Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S.

Res. 451 regarding Max Cleland submitted earlier today.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 452, submitted earlier today.

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

Mr. President, I understand there is a bill at the desk that is due for a second reading.

In order to place the bill on the calendar under the provisions of rule XIV, I would object to further proceedings.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 9:30 a.m., Wednesday, November 17; 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 Nelson nomination.

For the information of the Senate, there will be two rollcall votes at 10 a.m. on cloture on the Nelson nomination and cloture on the motion to proceed to the NDAA.

If there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it stand adjourned under the provisions of S. Res. 451 and do so as a further mark of respect honoring the life and legacy of the late Senator Max Cleland.

Mr. President, I rise today to discuss again the scheme by rightwing donor interests to capture

and control our Supreme Court, just like big industries have captured and controlled regulatory agencies through history.

In these speeches, I have covered the origins, motivations, and central players in the scheme; and, today, I am here to respond to a little bit of counterprogramming from the scheme.

So, obviously, Job 1, if you have captured an agency, is to pretend it is not captured; it is still legit.

Well, on Thursday, the minority leader, Senator McConnell, one of the principal operatives of the court capture scheme, traveled to The Heritage Foundation, one of the central dark-money groups in the court capture scheme, to toast Justice Clarence Thomas, one of the most ardent justices in pursuing the scheme's donors' goals and purposes.

Senator McConnell opened by lauding Justice Thomas for his campaign to overturn decades of precedent protecting women's constitutional right to abortion. That is an important point to note because the court is set to take up not one but two cases offering the new 6-3 Republican majority a chance to tear down Roe v. Wade.

But his other mission was to defend the court capture scheme, and that is an important mission right now because the court just hit an all-time low on Gallup's national approval survey. According to a poll out this month by one of the most respected pollsters in the country, about two-thirds of Americans think politics guides the Supreme Court's decisions. And that is not a partisan opinion. Republicans and Democrats share that view in equal proportion.

And Americans aren't wrong. When big Republican donor interests come before the Court, they win--it looks like every time. I have shown the pattern. I have published an article on it. It is currently at 80 to 0. Lawyers would love to take evidence like that--an 80-to-0 record--into court as pattern evidence of bias.

So when the evidence is bad, what do you do? You blow smoke. There is an old, old propaganda technique of accusing your adversary of the exact wrong you are committing. It is such an old propaganda technique that it even has a Latin name: the ``tu quoque fallacy,'' from the Latin for ``you too.'' The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as ``retorting a charge upon one's accuser.'' It is a rhetorical trick.

At Heritage, Senator McConnell used this rhetorical trick, retorting a charge that critics like me of what has happened to the Court were trying to politicize the Court. Now, that is a particularly tricky version of this rhetorical trick because it is an accusation of something that we did not do, coming from people who actually did that.

We have all seen in plain view the mischief done by Senate Republicans to capture the Court for big special interests. They weren't even subtle. So the ``tu quoque'' rhetorical trick says to accuse us of what they did.

The Republican leader's rhetorical charge stood on a Supreme Court brief that I wrote, along with a number of my colleagues. And in that brief, we quoted a Quinnipiac poll. That Quinnipiac poll showed that a majority of American voters believe the Court is--and I quote the poll here--``motivated mainly by politics''--``motivated mainly by politics'' and the poll continued that those voters believed the Supreme Court should be--and, here, I am quoting the poll-- ``restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.'' That is the language from the poll question. And in our brief, we quoted it precisely.

In his telling, Senator McConnell leaves out the quotation marks and turns what was essentially an uncontested observation of fact of what that poll said, using the language of that poll, into what the rightwing has constantly replayed and cooked up as a threat to the Court. He also suggested that I had called for expansion of the Court, which I have actually not done. But never let the facts get in the way of a good story, huh?

In his telling, the majority leader's telling, it is Democrats who are up to no good at the Court. Let's look at what that telling leaves out because it masks a lot.

First, it masks the Court's partisan record, the record I have described: Justice Thomas and his fellow Republican appointees in the 5-to-4 and now 6-to-3 majority on the Robert's Court has handed down over 80 partisan 5-to-4 decisions benefiting easily identified Republican donor interests. Like I said, by my reckoning, it is an 80- to-0 record for the big donors. His telling masks all of that.

It also masks the entire Republican Court-packing operation that yielded three donor-selected Justices and hundreds of lower court judges during the Trump Presidency.

It masks the big donors' nominations turnstile at the Federalist Society, where they decided who would and would not become a Justice. It was insourced to the White House for it to vet and select Trump nominees.

It masks the dark money political attack groups, which used massive anonymous donations to apply political pressure on behalf of the donors' nominees.

And it masks Leonard Leo and the shady $250 million web of dark money groups outed by the Washington Post for packing and influencing the Court.

What else does it mask? It masks the influence operation built to steer those Justices' attention to rightwing donor priorities.

It masks the armada of amici curiae--so-called friends of the court-- appearing before the Court by the orchestrated dozen, funded by dark money.

It masks the dark money front groups that comb the country for cases that can catapult selected controversies before the Court to help the Justices change precedent; it masks the special interest fast lane those front groups have established to get cases quickly before the Court, a fast lane the Court indulges; and it masks the hot house dark money so-called think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation where Senator McConnell spoke, where legal theories benefiting Big Donor interests are planted and watered and fertilized and propagated for the Court to adopt.

And, last, it masks what Republicans did, shredding norms and rules that the Senate had long relied on to manage judicial nominations, the scrapping of the Supreme Court filibuster; the scrapping of the circuit court blue slip; the acceptance of preposterous assertions of executive privilege to hide nominees' records; the refusal to grant Merrick Garland so much as courtesy visits, let alone a hearing; the invention of the so-called Garland rule about not confirming Justices near an election; the mad rush to confirm Brett Kavanaugh under the cloud of barely examined sexual assault allegations; and then the hypocritical full 180 reversing that so-called Garland rule to jam a rightwing Justice onto the Court 8 days before an election.

This was all done in plain view. This was not subtle. You have got to be gaslighting really hard to not pay attention to all that evidence.

I will tell you what, we weren't the only ones watching. The American people are watching, and they are fed up with all of this. They trust their noses, and they know this reeks.

Senator McConnell and I do agree on one thing. There are, as he said, ``storm clouds'' swirling around the Court.

I also agree with him when he said this; he said:

One of our country's two major political movements has

decided they're fed up with trying to win the contest of

ideas within the institutions the framers left us and would

rather take aim at the institutions themselves.

That statement is exactly true. It is just that Senator McConnell got exactly wrong which party is the guilty one. Against that litany of interference and influence and dark money all around the Court that I just described, one misquote from a brief--it is not even a contest.

Here is a final quotation to set next to Senator McConnell's. It comes from Lewis Powell a few months before he took his seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. In a memo he wrote to one of the most significant forces in Republican politics, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce--a memo, by the way, that was never disclosed to the Senate during his confirmation proceedings. Here is what he wrote:

Under our constitutional system, especially with an

activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most

important instrument for social, economic and political

change.

Powell branded the courts a major element of what he called ``The Neglected Political Arena'' that Big Business and rightwing ideologues should

move in and exploit. Exploiting that is exactly what the rightwing donor scheme is. It enmired the Court in dark money influence. It packed the judiciary with judges selected to rule in the big donors' favor. It won an 80-to-0 rout of partisan decisions benefiting Big Donor interests. And it is steering the Court to protect the dark money that was the prime vehicle for capturing the Court in the first place.

Oh, yes, indeed, the Court has been politicized, but look at the evidence. We weren't the ones who did it, and no amount of smoke can obscure the evidence of how this Court became the Court that dark money built.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I have 11 requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders.

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

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, as we go over the wonderful things that Build Back Better offers--including tax benefits for families with children, support for home care and childcare for family members, lower prescription drug costs--I want to focus on a particular area, which is the addiction crisis, which grinds on in Rhode Island. I think every Member of this body knows a family who has been touched by this crisis.

I remember visiting the small town of Burrillville, RI, a close-knit community. People know one another there. On January 1, 2015, no one would have known that half a dozen people would die in Burrillville of drug overdoses in the next 3 months. That went through that community just in a heartbreaking wave, and it remains burdened by addiction and overdose.

We have made a lot of gains since then. The CARA bill that Senator Portman and I did, CARA 2.0, which was baked into the SUPPORT Act, shifted the way we think about addiction so we don't see it as a moral failing. We recognize its medical nature. We recognize, frankly, the noble nature of the path to recovery that people have to walk. We invested in prevention and education and treatment.

But still there is a massive gap that remains between the needs of families who have a member who is facing addiction and the care and support that we give them, and Build Back Better makes some really important steps for those families--first, for new mothers in recovery.

A new mom has a lot going on: caring for a newborn, coping with a potential substance abuse complication for that newborn, and caring for herself in her often deadly battle with addiction. Build Back Better would grow the workforce specializing in that care for moms.

The Medicaid Reentry Act, which I did with Senator Baldwin, is also in the mix to provide Medicaid coverage to people as they get out of jail and prison. We showed in Rhode Island that these programs dramatically reduce overdoses and deaths in the weeks following release from incarceration. Steady access to care through Medicaid will save lives.

There is a boost to the Minority Fellowship Program because it is demonstrable that a more diverse workforce produces better outcomes for patients and families.

Finally, the peer recovery coach is a personal favorite of mine. We are pioneering this in Rhode Island. These are people who have walked the path of addiction and recovery, and they can relate to people who are struggling in a way that you and I might not be able to. Their role, after an overdose or in a crisis, to get people onto the path of recovery is wonderfully important.

All of the other things we are doing will actually create more stable lives. When events happen that knock people off of the path of recovery, having a stable life actually allows for a better shot at recovery and work around relapse.

So there is a lot to love in Build Back Better, and I want people to know that we did not forget those folks who are struggling with addiction or walking the noble path of recovery.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I want to talk a moment about my REDUCE Act, which is the act to reduce plastic pollution, of which we have a lot.

Humans have created 8 billion tons of plastic, and it is all over the place. It is in our water. It is in our rivers. It is in our food. The Presiding Officer is from Colorado. As he knows, there was a study done that tested the rain falling in Colorado that showed that there were microplastics in the raindrops in Colorado.

So we have a plastics problem, and this is a bill whose intention is to solve that plastics problem.

I want to have you think about three numbers while I am making this speech: 2 percent, 10 percent, and 2050; 2 percent, 10 percent, and 2050.

What is 2 percent? Two percent is how much recycled plastic the plastics industry uses in single-use, disposable, throwaway plastic.

We had a hearing in the Environment and Public Works Committee, led by Chairman Carper. We had witnesses in who were experts. They said it is actually less than 2 percent. So the plastics industry is comfortable with a business model in which they are only using recycled plastic for less than 2 percent of their production of single-use, disposable stuff.

They will then say: Well, yeah, but we don't need to worry about that because then it goes into the recycling bin.

Well, first of all, that is not much help if you are only going to use 2 percent recycled plastic in your plastic manufacturing and then 98 percent is all new fossil fuel-based plastic.

But here we get to the second number, 10 percent. When you put plastic in that blue bin and send it out to be recycled, less than 10 percent of that plastic actually gets recycled. Some people have said 6 percent. Some people have said 8 percent. Some people have said 9 percent. But pretty much everybody agrees that less than 10 percent of what you put in the recycling bin to recycle ever gets recycled. And the plastics industry is cool with that too.

The plastics industry is cool with 2 percent recycling content in their throughput, in their supply, and they are comfortable with 90 percent or more of your recycled plastics sent out in the blue bins never being recycled.

This brings me to the third number, 2050. Twenty-fifty is the year which, on present trends, will produce the following state of affairs: There will be more waste plastic floating in the Earth's oceans by mass than there will be living fish. That is the trajectory we are on with an industry that is totally content to use only 2 percent recycled plastic in its production and to have the recycling system recycle less than 10 percent of the plastic that goes in. That is where we end up by 2050. And if we are content in this room to confer on our children and grandchildren a world in which there is more waste plastic floating around than there is living fish, then shame on us.

This is a trajectory we have to change, and my bill will change it. But, of course, the plastic industry doesn't love this. They are happy with using only 2 percent recycled plastic in their production. They are happy with less than 10 percent of recycled plastic in the blue bin ever getting recycled. They don't seem to give a red hot damn about the trajectory we are on with where we are going to be with waste plastic in the oceans. But they obviously care a lot about the bill because if you lived in Washington, DC, and you got the Washington Post on Wednesday, September 22, you got this little gem tucked in your newspaper on the front. It is a very glossy, multicolored handout, and it says:

Stop the plastic tax. Keep everyday goods affordable.

And then it shows a whole bunch of everyday goods: a bicycle helmet, reusable plastic containers that you use in your refrigerator to put stuff away when you are putting it back in the fridge, sneakers, a plastic child's toy, and a baby diaper.

Not one of those things is covered by our plastics tax--not one of them--not personal hygiene products like a diaper and not multiuse products like a child's toy or a sneaker or a bicycle helmet or the plastic containers that you store stuff in in your refrigerator.

If you flip it over, they go at it even further. There is a child's baby seat. There is solar paneling. There is a toothbrush. There is a cellphone. And there is a little package of tomatoes in Saran wrap in one of those foam Styrofoam containers.

The one thing on this whole page that this plastics pollution fee would touch is that disposable bit of foam. And if you would rather have that in the ocean instead of being recycled, fine; vote against this bill. But if you would like to see that kind of junk get properly disposed of, you need to support the act.

So why do you think the industry got this so wrong? Bicycle helmets, children's toys, car seats, toothbrushes? Do you think they actually didn't know what was in the bill or is it possible that they are just lying about the bill? And what conclusion do you draw when an industry is lying about a piece of legislation? The conclusion that I draw is that they know they would lose if they argued on the truth, and so they lie.

And they spent a lot of money on this. This is, you know, glossy. This is multicolor. We in politics, we send out mailers. This is not inexpensive. You put this onto every Washington Post--that is a big deal. They flooded the DC metropolitan area with this glossy pack of lies.

So let's just take a quick look at some of the stuff that they have been saying. Their myth is that the REDUCE Act affects all plastic products. No. Read the bill. It is a fee on single-use plastics that targets the fossil fuel companies that make the fossil fuel feedstock for those single-use disposable plastic products.

All you have to do is read the bill to see that. I don't know how we could make that any clearer. We specifically exempt anything other than single-use disposable plastics.

Further, if it is a single-use disposable plastic that is used in healthcare, that is used in hospitals, in patient treatments, we understand that; we exempt that too. It is the plastic spoons and the straws and the wrapping and the foam containers and all the rest of that junk that you can walk down any beach in America and see; that is the junk we are trying to see gets properly recycled by charging a fee on the people who are throwing this stuff out into the environment and not recycling it--or at least 98 percent not recycling it.

Here is the other myth: The REDUCE Act disadvantages U.S. businesses; we will fail in international competition if we do this.

Not true. If you are importing plastic, you have to pay just the same way as if you used U.S.-made plastic. This is a fee on plastic that touches the U.S. economy if it is going to be single-use disposable, and we are going to need to think about recycling it. It applies to any company doing business in the United States and imports from foreign companies. So that is another made-up myth.

And the last one, which is really--maybe it is designed to annoy me, but it is that the fee on plastics to encourage recycling would actually harm our climate; that this is an anti-climate piece of legislation.

The fact of the matter is that by the middle of the century, plastics will account for about a quarter of global oil consumption. This is what the fossil fuel industry is banking on for its future as we start driving electric cars that are nicer than internal combustion cars and cheaper and easier to maintain.

By 2030, greenhouse gas emissions from new plastics production will reach 1.3 billion tons--1.3 billion tons--which is equivalent to running 300 coal-fired powerplants. That doesn't sound to me much like sustainability.

This REDUCE Act is a fair and sensible and effective response to plastic pollution that is filling up our oceans, our rivers, and even our raindrops. The costs will be paid by the fossil fuel industry where the profit is made.

And by the way, when they try to push that cost down to consumers, good luck, ExxonMobil, telling Coca-Cola: We are raising our prices to you. Coca-Cola and all of its beverage companies have got pretty significant market clout, and they might just say: Not so fast, pal; you eat that cost. This is your mess; you clean it up.

Anyway, it is a good discussion to have because 2 percent of the plastics stream being recycled, 10 percent or less of plastic in the blue bins ever actually being recycled, and an ocean that has equal parts waste plastic and fish in it by 2050 is not acceptable.

I yield the floor.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, I return to the Senate floor to again discuss the scheme to capture our Supreme Court; in this case, it will be through the lens of how recent Justices got on the Court. And I will choose Brett Kavanaugh.

I think we all remember the famous list--the Federalist Society list--that Donald Trump promised to follow in Supreme Court appointments. The first interesting thing about Brett Kavanaugh is that he was not on the list of candidates that Donald Trump had offered up-- this list that bought peace between house of Trump and house of Koch. Trump had promised he would appoint off that scheme-approved Federalist Society list. He didn't, and yet no one complained. That is a telltale right there.

There was no complaining because Brett Kavanaugh knew this terrain. He knew the central operative at the heart of this scheme, Leonard Leo. He had worked on judicial nominations in the Bush White House with Leonard Leo, who coordinated big donors' support for judicial nominees.

I have described before a judge who bemoaned to me what he called his colleagues auditioning--auditioning for higher office, auditioning for the Supreme Court. ``Auditioning'' was a telltale word that stuck with me. You don't audition without someone to audition to. Well, Kavanaugh knew the guy at the center of the scheme, and he knew that the donor turnstile to the Supreme Court was run out of the Federalist Society.

So Kavanaugh not only auditioned with Leo; he auditioned at the Federalist Society. And no one auditioned harder than Brett Kavanaugh. As a circuit judge, he campaigned through 27 Federalist Society events. I think he set the record for auditioning at Federalist Society events. He knew who, and he knew where. And he also knew what the big donors wanted. So he made sure his circuit-court opinions signaled his chops.

On abortion, Garza v. Hargan, OK to force a teenager to wait indefinitely for an abortion as the clock ran; check.

On guns, Heller v. District of Columbia, a dissent in the follow-up case to the Supreme Court Heller decision--in his case, one even more extreme than Scalia; check.

For polluters, PHH v. CFPB, waving the Federalist Society's unitary executive banner, even saying that regulatory agencies are a significant threat--I am quoting him here, regulatory agencies, the things that protect us from pollution and cheaters, are a ``significant threat to individual liberty,'' if you are a polluter; check.

And most important to this dark money scheme, EMILY's List v. FEC, where he said the front groups ``are constitutionally entitled to raise and spend unlimited money in support of candidates for elected office'' because it is ``implausible that contributions to independent expenditure political committees are corrupting.'' Yeah, how could that possibly be corrupting? Check.

So this is behavior. In nature, when you see behavior, you can draw conclusions. When you see, for instance, a vulture wheeling, you can expect something dead below. It is not always true; the vulture may just be wheeling in an updraft eddy. But when you get a number of vultures wheeling, it is pretty reliable that there is something dead below. And when so many judges start auditioning for advancement that their behavior acquires a name from other judges, you can be pretty sure there is an audience for their auditioning.

And Kavanaugh knew that audience. His relationship with Leonard Leo, his hustling of Federalist Society events, his insider knowledge of the Republican selection process and the big donors, and his ardent display of his wares in all the ways big donors would want, was a winning combination.

So Leonard Leo hand-walked him around the Trump Federalist Society list and straight to the top of the judicial selection pile, and no one with a hand in the Trump-Koch deal that spawned the Federalist Society list voiced an objection.

Kavanaugh had auditioned his way around the list, and the scheme could not have been happier with the outcome. All of that behavior is telling. There is a scheme, and Kavanaugh knew how to play it.

Now that the scheme had its man, they would fight for him. They did not know how hard the fight would be, until Dr. Christine Blasey Ford came forward with a tale of youthful sexual assault by Kavanaugh and a drunken buddy.

But even before that, there were telltales of the pressure to get Kavanaugh onto the Court. Thousands of pages of records from his White House days were withheld; blank pages stamped ``Constitutional Privilege'' were presented to us on the committee. They couldn't even bring themselves to call it ``executive privilege,'' the claim was so far-fetched. ``Constitutional Privilege'' was an invented phrase, but they knew no Republican would object.

The pressure was on. The play had been signaled. The money behind the scheme was the money behind the Republican Party, so Democrats could complain, but the Republican wall would hold. All our objections and requests would be overruled.

Another example of signaling from nature, you can tell a lot about the wind by looking at the water, as sailors know. You don't have to feel it; you can understand the wind by looking at the water. Little wavelets show where gusts of wind can be found on a still day. The water darkens where there are stronger puffs on windy days. As the wind grows, the waves grow bigger, and then whitecaps form. And as the wind strengthens more, wind lines appear--Langmuir circulation, the scientists call it--aligned with the wind's direction. And in a full gale, spindrift, foam from the tops of the waves--spindrift blows off the wave tops.

In the same way that you can tell a lot about the pressure of the wind by looking at the behavior of the water, you can tell a lot about the pressure of the scheme by looking at the behavior of the Republicans--particularly in the gale-force controversy over Dr. Blasey Ford's testimony. By all rights, in any normal world, Kavanaugh would have been withdrawn. The fact that he wasn't is a telling signal of pressures afoot.

Allegations of sexual violence motivate domestic violence and victims groups, groups which Senators do not ordinarily choose to cross.

Is one judge worth that? Why not just pick another?

Yet they went forward--another telling signal of the pressure.

Senators usually prize their chance to question Supreme Court nominees, yet Republicans gave that up to a female prosecutor sent to disarm Dr. Blasey Ford's testimony--yet another signal.

Of course that didn't work. The witness's testimony was clear and credible. The female prosecutor was sent packing. Republican Senators were left in the touchy position of having to disbelieve Dr. Blasey Ford without any basis for disbelieving her.

Yet only one Republican Senator buckled--another signal. Senator Flake demanded some investigation, and here, the gale force pressure kicked in. This could not go on. Kavanaugh was too great a prize. The FBI was pressured to do a fake investigation. That is a fire alarm of a signal.

We saw many signs of things awry. For a while, early on, the FBI became impervious to information. To put it mildly, that is not the FBI's customary disposition. An FBI that suddenly becomes impervious to information is quite a signal. The FBI was told which few witnesses could be interviewed. The interviews were cursory and terse.

Other witnesses who came forward were ignored or turned away. Even when Dr. Blasey Ford and other witnesses were trolled by the ``flying monkeys'' of the far right so venomously that Dr. Blasey Ford had to stop teaching, had to leave her home, had to hide herself under the protection of a security detail, witnesses still tried to come forward. So ultimately, under pressure, the FBI announced a tip line for witnesses to contact, but the tip line was a fake.

The FBI has procedures for things, and it has tip line procedures. The FBI did not follow its tip line procedures. It appears the FBI did not follow up on any of the tips that came in on the Kavanaugh tip line. Instead, the FBI routed the Kavanaugh-related tips to the White House Counsel's Office for a decent burial.

We on the committee were ultimately allowed, in a classified setting--classified setting--2 hours of what you could call speed dating with documents to look through pile after pile of documents--no notes allowed, no photos allowed, no copies allowed. One of those piles, though, was tip line results, so we know that tips came in.

The FBI admits thousands of tips came in. None were followed up.

FBI statements at the time said they were following standard procedure. What they meant by that, which they later admitted, is that in background investigations, they are agents of the White House and under White House political direction, so their regular procedures did not apply. The standard procedure they said they were following was the procedure of not following the standard procedures, if you can get around that verbal somersault.

What the FBI did not say is that, aside from standard investigative procedures they did not follow, there are also standard FBI procedures for background investigations. The FBI is a procedure-bound institution. We are still digging and we are going to keep digging, but it looks like they didn't follow those background investigation procedures either.

For apparently the first and only time in a background investigation, I believe an FBI ``investigation'' was put under the operational control of the White House so that the White House could craft, with the FBI, the appearance of an FBI investigation without any real investigating. The kind of pressure it takes to do that is intense. That is gale force. That is the spindrift flying. It takes a gale of pressure to have the FBI violate so many of its own procedures, to meekly go along with the White House's abuse of the FBI's longstanding reputation for thoroughness and integrity. That is the kind of gale- force pressure the scheme can mount. The scheme had to have its prize.

Republicans even turned their guns on polite, honorable, bipartisan Dianne Feinstein. She was accused of a corrupt plot to sandbag Kavanaugh. Senator Feinstein is not capable of such a thing, and everyone knows it, so this attack on her was yet another signal.

There was a new narrative to impose. Kavanaugh becomes the victim, wicked Democrats become the wrongdoers, Dr. Blasey Ford and her testimony get swept aside, and, in a well-whipped stampede of partisan tribal anger and grievance, Kavanaugh sweeps onto the Court.

Another signal that I am still seeing now is the effort of rightwing media to cover this all up. After Senator Coons and I pressed the FBI on this bogus investigation, the National Review and other rightwing outlets immediately published articles to tidy things up. Their main source seems to be a former Republican Judiciary staffer who tweeted and then deleted ``Unfazed and determined. We will confirm Judge Kavanaugh'' just a few days after the Blasey Ford investigation came to light, before this so-called investigation was concluded.

The coverup article suggests three things: First, hey, we had a chance to read all of the over 4,500 tips the FBI received; second, there was a 400- or a 600---it varies depending on the article--page FBI report assessing the tips and exonerating Kavanaugh that was circulated to all Senators, and all we had to do was read it; and third, that had there been anything wrongful or incriminating or derogatory that was found, it could have been referred for further investigation.

Let's look at those three claims.

First, this ``open access'' to those documents was the 2-hour window I was talking about where we could go in and speed-date with raw FBI documents in piles and interview reports--again, no notes, no copies, no pictures; just piles of documents in a room we had to walk through and clear out of--and if we wanted, we could return to review the documents when votes on cloture and confirmation were ongoing. I am not making that up.

The supposed report, this 400- or 600- or whatever page report, is actually a 28-page document compiled by Republican Senate Judiciary Committee staff, not the FBI, with hundreds of pages of attachments to thicken it up. Those 28 pages are pure political whitewash that cast aside the credible claims offered to the FBI for further investigation but altogether ignored. Saying that this Republican committee report-- so-called--was available to Senate Democrats is like saying we should have turned on FOX News for the lowdown on these tips--not actually.

As to the idea that we could have referred anything suspicious for further examination, I really don't know what these rightwing outlets are talking about. If they meant the FBI, that is not true. The FBI and the White House had agreed that the investigation was over as far as they were concerned. If they mean the Senate Judiciary Committee, that is as laughable as the 28-page whitewash.

One last signal here. The FBI continues to dodge questions about this investigation. It was over 2 years ago that Senator Coons and I asked simple, direct questions about the tip line. Only this summer did we receive the first smidgeon of a response. The response deflected us to an MOU between the White House and the FBI, which, when we dug around and found it, which we had to do ourselves, proved not to substantiate what we were being told. So we repeated our questions and repeated our questions, and last week, Director Wray appeared in Senate Judiciary and promised answers in 2 weeks. We will see.

As a prosecutor, I know those cases where you can't go forward, for a victim, with charges. There could be innumerable reasons, but sometimes you just can't. In those unfortunate cases, it can matter a great deal to the victim that she at least got an honest and thorough investigation of her claim. Dr. Blasey Ford was denied even that. The FBI sacrificed her to the gale-force political pressure applied by the scheme to get this well-auditioned nominee into place.

And let's get real. You don't apply gale-force political pressure for judges who are just going to call balls and strikes. Four hundred million dollars--$400 million--has been spent in dark money on this Court-capture scheme. For $400 million, you don't want balls and strikes. You want judges who will throw the game for you. You want what you paid for--a captured Court. And if you look at its track record, that is this Court. It is the Court that dark money built, and it is delivering.

To be continued.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, just yesterday, the world's scientists offered an unequivocal warning to us about the condition of our planet. Every single one of us has a home State university that teaches climate science, and if we ask them, they will confirm that warning; and yet we relentlessly subsidize the fossil fuel industry, which floats already on a $600 billion annual subsidy in this country, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Enough is enough. Our grid operators almost everywhere do a good job with reliability, and we have just added billions of dollars to improve grid reliability.

There is no reason whatsoever to put another thumb on the scales for this already heavily subsidized industry when most of these blackouts and brownouts are driven by extreme weather caused by the climate change from their pollution.

I urge a ``no'' vote.

Mr. President, a short word on dark money. When the Republican justices on the Supreme Court opened the floodgates of unlimited money in the disgraceful Citizens United decision, that suddenly made something new very important, and that was to hide who you are when you are spending the money.

If the biggest check you can write is $5,000, there is no great premium in hiding who you are. When you can write a $5 million check to back a candidate, suddenly hiding who you are becomes extremely valuable and salient.

So, suddenly, this became very real. But those Justices who had opened the door to unlimited money, when they made that decision, in order to justify that decision, they had to say that the spending had to be transparent. Otherwise, the Citizens United decision would not have worked in the constitutional scheme. They had to say that.

But for the next decade, what did they do about it? Case after case came before them where the dark money problem was raised. We rode through a billion dollars in dark money being spent in our elections. This was on the front page of the newspaper. This was being done in plain view. And what did the Republican Justices on the Supreme Court do to enforce their own stated requirement of transparency? Not one thing.

And so we have had a decade of corruption of government by billionaire interests who can hide who they are and operate through an enormous phalanx of phony front groups whom they have stood up. And if you want to know how real this is, look at what we have had to do in the reconciliation measure to address climate change--because when I got here, there were Republicans willing to address climate change.

We had bill after bill in the Senate that were bipartisan and serious and sincere. That stopped dead in January of 2010. When Citizens United was decided, the dark money spigots opened, and the fossil fuel industry behind them enforced compliance across the entire Republican Party. If you crossed the fossil fuel industry on climate change, if you are Bob Inglis, you were out, you were done. If you lined up with them and did what they said, in came tens of millions of dollars in dark money to support you.

It was a devil's bargain, and it cost us a lost decade on climate change. And now we have to go forward, sadly, in a partisan way to solve this problem. That is the pressure of dark money in our politics. It is behind the capture of the Supreme Court. It is behind voter suppression. This is demonstrable stuff, and we have got to put an end to it. And it is a tragedy and a disgrace that we can't go to cleaning up the dark money mess.

My Republican colleagues and their dark money groups are actually at the point now where they are accusing us of taking dark money. They are accusing Democrats of being the dark money party. Well, we just settled that question tonight. Democrats want to clean it up. They want to protect it. It is as simple as that. That is all you need to know.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I am delighted to follow my distinguished chairman on the Finance Committee as he gives assurances about our important work on climate change.

The majority leader has announced that the final vote on the bipartisan infrastructure package will be tomorrow at 11 a.m., and we will then roll into the rather ignominious spectacle of the Senate known as vote-arama. What vote-arama does, however, it allows us to go to budget reconciliation, which allows us to pass measures with a simple majority.

We should do that bearing in mind what just came out--the latest IPCC report on climate change. It is getting increasingly dire. The IPCC report uses words like ``unequivocal,'' ``unprecedented,'' ``irreversible.''

Unequivocal is the link between fossil fuel pollution and the climate damage we are doing to our oceans and atmosphere--unequivocal.

Unprecedented. We talk about unprecedented around here if it hasn't happened in a decade. They talk about unprecedented across many centuries or many thousands of years. We are undoing the basic operating systems of our planet as humankind has come to know them.

Irreversible means, for some of this, there is no going back. We were warned and warned and warned. We ignored it and ignored it and ignored it, and now we are in it. We can make it less bad, but parts are irreversible. As one United Nations spokesman said, this is red alert for humanity.

It doesn't take the IPCC or the U.N. or the universities in our home States or our environmental community to tell us this. All we have to do is look around. Look at the wildfires that are tearing through the West. Senator Padilla was here earlier today talking about what is going on in California.

Here is a report from California, from the head of the Plumas National Forest, its supervisor:

We are seeing truly frightening fire behavior, I don't know

how to overstate that. We have a lot of veteran firefighters

who have served for 20, 30 years and have never seen behavior

like this, especially day after day, and the conditions we're

in. So we really are in unchartered territory around some of

these extreme, large fires and the behavior we're seeing.

That is the report from the front of the wildfires. But we are not just in unchartered territory with wildfires; we are in unchartered territory with respect to flooding. Here is what we are predicting in Rhode Island. Right now, this is the northern part of my State. Everything you see here that is a bright-blue color, that is land right now. People live there. People have businesses there. People have recreation there. There are things that people do that are part of their lives there, and it all disappears under current predictions of sea level rise. It disappears

This is a place called Warwick Neck. It becomes Warwick Neck Island. This is a place called Poppasquash Point. It becomes two little islands off of Bristol, and Bristol becomes its own island. Barrington gains sort of the Barrington Great Salt Lake in the middle of it, and now you have an island along what is now Barrington's southern coast. We stop being Rhode Island, and we become the Rhode Island Archipelago. That is a big change, and if I can stop it, I am going to.

Drought. You have seen the pictures of the western lakes at alltime lows, and the dependence of those Western States on water is acute. The hurricane cycle we are already in has warnings about how serious the coming hurricane season is going to be.

If you step down to God's creatures, you have manatees that are dying in unprecedented numbers in Florida. Off the northwest coast, in the Pacific Ocean, you have the humble tetrapod, a tiny, small oceanic snail that just happens to be a big part of the bottom of the ocean food chain. Half of the tetrapods sampled have severe shell damage because of ocean acidification, which is happening because the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide, and it turns acidic when it happens. I have proven that little experiment from this desk early in the morning once.

Our Atlantic fisheries are all in flux, all moving. Our Connecticut and Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts lobster fisheries pretty much collapsed. Species that farmers didn't used to see are now turning up in our waters.

There were these horrible stories about the heat that Chairman Wyden spoke about. Small birds get so disoriented in the heat as fledglings that they jump out of their nests to get away and then, of course, become prey and incapable of getting back to their nests on the ground. And birds generally and insect populations generally are crashing.

We think about this very often in terms of looking back at what we have been through, and we are told over and over again and we know from our own experience that this past year has been the worst in the last 10 years or the last 20 years across all of these measures. But I want you to think about this. Yes, it has been the worst year in the last 10 or 20 years, but here is what else we know and here is what the IPCC report warns us: It is the best year of the next 10 or 20. This is getting worse, period--end of story. We can slow down it getting worse, and we can slowly turn it around, but the disasters we are seeing now are child's play compared to what is coming.

So action is now necessary, and thankfully, our timing is such that we have a reconciliation measure starting tomorrow that gives us the tools to take action. We have to do this now, and unfortunately, we have to do this alone.

There are three sad facts about our predicament. One is, we can't count on Republicans. If we lose the House next year, as people are predicting, to gerrymandered States, we are done getting serious about climate because we know perfectly well that since the Citizens United decision, no Republican has gotten on a serious climate bill in the Senate--not one. It used to be bipartisan.

John McCain ran for President on a climate plan that was very good. There were three or four different serious climate bills kicking around before Citizens United. But then Citizens United came. Unlimited money came. The fossil fuel industry used unlimited money, and they shut down the Republican Party on climate.

They said: We are tolerating no dissent any longer. You are all going to line up and do as you are told. If you don't do what you are told, we will do what we did to Bob Inglis--take him out in a primary. And if you do as you are told, we will send boatloads of dark money to throw into elections through super PACs.

You have a party that is hip deep in fossil fuel money and has a decade--a lost decade--in which it would do nothing serious about climate. So, unfortunately, and to the great sorrow of my friend John Warner, who passed away recently, and John McCain and others who worked hard before this when the Republican Party was less dependent

on fossil fuel money, unfortunately, we have to do it alone.

We can't count on the fossil fuel industry to mend its ways. They have been at a decade of lying. They built this, an entire web of phony-baloney front groups all paid for with fossil fuel money--in the hundreds of millions, billions of dollars--to put out fake science, to hide who they are behind the dark money, behind these front groups. They ran an enormous corrupt scheme to fool Americans and block progress here in this building so that they could keep polluting. And now we are supposed to count on them? No way.

They still haven't come clean about their years of funding denial, and they won't come clean. Guess why. Because they are still at it. Their CEOs will say one thing at a press conference, but this machine of disinformation and obstruction--this machine is still funded, and it is still rolling. So you can't count on the fossil fuel industry to change its ways.

Third, unfortunately--and I really hate to say this--you can't count on corporate America. They are full of great statements. CEOs go to the business roundtables, and they go to the Climate Leadership Council, and they go to C2ES. They join series and talk about their support for climate and how it is urgent and how they support carbon pricing. But when it comes to the levers of power here in this building, forget about it. They have built the most powerful lobbying and electioneering apparatus in our country's history. Trade association after trade association, business group after business group--not one has been switched on to do anything about climate.

By the way, when it is a CEO giving a press conference in New York, but that trade association is saying nothing or ``Don't do it,'' guess who people listen to here in Washington. They listen to that trade association. They know what greenwashing is, and they know when corporate America is serious. At this moment, no major trade association is taking any interest in climate action.

The chamber of commerce--nothing. They are embroiled in a long conversation with members of theirs who are fed up with their climate denial, but they have done nothing.

The National Association of Manufacturers--also nothing. They were recently the two worst climate obstructers in America. Have they changed their direction? No. Now they are just climate obstruction light, climate obstruction 2.0.

Look at API, the American Petroleum Institute. This one is pretty funny. They come out and they say they support carbon pricing. They are going to support putting a cost on pollution, on greenhouse gas. And then we come out of the Budget Committee and we announce, as Leader Schumer did, that we are going to actually price methane, another greenhouse gas--an even more potent greenhouse gas and actually kind of a dangerous one--so, uh-oh, suddenly it looks real. Somebody might actually price methane. And what did API to? Came out against it.

Now, you tell me how you can be for pricing a milder greenhouse gas in order to help address climate change but against pricing an even more toxic chemical to help solve climate change. It makes no sense. The only way you can reconcile those two things is with the statement of the Exxon lobbyists that the only reason the industry is talking about carbon pricing is because it doesn't think it is going to happen. It is another fake. It is another scheme. It is another denial and obstruction--in this case, probably 5.0.

The American Bankers Association. You read from central banks around the country warnings about the economic crash that is going to happen if we don't get ahead of the climate problem. Those are the central banks' warnings, but what did the American Bankers Association have to say to us? Nothing.

Insurance companies are screaming about the risks that they are facing now from worse hurricanes, worse flooding, worse droughts, worse wildfires; claims going up, difficulty anticipating what risks are, and hard-to-price insurance. Yet where is the American Insurance Association? Silent.

Freddie Mac has warned us that there is going to be a coastal property values crash as those sea levels rise and, as you can predict, that that home is going to be literally under water in the 30-year mortgage period, not just figuratively under water--so no mortgage, no insurance, no market; hence, our property values crash.

And where is the Realtors Association? Where are the American Home Builders? Silent.

The American Beverage Association. Oh, Coke and Pepsi talk a really big game. What is the American Beverage Association doing on this? Nothing.

And all those big barons out in Silicon Valley are represented by a group called TechNet. A year ago, they didn't even mention climate change in their lobbying materials. They didn't even mention clean or renewable energy, and they have clean and renewable energy companies in their membership.

So we cannot count on corporate America to take climate change seriously here, where a solution is needed. So this is on us.

And I will tell you, we intend to--I intend to--meet the moment. And there are those out there who will grouse and complain. And to you, I say: Too damned bad. You have had years to help, and you did nothing or worse. So you have lost your right to complain.

But under pressure of the facts and the realities of what is going on around us, under pressure of the warnings about this being irreversible, unequivocal, and unprecedented, we are going to act. We are going to act.

And I don't want to hear your complaining because you had a decade to come in and try to do something about this and you shirked your responsibilities for a decade, you funded trade associations that were doing nothing, you funded these creepy front groups that were attacking us on climate change. So you lost your right to complain.

And in the next 6 or 7 or 8 weeks, as we go through building this reconciliation instruction, we aren't just going to address climate change, we are not just going to do more than has ever been done before; we are going to get on a safe pathway for this country and for the planet.

Because I will tell you, ``more than we have ever done before on climate'' is a pathetically low bar because, for a decade, thanks to the fossil fuel industry and its web of denial and its control over the Republican Party, we have done nothing on climate.

So we have got a lot of catching up to do. Reconciliation gives us the chance to do it. I pray to God that we meet the moment.

I yield the floor.