Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.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 10 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. President, there was an interesting press conference earlier today in which I joined with Senator Heitkamp, Senator Capito, and Senator Barrasso on a common piece of legislation that will help address climate change. That does not happen often, so it was a good sign.

This is not a comprehensive solution. It may not even make much of a measurable difference, but it will make some difference. It will help drive America's technological edge, and it will help, as it gets implemented, reduce our carbon emissions. It was very good to be working with those Senators.

The fundamental problem we face with carbon capture and utilization and the reason so little of it now happens is economics. There is a flaw in the market economics related to carbon capture utilization and sequestration. Here is the flaw: There is no business proposition for stripping out the carbon dioxide, and in a market economy, if no one will pay for something, you don't get very much of it.

Lindsey Graham and I flew up to Saskatchewan to see Boundary Dam, a carbon capture plant at a coal-powered electric generating facility where they are removing the carbon dioxide by running the exhaust from the plant through, essentially, a cloud of aminos. They are able to sequester closing on 80 percent of the carbon, and they use it to pump out and into nearby oil fields to pressurize the oil to facilitate extraction. Up in Saskatchewan at Boundary Dam, they have proved that the technology works, and where they are, with a little financing help from the Province, the economics work also.

Unfortunately, not every coal-burning plant is on an oil field where the carbon dioxide can be used for extraction. Other than the facility in Saskatchewan, there is not a lot going on, on this continent. The Illinois facility collapsed, the facility in the South just collapsed, and there is one in Texas that is going on. But the bill the four of us got together on--which would be to create a tax credit paid for each ton of carbon that is captured and utilized or sequestered--could really make a difference. Knowing those credits are out there is the kind of reliance industry needs in order to invest in the technologies to make this happen.

Of course, a real market for carbon reduction technologies ultimately requires putting a price on carbon emissions. We can fiddle around with payments for reduced carbon, but ultimately a price on carbon is the sensible economic solution. I think that is pretty much universally agreed by economists. Everyone agrees that carbon dioxide emissions are not a good thing. Everyone also agrees that carbon dioxide emissions are free to emitters now, so we get a lot of them.

A harmful thing that is free to the emitter is called, in economic terms, an externality. It is an externality because the cost of the harm is external to the price of the product. A basic tenet of market economics is that the cost of a harm should be built into the price of the product that causes the harm.

It is basically an economic version of being polite. If you throw your trash over into your neighbor's yard instead of paying for your trash collection, well, your neighbor has to clean up

your mess and you are being really rude--a bad neighbor.

In essence, that is what the fossil fuel industry has been doing with their carbon dioxide emissions for years--not paying to clean them up, dumping them all into our common atmosphere and our common oceans, making their neighbors pay because they don't want to pay for their own waste.

Like that bad neighbor, they have come up with various excuses: Oh, it would be too expensive for us to pay for our trash collection. Or, our trash is actually good for your yard; it kind of composts it a bit. You will love it. It is better for you to clean it up.

Then there is my personal favorite: If you make us take care of our own waste, we will beat you up--politically, at least, which is why the fossil fuel industry spends so much money on politics, just to be able to make that threat credible. And around here, boy, is it credible. It explains virtually fully our failure as an institution to address this patently obvious problem that our own home State universities are telling us is real. From Utah to Rhode Island, the universities we support and root for know and teach climate science.

Anyway, I have a carbon price bill that would cause a technological boom in carbon capture and carbon utilization because, at last, there would be a reason to pay for it, and the free market could get to work. American ingenuity could get to work. With that market signal and with funding from revenues that the fee would generate, we could actually extend the life of existing coal plants being shuttered by competition from natural gas, by stripping their carbon dioxide emissions so that they actually didn't do the damage that they are doing now, they stopped throwing their trash into their neighbors' yard, and they paid for trash collection. The technology needs to be there and the economics need to be there, and then it can be done.

We really ought to pass the carbon fee bill. I would add that the carbon fee bill also creates a lot of revenue. We, I think, have agreed that revenue ought not go to fund the government--not to make Big Government--but there are other things we can do with it that would be very helpful. One would be to make coal country whole for the economic losses coal country has sustained.

Remember Huey Long's old slogan: ``Every man a king.'' We could make every miner a king--with a solid pension, retirement at any time, full health benefits for life for the family, a cash account based on years worked, a voucher for a new vehicle, a college plan for their kids. It all becomes doable if we pass a carbon fee and use the revenues to help coal country. Otherwise, nothing will change.

Coal country will just keep suffering as natural gas keeps driving coal out of the energy market. There is no mechanism now to remedy that inevitability. People will suffer. There is a remedy right there--a carbon fee--that can help fund and encourage the development of the technologies so that we can strip the carbon dioxide out of the emitting powerplants and so that we can go into these coal countries where pensions and benefits have been stripped by bankruptcy, by the collapse of this industry, and make those folks whole again.

Give them their dignity. Let them retire now. It is not their fault that the coal industry has collapsed. They worked hard. They did dangerous work. They went down in the mines. They worked big equipment. It is a dangerous occupation to be a coal miner, and it is entitled to respect. Retire any time, full health benefits for you and the family, a cash account to help, a new vehicle voucher, a college plan for the kids, to make sure they are well-educated--you could do a lot of those things. You could help those people pass a carbon fee and make every coal miner a king.

In the meantime, I am willing to find funding to flip the social cost of carbon--the way we did in our bill, announced today--and create a positive fee, a tax credit for carbon capture and carbon utilization. I am willing to work with Republican colleagues to find a way to pay our nuclear fleet for the carbon-free nature of its nuclear power.

It is crazy to be closing safely operating nuclear power facilities just because they get zero economic value for the carbon-free nature of their power. The carbon-free nature of their power has value. The carbon-free nature of power has significant value. That is why we are offering in our legislation a tax credit of $30 to $50 per avoided ton of carbon dioxide emissions. That implies that an avoided ton of carbon dioxide emissions is worth $30 to $50.

If nuclear power avoids that, I am willing to work with my Republican colleagues to figure out a way so that our nuclear fleet can enjoy the actual economic advantage of the carbon-free power they produce.

We close a nuclear plant so we can open a natural gas plant which pollutes more than the nuclear plant because the economics are so fouled up that the nuclear plant gets no value for carbon-free power and the natural gas plant pays no costs for the harm of its carbon emissions. It is economic madness.

We know that carbon-free nature has value. We know that the carbon- free nature of nuclear power has value. We just will not pay for it, and plants close due to that market failure, and jobs are lost, and power is lost, and new investments have to be stood up in polluting plants to make the difference. It is crazy.

In closing, the Heitkamp-Whitehouse-Capito-Barrasso bill, the FUTURE bill, to provide a tax credit for carbon capture utilization and sequestration in powerplants, in factories, and in a variety of applications, is small. It is in some respects a gesture, but everything begins with small steps and small gestures. I am proud to be a part of it, but I want to remind my colleagues that there are also big win-win ways that we can solve the larger problem. I look forward to working together to accomplish just that.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I am back for my weekly ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, which, given the theme of the week in Washington, it is going to focus on the health consequences of what is going on in climate change. It is timely to do so because just recently the National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning for the Southwestern United States. In California, San Diego County set a record at--hang on--124 degrees.

As a result of this heat, the National Weather Service warned of ``a major increase in the potential for heat-related illness and even death.''

In Phoenix, AZ, it got up to around 120 degrees. It got so hot that flights had to be grounded at the Phoenix airport because the hot air was too thin for the jet engines to get enough bite on the air for the planes to fly safely. The emergency rooms saw patients coming in with burns caused by walking barefoot on hot pavement or touching their cars that had gotten so hot in the sun that they were burned. There were several heat-related deaths reported in the Las Vegas area and in California.

This heat wave problem is not going away. ``Heat waves like the one we are seeing in the Southwest are becoming much more frequent,'' said Robert E. Kopp, director of the Coastal Climate Risk and Resilience Initiative at Rutgers University.

He went on to say: ``Looking forward, we expect the amount of extreme heat on the planet to continue increasing even more'' with obvious health effects.

It has gotten deadly serious in many places. In the 2003 European heat wave, there were more than 30,000 deaths across the continent, and the 3-day 1995 Chicago heat wave killed more than 700 people.

We need to pay attention. As Mr. Kopp concluded, ``that calls for a major rethink of the systems that we rely upon.'' This is not normal any longer.

This week also saw the publication in the Providence Business News of an article by Nitin Damle called ``Climate Change's Dire Health Consequences.'' Nitin Damle is a physician in Rhode Island. He is a leader of our medical profession in Rhode Island, and he just recently was the President nationwide of the American College of Physicians.

In the Providence Business News, he writes:

The medical community is witness to the health effects of

climate change now and not in some distant future. There are

five categories of health effects that will affect not

thousands but millions of people in America and around the

world.

First, as we just talked about what we saw in Arizona and in Southern California, he goes on to say:

An increase in global temperature and frequency of heat

waves will expose people to a risk of heat exhaustion

(dehydration, headaches, weakness, nausea and vomiting) and/

or heat stroke (high fever, stroke, confusion and coma). The

most vulnerable will include the elderly, with multiple

heart, lung and kidney conditions, multiple medications and a

poorer ability to regulate their body temperature.

But Dr. Damle went on to say:

Children will be at risk due to their inability to thermo

regulate, as will laborers who work outdoors and the

homeless. History tells us that there have been 7,400 annual

deaths between 1999-2010 in the United States, 15,000 deaths

in France in 2009, 70,000 deaths in Europe in 2003 and 15,000

deaths in Russia in 2010 from heat waves.

Respiratory effects are another health consequence that Dr. Damle elucidates here.

Respiratory effects from particulate matter and ozone

result in exacerbation of asthma and other chronic lung

conditions.

He continues:

Fifty-five percent of the U.S. population tests positive

for allergens and 34 million people have asthma. The

increased length of the pollen season and growth of allergen-

producing weeds, grasses, mold and fungus will lead to more

exacerbations of asthma and chronic lung conditions at an

annual cost of $56 billion per year with visits to the

emergency room and hospital admissions.

I was at a conference recently and saw a presentation by Dr. Kari Nadeau, who is the director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy & Asthma Research at Stanford University and the Naddisy Foundation Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics.

I am going to borrow a few of her slides that relate to the asthma and allergen concerns. Let me start with this graph, which shows asthma prevalence nationwide and asthma prevalence in Rhode Island.

In Rhode Island, we run a little bit higher for the experience of asthma than nationwide, and this is an issue that is important to us. It comes home to roost. Dr. Nadeau used this slide. This was exposure to extreme heat and precipitation events associated with increased risk of hospitalization for asthma. This was a study that was done in Maryland. As the temperature went up, and there was extreme heat or precipitation, and asthma hospitalizations went up as well.

She showed a graph from another study in New York that of the ED visits, or emergency department visits, related to ozone or related to smog, which is a well-known asthma trigger

and the estimated increase in ozone-related emergency department visits for children in New York from the 1990s to 2020s resulting from climate-change-related increases in ozone concentrations. As the ozone concentrations went up, up went the ozone-related emergency department visits.

The dark blue shows places where the emergency department visits went up 10 percent; the lighter blue, 7.8 to 9 percent; the even lighter blue, 6.6 to 7.7 percent; and in these counties, up 5.2 to 6.5 percent.

Globally, we see that pollen counts go up in conjunction with increasing carbon dioxide. In 1900, there were about 280 parts per million of pollen production, and we hit 370 parts per million in 2000. I take it back. At 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide, there were 5 grams per plant of pollen production. At 370 parts per million of carbon dioxide, pollen production increased to over 10 grams per plant. We are over 400 now. We are headed for 720 parts per million. At that point, we have more than quadrupled the pollen output.

We are seeing this happen not only in terms of the amount of pollen output that can trigger asthma but also the length of the pollen season. The months in which people who have asthma are vulnerable are extending themselves. Here, it is nearly 27 extra days. Here it is 24 extra days, 17 extra days, 19 extra days, 14 extra days, 13 extra days. We went through the middle of the country and saw over and over that the ragweed pollen season is getting long, and it is worse for asthma sufferers.

Another thing we have associated with climate change and with the dry drought spells has been wildfires. Wildfires, for obvious reasons, put a lot of stuff--ash and things--up into the air. In this monitoring map of California, when the wildfires were going on, you could see these spikes in asthma activity.

Here is before the fire. Here is during the fire activity, and here it falls back down afterward. The risks for asthma climbed dramatically during that period. The wildfires present yet another climate-related risk for people who have asthma. And here are the wildfires in California, shown to increase asthma, as determined by the emergency department visits. The emergency department visits climbed based on various risk factors. So when you are seeing folks having to go to the emergency department for asthma, that has gotten pretty serious. There is a lot of support for Dr. Damle's assertion that this is a concern we should pay attention to.

He goes on to list another category of concern: exposure to infectious disease from vectors such as mosquitos and ticks. He says it has and will continue to escalate.

There is a documented increase in cases of dengue,

chikungunya, West Nile virus and Zika.

He goes on to say:

We will likely see a resurgence of malaria in certain areas

of North America.

Other illnesses come from other consequences of climate change.

He goes on to report:

An increase in heavy downpours and flooding in America and

the world will lead to an increase in waterborne diseases

such as E. Coli and other bacteria (salmonella, typhoid and

cholera), parasites (Giardia) and viruses (Hepatitis A and

Norwalk) with an impact on millions of people around the

world.

He goes on to cite extreme weather events, which create stress, anxiety, and depression. Hurricane Katrina, he reports, led to 32 percent of people affected by the hurricane suffering from post- traumatic stress.

He continues:

We know that there will need to be a global effort to

reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and the

developed countries need to take a leading role developing/

implementing and moderating the success of those mitigating

measures.

He concludes:

We need to reenter the Paris agreement and move forward at

the local and State levels for the benefit of our patients.

He is a respected doctor in Rhode Island. He is a clinical assistant professor of medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Also, he was recently the president of the American College of Physicians.

I know my colleagues don't want to listen to any of this stuff about climate change because the fossil fuel industry controls them so much that they cannot even say the words, in many cases, ``climate change'' on the floor of the Senate, but for crying out loud, you have the former president of the American College of Physicians talking about the health effects; you have a prominent researcher at Stanford University talking about the health effects; and you have the National Weather Service warning about dangerous health effects from climate- related heat in the Southwest. When are we going to finally get around to having a serious discussion about this?

It is great that we had a little pause on this wretched healthcare bill. I couldn't be happier to be rid of it for a while, and I am hoping we can be rid of it for good, but it is probably going to come back. We will have to hammer a few more stakes into the heart of this zombie before we are rid of it, and then we can move on to a serious bipartisan healthcare bill.

There is good work to be done on healthcare. There is good work to be done on climate change. But we have to take the wretched special interest politics out so we can get to serious business.

With that, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I come weekly to the Senate whenever we are in session to give my ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, talking about climate change and, quite often, talking about the climate denial campaign that prevents us from taking action and, quite often, talking about the campaign finance problems in our country that make climate denial effective. Here, in Congress, it is not hard to connect the dots from campaign finance to climate denial.

The Supreme Court's Republican majority's disastrous Citizens United decision was requested by the fossil fuel industry, and the fossil fuel industry took instant advantage of it--almost like they saw it coming. The industry and its front groups instantly used their new power conferred by Citizens United to come after politicians--Republicans in particular. Ask Bob Inglis, who backed responsible climate policies. Citizens United created new American dark-money emperors, and--no surprise--the new emperors love their new political power.

Their first payoff was that Republicans in Congress fled from any legislative action on climate change. Before Citizens United, there were multiple bipartisan climate bills. Year after year--when I was here in 2007, 2008, 2009--there were bipartisan climate bills to the left of you, bipartisan climate bills to the right of you, bipartisan climate bills cropping up all over. Today, we watch our Republican President trying to undo curbs on carbon emissions and, to the cheers of Republicans in Congress, withdrawing the United States from the historic Paris Agreement. We join Syria and Nicaragua as the only nations to reject this common cause. That, my friends, is the heavy hand of fossil fuel influence, driving us into isolation and abdication of American leadership.

Of course, right now, no Republican can safely sponsor any bill to limit carbon dioxide emissions, and so none do. Very different than before the Citizens United decision in January of 2010. That changed everything. When those five Republican justices opened up unlimited political spending to the big Republican special interests, that unlimited political spending was inevitably going to find dark-money channels. Dark-money channels hide the identity of the political donor, so that big special interests can pollute our politics with their money with seemingly clean hands.

The climate denial scheme of the fossil fuel cartel is powered politically by dark money. Whether through the lure of dark money coming in for you in a political race or the threat of dark money coming in against you in a political race, dark money powers climate denial. Well, we have just learned something new about dark money.

Chairman Graham and I held hearings in our Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism to look at Russian interference in the recent 2016 election and what it portends for elections to come. Our witnesses warned us that Russia has strategically manipulated politics in Europe for decades. They started working in the former Soviet Union countries, and they expanded to where they are manipulating politics in France, Germany, Holland, England, and all over Europe. The witnesses warned us that we in America must be prepared for that. They jumped the Atlantic to manipulate the 2016 elections, and they are not going away.

One identified weakness of the United States against Russian influence was this dark money in our politics. Why is that? Well, it is obvious. Once you allow dark money in, dark is dark. Cash from Vladimir Putin is no more traceable than cash from Charles and David Koch. One witness, a former Republican national security official, told us: ``It is critical that we effectively enforce the campaign finance laws that would prevent this type of financial influence by foreign actors.''

``It is critical that we effectively enforce the campaign finance laws'' against foreign influence by foreign actors.

The two best studies of Russian influence in Western Europe in their elections and in their politics are ``The Kremlin Playbook,'' by CSIS, or the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and ``The Kremlin's Trojan Horses,'' by the Atlantic Council. Both of them report that Russia takes advantage of nontransparency in campaign financing to build its shadowy webs of influence and control. If you leave dark- money channels lying around, it is likely that Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs will find them.

The ``Trojan Horses'' report warns this: ``The Kremlin's blatant attempts to influence and disrupt the U.S. presidential election should serve as an inspiration for a democratic push back.'' That is a lower case ``d'' for ``democratic push back,'' and it points to one key way we need to push back.

I will quote them again.

Electoral rules should be amended, so that publically

funded political groups, primarily political parties, should

at the very least be required to report their sources of

funding.

That is, end dark money.

Likewise, the ``Kremlin Playbook'' report warns:

Enhancing transparency and the effectiveness of the Western

democratic tools, instruments, and institutions is critical

to resilience against Russian influence.

Enhancing transparency means ending dark money.

Our hearing and these reports reveal another political influence tool used by the Kremlin: fake news. As we shore up our democracy to defend against Russia's fake news information warfare, we must remember this: Climate denial was the original fake news.

To give an example, here is a story that may sound familiar. An unknown hacker illegally breaks into and steals an organization's emails. The organization's emails are held until they can be released at a politically strategic moment. At the strategic moment, emails are leaked to a website with shady ties. The leaks are then amplified and spun by fake news, driven into the regular media, and have their desired political effect. Does any of that sound familiar? Of course, it is the methodology of the Russians' hack of the Democratic National Committee, right? Unknown hacker, stolen emails, strategic release, caching them until they can be used, shady website, fake news spin-up, regular media takes the bait, political damage.

If you step back and look at just the methodology, we have seen this pattern before--so-called climategate, the

fake scandal years ago cooked up by the climate denial machine. It was 2009, not 2017. The organization hacked was not the DNC but the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. The release was timed to the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, not the Presidential election. The documents went to climate skeptic blogs--with, interestingly, the first upload in Russia--instead of to WikiLeaks, but the mainstream media took the bait, and the political damage was done.

At the time, the New York Times wrote:

The[se] revelations are bound to inflame the public debate

as hundreds of negotiators prepare to negotiate an

international climate accord at meetings in Copenhagen next

month.

This climategate scheme worked so well that in November 2011, the climategate operation did it again just before the U.N. climate conference in Durban in what was dubbed climategate 2.0. Of course, the whipped-up climategate hysteria was all fake news.

As the Guardian wrote in February 2010:

Almost all the media and political discussion about the

hacked climate emails has been based on soundbites publicised

by professional [climate] sceptics and their blogs. In many

cases, these have been taken out of context and twisted to

mean something they were never intended to.

Eight times, everyone from the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Commerce, to the National Science Foundation, to the British Parliament found no evidence of any misconduct by the scientists, but for the climate denier groups, the truth was never the point.

This climategate stunt was the product of a fake news infrastructure built by the fossil fuel industry to attack and undermine real climate science--disinformation campaigns, false-front organizations, stables of paid-for scientists, and propaganda honed by public relations experts. This denial operation aspires to mimic and rival real science, and it is an industrial-strength adversary with big advantages. It does not need to win its disputes with real science; it just needs to create the public illusion of a real dispute. It doesn't have to waste time in peer review, and it doesn't have to be true; it just has to sound like it might be. This industrial fake news operation isn't going anywhere. It is too valuable to the big polluters.

As we prepare to face down Russia's campaign of election interference, we will have to face up to these two hard facts:

If the Kremlin wants to deploy fake news information warfare in our country, the climate denial fake news infrastructure already exists. Remember, climate denial was the original fake news.

If the Kremlin wants to deploy a surreptitious financial influence campaign, the dark money infrastructure already exists. The fossil fuel industry's dark money election manipulation machinery is ready to go. Putin doesn't have to build a thing. The fossil fuel dark money and fake news infrastructure stands ready to go.

Unfortunately, we know it works because it has worked for years for the fossil fuel cartel, particularly since Citizens United allowed the fossil fuel industry to enforce silence on the Republican Party.

The dangers of fake news, dark money, climate denial, and foreign interference in our elections are all intermixed. They have brought us to the point where the President of the United States will leave the Paris Agreement, betraying the country's interests, in the service of the fossil fuel industry, the Koch brothers' climate denial operation, and Breitbart fake news.

This calls for an American response. Dark money and fake news are a sinister combination, whoever is behind them. America must address the twin threats of fake news and dark money. It is bad enough when these are the tools of the fossil fuel industry's climate denial operation, but we are on notice now. We are on notice from these reports and from multiple witnesses that the Kremlin can borrow these tools too.

I will close by asking that we clean up this mess. It may take citizen action, given the stranglehold dark money and fake news have on Congress, but this is a fight worth having. There is no good that comes out of dark money and fake news, whoever is behind them. We should rid ourselves of this sinister combination.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am pleased to follow the Senator from Minnesota, as because of him I had the chance to be on the HELP Committee during all of those hearings--all of those dozens and dozens of Republican amendments that took place during the vibrant, robust, bipartisan process in the HELP Committee. Senator Franken was still in litigation over his election so his seat on the HELP Committee was vacant, and Harry Reid asked if I would take that seat. My senior Senator Jack Reed and I, both of Rhode Island, were there in the room day after day, week after week, while this exhaustive, public, bipartisan process went forward.

I can even remember working with Senator Isakson, of Georgia, and supporting his amendment that would allow a doctor to be paid for having a conversation with a very ill patient about what his desires were if his condition did not get better. What type of end-of-life care did he want? Did he want every possible intervention or did he want dignified time at home with his family? What were his desires? That is a conversation that is important for doctors to have with those patients.

In the environment of the time, that became the death panel phony story. So I was there. I saw it happen. Thanks to Senator Franken's delay in getting here, Jack Reed and I were in the room.

Why does this matter? This matters because, like the story of Leanna and Henry, there are people on the other side of what is--apparently, for our Republican colleagues--a purely political piece of parliamentary chicanery.

I have a constituent, a woman named Pamela, who lives in Jamestown, RI. She works with people and nonprofit organizations that advocate for people who have very rare diseases so, in her work, she has seen the before and after of the Affordable Care Act.

``Before the Affordable Care Act,'' she wrote to me, ``I saw many patients and families distraught by medical bankruptcy.''

Then it came even closer to home for Pamela when she was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. If there were an annual or a lifetime limit on health benefits, she would be in deep trouble. If the protection for people with preexisting conditions were undone, that would imperil her ability to get insurance in the future.

She wrote to me:

As a patient myself, with a chronic, costly medical

condition, I am very worried that [these] protections will be

taken away, making my life-sustaining care unaffordable.

Pamela deserves to be heard, but nobody can speak up for her with a bill that nobody can see.

From Cumberland, Marilyn wrote to me. Marilyn is a family physician. She knows the healthcare system. She also has severe asthma. She has had asthma since she was a little child, and she manages her severe asthma with very expensive medication. Her husband is retired, and Marilyn purchased her health insurance through HealthSource RI--our ObamaCare health insurance marketplace--which, by the way, is working very well. There is no need to undo what is going on in Rhode Island. It gives her peace of mind, and she wrote to me to say she was terrified by the possibility that the preexisting condition clause will be allowed back in.

She wrote:

I am not a specialist but a family medicine physician,

doing the best I can to pay my student loans and daily

expenses. I could not afford the lifesaving treatment I

require to function. . . . I do not know how I would survive

financially if the current legislation the House has approved

is allowed to become law.

Gina wrote to me from Lincoln, RI. Gina's daughter, Sofia, is 6. Sofia has cerebral palsy. We think we have problems here. I tell you, whatever the political problems we have over the Affordable Care Act, have a 6-year-old with cerebral palsy, and then come back and tell me you have a problem not liking ObamaCare.

Sofia needs round-the-clock care and she gets it because of Medicaid. Gina wrote to me: ``From her home nursing care to her wheelchair, we could not live without [Medicaid].''

Before Sofia came along, Gina and her husband never imagined they would need Medicaid; it never crossed their minds. But now, the welfare of their little daughter is entirely dependent on Medicaid. Depending on what we do here, Gina wrote:

Will there even be a Medicaid then? This administration is

stripping benefits from the most vulnerable in our society.

How will they survive?

The last story I will share is from Tony and his family, who live in North Kingstown, RI. Tony has a son whose name is Michael. Michael, right after he was born, was diagnosed with something called mitochondrial disorder. It is a severely, catastrophically debilitating illness. It left Michael severely disabled. Michael is 10 years old now, but developmentally he is more like a 3-month-old. He can't walk, he can't talk, he can't feed himself, but he is happy, and he is sweet, and he is a source of joy for his parents and his four siblings.

Through Medicaid, Michael can receive up to 30 hours per week of care from a certified nursing assistant. It is

this program--it is Medicaid--supporting the certified nursing assistant those 30 hours per week that lets Michael live at home with his parents and those four siblings. Otherwise, he would have to be institutionalized. Somebody explain to me why a political victory shoved through this body after secret proceedings is worth explaining to Michael's parents that he is at risk of losing that coverage.

When President Trump said that the House bill was mean, he was not kidding around. It is mean, mean, mean--dirty, rotten mean. And if you think the one on the Senate side is going to be any better, there is one little phrase I would like to bring to your attention: ``We're not stupid.''

``We're not stupid'' is what a Republican staffer said when he was asked, Why aren't you guys having a public process? Why are you trying to jam this through in secret? His answer: ``We're not stupid.''

Well, what can you logically deduce from that? What kind of bill would be stupid to show the American public? If this was a bill that was going to be greeted with great applause and joy and relief and satisfaction by the American public, would you hide it? No. If it were terrible, if it would threaten people all across this country, then you wouldn't want them to see it. That would be stupid.

So that is what they are up to. They know perfectly well that this bill is not good for America. That is why showing it to the American people would be, by their own words, stupid.

Let me switch to my geek point before I go, because this is something I talk about a lot, and it bothers the heck out of me. This is a graph that shows healthcare in most of the countries that compete with us-- the OECD nations.

This chart shows life expectancy in years. At the bottom is 72, at the top is 86, so where you fall in this shows where your life expectancy is in the different countries, and life expectancy is a pretty good measure of how good the healthcare system is.

Here is the cost of healthcare per capita, averaged across the population. And as you will notice, most everybody is right up in here--Japan, Switzerland, Netherlands, United Kingdom. Most of our competitors, including France and Germany--they are up in here. Where are we? Out here. The most expensive other country in the world is Switzerland, which doesn't break $6,000 per person; we are over $8,000. The average in here, where Japan comes in, above where the United Kingdom comes in, is $4,000 per person; we are above $8,000. We are 100 percent more expensive than the average and more than 50 percent more expensive than the least efficient other country in the world.

So there is progress to be made at bringing costs down, if we would pay attention to this real problem instead of the imaginary problem of Americans having too much healthcare.

And over here--look at the life expectancy in years. Look where we come in. We match the Czech Republic. So there is progress to be made on cost and on outcomes in this country. And, believe it or not, we are actually starting to make a little progress. Let me take my colleagues through this graph, and then I will leave you be.

This top line was drawn by the Congressional Budget Office back in 2010. They project forward into the future where they think healthcare costs are going to go. These are all Federal healthcare costs; the whole Federal healthcare costs, all of them piled up--Medicare, Medicaid, veterans--all of it. So here is what they projected it would be, this top line, in 2010. Then, they got to 2016, and they did another projection because they realized that as of 2014, things were coming in below their expectations. After the Affordable Care Act, things started to change. So they did another projection in 2016, and they projected this line right here.

Those of us who serve on the Budget Committee know that we think in 10-year increments. So here is a 10-year increment from 2017 to 2027. And if you look just at the difference between what CBO predicted in 2010, before the Affordable Care Act, and what they predicted in 2016, after the Affordable Care Act: $3.3 trillion in savings--$3.3 trillion in savings. Think of what a difference that makes for our country if you can save $3.3 trillion in our healthcare costs.

Healthcare costs are what is driving most of our debt and our deficit, so $3.3 trillion in savings? I tell you what, I want to see this bill because I want to know what CBO thinks about what happens to that $3.3 trillion in savings. If the cost of this Republican parliamentary chicanery is going to be losing $3.3 trillion in savings, the American people ought to know about that.

So I call on my Republican colleagues to have a process. I don't know if the Presiding Officer has seen the bill yet. It is so close hold, I don't think all of the Republicans have even seen it. But for gosh sake, when you have these stories from Rhode Island and from all the other States around the country, when you have real fellow Americans counting on the healthcare that the Affordable Care Act made possible, the idea that you throw that out to score political points and to give super rich people a tax break is disgraceful. It is a disgrace.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I understand Senator McCain has come to the floor. I will yield to him as the chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

Madam President, I appreciate my colleague's sense of humor.

Transparency in Business Ownership

Madam President, the United States of America has suffered an unprecedented intrusion into our American Presidential elections. In January, our intelligence agencies disclosed that agents of Russia, on the orders of President Vladimir Putin, engaged in a massive election influence campaign throughout 2016.

This effort strikes at the very heart of our representative democracy. All Americans should take this attack deadly seriously. Congress had to act against such interference decisively. By strengthening economic sanctions against the Russian gangster state, we hit them where it hurts, right in the oligarch. I am glad to see that Republican and Democratic Senators came together to do this.

Now the question will shift to the White House. Last July, as evidence of Russian election meddling began to emerge, then-candidate for Vice President Mike Pence said: ``If it is Russia and they are interfering in our elections, I can assure you both parties in the United States government will ensure there are serious consequences.''

Well, it is Russia, and they were interfering, but there has been little sign of consequences so far from the Trump White House.

Michael Flynn, as adviser to the President-elect, had illicit communications with the Russian Ambassador, about which he then lied. Trump appointees at the State Department alarmed career officials with their rush to craft a pro-Russia program. President Trump held an unprecedented, cozy meeting with Russian envoys--all smiles in the Oval Office--a meeting for which Putin says he has a transcript. In Europe, Trump, dropping the assurances about article 5 protections from his NATO speech, gave the Russians joy.

The Trump administration has been reportedly trying to return two compounds used by Russian intelligence to Russian control--compounds here in the United States. Former FBI Director James Comey told the Senate last week that President Trump never spoke to him, not even once, about defending against Russia's acts of aggression.

Well, the threat from Russia is severe. Chairman Graham and I held hearings in our Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, exploring the Russian toolbox for interference in democracies across the globe--how Russia exploits the dark shadows of other countries' political and economic systems.

One tool is campaign money. Russia is reported to have funneled money to French far-right party Presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, for instance, as part of a reward for her support of Russia's actions in Crimea. Ken Wainstein, Homeland Security Advisor to George W. Bush, cited Russia as a threat of that kind of foreign financial infiltration here in the United States. ``It is critical that we effectively enforce the campaign finance laws that would prevent this type of financial influence by foreign actors,'' Wainstein told our subcommittee. But that task proves difficult in a system like ours that permits the free flow of dark money.

Since the Citizens United decision, we have seen unprecedented dark money flow into our elections from anonymous dark money organizations, groups that we allow to hide the identities of their big donors. We don't know who is behind that dark money or what they are demanding in return. Despite this risk, Congress has been unwilling to push back against the tide of dark money. Too many are too in tow to the big American dark money emperors, like the Koch brothers, but once you permit big money to flow through dark money channels, cash from Vladimir Putin is no more traceable than cash from Charles and David Koch.

``The Kremlin's Trojan Horses'' is a study of Russian influence in Western Europe done by the Atlantic Council. Russia takes advantage of nontransparency in campaign financing and financial transactions, the report says, to build political alliances with ideologically friendly political groups and individuals, as well as to establish pro-Russian organizations in civil society, creating a shadowy web of political networks which help to propagate the regime's point of view.

Corruption is the grid on which the electrons of Russian influence flow. In

the foreword to the ``Kremlin's Trojan Horses'' report, Radoslaw Sikorski, former Foreign Minister of Poland, who has seen a lot of this up close, described what he called ``the financial networks that allow authoritarian regimes to export corruption to the West.'' He warns:

Electoral rules should be amended, so that publically

funded political groups, primarily political parties, should

at the very least be required to report the sources of their

funding.

He continues:

The Kremlin's blatant attempts to influence and disrupt the

U.S. Presidential election should serve as an inspiration for

a democratic push back.

Well, we should certainly push back by requiring political entities in this country to report their sources of funding.

Another of our witnesses, Heather Conley at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote about ``The Kremlin Playbook.'' The CSIS report, ``The Kremlin Playbook,'' calls corruption ``the common thread'' among these various drivers of Russian influence. It is, the authors write, ``the lubricant on which this system operates.'' She testified just today in the Helsinki Commission that ``corruption is a systemic weakness within a country that is exploited and influenced by adversaries and from which no country is immune, including the United States.''

Where Russia can work in darkness, Russian agents systemically exploit democratic institutions to acquire influence over politicians and political systems using corruption. Russia has done this in the former Soviet Union and in Europe for decades, and we should be prepared in the United States, Ms. Conley says, for them to keep doing it here.

``The Kremlin Playbook'' warns that to fight the corruption that gives Russia this channel of influence, ``enhancing transparency and the effectiveness of the Western democratic tools, instruments, and institutions is critical to resilience against Russian influence.''

Ms. Conley echoed the widespread warnings that the United States is particularly susceptible to Russian influence via dark money channels in our politics. That is widely agreed.

She and others have warned of a second vulnerability: lax incorporation laws that hide the true owners of shell corporations. In the same way that dark money channels can hide the hand of foreign influence, so can shell corporations, which obscure the hand of the entity behind the corporate screen. Interestingly, USA TODAY just reported: ``Since President Trump won the Republican nomination, the majority of his companies' real estate sales are to secretive shell companies that obscure the buyers' identities.''

Our lax incorporation laws have made the United States a destination for drug traffickers, terrorists, corrupt foreign officials, tax cheats, and other criminals from around the world. Former FBI Director Comey testified before the Judiciary Committee that the United States is becoming the last big haven for shell corporations--sickening but true. These crooks come here to America to form shell companies to hide assets and obscure illegal activities. For added safety, a foreign gangster or a crooked despot or an agent of Putin could put a shell corporation behind a shell corporation with another shell corporation behind that.

There are few safeguards in place to prevent foreign actors from funneling money into our elections through faceless shell companies. We actually already see shell companies used to hide the identities behind big political spending. This is not a potential. This is happening now. We just don't know whether foreign influence is behind it. Nothing prevents agents of Putin from being behind those hidden entities.

Part of the Kremlin's playbook is to use shell corporations and other devices to establish illicit financial relationships with prominent local figures. The shell entities allow Russian money to flow anonymously into crooked deals. The crooked deals give rise to corrupt relationships, and these corrupt relationships give Russia leverage, either through the carrot of continued bribery of the prominent local figure or the stick of threatened disclosure of the crooked deal imperiling the prominent local figure. The prominent local figure in the crooked deal is well and truly on the Russian hook. For what it is worth, Donald Trump is the very model of the Russian mark in this sort of scheme.

To close this avenue of foreign political influence, Ms. Conley told us: ``Building and strengthening financial transparency requirements and beneficial ownership will go an extraordinary way to prevent these corrupt practices to further Russia's influence.''

We really ought to be able to agree that we need to prevent these corrupt practices to further Russia's influence.

The answer to the problem of shell corporations is simple: Have each state track the actual owners of companies they charter and make that information available to Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies through proper process. That is what Ms. Conley means by that phrase she used, ``beneficial ownership.'' It is the term of art for a simple concept, knowing who the real owner is.

The True Incorporation Transparency for Law Enforcement, or TITLE, Act, which Chairman Grassley and I will reintroduce soon, would require States to identify the actual human beings who own the company they incorporate. The bill would provide funding to support the maintenance and retrieval of this information, which would be available to law enforcement officers who present valid, court-ordered subpoenas or search warrants. The bill has bipartisan support and has received strong endorsement from the law enforcement community, banks, and anti- trafficking organizations.

Transparency in business ownership is ever more vital around the world. The European Union understands very well the shadow of Russian influence that has been cast over it, and every member of the European Union has committed to ensuring incorporation transparency. The United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Italy, and France have already enacted incorporation transparency laws. The light of corporate transparency is about to shine throughout Europe to help defend them from Russian influence. This means that money from those shell companies and schemes committed through those shell companies will be looking for new, dark homes, likely in American shell corporations. Again, we are supposed to be an example to the world. We are supposed to be the ``City upon a Hill,'' not the place where the world's most corrupt and criminal evildoers come to hide their cash and their assets.

We know the Russian playbook for election interference exploits opaque incorporation laws. We know criminals and even terrorists view the United States as a haven to hide illegal activity and its proceeds. We even know, weirdly, that lax incorporation laws are affecting our real estate market. Some American cities are so loaded with real estate held by shell corporations that it is actually driving up the prices for real American home buyers. Of course, there are not a lot of people in the corner store when the property is held for a foreign owner as the safeguard for his illicit gains.

We must take commonsense steps to stop these activities and bring wrongdoers into the light. The measures that we will take against Russia are welcome and, as Senator McCain has said, even overdue, but we must remember that this is an ongoing battle and we have systemic weaknesses that have already been clearly identified to us over and over by bipartisan experts in this field and renowned think tanks and study groups here in Washington. To quote Ms. Conley again, ``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 and urged Congress to act. He said:

I believe [the Russians] are now emboldened to continue

such activities in the future both here and around the 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.

This week the Senate takes strong steps to punish Russia for its disruptive meddling in the past, but we must do more. Dark money and the shell corporations that allow Russian influence are identified known vulnerabilities in the future. Every warning is that the Russians are not going away and that future elections will be marked by Russian mischief. We have to close both avenues of foreign influence and corruption: dark money and shell corporations. They are no good in any event. They are no good in any event, and now they bring the added contamination of Russian election manipulation. I hope we can work together to remedy that contamination.

I yield the floor.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for up to 10 minutes.

Mr. President, however loud, persistent, and powerful the climate denial operation has been, we have to remember that it has always been built on lies. It is a huge fortress of lies stacked upon lies--lies about the science, lies about the scientists, lies about doubt, lies about costs, lies through phony front groups, and lies about where the money comes from and who is pulling the strings.

This fortress of lies protects a subsidy to the fossil fuel industry that the International Monetary Fund puts at $700 billion per year. For big, big money, you can do big, big lies, and they do. These have been the biggest lies of our generation. But to paraphrase the great reggae singer Jimmy Cliff: ``The bigger you lie, the harder you fall.'' To paraphrase the ``Game of Thrones,'' ``The fall is coming.'' In the last few weeks, there has been news that has shaken this fortress of lies and moves us toward that fall. Shareholders are rising up.

For as long as there have been shareholder resolutions to fossil fuel companies about climate change, there has been resolute opposition from management to every vote. Hundreds of shareholder resolutions went down to defeat until now.

Occidental Petroleum shareholders last month won the first victory against management, and a week later mighty ExxonMobil was defeated by its shareholders. This new reporting that shareholders have demanded will help clear away the lies. The fall is coming.

There are even lies within the lies. To fend off this latest shareholder resolution to try to make the company look less irresponsible, ExxonMobil's CEO repeated the company's claim that it knows climate change is real and supports a carbon fee--but it doesn't.

As everyone in this building knows, ExxonMobil maintains a massive lobbying apparatus in Washington, and that massive apparatus is and always has been resolutely opposed to any such thing as a carbon fee or any serious climate action whatsoever, for that matter, unless maybe ExxonMobil doesn't know what its own vast lobbying apparatus is doing. Maybe ExxonMobil spends that enormous amount of money to exert its influence in Washington to stop any climate action, and the CEO is unaware of that going on. I doubt that. You be the judge of whether that is credible.

It is not just shareholders rising up; attorneys general are starting to win. The attorney general of New York has just filed pleadings in State court in New York asserting that ExxonMobil's climate reporting has been a ``sham''--to use the word from his filing; that, in the oldest of accounting tricks, ExxonMobil kept two sets of books assessing carbon pollution risk. After fierce opposition by ExxonMobil lawyers using every trick in the book to delay and snarl the New York attorney general, it looks now as if ExxonMobil may have lied to its investors and its shareholders. If ExxonMobil has lied to its shareholders, that is a violation of law, and that fall comes hard indeed.

Secretary of State Tillerson evidently knew of and approved the two sets of carbon pollution books when he was CEO of ExxonMobil. We will see where this goes, but of all the people around Trump who might be indicted, now we might add the Secretary of State.

The Attorney General of Massachusetts is also pursuing ExxonMobil against equally fierce tactics by ExxonMobil lawyers. To try to get away from the Massachusetts attorney general, the lawyers even went so far as to claim--get this--that ExxonMobil was not doing business in Massachusetts; that it didn't have the minimum contacts with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts necessary for the State even to assert jurisdiction. Well, the judge virtually laughed that argument out of court, but it shows how desperate ExxonMobil must be feeling as it tries to wriggle away from having to answer questions under oath.

Nothing turns a big lie into a hard fall better than having to put that right hand up and give truthful testimony and face cross- examination under penalty of perjury.

Will the Securities and Exchange Commission take a look at this sham reporting, too, or has the Federal government, under Trump, degenerated into such a fossil fuel banana republic that no Federal agency will do its job against that industry or might it even chime in on the side of industry Pruitt-style?

Do you remember the question of whether the fossil fuel climate denial operation merits investigation under Federal civil racketeering laws? The tobacco industry was sued under Federal civil racketeering laws by the U.S. Department of Justice so there is a model. You may remember that the question as to the fossil fuel climate denial operation was referred by Attorney General Lynch to the FBI--or so she testified.

One wonders, did the FBI ever take an honest look? What was the outcome? Was there ever a report? Are they still looking at it?

Remember that the Department of Justice won its civil racketeering case against the tobacco industry, they won it at trial, and they won again on appeal. The woman who won that case for the Department of Justice, the lead trial attorney for the Department, has said publicly that this climate denial operation also merits investigation as fraud. That would seem to be a knowledgeable opinion from the woman who

won the last case, an opinion perhaps worth heeding, but did anything happen? Will anything happen?

Forget too big to fail or too big to jail. Is the power of the fossil fuel industry now so great that it is too big even to investigate, even by the Department of Justice? Does it now take State attorneys general to do the job because the Federal government is so owned now by the fossil fuel industry?

Think about it. What if the FBI reported to the Attorney General that there was a meritorious fraud case arising out of all the lies propping up climate denial? Who believes Attorney General Sessions would allow that case to go forward against his party's biggest backer?

Well, the bigger the lie, ultimately, the harder the fall. One way or the other, this fact remains constant and true. There always will come a day of reckoning. With these shareholder victories and with these attorneys general victories, that day of reckoning is closing in--the day when they have to put that right hand up and testify truthfully and under oath, not just send out spin through front groups and operatives but testify truthfully under penalty of perjury.

It is long overdue for truth to have its day.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, Donald Trump has decided to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change. This is a decision that may prove to be one of the worst foreign policy blunders in our Nation's history.

There is no denying the mounting threat of climate change. We observe rising seas, warming global temperatures, and melting glaciers and ice sheets. Yet the President cast aside a historic global agreement forged through American leadership.

Americans now ask what to do next. For individual citizens, my answer is simple: Take action. Join an environmental group. Support science and scientists. Organize in your community.

Many Americans have been publicly pledging to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement through movements like the ``I am still in'' pledge. Every action, big and small, counts.

American corporations must also act. Unfortunately, they have been AWOL in the politics of climate change. This has been so frustrating because so many of them have great climate principles. They just abandon them when they come to Washington. That is why, for my 169th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, I have a message for corporate America:

First, know that you are hugely influential in Congress. You command extraordinary attention in our political system. This gives you a unique power against the Breitbart fake-news spigot, the shameless fossil fuel industry, and the Koch brothers' climate denial operation, which were all behind the President's fateful decision.

President Trump's brain-dead withdrawal from the Paris accord may prove to be for the best if it creates heightened political interest in climate action from American business leaders. At the moment, corporate political interests in climate action, setting the fossil fuel industry aside entirely, still averages out below zero.

As a Senator, I see corporate America's lobbying efforts in Congress firsthand. Here are some highlights:

Silicon Valley lobbies through an organization called TechNet. TechNet represents Goliaths, like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook, all of which have great climate policies. TechNet also represents clean energy companies, like Sunrun, Bloom Energy, and SolarCity.

TechNet came again this year to lobby Congress on its six priorities. Here is a page from the actual lobbying materials that TechNet brought to our meeting. The group's Federal policies are these: tax reform, high-skilled immigration reform, education and workforce development, entrepreneurship and job creation, smart infrastructure, and digital trade. Climate change did not make it onto TechNet's priorities list. Even clean energy failed to make it onto the list of the organization that includes Bloom Energy, SolarCity, and Sunrun.

This is not a matter of these giants being cowed by the Trump administration. TechNet came last year when Obama was President, and climate change was not on their agenda then, either. Indeed, the week TechNet came last year, I also had a visit from the timber and lumber industry. Despite what climate change is doing to America's forests, climate change was not on the lumber and timber industry agenda.

That very same week, the property casualty insurance industry came to meet me. These insurance companies write the big checks when climate change sends Mother Nature haywire. Climate change was not mentioned by this industry, either. That was quite a week.

Big business lobbying on climate change is actually worse than zero because the big business trade associations and lobbying groups are often run by the fossil fuel industry. Green energy manufacturers, represented in Washington, DC, by the National Association of Manufacturers, will find their own association lined up against them on climate change. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is one of climate action's most implacable enemies, despite the good climate policies of so many companies on its board.

These lobby groups are the most persistent voices of America's business community here in Congress. They are the ones who are most active, and they are constant enemies on clean energy and climate action--despite the companies they represent--because, in truth, they answer to the fossil fuel industry, not the business community, when it comes to climate change.

Here is how this can play out. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are the two biggest beverage companies in America. Both have excellent climate policies. Pepsi even supports Ceres, a fledgling business lobbying group for climate action, but their trade association, the American Beverage Association, takes no lobbying interest in climate change. It knows how to lobby. We can see the lobbying expenditures run up in 2009 and 2010, when they were concerned about Congress's taxing sweetened drinks or corn syrup. It just takes no interest in climate issues.

Worse, Coke and Pepsi run money through the American Beverage Association to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Add their lobbying all up, and Coke and Pepsi do virtually nothing themselves. A few ounces of credit go to Pepsi for supporting Ceres. Their American Beverage Association trade group doesn't lift a finger to help, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a brute force adversary.

The result is that the net lobbying presence of Coke and Pepsi in Congress on climate change is exactly opposed to the two companies' stated policies on climate change. They say one thing; their lobbying effort does the opposite.

On the other side of the fossil fuel divide, the heavy political hand of the fossil fuel industry is felt constantly around here, and that heavy hand is mercilessly opposed to any climate action and enforces its will with a parade of political weaponry akin to those old Soviet May Day parades of tanks, rockets, and artillery. Cross them, and they

come after you hard. Ask former Congressman Bob Inglis. He urged his fellow Republicans to heed the climate science and was hammered for it.

Also, no one should buy the phony assertions by Big Oil CEOs that they recognize that climate change is real and support putting a price on carbon. They say that. ExxonMobil's CEO said that to his shareholders again just last week.

In the Senate, I am the Senate author of a carbon price bill. I know who is lobbying where on carbon prices, and I can tell you their statement is just not true. Every single element of that Soviet May Day parade of fossil fuel political weaponry is dead set against any such thing. What do we conclude from that? Either Big Oil's CEOs don't know what their own lobbying apparatus is doing, or they are just not telling the truth. You guess which.

The strategy of the fossil fuel industry has been to control the Republican Party. You can jam things up by jamming up one party, and you can make it look like it is a partisan issue when it is just old- fashioned, self-interested lobbying. In order to accomplish that purpose, the worst of the political threats and blandishments of the fossil fuel industry are directed against Republicans.

As long as legitimate corporate leaders in America sit idly by while fossil fuel terrorizes and corrupts the Republican Party, there will not be much progress. ``But, oh,'' some will say, ``there aren't Republicans who will respond. This is too partisan an issue. It will be a wasted effort.'' Not so. I came to the Senate in 2007, and for years there was bipartisan action on climate change--2007, 2008, 2009.

It only stopped when the fossil fuel industry secured from five Republican-appointed Justices on the Supreme Court the disgraceful Citizens United decision of 2010. In 2007, lots of bipartisan activity; 2008, lots of bipartisan activity; 2009, lots of bipartisan activity; 2010, Citizens United--dead stop. That Citizens United decision is what started the fossil fuel Soviet May Day parade of unprecedented political artillery. No special interest had that kind of political artillery before Citizens United opened it up, and much of the post- Citizens United effort has been using dark money to hide the fossil fuel industry's hand.

Since Citizens United, there has been no bipartisan climate action, but that doesn't mean there aren't still Republicans willing to work with us. I know this firsthand. There are Republicans willing to work with us. They just need to know somebody will give them safe passage through the political kill zone that Citizens United has let the fossil fuel industry create. Well, with the Trump administration now all the way over in the ``fossil fuel, Breitbart, Koch brothers climate denial corner,'' it now rests on the shoulders of the legitimate business community to come off the sidelines. They can't count on this administration. They now have to come off the sidelines themselves and do so in strength commensurate with the seriousness of the problem.

If, as a country, we pitch ourselves and the world into the present worst-case climate change scenarios, billions of people will suffer, and suffering people want answers and justice. It will become hard to defend to them our American system of democratic government against charges of corruption and our system of market capitalism against charges of indifference. Government has been corrupted by fossil fuel interests, and too many companies are indifferent. You can't make a case without the facts to back it up, and American companies, more than anyone else, benefit from a world order where liberal democracies prevail. So the stakes for the American business community are very real.

The political mischief of the fossil fuel industry and its front groups will leave a lasting stain on the democracy we all treasure. It is time, in the wake of the President's decision on Paris--isolating America with Syria as our companion in isolation--it is time that the decent and honorable business community played a meaningful role in setting this right. To them, I say: Trump has betrayed you so now is the time to align your industry's political engagement with your industry's position on climate. That is not asking much. We are only asking that American corporations align their political engagement on climate change with their actual position on climate change. If you take climate change seriously, great. Take it seriously when you come to Congress. The United States of America, where 1 day after D-day--a day when Americans stormed ashore to free the continent of Europe, fought their way through to knock down Nazi tyranny, and then rebuilt Europe under the Marshall Plan and came home--that country ought not to be a pariah nation with Syria.

We needn't be a banana republic for fossil fuel. We can lead the world into a brighter, cleaner, safer energy future, but it will take an effort. So, corporate America, let's make the effort.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I come to the Senate floor every year around this time to discuss an important incident in the history of Rhode Island largely overlooked in the history books, certainly overlooked in consequence to its importance.

We have to understand that we Rhode Islanders have always had a pretty fierce independent streak. The Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations was founded by Roger Williams and others fleeing the harsh ideological conformity of the Massachusetts theocracy. Our 1663 charter, describing the colony as a ``lively experiment,'' is the first formal document in all of history granting to a political entity the separation of church and state, along with unprecedented freedoms of speech.

Rhode Island was the first colony to declare its independence from Britain, on the Fourth of May, 1776--2 months before the rest of you did on the Fourth of July--and we were the last colony to join the Union, waiting for an independent Bill of Rights. Like I said, an independent streak.

Colonial Rhode Islanders chafed at the inequities of British rule, especially the disruption of our liberty at sea. We are the Ocean State. Living and working on the water has always been a Rhode Island way of life. As tensions with the American Colonies grew, however, King George III stationed revenue cutters, armed Customs patrol vessels, in the waters of Narragansett Bay to prevent smuggling, enforce the payment of taxes, and impose British sovereignty.

In 1764, after a British ship called the HMS St. John stole goods from Newport merchants, a group of Rhode Islanders seized control of Fort George on Goat Island in Newport Harbor and fired cannons on the vessel.

In 1769, the HMS Liberty, a sloop confiscated by the British from none other than John Hancock and repurposed as a Customs vessel, was boarded, scuttled, and burned by a mob of angry Rhode Islanders.

In 1772, on a dark night, a band of Rhode Islanders destroyed the HMS Gaspee, one of the most hated imperial ships, drawing what the Rhode Island abolitionist Frances Whipple McDougall called, in 1884, ``The first blood in the Revolution.''

The Gaspee and its captain, Lieutenant William Dudingston, were known for destroying Rhode Islanders' vessels, seizing their cargo, and flagging down ships to harass, humiliate, and interrogate the Colonials. As historian Steven Park describes in his new book, ``The Burning of His Majesty's Schooner Gaspee: An Attack on Crown Rule Before the American Revolution,'' the Gaspee was an unwelcome, even hated, presence in Narragansett Bay. Rhode Island Deputy Gov. Darius Sessions complained to Gov. Joseph Wanton, in March 1772, that Lieutenant Dudingston had ``no legal authority to justify his conduct, and his commission . . . [was] more of a fiction than anything else.''

When British authorities assured Governor Wanton that Dudingston was there to protect the Rhode Island colony from pirates, the Governor replied that he didn't know whether Dudingston was protecting them from pirates or was the pirate himself.

On June 9, 1772, all this tension came to a head. On this day, Rhode Island Captain Benjamin Lindsey was en route to Providence from Newport in his ship the Hannah. He was ordered by the hated Gaspee to halt for inspection. Captain Lindsey refused, and he raced up Narragansett Bay-- despite warning shots fired at the Hannah. The Gaspee

gave chase to the Hannah, and Captain Lindsey, who knew the waters of Narragansett Bay far better than Dudingston did, steered his ship north toward Pawtuxet Cove in Warwick, right over the shallows off of Namquid Point--known today as Gaspee Point. The lighter Hannah was able to shoot over those shallows, but the heavier Gaspee ran aground and stuck firm in a sandbar in a falling tide. The British ship and her crew were stranded and would need to wait many hours before a rising tide could free them.

Wasting no time, Captain Lindsey sailed up to Providence, and with the help of the respected merchant and statesman John Brown, rallied a group of Rhode Island patriots at Sabin's Tavern, in what is now the East Side of Providence. Together, after suitable refreshment, the group resolved to end the Gaspee's menace in Rhode Island waters.

That night, 80 or so men shoved off from the wharf under a moonless sky, with their faces blackened and their oarlocks muffled, paddling eight longboats down Narragansett Bay toward the stranded Gaspee. The longboats silently surrounded the Gaspee, and the Rhode Islanders shouted for Lieutenant Dudingston to surrender his ship. As Daniel Harrington recounted in the Providence Journal, ``Captain Abraham Whipple spoke first for the Rhode Islanders, summoning Dudingston: `I am sheriff of Kent County, [expletive]. I have a warrant to apprehend you, [expletive]; so surrender, [expletive].' It was a classic Rhode Island greeting!''

Surprised and enraged, Dudingston refused and ordered his men to fire upon anyone who attempted to board the Gaspee. Gunshots struck out in the night, and musket balls hit Lieutenant Dudingston in his groin and his arm. The Rhode Islanders, outnumbering the British, swarmed onto the deck and commandeered the ship. Brown ordered one of his Rhode Islanders, a physician named John Mawney, to tend to Lieutenant Dudingston's wounds.

After properly plundering the lieutenant's quarters, the patriots removed the British crew to land and returned to torch the Gaspee. Ultimately, the flames reached the powder magazine, and the resulting blast echoed across the bay as the dreaded Gaspee blew to smithereens.

When word got back to the King, he was furious, and he offered huge royal rewards for the capture of the rebels who had done this deed, but, strangely enough, no Rhode Islander would step forward to finger the perpetrators. You have to admire, under that kind of pressure, that with 80 people who had gone down in those longboats, not one Rhode Islander would spill the beans.

Word spread throughout the Colonies of this incident and of the Crown's brand of justice. Samuel Adams wrote a letter in the Providence Gazette on December 26, 1772, that read, in part:

A court of inquisition, more horrid than that of Spain or

Portugal, is established within this colony, to inquire into

the circumstances of destroying the Gaspee schooner; and the

persons who are the commissioners of this new-fangled court,

are vested with most exorbitant and unconstitutional power.

They are directed to summon witnesses, apprehend persons not

only impeached, but even suspected! And . . . to deliver them

to Admiral Montagu, who is ordered to have a ship in

readiness to carry them to England, where they are to be

tried.

The Reverend John Allen delivered at the Second Baptist Church in Boston a Thanksgiving sermon on the Gaspee Affair that was distributed in pamphlet form throughout the Colonies. His words helped rouse the spirit of independence of this fledgling Nation. He said:

Supposing . . . that the Rhode Islanders, for the sake of

the blood-bought liberties of their forefathers, for the sake

of the birthrights of their children, should show a spirit of

resentment against a tyrannical arbitrary power that attempts

to destroy their lives, liberties and property, would it not

be insufferably cruel (for this which the law of nature and

nations teaches them to do) to be butchered, assassinated and

slaughtered in their own streets by their own King?

Well, schoolchildren's history books tell a tale of Bostonians who dressed up in funny outfits and climbed onto a British boat and pushed bales of tea into the harbor, but not enough schoolchildren know of the bravery of the Rhode Islanders who, more than a year earlier, fired the first shots and drew the first blood in the quest for American independence. It is a fine thing, I am sure, to push tea bales off a boat. We blew the boat up, and we did it more than a year earlier.

Rhode Islanders are justifiably proud of our role in our rebellion. We have made a tradition of celebrating the Gaspee incident with the annual Gaspee Days celebration and parade through Warwick. An independent study group at Brown University is adapting the tale of the Gaspee into a virtual reality educational experience so you can put on the goggles and reenact the experience of the Gaspee, marrying Rhode Island history with cutting-edge technology to engage middle and high school students in this history.

Someday soon, children across the country may be able to join Captain Whipple and John Brown and step into a virtual longboat, coast down a virtual Narragansett Bay, and watch the sky over a virtual Rhode Island, alight with the fire of revolution.

I thank the Presiding Officer.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I am very pleased to join my colleagues, Senator Franken and Senator Warren, who are also here for this conversation that was kicked off earlier this afternoon by our friend and colleague from West Virginia, Senator Manchin.

West Virginia does not have a whole lot in common with Rhode Island. We are a coastal State. Senator Manchin comes from a very landlocked mountainous State. Our biggest mountain in Rhode Island is probably the Johnson landfill. But we have something in common, which is the extent to which opioid addiction and opioid overdoses have stricken our State. We have had over 200 deaths per year. In a State our size, everyone is within 2 or 3 degrees of separation of everyone else. Those 200 deaths reverberate through our whole State.

There is a small town in Rhode Island called Burrillville, up in our northwest corner. Burrillville is a very small town in Rhode Island. I went up there for a meeting about the opioid epidemic at Burrillville High School. In the previous quarter, in just 3 months, that one little town had six deaths from opioid overdoses. That is six times that the little police force had to respond, six times the funeral parlors had to handle grieving families, six times that death notices had to be published in the local paper. It felt like a battering to people in that community.

Senator Manchin has a pretty good idea to help make sure that we have the funding to get treatment to people before these tragedies take place. He proposes what he calls the LifeBOAT Act, which is one penny for each milligram of active opioid in a prescription drug--one penny. It is only a penny, but it would have raised about $2 billion last year. So $2 billion would save a lot of people and save a lot of lives.

Just to give you some idea of the scale, Purdue Pharma has generated estimated sales of more than $35 billion since 1995 for opioid medications. It has annual revenues of about $3 billion, mostly from OxyContin. That is just one company. So the idea of adding a penny really does not seem to me to be asking very much.

The way we operate now in the Senate, I know that asking corporations to do anything seems impossible because they have the financial whip hand over so many Senators because of the unlimited money they are allowed to spend and threaten to spend in our politics. But really, after all the lives that have been lost, after all the lives have been affected, you would expect that just out of common decency this industry would step up and say: For a penny, we are in. So let's hope they come around to that because I think it is a good plan.

TrumpCare, on the other hand, would be a disaster. So many people get their opioid treatment through Medicaid and through the expansion of Medicaid that the Affordable Care Act created. To undo that, to strip $1.4 trillion, as President Trump has proposed, out of Medicaid is inevitably going to deny people access to care.

I am not the only one saying this. Someone who works in Providence with recovering heroin addicts wrote to me. His name is Travis. He wrote to me about his clients who are receiving medication-assisted treatments. He credits their being able to come in and get the care that they get to the Affordable Care Act. He said that it is the reason he and his colleagues have been able to help recovering addicts enter effective treatment programs. It works.

Travis relates that repealing the Affordable Care Act would have what he calls a profound impact on his clients' ability to get needed addiction and recovery services.

I will turn the floor over to Senator Warren in a minute, but I want to recognize one other person. I will not use last names. His name is Mark. He wrote to me from Rumford, RI, which is a very nice part of East Providence, RI.

This is a gentleman who became addicted to opiates at the age of 52. He had surgery, and after the surgical procedure, his doctor gave him opiates for the pain. The doctor was somewhat indiscriminate about continuing to prescribe those opioids.

Mark realized that he was addicted. He went to a recovery group in Rhode Island called CODAC, which does very good work for treatment. He went into recovery, and he succeeded for 8 years without using opioids.

As sometimes happens, family stresses, business stresses, other stresses intervene. In his case, a family stress caused a relapse, but he knew what to do. He went back to CODAC. He became sober again. Now he is back in recovery, clean and sober.

This pattern of recovery and then an occasional relapse and then back to recovery again is very often the way people who have an addiction get through it. To make sure that the treatment is there for them when they relapse can be a lifesaver.

By the way, Mark is a success. He is in the music business. He has toured around the world. The fact that CODAC was there for him on those two occasions has allowed him to achieve that success. Again, this was a 52-year-old individual whom a surgery sent into addiction.

I will close by pointing out that one of the things the CARA bill, which many of us worked so hard on, accomplished was to send the message that addiction is not a moral failing. It is a medical condition. It should be treated as a medical condition. Not only is it not a moral failing, I think many of us who have had family, loved ones, friends, or any experience with folks who are going through recovery--what we have learned is that recovery is actually a noble accomplishment. It is not an easy path, but it is a path that demands deep honesty, deep courage, deep trust, very often love. It is a path that people who are walking it can and should be proud of, and we should be proud of them for their achievements, and we should be there for them in their relapses and make sure the care that will put them back on that path is available.

I yield the floor to my terrific colleague from Massachusetts.

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 am here to discuss what you might call the Scott Pruitt philosophy of environmental regulation. In a recent interview, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency expressed his view that the EPA should ``simply pass regulations that provide fairness and equity and allow utilities to make decisions based upon stability, cost, and security to the consumers that they serve.'' Did we notice anything missing in that assertion of what EPA's role should be? How about no mention of the environment, no mention of climate change, no mention of public health? So my 168th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech will look at how paid-for Administrator Pruitt is by the very industries he is supposed to be regulating. Often, the word for this is ``corruption.''

Scott Pruitt is a functionary of fossil fuel money. He has a long record of dark money fundraising and long, cozy relationships with big fossil fuel political donors.

As you can see, energy interests contributed over $136,000 to Pruitt's 2014 campaign even though he ran unopposed. During the 2010 and 2014 election cycles, oil and gas giants Devon Energy and Koch Industries--yes, of those infamous Koch brothers--maxed out to Pruitt's campaigns.

Thanks to Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting by the New York Times, we know that backing Pruitt was a good fossil fuel investment, particularly for Devon Energy. In 2011, Attorney General Scott Pruitt took a letter written by Devon Energy, he put it onto his Oklahoma attorney general letterhead, he signed it for them, and he sent it off to EPA, pleading Devon Energy's anti-regulatory case as if it were his own.

As attorney general of Oklahoma, Pruitt directly solicited political donations from companies now regulated by EPA, then regulated by EPA as well.

He spoke at dozens of industry events but never at a public health or environmental event.

He led the boards of political organizations, like the Republican Attorneys General Association and its dark money political fundraising arm, the so-called Rule of Law Defense Fund, this thing. Pruitt was a member of the RAGA executive committee--RAGA being Republican Attorneys General Association. He was a member of their executive committee between 2014 and 2016, when RAGA raised $530,000 from Koch Industries-- yes, those same infamous Koch brothers--and $125,000 from Devon Energy--yes, of the letter he put onto his own letterhead.

Coal giant Murray Energy donated $50,000 to Liberty 2.0, Pruitt's own super PAC, and it donated $350,000 to RAGA between 2014 and 2016.

The Rule of Law Defense Fund doesn't have to disclose its donors. They hide in a loophole in the law. But other public reporting has shown that it received at least $175,000 from something called Freedom Partners. With a name like that, you know it is up to no good. Sure enough, it is another dark

money group run by several Koch Industries executives. That is not Coca-Cola; that is the Koch brothers' fossil fuel processing company.

We don't know more about this. Why do we not know more about this? Because Republicans in the Senate protected Scott Pruitt from having to answer these questions during his confirmation process.

While he was busily helping raise dark money, dark money groups, in turn, came back and worked hard to help Pruitt get confirmed to the EPA. A Republican opposition research PAC called America Rising launched a pro-Pruitt ad campaign, and its dark money arm, America Rising Squared, funded confirmpruitt.com. A 501(c)(4) dark money entity ironically named Protecting America Now was created solely to help confirm Pruitt to the EPA. Its fliers asked for contributions ranging from $25,000 to $500,000. Just another grassroots group trying to get a good guy confirmed. Koch Industries' own lobbying disclosure forms reveal it spent part of $3.1 million lobbying to confirm Scott Pruitt.

In Trump's science-denial Cabinet, Administrator Pruitt seems to see little reason to hide his anti-environment and Republican political interests. He has spoken at the Conservative Political Action Conference and the American Farm Bureau board meeting. He attended rallies with coal miners against his own regulations and met with the National Mining Association's executive committee ``to lay out his concerns with the Paris accord'' the day before the mining association voted to press President Trump to withdraw from that agreement.

Administrator Pruitt planned to appear as the keynote speaker at the Oklahoma Republican Party Gala on May 5. This invitation mentioned his official position as EPA Administrator three times. It featured this photo of him being sworn in as the EPA Administrator. It promised donors a ``once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear him discuss his plans to slash regulations, bring back jobs to Oklahoma, and decrease the size of the EPA.'' Well, the 1939 Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities, more commonly known as the Hatch Act, forbids this, so I filed a Hatch Act complaint and Administrator Pruitt's appearance was canceled. The Office of Special Counsel is now conducting a full investigation.

But it wasn't just there. He goes to other dinners. On February 28, 2017, Pruitt was a speaker at a RAGA major donors dinner. You know who major donors are by now. Days after the RAGA major donors dinner, Pruitt unilaterally withdrew an EPA request for information from oil and gas producers about their methane emissions, citing a letter from nine members of RAGA and two Republican Governors, who alleged the methane information request ``furthers the previous administration's climate agenda and supports . . . the imposition of burdensome climate rules on existing sites, the cost and expense of which will be enormous.''

There was no public comment period. There was no request for input from other States. This basically was a little party favor for his RAGA pals right after the RAGA dinner.

This EPA Administrator has solicited thousands, if not millions, of dollars from corporations he now regulates. Our current ethics laws do not require nominees in the confirmation process to disclose their political and dark money connections, so the Senate and the public are kept blind to the conflicts of interest of such nominees, and we have no idea how those conflicts would manifest in their offices. Pruitt knows who gave dark money to his political causes. The corporations know what dark money they gave. It is just the rest of us who are in the dark.

This is new, and this is weird. This was not a problem for President Obama's nominees because the dark money political tsunami that has swamped our politics in slime did not exist when President Obama was elected. It was the Citizens United decision of 2010 that allowed unlimited political spending by big special interests, and that unlimited money found dark money channels.

To address the gaping loophole in our Federal ethics laws, I have introduced the Conflicts from Political Fundraising Act with Senators Udall, Carper, Van Hollen, and Franken. This bill would require Presidentially appointed Federal officials like Scott Pruitt to disclose their political fundraising, and it would require Federal ethics officials to address these conflicts by, for example, making sure officials are recused from decisions affecting big political donors, making sure the public has the information to know they should ask for a recusal because the director is conflicted by reason of his political relationship with big dark money donors.

I wish the conflicts at EPA stopped with the Administrator, but they don't. It is a swarm of swampy conflict over there. Pruitt has surrounded himself with political operatives and fossil fuel lobbyists. The Associate EPA Administrator for Policy previously worked at RAGA, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, and something called the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce--a Koch brothers-funded dark money group that has underwritten the Rule of Law Defense Fund. EPA's Senior Adviser for Regional and State Affairs came from Pruitt's own fossil fuel-funded super PAC, Oklahoma Strong. The Assistant Administrator for Congressional and Intergovernmental Relations came from the oil company, the Hess Corporation. One Deputy Associate Administrator is the former president of the Ohio Coal Association. Another Deputy Associate Administrator was a registered lobbyist at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, where she specifically lobbied against EPA's Clean Power Plan and New Source Performance Standard, the clean water rule, the ozone standard, EPA enforcement, pesticides bills, budget resolutions, and EPA appropriations bills.

This corruption of EPA is the work of the fossil fuel industry. One day there must come a reckoning.

Just this weekend, the New York Times reported ``How Rollbacks at Scott Pruitt's E.P.A. Are a Boon to Oil and Gas.'' The article included a checklist of rollbacks that specifically benefit long-time Pruitt benefactor Devon Energy--the one that got the letter--delaying a rule raising royalties on fossil energy production on Federal land, undoing new fracking standards, rolling back rules on the leaking and flaring of methane, and rolling back reporting of methane emissions.

In another matter, Devon Energy had been preparing to pay a settlement of over $100,000 and to install emissions scrubbing equipment to remedy illegal emissions from a Wyoming natural gas facility. Five days after Pruitt was installed at EPA, the company told officials it was ``re-evaluating its settlement posture,'' offering a quarter of what it had previously proposed to settle the charges and scrapping the emissions controls entirely. They know their Administrator Pruitt.

Pruitt's record at EPA reveals he is unabashedly looking out for his industry donors at the expense of public health and the environment. As far as I can tell, every action he has taken since taking office will lead to an enriched industry--at the expense of dirtier air and dirtier water--and a more imperiled climate.

Myron Ebell is someone I don't quote often. He is the head of President Trump's EPA transition team and a prominent climate denier. He has something interesting to say about Scott Pruitt. He has said that he thinks Scott Pruitt is using EPA as a ``stepping stone to political office'' and that ``everything he does is going to be a political calculation about what furthers his own political career.''

This is not a liberal environmentalist making these accusations. This is somebody who is right in Scott Pruitt's climate denial wheelhouse. This is someone from the Trump science denial EPA destruction team. This is the guy who is in the club of fossil fuel-funded climate denial, and he thinks everything Pruitt does is a political calculation about what furthers Pruitt's own political career. If that is the case, everything Scott Pruitt does is a conflict of interest, as he sees regulated industry as the funders of his next political campaign. They pay for him now, and he delivers.

Sadly, the people who own Pruitt also own Congress. So good luck getting an honest look at this mess from our fossil fuel-funded colleagues in the majority.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.