Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I am here for my 197th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech. My poster board is getting a little dog-eared, but we keep moving doggedly along.

Last week, I spoke about corporate America outsourcing its lobbying to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce--a determined enemy of any action on climate change. When pro-climate companies support the chamber, they support its anti-climate lobbying, its anti-climate election spending and threatening, and they enable the chamber's anti-climate stranglehold with the fossil fuel industry on Congress.

The chamber is not alone in its anti-climate advocacy on behalf of corporate America. Another big Washington trade association obstructing climate action, despite having been a pro-climate action member, is the National Association of Manufacturers, often called NAM.

Over the last two decades, NAM has spent more than $150 million lobbying the Federal Government, and each year, NAM lobbies extensively for the fossil fuel industry.

Here are some of the greatest hits of NAM's fossil fuel lobbying.

NAM lobbies to expand offshore drilling in the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, Pacific, and Arctic. I wonder how many of its members want to be out there supporting offshore drilling in all those areas.

NAM advocates for the continued use of coal in the electric power and industrial sectors. There is not a congressional district left where a majority of voters don't want coal-plant emissions regulated. Yet there is NAM.

NAM lobbies to roll back fuel economy standards that save consumers billions of dollars at the pump. Never mind that the equipment that keeps cars cleaner is manufactured; the National Association of Manufacturers is opposed.

NAM sent what it calls a key vote letter to all Members of Congress urging repeal of a rule to protect streams from mountaintop removal coal mining pollution. More on that in a moment.

NAM urged the Trump administration to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. More on that in a moment too.

Finally, NAM opposes any efforts to put a price on carbon pollution.

Back to that key vote letter. ``The NAM's Key Vote Advisory Committee has indicated that votes on H.J. Res. 38, including procedural motions, may be considered for designation as Key Manufacturing Votes in the 115th Congress.'' This letter warns Members of Congress to vote the way the group wants or risk losing out on its endorsements and all the campaign support that goes with it. Who knows--run up a bad enough score and NAM may support your opponent.

Well, you would think protecting streams and drinking water from pollution from coal mines would be nothing but common sense. Streams fouled by coal mining waste literally run orange. This is the actual photograph; this is not a black-and-white photograph that has been color-corrected. This stream is running orange. As one West Virginia woman whose local stream was contaminated told the New York Times, ``Orange is not the color of water.'' But NAM and its fossil fuel allies opposed those clean water protections. Why? Where is the manufacturing value in streams that look like that? Follow the money. Look at the National Association of Manufacturers' major donors. A lot of the usual suspects--coal companies, oil companies, and Koch-owned oil production companies.

But here is what is strange. There are also a lot of companies that care about climate and sustainability that fund the National Association of Manufacturers. Just look at the pharmaceutical and healthcare sector. Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Pfizer, and UnitedHealth all belong to and fund NAM. If you go on their websites, you will find them urging people to live healthier, longer lives. So why are they lobbying through NAM to let coal companies make streams look like this? You will find these companies, on their websites, touting their commitments to sustainability and to reduce carbon emissions. So why are they lobbying through the National Association of Manufacturers against climate policies they actually support?

The National Association of Manufacturers rather inexplicably opposes all serious climate action. In particular, it opposes putting a price on carbon emissions. It even funded a debunked study that claimed putting an economy-wide price on carbon would cost millions of jobs. It lobbied for a legislative amendment making it more difficult to begin pricing carbon. But look at NAM's own member companies that are already pricing carbon emissions. Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Corning, Microsoft, and Stanley Black & Decker all apply a price on carbon in their own internal management and accounting. They understand that pricing carbon doesn't kill jobs. They understand that pricing carbon makes economic and environmental sense.

Here in Congress, what we see is NAM claiming to represent them but actually carrying water for the fossil fuel industry and waging full- scale war on good climate policy. Just like with the chamber's pro- climate members, we see essentially no pushback when the ostensible mouthpiece for these companies lobbies against these companies' stated position. Why would you, as a big American corporation, take a position on a very big issue and then delegate your lobbying to an entity in Washington that is opposed to your stated position? Indeed, we see virtually no corporate lobbying by anyone for good climate policy. Even companies with an internal carbon price don't lobby for a carbon price.

The American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act, which Senator Schatz and I have introduced in the last two Congresses, would create an economy- wide price on carbon emissions, using market forces to dramatically reduce

greenhouse gas emissions, protect our future, and improve public health. It would be border adjustable to protect American companies from unfair competition abroad, and it would return all of the revenue it raised to the American people. Liberal and conservative economists agree that this is the best way to tackle climate change. But the National Association of Manufacturers, on behalf of its fossil fuel allies, opposes us. It protects at all costs the massive market failure that allows the fossil fuel industry to duck the costs of its pollution. That is market failure 101.

It is not just that. NAM opposed cap and trade. NAM opposed the Paris Agreement. NAM sued to stop the Clean Power Plan. NAM supports the climate deniers of the Trump administration. They have no alternative, no better idea, no other way that they want to address the climate crisis; they are just against any serious action on climate change.

Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Corning, Microsoft, and Stanley Black & Decker are members of NAM. All of them supported the Paris Agreement, but all this time, they continue to fund the National Association of Manufacturers. It doesn't make any sense. These companies are already pricing carbon. They know it is good policy. They support the Paris Agreement. Yet they fund the trade advocacy group that is pulling out all the stops to kill the policy they support and the agreement they support. I asked last week, and I will ask again: When is the cavalry going to get here?

Lots of pro-climate companies fund the National Association of Manufacturers' anti-climate crusade. It is bizarre, but it is true.

Intel says it ``believes that global climate change is a serious environmental, economic and social challenge that warrants an equally serious response by governments and the private sector,'' but Intel funds NAM as NAM fights any response by governments.

KPMG has an entire practice area devoted to advising companies on the emerging risks and hazards of climate change, but KPMG funds NAM as NAM ignores and talks down those very hazards.

McCormick is focused on reducing its carbon emissions and, like a lot of good companies, even expects its suppliers to do the same, but McCormick also funds the National Association of Manufacturers.

Pernod Ricard is committed to reducing its carbon emissions, but Pernod Ricard funds NAM.

Procter & Gamble says:

As a global citizen, we are concerned about the negative

consequences of climate change. We believe industry,

governments, and consumers can work together to reduce

emissions to protect the environment.

That is what they believe, but they fund the National Association of Manufacturers, which tries to stop any such effort.

Verizon is so concerned about climate change that it has reduced its own emissions by over 50 percent, but Verizon still funds the National Association of Manufacturers.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Company after company claims that addressing climate change is their priority, and many do great things--truly great things--inside their fence lines and in many cases even out their supply chains, demanding sustainability compliance out their supply chains. But here, where the rubber hits the lawmaking road in Congress, the corporate support is for groups leading the war against climate action here in Washington, and virtually none of the companies show up here on the other side.

It is not as though they say: OK, I will support the National Association of Manufacturers and their efforts to obstruct any climate action, but I am going to come down and make clear on my own, in my own lobbying, that we want climate action. I am going to offset the lobbying that this group I fund does against the position I espouse.

No, they don't do that. They almost never come in on their own to support good climate policy to counterbalance what their own advocates are advocating when their own advocates are advocating against them, which explains why the fossil fuel guys keep on winning here in Congress. It is easy to win when the other side doesn't show up or, if they do, shows up wearing your jersey.

Here is how bad it is. The National Association of Manufacturers and the chamber and the fossil fuel industry hired a bunch of Washington lobbyists to create a fake consumer group called the Consumer Energy Alliance. This fake consumer group then created a fake initiative in Kentucky called--these names are always so comical--Kentuckians for Solar Fairness. What is the goal? The goal is to support Kentucky legislation making it harder for consumers to sell rooftop solar power back to the big utilities.

NAM is behind this scheme. Why? If you are Johnson & Johnson or Cargill or Corning or Microsoft or KPMG or Procter & Gamble, why do you want to be associated with a scheme like this? Remember, this is ostensibly the National Association of Manufacturers. Out in the real world, there is a lot of manufacturing going on in renewable energy.

We manufactured offshore wind turbines in Rhode Island's waters. Rhode Island boat builder Blount Marine even got the contract to manufacture the new boat to get technicians out to service the manufacturer turbines. The framing on which our offshore wind turbines stand was manufactured in Louisiana. Solar arrays are manufactured and installed all around the country, providing more American jobs than coal. In Texas alone, solar provides nearly 9,000 jobs, and more than 1.6 gigawatts of solar capacity has been manufactured and installed in Texas. Go to Iowa, where one-third of their electricity is from wind, and look how much ground-based wind turbine manufacturing and maintenance is going on--really good jobs.

Why is the National Association of Manufacturers so violently opposed to manufacturing in the renewable energy industry? Why does NAM get involved in a Kentucky utility regulatory issue with nothing apparent to do with manufacturing? Why is the National Association of Manufacturers exactly and perfectly aligned with the fossil fuel industry and not its own membership on so many issues?

In Washington, the fossil fuel lobby is relentless. They have a bad name and an obvious conflict of interest, so they like to do their political dirty work through groups like the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

I get it. Disguise is an age-old tactic. But why does corporate America put up with having its trade association used as disguise to fight climate action and to get involved in State quarrels that benefit only the fossil fuel industry?

The effect of corporate America allowing its trade groups to be captured by fossil fuel interests is that corporate America is now, for all practical purposes, collectively united against climate action in Congress. Say whatever they say on their websites; do whatever they do within their fence lines or out their supply chains; sign whatever they sign by way of letters and advertisements; that is all good, but when it comes to Congress, where the lawmaking rubber hits the road, corporate America is collectively united against climate action, either through direct antagonism like the fossil fuel industry or by letting antagonists like the National Association of Manufacturers and the chamber be their lobbying intermediaries and erase their good climate policies by the time they get to Congress and replace them with the fossil fuel industry's climate denial or by simply ducking the fight and not showing up on game day.

If we are going to meet America's responsibilities and finally pass good climate policy, we are going to need everyone, including corporate America, to do their part. Right now, fossil fuel interests from corporate America are all over the field, armed and ready for battle, and the good guys are not even showing up at the game.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, before I make my remarks, let me just say that in what we might call the current unpleasantness in Washington, what a pleasant thing it is to be here on the Senate floor and hear the respected chairman of the Senate Finance Committee say the positive words he has said, describe his success at expanding CHIP and call to our memory the name of Senator Kennedy--who was his friend and ally in creating that program upon which so many children across America depend.

So I thank him for a lovely moment in an otherwise somewhat, shall we say, challenging Washington environment.

Mr. President, in the spirit of back-and-forth--which is often the spirit of the Senate--I am following Senator Hatch, but I see Senator Wicker also on the floor. If time is pressing on him, I would be willing to consider yielding for a few moments. I don't know how much time he intends to consume.

Mr. President, in that event, let me commence my 196th ``Time to Wake Up'' climate speech.

The last year has been a lousy one for environmental policy in the United States. While the rest of the world began implementing the Paris Agreement to reduce the carbon emissions that are changing our climate and our oceans, this proud body, the U.S. Senate, sat on its hands.

When President Trump handed the keys to his administration over to what I call the three stooges of the fossil fuel industry--Pruitt, Perry, and Zinke--the Senate sat on its hands. The recent interview with British journalist Piers Morgan shows Trump willing to make a scientific fool of himself on the question of climate change to please the general managers pulling the strings of his administration, the Koch brothers.

This record puts them all way out of line--way out of line--with most Americans. Overwhelming numbers of younger Americans demand climate action and plan to hold politicians who stand in its way accountable. Faith groups, universities, State and local governments, and businesses have stepped up their climate leadership. Businesses hear from their customers and know the American people want action, but if corporate America is serious about climate action in Washington, corporate America needs to explain why the Big Business lobby groups in this town--the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, and the National Association of Manufacturers--stand so resolutely in the way of climate action. These three industry groups have been instrumental in blocking climate action, using lobbying, dark money election spending, and threats of dark money election spending.

Today, I want to take a look at the biggest and swampiest of the three, the so-called U.S. Chamber of Commerce. First, let's clear up some common misperceptions about the chamber. It is not a government agency, and it bears almost no relation to your hometown chamber of commerce.

Instead of representing the interests of small businesses, the chamber represents the interests of giant corporations, international corporations, and the ultrarich. The chamber president, Tom Donohue, admitted as much in a letter to the tobacco company Philip Morris. He wrote that small businesses ``provide the foot soldiers, and often the political cover, for issues big companies want pursued.''

Why this service to giant corporations and the ultrarich? Easy answer: They pay the bills. The vast majority of the chamber's $275- million-per-year budget comes from just a handful of donors. For instance, in 2014, just 119 donations accounted for over $160 million of the chamber's fundraising haul. Who are these donors? Well, the chamber doesn't want you to know. It does all it can to resist transparency, but thanks to voluntary disclosures by some corporations and the tax filings of some nonprofit groups, we know that its donors include many of America's biggest corporations as well as political front groups run by the billionaire Koch brothers and Karl Rove.

The chamber took in at least $5.5 million from Koch-backed groups between 2012 and 2014, and a Karl Rove-affiliated group gave the chamber $5.25 million in 2014 alone. It would be interesting to know how much of the Karl Rove money is actually Koch money laundered through the Karl Rove front group.

What does the chamber do with all of this money? It lobbies, it litigates, and it runs political attack ads on television, radio, and the internet.

Let's start with the lobbying.

The chamber spends far more than anyone else in lobbying the Federal

Government. It spent more than $80 million last year alone--far more than any individual company. Over the last 20 years, the chamber has spent more than $1.4 billion--that is billion with a ``b'' and the nine zeros after it--in lobbying the Federal Government. That is three times more than the next largest lobbying spender--a swamp monster, indeed.

Much of this lobbying is against environmental policies, with the chamber's lobbying Congress, the White House, the EPA, the Department of Energy, and the Department of the Interior on behalf of--yes, you guessed it--the fossil fuel companies. The chamber champions the fossil fuel agenda. It opposes limits on carbon emissions and supports drilling and mining on public lands and in offshore waters.

The chamber champions only the fossil fuel energy agenda and attacks renewable energy despite that industry's being responsible for more jobs than the fossil fuel industry. In 2016, for instance, the chamber lobbied the Federal Government on at least 14 separate issues in favor of the oil and gas industry and on at least 7 issues in favor of the coal industry. On renewable energy, there were zero--not one.

It was the chamber that paid for the debunked study that claimed the Paris Agreement would kill jobs and weaken economic growth, which Trump cited as justification for withdrawing from that agreement.

The chamber also spends a lot of effort in importuning the courts. In a recent 3-year period, the chamber was involved in roughly 500 cases as either a plaintiff or an amicus curiae--an interested party deemed a ``friend of the court.''

Once again, the chamber fronted for the fossil fuel industry. In just 3 years, it sued the EPA 15 times and filed amicus briefs against the EPA in another 11 cases, making the EPA the chamber's most frequent target in court. The chamber sued against the Clean Power Plan and has consistently opposed the EPA's authority to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act.

The chamber also wrote an amicus brief that urged the Supreme Court to strike down limits on election spending. It got its wish in the Citizens United decision. Citizens United allowed dark money groups-- outside groups--to spend unlimited sums in corrupting our elections. The chamber and the fossil fuel industry have been the biggest beneficiaries--the biggest users--of this horrible decision.

Over the last 10 years, the chamber has spent more than $150 million in dark money on Federal elections, and we don't know how much it has spent on State elections other than we know it has contributed millions to other outside spending groups that are active at the State level.

In 2016, the chamber was the largest dark money spender in congressional races. It often ran vicious attack ads in races across the country. Many of these ads supported the fossil fuel agenda. Here is one from the 2016 Senate race in Pennsylvania. The chamber was again the largest dark money spender on this race in its having spent over $6 million. It ran a series of attack ads against Katie McGinty and slammed her for supporting legislation to reduce carbon emissions.

Here is the ad:

A couple of moms are watching their kids, and the kids are playing on the playground. One is complaining that McGinty supports taxing energy from fossil fuels, and the other mom remarks as to how much energy their kids have, to which the first replies: Oh, if McGinty finds out about that, she will tax the kids. Right on cue, an actor who is supposed to represent McGinty, the candidate, arrives--of course in a chauffeured black sedan--ready to tax the energetic kids. The ad ends with one mother screaming at her son, Jimmy, to run away.

So that is what we get--the chamber as the enforcer for the fossil fuel industry. Dare to support climate action or oppose fossil fuel interests, and the chamber will go after you with everything it has.

It is actually worse than that because there is one thing more insidious than spending millions of dollars on attack ads, and that is the threat of spending millions of dollars on attack ads. You see, once Citizens United allowed the chamber and other outside election spending groups to spend unlimited funds, the corollary was that it could threaten to spend those unlimited funds. All the chamber and other outside election spending groups now have to do is threaten to fund a challenger in order to bring many candidates and elected officials to heel. This Citizens United-sanctioned intimidation explains why we cannot make good climate policy in Washington, and the chamber is its leading proponent.

Several big American companies have stopped funding the chamber over its anti-climate agenda. Apple, PG&E, Costco, Hewlett-Packard, Starbucks, Mars, and others have all left. Yet plenty of other corporate climate champions still fund the chamber. It is unbelievable but true.

Here is an ad that was run last spring by several big companies that urged Trump to stay in the Paris Agreement. These companies--Facebook, Gap Inc., Google, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, and Salesforce--signed this full-page ad that supported the Paris Agreement. At the same time, they were donors to the chamber, which was out attacking the Paris Agreement. How do you publicly support the Paris Agreement while funding the swamp monster that attacks the Paris Agreement?

The Trump administration is also seeking to cut funding for renewable energy research by 72 percent. America's business leaders should want to maintain U.S. technological leadership and create millions of high- paying, clean energy jobs in the future, but the chamber's so-called Global Energy Institute's website is promoting Keystone XL, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and offshore drilling. I kid you not--offshore drilling. Facebook, Gap Inc., Google, Intel, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, and Salesforce--offshore drilling? What do you bet those companies won't take out full-page ads to support offshore drilling? They do come to Washington to lobby, but when Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Salesforce came to lobby Congress through their trade association TechNet, they didn't even mention climate change. They didn't even make clean energy a priority. Instead, they fund the biggest, baddest opponent of climate action and clean energy.

Why do companies that are so committed to increasing their own use of renewable energy not lobby Congress in favor of renewable energy? It is a battle here, folks. Where is the corporate cavalry?

As long as pro-climate companies do nothing in Congress and allow fossil fuel front groups like the chamber to be their voices here in Washington, how do they expect to make progress? The Chamber of Commerce they fund throws around hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying and elections to ensure that Congress will not take the climate action they seek. What are Facebook, Gap, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, and Salesforce waiting for? Do they expect some kind of immaculate political conception of a climate bill--climate action that suddenly floats magically down from the clouds? It is not like they don't lobby themselves. For Pete's sake, they know how the game is played. They just don't lobby for this. They just don't lobby for climate action.

Look, good corporate policies on climate are important. They are very important. I get that, and I appreciate that. But we know well that good corporate policies will not reach those Paris climate goals. To reach those goals, you have to pass a bill. You have to do something on climate here in Congress. When the fossil fuel industry's blockade stopping such a bill is right here in Congress, this is a battlefield you have to show up on. It is great to take out ads--it helps--but it would really help to be present here in Congress and accounted for.

Fighting for climate action in Washington is indispensable in order to finally break the stranglehold of the chamber and its dark money allies. So please, corporate America, show up.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, one of Rhode Island's contributions to the cultural life of our Nation came from two brothers who grew up in Cumberland, RI, Bobby and Peter Farrelly. The Farrelly brothers did a number of movies. One of them was famously called ``Dumb and Dumber.''

This is a good example of dumb and dumber. It was dumb when President Obama opened the south Atlantic coast to the prospect of oil drilling. When he did, the reaction was immediate and profound. From Norfolk, VA, all the way down the red south Atlantic coast to St. Augustine, FL, city after city, county after county, coastal community after coastal community passed resolutions saying: Get that offshore drilling out of here. We don't want it. It was a sweep of that Republican shoreline. It was called the resolution revolution because so many resolutions were passed saying: Get your oil drilling the heck away from our coasts.

Ultimately, the Obama administration got smart, and in the final approval, there was no drilling in the Atlantic and no drilling in the Pacific. They gave some reasons for their choice: strong local opposition was one, conflicts with other ocean uses was another, market dynamics was a third, and comments received from Governors was a fourth.

So, in the wake of that, here comes the Trump administration, and they have seriously gone from dumb to dumber, to go right back into this fight, where it blew up in the Obama administration's face among the red State communities of the Atlantic coast. Good luck finding support for this up in New England.

In New England, our ocean economy was valued just a few years ago at over $17 billion. It employs about a quarter of a million people. Who thinks we are going to walk away from that? Who thinks we are not going to defend that ocean economy against an idea as dumb as offshore drilling in the Atlantic? We are not going to permit it.

I have authored, with my House colleague David Cicilline, legislation that the whole New England Senate representation supports, to ban this as a matter of Federal law; to stop this. The attorneys general of States from Maine down to North Carolina, including Massachusetts, Delaware, Rhode Island, of course, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, and Virginia, all have spoken out against this and I expect will litigate against it. Our Governor, Gina Raimondo, has come out strongly against this incredibly dumb idea, and she has been joined by Republican Governors in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maryland, and South Carolina because this is such a dumb idea.

Why would this administration pursue such a dumb idea, that Republican Governors oppose, that blew up in the face of the Obama administration along the south Atlantic coast when they tried it, that would infringe upon and damage critical coastal economies in States that are Republican and Democratic? Why would they do such a stupid thing?

Well, Attorney General Kilmartin of Rhode Island has one suggestion: ``This decision by the administration is clearly driven by the oil and gas industry.''

Huh. No kidding. This administration is bought and paid for by the oil and gas industry. Throw in coal, and we have the complete lock, stock, and barrel sale. We have complete industry toadies in the responsible agencies of

government and climate denial of the most flagrant and obtuse variety coming out of the White House. I mean, it is nonsense land, except for the fact that it keeps the oil and gas and coal money coming to prop up the Trump administration and the Republican Party. We are not going to stand for it. It is crooked. It will not go.

Chris Brown is the head of the Commercial Fishermen's Association of Rhode Island. He is adamant that ``oil drilling is something that is incredibly threatening and directly adverse to our well-being.''

We are going to stand and fight for our fishing communities.

Our environmental community is wildly against this: ``The last thing our coast needs is oil drilling and all of the risks that go with it,'' says our lead environmental organization, Save the Bay.

I will close with the Providence Business Journal, the voice of the Rhode Island business community, which just editorialized:

Fossil fuels, no matter where they are harvested, are

putting coastal areas across the globe in danger as sea

levels rise. In the name of national energy independence,

public policy would hasten the devastating impacts of burning

fossil fuels and make much of Rhode Island and other low-

lying areas uninhabitable.

At a time when renewable energy in the United States and

across the world is becoming less expensive, and the effects

of climate change are becoming more pronounced, pulling more

fossil fuels out of the ground is not a wise decision, and

one that hopefully will be rescinded before any drilling rigs

park themselves off Block Island.

That is the voice of Rhode Island's business community.

If you want to take a look at why this bothers us, take a look at the footprint of the BP oilspill laid on the map of the New England coast. There is Boston, there is Long Island, there is Narragansett Bay, and that is Rhode Island. That is the footprint of the mess the oil industry left when it blew up its facility in the middle of the gulf. That is what they did, and we don't need that up in New England.

We have offshore industries that are vibrant, that support our economy, that are welcome, that have long traditions and histories. We do not need oil industry invaders coming where they are not wanted because they have bought their way into the Trump administration with their political contributions and their dark money. That will not stand.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, a number of my colleagues will be coming to the floor this afternoon to discuss the predicament we face as the Mueller investigation--the special counsel investigation, the Department of Justice--closes in on the Trump White House and the Trump campaign, creating two problems. One is an unprecedented attack on the law enforcement institutions that are involved in that investigation, an effort to discredit our Federal Bureau of Investigation and our Department of Justice, including the suggestion that this whole thing is a witch hunt, even though every single witness, including Trump appointees who have come before our committees, has been asked ``Hey, this investigation, is it a witch hunt?'' and, to a person, has said no.

Russian interference was real, they are coming back in 2018, and it is no witch hunt to look into what took place.

You have this whole smear effort going on of individuals and institutions involved in the institution. You could call that the crime of commission, if you would. The crime of omission that accompanies that is, while the majority in both Houses is busy trying to smear the FBI, the Department of Justice, and various individuals in this investigation, they are not taking the steps necessary to protect the 2018 elections. We have done virtually nothing.

The one thing we have done--led by Ranking Member Ben Cardin, the Senator from Maryland--was to get really strong sanctions put through. We all agreed on that. I think the vote was 98 to 2 in the Senate--98 to 2, powerful sanctions.

You messed in our elections. Pop. Here is one in the nose for you. Don't do it again.

That was the lesson. We are going after you, Mr. Putin, where it hurts, which is with all your dirty, corrupt oligarchs who support you and whom you pay to stay in power. That is the shot we took back. You messed in our elections; we are going after your crooked oligarchs.

Except guess where that effort stopped dead--in the Oval Office, at the President's desk, where President Trump will not let the Russia sanctions go forward. We have this whole smear campaign, discrediting honorable American institutions just to protect the President from the investigation. We have nothing being done legislatively to protect the 2018 elections, and you have the one thing we did do to send the message to the Russians that we are tired of this nonsense and to give them a little bit of a pop in the nose to get them to knock it off, a little deterrent, and the President will not act on it.

I am going to be here for the duration of this and have more to say, but I want to yield to the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who was so important in getting these sanctions through and understands very well, from his work on the Magnitsky issue, what these Russian oligarchs are up to.

Mr. President, indisputably, Vladimir Putin conducted a broadly based attack on American democracy and its most important institutions. Tragically, Putin's broadly based attack on American democracy and our institutions is echoed by President Trump's attack on American democracy and our most important institutions. And tragically or pathetically--I don't know which to say--that attack is echoed by a broad Republican attack on American democracy and institutions.

We can and should take steps to defend our American democracy. They are not terribly complicated.

No. 1, stop attacking our own institutions. We can start there. We are doing Putin's work when we attack our own institutions.

No. 2, step up to protect our own elections. All of our national security witnesses have warned that they are coming after us in 2018 with more election interference. Yet what have we done?

No. 3, stop sheltering Putin and his oligarchs from consequences. We passed sanctions against Russian oligarchs and Putin and Russia for this very thing--messing around in our elections--through the Senate 98 to 2. The effective date of them has run. Yet the President won't enforce them. Stop sheltering Putin and his oligarchs.

No. 4, clean up the dark channels of foreign influence and corruption. We know what they are because we have seen this play out in European countries and former Soviet Union countries. We know how it works. We have similar vulnerabilities. Fix them.

Those are four things that are not hard to do.

A fifth would be serious investigations by Congress--not tiptoe investigations but ones where we take hard looks, ask hard questions, and demand hard evidence.

No one in the Senate has tangled more with Vladimir Putin than our friend John McCain. Senator McCain has tangled with him so often that he has actually been blacklisted from travel to Russia. What Senator McCain said last week is something we should take to heart: ``The latest attacks against the FBI and Department of Justice serve no American interests--no party's, no President's, only Vladimir Putin's.''

He also said this: ``Our Nation's elected officials, including the President, must stop looking at this investigation through the lens of politics and manufacturing political sideshows.'' Instead, we need to be looking at the situation through the lens of our national security.

Here is what America's national security professionals tell us. First, they concluded: ``Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election.''

I will continue. ``Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. Democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.''

They concluded: ``We further assess Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.''

We went on with this important conclusion in the January 2017 intelligence community assessment: ``We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the U.S. presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against U.S. allies and their election processes.''

We know they are coming. We have been warned by Trump's own appointees that they are coming. Yet we do nothing. Nada. As Putin would say, ``nichego.''

Well, right now that leaves Congress complicit, but it doesn't have to be this way, and it ought not be this way. It is not too late to defend our democracy and to teach Russia and the world some different lessons about who we are. What are the things we could do? Well, we could defend our democracy from Russian political influence.

Let's take legislative action to secure election infrastructure, improve our cyber security, counter and blunt Russian propaganda, and keep foreign money out of our politics. That ought not to be too hard to ask.

Let's defend our democracy from future Russian and foreign meddling. Let's insist on the implementation and enforcement of the sanctions against Russia. We passed them 98 to 2 for a reason. Why is President Trump sheltering Putin and the oligarchs from that punch? Let's insist on the message being delivered that we don't tolerate this behavior and that we will deter it with serious sanctions.

Let's insist on transparency. Let's insist on transparency about foreign financial interference in our country, through shell corporations in particular, and let's insist on transparency about the President's foreign financial dealings and conflicts of interest.

Finally, let's pass legislation to protect the special counsel from interference and obstruction. I have been a U.S. attorney. I understand the role of an independent and honorable Department of Justice. I understand, as we all should, that no man--not even the President--is above the law. And like many colleagues who have served in the Department of Justice, I expect, as they all expect, that even under the pressure, the threats, and the intimidation brought by the President against this Department of Justice, it will do its job. As FBI Director Christopher Wray recently said, ``We expect them to keep calm and tackle hard.''

I see the majority leader is on the floor.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak for several minutes and then turn the floor over to the Senator from Connecticut, Mr. Blumenthal, and then, thereafter, that we may be permitted to engage in a brief colloquy.

Mr. President, Senator Blumenthal and I have come to the floor with a shared concern that the raiding parties are circling the Mueller investigation and preparing for an attack on that investigation.

We see this with collateral attacks on individual members of law enforcement. We see this with efforts to discredit the FBI and the Department of Justice in general. We have seen it even with Presidential tweets seeking to discredit folks who might be witnesses before a grand jury, which would, with the right state of mind, actually amount to obstruction of justice itself.

The first thing I want to say is that the Senate is entitled to a full and truthful explanation of why Deputy Director McCabe of the FBI left. We do not know the reason behind his sudden, abrupt departure. But we do know that Sally Yates was fired; we do know that Jim Comey was fired; we do know that Bob Mueller was not fired only because White House Counsel threw himself in front of that decision by President Trump and said: If you do that, I am out.

So firings at the top of our Department of Justice are becoming an unpleasantly frequent thing, and they tend to relate to matters where investigations touch on the White House: Sally Yates and the Flynn investigation; Jim Comey and the obstruction of justice, Russia collusion investigation; and, of course, Bob Mueller leading that investigation. I think we are entitled to answers, and I call for a full and truthful explanation.

The second thing going on is the more general attack on the FBI, the latest episode of which is this so-called Nunes memo, which has been described by Democratic House Members who have seen that memo and the underlying documents out of which it was selectively cherry-picked as profoundly misleading. It had the political purpose of spreading a false narrative--the political purpose of spreading a false narrative. This is like the information operations the Kremlin used to run against the free world if they had a political purpose of spreading a false narrative.

They also said it has the purpose of undermining legitimate investigations. Guess which legitimate investigations they mean.

This business of selectively cherry-picking things out of classified information to spread a false narrative has a very unpleasant echo for me because this is what the Bush administration was up to when it was trying to defend the torture program. They selectively declassified, for instance, that Abu Zubaydah had been the subject of what they called their enhanced interrogation techniques program and that he had produced important, actionable intelligence. What they did not declassify was that all the actionable intelligence he gave them had been provided before they started on the torture techniques. Then, once the pros from Dover came down--who didn't know anything about how to interrogate somebody but only knew how to do torture techniques--he clammed up, and that was the last actionable intelligence we got out of him. So deliberately misleading by selectively declassifying is an established technique, and it is one that is both shady and dangerous.

The process by which this so-called Nunes report or memo came out smells. It is the first ever invocation of an obscure House rule allowing for the selective declassification of material. It happened on a purely partisan vote. Trump's own appointees to the Department of Justice have called efforts to release the memo ``extraordinarily reckless.'' Yet, on a purely partisan vote, using this previously never used rule, they are putting the selectively cherry-picked false narrative out into the public debate.

Why are they steaming ahead with a report that Ranking Member Adam Schiff says ``contains significant errors of fact, mischaracterizations, and omits critical context and detail''? At the same time, they are pulling one more procedural stunt, which is to stall for at least a week a Democratic report that would rebut and expose the misleading character of the Republicans' document.

The only conceivable purpose is to take the false narrative and give it a headstart of a week so that the poison gets out into our information system. Sure enough, they are pounding away at getting that information out. FOX News is already whipping it up, talking about how it is going to be a bombshell and explosive. The House Freedom Caucus has Trump revved up about the memo, urging him to support its release-- against the advice of his own law enforcement and national security officials.

Over at Breitbart, FOX News, and throughout the rightwing echo chamber, hashtag ``Release the Memo'' became the rallying cry. Not only was it the rallying cry of Breitbart and FOX News--guess what. It was the rallying cry of our friends, the Russians. Hashtag ``Release the Memo'' remains the most used hashtag by social media accounts associated with Russian influence operations. Even the President's son, Don junior, got involved in the game, tweeting out that ``Democrats & deep state govt officials''--I guess by that he means the Trump appointees who said that releasing this report would be extraordinarily reckless--are behind some mischief and therefore, all caps, ``RELEASE

Mr. President, to follow the words of my distinguished colleague from Connecticut, not only are House Republicans--to use his phrase--playing into the hands of the Russians, they are actually playing by the playbook of the Russians. If you understand the Russian information warfare, the Gerasimov doctrine, the way in which Russians--and before them, Soviets--for years tried to poison the factual environment around them, and then you put that up against this scheme where you start with the selective release of classified material that the public can't get behind because the rest is classified, the false narrative that the ranking member has pointed out that that creates, the partisan and peculiar process for getting there, the ignoring of warnings from their own national security officials about how bad this is, the convenient whipping up of all of this in far-right media at the same time, the amplification of that actually by Russian bots and other sources, and the fact that this is all pointed, not coincidentally, at the agency and officials who are engaged in investigating the Trump White House and the Trump campaign, it is so appallingly obvious what the game is that is being played here.

It is stunning to me, to follow on what Senator Blumenthal said, that we have heard nothing--at least I have heard nothing--perhaps the Senator from Connecticut can illuminate further, but I have heard nothing from our Director of National Intelligence, DNI Coats, and I have heard nothing from CIA Director Pompeo for--how long it has been? Since the very foundation of the FISA Court in the wake of Watergate, it has been an essential defense of our intelligence community that they don't want release of the FISA Court records. Now we have a partisan release that touches back to FISA applications that the Department of Justice has said is reckless. And where are they? It is astonishing that the custodians of those secrets appear to have absolutely no concern about this

partisan and peculiar, selective release of classified information.

I will echo another point Senator Blumenthal made. This just happens to be happening at a time when the sanctions we voted on by massive bipartisan majorities--I can stack the votes together, House and Senate. It was something like 515 to 5. It was an enormous, bipartisan vote to sanction the Russians for what they have been doing, and that just went live. The President could impose those sanctions now. Yet he has not. What is the explanation?

The only people this President seems incapable of being tough on are Russians. It is a very unpleasant set of coincidences. At the same time, here we are with the Republican leadership in the House and the Republican leadership in the Senate and virtually every law enforcement and national security official who has come before us is saying: Hey, yeah, they did attack our last election in 2016, and they are going to attack our next election in 2018.

We are warned that a hostile foreign power is going to attack our 2018 election. Where is the legislation to defend against that? Where is the markup of the legislation? Where is the effort to do what needs to be done to defend our democracy? Here we are just a few months out from the election. We are 9 months out. Do I have the math right? It is 9 months between here and there. Nothing.

Why is it that whenever the Russians come up, it seems that the Republican Party has to go into complete stasis, just roll right over.

I offer those thoughts to the distinguished Senator from Connecticut.

Mr. President, I am prepared to deliver remarks, but I see that the majority leader is on the floor, and I do not want to intrude on his desire to take the floor if he wishes.

Mr. President, tomorrow the Environment and Public Works Committee will have an opportunity to question Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt at an oversight hearing. Oversight of the executive branch is one of the Senate's great responsibilities. Unfortunately, the Republican leadership of this body has shown little interest in holding the Trump administration accountable, despite the fact that this administration is more ethically challenged, more riven by conflicts of interest, more captured by special interests, more defined by cronyism than any other.

After a year of Pruitt at the helm of EPA--a tenure that has been marked by mass staff departures, a slowdown in enforcement actions, questionable travel and other personal spending, rolling back critical clean air and clean water protections, a purge of scientists, an influx of industry insiders, a smorgasbord of meetings with industry bigwigs, many of whom coincidentally also bankrolled his political career back in Oklahoma, an obsession with secrecy, and heaps and heaps and heaps of climate denial--Pruitt will finally be appearing before our committee. I urge my Republican colleagues on EPW to bring some good questions to tomorrow's hearing.

Judging by Pruitt's first year, he is running dangerously amok. He has turned EPA into perhaps the swampiest Agency in a very swampy administration. Pruitt's record at EPA demands the sort of oversight this body used to exercise. If you don't believe this about Pruitt's record, just take a look at what some distinguished Republicans have to say. William Ruckelshaus, who under both Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan ran the EPA, has criticized Pruitt's penchant for secrecy in this Washington Post op-ed contrasting it with his own more transparent management style. He said:

We release[d] my full schedule and the publication of

written communications on a daily basis . . . Scott Pruitt is

taking the absolute opposite approach. Pruitt operates in

secrecy.

In an interview with HuffPost, former New Jersey Governor and chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Tom Kean, is also troubled by Pruitt's fixation with secrecy. I think this New York Times op-ed makes his opinion clear. He writes:

[T]o satisfy his penchant for secrecy, [Pruitt] is

installing--at a cost of nearly $25,000 to taxpayers--a

secure phone booth in his Washington office to keep people,

including staff members, in the dark.

Imagine that. While demanding massive cuts to EPA's budget, Pruitt is spending thousands of dollars to build himself, like Maxwell Smart, a cone of silence. He doesn't run the CIA. He doesn't run the FBI. He doesn't even run the State Department. What possible purpose could this very expensive, secure phone booth have at the Environmental Protection Agency?

Governor Kean believes Pruitt is doing this to keep his own staff members in the dark, which begs the question: What does Pruitt have to hide from his own staff? It sounds like a question my Republican colleagues on EPW should ask him tomorrow.

Pruitt's wasteful spending isn't just limited to his cone of silence. As Governor Kean points out, Pruitt has used private jets costing taxpayers another $58,000. His princely habits have even prompted questions from Senator Grassley. So I ask my EPW Republican colleagues: If Senator Grassley is troubled by Pruitt's wasteful spending of taxpayers' money on personal luxuries, shouldn't you ask him about it at tomorrow's hearing?

Pruitt's penchant for secrecy goes well beyond the expensive cone of silence that was designed to keep his own staff in the dark. It also extends to his schedule, where he tries to keep the American people in the dark. Unlike Ruckelshaus and previous EPA Administrators, Pruitt will not even disclose whom he is meeting or when he is traveling. As Governor Kean notes, our only idea of the folks he is meeting comes from the Freedom of Information Act. Once EPA finally released the first few months of Pruitt's calendars in response to a FOIA request, that is when we learned he was meeting with scores of industry fat cats and almost no environmental groups.

As for his travels, we only find out about them after the fact, which of course prevents the press from covering Pruitt, say, when he jets off to Morocco to lobby for American natural gas producers. One of my Republican colleagues on EPW might want to ask Pruitt why he is jetting around the world playing Commerce Secretary for the fossil fuel industry when he should be working here at home in America to protect people's health and their environment.

What does Governor Kean have to say about Pruitt's industry ties? ``He has elevated cronyism to new heights.'' Those are Governor's Kean's words, not mine.

In an interview with HuffPost just this past Friday, Mr. Ruckelshaus echoed this concern that Pruitt cares more about his political ties than protecting the environment. ``He's just like Trump,'' Ruckelshaus said. ``He's got an ideological approach to it, an approach that affects the large contributors in his party in Oklahoma.''

Here again, Republican colleagues on EPW might want to ask Pruitt about his close ties with industry and whether he is working for the fossil fuel interests that donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to his political activities back in Oklahoma or working for the American people. Governor Kean goes on to say that Pruitt ``built his

political career by attacking clean-air and clean-water rules'' and that he is ``blocking scientific input,'' which brings us to science.

Science, of course, gives society its headlights to look ahead and see oncoming hazards. Without science, if we ignore it or block it, as Governor Kean says Pruitt is doing, the decisions we make are simply uninformed and irrational, and Governor Kean and I aren't the only ones who think this.

Yet another high-profile Republican, the former New Jersey Governor and George W. Bush EPA Administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, agrees. Pruitt claims he will pursue so-called ``red team/blue team'' exercises instead of the long-established gold standard peer review process for rigorously evaluating science. Governor Whitman sees right through that.

[D]ecisions must be based on reliable science. The red team

begins with his politically preferred conclusion that climate

change isn't a problem, and it will seek evidence to justify

that position. That's the opposite of how science works.

Pruitt doesn't want to follow the scientific method, at least not when it comes to climate science or any other science, for that matter, that his industry backers object to. He wants to fabricate a case for his industry backers' politically preferred hypothesis. This isn't science. This is a counterfeit of science. As Governor Whitman writes, ``True science follows the evidence. . . . Government bases policy on those results. This applies to liberals and conservatives alike,'' or at least that is the way it used to be before Scott Pruitt turned the keys over to polluting industries.

So, EPW Republicans, there is another question for you to ask Pruitt tomorrow: How does he justify throwing out the real scientists and the real science in order to arrive so predictably at the fossil fuel industry's preferred conclusions?

Governor Whitman calls Pruitt's climate denial scheming ``a waste of the government's time, energy, and resources, and a slap in the face to fiscal responsibility and responsible governance.'' It is, in her words, ``shameful,'' ``unjustifiable,'' and a ``wild goose chase.'' It sounds like more great questions for EPW Republicans to ask Pruitt tomorrow: How does he justify spending taxpayers' money on his backers' climate denial schemes.

This question is particularly relevant in light of Pruitt's campaign to radically cut EPA's budget and staff. Under his tenure, EPA staff has been reduced to the lowest level in more than 30 years. EPW Republicans, take note because here is another question you can ask Pruitt tomorrow: How can he justify spending taxpayer money on frivolities like his Maxwell Smart cone of silence or personal luxuries like exorbitant private travel or crazy climate denial schemes all while demanding drastic cuts to the people who do the real work of protecting the public at his Agency?

In an interview, Governor Whitman said she ``would like to see [EPA's] budget have enough in it to ensure we are enforcing the regulations we have in place,'' a fairly conservative notion. As she notes, EPA enforcement actions are slowing down ``in some instances fairly dramatically because they've cut the budget for the number of enforcement agents.'' You can't do cleanups or police polluters without money and people, both of which Pruitt is looking to cut. Simply put, Pruitt's so-called back-to-basics campaign is a smokescreen to hide his attempts to gut the Agency he is supposed to lead because it will make his industry backers happy.

Once again, I ask my EPW Republican colleagues: Will you confront Pruitt about his sham promises to get back to basics while he is really just cutting staff and resources and reducing enforcement?

Governor Kean speaks for many Americans when he writes, ``For the sake of our children's health, it's time for Scott Pruitt to go.'' When you are hearing that from the Republican side, it is worth listening.

Pruitt's tenure at the EPA has been an unmitigated disaster for public health, for the environment, and for the future of the planet we call home. Its only value is if you have some peculiar connoisseur interest in government corruption to watch all the many ways in which industry can work its will within its supposed regulator.

Tomorrow, those of us who sit on the Environment and Public Works Committee have an important opportunity to put the Senate's oversight authority to good use and expose how badly Pruitt is in the pocket of the polluters he is supposed to police. I sincerely hope that my Republican colleagues on EPW will seize the opportunity. You can be sure that my Democratic colleagues and I will.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 15 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. President, I begin today by adding a Rhode Island voice to the chorus of coastal communities around the country standing against President Trump's reckless and unwelcome choice to try to allow oil and gas drilling off of nearly all U.S. coasts.

The Rhode Island ocean economy is worth over $2 billion and employs more than 40,000 people. For whatever potential gain of fossil fuel corporations, offshore drilling introduces all sorts of hazards to our fishing industry and people who work in tourism and recreation along Narragansett Bay.

Remember how devastating the 2010 BP oilspill was in the Gulf of Mexico? This graphic depicts what a spill that size would look like off of New England.

The administration has tossed aside a 5-year plan that underwent multiple revisions and involved multiple agencies over multiple years taking into account the input of stakeholders and literally millions of comments from the public.

The final plan that had been developed after all that effort allowed for only 10 lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and one sale in the Cook Inlet program area off the Alaska coast. There were no lease sales allowed in the Pacific or Atlantic. Why? Because everybody hates it.

In ruling out drilling off our Atlantic coast, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management cited ``strong local opposition, conflicts with other ocean uses, . . . current market dynamics, . . . [and] careful consideration of the comments received from Governors of affected states.''

None of that has changed, and the Trump administration ought to listen to those coastal voices, not just the occasional Republican Governor of a coastal State seeking a political boost.

Rhode Island, the Ocean State, has come out strongly opposed to this proposal. Our Governor, Gina Raimondo, said the administration's plan is ``endangering the health of nearly all coastal waters in our country, including our 400 miles of coastline in Rhode Island, so that rich oil companies can get richer.''

Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Kilmartin vowed to ``continue to fight this latest move by the Trump administration to give the oil and gas industry carte blanche to destroy our environment.''

Rhode Island is a leader in offshore wind development. It was the first in the Nation to have steel in the water, first in the Nation to have electrons flowing to the grid. We also have vibrant fisheries and a longstanding fishing economy. We depend on our coastal economy for that, for tourism, and for many other things. Also, we are especially susceptible to sea level rise and other consequences of climate change. We are not about to go back in time and endanger our coast with the extraction of more dirty fuels.

Here in Washington, I led a bipartisan group of New England Senators seeking legislation to bar offshore drilling along our New England coast. My Rhode Island colleague, Representative David Cicilline, introduced the companion legislation in the House of Representatives. The Trump administration will not be following through on its rash plan if New England's bipartisan Members of Congress have anything to say about it. The value of healthy oceans and coasts is tangible and immediate for us.

The larger backdrop to this conversation about offshore drilling is that our oceans are steadily getting sicker, even without the threat of additional oilspills. The oceans have absorbed approximately 30 percent of the excess carbon dioxide that we have added to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution began. That is changing the ocean's chemistry dramatically. The oceans have already absorbed roughly 90 percent of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by those greenhouse gases. We would not be living the way we have gotten used to through our development as a species if it weren't for the ocean absorbing so much of that excess heat. We owe the oceans a lot, but as a result of that excess carbon dioxide and excess heat, our oceans are warming, and because they are warming, they are rising and, as well, of course, they are growing more acidic, putting marine life, coastal communities, and ocean economies all in jeopardy.

Oceans face another emerging problem, which is deoxygenation. Oceans need oxygen, and fish and other creatures that live in the ocean need oxygen, and we are finding that there is less and less. Low-oxygen zones in the ocean are nothing new. Dead zones or areas where oxygen levels drop too low for marine life to survive occur naturally, but dead zones are worsening. They are worsening near the coasts where agricultural runoff spurs rapid blooms of phytoplankton. When the phytoplankton die, their decomposition consumes large amounts of oxygen from the water, and fish and other marine animals suffocate. We saw this just a few years ago in Narragansett Bay's Greenwich Bay area.

Now, the Gulf of Mexico routinely sees dead zones as nitrogen-rich waters

flow from farms in the heartland, down the Mississippi River, and into the gulf. Last year's gulf dead zone reached record levels. NOAA, which measures these things, estimated the dead zone to be the size of New Jersey--the largest ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico. NOAA assessed that the cause was unusually heavy rains in the Midwest associated with climate change that washed large amounts of fertilizer into the river and down to the gulf.

NOAA is not alone. Last year's Climate Science Special Report, the scientific backbone for the Federal Government's Fourth National Climate Assessment, discussed the growing issue of climate change- driven ocean deoxygenation. The report did not mince words. ``Global ocean deoxygenation is a direct effect of warming.'' As water warms, it loses its capacity to absorb gases like oxygen, and warmer water circulates less, meaning there is less mixing of water and oxygen between the surface and deeper waters. The report attributes 85 percent of global oxygen loss to this stratification, as it is known, of the water.

Worldwide, ocean oxygen levels have declined. According to the Climate Science Special Report, the North Pacific, North Atlantic, Southern Ocean, subtropical South Pacific, and South Indian Oceans are all expected to experience further deoxygenation. Oxygen may drop off as much as 17 percent in the North Pacific by 2100 if we don't rein in carbon emissions.

Not surprisingly, fish and other marine wildlife try to steer clear of dead zones. If they are not able to breathe in these low-oxygen waters, they can die. Dr. Callum Roberts, a researcher at the University of York, has also warned that large and fast-moving fish that use more oxygen, like tunas, billfish, sharks, and fish like this unbelievably beautiful marlin, are being relegated to shrinking high- oxygen areas causing them to change how they hunt. A 2010 paper in Deep-Sea Research estimated that from 1960 to 2008, the areas in the ocean where oxygen levels are too low to support fish and other big ocean organisms have grown by over 1.7 million square miles--an added 1.7 million square miles with oxygen levels too low for God's beautiful creatures like this one.

One example of this phenomenon comes to us from former NOAA researcher Dr. Eric Prince, who noticed that blue marlin, a fish which is actually well known for its diving capabilities, would not leave the top hundred feet of ocean off of Costa Rica and Guatemala. Elsewhere, in the ocean, marlin regularly go half a mile down to hunt. The reason for constraining themselves to that top 100 feet of ocean? ``A deep, gigantic and expanding swath of water that contained too little oxygen.'' A 2011 study in Nature Climate Change estimated that over 50 years the surface ocean habitat in the tropical Northeast Atlantic used by tunas and billfish, like the blue marlin, has shrunk by 15 percent due to deoxygenation.

A study published earlier this month in the prestigious journal Science warned that though there may be a short-term fishing surge due to the crowding of fishing species into surface waters--they are easier to find because there is less oxygenated water that they are in--``[i]n the longer term, these conditions are unsustainable and may result in ecosystem collapses, which ultimately will cause societal and economic harm.''

This portends devastating effects. The World Health Organization says around 1 billion people rely on fish as their main source of protein. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates 10 to 12 percent of the world's population base their livelihoods on fisheries or aquaculture. Bringing it closer to home, commercial fish landings for Rhode Island for 2016 totaled 82.5 million pounds and were valued at nearly $94 million. In 2014, the New England ocean economy was valued at over $17 billion and employed nearly a quarter of a million people. All of that is at risk as we pull out the cornerstones of our ocean ecosystem.

Here is where it actually gets a little weird. Oxygen depletion could actually spur a boom in nitrogen-breathing microorganisms--tiny microbes that breathe nitrogen instead of oxygen. They might then demand enough valuable nitrogen that they crowd out other ocean species that also need nitrogen, and these nitrogen species exhale nitrous oxide, which is a greenhouse gas which creates another possible climate change feedback loop.

As a recent Washington Post story put it, our growing understanding of ocean deoxygenation ``underscores once again that some of the most profound consequences of climate change are occurring in the oceans, rather than on land.''

As Dr. Denise Breitburg, the lead author of the recent Science paper said, ``Of course, declining oxygen isn't happening in isolation. . . . Warming itself threatens marine food webs, as does acidification caused by increased carbon dioxide in the water. But the threats are worse when combined.''

That is what we are seeing--deoxygenation, warming, acidification combined.

We recklessly ignore the warnings that the oceans are screaming at us. Scientists are seeing numbers and conditions in the oceans they have never seen before. We ignore also the high tides that now regularly flood downtowns of major cities as sea levels rise. We ignore fish species moving northward and offshore in search of cooler waters away from traditional fisheries. We ignore the oyster spat dissolving in acidic seawater before they can grow to maturity. We ignore coral reefs turning white and dying in warm, acidic seas. We ignore the record strength of warm-water-fueled 2017 hurricanes that killed people, destroyed homes, and caused billions of dollars in damage.

I wonder how long can we ignore the cries from our oceans? Truly, it is time to wake up.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, let me first thank my friend from Oklahoma. We often disagree; indeed, we often violently disagree on matters of environmental issues. But we have been teammates--indeed, close teammates on the chemical safety legislation, which has been passed into law; on water resources bills, which have been passed into law; and on the last highway bill, which was passed into law. The lesson I take from that is, in the Senate, we can disagree, and we can disagree violently, but where we agree, push the throttles forward and get it done.

I will.

I appreciate very much the Senator's words of goodwill, and it aligns very well with the note of optimism that I want to open on after last night's vote.

Last night's vote provoked the first real conversations--the first real, bipartisan conversations about this continuing resolution that I have seen. People all around the country watching C-SPAN saw right there on the Senate floor the Senators pooling about each other, the conversations, the back-and-forth, the intermediaries going in between the leaders. They saw live what the Senate should have been doing for weeks, which is to work in a bipartisan fashion toward a compromise. When starting at 20 minutes to midnight, it is hard to work it all the way through.

My strong hope is that the energy and the spirit of bipartisanship that was evident right down here in the well last night persists through this weekend and as long as necessary to get a bipartisan deal accomplished. We have the weekend to do it, we probably even have Monday to do it, and we should get about our business.

We can also be optimistic that the measures that the Democrats want to include are bipartisan. We are not trying to jam one-side-only poison pills through; we are trying to get attention to long overdue matters where there is a bipartisan solution.

There is something of a backstory to where we are right now, so I want to mention it. I have obviously considerable sympathy for Majority Leader McConnell's predicament with a President who takes opposite positions within hours. How does one negotiate with that?

``Give me a bipartisan deal and I will take the heat,'' the President said. He has since blown up anything bipartisan that came anywhere near him. Majority Leader McConnell is reduced to saying: I don't know what the President will sign, and I can't act until I know. Well, I think last night shows that we actually can begin to act here in the Senate even if the President can't get his signals straight about where he wants us to come.

I can't help but remember Senator Graham's description in our Judiciary Committee of President Trump's reversal on the Durbin-Graham proposal. He described it in 2 hours--he described the 10 o'clock Trump and the 12 o'clock Trump, and within 2 hours, he completely reversed his position. Senator Graham said ``I want that guy back'' about the 10 o'clock Trump.

It is very hard to negotiate with someone who doesn't know what his position is, so I do have sympathy, and I hope the White House sits down and has a negotiation with itself so that it can decide what it wants.

The other problem over at the White House is that the President has surrounded himself with extremists, and that means that nobody knows how to negotiate. And the advice he is getting doesn't serve him. You really don't do deals--I think virtually anybody in politics knows this--by bringing in the most extreme elements to shout at each other; you do deals by bringing in people who have good faith and a common interest in solving the problem together. If all you have around you are extremists, you have dramatically crippled and shrunk your own capabilities--unless, of course, what you wanted all along is what the extremists want: ``a good shutdown.''

There is another backstory going on that I want to discuss. This is a fight over maybe a dozen legislative issues, but it is also a fight over the institution of the Senate and how far we will let the Senate degrade into a partisan dead zone. In the oceans, we see more and more dead zones where there isn't

enough oxygen to support life, so there aren't fish and there isn't the mixing and the turbulence that are necessary for the mixing of life and oxygen. The Senate seems to be slowly turning into that dead zone.

We know what works around here because the majority leader has a long history of fighting to get it, to make sure that the minority has amendments and to try to block things that are exclusively partisan. Indeed, at various times, he has encouraged his caucus to avoid joining Democrats on any bills, so that they are partisan, so that he can block them. So we have lived the experience of the majority leader's interest in amendments and in opposition to purely partisan legislation. We have also heard it, and in the majority leader's own words, he has called for a Senate ``which honors and respects all the members and allows everybody to participate and offer their ideas, regardless of party.'' He went on to say: ``That's something that the majority leader can do and I intend to do it.''

How do you do that? Well, he went on to say in another interview that the way to do that is ``to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to participate in some way in the passage'' of the legislation. To be specific, he said, ``bills should come to the floor, be thoroughly debated, and include a robust amendment process''--a robust amendment process. He went on: ``The answer is to let [the Senate] debate; to let the Senate work its will. And that means bringing bills to the floor. It means having a free and open amendment process.'' He also said: ``We want to engage members from both parties in the legislative process, to get our democracy working again the way it was designed.''

With that background, let's look at Trump year 1. The opener legislatively in the year was the partisan budget reconciliation bill, a purely partisan measure whose only purpose was to open the door to further purely partisan measures under the budget reconciliation process. So we opened with that partisan process. Having opened that door, sure enough, we went on to partisan ObamaCare repeal, which failed, and they tried again, over and over, but always partisan, whatever the effort. Then we went back to partisan budget reconciliation 2 to tee up a partisan opening for a partisan tax bill. Then, of course, we had the partisan tax bill.

There was one briefly shining light on the national defense authorization. Chairman McCain and Ranking Member Reed in the Armed Services Committee led a robust, bipartisan amendment process that brought the committee together and brought forward a bill that I think everybody in the Senate could be proud of, but when it got to the floor, here on the Senate floor, not one Democrat was allowed a floor vote on any amendment.

So the grand total for the year for the U.S. Senate, setting aside the budget and vote-arama amendments, which, in my view, don't count-- that whole process is a joke. That simply tees up a reconciliation measure that allows further partisanship. So set those aside because they don't count. In real legislation, how many amendments has the minority been able to get on the floor? The grand total all year long, ever since Trump was elected last year, to this year, is a grand total of zero. Zero Democratic amendments considered on the Senate floor since Trump--not one.

Compare that to all the things I just read that the Senate majority leader promised on amendments--that bills should come to the floor, be thoroughly debated, and include a robust amendment process; that the answer is to let folks debate, to let the Senate work its will, and that means bringing bills to the floor, and it means having a free and open amendment process. To paraphrase Senator Graham, I want that guy back.

When the leader shuts down the amendment process, it is not just the minority party that suffers. Republicans also, under Trump, have gotten virtually zero floor amendments voted on all year long.

That leaves the Senate exclusively with partisan ram jobs, which is what we have seen a lot of, and UCs--unanimous consent agreements-- things so noncontroversial that they can avoid the dead zone of the McConnell Senate floor and be agreed to by everyone and passed into law. That is a worthy process, but it is not a process that is going to yield a solution to the big controversies we need to resolve here in this world's greatest deliberative body.

This problem of no open process and no amendments is a problem for all of us. When we get all tangled up in leadership chess games, all Senators lose their ability to represent their States. Power gets concentrated in the leader.

I remember Senator Sessions, on the floor over there--I was actually in the Presiding Officer's chair on some of the occasions when Senator Sessions was animatedly discussing his concern and irritation with what the masters of the universe were doing in secret rooms that he did not have access to. This is a bipartisan frustration. We all become cogs in the majority leader's leadership chess match, and we all have common cause in going back to a place where the leader helps the Senate work its will, not where leaders impose their will on the Senate.

The Senate is broken. Over and over again that has been said on the Senate floor, and by no one more articulately than by Senator Durbin. The longer you have been around--Senators Durbin and Alexander particularly--when you remember what it was like, it is much more apparent how broken it is. And for whose benefit? For big donors, so they can call the shots through the leadership? For the leadership thrill of being a bigger player in DC's ``Game of Thrones''?

This ought not just be a Democratic revolt against the mess we are in. Republican Senators are often just as neutered as their minority colleagues when all power moves to the majority leader. Zero amendments--not a single minority amendment in the entire year on real legislation--ought to be a symptom that concerns everyone. And I don't know what Republicans got--two, maybe three amendments in an entire year? How many Republican Senators are there who have never had an amendment of theirs called up and voted on on the Senate floor?

Let me add one additional point against this looming specter of a shutdown. Speaker Ryan sent over a bill last night that we voted on last night that he knew was going to fail. I am a junior Senator here, and I had last night's vote predicted exactly. With all the powers of the Speaker of the House, with his direct line to his fellow Republican, the majority leader, is it plausible to think that what happened last night in the Senate was any kind of a surprise to the Speaker of the House? Of course not.

We know from Senator Schumer and Leader Pelosi that there was not even consultation with Democrats about the contents of the CR last night--no negotiations, nothing, a partisan ram job that the Speaker had to know would fail when he sent it over. Imagine the cynicism. Imagine the cynicism, with the shutdown of the government looming, of sending to the Senate a partisan bill you know will fail, teeing up a shutdown just so you can tee up a blame war about the shutdown you knowingly provoked. That is ``House of Cards'' cynical stuff.

Let me wrap up by saying that the Senate balance is about as close as it could be. Moreover, Democrats in the Senate represent 40 million more Americans than our Republican colleagues do. When the Senate majority is microscopic and you represent a minority of the American people, dictating terms to the Senate minority as if this were the Soviet Duma is not justifiable, and it is destroying the Senate. We on our side have been rolled and we have been rolled and we have been rolled, and there is no end in sight. The Senate of the United States has been turned into a dead zone--the McConnell-partisan dead zone. Those strategies amass power into the leader's hands, away from Republican and Democratic Senators alike, but that breaks all the promises the majority leader made about amendments and regular order, and that is destroying this institution--this institution that we love. You simply cannot have both bipartisanship and utter dominion by the majority leader at the same time. That just can't coexist; it is impossible. You cannot have an open amendment process and utter dominion by the majority leader at the same time.

If the majority leader insists on being, to use Senator Sessions' phrase, the ``master of the universe,'' what does that leave for everyone else? Well, we have seen what it leaves on our

side: zero amendments, zero consultation, no input, no bipartisanship ever.

Why should the great affairs of government be worked out in private meetings of two or five or eight? Those rooms may not be smoke-filled any longer, but the atmosphere is just as unhealthy without the smoke. The atmosphere is just as unhealthy when so much gets done in the dark, and so many Senators, who are not the master of the universe, are reduced to begging and pleading to their leader to have favors slipped into the backroom deal. That is not the way the Senate should work. Smoke or no smoke, that is not healthy, but too many Senators, too many Members have never even breathed the fresh air of a healthy Senate. Like the pit ponies of the old coal mines, they trudge and they haul in darkness, trudging and hauling in the darkness so long they don't know what daylight looks like, but Senators like Dick Durbin and Lamar Alexander, who remember what daylight looks like, are here to remind us how healthy a process that should be.

Remember, in a Senate in which the minority party--the barely minority party, I should add--is not for an entire year able to get even one amendment voted on, on one piece of meaningful legislation, in a Senate like that, everybody loses or maybe I should say virtually everybody loses. Unanimous consent, partisan ram job, or nothing is no way to govern and no way to run a Senate.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for approximately 15 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. President, now, for the 193rd time, I will give my ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, and as I do so, we are coming up on President Trump's anniversary in office. Unfortunately, this occasion does not offer the American people much to celebrate. Behind the persistent tweets and the dog whistles, the Trump Presidency has been a spectacle of special interests and self-dealing. Billionaire donors have endless access installing their operatives and pursuing their special interest goals throughout the executive branch. They are literally writing the rules in an unambiguous effort to enrich themselves evermore at the expense of everyone else.

Fossil fuel barons are the new American dark money emperors. Carl Icahn, early on, got himself installed as a special adviser to the President on regulatory reform and began pushing for a change to the renewable fuel standard that would net one of his companies, CVR Energy, hundreds of millions of dollars. Icahn's insider campaign came to an end in August of last year right around the time a New Yorker article outlined the potential legal claims that could arise from his murky status and self-dealing. Federal investigators have since opened a probe into Icahn's time at the White House.

Then came Murray Energy Corporation CEO and big Trump donor Bob Murray with his policy wish list for Trump officials. He called it his action plan. Murray had donated $300,000 to the President's inauguration, and he donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to political action committees affiliated with the EPA Administrator and fossil fuel operative, Scott Pruitt. In a ``Frontline'' documentary, Bob Murray bragged about giving the administration this action plan and that the first page was already done.

Well, I was curious to see the Bob Murray action plan for the Trump administration, so I joined Senator Carper, our ranking member on the Environment and Public Works Committee, and asked the White House for a copy of the Bob Murray action plan. The White House ignored our request and to this date has never responded.

I guess the White House was busy organizing Trump's nominee for second in command at the EPA: a lobbyist for, guess who--Bob Murray and Murray Energy. During the Murray Energy lobbyist's EPA confirmation hearing, he claimed he did not have the Bob Murray action plan. He admitted he had seen the Bob Murray action plan at a meeting between Bob Murray and Energy Secretary Rick Perry last March, but he could not recall details of what was in the action plan or what was discussed in the meeting. Lobbyists for energy companies who get one-on-one meetings with the Secretary of Energy often little note nor long remember what went on at the meeting.

Anyway, I asked the Department of Energy whether they had a copy of the elusive Bob Murray action plan. Shortly after my request, and before we heard anything from the Department of Energy, the magazine In These Times released photos of that March meeting that the Murray lobbyist had mentioned between Secretary Perry and Bob Murray.

This photo shows Bob Murray and Secretary Perry. It looks like Bob Murray received a pretty cozy reception from the Energy Secretary. This gentleman, I believe, is another lobbyist for Bob Murray and Murray Energy. After they got through the hugging, they got down to business. There is the Secretary, there is the CEO Bob Murray, there is his other lobbyist, and this is the Bob Murray lobbyist who is now teed up to be the No. 2 at EPA. Right there in the picture is the Bob Murray action plan. This is a closeup of it, and the Presiding Officer can't see from there and nobody on the camera can see, but if you look right here, it talks about power grid reliability in the cover letter signed by Bob Murray, which may have cooked up, since this was a meeting with Secretary Perry, Secretary Perry's power grid reliability proposal to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which included huge subsidies to coal plants.

So we have a coal company CEO bringing his action plan in to Secretary Perry on whose cover letter it talks about power grid reliability, and before you know it, Secretary Perry is proposing a power grid reliability project to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that just happens to give the coal industry enormous subsidies. What could possibly be wrong with that?

Well, with this photographic evidence in hand, I renewed my request that the Energy Department produce this Bob Murray action plan. They were no longer able to pretend they didn't have it because they had a picture of it, with the Secretary, on his desk. They nevertheless continued to stonewall me, saying they would provide me the document after responding to FOIA requests from the public.

So, memo to my Senate colleagues, when in the exercise of your oversight authority and the oversight authority of Congress and the Senate you request documents from the Trump administration, you might want to consider putting in a parallel FOIA request as that may be the only way you get a response.

Despite the administration's best efforts to stonewall the Bob Murray action plan, however, my office was able to obtain a copy from an independent source. This version is addressed to Vice President Pence.

The New York Times has now published the Bob Murray action plan.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the article they wrote, ``How a Coal Baron's Wish List Became President Trump's To-Do List,'' and the Bob Murray action plan that was the subject of that story at the conclusion of my remarks.

The article details demands made by Murray that have already been checked off by the President and the administration, including the repeal of the Clean Power Plan, withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, the installation of mining industry operatives at the Mine Safety and Health Administration, and even, believe it or not, the appointment of a fossil fuel-friendly U.S. Supreme Court Justice.

Several more of Bob Murray's action plan requests are underway. At the

Mine Safety and Health Administration, now led by a former coal mine executive, Murray Energy and trade associations are working to undo Obama-era rules to protect miners. The 2010 coal mine dust rule is also on the chopping block. Over at EPA, Bob Murray's political money beneficiary, Scott Pruitt, has begun a review of the Agency's 2015 ozone standards.

Let me just drop in, as a Senator from Rhode Island, we have had days when you drive into work and the skies are clear and the weather is nice and the radio says: Little children, infants and elderly folks and people who have a breathing difficulty should stay indoors in the air- conditioning. They should not go outdoors and enjoy the beautiful day. Why? Because of ozone which is being bombarded in on Rhode Island from--guess what--coal plants in the Midwest. We are in the downstream receiving end of ozone, which is the product of those coal plant emissions. So, obviously, loosening the ozone standards is good for coal companies.

On a new topic, EPA continues to cut and to drive away its staff--all items on Bob Murray's action plan.

Since it appears that Bob Murray has tailored his action plan for individual agencies, I have sent additional requests last week to the Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, all of which are named in the Bob Murray action plan to see what specific action plans they have from Bob Murray.

The fossil fuel industry may be able to boss Cabinet Secretaries around and may be able to bring the majority party in Congress smartly to heel, but, fortunately, there are still some venues where their demands run smack up against the rule of law. In our courts and in administrative proceedings, decisions must have substantial support in the evidence, and lying and misleading can be exposed and even punished--unlike in Congress, where lying and misleading have been sickeningly successful fossil fuel tactics for decades.

Last week, the independent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission--even one stuffed with Trump appointees--rejected Secretary Perry's proposed power grid reliability rule to subsidize coal and nuclear plants. The FERC Commissioners found that the proposal failed to meet ``clear and fundamental'' legal requirements, like that the result will be ``just and reasonable'' under the Federal Power Act.

As an aside here, the theory of the coal industry was that their units provide more reliability than renewables. Well, tell that to Iowa's electric grid operators, which have baked Iowa's abundant wind energy not just into their flow but into their reliability modeling. Tell that to New England's ISO, which has allowed renewables into its capacity auctions to be paid, for meeting baseload capacity requirements. And, of course, tell that to anyone who has had to deal with scheduled and unscheduled outages at coal plants.

When I went on one of my climate visits to, in this case, Tennessee, I heard about a coal plant that had to be shut down because climate change had warmed the river and shrunk the flow so that the river used to cool the plant was no longer adequate to cool the plant, and they had to go into an unscheduled outage. Wind and solar are very reliable, and the ISOs have baked the algorithms that quantify their reliability into their grid reliability planning.

The ``coal is reliable and renewables aren't'' argument may pass muster on talk shows, but in the real world of grid operators, it is nonsense. FERC, as a rule-of-law agency, is required to face that fact.

America's courts also stand in the way of the Bob Murray action plan agenda. Murray, for instance, has demanded that the EPA overturn its 2009 endangerment finding--the administrative finding that greenhouse gas emissions, like carbon dioxide and methane and so forth, threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations. That is their finding, that those greenhouse gas emissions threaten the health and welfare of current and future generations. That is why it is called an endangerment finding, because of the danger to the public. Well, good luck challenging that determination in a court of law. In fact, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has already upheld the endangerment finding back in 2012.

Even the fossil fuel flunky running the EPA now knows better than to challenge that endangerment finding. If he thought he could, he would in a heartbeat, but he is clever enough to know that an avalanche of climate evidence would fall in on his head if he tried. Witnesses from virtually every leading State university in the industry, from Alaska to Oklahoma to Georgia to Maine; expert scientists from our National Laboratories, from Idaho to Tennessee; our national security agencies and our military; America's government watchdog agencies, like the GAO and the GSA; and even the Trump administration's own recent climate report, all, would pile on the conclusive evidence of climate change. And on the other side would be what? Pathetic Kathleen Hartnett White, who gave one of the worst performances in Senate history at her confirmation hearings? The secretly fossil-fuel-funded Willie Soon? Some coal company lobbyist? Or perhaps the Heartland Institute, with its proud history of comparing climate scientists to the Unabomber?

It would be a rout. It would be a rout, and even Pruitt knows it. The reason it would be a rout is because of the rule of law--the rule of law requirements of the Administrative Procedures Act, the rule of law specter of judicial review, and the rule of law sanctions that courts impose for false evidence.

Certainly, Bob Murray and his surrounding crowd of bad-acting fossil fuel billionaires know how to throw their political weight around. We see everywhere the phony science denial apparatus they have created. We see their false and toxic messages even in outlets like the Wall Street Journal editorial page. We see their lobbying front groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, continuing adamantly to oppose any serious climate legislation despite the contrary position of companies on their board of directors. American elections stink with their dark money and promises and threats. Their flunkies have now been moved into positions of authority in government, and the Trump's administration eagerness to carry out industry marching orders is humiliatingly servile.

Ultimately, the polluters' drive to put profit first above the health and safety of Americans will face strict scrutiny in the truth-based arena of Federal courts. Ultimately, it will also face the harsh test of time, as the fact that they knew and the fact that they lied becomes ever more obvious and ever more odious. Ultimately, the American voter will have her say about whether this great Republic should be under the dominion and control of the fossil fuel industry or free to address the problem of climate change as a rational world leader must.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the Trump administration has come up with a name for its energy policy. The energy policy amounts to, basically, a big, fat cascade of gifts and special favors for oil, gas, and coal companies, which, in turn, make big political contributions. Trump officials call the policy ``energy dominance.'' More accurately, its name would probably be ``fossil fuel industry political dominance'' or one might actually call it ``ignorance dominance'' since the administration willfully ignores scientific understanding, basic economics, market theory, and even the warnings of our national security community.

The situation is not pretty from an environmental point of view. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is busily trying to roll back rules that limit, for instance, emissions of methane, which is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. He is considering walking back fuel efficiency standards that save drivers money at the pump. President Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord and was promptly ignored by every other nation on Earth.

Last month, on the Interior Secretary's recommendation, Trump took big areas of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, in Utah, away from the public and opened them, instead, to big mining and oil and gas interests. Zinke has even proposed to open almost all U.S. coastlines to drilling by oil and gas companies. That includes drilling in protected areas in the Arctic, drilling up and down the Atlantic coast, expanded drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and drilling along the Pacific coastline. The plan even includes Georges Bank and other crucial fishing grounds for New England.

This drilling scheme is likely dead on arrival. Republican Governors in New Jersey, Maryland, and Florida have all denounced the plan, as have Florida's Democratic and Republican Senators. It even runs into objections from the Pentagon. When President Obama considered opening the southern Atlantic coast to drilling 2 years ago, the Defense Department told the Obama administration that offshore energy development could interfere with military readiness and missile testing.

Given the dominance of fossil fuel political interests in this administration, the whole Trump energy dominance scheme, of course, neglects the warnings of our national security experts about climate change--climate change as an accelerant of global instability and conflict and climate change as a direct hazard to military installations and infrastructure, from the Naval Station Norfolk to faraway facilities like Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

In 2008, the National Intelligence Council reported more than 30 U.S. military installations facing risk from rising sea levels. A vulnerability assessment directed by the ``2010 Quadrennial Defense Review'' found that at around 3 feet of sea level rise, 128 military installations are at risk. Naturally, many of those belong to the Navy--indeed, 56 out of those 128. It is a significant share of the Navy's global footprint, totaling around $100 billion in value.

In 2011, the National Academy of Sciences report, ``National Security Implications of Climate Change for U.S. Naval Forces,'' recommended the continued review of how sea level rise and changes in storm frequency and intensity would affect coastal installations.

The National Defense Authorization Act, which we just passed, directs the Department of Defense to study how climate change will affect our most vulnerable military bases over the next 20 years, including ``the effects of rising sea tides, increased flooding, drought, desertification, wildfires, thawing permafrost,'' as well as how climate change may drive new requirements for combatant commanders.

The law includes a sense of Congress statement that ``climate change is a direct threat to the national security of the United States and is impacting stability in areas of the world both where the United States Armed Forces are operating today, and where strategic implications for future conflict exist.''

That is a sense-of-Congress statement that has passed this Republican-controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House and was signed into law by this administration. Thank you to the author of this language, my friend and fellow Rhode Islander, Congressman Jim Langevin.

Even the U.S. Government Accountability Office has engaged. The independent oversight agency issued a report titled, ``Climate Change Adaptation: DoD Needs to Better Incorporate Adaptation into Planning and Collaboration at Overseas Installations.''

I think that title gives away the punch line. Surveying our bases and installations across the world, GAO found that weather and climate change pose operational and budgetary risks to infrastructure. GAO recommended that DOD's climate planning efforts be expanded and increased; specifically, that the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force require defense installations to ``systematically track the costs associated with extreme weather events and climate change'' and that DOD better coordinate addressing climate change risks across different DOD installations.

This picture in the GAO report shows an unnamed military facility in the Pacific that has at times been cut off by flooding from access points to its munitions storage complex. If you have a military facility that can't get access to its munitions storage, you have a problem.

This is the picture of the flooded entryway, and this is the picture of the similar entryway under normal circumstances, able to be traveled.

A 2014 typhoon caused flash flooding here that trapped and imperiled American personnel. The point is, when climate change effects inhibit military base operations, defense preparedness requires climate preparedness.

Naval Station Norfolk, the largest Navy base in the world, is a poster child for the devastation that awaits our coastal military bases if we continue to pump out the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving sea level rise. A tide gauge operated at the base since 1927 has shown nearly 15 inches of vertical sea level rise so far. In the broader Hampton Roads metro area, home not only to the Navy but also to facilities of the Air Force, the Marine Corps, the Coast Guard, NASA, and NOAA, high tides are already regularly forcing seawater back through storm drains and flooding roadways.

DOD's own environmental research program, the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program, used Norfolk as its case study for sea level rise and extreme storm risks to coastal DOD installations. The study found a ``tipping point'' of about a half meter, 1.6 feet, of sea level rise, at which point ``the probabilities of damage to infrastructure and losses in mission performance increased dramatically.'' This is mapping of the flood hazard around Naval Station Norfolk.

This tipping point at which the mission performance losses increase dramatically is only a few decades away. Retired RADM David Titley, a former oceanographer and navigator of the Navy and leader of its Climate Change Task Force, said Norfolk has about 10 to 15 years to get serious about sea level rise in the region before ``we're really cutting it close.''

In 2017, CAPT Dean Vanderley, who leads infrastructure engineering at the Norfolk Naval base, admitted that sea level rise is ``something where I don't know that we've fully defined the problem. And we have definitely not fully defined the solution.''

Retired CAPT Joe Bouchard, a former base commander, told InsideClimate News that Naval Station Norfolk would need significant improvements to nearly every piece of infrastructure, from electrical and drainage systems to pier improvements, not to mention a seawall. He estimated this work could cost more than $1 billion and take as long as a decade to complete. That is just one base with $1 billion and a decade's worth of work. The DOD has identified over 128 bases that would be at significant risk with 3 feet of sea level rise. I think NOAA's current estimate is for 6 feet of global sea rise by the end of the century.

Even though our President is clueless about the basics of climate change, his Secretary of Defense understands and acknowledges the risks. In response to congressional questioning last year, Secretary Mattis said, ``Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today. . . . It is appropriate for the Combatant Commands to incorporate drivers of instability that impact the security environment in their areas into their planning.''

Well, for political reasons, the White House can't acknowledge the problem so the recently published ``National Security Strategy'' totally disregards all of these recommendations. It will not even mention the forbidden words. We know these words are forbidden in the Trump administration because over and over again the memos leak out about people being told don't say the words ``climate change.''

Instead, with all these warnings from GAO, from senior military officials, from the National Intelligence Council, from a decade of Quadrennial Defense Reviews, and the testimony of Secretary Mattis-- instead of listening to that, Trump parrots climate change denial talking points that come from the phony fossil fuel front groups. It is pathetic. Calling this deliberate ignorance ``energy dominance'' may be a fine fossil fuel flourish, but it is completely disconnected from actual safety, security, and military readiness--and don't get me started on what the fossil fuel industry's systematic corruption of our democracy means for America's fabled status as that ``city on a hill.''

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I believe that my distinguished colleague and friend, Senator Blumenthal, will be joining me on the floor. I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak as in morning business for such time as I may require and, at the conclusion of my remarks, that Senator Blumenthal be recognized to make his remarks on the same subject.

Mr. President, 2018 is going to be an election year. In just 10 months, Americans will go to the polls to exercise their franchise, believing in the integrity of our democratic process. I am here today to discuss a threat to the integrity of that process, which is getting little attention here in Congress--nothing near what it deserves. We really ought to be acting with some expedition to safeguard our elections this November. Yet, instead, the effort is one of chasing down partisan investigative rabbit holes.

What ought to be our job? Well, national security, intelligence, election, and law enforcement officials, many of them testifying before us here in Congress, have made what our job is very clear. We must counter Russia's well-established election interference playbook. Russia will hack. Russia will bully. Russia will propagandize. Perhaps more insidiously, Russia will seek to corrupt, particularly by exploiting cracks in our incorporation and campaign finance laws. We are warned: Russia will seek to interfere in 2018's election.

I ask unanimous consent that an article entitled ``CIA's Pompeo says Russia and others trying to undermine U.S. elections'' be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.

To quote the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Heather Conley, testifying before Congress last spring, corruption is the ``lubricant'' for Moscow's election interference, so ``the battle of Western democracies to defeat corruption'' must be seen as ``a matter of national security.''

Testifying before our Crime and Terrorism Subcommittee, former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, agreed, saying of Russia's 2016 election meddling:

I believe [the Russians] are now emboldened to continue

such activities in the future, both here and around world,

and to do so even more intensely. If there has ever been a

clarion call for vigilance and action against a threat to the

very foundation of our democratic political system, this

episode is it. I hope the American people recognize the

severity of this threat and that we collectively counter it

before it further erodes the fabric of our democracy.

How to counter it? Well, there are two important solutions that witnesses have identified in recent testimony before the Judiciary and other committees here in the Senate.

First, guard against the use of phony shell corporations as facilitators of corruption. Ms. Conley, as I said, wrote that corruption is the ``lubricant'' with which the Russians operate their interference schemes. She and her colleagues warn that to fight the corruption that gives Russia this channel of influence--and I quote her here--``enhancing transparency and the effectiveness of the Western democratic tools, instruments, and institutions is critical.'' One central way to cut off this channel of improper influence would be to require companies to disclose who their real owner is so that Russian influence can no longer hide behind anonymous American shell companies.

Another would be to crack down on the dark money that is flooding into American elections. It is illegal for foreign nationals to spend money or participate at all in American elections. Yet, post-Citizens United, the same dark money avenues that allow domestic election interference--for instance, that the Koch brothers use to manipulate American elections--are right out there to be used by Vladimir Putin. If they can hide their identity behind 501(c)(4)s and other dark money channels, so can operatives for the Russians.

Instead of taking up these important measures or even ensuring a thorough investigation into the 2016 election meddling, we are--to paraphrase the legendary Senator Sam Ervin of Watergate fame--chasing rabbits when we should be on a bear hunt.

Let's look at a few rabbits that have distracted us from the task at hand. Remember, when Michael Flynn, the President's former National Security Adviser, illicitly communicated with the Russian Ambassador about sanctions during the transition. Then in the White House, he lied to the FBI about it, which concerned the Justice Department so badly that the Acting Attorney General warned the White House Counsel personally, after which she was fired, but the President then

waited 18 days until all of this had become public in the media to ask for Michael Flynn's resignation. Out of all of that, the topic for many Republicans was the alleged leaks of classified information that allowed the story to come to light--not the story itself of problems at the highest level of our national security establishment. Off people went after the ``leaks'' rabbit.

Republicans then pivoted to talking about the ``unmasking''--remember that word; we heard a lot of it around here--of identities in intelligence reporting and the purported misconduct of Obama administration officials. Trump even publicly suggested that former National Security Adviser Susan Rice may have committed a crime. So off people went after the ``unmasking'' rabbit.

Next, the President accused President Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower, an allegation so outrageous that even congressional Republicans have refused to stand by it, but my, what a bright and shiny rabbit it was for the weeks that it was still a distraction.

By the spring and summer, Republicans were railing against purported conflicts of interest by FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, a distinguished career public servant.

I ask unanimous consent that this article, ``FBI ruled McCabe had no conflict of interest in Clinton probe,'' be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.

So off everybody went after the ``McCabe's wife'' rabbit.

After President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey to impede the Russia investigation and then told the Russian Foreign Minister and NBC that was why he had done it, the President launched another leak rabbit: a coordinated effort with his lawyers, congressional Republicans, and the rightwing media to suggest that Comey had leaked classified information by sharing with a friend his own contemporaneous notes of conversations with Trump.

Just last week, the President again suggested on Twitter that Comey should be charged with a crime--another bite at the ``leaks'' rabbit.

In early July, we learned of the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Russian lawyer and operative Natalia Veselnitskaya and senior Trump campaign leaders seeking dirt on Hillary Clinton. Republicans tried to distract attention from that mess by suggesting that Veselnitskaya was in the country on a visa issued by Obama administration officials, with some rightwing media--aided by some congressional Republicans--even whipping on the ``visa'' rabbit by suggesting there was a setup orchestrated by the Obama administration against the Trump campaign.

Then came the ``Fusion'' rabbit. Because Fusion GPS had worked on separate projects--one with Christopher Steele and a separate one with Natalia Veselnitskaya--some Republicans began suggesting either that Russia had been Fusion's client for the Steele dossier or that Steele was the unwitting victim of a Russian disinformation campaign.

Then there is the ``Uranium One'' rabbit, which began when a rightwing author suggested, without evidence, that Hillary Clinton may have been responsible for a Russian state company acquiring uranium mines in the United States. This rabbit remains a topic of investigation in Congress and in rightwing media.

Then there are the attacks on Bob Mueller, which, like rabbits, multiply by the hour. As the special counsel's investigation started heating up over the late summer and fall, the rightwing began investigating the investigation--alleged conflicts of interest, history of campaign donations, inappropriate text messages, questions about spouses' employment. But the big one was that the FBI was corruptly involved in the procurement of the Steele dossier and that this had launched the ``witch hunt.'' This, of course, is a very shiny rabbit.

However, a week ago, reporting by the New York Times confirmed that the FBI did not begin its investigation into Donald Trump's connections to Russia because of the so-called Steele dossier. This should not come as a surprise. We have already been told that U.S. allies warned American national security officials about Russian interference in our 2016 elections.

In response to a question from Ranking Member Feinstein at our Crime and Terrorism Subcommittee hearing on May 8, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper confirmed that ``Britain's intelligence service''--Britain's intelligence service--``first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious interactions between Trump advisers and Russian intelligence agents,'' and the Brits passed that information on to U.S. intelligence agencies. Clapper confirmed that in ``the spring of 2016, multiple European allies passed on additional information to the United States about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians.'' Clapper said that these reports were accurate and that ``the specifics are quite sensitive.''

Now we have learned that Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, who pled guilty last year to lying to the FBI, apparently told a senior Australian official in the spring of 2016 that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton. This is something he said he had been told by an intermediary for the Russians. When hacked emails started showing up that summer, Australia's Government became sufficiently concerned to let U.S. officials know about what they had learned from Papadopoulos.

So you have the British intelligence community warnings, the European intelligence community warnings, the Australian warnings, and Carter Page's travels to Russia. You have the attribution of the DNC hack, the intrusion into those emails, to Russian hackers. You have the leaking of the stolen emails. You have abundant evidence out of all of that for the FBI that the Trump campaign's links to Russia required further investigation. It would have been a complete failure of their duty to not have looked further based on all of that evidence.

That is not to say that Christopher Steele and his work are not taken seriously by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials. U.S. security agencies have relied on Steele's analysis long before any dossier appeared. Steele is a leading Russia expert. Beginning in 1990, as an undercover officer in Moscow, he watched the Soviet Union unravel. He observed Russia's current leaders ascend through the Russian security services during the 1990s and 2000s. He rose to a senior position on MI6's Russia desk in London. Since leaving MI6, his reports on Russia and Ukraine have been shared widely within the U.S. Government as credible reporting. A U.S. official told the Guardian that Steele's reports were ``consistently reliable, meticulous, and well-informed.''

But you would never know this from listening to congressional Republicans. They have been repeating, in chorus with the White House and conservative media, the disproven claim that the Russians somehow commissioned the Steele dossier or that Steele somehow got suckered by the Russians or that some deep-state FBI set up the whole thing to pressure Trump. They have pushed to discredit Steele. They have pushed to discredit Fusion.

As one example, rewind to the Judiciary Committee's hearing on the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, last July. On the morning of the second day of that hearing, the President tweeted: ``One of the things that has been lost in the politics of this situation is that the Russians collected and spread negative information about then candidate Trump.'' This is Trump tweeting about himself. His tweet came shortly after a segment on FOX News centered on the same question. Other rightwing outlets parroted the same message.

That same day, Republicans in Congress spun out the same premise that Russians paid for the dossier and that the dossier was, to use their word, the ``genesis'' of the FBI's inquiry. I hope we have made it clear that this was not the genesis.

While the FARA hearing was still going on, that same day, the gop.gov website published this post:

[W]e now know a Russian backed, Democrat connected research

firm, with a history of smearing individuals and pitching

fake information to reporters, was hired by opponents of

President Trump to compile a ``dossier'' of supposed Trump

ties to Russia.

The information that was compiled was taken seriously by

the highest level of our intelligence community along with

our media, despite obvious signs that the firm behind it was

tied to Russia.

As a reminder, this phony ``dossier'' helped spark the

investigation now led by Special Counsel Mueller.

That is the rabbit we are chasing now.

The uniformity of the rightwing message that day with the White House was telling, but the message--the content of it--is simply not true. In fact, at that hearing, the witness denied any knowledge of any link between Russians and the clients of the Steele dossier.

In the months that followed, Fusion GPS's founder, Glenn Simpson, spent over 20 hours speaking with congressional investigators, including investigators from the Senate Judiciary Committee.

I ask unanimous consent that his op-ed be printed in the Record as a third and final item at the conclusion of my remarks.

During these interviews, he specifically told Democratic and Republican staff alike that the dossier was taken seriously by the FBI because it corroborated reports the Bureau had already received from other sources--remember the British, the European, the Australian we have talked about--and a source inside the Trump campaign. From the Time's recent reporting, we can conclude that that source was George Papadopoulos. This has all been known for months, but the narrative about Fusion GPS and the FBI grinds on, unhinged from fact.

The revelation about George Papadopoulos and the Australian Government should serve as a clarifying moment about the rightwing effort to undermine Bob Mueller's investigation of the ties of the Trump campaign and his Presidency to Russia. The FBI investigation did not begin because of opposition research. It did not begin because researchers or journalists or American national security officials fell victim to Russian disinformation. It did not begin because of fake news or because Democrats needed an explanation for losing an election. It began when multiple allies, friends of the United States, warned us that the Russian Government was interfering in our democratic process-- something many of them knew about from Russia's interference in their own democratic process.

We still do not know to what extent that interference may have been facilitated or even simply known to members of the Trump campaign or other Trump associates. We still have done nothing to prevent further interference in our elections in 2018. The special counsel's investigation and the investigations going on in Congress must be allowed to continue until all of the facts are known.

Here in the Senate, we should stop looking for new distractions, stop chasing rabbits, and start thinking about how we are going to protect our future elections--our 2018 election--against a repeat performance, which we have been warned about, by the Russians or another foreign adversary, for that matter.

As the Center for Strategic and International Studies warns in its report, ``The Kremlin Playbook,'' we must fight the avenues for corruption that give Russia influence. We must ``enhanc[e] transparency'' in government and build ``resilience against Russian influence'' in our elections and elsewhere in American society.

I will conclude by saying that the best measure of our success in Congress will be an America defended against foreign election interference in time to protect our 2018 elections. If we have not achieved that, we have failed at our duty. I do not see us presently on a path to meet that goal. We are less than a year out from election day. We have work to do. Enough with the rabbits.

I now yield, per the pending agreement, to my distinguished friend from Connecticut.

Madam President, I ask to speak for 3 minutes on behalf of my departing friend.

Madam President, Senator Franken will shortly go on to his next chapter, which I hope will be wonderful for him and for Franni and for their family. I hope and believe that he leaves us with everyone's good will here in the Senate. He certainly leaves with mine.

Al Franken has been an unusually good Senator, in part because he has such a good staff. He has also, to me, been an unusually good friend, particularly in this hard town where you are supposed to buy a dog if you want a friend. We served together on the HELP and Judiciary Committees, where he did great committee work. He stood out particularly for his talent on Judiciary without even being a lawyer.

I will miss him. The Senate will come to miss him, too, I expect. He was a lot of things that one would want in a Senator: principled, innovative, hard-working, supersmart, bipartisan, generous, caring. Things will be different around here without him. It will be quieter on the floor without his big, bursting laugh. We will miss his presence on personal privacy issues, on monopoly power issues, on forced mandatory arbitration, and in championing LGBT kids, where he has real passion and expertise.

Senate hearing witnesses who have been up to no good will breathe a lot easier knowing they won't have to face Al Franken's pointed questioning. The Senate Secret Santa, a Franken legacy, will probably continue. Selfishly, I will miss Franni's amazing homemade pies.

As my friend departs, I am left at this difficult moment with this thought: I have been fortunate in the Senate to have had a colleague to whom it is so hard to say good-bye.

I yield the floor.