Floor Statements

Madam President, I rise today to honor an important advocate for environmental preservation and addressing climate change, Greg Gerritt. Mr. Gerritt has worked for the past 20 years for the Environmental Council of Rhode Island, retiring in January of this year. He served as the coordinator for the Compost Initiative, which earned a 2012 EPA Region 1 Merit Award, and founded the Rhode Island Compost Conference. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency awarded him an Environmental Merit for Lifetime Achievement.

Mr. Gerritt grew up in New York City before earning a bachelor's degree in anthropology from University of Maine. He organized his high school's first Earth Day and has since continuously engaged across communities to support a sustainable green economy in Rhode Island. He founded and served on the board of the Environmental Justice League of Rhode Island, began the Buy Nothing Day Winter Coat Exchange, which has occurred on the day after Thanksgiving for over 20 years, and ran for mayor of Providence as a Green Party candidate. Mr. Gerritt also founded and is the watershed steward for Friends of the Moshassuck, an organization dedicated to preservation, restoration, and revitalization of the Moshassuck River. He created a wetland habitat by restoring a small stormwater drain in the North Burial Ground in Providence and, for over a decade, has produced about 1,500 videos documenting wildlife in this urban landscape and at locations around the Seekonk River.

I am pleased to recognize Mr. Gerritt's accomplishments in environmental advocacy, justice, and preservation of natural resources and extend my appreciation for his work for our State and environment.

Madam President, I rise today for my 286th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, in this case to report back from the United Nations' 27th Conference of the Parties, or COP, the annual meeting where the nations of the world work to combat climate change. The Paris Agreement, for instance, sprang from the COP. Senators Cardin, Markey, and I went to this year's COP in Egypt. Speaker Pelosi led a separate House delegation, and President Biden traveled there with a large executive branch delegation to make some important announcements.

Our Senate delegation met with government officials from many other countries, with American officials, with UN leaders, and with dozens of business leaders, labor leaders, environmental groups, environmental justice advocates, and oceans advocates.

We consistently heard that the work we accomplished right here in this Chamber through the Inflation Reduction Act and by ratifying the Kigali Amendment brought our country back into global leadership on climate. But we know that our work to tackle climate change is not over--not by a long shot.

Emissions from fossil fuel are still growing. 2022 fossil fuel emissions will blow right past previous record highs. Things are not getting better yet; they are getting worse. We need additional ambitious climate policies, both at home and abroad, to reduce those emissions.

And because climate disasters so often fall upon the most vulnerable, particularly in developing nations, we need the wealthier nations and the ultrawealthy corporations responsible for the lion's share of climate upheaval to step up to finance the clean energy transition for those countries.

So, what are the things the United States and other nations should do? At the COP, I spoke a lot about the upcoming European Union carbon border adjustment mechanism, or CBAM. The EU already applies a carbon price to energy-intensive manufactured goods. That is one of the main policies that is driving decarbonization in Europe, and they will start, later this decade, imposing a carbon tariff on goods from countries that don't impose a comparable carbon price on those imported goods.

My message to the COP: The EU CBAM is good policy. It creates an incentive for lower carbon manufacturing, no matter where the goods are produced. The United States should not--I repeat--the United States should not complain about the EU CBAM. Our manufacturers are among the least carbon intensive in the world, and they will pay far lower carbon tariffs than, for instance, Chinese manufacturers. That makes American companies more globally competitive and will move jobs and manufacturing our way to our shores.

So instead of complaining, we should match the EU CBAM or beat it with our own carbon border adjustment plan. And, by the way, we should urge the British and the Canadians and the Japanese and the Australians, anyone else interested in lowering emissions, to do the same. We should all pull together.

The beauty of a well-designed carbon border adjustment is that it prevents cheating by polluters to cross borders and pollute elsewhere for free.

A carbon border adjustment regime will drive decarbonization everywhere--in China, India, and around the world. If their manufacturers want to compete, they will have to reduce their emissions. So, yes, let's meet or beat the EU CBAM, not fear it or resist it.

By the way, when we heard quibbles about our IRA incentives for clean energy and electric vehicles and low carbon manufacturing being unfair to our foreign trading partners, my response was the same: Meet us or beat us. Pass incentives as good as ours or better. Let our IRA be an example that can be replicated around the world. As I mentioned earlier, President Biden came to the COP with ambitious proposals. He unveiled a new EPA proposal to reduce methane emissions from oil and gas production and transport by almost 90 percent.

This is--as President Biden might say--a ``BFD'' as methane emissions are responsible for about 25 percent of observed warming. The EPA proposal is a huge step in the right direction. It would create a new process for third-party monitoring of methane emissions. There are already a number of private and public entities that monitor methane emissions around the world using satellites, aircraft, drones. Utilize this data to quickly identify and eliminate large sources of methane emissions.

We should stand up an enforcement task force to make sure leakers promptly face the best enforcement methods to stop their leaks. Combined with my methane fee, which was adopted into the IRA as the Methane Emission Reduction Program, we now have the platform for the EPA, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Interior, and interested State, local, and tribal authorities to, as they would say in the military, find, fix, and finish methane leak sources.

Given that methane emissions are a global problem, particularly in fossil fuel-producing countries like Russia, I also urged the U.S. and foreign officials with whom we met to stand up an international task force to identify overseas methane emissions and sanction parties, companies, and countries that don't eliminate them.

Buried within EPA's methane proposal is another important announcement, an updated social cost of carbon, pegged at $120 per ton, more than double the Obama-era estimate. This too is a ``BFD.'' But only if the Office of Management and Budget follows up and spreads its use beyond just the EPA and this regulation into rulemaking, procurement, grantmaking, investment decisions, leasing, trade policy, just to name a few. It would be transformative; and given the scale and scope of the Federal Government, it would have the power to move markets.

One note of warning, our success in the United States, as well as in countries around the world, will, in significant ways, be determined by the behavior of big corporations.

Corporate America has built the biggest political influence operation the world has ever seen. It surrounds this building, surrounds us here in Congress. Lobbyists, dark money, trade associations, political contributions, phony think tanks--it is an awesome apparatus, and it is one that corporate America has yet to switch on for climate legislation. They either sit out there doing nothing or they actually oppose it.

Despite often admirable corporate work to decarbonize their own operations and even their supply chains, much of the corporate political apparatus is actually actively hostile to real climate legislation. And on top of that, of course, is the fossil fuel industry's inveterate, ceaseless obstruction machine.

So I was pleased to see the United Nations Secretary General announce new criteria for assessing corporate climate pledges--criteria that will include their lobbying and advocacy behavior. The report states:

[Companies] must align their external policy and engagement

efforts, including membership in trade associations, to the

goal of

reducing global emissions by at least 50% by 2030 and

reaching net zero by 2050. This means lobbying for positive

climate action and not lobbying against it. [Companies]

should publicly disclose their trade association

affiliations. They should encourage their associations to

advocate for positive climate action and have an escalation

strategy if they do not, including the option of leaving the

association if the necessary changes are not made.

I could not agree more. At COP, I repeatedly made the argument that companies should actually be required to file audited climate political footprint statements. Too many companies have been two-faced for too long. That climate political footprint statement should be the ticket that admits companies to COP and to other environmental gatherings.

But instead of corporate transparency about their political activities, more than 600 fossil fuel lobbyists swarmed this COP. Coca- Cola, the world's largest plastics polluter, was a leading sponsor. That ``worst climate obstructor''--the U.S. Chamber of Commerce--hosted the big dinner and put on a speech by a fossil fuel services company president. It is hard for people around the world to take COPs seriously when the fossil fuel industry and other large polluters have such a prominent presence at the COP and they haven't had to even disclose their political efforts to undermine that very COP.

Instead of welcoming the big polluters to COPs, we should hold them accountable for the damages their pollution is causing. A windfall profits clawback on global excess fuel profits, just like the conservative Tories did in the UK, could help fund remediation, transition, and adaptation efforts in developing countries. It is a commonsense principle that polluters should pay for the harm that they cause.

At the end, I left this COP with a sense of pride that the Senate and the U.S. Government are finally getting going on climate, but also a sense of the awesome difficulty of the task ahead to bend that global emissions curve, to hit nature's emissions reduction targets.

Our work is not close to done. In fact, it has only just begun. After decades of delay, deliberately caused by the fossil fuel industry's multibillion-dollar campaign of denial and obstruction, we are now in a marathon that we will have to run as a sprint. But this past year proved that we are finally up and running, and the announcements at COP will pick up our laggard pace. Our joints may be stiff from disuse, our breathing may be ragged from years of lassitude on the couch, but we have at last begun to run. And, boy, does it feel good. We will only speed up and do better. Powered by the energy and enthusiasm of legions of young voters, we are, I dare to say, at last coming awake.

I will close with this last slide which shows how important it is to see this as a global problem.

Those are emissions from China, from the United States, from India, and from the EU. When you add them up, you see the global figure. If we address each of these or just our own, it does not help enough to avoid the consequences of that continuing upward emissions trajectory.

So that is where an internal social cost of carbon that cuts across every aspect of government, buttressed by a carbon border adjustment of the world's major economies--that is what can drive that line down and put us on a pathway to safety.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I understand that Senator Thune is next in order on the floor, but not seeing him on the floor, I thought I would take the time before he arrives to echo the terrific remarks of my Judiciary chairman, Dick Durbin.

As I think people know, a lot of money has been spent in this effort to control the Court by special interests. Indeed, the last count is that it cost $580 million in dark money to achieve that purpose. I don't know anybody who spends nearly $600 million--more than half a billion dollars--without having a purpose in mind. And when you see the undoing of women's right to determine their own reproductive choice, when you see new weaponry rolled out against pollution regulations, when you see 100-year-old gun laws being taken down, when you see the agenda of the big-money rightwing being implemented by the Court, it begins to look like, in fact, they got their money's worth, and they didn't mind spending big.

One of the ways they did this was to make sure that all of the Trump selections of nominees went through the Federalist Society. Never in our history has that happened, with a private organization stepping in and deciding who would be on the Supreme Court.

I see that Senator Thune has arrived. The floor is his. I will interrupt my remarks because I was just filling time.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the place where I left off, when Senator Thune came to the floor, was discussing the extent to which huge floods of dark money had taken control of our Supreme Court. I will just dig into that a little bit further while we have a moment, because one of the vehicles for this effort was the Federalist Society.

It is extremely unusual in any modern democracy that the selection of who got onto the Supreme Court would be parceled out to a private organization. It is even more peculiar when that private organization has a very distinct political and ideological bent, and it is worse still when that private organization, while acting as the gatekeeper to Supreme Court appointments, was receiving massive dark money infusions.

Before it got that role, the Federalist Society did not get loads of dark money. Back in 2002, their anonymous donations summed to a grand total of $5,000. But once it became clear that they were the gatekeeper to the Supreme Court for the Republican Party, by 2019, they were up to $7 million pouring in in dark money.

We don't know how those names were picked for Donald Trump's Federalist Society list. There was no public process. There was no disclosure. There was some back room someplace where those lists were assembled. And who got a voice controlling who got on that list, I suspect, has a lot to do with that $7 million.

Again, when you are spending $7 million, you are not kidding around. You want results, and they have got them.

The other piece of the pie here is one of Leonard Leo's little nodes of phony front groups funded by dark money. He has got an 85 Fund and a Concord Fund, a 501(c)(3) and a 501(c)(4). That is the state of the art in dark money political manipulation: You do a 501(c)3. You do a 501(c)(4). You put them in the same office with the same staff, with the same oversight and the same funders, but you pretend that they are different. Then, to make it even more complicated, you file under Virginia corporate law fictitious names--that is what it is actually called under Virginia corporate law--fictitious names for other front groups. So in this dark money Court capture machine, even the front groups have front groups.

One of them is right here. It is called the Judicial Crisis Network. The Judicial Crisis Network was the one that took in the dark money from anonymous big donors to push out the television ads to capture the Court: ads for Gorsuch, ads for Kavanaugh, and ads for Barrett. They put out some pretty good money to do that. For Gorsuch, they spent $21 million. For Kavanaugh, they spent $17 million. For Barrett, as far as we know so far, they spent $14 million. These came in not from grassroots donations. The checks were as big as $15 million. The checks were as big as $17 million. And if the same person was writing those $15 million and $17 million checks, our count is that it is $60 million or more. And if one person has paid $60 million or more to influence who gets on the Supreme Court and we don't know what business they have before the Court, that is an open avenue and prescription for corruption.

Right now, after all that money got spent by the Judicial Crisis Network to push all those rightwing FedSoc Justices onto the Court, the Honest Elections Project, another fictitious-name leg of this dark money critter, is in the Supreme Court right now pushing the argument developed by John Eastman--the Big Lie argument that in Georgia and other States the State legislature should be able to throw out the outcome of a Federal election and replace the winner of it with the person they want.

The theory is so extreme that it even posits that the State court system can't control the State legislature. The principle of judicial review of legislative acts is undone by this. It is wildly extreme.

But there is the Honest Elections Project--so-called--showing up in Court as an amicus, pushing the Big Lie theory to the very judges who the Judicial Crisis Network paid to get on the Court.

And guess what. Do you think they disclosed to anybody that that was the connection? No, I have got to come to the floor of the Senate to point that out because the Supreme Court, which is behind so much of this--the unlimited money, the failure to enforce the transparency requirement, the gobs of dark money that are going through--also won't enforce the rule that requires amicus curiae, the people who file the briefs, to tell the Court and the other parties who is really behind them. So they are getting away with it from the judges who got put on the Court.

This whole dark money problem goes well beyond just dirty dark money flooding into our elections. It goes beyond the cause of the slime of the dirty, noxious TV ads that come pouring out of our television screens, pouring through our devices with a phony-baloney name behind the advertisement.

The good Senator is from New Jersey. Perhaps it could be ``New Jerseyans for Peace and Puppies and Prosperity.''

Anybody watching the ad knows that that is not a real organization. And what does it tell you, as a citizen, when slimily, lying, dirty smear ads are being pushed through to you, through your TV screen, through your device by a group that you know is a phony? How do you have confidence in that?

I will close because Senator Hirono is here, and I want to have her speak. But I will say that I am not alone in thinking that requiring people to stand up and identify who they are when they are trying to influence our politics is a distinctly American quality.

In fact, I quote:

Requiring people to stand up in public for their political

acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is

doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society

which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously . .

. and even exercises the direct democracy of initiative and

referendum hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the

accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the Home

of the Brave.

The author of that: Justice Antonin Scalia.

I will continue later, but I want to defer to the busy schedule of my friend Senator Hirono.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Hawaii, who has been such an ardent and effective ally in this fight, for coming to the floor today and for all of our work in the Judiciary Committee and also through briefs that we file in the Supreme Court trying to wake up the Court to what is happening around them.

I would add an additional point to my description of this little node of the dark money apparatus that has controlled the makeup of the Supreme Court and works very hard to control the decisions of the Supreme Court--and too often does--because you have heard Senator Durbin and others speak on the floor today about the biggest dark money contribution ever made, $1.6 billion, given to an organization run by this same individual.

And you see it going in but only because some whistleblower told the press what had happened. But even knowing that $1.6 billion went in, you don't know where it goes next because this complicated apparatus and others like it enable the money to be sluiced through underground, subterranean, clandestine channels and pop out in political races through unknown, phony front groups with preposterously sweet names.

And nobody who is a citizen is allowed to understand what is happening. You can bet the word gets to the candidate about who is behind ``New Jerseyans for Peace and Puppies and Prosperity,'' and you can bet the big donors know. And if it is a House race, you can bet the House leaders know; and if it is a Senate race, you can bet the Senate leaders know. And you can bet that gives immense clout at stopping things in this building.

And, sure enough, that $1.6 billion went into Marble Freedom Trust. And one of the first things it did was give money to the Concord Fund, one of the other Leonard Leo groups. You will recognize that as this chart behind me, and you add to it the Marble Freedom Trust that was the vehicle into which the $1.6 billion got dumped, and then--zip--here came money straight to the Concord Fund, among other uses of it. So this thing is sort of a creature of multiple fronts.

And I was struck today when I read a news article about the resignation in Iraq of the finance minister, who is largely regarded as being the voice of integrity and decency and honesty in that government. And he quit, and he said one of the reasons was that he felt that there was around him a ``vast octopus of corruption and deceit.''

This is just one piece of a vast octopus of corruption and deceit whose target is the American people and whose desire is to control government from behind the scenes without even showing up and showing who they are. If you want to see some of this mischief in action and in relation to what I have said about how this captured Court, with its FedSoc Justices, has delivered for the big-donor interests, the biggest thing that they have done so far in terms of affecting the trajectory of honesty and decency and public accountability in this country has been in a case called Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta.

What did the judges who dark money put onto the Court that dark money built do? They built a brandnew constitutional right to dark money-- unprecedented. And when they did it, when the case came up to them-- interestingly, as part of this octopus of deceit are innumerable front groups that file amicus briefs.

I talked about how they don't disclose, and the Court lets them get away with it. Let me give you an idea of the number at the certiorari stage, which, for those not familiar with Supreme Court practice, is the point where the Supreme Court decides whether or not they will take up the case. And then there is the merits decision later on, on how they decide the case. But on the question of whether they take up the case, we counted about 50--5-0, 50--of these phony, dark money-funded front groups coming in and saying: You have got to take up this case. You have got to take up this case. You have got to take up this case.

It was signaling; it was flares; it was semaphore telling FedSoc Justices: We put you there. This is what we want you to do.

So let's take a quick look at a little bit about the Americans for Prosperity Foundation because it is related--remember what I said about 501(c)(3)s and 501(c)(4)s twinning together and having basic identity? Well, the Americans for Prosperity Foundation is the 501(c)(3) twin to a 501(c)(4) called Americans for Prosperity.

And guess what Americans for Prosperity is? It is the biggest battleship in the Koch brothers' political influence operation. It is the mother ship. It is as political as you get. It goes directly into elections and spends dark money.

And here are the big differences between Americans for Prosperity and the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. Well, the CEO and director of Americans for Prosperity is, amazingly enough, the CEO and director of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. And the secretary of the Americans for Prosperity group happens also to be the corporate secretary of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. How about that? Oh, here is a big difference. The senior vice president of grassroots operations for Americans for Prosperity is the senior vice president of state operations for Americans for Prosperity Foundation. There is a difference. The treasurer and vice president of Americans for Prosperity is the same as the treasurer and vice president of finance for the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, and the director of Americans for Prosperity is the chair of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation.

There is a thing in law called piercing the corporate veil. This is a corporate veil you could pierce with a banana. This is the kind of phony fun and games that dark money allows to intrude into our democracy. And in this

terrible death loop, dark money puts Justices on the Supreme Court who get told by dark money amici what they want, in flotillas of 50, and then deliver for dark money to a nominal plaintiff who is the indistinguishable twin of the Koch brothers' political battleship, letting that money loose into our politics with now constitutional imprimatur.

And they show up in droves. Here is just one case: Seila Law. This was the one about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. You know the dark money people hate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In fact, they hate regulation. That is why they are trying to undo American government as best they can.

So here are some of the amici that showed up in Seila Law. I actually put this in my brief to the Supreme Court in that case as an appendix so they could see what was going on around them. A lot of good it did. So here are some of the front groups, all of whom take dark money, and here are some of the dark money sources we were able to trace them having taken: Donors Trust, widely described as the ATM of the far right. It has no purpose. Donors Trust doesn't make a product. You can't buy a Donors Trust car or bicycle or tire or pedal. It doesn't provide services. You can't go to Donors Trust and get your taxes done. You can't go to Donors Trust and get your shoes polished.

It does one thing and one thing only: It takes money in; it scrubs off the identity of the person who gave it the money; and then it sends the money where that person wants, as Donors Trust. That is it. It is an identity laundering machine for the dark money operation that we have running for this vast octopus of deceit.

And here are other foundations: Bradley, Scaife, Searle. Look at how much of this is in common. That was not described to the Court.

My time is running out. I will say two things as I go. One is, until the Supreme Court opened the floodgates of unlimited money, Republicans wanted disclosure. Republicans wanted disclosure. Mitch McConnell, the leader:

We need to have real disclosure. Why would a little

disclosure be better than a lot of disclosure?

He was in favor of a lot of disclosure on ``Meet the Press.''

``I think disclosure is the best disinfectant,'' he wrote.

We could do disclosure more frequently. I think disclosure

is the best disinfectant.

Mitch McConnell.

But then along came the Supreme Court in 2010; they opened the floodgates of unlimited money. And particularly the fossil fuel industry, which wanted to stop climate legislation, knew that if it showed up as Exxon, as Marathon, as Chevron, as Shell, the public would get the joke; their unlimited money would be useless because everybody would see the self-interest and the corruption behind all of that. So they immediately went to work through phony front groups, 501(c)(4)s, Donors Trust, shell corporations.

And the Supreme Court let them do it despite the fact that, 8 to 1, the Supreme Court in Citizens United has said:

Without transparency, this unlimited money is corrupting.

Without transparency, this unlimited money is corrupting.

Despite having said that, for 12 years, they have done nothing but let the dark money flow--over a billion dollars now into any single election.

It is intensely frustrating to see our country head down this filthy road, where huge special interests, defined by just a few characteristics--one, they have unlimited money to spend; two, they can win in politics by spending it; and, three, they want to hide--is that group of people the ones we want controlling our country? I don't think so. How about regular voters? How about regular people? How about farmers and doctors and business owners, nurses? No.

I know the leader wants to come to the floor, and I will yield as soon as he comes to the floor. Before he does, I want to thank him for bringing this measure here, for the strength of his statements, for the strength of his commitment, for his help to organize all of this. This began originally as his bill years ago, after Citizens United. So I want to yield to him when he gets here.

But I want to go back to this departure of Minister Allawi, who talks about the Iraqi state having become degraded and become a play thing of special interests. That is the choice we face in this vote: Is this going to be America the beautiful or is this going to be America the degraded placing of special interests? This vote will determine it.

I yield to the leader for his remarks.

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

Mr. President, I wanted to come to the floor and kick off the process that will culminate tomorrow with our vote on the DISCLOSE Act.

The DISCLOSE Act will get rid of dark money in our politics. President Biden gave a good speech about it yesterday to help stir interests and progress in this area.

There are problems with dark money in and of itself. It contributes to what has been called the tsunami of slime in our politics, because when the slimy ad has a fake, phony front group's name on it and no actual real entity or company or association is accountable for that, well, then you can lie to your heart's content, you can smear to your heart's content, and there is no accountability.

So there are reasons for getting dark money out of our elections on their own: just giving disproportionate power to special interests, sliming up our elections, allowing a lot of bad actors powers that they don't deserve, and putting enormous power in the hands of people who are, A, politically active enough to be willing to spend that kind of money and have a motive in legislative outcomes to spend that kind of money that regular citizens can't begin to match.

But there is a lot more to it than that. There is a lot more to it than that, because, like corruption, dark money is used to achieve other goals. And those other goals have had very important policy effects in our country.

Climate change we are dealing with daily now in floods, in fires, in droughts, in species moving about--particularly in Rhode Island, our ocean fisheries are moving about. The oceans are acidifying. We are putting essential operating systems of our planet in danger and onto a course that mankind has never seen before in the entire history of humankind.

When I got here in 2007, this was addressed as a bipartisan problem. There were three different bipartisan Senate bills, all of which were very consequential. It would have made a huge difference. Senator McCain ran for President carrying the Republican Party banner with a significant and serious climate platform, and it looked like democracy was responding to this problem in a responsible way. All of that activity came to an instant shuttering halt in January of 2010.

What happened in January of 2010? What happened in January of 2010 was that the U.S. Supreme Court let loose one of the worst decisions it has ever rendered--the Citizens United decision--and that decision allowed unlimited money to flow into politics.

Of course, if you can spend unlimited money in politics, you suddenly have an unprecedented motive to hide it. If the most you can give is $3,500 or $5,000 from your PAC, it is not worth putting a lot of effort into hiding that; plus, nobody really cares. But if you can give $35 million, plus, let's say you are a polluting fossil fuel company and you don't want people to know that, now it is worth putting quite a lot of money into the apparatus of hiding who you are. It is an expensive apparatus. It is a real apparatus. Senators have gone to the floor before to describe it. We have used this graphic.

This is the web of climate denial that has been chronicled by scientists who study as a phenomenon climate denial and how the money flies around

through these different groups and how they use it to hide what they are doing on climate.

Well, once that got launched, that was the end of bipartisanship on climate. We lost a decade. I think history will show that the lost decade from January 2010 until now is one that these pages and children across the country will pay a very steep price for.

Why would they be willing to do it? Well, the fossil fuel industry has an annual subsidy of $660 billion, basically, from being allowed to pollute for free--$660 billion.

If you are protecting a $660 billion subsidy, how much would you be willing to spend any given year to protect it? If you spent $6.6 billion a year, you would still be earning 100 times your investment. Sure enough, we have seen dark money explode into expenditures by the billion. And as that happened, climate progress ended.

Look at voter suppression. Across the country, there was a wave of Republican State legislatures passing voter suppression laws. Was it an amazing coincidence that they all happened to do that at the same time? Evidently not, because there is actually a tape from Heritage Action-- one of the dark money groups behind those voter suppression campaigns-- where the person briefing the big donors admitted this:

We're working with these state legislators . . . in some

cases we actually draft [the bills] for them or we have a

sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it

has that grassroots, you know, from-the-bottom-up type of

vibe.

The whole thing was a dark money fake fed into these State legislatures by dark money and no small amount.

This is a $24 million investment--

The speaker said--

We . . . started . . . right after the November election. .

. . we've driven hundreds of 1000s of calls, emails, placed

letters to the editor, hosted events, and run television and

digital ads.

So voter suppression is an artifact of dark money.

And, last, Court capture. I have got a series of speeches that I have given so far--18 of them. When I do, I put my ``Scheme'' poster up because this was a scheme; indeed, a scheme and a half.

At this point, what we know is that at least $580 million was spent on phony front groups using dark money out to capture the Court. We don't know how much additionally went into political coffers to reward people for their Court-packing enterprise or to threaten to punish people if they didn't go along with the Court-packing enterprise, but it was quite a show.

This is just one little node of that $580 million Court capture enterprise. It shows two groups, which is the current, sort of, best practices--worst practices, better to say--in political influence. You have a 501(c)3 and a 501(c)4 side by side, same location, same staff, indistinguishable in any real sense. And then in this case, they pushed what they called fictitious names so that their phony front groups had phony front groups that had names like Judicial Education Project and Honest Elections Project Action. But here is one that was somewhat significant, the Judicial Crisis Network, because Judicial Crisis Network took $15 million checks, $17 million checks and turned that money to TV ads to stop the confirmation of Justice Garland and to push through the confirmation of Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. So dark money flows into all these other areas.

If you like climate denial, you love dark money. If you like voters having their votes suppressed by partisan legislators, you love dark money. And if you like a captured Court that dances to the tune of the dark money donors who stocked it, you love dark money. And that is before we even get to its pernicious, insidious, clandestine effect in our elections.

With that, I see that my time has expired and that Senator Grassley is here for his time, so I yield the floor to my friend Senator Grassley.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that with respect to the resolution of ratification, the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

Mr. President, I also ask unanimous consent that the Secretary of the Senate be authorized to make grammatical, technical changes to the resolution of ratification with respect to Treaty Document No. 117-1 in order to reflect the addition of material.

Mr. President, I am here today as we close in on the vote on the DISCLOSE Act scheduled for tomorrow to urge my colleagues to vote yes on that measure. I have introduced the DISCLOSE Act in every Congress since Leader Schumer first unveiled it in 2010 on the heels of the wretched Citizens United decision.

Every Congress, just about every time I have set foot in Washington, I have sounded the alarm on the ever-growing tsunami of slime that Citizens United unleashed into our elections. I rise once more today to urge this Chamber to end the flood of dark money drowning our democracy.

This is not inevitable. As late as 2006, the amount of dark money sloshing around in our elections was only $5 million. In 2020, it had crossed the billion-dollar threshold. Big special interests don't spend a billion dollars without expecting return on investment, and that has damaged our democracy.

Voting to clean up that mess presents clear choices: whether or not billionaires and big corporations can purchase influence in secret, whether or not Americans deserve to know who is buying that influence, whether or not corruption has a place in our American democracy.

Twelve years after Citizens United, the evidence is in. Dark money powers up corporations and megadonors to pump billions into phony front groups. Those groups, often with soothing names like People for Puppies and Prosperity, then spew bile and slime into our elections. We often can't know exactly who paid for that bile and slime, but when corporations and the ultrarich keep getting what they want from a dark money-funded Congress, well, you see that over and over and over again; and Americans' suspicions grow. Their gut tells them the corporations and billionaires are behind the phony ads in an effort to rig our political system.

And Americans' instincts are right. Academic studies show that economic elites and business interests command huge influence in government policy while regular people have statistically little or none. Studies also show that politicians elected to Federal office with the support of dark money are more likely to support legislation aligned with big corporate interests. Regardless of what the American people want, the big donor interests win time after time.

Dark money isn't limited to elections either. I have come to the floor now 18 times to expose a decades-long, rightwing scheme to capture the Federal judiciary and its crown jewel, our Supreme Court. This scheme included a $580 million secretive campaign of dark money and phony front groups to pack the courts with judges selected to green-light donor-friendly policies, running multimillion-dollar ad campaigns to keep the confirmations of those judges and Justices on track.

Now, the result is the Court that dark money built is delivering big for its donor puppeteers. In a matter of days, the FedSoc Six on the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, manufactured new polluter- friendly legal doctrines, and threw out centuries-old gun safety regulations--all things big donors wanted; all things majorities of Americans did not want. What is more, one rightwing donor just dumped $1.6 billion to supercharge the dark money operation that captured the Court and cement that dark money network's hold over the Federal judiciary. And guess what. We wouldn't know who that donor is if someone hadn't tipped off the press--ProPublica and the New York Times. Think about that. We only know this because we get occasional little glimpses of these megadonors' covert schemes. That means this is only the tip of the iceberg. And where that $1.6 billion goes on its way out into our political system will be obscured in dark money channels.

No wonder Americans' trust in the government is cratering. Fifty- eight percent of voters say our government needs major reforms or a complete overhaul. Just a quarter of Americans say they have confidence in the Supreme Court. That is down 11 percent just from last year. Americans know something is deeply amiss in our democracy.

Mr. President, I believe to restore trust in government, we need to flush dark money out of government. Year after year, poll after poll, overwhelming majorities of Americans say: money in politics and wealthy political donors are the root of Washington's dysfunction. Election cycle after election cycle, even during COVID, voters listed political corruption among their most important issues. Americans no longer trust that their voices matter here, not as much as the dark money voices of big corporations and billionaires. And it is time to listen to them. It is time to rid our system of the corrupting influence of unlimited dark money.

Even the Citizens United Justices recognized that unlimited political spending without transparency would corrupt. Even the Justices who opened the floodgates of unlimited political spending knew that if it was not transparent, it would corrupt. They just wouldn't do anything about it.

The DISCLOSE Act hinges on a very simple idea: that Americans deserve to know who is spending to influence their vote. If you agree with that simple idea, vote for the DISCLOSE Act. If you believe that corporations and billionaires shouldn't hide behind phony front groups while spending gobs of money on elections, you should vote for the DISCLOSE Act. If you oppose corruption, you should vote for the DISCLOSE Act. It is time for every Member of this body to go on record about this poison in our system. And with any luck, with 10 Republicans joining us, we can return to a Congress that serves America again, and Americans deserve that.

I yield the floor to my distinguished colleague, Senator Merkley.

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

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

committee on environment and public works

The Committee on Environment and Public Works is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, September 21, 2022, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing.

committee on foreign relations

The Committee on Foreign Relations is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, September 21, 2022, at 2:30 p.m., to conduct a hearing.

committee on homeland security and governmental affairs

The Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, September 21, 2022, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing on nominations.

committee on the judiciary

The Committee on the Judiciary is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, September 21, 2022, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing on nominations.

committee on small business and entrepreunership

The Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, September 21, 2022, at 2:30 p.m., to conduct a hearing.

committee on veterans' affairs

The Committee on Veterans' Affairs is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, September 21, 2022, at 3 p.m., to conduct a hearing.

select committee on intelligence

The Select Committee on Intelligence is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, September 21, 2022, at 2:30 p.m., to conduct a hearing.

subcommittee on national parks

The Subcommittee on National Parks of the Committee Energy and Natural Resources is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, September 21, 2022, at 10:30 a.m., to conduct a hearing.

subcommittee on personnel

The Subcommittee on Personnel of the Committee on Armed Services is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, September 21, 2022, at 3:30 p.m., to conduct a hearing.

Mr. President, before I start my planned remarks, let me thank Senator Portman for his remarks and all his effort. There is considerable bipartisan consensus about the need for support of Ukraine's efforts. The mantle of freedom in the world right now is carried by Ukraine against Russian oppression. I am delighted to have been present for his remarks.

Very early on, there were a few of us here in the Senate who, on a bipartisan basis, decided that the U.S. policy ought to, at a minimum, contemplate the possibility of Ukrainian victory, that writing it off was simply a bad mistake. At the time, it looked like it was a very small prospect, but the courage of the Ukrainian military, as they have pushed back in Kharkiv with counteroffensive and the abundant supply of military hardware that they have received from the West has made what seemed a fantastic, hopeful notion something that actually could be real, and it could be real in a fairly short time.

I, again, thank Senator Portman for his remarks.

Mr. President, I am here on a different subject. I will now turn to that subject.

This is the 18th time that I have come to the floor to expose the dark money scheme that has captured and controlled our Supreme Court.

Over the last 2 years, I have, over and over, exposed how dark money operatives, working from the shadows, have installed Supreme Court Justices handpicked--handpicked--by the minions of far-right donors.

I have exposed the key front groups through which this Court-packing operation is driven and the tactics that the schemers have used to hide the dark money donors who pull its strings.

And when you take a close look at the scheme, the little spider that you find at the center of the dark money web behind it is a character named Leonard Leo.

From his perch at the dark money-funded Federalist Society, Leo crafted a reputation as the Court-capture scheme's puppet master. The key to his craft is an armada of phony front groups that shuffle dark money back and forth, around and amongst each other, to deploy as spin, as propaganda, as political ads, or as hidden campaign funding.

During Donald Trump's time in office, Leonard Leo brokered the scheme to have the Federalist Society or--more accurately--the big secret donors behind the Federalist Society handpick Trump's Supreme Court nominees. Remember that list we all heard about?

Leo coordinated the dark money propaganda machine that kept the heat on Senate Republicans to confirm those nominees, and he supported the big donors' doctrine factories where donor-approved fringe legal doctrines are concocted for the anointed judges to weaponize from the Bench.

Look no further than the recent West Virginia v. EPA decision weaponizing the doctrine factory-concocted major questions' doctrine. And this was no small scheme. The latest estimate from earlier this year is that these big donors put $580 million, more than half a billion dollars, into Leo's network of Court-capture front groups.

Well, little did we know, that was just the beginning. Last month, ProPublica and the New York Times broke the news that a reclusive, far- right billionaire supercharged Leo's dark money operation with a $1.6 billion donation to a Leo front group. You heard that right, $1.6 billion into this dark money operation.

The man behind this new slush fund is a billionaire named Barre Seid, and even the way the donation was made was creepy and clandestine. Seid and Leo devised a plan to transfer all the shares in an electronics company to Leo's front group, on the way to selling that company.

So when that company sold for $1.6 billion, it all went straight to Leo's group and, by the way, helped Seid avoid what would have been roughly $400 million in taxes.

Seid has a long history of funding far-right front groups. Here is how ProPublica characterized what Seid calls his ``attack philanthropy.''

Seid has funded climate denialism as well as a national

network of state-level think tanks that promote business

deregulation and fight Medicaid expansion. He's also

supported efforts to remake the higher education system in a

conservative mold, including to turn one of the nation's most

politically influential law schools into a training ground

for future generations of right-wing judges and justices.

So let's unpack all of that, starting with the climate denialism. The ``climate denialism'' that they are referencing came from a group that he funded called the Heartland Institute. I have talked about the Heartland Institute on the floor before in my ``Web of Denial'' speeches.

Heartland is a dark money disinformation mouthpiece for fossil fuel interests. In 2012, Heartland compared climate scientists to the Unabomber. So you can see it is a classy bunch.

According to one of Seid's advisers, he was Heartland's major patron, and he even convinced his business's chief financial officer to join Heartland's board of directors.

If that isn't creepy enough for you, we move on to the national network of State-level think tanks that promote business deregulation and fight Medicaid expansion.

That is a reference to the State Policy Network, a web of dark money front groups that pump into State legislatures the propaganda and legislation designed by fossil fuel and other corporate interests.

The State Policy Network has also received millions from DonorsTrust, which has been called the ``dark money ATM of the right,'' a central node of the rightwing Koch dark money network.

The service that DonorsTrust provides is to scrub the identities of actual donors. It creates dark money. Anonymity is key for these donors, many of whom have financial interests behind their political schemes that they really don't want disclosed.

If a fossil fuel billionaire, say, wants to run ads against me in Rhode Island--folks will get the joke. So the real donor's identity gets laundered through groups like DonorsTrust and comes out under other groups with names like--I am making this one up, but they sound this way ``Rhode Islanders for Peace and Puppies and Prosperity.''

All of that, of course, leaves citizens in the dark about both the actors and the plot in the politics in which they are supposed to be active participants. And that brings us to Seid's project to ``turn one of the nation's most politically influential law schools into a training ground for future generations of right-wing judges and justices.'' That is a reference to Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, a central cog in the right-wing doctrine factory.

The cog was not always named Antonin Scalia Law School. In 2016, George Mason received $10 million from the Charles Koch Foundation, plus another $20 million from an anonymous donor, orchestrated by that same Leonard Leo, and one of the strings attached was that George Mason rename its law school after Scalia.

When folks at George Mason University, a public university, pushed for answers about all of this, the university, after a legal battle, had to disclose that renaming the law school wasn't the only string attached to that $20 million donation.

Leo and his donor wanted input over faculty hiring. And that legal battle also unearthed the name of the anonymous donor: Barre Seid. And all of that brings us back to Seid's $1.6 billion to the Leonard Leo dark money apparatus.

Remember that with $0.6 billion, Leo was able to orchestrate a dark money takeover of our Supreme Court, stacking it with far-right Justices, who have already delivered massive victories for their donors: overturning Roe v. Wade, undermining the government's power to combat climate change, throwing out century-old commonsense gun regulations.

If he can do that with $0.6 billion, imagine what kind of damage he will be able to do with $1.6 billion to squirt out as dark money through his armada of phony front groups.

Leo's already dispensed $153 million to Rule of Law Trust, which appears to exist solely to funnel money to other dark money groups and another $16.5 million to his own Concord Fund. If you have been watching these ``Scheme'' speeches, you will remember that the last time I addressed the scheme in this Chamber, I laid out how the Concord Fund and its corporate twin, the 85 Fund, are the central nodes in a collection of phony front groups that deploy fictitious names, fictitious names to mask their connections.

The coordinated and colocated front groups, Concord Fund and 85 Fund, operate through the fictitious names Judicial Crisis Network and Honest Elections Project, among other fictitious names. So, yes, you have got this right. In this dark money netherworld, the front groups have front groups.

With this new billion-dollar slush fund, Leo can take those efforts to entirely new levels: more voter suppression, which is the job of Honest Elections Project; more abortion bans, which was the accomplishment of Dobbs; more climate denial, which was powered by West Virginia v. EPA and the earlier EPA decision by the Supreme Court about the Clean Power Plan; more power for corporations, which is, of course, the constant goal of this dark money operation; more disinformation; and more dirty dark money in politics--sluiced around inside this covert apparatus until it gets squirted out through even more phony front groups.

This dark money slime will ooze everywhere. With pivotal elections coming up this fall, this slime will ooze out through your television sets, through your mailboxes, through your telephone, all of it designed to smear and lie to benefit far-right donor interests.

The phony front group squirting out the slime will have innocuous- sounding names, but make no mistake, hiding behind many of them will be Leo and his secretive billionaire backers.

While this tactic isn't new, it has been perfected by the rightwing. It began with the Koch brothers, who spent the last decade pumping dark money into our politics, producing a decade of successful climate obstruction, until finally we got the Inflation Reduction Act passed with the first real climate measures Congress has

ever passed, but because of the Koch brothers' pressure, we had to rely entirely on Democrats to get that bill passed. We did not get one Republican vote in the Senate. We did not get one Republican vote in the House.

Constant assaults on workers' rights, endless attacks on the Affordable Care Act, and, of course, the rightwing billionaires own big payoff, big tax cuts for billionaires--it is probable that for all of the money that got thrown into this dark money apparatus by rightwing billionaires, some of them probably made more money than that back from the tax cuts that were delivered for them under the Trump administration. This is a it-pays-to-play dark money operation.

And the result is that all this dark money has reduced the once Grand Old Party to the political operation of a handful of extremist megadonors.

The dark money assault on our democracy is not over. Right now, Leonard Leo, his rightwing donors, and their dark money apparatus are devising the next phases of the scheme.

They have already captured the highest Court in the land, but they will not stop until they have enacted their entire radical agenda. They will turn their sights on State courts, on city councils, on local school boards--anywhere they can find a way to subvert democracy with dark money.

So now is the time to fight back, and the first step is to pass the DISCLOSE Act. It is way long past time that we shine the light on the dark money schemers.

You may recall that in the Citizens United decision, by a vote of 8 to 1, even that Court said that dark money is corrupting. That is an established principle of the Citizens United decision.

Well, if it is corrupting, we ought to get rid of it, because the American people deserve to know who captured their Supreme Court and who keeps flooding our politics with dark money.

When you spend that kind of money, there is a motivation, and voters, citizens, deserve to know.

To be continued.

Mr. President, we revert now to the closing script, and I will ask unanimous consent that notwithstanding rule XXII, the Senate consider the follow nominations en bloc: Calendar Nos. 921, 1101, 1102, 1040, and 1042; that the Senate vote on the nominations en bloc without intervening action or debate; that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table; and that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

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

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

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the en bloc consideration of the following Senate resolutions, introduced earlier today: S. Res. 759, S. Res. 760, and S. Res. 761.

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

The resolutions (S. Res. 759, S. Res. 760, and S. Res. 761) were agreed to.

The preambles were agreed to.

(The resolutions, with their preambles, were printed in today's Record under ``Submitted Resolutions.'')