Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 690, submitted earlier today.

I ask unanimous consent 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 with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 10 a.m., Thursday, June 23, and that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and morning business be closed; that upon the conclusion of morning business, the Senate proceed to executive session to resume consideration of the motion to discharge the Clarke nomination; further, that at 11 a.m., the Senate vote on the motion to discharge the Clarke nomination; that upon the disposition of the motion, the Senate resume legislative session to resume consideration of the House message to accompany S. 2938 and vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the motion to concur in the House amendment with amendment No. 5099.

Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it stand adjourned under the previous order, following the remarks of the distinguished Senator Peters.

Madam President, reserving the right to object.

I have been listening with interest to my two distinguished colleagues discuss this measure, referring to it repeatedly as ``governing American energy.'' But, of course, what it really governs is fossil fuel energy. That is the intention here, and that is the result.

Let's start with a basic factual proposition, which is that the price of oil is set by oil companies.

In a market economy, the producer of a product chooses the price. And what has happened in this instance is that the oil industry has chosen to depart from market economics, to depart from the costs that were the same just a few years ago, and instead to follow upward the international cartel that our oil industry is a part of.

This international cartel has driven world oil prices extremely high. And American oil companies have chosen--have chosen--to follow that price, raise the prices at the pump, punish American drivers, in order to blow out their profits.

We know that this is true because the companies themselves are reporting unprecedented profits--massive profits. We know they are not tracking the cost of production at a reasonable profit because their profits have soared as they have chosen--chosen--to pursue this international cartel price and punish American drivers. It is their choice.

And then they have the colossal nerve to take their choice, what they have done to American drivers, and then start using that for leverage to try to get other fossil fuel industry prerogatives accomplished politically.

And let me say, don't be mad at the gas station owner. The gas station owner is not the one who is jacking up the prices. For a lot of gas station owners, they don't even make money on the gas. You have got to go in and buy a coffee or snacks to have them make money.

Your local gas station is not the problem with these prices. The problem is Chevron, Exxon, Marathon, all of the big oil companies that have chosen to drive gas prices through the roof so they can fill their pockets with profit, so they can prepare for the fact that their product has got an end point.

We can't keep polluting the Earth the way we are with the emissions of fossil fuel. I noticed that neither of my colleagues mentioned that this fossil fuel actually gets burned. We don't eat it; we burn it. And when we burn it, it emits CO2 and other gases, and we are seeing the effect of that all over the planet.

Pollution increases. CO2 levels continue to increase. We constantly set new records for CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Heat increases. We are heating the ocean so fast--there is a new term that we have, a new term of measurement, a ``zettajoule.'' Do you know what a zettajoule is? A joule is a unit of heat energy measurement. A zettajoule is that unit with 21 zeros after it. It is an enormous number. All of the fossil fuel burned by all of the people across this entire planet amounts to less than half of a zettajoule of energy--all of it, less than half.

And for the price of that--because of the emissions, because of the pollution, because of the CO2, because of the methane--we are heating up the planet so fast that every year 14 zettajoules of excess heat go into the ocean, where my fishermen in Rhode Island see their catches disappear, see their lives turned upside down, see fisheries that their fathers and their grandfathers fished completely upturned.

This comes home in Rhode Island. Our Coastal Resources Management Council predicts that all that ocean warming is going to raise sea levels so that in my lifetime we are going to start to see flooding. Things that are now part of our State are going to become islands. Warwick Neck becomes Warwick Neck Island. Bristol becomes Bristol Island. Poppasquash Point becomes Poppasquash Island. Newport divides into a mainland and an island.

We become the Rhode Island archipelago. We lose enormous amounts of our shoreline to sea level rise. Never mention--never mention that harm. So when you come here and say, we want to help more fossil fuel get burned, remember that on the other end of that are places like Rhode Island.

And if we want to have a conversation about how we solve price now and how we protect against emissions later, that is a conversation I am more than willing to have. But a one-sided conversation that is only about more burning, more pollution, more emissions, more of that for Rhode Island, I don't think so.

And it is not, of course, just Rhode Island. Other States are having unprecedented wildfires. They are having unprecedented droughts. We are seeing a planet whose basic operating systems are being changed by fossil fuel emissions. And until we grapple with that seriously, you can bet I will object--which I do.

Madam President, I would actually ask, in response, that we pass a different measure, and I would ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be discharged from further consideration of S. 4217, and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration. I further ask that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

My colleague may care to object.

Or at least to the motion I propounded anyway.

Senator Whitehouse, of course, as well, but I think the intention was to object to the measure.

I see that my friend Senator Barrasso has joined us. I had mentioned zettajoules. I want to add one other figure. This is from a report by the corporate accounting and consulting firm, Deloitte Consulting, which has said that if we don't get ahead of this climate problem that my colleague seems so scrupulously interested in ignoring, the cost to society in the next five decades will be, if I remember correctly--the number is $178 trillion in economic harm across those years.

You want to talk about big numbers? And if we do get it right, if we grow up, treat this as a factual scientific problem and put in serious, real economic solutions, then the win side is $43 trillion.

So the swing is $220 trillion. You want to talk about big numbers? That is a big number. And it is going to depend on decisions we make now, and I hope we start making good decisions.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I am here for the 15th time in my series of ``Scheme'' speeches to call attention to the rightwing donors' long-planned scheme to capture and control our Supreme Court.

What I will talk about today is that scheme's donor-funded doctrine factory and a case in which the ``Court that dark money built'' could weaponize dangerous, concocted doctrines to power up polluters and threaten the basic function of government.

Before I get into this, let me say that I detest and condemn violence or threatened violence against members of the Court, and I object even to protesters making a racket in Justices' neighborhoods. There is a lot to be angry about, but the solution is through democracy and laws, not violence and noise. The capture of the Court by secret and special interests is deadly serious under our laws, and we have to respond seriously under our laws. Neighborhood noise and violent threats don't help.

Let's remember that all three Trump Supreme Court Justices were actually chosen and then campaigned for by a dark money donor apparatus. Remember, the whole point of the scheme is to capture the Court so it will deliver big wins for the big rightwing donors, no matter how unpopular or radical those wins are. Remember that the donor elite behind the scheme spent hundreds of millions of dollars on an apparatus to capture the courts. It plotted for decades to seize this power and set up a system to get its hand-picked, extremist nominees onto the Bench. It instructs those Justices with coordinated flotillas of amicus briefs so the Justices know how they are supposed to rule. It is quite an operation.

But none of that works--none of that works if judges are following the law as it is. Existing legal precedents are a problem for the scheme. So, to accomplish its mission, a radical deconstruction of our American laws, the big donor elite need to destroy decades of legal precedent.

We got a preview in the looming effort, shown by the Alito leaked draft opinion, to destroy precedent protecting women's right to decide about abortion and relocate that right from women to State legislatures. That is just the scheme's opening act, a sop to one segment of its social issues base. The scheme is out to deconstruct American law and destroy established precedent across many areas of the law.

Now, if you are out to deconstruct American law and replace it with what the big donors want, you need some intellectual weaponry. You don't just need Justices who will do what you ask, you need legal theories. You need to give the Justices you put on the Court the intellectual artillery--the demolition theories--that will help them destroy the precedents and deconstruct our legal system.

So that is a problem.

But when you are spending more than half a billion dollars on such a scheme, you can find solutions. And sure enough, rightwing donor interests found solutions. It took time, but the whole scheme took time. It took a lot of money, but the whole scheme took a lot of money. It took patience and planning, but what a payoff when you succeed.

And now it is payday.

The first thing you do is erect an array of legal think tanks, phony institutes, the hothouses in which the deconstruction theories are grown; the factories, if you will, where doctrines are crafted, reverse-engineered from the results the big donors want so that willing, complicit Justices have the ideological weaponry for deconstruction of the law.

These think tanks do a couple of things. First, they nurture rightwing legal scholars to formulate bogus legal doctrines. They pay them comfortable salaries. They grant them nice titles. They cover their trips to conferences and symposia with fellow hothouse scholars. The whole thing apes regular academia, but this academia-resembling performance has a very different mission: It has deliverables.

Second, they systematically cheerlead for their new legal doctrines. They create an echo chamber of approval for their cultivated fringe ideas. Once the hothouse conjures a fringe idea, the hothouse bounces it among other so-called scholars and through other anonymously funded affiliate groups and through law school debate clubs and conservative conferences--also funded by secretive donors--and into flotillas of scripted amicus curiae briefs and ultimately, the prize, into legal opinions. They create a legitimization process, and of course they concoct or retool the desirable theories.

The legal theories are actually pretty easy to come up with. You reverse-engineer. You start with what big donor interests want and then work backward. And what lots of big donors want--especially fossil fuel companies--is to weaken and disable government regulation.

Government regulators stop all sorts of harmful corporate practices: pollution of our air, water, and climate; dangerous factory floor working conditions; crooked schemes that cheat investors; snake oil medications that don't cure disease; unsafe products; insurance policies that don't pay. The list is long. Demolishing that protective network of regulations protecting America's health, safety, and financial well-being is a scheme priority, and the destruction begins by pejoratively naming the Agencies whose work protects us the ``administrative state.''

There are many of these doctrine-growing hothouses. Two examples are the Cato Institute, originally founded by the Koch brothers, and the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School, of course. Both of these groups are funded to pump out and legitimize anti-regulatory fringe theories and talking points.

Think of them as factories for ideological artillery designed for the demolition of Federal Agencies' authority, particularly over polluters.

What do they manufacture? Well, the concocted doctrines fall into a few buckets. There is the so-called unitary executive theory, cooked up to argue

that safeguards set in place by Congress to protect Federal Agencies against political interference are unconstitutional.

Now, if you are a big donor and you paid big bucks to get your man in the White House, you want political interference by your guy in regulatory decisions.

Congress built safeguards against that for a very good reason. But a captured Court could disable Congress's ability to defend the Agencies that Congress itself created. This unitary executive legal theory was the pet theory of the Reagan administration. It was thoroughly debunked by serious scholars and rejected initially even by the Supreme Court. But the rightwing Court-capture apparatus has persistently kept this theory a Federalist Society cornerstone and diligently packed the Court with new Justices more amenable to this nonsense.

Other concocted doctrines also target Agencies. The so-called nondelegation doctrine is so radical and meritless that the Supreme Court dismissed it a century ago, except for rare cases that no longer exist where Congress might give Agencies power with no direction whatsoever.

This nondelegation idea has been retooled in the doctrine factories to target Agency regulation generally. Under this doctrine as retooled, the power is removed from Congress and given to unelected courts to decide how questions should be assigned by Congress to Federal Agencies. This gives big, regulated industries a big weapon to attack the Federal Government's ability to regulate problems that they cause, at a minimum allowing industries to tie public protection regulations up in years, even decades, of litigation.

Federalist Society Justices on the Court long clamored for the nondelegation doctrine, and as new Federalist Society Justices get added to the Court, it becomes more probable. Certainly the dark money front groups that provide instruction and encouragement to the Federalist Society Justices--they are in full clamor, using amicus curiae briefs to signal their wishes to the captured Court.

On now to yet another hothouse-grown doctrine, the major questions doctrine, which provides a similar weapons platform to assault public safety regulations. Where the nondelegation doctrine would require Congress to set more specific regulatory standards for Agencies to police, the major questions doctrine would let the unelected Court determine that some questions are just too big to regulate--too big to regulate at all.

Again, at a minimum, that lets big industries snarl Agency protections up in litigation. At worst, it forces Congress into detailed, complex questions that Congress already determined--already determined--should better be handled by expert Agencies.

Perhaps I should mention here how hard the Federalist Society Justices have worked to create avenues of corporate political influence, including anonymous, unlimited, corporate political spending, allowing corporate interests to blockade action in Congress; but while it is relevant here, that is a longer story for another day.

All of these concocted doctrines share the premise that Congress may not deploy Agency regulation against certain problems and that the power to grant Agencies authority to regulate in certain areas is, instead, to be decided by unelected courts--in present circumstances, decided by a captured Supreme Court with Members installed by big special interest money.

What could possibly go wrong?

All of these concocted doctrines overlook the robust oversight of Federal Agencies by the people's Representatives in Congress and by courts, tasked by Congress, with applying the Administrative Procedure Act. If an Agency were to go rogue, Congress can immediately intervene. Congress can reverse the decision of the Agency. Congress can change the underlying law the Agency enforces. Congress can redirect, defund, or even eliminate the errant Agency. Moreover, if Agencies don't follow the law as Congress directed or if the Agencies behave illogically or unfairly or don't give evidence proper consideration, there are avenues of legal relief in court.

But the donors behind the scheme don't want relief from improper or misguided Agency action. They want relief from lawful, legitimate, and correct Agency action. This is a power grab by regulated interests using the Court, and they can do it because of the scheme. It is not a bug that these doctrines threaten harm to an array of basic government functions; it is their purpose.

Let's go back to what the rightwing, corporate-funded propaganda machine likes to deride as the ``administrative state''--their little code word. What has really gone on in these Agencies? I will tell you what has gone on.

Over nonstop quarreling by big special interests, regulatory Agencies made life better. They made drinking water safer. They cleaned up smokestacks. They put airbags in cars and required better seatbelts. They protected us from contaminated food. They made medication safer and more effective--no more snake oil mysteries. They made financial markets safer places for retirement funds and college savings plans to grow. They made it harder for stockjobbers to sucker innocent investors. They required insurance policies to actually pay when an insured risk occurs. They put an end to people dying from disasters like boiler explosions that used to be a regular thing. Americans live longer; highways are no longer carnage; products are safer; markets are stronger; and the American economy is more robust. So, whenever you hear the phrase ``administrative state,'' it should ring in your head a little alarm bell that special interest mischief is afoot, which brings me to the ruling expected from the Supreme Court in a case called West Virginia v. EPA.

The fossil fuel interests behind the case are challenging the Federal Government's power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal-fired power plants. Put simply, they want to make it harder to fight climate change. I can't think of a more important protection for the American people than a livable planet, and I can't think of a Member of Congress who has done more work to achieve those protections than the Presiding Officer, but the fossil fuel industry is desperate to continue to pollute for free.

The first thing to know about this case is that there is no case. The Constitution requires ``a case or controversy''--that is the language in the Constitution: ``a case or controversy'' before the Court can intervene--and, here, there is no case because there is no Agency rule to challenge. The Trump administration's rule, which was a sop to polluters, was thrown out--gone. The Obama-era rule is not being pursued--gone. Biden's EPA has announced that it is formulating a new, different rule that it has not yet produced. It is not out. There is no rule in place right now.

That does not seem to bother the scheme's new donor-selected majority. A few Republican States, bolstered and probably directed by an armada of rightwing, dark-money front groups, sued to challenge the EPA's authority, and the captured Court jumped right in.

Think about that for a moment.

With no actual rule to review, the Court is, apparently, going to decide this case based on what the Biden administration might do or issue some general observations about the EPA. Where I come from, there is a name for that. It is called an advisory opinion, and our Supreme Court is forbidden to do that under our Constitution.

This is actually a big deal at the heart of the separation of powers, but the Federalist Society Justices, packed onto the Court with fossil fuel dark money, are on a mission to deconstruct the administrative state. So why let the Constitution get in the way? Just throw out more precedent about case or controversy. What is one more smashed precedent in the captured Court's cascade of precedent demolition? The donors don't care. They are not finicky. They want results.

Fossil fuel is the political 800-pound gorilla in this country. The industry spent decades blocking climate action in Congress. It lurked behind this web of climate denial front groups that sowed false doubt about climate science. It was their job to mischaracterize the science. It is behind what watchdog group Influence Map calls the biggest climate-obstructing trade organization in Washington--the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Boom.

It maintains its own trade group hitmen, like the American Petroleum Institute. It funnels secret money by the tens of millions into Republican super-PACs and other secret, partisan political spending fronts in a not-so-hostile takeover of the Republican Party, and it wrote some of the biggest checks to pay for the scheme, funneled through dark-money conduits like DonorsTrust and the Judicial Crisis Network.

When I say we now have the Court that dark money built, it is probably more accurate to say that we now have the Court that dark fossil fuel money built. So watch out for the six-Justice supermajority that is poised to rule in this no case ``case.''

It is no surprise that the amici--the amicus curiae, the so-called friends of the Court--gathered in this case read like a who's who of fossil fuel polluter front groups. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, for instance, produces hothouse attacks on the EPA's authority, and is funded by ExxonMobil, Murray Energy, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Koch brothers' political groups. Fossil fuel front groups, as amici and litigants, sing a harmonious chorus of ``unitary executive'' and ``nondelegation'' and ``major question''--all concocted doctrines targeting the administrative state they so resent.

Back before the takeover, here is what the Court said in a case called Mistretta.

The Court said this:

In our increasingly complex society, replete with ever

changing and more technical problems, Congress simply cannot

do its job absent an ability to delegate power under broad

general directives.

That is the language of the Court:

In our increasingly complex society, replete with ever

changing and more technical problems, Congress simply cannot

do its job absent an ability to delegate power under broad

general directives.

That is the precedent of the Court. That is the law of the land, and it is the law that special interests sent these Justices to the Court to deconstruct. So get ready.

To be continued.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, this week marks the 250th anniversary of the first blow struck in the American Colonies' struggle for independence from the British Crown. I come to the Senate floor every year to commemorate this moment because it took place in Rhode Island at the hands of some brave and bold Rhode Islanders.

Before recounting the tale of those bold Rhode Islanders, I would like to acknowledge a special guest with us in the Gallery today: Michael Tatham, Deputy Head of Mission for the British Embassy here in Washington. A lot has happened over the last 250 years, and Great Britain is now America's closest ally and great, great friend. It is an honor to have the Deputy Ambassador here today.

So it was 1772, and the Royal Navy's revenue cutter, the HMS Gaspee, patrolled Narragansett Bay in the wake of the Seven Years War, where Great Britain had emerged the victor. The Crown owed, by some estimates, between 74 and 133 million pounds. That was a colossal burden on the empire's finances. The Gaspee's mission was to collect taxes from the Colonies to help repay British debt.

I will concede that part of the Gaspee's mission was righteous. Rhode Island's rum distilleries formed a corner of the so-called triangle trade, with enslaved people from Africa and sugar from the Caribbean forming the other legs of this foul business. Rum-running to support the slave trade was repugnant and a worthy target of British authorities.

But Britain's heavy hand reached far beyond that. British customs agents seized Colonial vessels and cargo at whim, leaving rightful owners with no recourse to reclaim their property. One such owner was John Hancock, whose signature would soon become famous. Authorities even pressed Colonial sailors into service on His Majesty's vessels against their will.

The Gaspee and her captain, Lieutenant William Dudingston, drew particular ire. One of Dudingston's first acts was to stop the merchant ship Fortune. Dudingston and his crew roughed up the Fortune's commander, Rufus Greene, condemned the ship and her cargo, and sent the Fortune to Boston for the admiralty to sell.

This did not please the Fortune's owner, Rhode Island's Nathanael Greene, who would go on to become General Washington's aide-de-camp and wartime administrator and then command the southern campaign of the Revolutionary War, which he did so effectively that British General Cornwallis would write:

That damned Greene is more dangerous than Washington.

Dudingston's reputation only worsened from there. British law awarded revenue cutter commanders a share of the cargo they seized. Dudingston seized so much cargo that he was able to nearly double his salary, and he earned, along with that bounty, a well-deserved reputation for arrogance. Soon Rhode Islanders were protesting his conduct formally, but those protests yielded no accommodation.

On June 9, 1772, simmering anger at Dudingston and the Gaspee boiled over. Dudingston spotted a small trading ship, the Hannah, bound for Providence. The Gaspee gave chase, and Dudingston hailed the Hannah's captain, Benjamin Lindsey, and ordered the Hannah to submit to a search. Captain Lindsey declined that invitation and ignored the Gaspee's warning shots and sailed on toward Providence.

Now, the Hannah was smaller and lighter than the Gaspee, and Captain Lindsey was more familiar than Dudingston with the waters between Newport and Providence. Lindsey steered his Hannah across the shallow waters outside Namquid Point. The Hannah could sail over the shallows, but the heavier Gaspee could not. Dudingston and his crew ran aground on a sandbar off Pawtuxet Cove, stranded, as the Sun was setting in a falling tide. The Gaspee would need to wait for the next day's high tides to lift it free.

When the Hannah arrived in Providence, Captain Lindsey summoned local patriots to Sabin's Tavern for refreshments and for planning. The result of the plan was that under the leadership of John Brown, later to be famous for Brown University, and Abraham Whipple, a group of men boarded a half dozen longboats to row from Providence down to Pawtuxet. Through the dark night, with oars muffled, the Rhode Islanders descended on the Gaspee. Whipple reputedly called out to Dudingston-- and I hope the young pages will forgive my language, but this is apparently the language used in that moment:

I am the sheriff of the county of Kent, God damn you. I

have got a warrant to apprehend you, God damn you; so

surrender, God damn you.

I believe I mentioned that the Rhode Islanders had fortified themselves at Sabin's Tavern, which might explain some of the language. In any event, Lieutenant Dudingston refused that invitation so a brief, sharp battle ensued.

At this moment those 250 years ago, Rhode Islanders drew the first blood of what would become our revolutionary struggle when a musket ball struck Lieutenant Dudingston. The Rhode Island patriots boarded the Gaspee. In the melee, Dudingston cried out:

Lord, have mercy upon me--I am done for.

But he was not. The British sailors soon gave up the fight. The Rhode Islanders took the crew prisoner and ferried the captives to shore. A marker still stands at the place where the captive crew was brought ashore. And there, Dudingston received the care of a doctor and, ultimately, recovered from his wounds. Indeed, Dudingston would not only heal, but go on to live a long life. He commanded other vessels. He moved back to his native Scotland and married and raised four children in a coastal town called Elie overlooking the Firth of Fife and the North Sea, but he never patrolled Narragansett Bay again.

A quick side story. A few years ago, a couple from Scotland, Angela and Roddy Innes, visited Pawtuxet during Gaspee Days, our annual celebration of the Gaspee raid, coming up this weekend. The Inneses are connected through

marriage to the Dudingstons, and Angela wanted to see what the Dudingston-Gaspee was all about.

In Pawtuxet, Rhode Islanders welcomed Angela and Roddy with open arms. Local historian Dr. John Concannon invited them to stay. ``It was an amazing experience,'' Angela said. ``The people there are incredibly friendly.'' The trip also helped them grasp the significance of the Gaspee raid on America's road to revolution. And this year, Angela Innes will mark the 250th Gaspee anniversary with a Gaspee Day party of her own in Scotland.

Well, that left the dreaded Gaspee. With the prisoners ashore, the Gaspee raiders returned to the stranded ship and set her afire. When the fire reached her powder magazine, she blew apart, and her remains were lost to time and tides. Rhode Island was rid of the dreaded Gaspee.

New efforts are underway now to find the charred remains of the Gaspee using advanced sonar technology. Dr. Kathy Abbass of the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project is on the case. Dr. Abbass is accomplished in her field. Indeed, she may have located Captain Cook's ship, the Endeavor, sunk in Newport Harbor. If anyone can find the Gaspee or what is left of her, it is Dr. Abbass.

I should offer special thanks to Peter Abbott, the British Consul General in Boston who, along with representatives of the Royal Navy, came to Rhode Island last month for the announcement that funds had been raised to find the Gaspee. Abbott said:

Being a British consul in New England means you must have

broad shoulders. I get invited to events that celebrate the

Boston Massacre and Evacuation Day. But what takes the

biscuit is commemorating the burning of a British ship!

The Deputy Ambassador should know that if, in fact, we do find the Gaspee, Rhode Island, a colony no more, intends to courteously seize the vessel for further research.

The Gaspee raid represents Rhode Island's spirit of independence, which has lived in us since Rhode Island's founding as a refuge of religious tolerance from the Massachusetts Colony's harsh theocracy. Our celebration of the Gaspee Affair represents Rhode Islanders' pride in that spirit, which we share willingly, even with a Dudingston descendant.

Oh, and by the way, this episode where Rhode Islanders rode down through the night to a British ship that had been stranded by Rhode Island wilds and sacked her and took her crew and set her afire and blew her up, that all took place more than a year before Massachusetts colonists boarded a British ship to push tea bales into Boston Harbor. They pushed tea bales off the ship; more than a year earlier, Rhode Islanders blew the ship up. I am just saying, Mr. President.

So here is to another 250 years of celebrating the Gaspee raiders and to more people learning about Rhode Island's role as a spark of revolution.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I do not want to keep the distinguished Senator from Maine on the floor any longer than we have to, so I am going to move rapidly to the unanimous consent motion.

But I do want to tell the Senator that I am actually rather sympathetic to her concerns. In Rhode Island, we have had issues regarding the black sea bass, which NOAA scientists have known for more than a decade were moving up into our waters, yet the fisheries regulation and the allotments have not moved accordingly. We have problems with evanescent species like butterfish and loligo squid that replicate more rapidly than the regulatory regime can keep up, so the information is really nonsense. And we have an urgent need to enhance electronic monitoring on our boats so that human monitors don't have to be taken out on the boat.

Yes, we have frustrations with NOAA about its pace in a lot of these areas, but I simply think that an understaffed NOAA is not a solution to those problems.

If I may, I ask unanimous consent that notwithstanding rule XXII, the Senate consider the following nomination: Calendar No. 768, Jainey Kumar Bavishi, to be Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere; that the Senate vote on the nomination without intervening action or debate; that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table; that any statements related to the nomination be printed in the Record.

Madam President, let me just say I hope we can find a way to move forward. Ms. Bavishi is needed to fill a very important position. Those of us in coastal States know the problem with Oceans and Atmosphere is profound. Perhaps my favorite new figure is called the zettajoule, the joule being the unit of heat energy by which we measure energy. The zettajoule is a joule with 21 zeros. It is a very, very big number. It is twice the complete full energy production and use by human species on the planet. All of our energy, our cars, our trucks, our homes, our factories--everything is half a zettajoule. For the price of that, we add 14 zettajoules of heat into the ocean every single year--every single year. It is the equivalent of three or four Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs being set off in the ocean every second and the ocean having to absorb that heat energy.

As the Senator from Maine knows, the Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest heating bodies of water on the planet, and she sees it as her fisheries and her lobster fisheries, in particular, move northward.

I am eager to find a way to make sure that Bavishi can get in place. She is a leading climate expert who worked in the New York Mayor's Office of Climate Resiliency and, before that, in the CEQ at the White House.

I respect the concerns that the Senator from Maine has indicated. As I said, I have my own. I just have a different view as to whether stopping the Assistant Secretary for Oceans and Administration position from being filled is conducive to getting those concerns met.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I would say to Senator Blumenthal, absolutely, yes, and to Senator Graham, also yes, and thank you.

Let me just give a quick overview of my part of this colloquy as to where we are.

This began with the Munich Security Conference, which Senator Graham and I led this year, the so-called McCain codel. When we heard about the imminent invasion, we both became very ardent that we needed to get after Russia's oligarchs; first, because it was turning the oligarchs against Yanukovych, which freed up Ukraine, and, second, because these oligarchs in Russia are part and parcel of the way in which Putin has manipulated his country and acceded enormous hidden wealth to himself.

So we knew that the oligarchs needed to be a target. We talked about it so relentlessly that whenever Secretary of State Blinken saw us coming, he would say: I know. I know. Oligarchs, I get it.

Afterward, the President came back and he took the Treasury's Asset Forfeiture Section and the State Department's Asset Forfeiture Section and the Department of Justice's Asset Forfeiture Section and pulled them together into what he is calling the Kleptocratic Initiative. That is a good thing the President did.

In this bill, there is money for it. We give $67 million to that enterprise and another $30 million to FinCEN, which is the group within Treasury that tracks dirty money. So that is about $100 million to support the KleptoCapture operation.

What they still need is authorities, and that is what our bill would give them. When we got back, Senator Graham, Senator Wicker, Senator Blumenthal, and I drafted this bill, and a version of it has been passed in the House, thanks to the leadership of Representative Tom Malinowski. And after that bill was filed, the Biden administration got together and they gave technical assistance to us from the Department of Justice as to what it was that they actually need to be more effective at going after these oligarchs to seize, to sell, and to send to Ukraine the proceeds.

So that is where we are right now. And one of the things that we need is to speed up the process; it can take forever to go through the process. We need to couch this process in the national security authorities of the President as much as possible, because this is primarily a national security issue. We need to speed up the process so that, for instance, you don't have to prove who the true beneficial owner is before you seize the yacht.

You can go on intelligence reports. You can go on whistleblowers. And, by the way, we want to reward whistleblowers. You remember the Ukrainian who sunk his boss's yacht and he got arrested because he pulled the plug out of that yacht and sunk it?

I would rather have that guy come to the Department of Justice and say: I can tell you all about who owns this yacht. You don't have to worry about going through the Cypriot bank account, the Cayman Islands shell corporation, the Dakota trust--wherever else this has been hidden. I can tell you that is the guy--and be able to act based on that and have the authority to have the action, what is called ``in rem'' by lawyers. You don't have to find the defendant.

This is United States v. Motor Vessel--whatever it is called-- Scheherazade. And you give public notice, and

you invite the world to come and make whoever has a claim to that yacht to show that it is there and it shouldn't be condemned, sold, and the proceeds go to Ukraine, which is an interesting predicament for the oligarch who owns it but has pretended he does not, who has hidden behind all these shells.

He now has to come forward and say: Actually I own that yacht.

Gotcha, game over.

Or he has to put in some phony to come and say: Hey, I actually own that yacht. I may be a cellist, but I am a billionaire cellist who happens to own that yacht.

And we get to say in a court of law: Prove it. Let's have some real discovery. Let's have some testimony under oath. If this is your yacht, God bless you, you can have it. Prove it. We dare you.

I think what is going to happen is a lot of these claims are going to be forfeit, because they are, in fact, crooked. And we have every right and every need to go after these assets because Putin's attack on Ukraine is supported, aided, abetted, and given aid and comfort to by this retinue of slippery oligarchs around him who have protected him.

You saw 29 of them showing up in that big office of his to have the little talk with him about how this was all going. We know who they are. And we know what their role is, and they are aiding and abetting and giving aid and comfort to an enemy of our ally Ukraine--as Senator Graham has pointed out--at the fulcrum in the world of our battle for freedom right now.

If we can't act on this, shame on us. So we are going to continue; we are going to continue in bipartisan fashion. We are going to take our bill, and we are going to add on to it the technical language from the Department of Justice that will specify the authorities that they need. And we are going to find a way to get this passed. If we can't do it by unanimous consent, which I hope we can, then perhaps on the NDA or some other must-pass piece of legislation.

But this must be done. And to Senator Blumenthal's question, will this make a difference? Some of these yachts cost half a billion dollars, and there are dozens of them floating around. This is real money. And that is before you get to the fancy paintings and before you get to the mansions in London and before you get to the villas on the coast of Spain.

We need to make it very expensive to be an oligarch supporting Putin, and we need to take the filthy pelt, the lucre that they stole from their country and put it to the benefit of the Ukrainian people.

So I am delighted that Senator Wicker was an initial cosponsor of this bill. I am delighted that Senator Graham was an initial cosponsor and Senator Blumenthal.

And I will close by saying that, you know, this Munich security delegation that we do every year has made a big difference on several occasions, because we get together in bipartisan fashion, we are presented with real, immediate problems in the world that we face when we go to that conference. And we craft bipartisan solutions in realtime there, and then we come back and deploy them. And that is what was done here. We are going to see this through. We are going to get this right.

Thank you, Senator Graham.

Gladly.

The oligarchs working with and for Vladimir Putin have stolen almost all of the wealth of Russia. These are extremely wealthy individuals. If you can afford a $500 million yacht, you have got money to burn. And that is not your only asset--that is just your yacht.

And you have got all the other stuff, the villas and the mansions and the artworks and the jets and all of that. The number is obviously in the tens of billions of dollars. When you consider that we are appropriating $40 billion, I think it is a fair bet that we can do half again, just from these oligarchs. And to have that money go to Ukraine's relief, to its victory, and to its rebuilding would be a very, very good use.

And at the same time, it would provide the strategic feature that it would start turning these greedy oligarchs against Putin because we are going to keep coming after them until this is over, and it would disable his apparatus of control over Russia, which is run through being basically a gang of thieves who all allow each other to loot their country.

I am reminded of Senator Graham's great friend, Senator McCain, who used to describe Russia as a gas station run by gangsters with an army.

Well, this turns the gangsters against each other, in addition to taking ill-gotten gains and turning them to a valuable and proper use. And the message it sends is: If you are a crooked oligarch who will support a dictator, a tyrant who will go into another country and shell its schools, send cruise missiles into its apartment buildings, target artillery at its hospitals, you are not going to get away with that easily.

And it sends a signal through that to the entire world of kleptocracy, which extends beyond Russia, that your days of thievery are numbered, we are going to have the resources to put rule of law back in charge.

I can, indeed, Senator Graham. I can, indeed. And I thank him for his persistent effort on this, and I thank our colleagues in the House who have been very persistent on this, none more than Congressman Malinowski of New Jersey.

Madam President, I am here for the 14th time to keep unmasking the scheme to control our Supreme Court--a scheme that is now poised to destroy a woman's right to make her own reproductive health choices and to smash foundational Supreme Court precedent to get there.

Last week, Politico confirmed a fear that many of us have had for years. We now see that the Supreme Court has at least five votes to eradicate Roe v. Wade, one of the most important decisions in the Court's history. For nearly half a century, women in this country have relied on Roe's recognition that our constitutional right to privacy includes the right to decide when to have a child. This is one of the most profoundly personal and life-changing decisions anyone can make. Now, the draft opinion from Justice Alito shows in black and white how the Court plans to steamroll over that right--and afterward probably many others that are anchored in that same American right to privacy.

If Justice Alito's draft opinion becomes law, women in this country will have a well-established constitutional right stripped away. That has not happened before.

Already 13 States have trigger bans that will snap into place the moment Roe is overturned, and 13 more are expected to ban or severely restrict abortions in the future. And it won't stop there. For example, Louisiana's Republican lawmakers just advanced a bill that would criminalize abortion as homicide and allow prosecutors to charge women seeking abortions as criminals.

In the week since the news broke, a lot of Americans have expressed just how strongly they disagree with the path this Court is headed down. They are disappointed, stunned, outraged, and they are right. When you take a second to remember what these same Justices told us in the past about Roe, you can be doubly outraged. I know Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are. We saw the last three Republican Justices come through that committee and look us in the eye as we asked what they thought about Roe. Let's be clear: Each of these Republican Justices came before the committee; each was specifically asked about Roe v. Wade.

Here is what they told us:

Neil Gorsuch:

Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, is a precedent of the United

States Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed.

Brett Kavanaugh:

It is settled as a precedent of the Supreme Court, entitled

to respect under principles of stare decisis.

Amy Coney Barrett:

Roe is not a super-precedent because calls for its

overruling have never ceased. But that doesn't mean that Roe

should be overruled. It just means that it doesn't fall

within a small handful of cases like Marbury v. Madison and

Brown v. Board that no one questions anymore.

Add in Alito himself:

Roe v. Wade is an important precedent of the Supreme Court.

Yet here is what Alito's draft opinion says:

Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was

exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging

consequences.

Well, there was no mention of ``egregiously'' at the confirmation hearings. There was no mention of ``wrong from the start'' when we asked about Roe. Does anyone seriously think that this was a sudden, new epiphany that came over the Federalist Society Justices in the last few weeks? None--none--managed to mention their belief that Roe v. Wade was ``egregiously wrong from the start.'' Whether that was outright lying or confirmation hearing hide-the-ball tricks, it is dishonorable, and it was dishonest.

If that is what you believe as a judge, own it. Don't keep your views secret until you have the votes to make your move. That may be clever politics, but it is politics, not judging. It is a big tell about this captured Court.

Since the news broke, Republicans have tried desperately to change the subject. The minority leader says:

The real outrage is not the obliteration of women's rights

but that we found out about it a month early.

He says:

This lawless action should be investigated and punished as

quickly as possible.

Other Republicans called for the FBI to prosecute the leaker criminally or civilly. Some even purport to identify the leaker.

Chief Justice Roberts called the leak ``a singular and egregious breach of . . . trust'' and an ``affront to the community of public servants who work here.''

Look, as to the leak, Mr. Chief Justice, go for it. Investigate away. Send the Marshals. But to my Republican colleagues, sharpening their pitchforks and calling for criminal prosecution: Spare me the high dudgeon. Spare me the faux outrage. As former White House Ethics Counsel Walter Shaub explains, ``[T]he Supreme Court has no code of ethics--which is the place you would normally put a ban on misusing nonpublic information. [So] what crime would [the] FBI . . . investigate?''

As for the ``affront'' to the institution, I suggest everyone consider the real rot at the core of the Supreme Court.

If you care about the independence and integrity of the Court, it is not this leak you should be outraged about; it is that for the first time in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court, the selection of Supreme Court Justices was farmed out, handed off to a private organization, and Justices were selected in some backroom with zero transparency into how the selections were made, how the lists were assembled, and zero transparency into the dark money that flowed into that private organization while the selections were being made. Who paid what to have a seat at the Federalist Society's judicial selection turnstile?

We know from new reporting that it was the Federalist Society's Leonard Leo who ``laid out [the] road map for Trump on the Federal court system'' with the goal of ``transforming the foundational understanding of rights in America.''

So much for balls and strikes, huh?

Leo came up with the list of ``judges that would please the Republican base'' from among what he called the ``decades of conservative lawyers in the pipeline.'' He became a ``team'' with Don McGahn, Trump's White House Counsel, and Mitch McConnell to ``keep the judicial nominations effort moving.'' It was Leo who took to the White House where he had ``extensive access,'' to the revised nominees list that included Kavanaugh and Barrett. The picks were made by advisers, said Senator McConnell, with Trump's role

merely ``signing off on them,'' and he ``never veered from the lists of candidates suggested by Leo and others.''

Again, this was not about calling ``balls and strikes.''

If you want ``to have the longest possible impact on the kind of America you want,'' said Leader McConnell, ``you look at the courts.'' That is their goal, to change the kind of America we have--more accurately, the kind of America the far-right megadonors want, I would say.

Trump noticed. ``Mitch McConnell. Judges. Judges. Judges. The only thing he wants is judges,'' said Trump.

We know this happened because the Trump White House, right up to Trump himself, said so. Trump's own White House Counsel joked that he ``in-sourced'' the Federalist Society into the selection process. As one prominent conservative explained, this was an ``enterprise''--an ``enterprise of building a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade.''

Once the anonymous donors behind the Federalist Society Justice- picking operation got the nominees they wanted, then came the dark money front groups rolling out ad campaigns to help ram those Justices through the Senate. Anonymous donations of $15 million, $17 million, $19 million went to phony front groups like the so-called ``Judicial Crisis Network'' to promote those backroom-chosen Federalist Society nominees.

Then, once the Federalist Society Justices were stacked onto the Court, flotillas of dark money front groups appeared before them, both as litigants and as amici curiae, orchestrated by the dozens in little groups to signal the Republican Justices how to rule. And it is pretty likely that the same donor network was behind the nomination turnstile, the propaganda machine, and the flotillas. And by the way, they are winning--winning--with these handpicked Justices at an astonishing rate--80 to 0 by one count.

We see the results of the scheme in this very case. The sponsors of the Mississippi abortion law admitted that they passed the law because they thought the new Supreme Court Justices would uphold it, just like a new legislative body had come in. After Amy Coney Barrett's nomination was rushed through the Senate, the State of Mississippi even changed its position to ask the Supreme Court to overrule Roe in its entirety. It all smells of ``fixery.'' No wonder Justice Sotomayor asked during oral argument whether the Court will ``survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?''

So, if colleagues want to talk about demolition of the integrity and independence of the Court, then they better have something to say about turning the Supreme Court over to dark money special interests, about special interests capturing the Court to serve their rightwing ``enterprise.'' A captured Court, that is delivering for the special interests that stacked it and helping to keep their secrets has had its integrity and independence pretty well demolished already.

The last gasp of the scoundrels is to pretend that it is Democrats calling out this dark money mess who are the ones undermining the integrity of the Court. They even point to a brief of mine where several colleagues and I quoted to the Court a poll showing that a majority of Americans feel the Court is ``mainly motivated by politics'' and that it ought to be ``restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.''

That is a poll, not a threat.

And the Court better start paying attention to why the American people feel that way, rather than quarreling that anyone that is ``threatening'' or ``bullying'' the Court by pointing that out.

By the way, if threatening is what you want to fuss about, have the decency to be consistent. Here is a quote from FOX News' host Laura Ingraham discussing this actual abortion case after the oral arguments were done.

Forgive my bad language to the pages who are here. I am actually quoting her verbatim.

We have six Republican appointees on this Court after all

the money that has been raised, the Federalist Society, all

these big ``fat cat'' dinners. I'm sorry. I'm pissed about

this. If this Court with six Justices cannot do the right

thing here, the constitutional thing, then I think it's time

to do what Robert Bork said we should do, which is to

circumscribe the jurisdiction of this Court, and if they want

to blow it up, then that's the way to change things finally.

Far from pushing back on that threat to ``blow it up'' and ``change things finally,'' the Senate colleague she was talking to said:

. . . in a heartbeat.

When you are treating an accurate quotation of a poll as a threat and ignoring a public threat to blow up the Court and change things finally--after all the ``fat cat'' money spent on the Federalist Society, no less--forgive me for doubting your sincerity.

As Senator Padilla said in the Judiciary Committee last week, have the decency to be consistent at least.

Justice Alito spent over 98 pages trying and failing to justify overturning the decision protecting these rights--overturning a decision he told the U.S. Senate was an ``important precedent of the Supreme Court.''

His opinion isn't persuasive to me at all as it reads as snide and cruel, but that is not going to stop these Justices from trying to throw us back into an age where women aren't free to make their own choices about their own bodies and their own futures. It looks like the fix went in on that a while ago, and we just weren't told about it in the hearings.

So, tomorrow, the majority leader will bring before this Chamber legislation to protect those rights nationwide, to protect that freedom across this country, and I am eager to vote for it. We have got to stand against this assault on women's constitutional rights, and I hope some Republican colleagues will join us.

Particularly, I hope, in the weeks and months ahead, that we can find ways to unravel the dark money scheme that has brought this Court and our country closer to the brink because the Court that dark money built--it is not done. It is not done trying to reshape America against our will to suit the extreme ideology of the rightwing billionaires behind the scheme.

There is one good thing in all this darkness, and that is that the American people see this nonsense and have had enough.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, if we want friends overseas and if we want a robust world economy, it is important that America plays fair with the rest of the world on climate. Participating in the international climate fund, participating in the Paris accord and the COP agreements, and having a robust national strategy on climate change are all distinctly in our national security and economic interests.

I urge voting no on the Lee motion to instruct, and I further urge that if we want to protect the American consumer, get the heck off of fossil fuel before it drives us into ruin with high prices set by international cartels and massive pollution.

Vote On Motion

Madam President, this is the second shot that has been taken this afternoon at the international climate fund by our friends on the other side.

America is a great and powerful nation, and it is usually good for great and powerful nations not to be a jerk, and therefore sticking up for the countries that are suffering because of climate pollution is something that a great and powerful nation ought to do.

Don't be a jerk and clean up your own messes are two things that I learned as a child. And I think that our national security and our economic advantage are both served by actually supporting the international climate fund and helping the world work its way through the predicament that the fossil fuel industry has foisted on us. I urge a ``no'' vote on this.

Vote on Motion

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following Senators be permitted to speak prior to the scheduled vote: I for up to 15 minutes, Senator Murray for up to 5 minutes, Senator Thune for up to 5 minutes.

Mr. President, this is my 283rd travel to the Senate

floor to ask that we wake up to the threat of climate change--an issue that demands, right now, American leadership. Over the recent recess, I traveled to parts of the world where climate catastrophe looms, and I saw firsthand what the absence of American leadership has cost.

My first stop was to the 2022 Our Oceans Conference in Palau, where I joined President Biden's Special Envoy for Climate, Secretary John Kerry, to discuss the state of our oceans. It was another productive Our Oceans Conference, leading to 410 commitments from around the world, worth $16.35 billion, to fund climate action, reduce plastic pollution, and reduce illegal fishing, among other things. These commitments are, indeed, a hopeful sign.

Palau is a tiny, beautiful ocean nation on the very far side of the Pacific Rim. This archipelago relies almost entirely on the ocean, with tourism as the dominant industry and fishing as a way of life. Palau has a front-row seat to the changes taking place in our ocean. Rising ocean temperatures and sea levels, acidification, disrupted fisheries, more frequent storms--they see and feel these every day.

I have spoken a lot about the amount of heat trapped by greenhouse gas pollution and then absorbed by our oceans. It is equivalent to multiple Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs being detonated in the ocean every second. That is the heat load that we are adding. In the last three decades, our oceans warmed eight times faster than in preceding decades. This is so much heat that you have to measure it using a special super unit of measurement--the zettajoule.

What is a zettajoule? A joule--J-O-U-L-E--is our standard unit of heat energy. A zettajoule is that unit with 21 zeros behind it. Here is a more practical reference: All of the energy used annually by all of the people in all of the world--all of it--adds up to one half--one half--of a zettajoule.

What does this mean for oceans? Scientists tell us that the top 2,000 meters of ocean absorbed a record 227 excess zettajoules of energy from 1981 to 2010. The current rate is to load 14 zettajoules of heat into our oceans every single year, which means we are loading into our oceans every year nearly 30 times more heat than the entire energy use of the entire species on the entire planet.

If you take a look at the segment of our energy use that is produced by fossil fuels, that segment, which is less than half a zettajoule, is creating this effect of 14 zettajoules of heat into the oceans every single year. We are pumping into the oceans nearly 30 times our total global human energy use.

This kind of heat is why coral reefs face mass bleaching and are dying, and, of course, dead reefs threaten the collapse of entire ocean ecosystems. It is not just dying reefs; when water warms, it expands, which means sea levels are rising and will rise by feet in the decades ahead--a big problem for coastal communities everywhere, including Connecticut and Rhode Island.

I landed in Palau on the heels of an unexpected tropical storm-- unseasonal--that grew into a violent typhoon. Climate change makes these storms more frequent, more severe, and more unpredictable, putting coastal infrastructure everywhere under serious threat.

From Palau, I met up with a congressional delegation traveling to India and Nepal--two nations at the center of dire global security risks. Nepal's Himalayan glaciers are the source of much of Asia's freshwater. The Himalayan snowcap is so big, it is described as the Earth's third pole--the North Pole with all of its ice, the South Pole with all of its ice, and the Himalayan glacier with all of its ice. As the planet warms, those Himalayan glaciers shrink away.

Our 1.5-degree Celsius global warming target right now is, in effect, a 2.1-degree Celsius global warming target for the Himalayas. Himalayan glacier mass is expected to drop by more than a third by the end of the century. If the glaciers aren't there to feed the rivers, the rivers don't have the water to flow.

For India, the consequences are deadly serious. According to the U.S. Institute of Peace, losing that glacial flow will spell rampant sickness, hunger, and economic calamity downstream, which could, as they say--I quote them--``in turn, open the door to conflict.'' Well, obviously, if people don't have the water they need to live, they are going to fight over it.

A likely flashpoint is Kashmir, the region between India and Pakistan--two nuclear-armed adversaries. India's Parliament has reported on the challenge climate change poses for distributing scarce Himalayan water among Indian and Pakistani downstream regions. India plans new dams on the Chenab River in Kashmir. Pakistan fears that India will pinch off river flow into Pakistan, perhaps to put economic survival pressure on Pakistan in times of conflict. Suspicions between the two countries of riparian mischief run high, and long memories of conflict linger. Food security, electricity generation, and public safety are all at stake, giving nuclear-armed adversaries a lot to fight over.

So what did we see and feel in India? Scorching heat--109 degrees Fahrenheit at the Taj Mahal. Last week in Delhi, thermometers topped 110 degrees. In Nawabshah, Pakistan, temperatures hit 117\1/2\ degrees. In another area of Pakistan, temperatures exceeded 122 degrees. Try to walk around and work and live outdoors in 122 degrees. It doesn't work. This is the kind of heat where the human body no longer functions properly. It can't cool itself. And, of course, electricity grids fail, and lots of water evaporates.

We discussed these issues with the Nepali Prime Minister and Congress president. Their government is clear-eyed about this problem. Their glaciers are thinning before their eyes. They see it now, they feel it in river flow, and they see it in the risk of glacier collapse, which leads to catastrophic downstream flooding. They feel all these shocks to their region's food supply and every tremor from their neighbors' conflicts. Their message to us is really clear: ``Nepal is ready to join hands with the U.S. on the issue of climate change,'' one of the Nepali Parliamentarians told us, but the United States needs to step up.

Our last stop was Doha in Qatar, where I met with airmen of the Rhode Island Air National Guard and other servicemembers carrying out vital missions in the Middle East at Al Udeid Air Base.

The Defense Department is worried about climate heat compromising its flight operations in places as hot as Doha. It gets hard to operate out on the runways in the kind of heat that climate change is causing, and Doha is hot. You may recall the news a few years ago about Qatar considering air-conditioning the out of doors. DOD's October 2021 Climate Risk Analysis listed rising temperatures affecting flight operations and ``aircraft performance''--``loss of payload capacity, range, and loiter time''--as the military has to schedule for ``too hot to fly'' times of day. For the airmen I met with, out protecting our country, these are real issues now.

The world cries out for Congress to act, to reclaim America's place of leadership on this defining issue of our time. The people of Palau cannot fix the ocean heat on their own. The people of India, Pakistan, and Nepal cannot solve the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers on their own. Our airmen cannot cool the temperatures disrupting their flight operations on their own.

President Clinton once said that the world is always ``more impressed by the power of our [American] example than by [any] example of our [American] power.'' If we are to remain Daniel Webster's city on a hill, we must reflect the power of that good American example beyond our borders. This goes beyond climate change; this goes to the heart of the integrity of the American brand.

At the end of an American century where we rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan and rebuilt Asia with the MacArthur Plan and set the stage for the freedom and peace and economic growth that this American century has produced, we are at risk of squandering that entire reputation as people from Palau to Nepal suffer and experience the consequences of climate change and know perfectly well that America could have and should have led, that America could have and should have done something about this, that America knew what the climate risk was and failed to act, and that the failure is explained by the worst of all possible

reasons: We got rolled by the special interests, the fossil fuel industry, whose conflict of interest is apparent but whose power through dark money and pressure and corruption in this body has disabled us for more than a decade from doing what everyone knows is right.

Our failure and the disgraceful reason for it will be a visible blot on America's standing for decades if we don't act. If we don't act, if we fail, don't think no one will notice. What we are doing is open and notorious, and it is a devastating failure of American leadership.

We must pass a real climate bill now. It is time, as I have said 283 times, to wake up.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I rise again, with my increasingly battered poster, to call on this body and in particular on corporate America to wake up to the threat of climate change.

Just this week, the IPCC report came out saying that we are now at the do-or-die, last-chance moment. The other interesting thing about that IPCC report was that it, for the first time, focused on the role of malicious fossil fuel political influence in preventing the solution.

Political influence is actually contributing to the climate change problem, and it is the scientists who are now pointing this out.

Well, one of the worst expositors of that political influence, the monster in the middle of that political influence campaign here in the United States, is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And I want to talk about them in a minute; but, first, let's do just a quick recap because we have known about climate change for a long time.

Scientists knew about the greenhouse effect back when Abraham Lincoln was riding around Washington in his tophat. In the 1950s--in the 1950s--the oil industry began research on the effects of greenhouse gas pollution. In 1977, nearly a half century ago, Exxon's top scientist warned management of what he called ``general scientific agreement''-- half a century ago, mind you--``general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.''

A Republican-led committee led by my predecessor, John Chafee, held a Senate hearing on climate change in 1986; and in 1989, the Chamber of Commerce--one of the most influential forces in Washington and now one of the biggest lobbyists for fossil fuel interests--the U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a report for business leaders about the threat of climate change.

We have dug out that report because they entered it into the Record in a House proceeding later that day, and here is what that report said. I will quote at some length.

[T]here is qualitative agreement among prognosticators that

sea levels will rise . . . wetlands will flood, salt water

will infuse fresh water supplies, and there will be changes

in the distribution of tree and crop species and agricultural

productivity.

A significant rise in sea levels will flood now inhabitable

land in some countries. . . . These same actions will affect

wetlands and it may not be possible [to] protect both coastal

and wetland areas.

Georgia, very susceptible to this, as the Presiding Officer knows.

Flooding will intrude into water supplies, such as in

coastal cities (e.g., Miami and New Orleans). . . . Changes

in temperature patterns will affect natural ecosystems by

altering the distributions of species, and affecting forestry

and silviculture. . . . [C]rop lands will change. . . . The

stress will depend on changes in precipitation patterns.

Global warming will affect snowfall patterns, hence melt,

and affect water supplies. Most of California's water

supplies are from snow melt and if snow is reduced to rain,

or melts quickly during the winter, water supplies in the

summer will be less than now.

Does any of that sound familiar? Of course. It is what we are looking at around us now, and it is what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce predicted in 1989.

Knowing that, what did the chamber do? I will tell you what the chamber did.

Over the past two decades, every time Congress took up good climate bills, the chamber conspired to kill them.

The reason is pretty simple: The chamber serves as the arm of the fossil fuel industry. It takes its money, and it does its dirty work.

A couple of years ago, a witness at our Special Committee on the Climate Crisis explained how big trade groups like the chamber ``adopt the lowest common denominator positions on climate of their most oppositional members.''

Fossil fuel pays the chamber to kill anything that threatens what the IMF estimates is an over $600 billion annual subsidy for fossil fuel in the United States. On climate, it is not the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; it is the ``U.S. Chamber of Carbon.''

Here are some of the corpses in the chamber's legislative graveyard. In 2005, the chamber opposed bipartisan cap-and-trade legislation. It issued a ``key vote alert,'' a signal that whoever voted in favor of the bill could face an onslaught of political attack ads.

Down the legislation went.

The chamber used the same playbook to kill cap-and-trade bills in 2007, including the aptly named Wake up to Climate Change bill that had started to gain steam until the ``Chamber of Carbon'' dug in against it.

In 2009, the chamber led the charge against the most promising climate bill in decades: the Waxman-Markey bill. The chamber spared no effort killing it. It harangued members, issued more vote alerts, and published ``How They Voted'' scorecards, with a clear message: Cross us and we will come after you.

Since then, the chamber's axis of influence in Congress has refused to hold hearings on, mark up, debate, or vote on any serious climate legislation.

At the same time, the chamber fought climate action in the courts and in executive Agencies. Here are a few of their cadavers there: In 2010, the chamber sued EPA to overturn the finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. Disabling that ``endangerment finding'' would cripple the Agency's ability to regulate carbon pollution under the Clean Air Act.

When courts rejected the chamber lawsuit, the chamber then set up as central command for fossil fuel lawyers, coal lobbyists, and Republican political strategists, who devised the legal schemes to fight climate regulations. This produced another chamber lawsuit to block the Clean Power Plan to reduce carbon pollution from powerplants. And on this occasion, five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court killed the Clean Power Plan using the shadow docket. They didn't even have proper hearings on it.

Once President Trump took office, the chamber began attacking and undoing Obama administration rules limiting carbon pollution. The chamber even funded the phony and debunked report that the Trump administration relied on to justify leaving the Paris accord.

The chamber's climate obstruction has continued across all fronts under President Biden. It released a position paper championing ``clean'' coal, which is right up there next to dry water and chilly heat. And, of course, it led the charge against our reconciliation bill, attacking more than $500 billion in climate-related investments.

To make all this dirty work possible, the chamber weaponized the dark money powers afforded by the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United. The chamber knew the power that this decision would grant them. Indeed, it filed an amicus brief in that case, telling the Court to knock out limits on so-called outside spending.

And Citizens United then allowed outside groups to spend unlimited sums on electioneering activities, which teed up the chamber to funnel roughly $150 million into congressional raises. And they bought a lot of climate denial with that money. It made them the

largest spender of dark money in congressional races.

Dark money talks, as we see every election on our television screens. But every bit as important, dark money threatens.

Republican colleagues have told me how this works. When a Republican dares to engage with Democrats to do something about climate change, a warning shot flies above their head. Chamber dark money and threats killed Republican support for substantial climate legislation.

When I got here in the Senate in 2007, there was a steady heartbeat of bipartisan climate activity, climate bill after climate bill, hearing after hearing. John McCain ran for President as a Republican with a strong climate platform. That all dropped dead in 2010 with that Citizens United dark money power in the hands of the chamber of commerce, which brings us to the present day.

American corporations, today, need to tell consumers and shareholders that they care about climate change. They need to for a couple of reasons. First, some of them actually are getting hurt by climate change--big insurers, the tourism industry, agribusiness. Tropical cyclones, more frequent heat waves, floods and droughts, more intense wildfires, higher sea levels--these things cost American businesses enormous amounts of money. According to NOAA, America sustained over 300 weather- and climate-related disasters since 1980, where the damage in that disaster topped a billion dollars and the total damage among all those disasters is over $2 trillion--$2 trillion lost to uncontrolled climate change, thanks to dark money efforts by the fossil fuel industry and, specifically, its operative, the ``U.S. Chamber of Carbon.''

Of course, consumers expect corporations to face up to the climate threat. The public wants us to do something and big brands like Coke and Pepsi need to say the right things when it comes to climate. And many of these companies have great internal climate policies within the corporation. But then--but then--those companies turn around and they pay dues to the ``U.S. Chamber of Carbon.'' And the chamber--the corporate serial killer of all things climate in this building--goes out and kills the things that the companies say they want.

According to a new report from the watchdog group InfluenceMap, the chamber remains one of the biggest impediments to climate action in America. They said:

There has been no material improvement in the Chamber's

climate change policy engagement over the past five years,

despite its positive ``high-level messaging'' on climate.

InfluenceMap concluded in this report last month:

The organization remains a significant blockage to U.S.

climate policy.

And it is supported by a whole swath of corporate America.

Many of us want a phone call with TechNet, the Silicon Valley trade association. Ten of its members are members of the ``Chamber of Carbon.'' They fund climate denial. They think they are doing the right thing on climate, but they are not. They are paying the biggest monster in the middle of a climate denial operation in this country.

So when Coke and Pepsi pay dues to the ``Chamber of Carbon,'' Coke and Pepsi's corporate net effect on climate legislation goes negative. The chamber keeps secret how much the fossil fuel industry paid it to turn the chamber into a ``worst climate obstructor.'' It has corralled its pro-climate members into what it calls a ``climate conversation'' that has been going on since 2019. I know that because I kicked it off. I thought something good might happen. But what has happened in that climate conversation since 2019 is that anything good on climate gets routed by the chamber into that climate conversation from which nothing serious has emerged in more than 2 years. It is where the good climate policy goes to die. It is the black hole of good climate action.

In the meanwhile, all the climate evil that doesn't get sent to the climate conversation goes straight by and out into chamber operations. At the end, the effect is clear: The ``Chamber of Carbon'' works the will of the fossil fuel industry and blocks climate progress in Congress, and it does so with corporate America's acceptance and financial support.

If the IPC is right that this is last call, that this is dangerous, that this is our make-or-break, do-or-die moment, then it is time for corporate America to tell the ``Chamber of Carbon'' to knock it off or to quit and disassociate themselves from the ``worst climate obstructor'' in America. We should no longer tolerate this.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, before I get underway with the business that brings me to the floor, I would like to take a moment to say farewell and thank you to a member of my staff who is going on to other pursuits. Her name is Leah Seigle. She is right behind me, and she was my scheduler for many, many years.

As every Senator knows, there is a special relationship between a Senator and a scheduler. They have to be on duty, more or less, 24/7 when we are up and about. They have to deal with our day-to-day life and how it integrates with our offices. They very often are close to and involved with our families, because of having to deal with keeping our family time extant and busy schedules.

So I want to say a word of appreciation to Leah.

I don't know how many speeches she has scheduled me here on the floor for--all the ``Scheme'' speeches, probably all of the ``Time to Wake Up'' speeches, and this one today. This one today she actually gets to be here for and doesn't have to watch on television.

So to Leah Seigle, thank you very much, and to schedulers everywhere, you are important to us.

Nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson

Madam President, the reason I am here is to announce my intention to vote for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and to congratulate her on the grace and dignity with which she withstood what Chairman Durbin called her ``trial by ordeal'' in the Judiciary Committee.

Last week, Judge Jackson set the gold standard for patience and courtesy from a Supreme Court nominee. She demonstrated, hour after hour after often-agonizing hour, in plain view the qualities that Rhode Islander and Reagan First Circuit appointee Judge Bruce Selya has praised in her, an outstanding legal mind, an exemplary judiciary temperament, and a depth of experience in the courtroom that none of the sitting Justices possesses.

Judge Jackson reminded us, through her personal story of perseverance and hope, how historic and important it is to have a Black woman about to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. That story of perseverance and hope stretches back beyond Judge Jackson's own life and work into the experience of Black women through American history, and it illuminates a brighter American future. So I will be proud to cast my vote for her confirmation.

During the Judiciary Committee hearing, there were persistent efforts to rewrite Judge Jackson's own history, to assign to her beliefs she has never espoused. She dispensed with those attempts so effectively that I won't dwell on them here. But there were other attempts in that hearing to rewrite history that I feel obliged to correct here today.

The first is the notion that a Justice must have a ``judicial philosophy.'' That is news to me. If a nominee has a judicial philosophy, it is definitely fair game. It is important to explore that, and it is particularly important to explore that because predisposition can come masked as judicial philosophy. But I don't see where a nominee has to have one, and I would actually suggest we are better off if judges don't, because judicial philosophy can so easily be code for predisposition.

Republicans persisted in that ``judicial philosophy'' quest, asking about ``judicial philosophy'' over 50 times. The favored theme appeared to be the so-called judicial philosophies of originalism and textualism, doctrines which illustrate my concern about predisposition.

The big, dark money donors who ushered the last three Justices onto the Supreme Court love the backward look of originalism. A backward look to an era when industry regulation did not exist because big industry did not exist. Moreover, Republican Justices completely ignore originalism when it suits them. As I pointed out in committee, the entire vast structure of corporate political power in America erected by Republican Justices over years is a continuing affront to originalism.

There was no corporate role in politics in the Constitution or the Philadelphia debates or the Federalist papers. Any of the customary wellsprings of originalism would say that this is a country to be run by we the people. But how happy--how happy--corporate political power makes big Republican donors. So originalism goes out the window, and corporate power gets baked into our system.

Unlike those judicial philosophies of predisposition and of convenience, Judge Jackson said her judicial philosophy is her methodology--``consistently appl[y]'' the ``same level of analytical rigor'' to a case ``no matter who or what is involved in the legal action.'' For a judge, following your oath of office, the constitutional precedents of the Court, and the text of the Constitution itself should suffice. You don't need a judicial philosophy.

So where did this Republican fascination with judicial philosophy come from? Here are talking points distributed by twinned rightwing, dark money influence groups, the so-called Independent Women's Law Center and the affiliated so-called Independent Women's Voice. These groups are tied in with Leonard Leo's massive, secretive $580 million- plus archipelago of front groups, like these, that make up the rightwing donors' Court-capture operation.

They sent these talking points to Republican Senators even before Judge Jackson was selected. These dark money groups noted that ``this nominee is likely to be a woman of color'' and urged the Republicans not argue, ``that the president's selection process led him to choose someone who may not be the best person for the job.''

They said:

It is . . . important that you focus not on the selection

process or on the nominee's paper qualifications, but rather

on the need to learn more about the nominee's judicial

philosophy.

The marching orders were clear, and 50 efforts at ``judicial philosophy'' discussion later, we saw these talking points play out in that hearing.

This rewrite of history, to presume that every nominee should have a judicial philosophy, just because rightwing nominees have a fake judicial philosophy of originalism that turns out to be sourced to rightwing dark money talking points, it seems to me to be an effort to erase the dangers of having a judicial philosophy, particularly a judicial philosophy that masks predisposition and is selectively applied.

Another rewrite of history came through the witness chosen to highlight Judge Jackson's amicus brief defending a 2000 Massachusetts law establishing buffer zones for protests around abortion clinics.

The witness was a sidewalk counselor, someone who encourages women not to go in and exercise their rights. She seemed like a very nice woman, and she testified that she acted with compassion and love. But history and

my experience don't align with that image of clinic protesters, as I recall personally.

Crowds outside of clinics in Rhode Island in those years leading up to the 2000 law were hostile and intimidating, screaming and accusing of murder, to the point where patients coming in required security escorts to protect them.

I remember pink sweatshirts that safety escorts wore outside Planned Parenthood so that patients could identify who was there to help them and then pass safely.

Activists went back and forth between Massachusetts and Rhode Island to protest outside of clinics.

On the morning of December 30, 1994, bad went to worse. A man walked into a pair of abortion clinics in Brookline, MA. At the first clinic, he shot and killed the receptionist with a modified semiautomatic rifle, then turned on others present--patients, their accompanying partners, staff. He left that clinic and traveled to the second clinic and there continued the slaughter. The man killed two people and wounded five others in this rampage, which shook New England to the core.

I was the U.S. attorney when word came out of these shootings at clinics just 1 hour up the road and that the shooter was still at large. I thought Rhode Island might very well be next. So I went and stood outside the Planned Parenthood clinic just off the highway with my friend and Federal law enforcement colleague U.S. Marshal Jack Leyden, and we stood there on that cold morning until a police cruiser could be posted outside.

I will just say that the environment that led to Massachusetts' buffer zone law passing in 2000 was not an atmosphere of compassion and love, and it is a disservice to the facts to try to rewrite history and pretend that it was.

Another rewrite of history that took place in this hearing was a rewrite of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.

The Judiciary Committee had been provided evidence in those hearings that young Brett Kavanaugh was an out-of-control drinker with a bad history of behavior around women--most particularly the testimony of this woman that she had been physically assaulted as a young woman.

You would never know of her testimony from the history rewrite offered by Republicans in the recent hearings. You would never know that she came to the Judiciary Committee; that she testified under oath and intense public scrutiny; that she weathered the attentions of a professional prosecutor hired by the Republicans; that she was calm and credible.

And you would never know that the FBI tanked its supplemental background investigation into these allegations, including a tip line whose tips received zero FBI investigation. I have described it before as a tip dump, not a tip line.

The tips related to the nominee were segregated from the regular stream of tips in the FBI tip line and sent, without investigation, to the White House.

Republicans sought to erase all of that by rewriting Kavanaugh hearing history during this Supreme Court hearing. Well, she has a face and she has a name: Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.

And the big rewrite--the big rewrite is to ignore all the evidence that our Supreme Court is now a captured Court, captured in the same way that Agencies and Commissions are sometimes captured by big special interests.

There is a whole literature in administrative law, there is a whole literature in economics about Agency capture or regulatory capture.

Well, even before the Trump Presidency, big, powerful, rightwing donor interests began spending massive sums of money to install Justices on the Supreme Court whom they expected to rule reliably in their favor.

Very often, as the Presiding Officer knows, if you can pick the judges, you can pick the winner.

The 5-to-4 and now 6-to-3 Republican majority on the Court has been steadily delivering for those big donors; over 80--eight, zero--80 5- to-4 partisan wins for big corporate and partisan donor interests under Chief Justice Roberts.

In those 5-to-4 partisan decisions, by the way, where there was an identifiable Republican donor interest involved, it wasn't just the 80 decisions that stood out; it was the fact that the score was 80-to-0. Every single one went their way.

Dark money lurked behind the Federalist Society turnstile that picked the Justices. Dark money lurked behind the secretive Agency down the hall from the Federalist Society that ran the ads for them. Dark money lurks behind the flotillas of front group amici curiae that tell the Justices, in orchestrated chorus, how to rule.

You would never know any of this from our Republican friends in the committee.

But the American people have seen those decisions, and more and more they understand that the Court is rigged; that it is now the Court that dark money built.

Judge Jackson, by contrast, is a walking reminder of what the Court ought to be. She didn't pass through the dark money-funded turnstile at the Federalist Society. She arrived after a lifetime of accomplishment, against unimaginable odds, through a fair and honest selection process, through her merit and abilities.

The attacks on her in the committee were unseemly, but there is no need to dwell on that because at the end of the day, they were sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Judge Jackson will excel on the Supreme Court, and I will proudly cast my vote to put her there.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.