Floor Statements

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 107, S. 1917.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I would like to ask unanimous consent to speak as if in morning business for, let's say, 22 minutes.

Mr. President, these speeches on the scheme by dark money interests to seize control of the Supreme Court are designed to describe it in all its repulsive intricacy.

My last speech discussed an operation in this scheme within the Federalist Society. This speech will take you literally down the hall from the Federalist Society to something called the Judicial Crisis Network, or JCN. They share the same purpose, the same hallway, and likely the same controlling donors.

Remember David Koch's disastrous bid for Vice President on the Libertarian Party ticket that showed how unappetizing his rightwing extremism was to normal people. And remember the Lewis Powell playbook, which advised:

Strength lies in organization . . . and in the political

power available only through united action and national

organizations.

No one corporation or wealthy individual needs to, as Powell said, ``get too far out in front and . . . make itself too visible a target.'' Let intermediaries do that work.

Corporate interests like Big Tobacco and the fossil fuel industry have, for a long time, used coordinated webs of national front groups in their plots to fend off accountability for the dangers of tobacco and carbon emissions.

These front group webs grew and multiplied and specialized, all while concealing their true interests and funders. They got more numerous, and they also got smarter and more strategic over time, polishing up front group names, like the not-too-subtle Tobacco Institute, to names like the more wholesome-sounding Heartland Institute.

It is quite a web. They created science groups to counter real scientific research on public health and climate change with fake science; think tanks to churn out white papers and hire sound bite- friendly fake experts; legal organizations to challenge and delay government regulation of harmful products; academic hothouses in which to grow donor-friendly, rightwing judicial philosophies; identity- laundering screens to hide the true donors and controllers and their interests; and political attack groups to pressure elected officials. People who study this have reported these groups numbering in multiple dozens, and their backers play the front groups like keys on a piano.

Apply this method to the scheme to capture the Court, and you see that the dark money donors needed more than just the nominations turnstile that they ran out of the Federalist Society. They also needed a bare-knuckle political brawler.

One night in early 2005, at an upscale Italian dinner, with special guest Justice Antonin Scalia, major donor and corporate lawyer Ann Corkery, California real estate tycoon Robin Arkley, and Federalist Society executive vice president Leonard Leo got together and celebrated George W. Bush's second term. The political importance of the Supreme Court would have been on everyone's mind there as it was the five Republicans on the Supreme Court who gave George W. Bush his first term.

According to reporting by OpenSecrets and the Daily Beast, this dinner linked to the creation of a 501(c)(4) dark money group, then called the Judicial Confirmation Network. By the end of that year, this group would spend money--lots of money, lots of big donor money--and they would spend it anonymously, first to boost John Roberts as Chief Justice and then Samuel Alito as Associate Justice, cementing rightwing corporate control over the Court and shifting its decisions further in big donors' favor.

There are a few things to note about the Judicial Confirmation Network's early days:

One, it began work fast. Just months after starting, JCN ads hit the air in support of Bush nominees.

Two, it had lots of money. Beginning in 2008, Ann Corkery took control of something called the Wellspring Committee--a dark money, identity-laundering group, seeded with funding from Charles and David Kochs' donor network. Thereafter, Wellspring funneled seven- or eight- figure dark money donations to JCN every year--millions of anonymous dollars.

Three, they brought on a lawyer with heavy rightwing chops to run the place. Wendy Long, a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, became chief counsel and mouthpiece.

Thus, in just a few months, JCN appeared and became a polished, powerful, anonymized campaigner for the big donor scheme to take over the Court.

And then came the election of Barack Obama, and JCN had to go from offense for nominees to defense against nominees. That ``C'' in JCN, for ``confirmation,'' no longer made much sense, and the scheme now faced a crisis--the crisis for it of a President nominating judges who had not been screened by them, judges whose fealty to the corporate rightwing could not be confirmed, judges who might even rule against the rightwing donors' agenda. So they quickly rebranded JCN as the Judicial Crisis Network, but even in the Obama years, the Republican 5- to-4 majority on the captured Court delivered big things for JCN and its secretive backers.

In the administration's first term, the Roberts Court handed down Citizens United and other decisions opening donor pipelines to 501(c)(4) groups like JCN. This caused the tsunami of slime we saw in our politics, and corporations and rightwing donors rushed to the feast. Anonymous money flooded in. Annual donations laundered through Wellspring to JCN rose from millions of dollars to many millions of dollars. JCN even expanded the scheme to seek to influence State supreme courts and State attorney general seats. The scheme was flourishing.

Then, on a 2016 all-expenses-paid trip for Justice Scalia to a luxury hunting ranch in Texas, the Justice died, leaving a Supreme Court vacancy, with the better part of a year left before the Presidential election. Now there really was a crisis. The big donors suddenly faced the prospect of a Democratic President appointing Scalia's replacement, shifting the balance of the Court 5 to 4 against them, taking away their precious majority, undoing the scheme.

So the donors swung into action. Within days, Mitch McConnell quickly pledged to hold the seat open, and within days, Republican Senators uniformly lined up behind that decision--a decision very possibly explained by the overlay between dark money donors to the scheme and dark money donors to Republican Senate political operations. History will have to judge the extent of that overlay.

In any event, dark money funding of JCN hit escape velocity during this period. According to tax records obtained by OpenSecrets and others, JCN received big donations in fiscal year 2015 to 2016. One single anonymous donation alone totaled $17.9 million. Wellspring separately channeled $23.5 million in dark money to JCN in 2016, then another $14.8 million the next year. When Wellspring dissolved in 2018, big slugs of dark money continued to flow through other conduits. JCN received four separate, individual, anonymous donations, each of $15 million or more following Justice Scalia's death. We cannot say for sure because the donors hide behind the dark money screen, but these donations, over $60 million in all, could well have all come from the same donor.

And one wonders, what are the odds that someone willing to spend $60 million anonymously to influence the makeup of the Supreme Court is someone who has business before the Court?

Pretty high, I would say, but dark money scheming keeps this information secret.

How did JCN spend all this money? Attack. Leonard Leo's Federalist Society operation had handed Trump a list of approved nominees. JCN spending poured into TV ads, pressuring Senators, and to media blitzes to sell the Federalist Society list. The group spent $7 million to attack Merrick Garland; $10 million to boost Neil Gorsuch; $10 million or more to prop up Brett Kavanaugh's deeply troubled nomination with its--now we know--fake FBI tip line; and $10 million in under 2 months to support Amy Coney Barrett.

On its own, this anonymous $37 million barrage smells terrible, but it is only part of the Judicial Crisis Network operation. JCN has a corporate twin, the Judicial Education Project, each group backing up the actions and finances of the other. Let me walk you through this setup because it is a capsule summary of how political scheming is accomplished in our corrupted dark money era.

First, you pair a 501(c)(3) and a 501(c)(4). The Judicial Crisis Network was chartered as a 501(c)(4) social welfare group, the Judicial Education Project as its allied 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Under a perverse reading of the law, the 501(c)(4) organization is allowed to operate as a dark money political attack group. We see this arrangement commonly now in the clandestine world of dark money politics.

In fact, a recent Supreme Court case about dark money was brought by a group called Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which was the 501(c)(3) associated with Americans for Prosperity, which is the Koch brothers' 501(c)(4) that spent millions of dollars to help Amy Coney Barrett get her seat, and yet she didn't recuse herself from the case involving the 501(c)(3).

So, second, you operate the two as one unit: Judicial Crisis Network and

Judicial Education Project are connected by staff, by dollars, and by location.

According to the most recent tax records, long-serving JCN staffer Carrie Severino is also the sole and principal officer of--you guessed it--the Judicial Education Project. Severino is not listed on JCN's tax forms, but she serves as its public-facing ``chief counsel and policy director.'' JCN and JEP tax records both list the same address in Washington, DC, which, by the way, is right down the hall from the Federalist Society at the same address, and both groups share day-to- day staff. There is a doctrine in the law called piercing the corporate veil. In this case, the corporate veil between these two is a web of holes.

What is the next thing you do? You soak up dark money together.

It is hard to know much about these two groups' dark money funding-- that is why they keep it dark--but we know the Wellspring Committee has funded both groups. Both have also paid money to something called BH Group, which is a mysterious LLC that Leonard Leo once disclosed as his employer, that made a $1 million mystery donation to Trump's inaugural. It seems to do no other business. They used the 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) status precisely because it lets them hide their donors and controllers.

And the last thing is that you get to play shell games with your name. A couple of years ago, those two organizations formally changed their legal names in Virginia. Now, follow this for a minute. Judicial Crisis Network changed its name, and it became the Concord Fund. Judicial Education Project changed its name, and it became the 85 Fund.

The Concord Fund then registered its old name, Judicial Crisis Network, as what is called a fictitious name, a kind of corporate alias under Virginia law, and continued to operate as the Judicial Crisis Network.

Here is the Virginia law that allows them to do that:

A fictitious name is a name that a person (individual or

business entity) uses instead of the person's true name,

usually in the course of transacting or offering to transact

business.

It also registered the name ``Honest Elections Project Action'' as an additional fictitious name to carry out a new voter suppression project. The 85 Fund likewise registered its old name, the ``Judicial Education Project,'' as a fictitious name, and it separately registered as the ``Honest Elections Project'' as an additional fictitious name.

It gets even better than this because, as I said before, when the Washington Post exposed the $250 million scheme that Leonard Leo was at the center of to pack and control the Supreme Court, to capture it like a captured agency, he wasn't much use any longer. He was like a blown agent in a covert operation. He had to go someplace. Where did he hop to? He hopped from the Federalist Society to the Honest Elections Project so he could get to work on the Presiding Officer's favorite cause, voter suppression. Same guy, same corporate network, new name, and new purpose: voter suppression.

As if this weren't enough, both of these groups have now filed new fictitious names. This is to help them wade into the rightwing fuss over what the rightwing likes to call critical race theory. So the Concord Fund has now added the fictitious name ``Free to Learn Action,'' and the 85 Fund has now added the fictitious name ``Free to Learn.'' Again, you see the pairing of the 501(c)(3) and the 501(c)(4) as part of the basic structure for dark money political influence operations.

By the way, the same person filled out all these forms for both organizations and is listed with various titles on each.

So now we have one group that calls itself the Concord Fund that operates simultaneously as the Judicial Crisis Network, the Honest Elections Project Action, and the Free to Learn Action, and we have a sister organization, the 85 Fund, that operates simultaneously as the Judicial Education Project, the Honest Elections Project, and Free to Learn--all with overlapping staff, locations, and funding.

By the way, when you are the funder of these groups, you are their controller.

Now, imagine this level of complexity multiplied many times over, because that is what the Washington Post disclosed. And I borrow a photograph from their video of their investigation.

That Washington Post expose on the covert court-capture operation exposed the Judicial Crisis Network as one part, just one part of a massive--there it is, Judicial Crisis Network--one part of a massive web of groups, a web of groups that took in over $250 million in dark money between 2014 and 2017.

This effort to capture the Supreme Court? They are not kidding around. Spending $250 million in dark money is a serious investment that demands a serious return. And guess what. Expert testimony before my Senate Courts Subcommittee has since raised that number to $400 million through 2018.

Through all these allied and coordinated front groups--the keys on the dark money piano that the big donors can play in chords and singly as they wish--dark money donors can, from hiding, covertly channel tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in anonymized money toward the scheme's court-capture goals.

Colleagues, this is a scheme akin in complexity and trade craft to an intelligence agency covert operation--only this one is not being run by one country against another; this one is being run in and against our own country by a handful of creepy billionaires and their foundations, trying to impose their self-serving ideology on the rest of us through our least democratic branch--the branch that doesn't care if normal people hate this stuff because they are in robes for life. That is our Federal courts, and particularly, it is our Supreme Court.

The big dark money donors have pretty well pulled it off, too, following Lewis Powell's old admonition to use ``strength . . . in organization'' and ``united action'' of all of this complexity. They have just made it all clandestine, which is why I am going to keep digging.

To be continued.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today to recognize a constituent and friend, Roger Begin. Roger serves as the Honorary Consul of France in Providence. In September, the French Government will award him the Legion of Honor, the country's highest order of merit, for his long and distinguished career in public service. I congratulate Roger on earning this recognition and thank him for his many contributions to civic life in Rhode Island.

As the Honorary Consul of France, Roger is a liaison to the French Government and helps Rhode Islanders with passports, immigration, and other government business. Roger previously had a lengthy and productive career in public service. A son of Woonsocket and graduate of CCRI and Bryant University, he was elected to the Rhode Island House of Representatives at the age of 19. After serving several terms, he went on to win election as Rhode Island's general treasurer and then Lieutenant Governor.

I served as legal counsel to Governor Bruce Sundlun during tumultuous years of crisis and reform, while Roger was Lieutenant Governor. Serving in government in times of crisis is a bonding experience.

Outside of his time in government, Roger has served on the boards of many mission-driven organizations in our community. From the Meeting

Street School, to the Rhode Island Historical Society, to the Rhode Island Hospital Association, there is hardly a comer of the State that has not been made better by Roger's energy and contributions.

Roger also enjoyed a successful business career in the financial sector. He is truly a man of many parts. And he is a gregarious, cheerful good person on top of it all.

I wish Roger all the best as he accepts the French Legion of Honor and look forward to celebrating with him next month.

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

Madam President, with the permission of both sides, may I ask unanimous consent that the vote scheduled to start in 3 minutes start now?

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I am here once again to shed a little light on the dark money scheme to capture and control our Supreme Court.

As folks may recall, my first two speeches covered the early foundation of this scheme--a prominent conservative lawyer Lewis Powell's detailed strategy memo for the corporate U.S. Chamber of Commerce and then Justice Lewis Powell's work on the Court to assure his corporate power strategy's success.

From there, I turned to what historian Richard Hofstetter called the paranoid style in American politics and how extreme anti-government megadonors like the Kochs harness that rightwing fringe and how, at the same time, they had at their disposal the polished mercenaries of corporate administrative agency warfare.

Then I discussed the scheme's two big recent dark money wins at the Supreme Court--the AFPF dark money case and the Brnovich voter suppression case.

The nutshell overview of all of this is that it is a short jump for big donors from regulatory capture, which is a well-understood and broadly observed phenomenon, to applying known techniques of regulatory capture to capture a court.

As the big donors had this realization and made this jump, one of their most important players in applying capture techniques to the judiciary has been the Federalist Society.

I will start with some very straightforward observations. Every member of the Court's six-Justice Republican majority is a current or former member of the Federalist Society.

Justices regularly headline Federalist Society fundraisers, like the gala Brett Kavanaugh chose for his first major public speaking engagement after his disastrous confirmation, and they boast of their association with the group. The Federalist Society is a dark money organization. It receives millions in anonymous donations.

The Federalist Society carefully vetted and promoted each member of the current Court majority. Each member rose to the top of the group's donor-approved slates of nominees. Each was backed by the Federalist Society's extended network of satellite groups.

For the dark money forces behind the capture of the Court, the Federalist Society became their nomination's gatekeeper.

The Federalist Society has three component efforts. The first is basically a law school debate club. At more or less every law school in the country, they organize seminars and invite academics, judges, attorneys to speak. It is pretty standard law school stuff.

The second is a fairly run-of-the-mill Washington think tank. They issue newsletters, host podcasts, convene events with conservative legal luminaries. This think tank's mission is to ``reorder priorities within the legal system'' and to create a network of members that ``extends to all levels of the legal community.''

Then there is the third Federalist Society operation. This is the gatekeeper. It doesn't really care about fostering young legal minds. It doesn't care about galas or podcasts either. It cares about one thing: the allegiance of Republican-appointed Justices to rightwing donors' interests. And the dark money sluice gates into the Federalist Society provide the perfect means of influence. Money talks. Dark money whispers.

The Federalist Society gatekeeper role began with the hiring of a Cornell Law graduate named Leonard Leo, fresh from a clerkship in 1991.

Leo's first task was building the lawyers division to serve as a pipeline for rightwing lawyers to rise through the Federalist Society ranks toward the Federal courts.

Observers say the Federalist Society didn't hire Leo for his skill as an attorney. What they saw in him was a savvy networker and fundraiser

Johns Hopkins professor Steven Teles, who has written extensively on Leo and the Federalist Society, says the idea was to build what he called ``a network . . . with Leonard Leo at the center . . . [to] give conservatives a chance to meet one another and check one another out.''

Under Leo's new system, ``the one thing all the lawyers [would] have in common is that they all know Leonard, and he knows all of them.''

Big rightwing donors recognized the opportunity that Leo's Federalist Society operation presented: a trusted broker to sift through eager legal talent and pluck out adherents to donor-friendly, rightwing legal doctrines and then push the most promising adherents toward judgeships, where they could advance the scheme's ultimate goal of courts that will reliably rule in the donors' favor.

As the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin has written, Leo quickly attracted the preeminent scheme funders, including the foundations of rightwing megadonors John Olin, Lynde and Harry Bradley, Richard Scaife, and, of course, the perennially mischievous and malign Koch brothers.

The scheme also raked in anonymous funding through Donors Trust--what has been called the dark money ATM of the right.

As another observer of the conservative legal movement Professor Amanda Hollis-Brusky said, ``The funders all got the idea right away-- that you can win elections, you can have mass mobilizations, but unless you can change . . . the courts, there are limits to what you can do.''

The second Bush administration, the Federalist Society quietly became the big donors' nominations turnstile.

Bush and his team welcomed Leo's help. It made things easy. Need someone to pay for public relations cavalry to rescue a struggling circuit court nominee? Leo's donors made it happen.

According to a 2003 email from a White House staffer to the then- Presidential Staff Secretary, a young guy by the name of Brett Kavanaugh, Leo coordinated ``all outside coalition activity regarding judicial nominations.''

In another email uncovered by the Washington Post, Bush aides referred to Leo explicitly as their judicial nominations cash machine.

``Leonard Leo will know,'' they said, ``where to find money to hold a presser for a failing nominee.'' That is from one Bush aide to another.

They go on: ``We probably don't want the fed soc''--Federalist Society--``paying for it, but he might know some generous donor.''

Leo's official fed soc bio, still online today, boasts that he ``organized the outside coalition efforts in support of the Roberts and Alito U.S. Supreme Court confirmations.'' The goal, of course, was to change the Court. The Court changed.

Under Chief Justice Roberts, the Court's Republican-appointed majority served up scores of partisan 5-to-4 decisions, delivering partisan win after partisan win to identifiable Republican donor interests.

Even before the Republican majority expanded to 6, that run of wins reached 80--80 partisan 5-to-4 decisions--a judicial rout favoring very happy rightwing donors.

When Donald Trump assumed office, the Federalist Society gatekeeper role became even more obvious and even more toxic.

You may recall that dark money emperor Charles Koch made waves when he told his rightwing network he could support neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump in 2016.

But the house of Koch and the house of Trump soon reached an accommodation. The house of Koch decided on a grand Trump gesture for their scheme donors--let their operative, Leonard Leo, handpick a list of Supreme Court nominees for Trump to announce early in the general campaign. For the price of known, scheme-approved Supreme Court prospects, peace might be acquired between house of Koch and house of Trump. Trump announced the list.

For what it is worth, I think the rest of the accommodation was for house of Trump to turn over all energy and environmental positions in government to climate change deniers approved by house of Koch, and at the end of the day, it was probably a lot of the same dark money behind both of those accommodations.

Anyway, rewind to 2016 and recall how large the Supreme Court loomed over that Presidential campaign.

Justice Scalia died suddenly during a hunting trip. Mitch McConnell broke with all Senate norms and denied President Obama any hearing or vote for President Obama's pick to replace Scalia, Judge Merrick Garland.

This vacancy would decide the partisan balance of the Court, which meant the 2016 election would determine whether the 5-to-4 rightwing majority that had delivered so abundantly for the donors would end or be renewed for years or even generations.

Remember Lewis Powell's memo to the Chamber, ``The judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change'' in all of government. Well, nothing could focus the scheme's donors on the stakes of that election more clearly than that vacancy.

With Scalia's sudden death, the scheme was at risk. So scheme donors' dark money flowed in ever-larger amounts to the Federalist Society, to Leonard Leo, and to Donald Trump.

Ambitious judges noticed. A court of appeals judge described to me the conduct of some of its colleagues as auditioning--auditioning. They weren't just deciding cases for the parties before them, they had another audience beyond the courtroom. You don't audition without someone to audition to. These judges knew they were being assessed, and they auditioned. And no one auditioned harder than Brett Kavanaugh. He filled his court of appeals decisions with signaling, and even set the record for speeches to the Federalist Society. I think it was over 50. He knew who he was auditioning for.

When Trump took the White House, the Federalist Society assumed control of judicial nominations, at least the important ones. Trump said so himself. He wasn't even subtle about it. House of Trump had peace to keep with House of Koch. This was no time for subtlety. Trump's new White House Counsel, Don McGahn, even joked about this role, of course, at a 2017 Federalist Society event. He said:

Our opponents of judicial nominees frequently claim the

President has outsourced his selection of judges. That is

completely false. I have been a Member of the Federalist

Society since law school. Still am. So, frankly, it seems

like it's been in-sourced.

Leo became the gatekeeper in chief, actually taking leaves of absence from

the Federalist Society to advise Trump directly on Supreme Court nominations.

Now, there are unanswered questions about whether this was even legal, but the point was clear. Virtually all major Trump nominees would be scheme-chosen, donor-approved FedSoc members. And, indeed, 86 percent of Trump's Supreme Court and appellate court nominees were or are members.

Leo and the Federalist Society's control ran deep. In Leo, the donors controlled an agent to orchestrate every aspect of Supreme Court judicial battles, and they provisioned him with dark money beyond imagining, and with a devious structure of front groups to hide behind while effectuating their scheme.

We are still learning about the scope of Leo's covert funding and influence, but a 2019 Washington Post expose painted a remarkable picture: a vast network of Leo-affiliated front groups; shell entities with no employees and vague connections to Leo cutouts; shared post office boxes; common contractors and officers across nominally separate entities, even some sharing Presidents; dark money funders, anonymous advertising, and enormous pay packages for operatives.

It has the earmarks of a covert operation of the sort that is run by hostile countries in the intelligence arena. But this covert operation was run in America against America by Americans. By the Post's reckoning, $250 million in dark money flowed through this apparatus. Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee's Courts Subcommittee, which I chair, has since updated that number to $400 million. Groups in this apparatus have gorged on dark money, their coffers swelling by orders of magnitude as Leo's influence grew.

For example, in 2002, DonorsTrust, the scheme's dark money ATM, had contributed $5,000 to the Federalist Society. Scroll forward to the most recent year on record: It contributed $7 million.

Before 2010, the Federalist Society received an occasional anonymous gift of $1,000 or more, at most one per year. Over the last decade, it averaged more than a dozen each and every year. Donors were not kidding around, not with that kind of money--$400 million. The scheme to capture the Court was deadly serious.

Eleven days after Donald Trump was sworn into office, he announced Neil Gorsuch--a name from the Federalist Society's infamous list--to fill Scalia's former seat. Then Brett Kavanaugh was hand-walked by Leonard Leo to the top of the list, after all his ardent auditioning from his court of appeals seat. And 7 days before Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Amy Coney Barrett--a Federalist Society member and regular feature speaker at Federalist Society events--filled Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat. The scheme's Federalist Society gatekeeper operation had delivered to its big donors a complete overhaul of the Court in less than 4 years.

One man, his secretive array of front groups, and hundreds of millions of scheme donors' money, delivered a donor-approved six- Justice majority to the Court.

The Federalist Society was the turnstile that controlled the appointments, and dark money was the inducement that controlled the turnstile.

To be continued.

Mr. President, as I give the closing remarks, I want to alert everyone listening that, at the conclusion of the closing, Senator Inhofe will hold the floor for his remarks, and his remarks will be regarding our common friend, Senator Enzi.

Mr. President, let me first ask unanimous consent that the nomination of PN913, James D. Rodriguez, of Texas, to be Assistant Secretary of Labor for Veterans' Employment and Training, be jointly referred to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and to the Committee on Veterans' Affairs.

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

I ask unanimous consent that Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of the following bills, en bloc: Calendar No. 36, H.R. 208; Calendar No. 37, H.R. 264; Calendar No. 35, S. 566; and Calendar No. 101, H.R. 772.

I ask unanimous consent that the bills en bloc be considered read a third time and passed, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, all en bloc.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be discharged from further consideration of S. 503 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

I know of no further debate.

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

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be discharged from further consideration and the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 452.

I ask unanimous consent that the Stabenow substitute amendment be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 1002 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be discharged from further consideration and the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 317.

I was going to say ``reserving the right to object,'' but I won't go there.

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.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 323, submitted earlier today.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 324, submitted earlier today.

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