just doesn't raise costs to pay itself back; it raises grid costs for every electron that is running at that same time.

So what that produces is, sticking with the 9- and 18-cent example, the 18-cent cost comes out of ratepayers' pockets. They have to pay their electric bill at 18 cents. They could have paid only 9 cents; instead, they are going to pay 18. The difference is going to go to the fossil fuel industry, to the big donors of Trump.

I call this a scam that Trump and his minions, for their big fossil fuel donors, are deliberately holding clean energy off the grid, which is cheaper, so that the grid can't go to it, has to go to higher and higher cost fossil fuel plants, so consumer costs go up. But that additional money that consumers have to pay goes to the fossil fuel industry, which gave him hundreds of millions of dollars to be elected, and this is payback for them.

Only Trump is no fool. Why pay it back himself or ask his political supporters to pay it back when he can go to electric consumers and bury it in their bill and make consumers pay to send hundreds of millions of dollars to these big donors.

So that is what we see in New England.

On the Hawaii grid, how does this work also?

Mr. President, I move to proceed to Calendar No. 290, S.J. Res. 86.

Mr. President, coal is America's dirtiest energy source. Coal pollution from powerplants befouls our air, pollutes our water, and leaches into our food. Coal pollution causes acid rain. Coal pollution causes severe health issues, even death.

Between 1990 and 2020, pollution from coal-fired powerplants killed 460,000 Americans--23,000 deaths per year on average. Despite how massive that death toll is, the trend has been in a good direction. Coal plant-caused death rates have decreased in the last 15 years as more and more coal plants have either shut down in favor of cleaner and cheaper energy sources or--often in answer to Clean Air Act programs-- adopted broadly available pollution reduction technologies which significantly reduce but do not eliminate the health-harming emissions and pollution.

One such Clean Air Act program, the Regional Haze Program, addresses haze and visibility impairment in national parks and wilderness areas. Unsurprisingly, coal plants are the Nation's most significant source of haze. The same coal pollutants that drive severe health issues and deaths nationwide, including particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and volatile organic compounds, also drive haze formation. Haze is a pollution marker. The Clean Air Act's regional haze provision requires States to reduce emissions from haze-causing sources through controls or retirements where necessary to make reasonable progress toward natural visibility conditions.

The EPA provides guidance regulations that help States develop appropriate regional haze plans which are due every 10 to 15 years. The Clean Air Act presumes that additional controls or retirements will be necessary for reasonable progress. They are thus required each time new haze plans are due unless the State can demonstrate that no action would be the reasonable course.

South Dakota took no action in its latest regional haze plan to address haze pollution over the long term. It made no updates to significantly out-of-date controls at its three major emitters--a coal plant, a cement plant, and a lime plant--and it failed to demonstrate that that inaction was reasonable. The Trump EPA approved the plan anyway.

The resulting pollution will blow downwind toward Midwestern and Eastern States. The EPA's approval puts forward a reading of the Clean Air Act that is blatantly at odds with the text, the context, and the purpose of the act, and that encourages the spread of harm to the downwind States from these polluting plants. Well, there is something we can do about it here.

In 1996, Congress enacted the Congressional Review Act to give Congress the opportunity to vote on administrative regulations. During the Biden administration, Republicans in the Senate forced 35 rollcall votes to try to kill rules that sought to protect consumers' public health and public lands--35 to 0. It was an astonishing record. Now that the Trump administration is in power, it has engaged at breakneck speed to tear down the protections of Americans' health and safety and our environment.

I know it is an uphill struggle in our polluter-funded Congress and particularly with this polluter-controlled Trump administration, but I nevertheless urge support for this commonsense Congressional Review Act resolution and hope that we can make it a brighter day as well as a clearer day for the downwind States.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am here to give, I guess, an explanation and update to my colleagues about the status of permitting reform.

I think, as you know, the chair and ranking member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the chair and ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee were working on a permitting reform bill until very recently. I have, together with Senator Heinrich, declared a pause in that permitting reform process, and I want to explain that because the progress had actually been good. We were working toward what I think could have been a very meaningful, very effectual, very bipartisan permitting reform bill. There were fairly new ideas being developed in it--like requiring front-loaded stakeholder engagement so the whole rest of the process, as it goes forward, is accelerated; disciplining the despised-by-me interagency process mechanism that excuses so much executive branch delay and indecision. I was actually pretty pleased with the way the process was going.

Off of Rhode Island, we are developing offshore wind. Our offshore wind project, Revolution Wind, had already weathered one stop work order which came out of the blue from the administration. This was a project then with about $4 billion of investment already expended and north of 80 percent complete--a lot of turbines fully complete out there.

And that order was without any lawful basis. As a result, the order was challenged in court. And in court, the Federal judge said: You can put that project back to work. The stop work order from President Trump is invalid.

The judge made that decision on September 22. The Trump administration had 60 days to appeal. It did not appeal. We got to November 21, the last appeal day, no notice of appeal was filed. The matter was settled; work could continue; and everybody was already back at work.

Thirty days later, the 22nd of December, a new stop work order was dropped by the Trump administration with no explanation.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the stop work letter of December 22 be printed in the Record at the end of my remarks.

So the first stop work attempt by the Trump administration had cited the protection of national security interests of the United States as one of its bases. And, obviously, that was deliberated in court. There were pleadings on that subject. The Trump administration lost. They did not appeal the order finding that they had lost, declaring that they had lost, so that was a settled question.

This second letter goes back and says again, national security risks. It does not identify them. In comments made on FOX News, it has been said that radar interference is the risk. Radar interference was deliberated in the initial permits. Radar interference was deliberated in the stop work order proceedings where the Trump administration lost. So what this looks like is a vindictive attack outside the law and proper due process by the Trump administration.

It is not the only mischief, and I am going to be joined here by Ranking Member Heinrich to talk about some of the more westerly tricks that the Trump administration has been up to to interfere with clean energy.

But that second stop work order kind of tore it for me--because any negotiation that we would enter into, any good bill that would result from it, would then have to be implemented by this administration; and this administration has been found to have illegally stopped work on this project, did not appeal that finding, and then came up with a new stop work order 30 days later. If that is not vindictive harassment without legal basis, I don't know what is.

It is in litigation right now. With any luck, it will be stopped again, and they can go back to work again. And--who knows--maybe there will be a third imaginary stop work order that drops. But in an environment like that, where the executive branch refuses its constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws, it doesn't make any sense for us to continue negotiations on a major bipartisan bill.

I want to say, in particular, that Chair Capito has been helpful, thoughtful, a good partner. All the Environment and Public Works Committee Republicans have been helpful and thoughtful. There is literally zero blame for this to land on the other side of the aisle in the Senate. This is entirely a legislative versus executive problem of an executive branch--a rogue executive branch--that refuses to faithfully execute the laws, notwithstanding its constitutional duty.

It is so bad that the three major miscreants in this process--Zeldin, Burgum, and Wright--have gone on a campaign of falsehood about the cost of offshore wind. Here are some of the things that they have been saying. Secretary Burgum said that ``intermittent, highly expensive wind is bad.'' ``Highly expensive,'' he called it. He then tweeted:

Offshore wind is one of the most expensive . . . schemes

ever pushed upon American taxpayers.

He said:

Offshore wind forces consumers and taxpayers to pay

CONSIDERABLY more for electricity.

He said that ``blue State offshore wind policies . . . lock in high prices.''

Zeldin criticized the economic impacts of wind.

Wright said that ``wind and solar brings us . . . less reliable energy delivery and higher electric bills.''

So all three of them have falsely asserted that offshore wind will raise electric bills.

In court proceedings, where you actually need to tell the truth--as opposed to in tweets and talk shows--the story that emerges is exactly the opposite. In the Rhode Island and Connecticut sworn complaint, we alleged that Revolution Wind, the project off our shores, ``will . . . yield substantial cost savings to the States' ratepayers.''

[S]avings to ratepayers--

the pleading continues--

are estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars over 20

years.

The September complaint brought in the Federal court by Orsted-- again, a court filing--pled that long-term contract prices ``are expected to act as a successful hedge against rising electricity rates,'' projected to save ratepayers ``hundreds of millions of dollars.''

In January--just now--in the litigation about the second stop work order, an affidavit was filed that swore that Revolution Wind would be a new source of low marginal cost power in New England; that ``once operational, Revolution Wind alone will provide hundreds of millions of dollars each year in energy bill savings to New England.''

The ISO, the grid operator, specified that during a specific cold snap, from December 24, 2017, to January 8, 2018--what is that?--2 weeks, basically--had this offshore wind been online during that period, it would have ``lowered regional electricity production costs by $80-85 million'' over those 2 weeks, ``resulting in an $11-13 per megawatt-hour reduction'' in what the grid charged ratepayers.

Revolution Wind has cleared in the New England capacity market, and if it were to fail, it would require increases in electricity rates in New England of hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

Over and over again, when people who know what they are talking about

have to say in court pleadings, where they have an obligation to tell the truth, what the cost effect of Revolution Wind will be, they talk about cost savings of hundreds of millions of dollars. And that is confirmed across the country by grid operators. You can go to any grid, and you can see pretty much the same thing. They call up power units by cost. They call up the least expensive power units first, for obvious reasons, and wind and solar tend to be the low marginal cost units. They are the ones that are called up first.

So the allegations made in court of savings to ratepayers are backstopped by the actual economic practice of our electric grids.

So back to Zeldin, Burgum, and Wright. If they are conspicuously and consistently failing to tell the truth about savings, specifically misleading the public, telling them fossil fuel is cheaper when it isn't, what does that tell you about their motives and their bias and inability to faithfully execute the laws?

It tells me that there is really no point in passing a bipartisan bill, which would be a really good one, because we wouldn't get the benefit of the bill. They would just continue with illegal acts and false statements--anything to help fossil fuel.

It is not just Revolution Wind. Dominion Wind is set to lower consumer power prices in Virginia, once it is operational, and it is, too, now under a stop work order.

I want to resume. I want to get back to work. I want to do this permitting reform bill. In order to get there, I am going to need some help. The artificial intelligence folks, the crypto folks, the data system folks who need massive amounts of electrons, you all need to start showing up and letting people know that you actually want permitting reform, and you actually want an administrative and regulatory process in which electrons are treated fairly, irrespective of source, so you can get the power that you need. That is where we need to go.

If you want permitting reform, don't come to me. I am not the problem. Don't come to Democrats in the Senate. We are eager to do permitting reform. Don't bother Chairman Capito and the Republicans. They are ready to go too. Leader Thune has been very supportive of our effort.

The problem isn't in the Senate. The problem is in the White House and in Environment and Public Works, Energy, and Interior. They are simply not executing the laws fairly, and the bias and injustice and illegality they have already demonstrated have got to stop if we are going to go forward.

It ain't just this bill that has to come through EPW and go through the Congress. There is also a highway bill coming. There is a water resources bill for the Army Corps bill. Are we really going to have to stop work on those big bipartisan bills because we can't trust the Trump administration to implement them according to law?

Something has to give here, and nobody has done anything wrong in this building. All of the problems are in illegal, false, unfair, and biased enforcement of what should be faithful execution of the laws. That is where we are.

Mr. President, today is a difficult day particularly for our Capitol Police officers. This is the fifth anniversary of the day when a violent mob attacked this building and attacked them. It did a lot of injury and a lot of harm to Capitol Police officers--in some cases, as they say in the law, death resulting. Today, pardoned criminals who participated in that riot are on the streets of Washington, and if they come back to this Capitol, our police officers are going to have to treat them professionally.

And what support are they getting from all of us? In a better world, this would be a bipartisan showing of respect and gratitude for the police officers who suffered and fought that day to protect this building and an expression of bipartisan gratitude. But that is not where we are as a country right now.

One of the symptoms of Trumpism--frankly, of authoritarianism generally--is the obligation to lie. You are not on the team, you are not in the club, you are not part of the movement if you are not willing to lie for it. So you are constantly tested with the obligation to lie--little ones and then big ones. It tests the loyalty and gradually erodes personal virtue of the person who is increasingly obliged to lie.

So, instead of this being a bipartisan expression of gratitude and appreciation, our colleagues on the other side of the aisle seem to be away today, and it is left to us to remember and honor the brave law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol that day.

The MAGA world has decided that no crimes were committed that day. Well, that is new.

At the time, Senator Ted Cruz described those crimes as a ``violent terrorist attack on the Capitol.''

At the time, Senator John Cornyn said, ``Those who planned & participated in the violence that day should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.''

At that time, Senator Josh Hawley said that ``those who attacked police and broke the law must be prosecuted.''

Those are only a few of the expressions that we heard from our Republican colleagues at the time.

Republican colleagues also once denounced pardoning rioters, particularly violent rioters.

Vice President Vance and the President of the Senate said:

If you committed violence on [January 6], obviously, you

shouldn't be pardoned.

Secretary Kristi Noem said:

We can't have a blanket approach. I would say each one of

those cases needs to be looked at specifically.

Senator Hawley again:

I'm against it for people who assaulted cops, threw stuff

at cops, broke down doors, broke windows.

Well, Trump came in, and he issued that blanket pardon virtually right away--nearly 1,600 rioters--and he commuted the sentence of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia. These were not great people. At least 33 of them have already been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for other crimes since that day. Four pardoned insurrectionists have already allegedly reoffended since receiving their pardons. One insurrectionist was charged with a felony for threatening to murder the House minority leader.

Now some of them are so emboldened that they are demanding a reward for having been prosecuted for the crimes that they committed that day and convicted in a court of law. That is an injury to them, in their view.

So, today, Senator Padilla and I have introduced two bills to make clear that no one who stormed the Capitol should get any kind of payment, even from this MAGA Department of Justice--no taxpayer-funded cash giveaways, which, by the way, echoes that we should not be giving taxpayer-funded cash giveaways to our colleagues because their names came up in the investigation of the crimes of that day because they were called by the instigators of the crimes of that day.

So I urge my colleagues to support these bills. Let us not reward the violence that was done that day. Too many are trying to turn that day into a payday for themselves. It is beneath us, and I urge support for those two pieces of legislation.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am honored to join our senior Senator as he calls for a moment of silence to share in the sorrow of the families who lost their young college student children to this tragedy.

I would only ask that all of us, including anyone listening, just hold off and give these families a little bit of grace and peace as they deal with this loss. They were expecting to see these kids for the Christmas holidays. There are other kids who are in the hospital--in some cases, in fairly critical condition. Those families are not going to be spending Christmas around the tree at home; they are going to be spending Christmas in a State away from home where their children are in a hospital room, trying to be there for them.

So there is a good deal of suffering and a good deal of sorrow. I think it is important that people not add to that with a lot of unfounded opinion and speculation about what took place. Let the investigation proceed. We will know what we need to know in due time. In the meantime, please give these families grace as they go through their grief.

I yield the floor.