Floor Statements

Mr. President, before I get into my ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, let me say I appreciate the concern of the Senator from Texas that the Affordable Care Act leaves too many Americans uninsured. I am not sure the solution to that problem is to throw another 24 million people off of their insurance. I appreciate his concern that premiums for many are too high. I am not sure the solution is to dramatically increase premiums on the elderly. I appreciate his concern that Medicaid can be managed by the States--and I think I used his words correctly--along with the money to

pay for it. But when the bill has $800 billion in Medicaid savings but will not cure or prevent a single illness, you are not reducing those $800 billion in savings; you are just moving it to the States. You are just putting that burden on the States. Ask Arizona how that worked when they tried to do Medicaid as they dealt with the mortgage meltdown.

The American people do perhaps demand better than ObamaCare, but the solution to offer them something that is far, far worse does not seem very sensible. I believe we are willing to work together. Indeed, in the HELP Committee our chairman has already said that as soon as we start talking about repair, we can get to work. But the notion that there is an invitation out to us to work in a bipartisan fashion when the majority party is jamming this bill through without negotiation, using reconciliation as an extraordinary process to try to put it through under arcane budget rules that were never designed for this-- that is not exactly much of a signal. So as soon as we get to regular order and 60 votes, I think we will be able to actually work and serve our constituents very well.

Climate Change

Mr. President, I am here today for my 160th ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, this one focused on the security consequences of our failure to deal with carbon emissions and climate change.

My remarks at the Munich Security Conference this year pointed out that climate change presents several orders of security risk to society. The first order of security risk is just physical damage, damage that science and our senses are already perceiving and measuring in our atmosphere, our oceans, and our environment.

This security risk, risks to the Earth's present national state, will hurt farming communities, coastal communities, fishing communities, and of course anyone vulnerable to wildfires, droughts, and extreme weather. Of course, the poorer you are in this world, the more vulnerable you are to this peril.

The second order of security risk from climate change is the consequences in human society from that physical, biological, and chemical damage in our environment. As farms and fisheries fail, people are impoverished and dislocated. Scarce resources lead to conflicts and confrontations. Storms and fires can make suffering acute, and people who are hungry or dislocated or torn from their roots can become desperate, radicalized, and violent. That is why the U.S. Department of Defense has for years called climate change a catalyst of conflict.

Drought in Syria, for instance, has been described as a root cause of the conflict there, a conflict that has killed more than 400,000 people, according to some estimates, and displaced more than 11 million. Researchers from NASA and the University of Arizona have determined that drought was very likely the worst in a millennium. Massive crop failures and livestock losses moved farmers into stressed cities, where popular protests met with brutal violence from the Assad regime and the tide of refugees from that chaos swamped Europe.

Nigeria, Sudan, and Central America are other areas where violence and flight are driven by scarce resources. So the second order of national security risk is the societal damage that cascades from the natural damage caused by climate change.

The third order of security risk is perhaps the most dangerous for our country; that is, reputational damage to the keystone institutions of our present world order: market capitalism and democratic government. People around the world who have been harmed by the first- order environmental effects of climate change, or people around the world who get swept up in the second-order societal effects of climate change will want answers, as will many who are witness to the global suffering and harm caused by climate change.

When that reckoning comes, as it will, the discredit to institutions like capitalism and democracy which failed to act, even when loudly and clearly warned, could be profound. This failure of action by these institutions is compounded by the moral failure. Fossil fuel companies are knowingly causing this harm. They are aggressively fighting solutions to this problem. Their weapons are as disreputable as their conduct: professionally administered misinformation--climate denial, after all, is the original fake news--and massive, massive floods of political money.

As a result, the Congress has shown itself utterly unable to resist the threats and blandishments of this industry, despite the fact that we know very clearly of the industry's enormous conflict of interest. This all stands to be a lasting blot on both democracy and capitalism, a blot that will worsen as the consequences of our climate failure worsen. If you believe, as Daniel Webster did, in the power of America's example, that we are, indeed, a city on a hill, then you should worry about this terrible example of greed, ignorance, and corruption triumphant.

It is not like we have not been warned. The National Intelligence Council has estimated that worldwide demand for food, water, and energy will grow by approximately 35, 40, and 50 percent respectively in coming decades. This increased resource demand is on a collision course with those first-order harms--disrupting fisheries and agriculture around the globe.

The U.S. Institute for Peace has warned that ``poor responses to climatic shifts create shortages of resources such as land and water. Shortages are followed by negative secondary impacts, such as more sickness, hunger and joblessness. Poor responses to these, in turn, open the door to conflict.''

For those who discount this as a bunch of peaceniks' prattle, let me add that in 2013, our National Intelligence Council put climate change alongside events like nuclear war and a severe pandemic among the eight events with the greatest potential for global disruption--noting for climate change that ``dramatic and unforeseen changes are occurring at a faster rate than expected.'' The Department of Defense 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review described climate change as a ``global threat multiplier.'' That report warned that ``the pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world.''

As head of U.S. Pacific Command, ADM Samuel Locklear warned in 2013 that climate change was the biggest long-term security threat in his area of operation, noting the need to organize the military for ``when the effects of climate change start to impact these massive populations.''

Again, I will quote him. ``If it goes bad,'' he said, ``you could have hundreds of thousands or millions of people displaced and then security will start to crumble pretty quickly.''

Operation Free, a coalition of national security and veterans organizations, has continually pointed out the national security threat posed by climate change, as has the American Security Project, comprised of retired military flag officers. The Government Accountability Office, GAO, has warned that climate change is affecting defense infrastructure around the world, from sea level rise at Naval Station Norfolk to heavy rain and flooding at Fort Irwin, CA, to thawing permafrost affecting Air Force radar installations in Alaska, to faraway effects, even at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

The Coast Guard, of course, must meet entirely new demands of the icecap's melt in the Arctic for transportation and shipping, for new fishing grounds, for resource exploration, and of course the possibility there of conflict. In 2005, when Defense Secretary Mattis led Marine Corps Combat Development Command, he called on Navy researchers to find ways to make the military more energy efficient, to ``unleash''--to use his words--U.S. military forces from the ``tether [of] fuel.''

Ask Senator Tammy Duckworth about the casualties sustained among her comrades in arms defending fuel supply lines if you want to see a passionate conversation. The military funds research into alternative energy and studies how climate change affects military capability because in the real world, where real lives are at risk, they can't afford to believe the false facts peddled by the fossil fuel industry.

The people we entrust to keep us safe, who have to deal with real threats in the real world, recognize the danger

climate change represents. The National Intelligence Council said in January that ``issues like . . . climate change invoke high stakes and will require sustained collaboration.'' Instead of that, we get a Congress and an administration that has deliberately let the fossil fuel industry occupy and sabotage the orderly operation of the Government of the United States to deal with this problem.

So I am going to start to push back. When these tools of the fossil fuel industry, to whom we in the Senate gave advice and consent, go too egregiously about their dirty business of climate denial, expect that I may come to the floor and object to consent requests.

Last week, Administrator Pruitt said carbon dioxide does not cause climate change. That is nonsense. That is somewhere between ignorant and fraudulent. He gets that one lie for free but no more--not next time with the stakes this high. It can't be free to have these fossil fuel tools spouting their fossil fuel nonsense from Senate-confirmed positions of governmental authority. Starting now, it will not be.

I yield the floor.

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

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

Mr. President, this is my ``Time to Wake Up'' speech No. 159. In giving these speeches, I have come to realize that some of my colleagues seem to have a hard time wrapping their heads around the basic understanding of climate change. Some of President Trump's Cabinet nominees seem to have the same problem.

They say the scientific community is split on the issue. It is not.

They say the climate has always been changing. Not like this, it hasn't.

They say we can't trust projections and complex computer models. But overall, they have actually been right.

And, of course, they have the notorious ``I'm not a scientist'' dodge. Well, if a colleague doesn't understand this, then perhaps he ought to trust the scientists at NOAA and at NASA, at our National Labs, and at universities in Rhode Island and across the country--the scientists whose job it is to understand this.

I must say, in addition to trusting the scientists, I also trust Rhode Island fishermen who see the changes in their traps and nets and our shoreline homeowners watching the sea steadily rising toward their homes. You don't need fancy computer models to see the ocean changes already taking place; you just need a thermometer to measure rising temperatures, basically a yardstick to measure sea level rise or a simple pH kit to measure the acidification of our oceans.

Let's look at ocean acidification. The oceans have absorbed about one-third of all the excess carbon dioxide produced by humans since the industrial revolution, around 600 gigatons' worth. When that carbon dioxide dissolves into the ocean, chemistry happens, and it makes the oceans more acidic.

Carbon dioxide reacts with water to form carbonic acid. Carbonic acid isn't stable in ocean water, so it breaks down into bicarbonate ions, a base, and hydrogen ions, an acid. The increase in acidic hydrogen ions is the crux of the chemistry of ocean acidification. More hydrogen ions lower the water's pH,

and the lower the pH, the higher the acidity.

Regular viewers of my ``Time to Wake Up'' speeches or people who spent the night up with us while we objected to Administrator Pruitt's nomination may remember that I demonstrated this in a simple experiment on the Senate floor just a few weeks ago. I took the glass of water on my desk, and I used the carbon dioxide in my own breath. Blowing through an aquarium stone, I was able to show, with the help of a little pH dye, how easy it is to actually measure the effect of CO2 on the acidity of water. With just a few breaths into the water, I was able to visibly make this glass of drinking water more acidic.

That little experiment is a microcosm of what is happening in our oceans right now, except, instead of bubbles blown through a straw, it is a transfer of excess CO2 from the atmosphere into the surface waters of the ocean all around the globe.

Scientific observations confirm that what the laws of chemistry tell us should happen is actually happening. Massive carbon pollution resulting from burning fossil fuels is changing ocean acidity faster than ever in the past 50 million years.

Now, you start talking in big numbers, and it all goes into a blur-- 50 million years, compared to how long the human species has been on the planet, which is about 200,000 years. So 50 million years is, what, 250 times the length of time that our species has inhabited the Earth.

This chart shows measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. That is the redline of climbing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And it shows carbon dioxide in the ocean, which is the green measure, which is also climbing in tandem with the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Finally, it shows the pH of ocean water in the sea. Of course, as the chemistry would tell us, as the carbon dioxide goes up, the pH comes down, and the acidity rises; the water becomes more acidic.

We measure that surface seawater on the Earth's oceans has, since the industrial revolution, become roughly 30 percent more acidic. NOAA predicts that oceans will be 150 percent more acidic than now by the end of the century. Coastal States, like Rhode Island and Florida, will feel the hit.

Ocean acidification disrupts life in the sea when those loose hydrogen ions we talked about latch onto free carbonate ions. Usually that carbonate is plentiful in ocean water. Shell-forming marine creatures, like oysters and clams, use this loose carbonate to help form their shells. But if the carbonate they need is bound up by hydrogen ions, they can't get enough carbonate to build their shells.

We have even seen acidification scenarios in which shells start to dissolve in the water. Shellfish hatcheries on the west coast have already seen devastating losses of larval oysters due to acidic waters. When ocean pH fell too low, baby oysters couldn't form their shells, and they quickly died off. Dr. Julia Ekstrom, the lead researcher for Nature Climate Change's 2015 study on ocean acidification, told PBS that it has cost the Pacific Northwest oyster industry more than $100 million and jeopardized thousands of jobs. Her research flagged 15 States where the shellfish industry would be hardest hit, from Alaska to Florida, to my home State of Rhode Island.

Toward the bottom of the oceanic food web is the humble pteropod. Pteropods are sometimes called sea butterflies because their tiny snail foot has evolved into an oceanic wing. In 2014 NOAA found that more than half of pteropods sampled off the west coast were suffering from severely dissolved shells due to ocean acidification, and it is worsening.

This is a pteropod shell degrading over time in acidified water.

Of course, we are here in ``Mammon Hall,'' where it feels laughable to care about anything that can't be monetized. We talk a good game here in the Senate about God's Earth and God's creation and God's creatures, but what we really care about is the money. So let's monetize this.

Who cares about this humble species? Salmon do. As the west coast loses its pteropods, that collapse reverberates up the food chain, and the salmon care because many of them feed on the pteropods. The west coast salmon fishery is a big deal, so salmon fishermen care about this.

Another foundational marine species, krill, is also affected by ocean acidification. In the Southern Ocean, nearly all marine animals can thank krill for their survival. From penguin diets to whale diets, krill is king.

A 2013 study in Nature Climate Change found ocean acidification inhibiting the hatching of krill eggs and the normal development of larvae. The researchers note that unless we cut emissions, collapse of the krill population in the Southern Ocean portends ``dire consequences for the entire ecosystem.''

Closer to home, the University of Alaska's Ocean Acidification Research Center--yes, ocean acidification is serious enough that the University of Alaska has an Ocean Acidification Research Center, and it warns that ocean acidification ``has the potential to disrupt [Alaska's fishing] industry from top to bottom.''

Turning to warmer waters, coral reefs are also highly susceptible to ocean acidification. A healthy coral reef is one of the most productive and diverse ecosystems on Earth, home to 25 percent of the world's fish biodiversity. Those reef-building corals rely on calcium carbonate to build their skeletons.

Since the Presiding Officer is from Florida, I know how important coral reefs are to the tourism industry in his State.

Coral depends on a symbiotic relationship with tiny photosynthetic algae, called zooxanthellae, that live in the surface tissue of the coral. There is a range of pH, as well as temperature, salinity, and water clarity, within which this symbiosis between the coral and the zooxanthellae thrives. Outside that comfort range, the corals get stressed, and they begin to evict the algae. This is called coral bleaching because corals shed their colorful algae. Without these algae, corals soon die.

The effects of acidification on sea life are far-reaching. Studies have found ocean acidification disrupts everything from the sensory systems of clownfish--those are little Nemos, for those who have seen the movie--to phytoplankton populations, to sea urchin reproduction, to the Dungeness crab, another valuable west coast specialty.

I asked Scott Pruitt, our ethically challenged Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, about ocean acidification. He gave these answers: ``The oceans are alkaline and are projected to remain so,'' and two, ``The degree of alkalinity in the ocean is highly variable and therefore it is difficult to attribute that variability to any single cause.''

Let's look at those answers.

The first answer is plain and simple nonsense because the harm to ocean creatures from acidification comes from the dramatic shift in ocean acidity, not from where along the acid-based spectrum the shift takes place. The observation he made is irrelevant to the question.

His second answer is no better. It exhibits purposeful ignorance of the role humans' carbon pollution plays in damaging the ocean, because the chemical principles at issue here are indisputable. You can replicate them in a middle school laboratory in any Florida school. As I showed in my little demonstration, you can replicate them even here on the Senate floor. Like its carbon cousin, climate change, ocean acidification doesn't care whether you believe in chemistry. It doesn't matter to chemistry if you swallow the propaganda pumped out by the fossil fuel lobby. The principles of science operate notwithstanding. The chemical interactions take place by law of nature whether you believe them or not. If you believe in God, then you have to acknowledge that these laws of nature are God's laws, the basic operating principles He established in His creation. But, of course, here at Mammon Hall, it is always about the money.

Any decent EPA Administrator is obliged to trust in real science and to take action to protect human health and the environment. I am deeply unconvinced that Administrator Pruitt will live up in any respect to those obligations, but I would welcome being proven wrong. Likewise, I similarly challenge my colleagues here in the Senate.

This Chamber and our Nation will be judged harshly by our descendants, both for our pigheaded disregard for the basic truths, the basic operating systems of the world we live in, and for the shameful reason why we disregard them. Mammon Hall indeed.

Mr. President, it is time for the Senate to wake up before it is too late.

I yield the floor.

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

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

Mr. President, I am here today for the 158th time to ask this Chamber to wake up to the mounting evidence of climate change. The sad truth is that, in Congress anyway, this issue has turned starkly partisan thanks to a torrent of dark political money that the fossil fuel industry uses to both threaten and reward the Republican Party in a dirty, dark money game of stick-and-carrot. Republicans in Congress ignore climate change for the simple reason that the fossil fuel industry has become their political life support system. It does not have to be this way.

Outside this Chamber, even Republicans see things very differently. In the investment sector, where people have to make decisions based on real facts and where duties to shareholders limit overly creative accounting, the Republican signal is clear.

An impressive group of Republican former Treasury Secretaries and Republican former Presidential economic advisers recently proposed a conservative, market-based climate solution. Republican Presidents trusted these folks with the conduct of the U.S. economy. Jim Baker was Secretary of the Treasury under President Reagan, Hank Paulson was Secretary of the Treasury under President George W. Bush, and George Shultz was Secretary of the Treasury under President Nixon, in addition to other distinguished offices that they held. Joining those three were Martin Feldstein, Chairman of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers, and Greg Mankiw, who held that position for President George W. Bush; Rob Walton, the former chairman of the board of Walmart, the world's largest retailer and employer; and Tom Stephenson from Sequoia Capital, the venture capital firm out in Silicon Valley. This Republican group proposed a ``carbon dividends'' plan. It combines a carbon tax on fossil fuels--which reflects harm from carbon emissions which market economics ordinarily requires to be built into the price of the product--with a big dividend returning all of the revenues to the American people, and a reduction of regulations, which may be mooted by a good enough carbon fee. This idea is actually not so different from my own American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act.

In their report, they all note that the ``mounting evidence of climate change is growing too strong to ignore.'' Many would say that it grew too strong to ignore a good decade ago, but it is important that these Republican leaders have acknowledged this.

They also said: ``Economists are nearly unanimous in their belief that a carbon tax is the most efficient and effective way to reduce carbon emissions.''

This report lines up with many other Republicans outside Congress who support a revenue-neutral carbon fee. It is the favorite climate solution in conservative economic circles. Indeed, it is the only widely accepted climate solution among Republicans.

The Niskanen Center, a Libertarian think tank that spun off from the Cato Institute, last month wrote this:

The case for climate action is now so strong that one would

be hard-pressed to find a serious academic economist who

opposes using market forces to manage the damage done by

greenhouse emissions.

Like the Treasury Secretaries, economists and investors throughout the financial community are saying loud and clear: We can no longer ignore climate change.

Goldman Sachs, for instance, in 2015 did a report on the low-carbon economy. It was called: ``Goldman Sachs equity investor's guide to a low carbon world, 2015-2025.'' So unless somebody here is going to say that Goldman Sachs is in on the hoax, Goldman Sachs is taking this pretty seriously.

Last year, the investment firm BlackRock, with more than $1 trillion in assets under management, issued a report titled: ``Adapting Portfolios to Climate Change.''

I don't think investors trust $1 trillion to a firm that falls for hoaxes. BlackRock, like Goldman, knows that climate change is real and is helping its investors plan for the economic fallout.

BlackRock warns in its report: ``Investors can no longer ignore climate

change. . . .'' Parenthetical editorial comment: That is the job of Republicans in Congress.

BlackRock also had something to say about a price on carbon. They said this: ``Higher carbon pricing would help address [externalities from fossil fuels] and would be the most cost-effective way for countries to meet their Paris agreement pledges.''

So in the real world, where real decisions are being made by very smart people backed by real money, they are telling their clients: You must take climate change seriously, and you must take carbon pricing seriously.

The BlackRock report had this data on prices that companies are setting on carbon internally--in their own internal accounting--across sectors, including healthcare and energy and utilities. As we can see, the price per metric ton ranges from a low of about $10 in information technology, up to over $350 per metric ton--internal costs of carbon accounting in these industries.

The point ought to be pretty clear. The business community is acting, investors are insisting on it, and a price on carbon is a key part of the program.

The legendary Wayne Gretsky's rule was to ``skate to where the puck is going to be.'' These major firms recognize where the carbon economy is heading. We should too. We would, if it weren't for the political mischief wreaked in Congress by the fossil fuel industry.

BlackRock and Goldman Sachs are not alone. The insurance and reinsurance industry is one of the world's biggest investors, as well as one of the world's best analyzers of risk. Munich Re and Swiss Re, and others in property casualty and reinsurance, warn us that climate change is real and portends huge costs for society. Munich Re's head of risk accumulation in the United States said in 2015: ``As a nation, we need to take steps to reduce the societal impact of weather events as we see greater variability and volatility in our climate.''

One of the biggest investors in the housing market is the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, Freddie Mac. Freddie Mac has warned about climate change impact on the real estate sector: ``The economic losses and social disruption may happen gradually, but they are likely to be greater in total than those experienced in the housing crisis of the great recession.''

When we think of what we went through in the housing crisis of the great recession, wow, Freddie Mac is warning that the economic losses and social disruption from climate change in our housing markets are likely to be worse.

These are all serious investors and they have serious warnings for us, and ignoring all of them just to please fossil fuel industry patrons is a big, big mistake.

Even President Trump's nominee to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jay Clayton, thinks we need action. For years, his law firm has encouraged clients, including ExxonMobil, to disclose climate change-related risks to the SEC and to investors. If he is confirmed, I hope he will enforce the SEC's existing disclosure requirements for climate risk and clarify that public disclosures should include asset valuations based on global compliance with international treaties. Investors need climate change risks disclosed against a ``reality check'' baseline that assumes international compliance with the Paris climate commitments. An assumption that we fail should not be acceptable.

Slowly, investor disclosures are improving. Last year, New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman forced Peabody Energy to restate its disclosures. Just last week, Chevron acknowledged to its investors in an SEC filing that, lo and behold, some of its products ``may be considered pollutants,'' noted ``new conclusions about the effects of the company's operations on human health or the environment,'' and they acknowledged ``an increased possibility of governmental investigations and, potentially, private litigation against the company.''

It is better late than never, I suppose. Now it is time for the rest of the industry to report fully and fairly, first on the risks that shareholders bear from assets that are wrongly valued now--that are falsely valued in their reports--and, second, on the company's potentially culpable behavior in climate denial.

Institutional investors are joining in those efforts. Our Rhode Island pension fund, managed by our treasurer, Seth Magaziner, is pushing for greater transparency on political and lobbying spending at large energy companies like Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Devon. For the resolution filed at ConocoPhillips, Rhode Island was joined by over 20 other cofilers, including the State of Connecticut, Senator Murphy's home State, whom I see here on the floor.

Just recently, the G20 nations--the 20 biggest economies in the world--set up a group called the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures. It is made up of 32 members from large banks, insurance companies, asset management companies, pension funds, credit rating agencies, and accounting and consulting firms--you know, liberal extremists. And they are saying: Here it comes; let's get ready. They have asked that companies begin to come clean on the climate risk they face.

The big energy companies need to come clean on how much they are spending to deny climate science and where they are spending it, because, ultimately, it is their own investors who will be hurt by their irresponsibility. Ultimately, all the phony climate denial they pay for is a fool's errand because the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology aren't going away, and a day of reckoning for all this mischief and nonsense they have paid for inevitably will come.

We in the Senate have a duty to the American people to find a way to combat climate change. I realize this body will need help in that task. We will need help from the business community, which can apply its understanding of market forces and risk analysis to this challenge. It would help if the fossil fuel industry would focus on the long term health of its shareholders rather than on short-term gain. The fossil fuel industry should stand down the relentless political opposition it has maintained to any climate solution, and it should stand down the phony climate denial operation it continues to support.

It will take all of us coming together--companies, investors, regulators, governments, citizens, Republicans and Democrats--to achieve Donald Trump's once-stated goal of combating the ``catastrophic and irreversible effects of climate change''--his quote: ``catastrophic and irreversible effects of climate change.''

I did not misquote President Trump, although he was Donald Trump then. It was 2009, and this full page advertisement was taken out in the New York Times declaring that the science of climate change was ``irrefutable'' and the consequences of climate change would be ``catastrophic and irreversible.'' It was signed by none other than Donald J. Trump, as well as his children, Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, and Ivanka Trump. They were right then. If they get back to this, they will be right now.

The evidence and the science have only piled up since 2009. It is time for all of us to heed the advice of our universities, our scientists, and the people who actually know what they are talking about, and put the arguments of the fossil fuel industry where they belong--in the trash bin of history. We need to wake up before it is too late.

I yield the floor.

A question of Parliamentary order here. The time during the colloquy will continue to be charged to the Senator from Hawaii, correct?

Through the Chair, I would inquire of the distinguished Senator from Hawaii whether, in addition to the concern about pollution that crosses borders when it flows down rivers or that crosses borders when it comes out of smokestacks and floats across State borders into other States, is there not also a supremacy clause in the U.S. Constitution that puts Federal law ahead of State law where there is a conflict?

Are there not means and manners by which a Federal official could either pretend or actually believe or try to impose a Federal rule in a way that interferes with the rights of States that wish to protect themselves more than the fossil fuel-friendly Administrator and inhibit their ability to do so?

Will the Senator yield for another question?

The Senator from Hawaii is a very kind as well as a very distinguished individual, and he is willing to spot Mr. Pruitt's sincerity in the way he goes about his business. I am a skeptical New Englander, and I think Mr. Pruitt looks a little bit too bought and paid for to spot him that same degree of sincerity.

But to the question of the Federal and the State role, to the extent that it was Mr. Pruitt's position that the EPA should not be on the front line, that it is actually up to the States to bear the bulk of this burden and to be on the front line and enforce environmental laws and protect their Senators, what about the conduct of the Oklahoma attorney general's office might give us some pause as to his sincerity in this being a federalist question in which the power to regulate should be enforced at the State level by strong attorney general enforcement as former attorneys general like myself know?

If I recall the facts of this correctly, not only did he shut down the environmental unit of the department of the attorney general, but in subsequent reporting you could not find a dollar allocated to environmental activities in the Oklahoma attorney general's budget. And he abandoned what his predecessor, Drew Edmondson, had been running, which was not just to have an environmental enforcement unit within the department of the attorney general, but also to have an environmental enforcement team that brought together Federal folks, State regulators, water officials, and put together the multiagency task force that prosecuted environmental cases--gone also.

Finally, Drew Edmondson used to do an annual report, as I recall, on the successes of his environmental enforcement and his environmental task force, the multiagency group. That was gone too.

In addition to all of those facts, what worries me a little bit--you know, one of the things we have to assess in this process is the credibility of the nominee. Are they going to tell you the truth in the nomination process? If they are not going to tell you the truth in the nomination process, you are probably going to get a lot of malarkey out of them down the road as well.

He took the position that he actually had not gotten rid of the environmental unit. He said he had moved it into a new unit--the federalism unit--which, if you go to their own website and read about the federalism unit, it says it is an appellate. You don't do environmental enforcement at the appellate level; you do environmental enforcement at the trial level, and you do it at the investigative level.

Further, if you read down, the word ``environment'' never appears in the general description of that unit. So it is not as if there is just one little wrinkle of the environmental unit kind of magically disappearing under this guy. Wherever there was any activity by the department of the attorney general with respect to the environment, he shut it down, zeroed it out, silenced it, finished it.

I believe that is a pretty fair description of the status in Oklahoma.

Well, on the subject of respect for and obedience to statute, I thought we might want to discuss for a minute the Oklahoma open records law which the attorney general of Oklahoma not only needs to obey, but he needs to enforce it. He is not just subject to that law. He is the agency responsible for policing compliance with it.

What we have just seen is 750 days of noncompliance by his office with an Open Records Act request where he refused to provide anything to us in the EPW Committee. And, by the way, shame on the Environment and Public Works Committee for allowing that to happen. Shame on the Environment and Public Works Committee for--on a purely partisan basis--not allowing us to get those emails that this office had covered up and suppressed for 2 years.

Finally, they got before a judge and the judge said: Release that first set Tuesday--Tuesday. So he is sitting on several thousand emails between his office and the big energy companies and the big energy organizations, and he stonewalls everybody for 2 years.

When a judge finally gets a look at this misbehavior, first she says: That is an abject failure. Second, she says: That is unreasonable under the statute. And third, she says: Produce them Tuesday.

This was a guy who didn't think he could produce them Tuesday. He couldn't produce them for 2 years, and now the judge says Tuesday.

So when you are looking at his adherence to law, his respect for law, it seems to me that this is yet another example in which off he goes. The beneficiaries are himself and all the big fossil fuel companies that he was engaged with. That is who the beneficiaries were.

The people who lost were the ones who were supposedly the beneficiaries of the law--the public, the right to know, transparency.

So it makes for an interesting comparison to his version of compliance with the law. And if that is the best he can do complying with an Oklahoma statute that he is obliged not only to comply with but to enforce, what reasonable conclusion would my colleagues draw about his willingness to follow Federal law, which he also despises?

Well, I wanted to go back to lawyering for a minute in response to the Senator's comments about the predicament that the other side is being put into--being asked to vote on the nominee, knowing that the disclosure of thousands of emails between the nominee and the industry and companies that he is going to supposed to regulate is imminent--is imminent. As the distinguished Senator from Hawaii said, maybe there is nothing in those; maybe this is just an empty concern. But over and over and over, emails have been really important at breaking investigations open. Certainly, our friends on the other side--until the election in November--had a fascination with emails, a fixation with emails. They couldn't get enough of other people's emails. And now suddenly everybody is looking at the ceiling, examining the ceiling tiles when it is time to wonder about these emails.

There is a doctrine, if I recall successfully back in the days when I was a more active lawyer, called willful blindness, which is the wrongful act of intentionally keeping oneself unaware of something--the wrongful act of intentionally keeping oneself unaware of something. If that doesn't describe what is being done right now to the Republican Senators about these emails with this vote, I don't know what does, but what I do know is that willful blindness under the law is a culpable state of mind. It is a culpable state of mind in civil cases, where you can be held liable because of deliberate willful blindness, and it is a culpable state of mind in criminal cases, where you can be found guilty of a criminal offense based on a finding of willful blindness.

So this is no small predicament that the majority leader is creating for his Republican Members in the mad rush to get this fossil fuel tool voted on before this stuff all comes out, and it is either going to be good or it is going to be bad, and if it is bad, there will be a price to pay for having ignored this emerging avalanche of emails. If they are good, fine, no harm done, but who really gets hurt if it is bad?

We are going to be examining Pruitt over this, when they come out. If these are bad things, there could be investigations that ensue and an enormous amount of stuff can take place, but there will be ownership on the other side of the aisle for the willful blindness they are displaying toward this package of emails that we now know are on their way and that we know were wrongfully withheld because the judge said so. The judge said it was an ``abject failure'' under the law. The judge said it was unreasonable. So we know it is wrong, and still, still, comes the vote.

You have to wonder what the power force is here that makes that happen. In astronomy, there are dark stars, black holes. Because they are dark and because they are black, you can't see them in the sky. You have to deduce their presence when light bends around them and when their gravitational pull affects the behavior of other heavenly bodies. When you look for those weird, anomalous behaviors in space, that is a signal that some dark star is out there operating. This is a lot of weird and anomalous behavior. And what is the dark star that is causing the majority leader to put all the Republican Senators, other than Susan Collins, in peril, in terms of willful blindness to this release of emails, which everybody knows now is coming and which everybody knows now was wrongfully delayed--wrongfully and deliberately delayed-- by this attorney general as the enforcer of the disclosure of his own emails.

If there was a question in there.

There you go.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

With respect to delay for delay's sake, when a judge finds that the emails can be made available and the judge finds today that the emails can be made available by Tuesday and the attorney general has kept them bottled up for more than 750 days, it would seem that the accusation that delay for delay's sake does not belong with the Democratic minority on this issue. Would it not be a badge that would fit rather well on the attorney general from Oklahoma?

I thank the Senator from Oregon.

Mr. President, I note the diagram that I am showing beside me here on the floor, which is the work of an academic professor. He is one of a considerable number of professors and researchers who are looking at the fossil fuel-funded climate-denial operation as a socioeconomic creature. They are studying it. It is rather new. This is a diagram done by Professor Robert Brulle of Drexel University, one of the many academics and researchers who are looking into what I call the denial beast, because obviously if you are ExxonMobil, if you are the Koch brothers, you don't want to be out front yourself. You want to put outfits with names that sound much more benign out there--the Heartland Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute. These groups get thrown up by the fossil fuel company, stuffed with their money, filled with their employees, and they all run around saying more or less the same thing, which is, don't worry about climate change; don't worry about our carbon emissions.

When the Senator from Oregon refers to a complex matrix that this individual serves, this is just one visual description of that complex matrix of fossil fuel interests with which he has been so closely involved.

Here is one other example. This is Mr. Pruitt's fundraising from all of these energy companies and then the different ways he raised money. Liberty 2.0 was his super PAC. We still don't know a single thing about it. We haven't talked about the dark money life of Scott Pruitt because--why?--our colleagues on the other side won't require those questions to be answered. They are perfectly willing to scoot him through without knowing a single thing about his dark money operation-- his attorney general reelection, which was chaired by a fossil fuel billionaire; the Oklahoma Strong Leadership PAC, which was his leadership PAC that took constant fossil fuel money; the Rule of Law Defense Fund, which was the laundering operation for bringing money to the Republican Attorneys General Association.

If you were one of these big companies and if you could drop money into the Rule of Law Defense Fund, it would wash your identity clean of the money, and then the money could go over to the Republican Attorneys General Association as if it were a gift from the Rule of Law Defense Fund, when all they did was launder the identity off of the fossil fuel donor. Then you had, of course, the Republican Attorneys General Association, which was so loaded up with fossil fuel interests that they had special, secret, private meetings with these big donors at their retreats. It was right on the secret agenda of the retreats, which we have been able to get our hands on.

I add that to the equation because when the Senator from Oregon talks about a complex matrix of fossil fuel interests, he is not kidding. This is a very, very significant matrix of fossil fuel interests, and that is what Scott Pruitt has been serving, not the public and not his duties.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

I draw the Senator's attention to this graphic my office has prepared which reflects certainly my recollection. When I came to the Senate, I want to say there were at least five Republican- sponsored climate change bills floating around. Senator John Warner, a Republican of Virginia, had one; Senator Susan Collins, a Republican of Maine, had one; Senator John McCain, a Republican of Arizona actually ran for President on a strong climate change platform; Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican of South Carolina, was working with Senator Kerry on one; Senator Lamar Alexander, a Republican of Tennessee, had one.

So there was a regular heartbeat of activity in this body on climate change, a bipartisan heartbeat of activity. Then, pow, came Citizens United 2010, and it has been flatlined since. It is the power of money unleashed into our politics, and nobody plays harder and nobody plays rougher and nobody plays meaner with the power of money than the fossil fuel industry that Scott Pruitt serves.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

One of the points I think could be made here with respect to the emails is that the first tranche of emails--the ones the judge instructed be released on Tuesday--are communications with Scott Pruitt's donors, with Devon Energy right here, with Peabody coal--which I don't see on the list--and with API, the American Petroleum Institute, which is right here. That funding has gone into his political operation.

It is worth understanding how that pays off. I don't know if we can see this, but this says ``confidential.'' I don't know if that is clear on the screen. This is the confidential agenda for a Republican Attorneys General Association meeting, at a nice place--the Greenbrier in West Virginia. It is pretty swish. Look here on the agenda: Private meeting with Murray Energy. There is Murray Energy, right in the energy donors. He is attorney general. Look at what they get--a private meeting with the Republican attorneys general on the confidential agenda. If you go to the next day, the morning meeting is an issue briefing on the dangerous consequences of the Clean Power Plan and other EPA rules, and guess who the lead panelist is--Attorney General Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma.

What you have is this link between a big political donor, Murray Energy, and a private meeting for Murray Energy on the confidential agenda and a followup meeting at the same retreat on attacking the Clean Power Plan. And guess who a lead plaintiff with Scott Pruitt is in the lawsuit against the Clean Power Plan? Boom--Murray Energy.

There is a little machine here that turns between money in from the fossil fuel industry and litigation out on behalf of the fossil fuel industry. These emails aren't just matters of general interest. These emails may provide some good connection, some good evidence into what exactly that little feedback loop entails, because there are plenty of circumstances, and, as somebody who spent years as an attorney general and years as the U.S. Attorney, those little feedback loops is sometimes called corruption.

Depending on what those emails say, that could easily be prosecutable corruption. Rather than answer that question, of whether this link between big donors and action on cases using the badge of the State of Oklahoma as a shield to protect the fossil fuel interests, which were the donors, and talking about it in confidential meetings, in private meetings on confidential agendas--to me, that smells pretty high all by itself, before you have actually dug into it and seen what the emails say and gotten to the potentially really stinky part.

The fact that this is being jammed through is not without consequence for the Republicans on the other side who are not being given the chance by their leadership to say: Hold it. Whistle. Let's give this a couple of weeks. Let's see if there is something beyond how bad it is already--that perhaps might even make this chargeable stuff--before we are forced to vote on this guy.

Once again, the fact that they are being forced to vote on this guy in this circumstance is very, very unusual behavior. And unusual behavior, to me, signals powerful forces.

I could not agree more with the Senator from Oregon about the importance of these emails and their potential significance. I agree with my friend from Hawaii that I hope there isn't anything really bad here, but the likelihood that there is is very strong. The dogs are hunting.

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

Thank you, Mr. President.

There is a lot we don't know about Scott Pruitt. We know that thousands of emails between this man and the industry that he is supposed to be regulating as EPA Administrator have been suppressed by him for years. We know that just yesterday a court found that suppression of his emails unreasonable, an abject failure of his duties under the law to disclose. Those ought to be alarm bells for the side of the aisle that is forcing, jamming this nomination through.

He told us he couldn't get these emails released for more than 2 years, and the court ordered him to release the first chunk Tuesday, just days from now; the second big chunk, 10

days from now. So clearly there has been some mischief here, when on the one hand this office pretends that it can't get the emails out for more than 2 years, and a court looks at the situation and says: No. You make them available Tuesday. That is not a sign of good things.

No. 2, this is a guy who, as part of his political money operation--a political money operation that is heavily funded by big fossil fuel industry players about whose carbon emissions he will be making vital decisions as EPA Administrator. So far, his relationship with them has been to take their money and to be their lawyer. That is not a good start, either, for an EPA Administrator.

Here is the other thing we don't know: We don't know about his dark money operation. The Rule of Law Defense Fund--the whole reason you set up something like that is to hide the source of money that you use in politics. That is why the entity exists. It is to take groups like this and launder their identities right off of them so that, when money shows up, for instance, at the Republican Attorneys General Association, it is not attached to Devon Energy; it is not attached to ExxonMobil; it is not attached to Murray Energy; it is not attached to the Koch brothers or to their front groups--Freedom Partners and Americans for Prosperity--it is not attached to the company whose billionaire president was his finance chairman for his campaign, Continental Resources; it is not attached to the Southern Company and to other big energy companies. It just comes out of the Rule of Law Defense Fund. The identity of the donor has been scrubbed away. It is an identity laundering machine.

These are the relationships that are forged when you are asking people for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and $1 million a year was the budget for the Rule of Law Defense Fund. If you are asking for that kind of money from these people, it is elementary that the Senate should know about that, but our colleagues on the other side of the aisle have completely stonewalled this--zero inquiry into the dark money operation that this individual was allowed.

Why is that? That is pretty unusual. Why were we not allowed to get these emails? Why were we told: Oh, you will have to line up behind everybody else in this FOIA line that I have maintained for 2 years. That was an adequate answer to the majority on the EPW Committee, but the judge who took a look at that same situation said: No, you get them Tuesday. If the chairman had said: No, you get them Tuesday, we wouldn't be having this problem. We would have seen them weeks and weeks and weeks ago.

All of the pressure from the majority on this nominee has been to cover up this stuff. Don't let it in. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. Move along.

That is not right. That is not the way the Senate should behave. That is not consistent with our advice and consent responsibilities, and, frankly, it sets up Republican Senators. If and when it ultimately does come out that there is significant mischief exposed in those emails or if there are significant conflicts of interest created by that dark money operation, the Senate does not look great for having used its energy and effort in this nomination to cover that stuff up.

There is a doctrine called willful blindness, which is the wrongful intention to keep oneself deliberately unaware of something. It is a culpable state of mind in criminal and civil law. That is the state of mind that is being maintained by the majority with respect to this individual, and one has to wonder why. Why are there these big things that we don't know about Scott Pruitt?

It is not that we didn't ask. It is that we got told by the majority: Run along; it doesn't matter. You will have no support from us. We are going to clear this guy anyway. It doesn't matter if his answers to you make no sense. It doesn't matter if his answers aren't truthful. It doesn't matter if his answers put you at the end of a long FOIA line when this is the Senate's advice and consent process. None of that matters.

Just by one point of evaluation, the difference is that, when the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works looked at this, they said: Run along; nothing here. We are not interested. Don't show us a single email.

And the judge looking at it said to get them out Tuesday--a local State judge.

Since when is the double standard in which Senators are deprived of seeing highly relevant evidence? What is being covered up and why? Who is pulling the strings around here so that these obvious questions don't get answered when you put it side by side with a State court proceeding that asks the same question and the questions get answered like that. Something is rotten in Denmark.

It hasn't fooled Rhode Islanders. My correspondence is running about 50 to 1 against Scott Pruitt. Over 1,000 Rhode Islanders have written in against him. Let me just read a couple of their communications with me.

This is from Amanda Tarzwell:

As a member of the Committee on Environment and Public

Works, I urge you to do all you can--

``All you can,'' she says--

to block Mr. Pruitt's nomination as the head of the EPA. My

grandfather, Clarence Tarzwell, worked for the EPA and opened

the EPA lab in Narragansett.

Narragansett is a Rhode Island town.

It is located on Tarzwell Drive in his honor. He is now

deceased, but I believe in the work he did and the necessity

to protect our environment and continue to work on climate

change. Please do everything you can to urge your fellow

committee members on both sides of the aisle to do the same.

Thank you.

On the next, her name is right in the letter. So I will read it:

I am a 23-year-old woman with a bachelor of science degree

in wildlife and conservation biology from the University of

Rhode Island.

I am writing to respectfully demand you vote ``no'' on the

approval of Scott Pruitt for Administrator of the

Environmental Protection Agency. It is extremely clear that

Pruitt is the WRONG choice to head the EPA.

As someone with an extensive education in environmental

sciences, conservation, wildlife and plant biology,

chemistry, and physics, I am deeply concerned with Pruitt's

capabilities. A climate change skeptic, with no formal

science-based education, Pruitt has zero concept of what it

takes to make informed decisions about the current and future

stakes of our environment.

Rhode Island is leading the country in many environmental

fields, such as renewable energy, environmental protection,

and sustainable agriculture and aquaculture. We cannot allow

a climate change skeptic, with a love affair with fossil

fuels, to make important decisions regarding our precious

environment and those working hard to protect it.

I urge you to vote no on the approval of Scott Pruitt for

Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Catherine Hoyt wrote in:

I have a special concern for the upcoming vote on the EPA

Director, Scott Pruitt. I know you are on the Committee for

Environment and Public Works so you are more informed than

most people--

Although, as I just explained, we are deliberately underinformed in some very telling ways--

and I trust that you are unlikely to vote contrary to the

interests of our beautiful and environmentally unique coastal

State.

Among other things I do, I am a sailing instructor in

Edgewood, in Cranston.

Cranston is another one of our municipalities.

I have been sailing in the Upper Bay for about 10 years.

Even in that amount of time, the bay is noticeably cleaner.

The water is clearer, and there are more birds and fish and

crabs and other creatures that signify, through my direct

experience, that the environment is healthier in the Upper

Bay.

My anecdotal evidence is also confirmed by scientific

reports from URI--

The University of Rhode Island--

over the summer that Narragansett Bay is cleaner now than it

has been in 150 years. Wonderful. I would be very sorry to

see that trend reverse. I am old enough to remember what it

was like before the EPA, and I do not want to go back to

smog-filled skies, polluted waters, and tragedies like Love

Canal and Woburn's poisoned well water.

I am sure that, if it were not for the EPA and groups like

Save the Bay--which is a local environmental organization--

that the Upper Bay would have become more toxic and polluted

due to industrial use, sewage, rainwater runoff, pesticides,

and road salt. What is more, I believe that the EPA

regulations have been good for business. Because pollution

is, ultimately, wasteful and counterproductive, and clean

businesses often are efficient and, therefore, more

successful businesses. Look at the careful reutilization of

materials by companies like Apple, who are investing in the

future and their profitability by going further than

required. They are nearly cash neutral at this point.

Some of that is through buying carbon credit, but, clearly, they are not

afraid of being environmentally responsible.

As a concerned citizen of Rhode Island and America,

regarding President Trump's nomination for head of the

Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, I believe

deeply that this is not the person for the job, that there is

nothing in his background that suggests he has any interest

in protecting American citizens and their health and

environment from harm. I have never written any of my

congressional Representatives in my many, many years on this

planet until today.

I remember the air quality in Rhode Island in the late

sixties and through the seventies-plus. Those visible brown

clouds, especially in the summer, as pollution and smog

drifted from New York or Connecticut towards Rhode Island. I

remember the pollution in our beautiful Narragansett Bay. I

see the changes ocean rise has already effected.

Climate change is real, and it is scientifically accepted

across the world. I am deeply troubled by Mr. Pruitt's

statements and legal actions he has instigated against this

Agency. I am asking you to take a stand for the health of the

citizens of Rhode Island and the American people. Please vote

no when the votes are called for Mr. Scott Pruitt's

nomination.

Here is the last one I will read:

As a retired Federal scientist, meteorologist, I am deeply

concerned that the EPA continue to be an agency that makes

decisions about our environment that are based on the best

science available.

Scott Pruitt has a record of supporting policies that are

pro-business at the expense of the environment despite what

the science shows. How can he possibly be considered as the

voice that will fight for clean air and clean water? Despite

excellent progress over my lifetime, pollution continues to

be a major problem for the air we breathe and the water that

sustains us.

Please join the voices on the Hill that block the

appointment of Scott Pruitt as EPA Administrator. Thank you.

I wish we could block the appointment of Scott Pruitt as EPA Administrator. It is really rare to see a nominee for a Federal agency who is as unqualified--indeed, as disqualified by conflict of interest--as this individual. As for the idea that he is being jammed through just as thousands of emails are going to be released about him--between him and his big funders and the groups that they funded him through--something is wrong. This is not the way the Senate should behave.

The people on that side--in taking all of this mystery, all of this mischief, all of the emails, all of the dark money--who are being asked to vote are being told: Don't even look at that.

I can promise you that if the shoe were on the other foot, Republicans would be clamoring for emails.

This is a grim day for this Chamber--what we are doing here, knowing of this man's record, knowing of his record of shutting down the environmental agency in his home State while attacking the environmental agency of the Federal Government while pretending that his concern is federalism; right? He has pretended that he thinks that the enforcement responsibility shouldn't be at the Federal level, that it should be down at the State level. But if that were even remotely sincere, he wouldn't have shut down his own office's environmental enforcement unit as the attorney general of Oklahoma.

The common thread here is that he doesn't want any environmental enforcement at the Federal level and he doesn't want any environmental enforcement at the State level. He shut down the unit. He zeroed out the budget. He gave us a bunch of soft soap about how actually he moved the environmental unit into something called a federalism unit. But if you look at his own website for the federalism unit, the word ``environmentalism'' or ``environment'' doesn't appear. It is news that that is his environmental enforcement section, because it doesn't say so on his own website. That was an invention just for the hearing.

When you look at his own budget, the amount he budgets for environmental enforcement disappears. It has gone to zero. When you look at the Environmental Enforcement Task Force that his office's environmental unit had participated in under the previous attorney general, Drew Edmondson, that has disappeared too. He has gotten rid of every element of environmental enforcement that he controlled at the State level, while taking money from all of the big polluters, while having the CEO of Continental Resources--a billionaire--as his fundraising chair.

He took money from the fossil fuel industry through all of these different entities--through his leadership PAC, Liberty 2.0; through his campaign, Pruitt for Attorney General; through his super PAC, Oklahoma Strong PAC--sorry, that is his leadership PAC, and Liberty 2.0 is his super PAC--through the Rule of Law Defense Fund, which is his dark money operation. By the way, whatever the attorney general needs is a dark money operation. Really? Through the Republican Attorneys General Association, which he raised money for, and who knows what else.

This guy is fully fossil fuel funded. And in his entire career, he has dedicated himself to getting rid of and attacking environmental enforcement wherever he finds it--at the State or Federal level. You can't beat shutting down the environmental unit in your own office.

So that is what we are looking at. When you look at that combination and throw in the secrecy about the dark money operation and this mad rush to get this guy through before the week is out in which these emails come out, it stinks.

What we are doing here is a deliberate act of sabotage of the orderly and honest operation of an agency of our government. We are putting in a person who can demonstrably be shown to be incapable of and disqualified for those duties. I think that is actually not a bug in this program; that is the feature. That is the feature because these same forces that have been behind Scott Pruitt all his life, as he has fought all environmental enforcement--State and Federal--are awfully powerful in this Chamber as well, and they are obviously calling the shots at the White House, where a nominee like this would come from.

We are in the process of deliberately sabotaging the orderly and honest operation of an agency of the U.S. Government, not at the behest of a foreign power but after a special interest--the biggest and, in my view, the foulest special interest in the world today--the fossil fuel industry.

The fossil fuel industry has become so big and so powerful and so mercenary that it has decided its best investment is no longer in oil fields or coal seams or fossil fuel processing plants, but in acquiring a controlling interest in the Government of the United States. And it turns out we come pretty cheap.

According to the International Monetary Fund, we give the fossil fuel industry a subsidy every year in the United States alone of $700 billion. That is a more valuable prize than any drilling rights or any mining lease. To protect it--to protect $700 billion a year--acquiring a controlling interest in the U.S. Government is a bargain. One fossil fuel front group spent $750 million in the last election. That is a 1- to-1,000 payback--a 1,000 times ROI--each year that they keep the $700 billion subsidy if they keep plowing $700 million a year into politics to produce results like this nominee for EPA.

You get benefits once you have acquired that controlling interest.

Only one Republican has publicly taken a stand against Scott Pruitt, the most compromised and corrupted nominee in memory, with huge holes of secrecy still around his relationship with the industry he is supposed to regulate--nobody else, just the one. No Senators from States whose big cities are flooded by rising seas on sunny days, no Senator from States whose historic native villages are washing into the sea, no Senators from States who are losing ancient forests to pine beetles and wildfires, nor from States whose farmers see unprecedented extremes of flood and drought, and whose home State universities assign responsibility for those new extremes to climate change caused by carbon emissions from companies like these--none from the States whose fisheries are imperiled by warming and acidifying seas--no one. There is just that one Senator. How well this industry is succeeding.

This EPA nominee may be compromised and corrupted, but he is compromised and corrupted by the fossil fuel industry. So there is no talking about it on that side. Everybody just studies the ceiling tiles when the subject comes up. Nobody will help us find out about the thousands of stonewalled emails with his fossil fuel industry patrons. Nobody will help us inquire into the nominee's fossil-fuel-funded dark money operation. Nobody challenges

his nonsense answers in the confirmation process. He answered, he answered; let's move along, let's move along.

The dark hand of the fossil fuel industry is all over this nomination. This is the wolf being deliberately inserted into the lamb fold. It is from the fossil fuel money that fueled his politics-- unknown fully because we refuse to shine the Senate's light into his dark money operation--to the thousands of emails between him and his fossil fuel industry patrons, only a fraction of which have been brought to light throughout our confirmation process, and which were only uncorked after his office was sued--not because of any effort on the other side in the confirmation process--to the fossil fuel front groups that have come out supporting this nominee and are spending millions to push him through. Think about that. These groups are funding ad campaigns to push this guy through. Obviously, they have expectations about how well they are going to be treated by him. Through all of that, the sting of this industry's influence is profound.

Just reflect on that last point. A dark money operation is being cranked up by polluters to ram the EPA nominee through.

Here is a headline:

Energy executives, secretive nonprofit raise money to back

Pruitt.

New group warns that EPA nominee's confirmation ``is not a

certainty'' and millions of dollars are needed for the fight.

There would have been a time when it would have been disqualifying when polluters were raising millions of dollars needed for a fight to ram through an EPA nominee. This is conflict of interest in plain day, but it is a conflict of interest with the right folks around here, I guess, and so we don't consider it conflict of interest any longer.

Whom do you suppose most of the dark money is? Well, we don't know, because it is dark money. But who is it usually? Well, the fossil fuel industry, the Koch brothers, and their front groups. And what do you suppose they want to spend millions of dollars for? What could be better for them, the biggest polluters on the planet, than a little minion to run the EPA as Every Polluter's Ally.''

In any sane world, the fact that all this dark and dirty money is being spent to ram through an EPA nominee would be disqualifying all by itself--but not here, not now, not in a Congress that is so compliant to the fossil fuel industry that this alarm bell doesn't even register.

Fossil fuel front groups sent a joint letter of support for their little minion Pruitt. Here is the letter with all of these various groups who I think are united in their dependence on fossil fuel money.

Here is the legendary Heartland Institute. They are that classy group that compared climate scientists to the Unibomber. That has been their contribution to the discussion about climate change.

Competitive Enterprise Institute, Americans For Tax Reform, groups from the State Policy Network--why don't these folks turn up somewhere else? They turn up in the research of academics who are actually studying the climate denial operation--because it is an operation. You can follow the money from the fossil fuel industry out into an array of front groups--front groups by the dozen--whose whole purpose in life is to make them look like they are not fossil fuel industry front groups. So they have names like the Heartland Institute or the George C. Marshall Institute, which, by the way, has nothing to do with George C. Marshall or his family. They just took the name because everybody knows what a respected individual George C. Marshall was. They just took the name and went to work phonying up the climate change debate under the name of George C. Marshall.

That is a pretty shameful act when you think what George C. Marshall did for this country, but these are not people for whom shame has much effect.

If you look at Dr. Brulle's analysis--he is one of the academics who looks at this array of front groups that are fossil fuel funded--this group of people, of entities that signed the letter for this guy--they show up here too--small world.

Well, I wonder whom they thought that letter would convince? I don't think they expected it would convince many Democrats. Many of us on the Democratic side have gone to the floor of the Senate to call out these fossil-fuel-funded, dark-money-driven front groups, as the fossil-fuel- funded, dark-money front groups that they are.

So I don't think Democrats are very plausible targets for that letter. So why the letter? Well, my view is that this was done because everyone in this building knows that the Koch brothers' political operation is behind all of these groups--many wiggly tentacles of the same fossil fuel polluter Hydra. Behind this letter is the same Koch brothers political operation that warned Republicans of the political peril--not my word, their word--that Republicans would be in if they crossed this industry, of ``how severely disadvantaged''--another quote from the industry books--``they would be if they dared to do anything on climate change.''

That is what this letter is. It is a signal. It is the political mailed fist of the Koch brothers in a front-group glove giving its marching orders. In any sane and normal world, this letter by itself from all these polluter front groups would be disqualifying, but it appears this body will obediently turn the Environmental Protection Agency of our government over to the minion of the polluters to join an administration dead-set to destroy science with politics. It is like everyone on the other side has been sworn to secrecy while this happens in plain view.

This is a heartbreaking speech for me. I perhaps need to start with a little personal background to explain.

Last year, we commemorated the 75th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. After Pearl Harbor was attacked, boys across America rushed to sign up for the service of their country. My father and my uncle were two of those boys. Both became pilots in the Pacific theater. My dad was a Marine Corps dive bomber pilot; my uncle was a carrier-based Navy fighter pilot. My uncle was killed over the Philippines. Actually, he was under John McCain's grandfather's command--small world--but I doubt that Admiral McCain knew who Ensign Whitehouse was.

My father came home from the war, and he served our country all his life, first as a CIA officer and then as a decorated career diplomat. I believe he won every award the State Department has to offer, and he served in difficult, challenging, poor, and war-torn countries his whole life. At the end, he came out of retirement to set up Special Operations Command in the Pentagon for President Ronald Reagan.

I was raised in that life. We were often in dangerous and war-torn places, and we were surrounded by American families who faced the discomforts, the diseases, and the dangers of those far-away postings because to them something mattered. Something mattered to take your family to a place where, if your child was sick, there was no decent hospital. Something mattered to take your family to a place that if your child was bit by a dog, there was a good chance the dog was rabid. Something mattered to take your family to places where the electricity wasn't reliable, the water wasn't clean, the people weren't friendly, and diseases abounded.

These folks didn't talk about it a lot. Today, a lot of people wear their patriotism on their sleeve. It was not really a topic of conversation, but it was a thread through their lives that showed that in their choices something mattered. They didn't wear their patriotism on their sleeves; they lived it.

The American Government that they served and that my uncle died serving was, to them, an ideal. Did America sometimes fall short of that ideal? Sure. But I will tell you what: Every other country in the world knew the difference between America and everybody else. We stood out for what we stood for. Across our agencies of government, for decades, many Americans have worked quietly and honorably to advance that American ideal.

At the heart of that ideal is a duty, and the duty is to put country first, to put the American people first, even before your own families's comfort and safety. That honor and that duty running through the lives and service of millions of public servants are the core heartstrings of American democracy.

Into that government, this Trump administration has nominated as Administrator of the EPA, a tool of the

fossil fuel industry, a man who demonstrably will not take his government responsibilities seriously because he never has. He has never taken EPA's responsibility seriously. He has done nothing but sue them. He has never taken his State's environmental responsibility seriously. He has shut down the enforcement arm that his office had. He will represent with the biggest conflict of interest in history a polluting industry whose regulation is actually now the EPA's primary public duty. This isn't some fringe question of conflict of interest about some question that may emerge. This is the biggest stinking conflict of interest I think we have ever seen in this body about the issue that is at the center of the Environmental Protection Agency's responsibilities. With the most important task before the EPA being to control carbon emissions before we push this planet over the climate cliff, the industry in question will now rule the regulator.

Well, this hits home. I have fishermen in Rhode Island who need honest environmental policy to protect our seas. ``It is not my grandfather's ocean,'' they have told me. ``Things are getting weird out there,'' people who have fished since childhood have told me.

Moreover, Rhode Island is a downwind State from the midwestern smoke stacks and a downstream State from out-of-state water pollution. Rhode Island needs a strong EPA to enforce clean air and clean water laws from harm starting outside our boundaries. My attorney general has not shut down his environmental unit, and my department of environmental management is doing our best to keep Rhode Island clean and livable. But they can't do much about out-of-state polluters. That is where the EPA comes in. For a man who so plainly disbelieves in and deprecates the EPA's mission, it is an alarming picture for Rhode Island.

We are a coastal State, and a small one. We don't have a lot to give back to rising seas. I have to say, I am sick of having to comfort people whose homes have been washed away into the sea.

This is a picture I took not too long ago. Colleagues who have been here for a while might remember this individual. He was the Governor at the time, but he was my predecessor in my seat in the Senate, Lincoln Chafee. His father served here with enormous distinction for many, many years and was actually a Republican chairman of the Environmental and Public Works Committee who cared about the environment. He was an environmental Republican leader.

These are houses that have washed into the sea as the result of a storm. Sea level rise has raised the level of the ocean so that storms throw their water farther in, and they take little houses like these that have been beachfront houses for many years and they just pull them into the ocean.

I spoke to the lady who I think owned that house. She was, I would say, in her seventies. She had childhood memories of that house. It had been her grandparents', and she would come to visit as a little girl. What she remembers as a little girl is that she would come out of that house, and in front of the house was a little lawn big enough to put up a net and play volleyball or badminton. Across from their lawn was a little road, just a sand-and-gravel road, but it allowed cars to come down and park near the beach. On the other side of the road was a little parking area where the cars could pull in. Beyond the lawn and the road and the parking area was the beach. Her memories of the beach were of sunny days with the sun beating down on the sand, and she would get across the lawn and across the road and across the parking lot, and then she would just have to scamper as fast as she could on her little feet across the hot sand. She described to me remembering what a long run that felt like for her to rush down to the ocean where she could put her feet into the cool Atlantic waters and swim. That beach, that parking area, that road, that lawn, and now her house are all gone. These are the things that are happening in my State that the Republicans in this building could not care less about--could not care less about.

The math is obvious: When you add heat into the atmosphere, the ocean absorbs the heat. Indeed, the ocean has absorbed almost all of the heat of climate change. God bless the oceans because if it weren't for them, we wouldn't be worried about hitting 2 degrees' increase in temperature. We would be worried about hitting 30 degrees' increase in global temperature. Because of all the heat that has been piled up, it has gone into the oceans 93.4 percent. That is like setting off more than two Hiroshima nuclear bombs in the ocean every second. Every second.

Think of the heat of a nuclear explosion of the level that destroyed Hiroshima. Think of the--whatever it would be--terajoule of heat energy that gets set off by a nuclear explosion. Our oceans are absorbing heat. If we measure over the last 20 years how much heat they have absorbed, they are absorbing heat at the rate of multiple Hiroshima nuclear explosions happening in the ocean every second for 20 years.

We wonder why Senator Cantwell was talking about strange things going on in the oceans. We wonder why my fishermen are saying it is getting weird out there. But when all that heat goes into the oceans, there is a law called the law of thermal expansion. That is not the kind of law we debate around here. That is one of nature's laws. That is one of God's laws. That is one of the laws of physics and chemistry that we so ignore around here because we are paying attention to the laws of politics and the ``golden rule'': Who has the gold, rules.

But these are laws that we don't get to repeal or amend. What they are doing is swelling the seas with that heat. On top of that, in comes the water from melting glaciers and there is your sea level rise, 10 inches of sea level rise that we have measured at Naval Station Newport, to the point where we face scenes like this: a man in a kayak going down in front of the Seamen's Church Institute in Newport, RI. This is not water in the ordinary course. This is a place where tourists walk. That is a storefront with water coming through the doorway. This was the storm surge, the tide, that came in with Sandy-- which missed us, by the way.

We have a Coastal Resources Management Council that defends our shores, and our University of Rhode Island and Coastal Resources Management Council work together to see what is coming. They have developed new computer tools to determine which houses are going to be lost in what kind of storms, how often this scene is going to have to repeat itself in Rhode Island. We are anticipating 9 feet of sea level rise by the end of this century.

My colleagues may think that is funny, that this is all sort of an amusing hoax we can talk about, but any State whose coasts are threatened with 9 feet of sea level rise, any representative of that State has a responsibility to come here and fight to try to defend that State.

When the adversary is the big special interests that is causing that and that has mounted the vast campaign of lies I talked about earlier to try to cover it--it is $700 billion in subsidies every year--then that is an adversary worth going after because that is a dirty and wrongful adversary.

When their representative is going to run the EPA, that is a disgusting state of affairs. If Rhode Island had to suffer this to save our country for some great goal, if Rhode Islanders had to go off to war again like my father and uncle and Rhode Islanders have since the first battles in Portsmouth, RI, the Revolutionary War, we would saddle up--sign us up--to take on whatever we need to defend this great country, but don't ask us to take a hit like this to protect a big special interest.

The arrogance and the greed of the fossil fuel industry and the dirty things it is willing to do to advance its interests knows no bounds. It lobbies Congress mercilessly against any action on climate change, and it has for years.

It runs a massive political electioneering operation of dark money and false attacks to prevent any action on climate change, and it has for years. It operates that giant array of front groups, a multi- tentacled, science-denial apparatus to put out streams of calculated misinformation. It does this all to protect what that International Monetary Fund report identified as a $700 billion annual subsidy.

What would big corporations do to protect $700 billion? Well, we are finding out. For years, the fossil fuel industry has been deliberately sabotaging

the honest and orderly operation of the legislative branch of America's government to protect its subsidy. With this appointment, it would be able to corrupt and sabotage the EPA.

I use the word ``corrupt'' because this is indeed the very definition of corruption in government. This is government corruption in plain view. In the Supreme Court decision Austin v. Michigan State Chamber of Commerce, here is how the U.S. Supreme Court described corruption. The Court described it as ``the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public's support for the corporation's political ideas.''

Back we go to this network of false front operations, established by immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of a corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public support for the corporation's ideas.

We got some interesting polling recently. The George Mason University went out recently and conducted a poll of Trump voters. What did Trump voters think? It turns out that more than 6 in 10 Trump voters support taxing and/or regulating the pollution that causes global warming. In general, Trump voters were asked: Which of these two approaches to reducing the pollution that causes global warming do you prefer? Well, 16 percent said: I don't know; 21 percent said: Do nothing; but 13 percent of Trump voters said: Tax pollution; 18 percent said: Regulate pollution; and 31 percent said: Tax pollution and regulate pollution.

That adds up to more than 6 out of 10 Trump voters thinking that the pollution that causes climate change should be taxed or should be regulated or should be taxed and regulated.

When you go back to the Austin v. Michigan State Chamber of Commerce definition of corruption and look at the section that says that the policies pushed by the massive aggregations of wealth accumulated with the help of the corporate form want to go one way and the public wants to go another way and the corporate powers' views have little or no correlation to the public support for the corporation's political ideas, well, heck, we know Democrats support doing stuff about climate change.

It turns out Trump voters do too. The public is actually happy to get something done. It is this mess that is stopping us. It is groups that spend $700 million in a single election to influence Congress that is the problem, not the American public.

Teddy Roosevelt described corruption this way. He described corruption as a sinister alliance between crooked politics and crooked business, which he said has done more than anything else for the corruption of American life against the genuine rule of the people themselves.

If you look at the influence of Big Business--particularly the fossil fuel business--it has been something else around here. I was elected in 2006. I was sworn in, in the Senate, in 2007. When I was first here in those early years, there was a Republican climate bill floating around the Senate virtually all the time.

My recollection is that there were five Republican cosponsored climate bills during my time there. Susan Collins did a climate bill with Senator Cantwell; Senator John Warner of Virginia, Republican, did a bill with Senator Lieberman; Senator Graham worked on a bill with Senator Kerry; Senator Lamar Alexander had a bill of his own; and Senator McCain supported climate legislation and ran for President of the United States on a strong climate change platform. And then came 2010. Then came a decision called Citizens United, which the fossil fuel industry asked for, expected, and immediately acted on when it came out, and it said to the big special interests: Go for it, boys; spend all you want in politics. We five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court are going to make the comically false finding that nothing you can do with unlimited money could possibly ever corrupt American democracy or could possibly even be seen as corrupting by the American public.

Of course, that is such hogwash that right now the Supreme Court is viewed by people who have been polled on this question as not likely to give a human being a fair shake against a corporation.

If I remember correctly, the numbers were 54 to 6. In a polling group of 100, 6 Americans believe they could get a fair shot in the Supreme Court against corporations and 54 believed they could not get, as human beings, a fair shot in the U.S. Supreme Court against a big corporation, but with the big corporations at the Supreme Court, the fix was in--not a great place for the Court to be when by 9-to-1 American human beings think they can't get a fair shot in front of that Court against a corporation.

They did deliver, and they delivered Citizens United and opened the floodgates. The next thing out there was groups like Americans for Prosperity, the front group for the Koch brothers, Donors Trust, which launders away the identity of big corporations like ExxonMobil, and all of these other front groups we looked at earlier, and they are spending immense amounts of money. The result is, if there was a heartbeat of activity on climate change with Republicans before Citizens United, it has been a flat line since. That has been the story behind this.

Not only has dark money poisoned our conversation about climate change, this guy actually ran his own dark money operation. His Rule of Law Defense Fund, a 501(c)4 organization that does not disclose its donors have been linked to the Koch brothers, who run one of the biggest polluting operations in the country, but we don't really know. We don't really know. It has been kept absolutely quiet.

There is a black hole of secrecy around this nominee's dark money operation; whom he raised it from, what the quid pro quo was, what he did with it. Not allowed to know. Move along. Move along. It doesn't matter.

This is a test. This is a test of the Senate. Will this nominee ever tell us exactly what his relationship with the fossil fuel industry is? Will we get these emails in time to make an informed decision before his nomination is rammed through one step ahead of the emails that the judge said had to be released?

I can't get over the fact that this guy covered up the emails for 750-plus days for more than 2 years and a judge said: No, get them out Tuesday. And they are going to get them out Tuesday. The second chunk, you have 10 days to get them out. He sat there in our committee and acted as if this was some huge terrible task that he couldn't possibly get done; that with 2 years to do it, he couldn't get a single email out. By the time of our hearing, zero of those thousands of emails had come out. A judge took a look the same situation and said: Do it Tuesday. And they are doing it.

We have been so deliberately stonewalled, and it has been so painfully and plainly made clear by what the judge has ordered. We are not passing this test of how a Senate should act.

President-Elect Trump promised to restore genuine rule of the people themselves. Remember, Teddy Roosevelt's quote that the sinister alliance between crooked politics and crooked business has done more than anything else for the corruption of American life against the genuine rule of the people themselves. President Trump promised to restore genuine rule to people and themselves, and yet it is looking more and more like shadowy and industry-funded groups will really run our government.

This is a test also for the rest of corporate America. A lot of corporate America has good climate policy. Most of corporate America has good climate policy, but when are they going to stand up about an EPA Administrator who is the minion of the fossil fuel industry? What will Coca-Cola say to the Georgia Senators? What will Walmart ask of its Arkansas Senators? What will VF Corporation urge its North Carolina Senators to do? How will Rio Tinto advise its Senators from Arizona? All these companies have taken important stands on global warming. Why not now?

Let's talk about the due diligence that a nomination like this should get, particularly the due diligence about climate change that the present urgency demands. I wondered what due diligence my colleagues have done to

assess the reality of climate change before making this fateful and foul vote. The fossil fuel fox is on its way to the henhouse now, and I challenge the colleagues who will have put him there: Have you gone to your home State university for a briefing on climate science to understand what your own universities are teaching?

This nominee, Mr. Pruitt, never had. When we met in my office, he didn't even know who Berrien Moore was. Berrien Moore is the dean of the College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences at the University of Oklahoma. He is a nationally renowned climate scientist. Before this nominee and I met in my office, for all this nominee's years of litigation against doing anything about climate change, he had never bothered to go to his own University of Oklahoma and find out from there, his home State expert, what climate change was, how it worked, and what it meant. Why not? The most logical answer is because he didn't care to know. He had already chosen sides and had been richly rewarded for doing so, although we don't know exactly how richly, since his dark money operation is still a secret, protected by the Senate Republicans who are shoving this nomination through.

Here is what Mr. Pruitt would have found out if he had bothered to go to the University of Oklahoma to ask the dean about climate change. The dean of the University of Oklahoma's College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences has said: ``On the increasing strength of earth sciences, we can now state that global warming is `unequivocal.' ''

The fact that the planet's warming and the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and the fact that it is increasing in the atmosphere and that increases in the atmosphere due to humans--about those things? There is no debate.

He has said:

We know precisely how fast CO2 is going up in

the atmosphere. We have made a daily measurement of it since

1957. We have ice-core data before that.

He continued:

We know without any question, that it has increased almost

40 percent since the industrial revolution, and that increase

is due to human activity primarily fossil-fuel burning.

Those are the words of the dean at the University of Oklahoma, who is the expert in this subject. And Mr. Pruitt had never bothered to actually ever ask him. The fossil fuel industry had told him all he needed to know, and that is going to be a continuing problem with him as EPA Administrator.

I thought to myself, have any of the Senators on the Environment and Public Works Committee, who voted for this nominee out of committee, done any better? Which Senator on that committee has been troubled to go for, say, half a day, to their own home State university and get a briefing on climate science? As I have said, this matters to Rhode Island because we are a downwind State. We have had bad air days where little kids and seniors and people with breathing difficulties are supposed to stay indoors in the air conditioning, not go outside. We are seeing warming rising, acidifying seas along our shores, hurting our fishermen, causing those families to lose those coastal homes I showed.

And the hits are just going to keep on coming. A child born today at Women & Infants Hospital in Providence, RI, can expect to see upward of 9 feet of sea level rise raging on Rhode Island shores in her lifetime, according to the University of Rhode Island and our State agencies.

Well, it seems to me the least a downwind State like Rhode Island might expect is some modicum of due diligence by colleagues who are blocking action on this subject. At the University of Rhode Island, the due diligence is very clear. URI is working with Rhode Island fishermen to help predict the harm from warming and acidifying seas and figure out what that means for our fisheries and our agriculture.

The Senator is from a State that has very distinguished fishing and agriculture himself, and I am sure his home State universities are doing similar research.

URI and our State agencies are drilling down to generate fine local data on sea level rise and storm surge, and we are starting to be able to predict, with specificity, which homes are likely to be lost in storms, which roads will become inaccessible in coming decades, what plan B is necessary to get emergency services to communities when flooding bars the way, and what water and sewer and other public infrastructure is at risk. These are all now the daily questions of Rhode Island coastal life, thanks to climate change, and our University of Rhode Island is at the forefront of studying that.

Of course, URI is not alone. You can go to every State university and find climate change concerns. They just understand this stuff. They are not actually just learning climate science, they are teaching about climate change. It is astonishing that Senators from those States will not listen to what their own universities teach.

Let's call the Republican roll of the Environment and Public Works Committee, all of whom voted to suspend the committee rules to jam this fossil fuel industry minion through to the Senate floor as Administrator of the EPA, notwithstanding the black hole of secrecy around his dark money dealings with the polluting fossil fuel industry, and notwithstanding his years of stonewalling dozens of Open Records Act requests, including the one that has just been ordered to be disclosed by the judge today--thousands of emails.

Let's see what our Environment and Public Works Committee colleagues, who cleared the way in committee for this nominee, would find at their home State universities, if they looked.

Chairman Barrasso could go to the University of Wyoming, where he would find the University of Wyoming Center for Environmental Hydrology and Geophysics reporting: ``Many of the most pressing issues facing the western United States hinge on the fate and transport of water and its response to diverse disturbances, including climate change.''

He would find University of Wyoming scientists publishing articles on ``The effects of projected climate change on forest fires' sustainability'' and the University of Wyoming awarding university grants to study the effects of climate change on pollinators, on water flow, on beaver habitat, and on whitebark pine growth, all work being done sincerely at the University of Wyoming on climate change.

Next down the line, we come to Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma. The senior Senator from Oklahoma could also go, of course, and consult Dean Moore of the College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences at the University of Oklahoma. But if he really wanted to dig in, he could also go over to Oklahoma State and get an update from Oklahoma State Professor Riley Dunlap, who has written in a peer review and scientific journal: ``Climate science has now firmly established that global warming is occurring, that human activities contribute to this warming, and that current and future warming portend negative impacts on both ecological and social systems.''

``Portend negative impacts on both ecological and social systems''-- that is science-ese for it is going to hurt people, as we Rhode Islanders already see all too plainly.

Oklahoma State's Professor Dunlap goes on to write something more. However, he goes on to say:

There has been an organized ``disinformation'' campaign . .

. to generate skepticism and denial . . . to ``manufacture

uncertainty,'' . . . especially by attacking climate science

and scientists.

Wow. Huh?

And he goes on:

This campaign has been waged by a loose coalition of

industrial (especially fossil fuels) interests and

conservative foundations and think tanks--

Look at that. He seems to be agreeing with Dr. Brulle at Drexel University--

that utilize a range of front groups and Astroturf operations

[to manufacture that uncertainty].

That is the research that Senator Inhofe would find at Oklahoma State. That organized disinformation campaign that Professor Dunlap reports on and the massive political muscle operation that supports it explains a lot of what goes on around here. And if you cross-reference the entities that Professor Dunlap puts into that organized disinformation campaign, you will find them on the record supporting this nominee. He is the nominee of the organized disinformation campaign. And that is because, behind this whole mess

of a nomination, is the fossil fuel industry.

Let's go back to the Environment and Public Works Committee and continue down the row on the majority side. We come next to Senator Capito. Senator Capito from West Virginia could go to West Virginia University, where the Mountaineers could show her their mountain hydrology laboratory, which tells us, ``Climate change has important implications for management of fresh water resources.'' These include, ``that the highlands region in the central Appalachian Mtns. is expected to wet up.'' As warmer air, which carries more moisture, leads to what West Virginia University is calling ``intensification of the water cycle,'' the laboratory warns that, ``the implications of this intensification are immense.''

West Virginia University's Wildlife Conservation Lab publishes regularly on climate change effects, and one of West Virginia University's climate scientists, Professor Hessl, has been recognized by West Virginia University as West Virginia University's Benedum Distinguished Scholar. West Virginia University even sends people all the way to China to study climate change. Some hoax.

Onward. My friend, Senator Boozman, is next in the line. His home State University of Arkansas has actually signed onto both the first and second university president's climate commitments. And the University of Arkansas has undertaken what it calls an aggressive and innovative Climate Action Plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help prevent climate change. The University of Arkansas explains the need to reduce greenhouse gases, particularly including carbon dioxide and methane. It is because these gases' ``absorption of solar radiation is responsible for the greenhouse effect.''

Explaining further, the University of Arkansas describes that the greenhouse effect ``occurs as these gases are trapped and held in the Earth's atmosphere, gradually increasing the temperature of the Earth's surface and air in the lower atmosphere.''

A University of Arkansas scientist predicts ``that the spread of plant species in nearly half the world's land areas could be affected by global warming by the end of the century.''

On down the EPW row is my friend Roger Wicker from Mississippi. Down in Mississippi, the University of Mississippi, Ole Miss, actually has an Office of Sustainability. The Ole Miss Office of Sustainability is there ``to further the university's efforts to combat global climate change.''

Believe it or not, Ole Miss is another signatory to that University Presidents' Climate Commitment just like Arkansas. It is moving toward net zero greenhouse gas emissions. By the way, so is the University of Southern Mississippi. The director of the University of Mississippi's Center for Hydroscience and Engineering explains why this matters.

Human influence and greenhouse gasses are the dominant

causes of the increase in global average temperature of the

earth. The impacts are observed in rising sea levels,

precipitation patterns, hydrologic regimes, floods and

droughts, and environmental processes.

He continues.

We must reduce our carbon footprint and take the necessary

steps to reduce our vulnerability to future climate change

impacts.

From the University of Mississippi. Also, at Ole Miss, anthropology professor Marcos Mendoza warns that ``climate change is the greatest environmental threat facing global society in the 21st century.'' Let me say that again--from Ole Miss. ``Climate change is the greatest environmental threat facing global society in the 21st century.'' But the fossil fuel machine is going to see to it that we put a climate denier into the EPA Administrator's seat.

So let's stay in Mississippi and go over to Mississippi State University, where several professors contributed to the American Society of Agronomy's report, ``Climate Change and Agriculture: Analysis of Potential International Impacts.'' The forward to that volume states that ``the threat of global climate change due to anthropogenic modification of the atmosphere--the so-called greenhouse effect--could potentially be one of the major environmental problems of our time.''

Down on the gulf, all three Mississippi universities are working together with Sea Grant, on what they call a climate team to assess ``the risk of environmental, economic, and societal impacts from rising sea levels and storm surges.'' My friend who is presiding knows well the effects in the gulf. When you are looking at the risk of environmental, economic, and societal impacts from rising sea levels and storm surges, you have something in common with Rhode Island as well.

Let's go on to Nebraska from where Senator Fischer hails. The University of Nebraska has published extensive reports on what they call ``Climate Change Implications for Nebraska.'' One University of Nebraska report leads with this blunt sentence: ``Climate change poses significant risks to Nebraska's economy, environment, and citizens.'' Well, Nebraskans, it turns out, agree. The University of Nebraska has published research that ``most rural Nebraskans believe the state should develop a plan for adopting to climate change, as do 58 percent of Nebraskans 65 and older.''

So even the elder Nebraskans by 58 percent believe it, and nearly 70 percent of young Nebraskans, from 19 to 29 years old. On the science, the University of Nebraska reports the following:

Is there debate within the scientific community with regard

to observed changes in climate and human activities as the

principal causal factor? The short answer here is no, at

least certainly not among climate scientists; that is,

scientists who have actual expertise in the study of climate

and climate change.

Let me repeat that again from the University of Nebraska.

Is there debate within the scientific community with regard

to observed changes in climate and human activities as the

principal causal factor? The short answer here is no, at

least certainly not among climate scientists; that is,

scientists who have actual expertise in the study of climate

and climate change.

The University of Nebraska goes on.

For more than a decade, there has been broad and

overwhelming consensus within the climate science community

that human-induced effects on climate change are both very

real and very large.

As to scope of those effects, the University of Nebraska warns:

The magnitude and rapidity of the projected changes in

climate are unprecedented. The implications of these changes

for the health of our planet and the legacy we will leave to

our children, our grandchildren, and future generations are

of vital concern.

The University of Nebraska has even published what it calls ``Key Climate Change Data for Nebraska.'' This is the list:

Temperatures have risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit since 1895; frost- free season has increased 5 to 25 days since 1895; very heavy precipitation events have increased 16 percent in the Great Plains Region; projected temperature increase of 4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit, low-emissions scenario, or 8 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit, high-emissions scenario, by 2100; projected summer of 2100 will have 13 to 25 days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit; number of nights over 70 degrees Fahrenheit will increase by 20 to 40 by 2100; soil moisture is projected to decrease 5 to 10 percent by 2100; reduced snowpack in Rocky Mountains equals reduced streamflow in our rivers; increasing heavy precipitation events; increasing flood magnitude; increasing drought frequency and severity.

That is the University of Nebraska's list of coming attractions to Nebraska from climate change.

On to Kansas, where Senator Moran would learn from Kansas State University about climate change's effects on agriculture in his home State. Kansas State University Professor Charles Rice, Distinguished Professor of Agronomy, working with the National Science Foundation is using ``climate modeling tactics to predict the effects of climate change in the Great Plains, and to develop adaptation and mitigation strategies for agriculture in the region,'' to help meet what Kansas State calls ``one of the grand challenges of the 21st century: evaluating and predicting the biological and ecological consequences of accelerating global climate change.''

Kansas State brought the executive director of agricultural giant Cargill to talk about climate change. News reports describe what the Cargill executive stated; that ``climate change is real and must be addressed head-on to prevent future food shortages.'' Specifically, the Cargill executive said that ``U.S. production of corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton could decline

by 14 percent by mid-century and by as much as 42 percent by late century.'' This is a senior corporate executive in one of our leading agricultural companies, warning of a 14-percent decrease in these essential crops by midcentury, and as much as a 42-percent decrease by late century.

From an agricultural standpoint, the executive said, ``We have to prepare ourselves for a different climate than we have today.'' Maybe that is why Kansas State calls evaluating and predicting the biological and ecological consequences of accelerating global climate change one of the grand challenges of the 21st century.

Let's head out to South Dakota, where Senator Mike Rounds would hear from South Dakota State University about climate change on the Dakota Plains. South Dakota State's Leffler Lab calls climate change ``the signature challenge of the 21st century.'' So let's bear in mind, we have the Kansas State University calling climate change ``one of the grand challenges of the 21st century.'' We have South Dakota State's Leffler Lab calling climate change the ``signature challenge of the 21st century.'' We have an EPA nominee who is a climate change denier, wrapped so tight with the fossil fuel industry, you can't tell where one ends and the other begins, and he has the support of the Senators from Kansas and South Dakota.

It is a riddle. South Dakota State scientists are not just saying that climate change is the signature challenge of the 21st century, they are out studying climate change around the globe. From the Upper Ghanaian forests of West Africa to the West Antarctica ice sheet. South Dakota State University Professor Mark Cochrane is working with the U.S. Forest Service to determine ``how a changing climate impacts forest ecosystems'' and reported that ``forest fire seasons worldwide increased by 18.7 percent due to more rain-free days and hotter temperatures.''

The South Dakota State University News Center has reported that season-shifting climate changes ``are all being affected by warming from an increase in greenhouse gases due to human activity''--``all being affected by warming from an increase in greenhouse gases due to human activity.''

South Dakota State University even brought in Harvard Professor and ``Merchants of Doubt'' author Naomi Oreskes, saying that her work ``has laid to rest the idea that there is significant disagreement in the scientific community about global warming.'' Somebody needs to translate between South Dakota State University and this EPA nominee.

So on we go to Iowa, continuing down the Environment and Public Works Republican roster, where Senator Joni Ernst could hear from an Iowa State University professor who told a United Nations conference not long ago that ``climate change was already affecting Iowa farmers. This is not just about the distant future,'' he said. Iowa State has published extensive reach and I will just quote the title of it. ``Global Warming: Impact of climate change on global agriculture.'' Iowa State's prestigious Leopold Center views climate change not merely as warming, but as a ``worsening destabilization of the planet's environmental systems.''

Climate change is not just warming, it is a ``worsening destabilization of the planet's environmental systems'' and yet the good Senator voted to move this climate-denying industry tool forward to be our EPA Administrator.

A worsening destabilization of the planet's environmental systems, they call it, that will create ``an aggravated and unpredictable risk that will challenge the security of our agricultural and biological systems''--``aggravated and unpredictable risk that will challenge the security of our agricultural and biological systems.''

That is Iowa State talking. They conclude: ``The scientific evidence is clear that the magnitude of the changes ahead are greater, the rate much faster, and [the] duration of climatic destabilization will last much longer than once thought.''

Now we come to the end of the row of the Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee.

As an Alaskan, Senator Dan Sullivan would get double barrels from the University of Alaska, first about climate change and second about ocean acidification.

``Alaska is already facing the impacts of climate change,'' the University of Alaska reports.

This question of ``facing the impacts of climate change'' matters enough to the University of Alaska that, on global warming, the university has stood up the Alaska Climate Science Center. The Alaska Climate Science Center has been established to help understand ``the response of Alaska's ecosystems to a changing climate.''

The Alaska Climate Science Center of the University of Alaska is charting the recordbreaking, year-over-year warming in Alaska, analyzing temperature trends, and receiving awards for ``modeling and evaluating climate change impacts in the Arctic.''

``One thing for sure,'' the center says, is that the climate ``will continue to change as a result of various natural and anthropogenic forcing mechanisms.''

Then there is the other climate change punch coming at Alaska, from the sea. In addition to its Alaska Climate Science Center, the University of Alaska is serious enough about this to have also stood up an Ocean Acidification Research Center to address what it calls ``growing concerns over increased acidity in the ocean and the impacts this phenomenon will have on Alaska's marine ecosystems''--``growing concerns over increased acidity in the ocean and the impacts this phenomenon will have on Alaska's marine ecosystems.''

Alaska's seafood industry is an enormous asset to Alaska's economy, and it depends on Alaska's marine ecosystems. Well, the University of Alaska's Ocean Acidification Research Center warns that ocean acidification ``has the potential to disrupt this industry from top to bottom''--``to disrupt this industry from top to bottom.''

The Ocean Acidification Research Center identifies the culprit of this phenomenon as ``the transport of CO2 from the atmosphere into the ocean.''

Indeed, as we have loaded up the atmosphere with more and more CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, the ocean has actually absorbed chemically about a third of that CO2.

In addition to all that heat I mentioned earlier that the ocean had absorbed--more than 90 percent of the added heat--it actually absorbed one-third of the carbon dioxide. Of course, when carbon dioxide interacts with seawater, there is a change that takes place.

Indeed, why don't we see about doing a demonstration of that change. It will take a minute to get that organized. While we are getting that organized, let me continue.

Here is a description--thank you to the University of Maryland for the graphic--of how atmospheric carbon dioxide turns the ocean acidic.

When you add additional CO2 to the atmosphere, at the surface, where it meets the sea, there is a chemical exchange, and the CO2 can be absorbed by the ocean. As I said, one-third of it has been. That dissolved carbon dioxide joins with the water chemically, and it creates carbonic acid. The carbonic acid, in turn, creates bicarbonate ions, hydrogen ions, and carbonate ions, and those ions interfere with the makeup of marine creatures, which make their shells out of free carbon in the oceans, and some of those effects are pretty apparent.

This is the shell of an ocean creature called a pteropod. It is at the base of a great deal of the ocean food chain. There are studies off the northwest coast that show that more than 50 percent of this creature have experienced what the scientists who them caught them and studied them called severe shell damage. Here is what happens when you expose them to high concentrations of acidified seawater, higher than usual. That is what it looks like day 1. That is a healthy shell. Fifteen days later, it is starting to gray. Thirty days later, beyond just starting to gray, it is starting to actually come apart. And by 45 days, the shell is a wreck. That is not an animal that is capable of surviving.

So let's see how this works. This is a glass of water, and I have just put 20 drops of a pH test into it. That shows what the acidity is of the water. As you can see, it has turned the water rather blue, which matches roughly this level of pH.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to continue with this little demonstration.

Mr. President, this is a very simple bubbler that anybody with an aquarium will recognize. All you simply do is you put the bubbler in. I produce carbon dioxide as I exhale. So I am exhaling one breath into this same glass. I will do one more. It was not even a full breath, but there it is.

It used to match that color; do you remember? Now look at what color it matches. Just breathing carbon dioxide through the water has changed its pH and has made it more acidic.

I can do that right here with a breath. It is happening on a global scale, as the interaction between the atmosphere and the oceans transports CO2 into the oceans. When that happens, the same chemical effect that we modeled here takes place, and the oceans become more acidic, and the effects continue to be damaging.

The previous shell that I showed was the pteropod, a humble creature, but an important creature in the food chain. It is actually called the ocean butterfly by some because its snail foot has been transformed by God's law of evolution into an oceanic wing that allows it to fly in the seas.

This is an oyster. The Senator's State of Louisiana does a lot of work with oysters, as does Rhode Island. Again, exposing oyster larvae to ocean water with heightened levels of acidity--day 1, day 2, day 4, and then we see exposure to acidity. Here is what a healthy larva looks like; here is what one exposed looks like. Here is what the healthy one looks like; here is what the exposed one looks like. Here is a healthy one; here is one exposed.

You will see that the healthy larva is growing day after day. It is getting bigger. It is going to become an oyster. Somebody is going to have a great oyster stew some day with that oyster with any luck.

This one is shrinking and deforming, and the reason is that the little creature is trying to take the carbon out of the ocean to make its shell--the calcium. And because of those ions that I pointed out, it is bound up, and they can't get it. So they deform this way.

When you are at a point where more than 50 percent of ocean pteropods are experiencing severe shell damage, if you are not paying attention, you are going to take a big punch.

Now I know around here we don't give a darn about God's creatures as being God's creatures. I probably sound funny to some people talking about a funny little creature in the ocean called a pteropod. The things we care about here are things that we can monetize because this is Mammon Hall. This is the temple where gold rules.

These little creatures are a little bit away from the gold. But who cares about the pteropod? I will tell you who cares about the pteropod. Salmon care about the pteropod, and people care about the salmon, and Alaska has a pretty good salmon fishery. The Pacific Northwest has a pretty good salmon fishery. If you drop out the pteropod from the bottom of the oceanic food chain because it can't grow because the ocean has acidified, there is a big collapse to take place.

As scientists would say, the upper trophic levels fall as the lower trophic levels collapse. So this is serious.

As I went through all these different Republican Environment and Public Works Committee Senators' home State universities, maybe you could say that all those home State universities are part of the climate change hoax that our President is so pleased to tweet about.

If so, my colleagues really ought to call their home State universities out about that. If they think their home State universities are in on a hoax, I think it wouldn't be right, and they ought to call out their home State universities. If the home State universities are part of a big old hoax, say so. Say so. But if all of my Republican colleagues' home State universities right down the line on the Environment and Public Works committee aren't in on a hoax, if what they are doing is good science, why not listen to them? Why not listen to them? What is the dark star in this firmament that causes the real science from the home State universities of these Senators to warp and twist around as it comes to this body? What is the power? What is the force that is causing every single one of these home State universities to be ignored by their home State Senators?

Let me go back and review very briefly what they said. Home State universities of the Republican Senators on the Environment and Public Works Committee warn of ``pressing issues'' related to climate change. That is Wyoming--pressing issues.

Assert that the science of climate change is ``unequivocal,'' ``without any question.'' That is from Oklahoma.

Foresee ``immense'' implications related to climate change. That is West Virginia.

Making anti-greenhouse gas ``climate commitments'' to fight climate change. That is the University of Arkansas.

Warn that ``climate change is the greatest environmental threat facing global society.'' That is Mississippi.

Find the ``significant risks'' from climate change to be ``of vital concern.'' That is Nebraska. That is the one that had the hit list of coming attractions from Nebraska of climate change

Describe climate change as ``one of the grand challenges of the 21st century.'' That is Kansas.

Call climate change ``the signature challenge of the 21st century.'' South Dakota.

Predict ``aggravated and unpredictable risk'' from climate disruption. That is Iowa.

Prepare for fisheries risk that could shake the State's seafood industry ``from top to bottom.'' That is Alaska.

Right down the row of Republican Senators who voted for this climate denying nominee, you have home State universities that say the opposite, that say that it is real, that it is beyond scientific debate at this point, that its effects are here, that its effects are worsening, and that it is going to shake industries like the fishing industry from top to bottom and create significant risk and disturbances in agriculture. But not one of those Senators stood up against the nominee who is the shameless tool of the industry that is causing all that harm.

So I have to ask, how does that end? If you listen to what all your home State universities are saying, this is a pressing and immense grand challenge. This greatest environmental threat--it doesn't go away. This is truth measured by science, God's and nature's truth, and truth always demands a reckoning.

If we listen only to the fossil fuel industry as it lies and prevaricates and propagandizes and disassembles and does all its nonsense to protect its all-important right to pollute for free, how do we expect this turns out in the end? Do you think these acidifying shells give a red hot damn what a fossil fuel industry lobbyist says? They are responding to laws of chemistry and nature that we don't get to repeal or amend.

Let me make one last point in closing, as I saw Senator Carper here, our distinguished ranking member, and I am sure he wants to speak.

Our Republican friends claim to support market economics. They are big on how you have to trust the market. You shouldn't regulate. Markets are the way to go. Market economics is the most efficient tool for allocating resources. Market economics are how we create wealth. Actually, I agree. So let's look at market economics.

What I believe and what economists say on all sides of the political spectrum is that it is market economics 101 that for the market to work, the harm of a product has to be built into the price of a product.

The fossil fuel industry, the dark star of our politics, absorbing and bending all of this home State information, absorbs and bends even conservative market principles so that they disappear here in Congress, at least wherever those principles conflict with what appears to be our first principle: the well-being and the power of the fossil fuel industry.

The fact that Senators do not hear or do not care about this science from their home State universities tells you all you need to know about the brute political force of the fossil fuel industry here in Congress.

(Mrs. ERNST assumed the Chair.)

Let me go back just a moment to something I said earlier, since we have been joined by the Senator from Iowa

at this fine early hour in the morning. Just before she arrived, I was talking about Iowa State. Since she is here, I will go back to those remarks and to the Iowa State University professor who told a United Nations conference not long ago that climate change is already affecting Iowa farmers. ``This isn't just about the distant future,'' the Iowa State scientist said.

I noted that Iowa State has published extensive research on, and I quote Iowa State University here, ``global warming, the impact of climate change on global agriculture.''

Iowa State has a center called the Leopold Center, which perhaps the Presiding Officer can confirm is a fairly prestigious institution within the University of Iowa. Iowa State's Leopold Center ``views climate change not merely as warming, but as a worsening destabilization of the planet's environmental system.''

I hope the distinguished Senator from Iowa will review Iowa State's view that this worsening destabilization of the planet's environmental system will create, and I quote Iowa State University again, ``aggravated and unpredictable risks that will challenge the security of our agricultural and biological systems'' and consider their conclusion: ``The scientific evidence is clear that the magnitude of the changes ahead are greater, the rate much faster, and the duration of the climatic destabilization will last much longer than once thought.''

Let me close, while we wait for Senator Carper, who is nearby, with my final exhibit.

This is a page from the New York Times in 2009. It is a full-page ad that was taken out in the New York Times in 2009, and it reads:

Dear President Obama and the United States Congress,

tomorrow leaders from 192 countries will gather at the U.N.

Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen to determine the fate

of our planet. As business leaders, we are optimistic that

President Obama is attending Copenhagen with emissions

targets. Additionally, we urge you, our government, to

strengthen and pass U.S. legislation and lead the world by

example. We support your effort to ensure meaningful and

effective measures to control climate change, an immediate

challenge facing the United States and the world today.

Please don't postpone the earth. If we fail to act now, it is

scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic

and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet.

Please allow us, the United States of America, to serve in

modeling the change necessary to protect humanity and our

planet.

That is the text of this advertisement in the New York Times in 2009. And guess who signed it. Donald J. Trump, chairman and president; Donald J. Trump, Jr., executive vice president; Eric F. Trump, executive vice president; Ivanka M. Trump, executive vice president; and the Trump Organization.

I will close with the sentence from this New York Times advertisement, signed by Donald J. Trump, that ``the science of climate change is irrefutable and our failure to act will have consequences that are catastrophic and irreversible.'' President Trump's words, not mine.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, we are considering the nomination of Congressman Mulvaney to become the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. In the context of the review of this nomination, there has been a lot of talk about Congressman Mulvaney being a ``straight shooter.'' I do appreciate his courtesy meeting with me and his participation in our Budget Committee confirmation hearing last month, but I have to say that his 6-year record in the House of Representatives makes it completely impossible for me to vote for him as our Nation's chief budget officer.

He may be a straight shooter, but he shoots straight at the wrong targets. One of them is the credit of the United States of America. In the House of Representatives, Congressman Mulvaney repeatedly put our economy in jeopardy by voting to let the Federal Government default on its obligations. He had an opportunity after his nomination, when he came before the Budget Committee, to pivot to a more mainstream and responsible position, but he refused. In an answer to a prehearing question he said:

I do believe that defaulting on America's debts would have

great worldwide consequences. I do not believe that breaching

the debt ceiling will automatically or inevitably lead to

that result.

Well, if you breach the debt ceiling, and if you honor the debt ceiling law, that means that our government would not have the money to pay all of its bills. Something has to be defaulted on or the debt ceiling is a complete chimera.

Mr. Mulvaney's completely unsupported faith that a default on some of our Nation's obligations might not have grave consequences ignores basic economics, and it ignores the guidance

of liberal and conservative economists and experts alike, including Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Benjamin Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Janet Yellen, Jack Lew, and many, many others.

In fact, many of my Republican colleagues in this room were gravely concerned about what happened if we blew through the debt ceiling, and that we perhaps had made a bet we would be unable to pay. To put it simply, lenders tend to charge more for riskier loans, and a borrower that won't pay all of its bills on time is riskier than one that does.

Tom Donahue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is not someone that I ordinarily cite favorably here in the Senate. He is an inveterate enemy on doing anything on climate change. He and I disagree on a great number of issues, but even Tom Donahue noted that a small increase in treasury rates, which would happen as the result of a default, ``would translate into hundreds of thousands of jobs lost every year.''

A member of the self-styled ``shutdown caucus,'' Mr. Mulvaney chooses to ignore the fact that his fiscal brinkmanship has already cost the American people. Playing around with the debt ceiling and shutting down the government are not free exercises. According to the Wall Street firm Standard and Poor's, the 16-day government shutdown that the Congressman helped orchestrate in 2013 cost the American economy $24 billion. That is shooting straight at our economy just to prove a political point. That is not the kind of straight shooter that we need. Of course, that doesn't even mention the unnecessary stress that the shutdown caused for millions of government contractors who weren't sure they would be paid. There is pain and there is damage from the reckless decisions that Congressman Mulvaney seems to make so easily.

Congressman Mulvaney's blind faith is not limited to economics. He disregards science too. In response to questions I asked him at the hearing, he said he is not convinced by the evidence presented that climate change is at least partly driven by human activity. Well, he ought to take a little look at what is going on at his home State university, the University of South Carolina, which has the School of the Earth, Ocean, and Environment. It actually teaches climate change. The University of South Carolina doesn't just believe climate change; it teaches it. It has a faculty who are involved in teaching the students about what is happening in our atmosphere and in our oceans as a result of climate change.

This is not all that complicated stuff. We have known since President Lincoln was riding around Washington in his top hat that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would catch heat in the atmosphere and would warm the Earth. That was a scientist named Tyndall. This is not news; this is 150 years old. It is simple, elemental chemistry, what happens when you ramp up the level of CO2 in the atmosphere and how that works in the oceans. The CO2 gets absorbed by the oceans. The oceans, as a result of absorbing CO2, become more acidic. What we are seeing now is the acidification of the ocean in the experience of humankind--indeed, in probably like 100 times the experience of humankind. You have to go back 50 years to find a similar rate of acidification of the ocean.

Well, Mr. Mulvaney represents South Carolina. South Carolina is a coastal State. It is an ocean State. The University of South Carolina studies its oceans. They know ocean acidification is happening. When the Congressman says that he is not convinced by the evidence presented, something other than being a straight shooter is going on.

According to NASA, for instance, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration--which, by the way, right now is driving a rover around on the surface of the planet Mars. So can we perhaps stipulate that the scientists at NASA know what they are talking about? No other country in the world, no other society in human history has had the capacity to launch from Earth a rover, fly it through space to Mars, land it safely on that other planet, and drive it around. We can do that. NASA scientists did that. So when NASA scientists say that ``multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activity''--so essentially all the experts agree.

His home State university, the University of South Carolina, teaches this. They don't just listen to it, they teach it. They understand what is going on. But Mulvaney says he is not convinced. What is it going to take to convince him? How can you be a straight shooter when you ignore this kind of certainty in science, particularly when around this building you see the circling menace of the fossil fuel industry always with its guns out, always trying to shoot down anybody who will disagree with them, always trying to pretend that climate change isn't real, always trying to defend a $700 billion-a-year subsidy that they get at the expense of the rest of America? And because, thanks to Citizens United, they have the capacity to spend enormous, unlimited amounts of money in politics, they can spend a great deal to protect that $700 billion in subsidies, and they do.

So we do nothing about climate change here. You can't get a Republican to talk seriously about climate change here. The oceans are changing off of their States, and they won't talk about climate change here. Their universities are saying that climate change is real. Their universities are teaching that climate change is real. And they won't say one thing about climate change here. And this so-called straight shooter is going to go along with that racket rather than listen to his home State universities and to the scientists at NASA, who have put the rover on Mars? Give me a break.

While this man claims to be a deficit hawk, I asked him if he was ready to take on the hundreds of billions of dollars that go out the back door of our economy in tax breaks, in wasteful tax loopholes, in tax benefits for special interests, and he wouldn't give me a straight answer to the question.

From his record in the House, it appears pretty clear that Mr. Mulvaney would rather balance the budget by going after seniors, by going after Social Security, by going after Medicare, by going after the families who have children on Medicaid because their children have lifetime disabilities that require Medicaid support. Those are the targets. That is who this so-called straight shooter wants to shoot at. But as for, say, the tax benefit that lets billionaires depreciate their private jets faster than the airline can, oh, no, can't touch that. As for the tax loophole that lets carried interest Wall Street billionaires pay lower tax rates than their doormen, than their janitors, oh, no, can't possibly touch that. As for the subsidies we give through the Tax Code to the fossil fuel industry every year when they are the most lucrative corporations in the history of the planet, oh, no, we can't possibly do that. Let's go after the old folks. That is not being a straight shooter; that is shooting at the wrong people.

Someone who is a straight shooter when it happens to agree with the politics that they like but is a flatout denier when it doesn't, that is not my idea of a straight shooter.

Congressman Mulvaney is possessed by conservative ideology that I strongly believe is going to prevent him ever from working across party lines on the budget, on health care, or on other major issues that he will have to face at OMB. His counsel is likely to pull President Trump further out to the extremes, which already divide this country.

And by the way, to all of those voters who voted for President Trump because he said that he was different from all the other Republican candidates; that he was different from the other 15 candidates because he wasn't going to hurt Social Security and he wasn't going to hurt Medicare; that he was different from all the others because he was going to protect Social Security and he was going to protect Medicare-- folks, I think you were sold a bill of goods because when you look at Congressman Price and when you look at Congressman Mulvaney and when you look at their records, you see the records of people who have targeted Social Security and targeted Medicare for years. They may be straight shooters, but they have Social Security and Medicare in the crosshairs. Those are not the right targets for us to be shooting

at in a tax system that is riddled with special interest loopholes and in a country that is so divided and where the poor and the elderly are struggling compared to the people who are at the very top, who have basically gathered all of the economic benefit of our growth since the great recession.

So, for all of those reasons, I will be completely unable to support this person's confirmation. I am sorry because I would like to have seen the President make the slightest gesture in the direction of bipartisanship, the slightest gesture in the direction of compromise, the slightest gesture in the direction of reasonableness, but out of this White House, on the civilian Cabinet, we have seen nothing like that.

It is a Cabinet that is completely controlled by rightwing ideology and appalling special interests. Usually, the special interests are the most dangerous and worst special interests that the agency has to regulate. Instead of accepting that as the agency's responsibility, he has brought that special interest in, brought the fox into the henhouse. If there was ever a fox in the OMB henhouse to take our Social Security folks and our Medicare folks and hurt them, it is this Congressman.

I cannot accept his nomination. I will vote against it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I, too, will be voting no on the candidacy of Mr. Mnuchin to become Secretary of the Treasury.

Rhode Island got hit so hard by the mortgage meltdown that Wall Street created. Frankly, I can never forget the Rhode Islanders who lost their homes in the course of that debacle. We were able to help some of them in my office.

As the Presiding Officer knows, when you come to the Senate, you put together a constituent office, and your constituent people work on usual constituent business. In the ordinary course, constituent business is dealing with Federal agencies. It is making sure Social Security is fine, getting people replacement passports that they put into the laundry by accident, dealing with veterans issues and getting veterans their benefits, helping people with Medicare and Medicaid confusion. It is all generally involving people who have gotten somehow fouled up in the Federal programs of which they are beneficiaries.

In our case, we had to open a constituent wing for dealing with the big banks because they were foreclosing so recklessly and in such a mercenary fashion on Rhode Islanders. It was such torture for Rhode Islanders, once the foreclosure process began, because they could never get the same person twice on the phone; there was always a mismatch between what they were being told on the phone and being told on paper. It was a nightmare of bad information and bad practice by these big banks.

What we would often be able to do is to say: Look, at least give this person one person they can deal with, that they can call every time so it is not ``Hi, I am John'' on one phone call and

``Hi, I am Mary'' on the next phone call and ``Hi, I am Joseph'' on the third phone call and nobody ever remembers the other phone calls, nobody ever knew where they were in the process. You can't move the process forward if the person on the other end of the line can't keep track of the conversation. So we were able to get that done, and that actually was able to help Rhode Islanders come to a deal with these big banks and save their homes. But for all the ones we were able to help, there were many, many we were not.

I simply cannot forgive somebody who took a look at that banking crisis, who took a look at the pain Wall Street sent in a wave across all of America, and thought: Oh, here is a great new way to make money--foreclosing on people.

Done. I am out. Sorry, I can't vote for somebody like that.

What I hope, though, is that he will at least show some common sense and some decency when it comes to other issues, and one of them is climate change.

If you go to the financial sector, they are taking climate change pretty seriously. Frankly, the financial sector is probably about as big as the fossil fuel industry, so when the fossil fuel industry comes around bullying and shoving and lying and going through all of its usual climate denial nonsense, the financial guys really don't care. They just do their thing. You are not going to intimidate Goldman. You are not going to intimidate BlackRock. You are not going to intimidate Bank of America. It just doesn't make any sense. So when you look at what these guys are saying, they are being pretty straight up about it.

As long ago as 2013, Goldman Sachs issued a report that said: ``The window for thermal coal investment is closing.'' That is the caption of the report. ``Thermal coal's current position atop the fuel mix for global power generation will be gradually eroded,'' it said. And sure enough, it has been. There was no grief for coal in there; they were just trying to predict the market. In 2015, Goldman Sachs did another report about the low-carbon economy. It was ``Goldman Sachs equity investor's guide to a low carbon world, 2015-25.'' So unless somebody is going to say that Goldman Sachs is in on the hoax, they are taking this pretty seriously. From 2015 to 2025, they expect a low-carbon world.

And it is coming on fast and furious now. Just recently, a global task force was set up by the G20 companies--the 20 biggest economies in the world. They have a group called the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures. They have asked that companies begin to come clean on the climate risk they face.

The news report about this says:

Concerns among the financial community are growing that

assets are being mispriced because the full extent of climate

risk is not being factored in, threatening market stability.

The story continues:

According to Barclays--

Barclays is a significant international banking institution--

the fossil fuel industry could lose $34 trillion in revenues

by 2040 as a global deal to limit temperature rise to well

below 2 degrees Celsius reduces demand for oil, coal, and

gas, returning reserves into stranded assets.

If, in fact, this is an industry that could lose $34 trillion in revenues by 2040, that explains a lot of their misbehavior around Congress. Obviously, for that kind of money, there is very little mischief these folks wouldn't get up to, and sure enough, they are getting up to all of that mischief, and more, around here. But the financial industry itself is pretty big, and it doesn't care. It is not going to be pushed around and bullied.

This Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure is described as having 32 members from large banks, insurance companies, asset management companies, pension funds, credit rating agencies, and accounting and consulting firms--32 members representing the 20 biggest economies in the world, and they are saying: Here it comes. Let's get ready.

So I hope colleagues will begin to listen to these folks in the financial services industry and these major market economies about what is going on and stop listening to the self-serving nonsense that the fossil fuel industry insists on trying to jam into our ears around here. It just is bogus. Bottom line: It is bogus.

Most recently, at the end of last year, September 2016, BlackRock, which is one of the most significant investment firms in the world--I think it has more than $1 trillion in assets under management--issued this new report: ``Adapting Portfolios to Climate Change.'' OK. So BlackRock, one of the smartest and biggest companies in the world, is now talking about how we have to adapt to climate change and helping investors plan for it. In this building, can we have a sensible conversation about climate change? No, of course not, because the fossil fuel industry won't even let some of us mention the words, but in the real world, where real money and real decisions are being made by very smart people, they are all over this. Here is BlackRock: ``Adapting Portfolios to Climate Change.''

Sentence No. 1 in the report: ``Investors can no longer ignore climate change.''

Investors can no longer ignore climate change. No, it takes Congress to do that. Investors can no longer ignore climate change, but don't worry, we will, as long as we are following the lead of our fossil fuel industry friends, right over the climate cliff.

The report continues that we can expect more frequent and severe weather events over the long term--something that actually we are seeing already, not only in the United States but around the world. They say that there is a market failure in this area--a market failure--as current fossil fuel prices arguably do not reflect the true costs of their extraction and use.

That is what we are fighting about here. The fossil fuel industry has the best racket going in the world. They are able to pollute like crazy, do immense damage in the world--damage that coastal homeowners in Rhode Island, fishermen in Rhode Island, people who have breathing difficulties and are trying to breathe on a hot summer day in Rhode Island--they all have to pay the price.

Under real market theory, the harm of the product has to be in the price of the product for the market to work. That is market 101. Well, they don't want to play by those rules. They want to have everybody else cover the harm in their product, and they just get to shove it out into the marketplace with the biggest subsidy in creation.

The International Monetary Fund is not a bunch of stupid people, and the International Monetary Fund, as far as I can tell, has no conflict of interest with respect to fossil fuel, unlike the fossil fuel companies, which are one massive example of a conflict of interest. The International Monetary Fund says that the subsidy to the fossil fuel industry every year--just in the United States of America--is $700 billion--billion with a ``b.'' Like I said, how much mischief would they get up to for $700 billion? Oh, about $700 billion worth.

Is there a fix to this? Yes, continues the BlackRock report. ``The most cost-effective way for governments to meet emissions reduction targets: Policy frameworks that result in realistic carbon pricing.'' Market 101. Of course, they don't want market 101, they want fossil fuels subsidies 101, and we go along with it because of the mischievous way they behave in politics. But we should not go along with it. It is not proper economics. It is not conservative. It is nothing except traditional, old-fashioned, special interests, special pleading. It is no different from any other polluter who wants to be able to dump their waste into the river or onto their neighbor's yard or wherever it is rather than having to pay for cleaning up the mess they made.

We go on through the report: ``The world is rapidly using up its carbon budget,'' says BlackRock. ``The damage from climate change could shave 5 to 20 percent off global GDP annually by 2100.'' Up to a fifth of global GDP gone. That is a massive economic correction. That is massive economic pain.

``The economic impacts,'' it goes on to say, ``are not just in the distant future. More frequent and more intense extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, flooding, and droughts, are already affecting assets and economies.''

For anybody just tuning in, this is not me making this stuff up, this is BlackRock investments.

They talk about global fossil fuel subsidies--four times as large, they say, as renewable energy support.

Here is an interesting thing: ``Scrapping energy subsidies could save governments some $3 trillion a year, more than they collect from corporate taxes,'' according to BlackRock.

So here we have the fossil fuel industry over there, and they are getting the biggest subsidy in the world--by IMF calculations, $700 billion a year--and the party that says it wants a more efficient government and that ordinarily would like to reduce corporate taxes is defending that subsidy, even though that is taking money out of government more than corporate taxes. It is quite astonishing. The BlackRock report gives such a window into Congress by comparison, frankly. They conclude here by giving some pretty dire warnings about where this goes if people aren't preparing for climate change. They say:

Risk for the long-term investor . . . could lead to a

permanent loss of capital. The effects of climate change need

to be part of that equation, we believe.

Yet even short-term investors would do well to integrate

climate factors into their portfolio.

So from Goldman Sachs on to BlackRock, some of the most powerful and intelligent financial firms in the world are telling their investors: Get ready for climate change.

The last page of the BlackRock report says:

[C]urrent market prices arguably do not yet reflect the

social costs of burning fossil fuels. . . . This externality

is at the core of the climate challenge.

The externality, of course, being that you take the harm that you cause and instead of putting it in the price of your product, you make everybody else around you pay for it by being a polluter.

Then they asked the question:

What is the correct price of carbon? It is hard to say. A

2015 U.S. government study estimated $36 of economic damages

for each metric ton of carbon emitted. Yet estimates are

rising: A 2015 Stanford University study points to $220 per

metric ton.

I believe that our U.S. social cost of carbon is running at about $45 per metric ton right now. And, by the way, it has been upheld twice--at least twice--by Federal courts. In fact, one court rather insisted that the social cost of carbon had to be baked into the underlying rule; otherwise, the underlying rule couldn't pass the test of being logical and fair and not arbitrary and capricious.

So there is the case from some of our leading financial institutions about climate change. They have real money at stake. They have real clients. They can't engage in the kind of nonsense that we engage in around here about climate change not being real or not being important or being something that there is still debate about or being something that if we try to fix it, it is going to cost too much money. All of that is total bunkum processed through all sorts of advertising-type public relations firms by the fossil fuel industry and sold to a gullible public as if it were true.

A few folks who aren't so gullible--all Republicans--have just come out with a very interesting report. Three of them were Treasury Secretaries. Republican Presidents trusted these folks with the conduct of the U.S. economy: Jim Baker, Secretary of the Treasury under President Reagan; Hank Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury under President Bush; and George Shultz, Secretary of the Treasury under President Nixon. These men have some pretty impressive credentials. Not only was he Secretary of the Treasury, but James Baker was also the Secretary of State. And not only was George Shultz Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State, he was also Secretary of Labor.

These three former Treasury Secretaries have led a group of other investors, including the former chairman of the board of Walmart, the world's largest retailer and employer; Tom Stephenson, a Republican who is a partner at Sequoia Capital, a very successful venture capital firm out in Silicon Valley; and Greg Mankiw, who was Chairman of George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, so this is a very Republican group. They have a lot of experience. None of them holds elective office now, so they don't have to worry about the fossil fuel industry threatening to crush them in a primary or spend millions of dollars through phony-baloney front groups against them or any of the usual stuff that politicians have to put up with from the fossil fuel industry as it fights to protect that massive subsidy that we have talked about already.

Let's go through this report by these very senior Republican officials. The first sentence:

Mounting evidence of climate change is growing too strong

to ignore. . . . For too long, many Republicans have looked

the other way.

Indeed. They go on to propose a conservative climate solution--what they call a carbon dividends plan--which aligns actually fairly well with my American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act, which I have put forward in the past and am going to put forward in this Congress as well. I hope, given its alignment with this Republican leadership on climate, that we might actually begin to get some conversations going here. We may have to go hide out of State someplace so the fossil fuel folks don't find who is participating in the conversation and start punishing them for doing so, but we will see how that goes.

The recommendation basically is for a carbon tax that collects revenue to offset the cost of pollution that is not in the price of the product and then return it all to the American people through a big dividend.

The report says: ``A carbon tax would send a powerful market signal that encourages technological innovation and largescale substitution of existing energy and transportation infrastructures, thereby stimulating new investment.''

Furthermore, a well-designed carbon dividends plan, the second half, the tax, would stimulate new investment and ``a well-designed carbon dividends plan would further contribute to economic growth through its dynamic effects on consumption and investment.''

They definitely want to protect that one-to-one relationship so that all the money that comes in goes back out. That is the principle of my bill, as well, and I am more than willing to live with it. But the problems of failing to act also need attention.

Since two of these gentlemen were Secretaries of State, we should take some interest when they say: ``Our reliance on fossil fuels contributes to a less stable world, empowers rogue petro-states and makes us vulnerable to a volatile world oil market.''

We have to address this issue for a lot of reasons, and I couldn't be more satisfied that these two Republican Secretaries of State have actually made the connection that Thomas Friedman has made and that the Department of Defense has repeatedly made in its ``Quadrennial Defense Review'' between our overreliance on carbon and between the harms of climate change and a less stable world--a world in which climate change is what the Defense Department has so often called a catalyst for conflict.

They then reflect a little bit on what is going on with their party: ``The opposition of many Republicans to meaningfully address climate change reflects poor science and poor economics, and is at odds with the party's own noble tradition of stewardship.''

You would never know it nowadays, but the Republican Party was once the party of Teddy Roosevelt. They point out that ``64% of Americans worry a great deal or a fair amount about climate change, while a clear majority of Republicans acknowledge that climate change is occurring.''

They go on to point out ``that 67 percent of Americans''--two thirds of Americans--``support a carbon tax with proceeds returned directly to them.''

Two thirds ``of Americans support a carbon tax with proceeds returned directly to them, including 54% of conservative Republicans.''

So let's not pretend that this is a partisan issue. It is not a partisan issue. It is an issue in which a big special interest has thrown incredible weight around to try to crush one side of the debate. But clearly, if 67 percent of Americans supported anything and 54 percent of conservative Republicans supported that, we would probably be having a sensible conversation in the Senate about whatever that thing was. We just can't do it when that thing happens to be climate change because we have the fossil fuel industry out there--powered up by Citizens United, spending all that money--trying to protect that huge, huge subsidy that they enjoy.

Finally, the report points out--and I see the pages lined up here along the

side of the podium: ``Increasingly, climate change is becoming a defining issue for this next generation of Americans, which the GOP ignores at its own peril.''

If this party wants to write off the young generation as they follow the fossil fuel industry off the climate cliff, there will be a very grave price to be paid.

The report concludes: ``With the privilege of controlling all branches of the government comes a responsibility to exercise wise leadership on the defining challenges of our era, including global climate change.''

I don't know where Mr. Mnuchin will lead on climate change at the Treasury Department. There are a number of ways in which the Treasury Department can be influential in this area. To my knowledge, he has never said anything about it yet.

It was not too long ago--2009--that a full-page advertisement ran in the New York Times, a full page advertisement that pointed out that the science of climate change was already, by then, to use the word in the advertisement, ``irrefutable.'' The science of climate change was ``irrefutable,'' the advertisement said.

Then the advertisement went on to say that the consequences of climate change would be ``catastrophic and irreversible.'' That is another quote from the advertisement: The consequences of climate change were to be ``catastrophic and irreversible.''

On the one hand, you have science that is irrefutable; on the other hand, you have consequences of ignoring it that are catastrophic and irreversible. Who signed that advertisement? None other than Donald J. Trump--not only he, but his children, Donald Trump, Eric Trump, and Ivanka Trump, also all signed it.

The year 2009 was not that long ago. It is possible that the Trump family could refer to what they knew in 2009 and perhaps take advice from a Treasury Secretary. I hope they take advice from three Treasury Secretaries, but we will see how that goes.

Perhaps Mr. Mnuchin can be a voice to try to get the GOP out of the fossil fuel hole it is in, aligned with the 67 percent of American voters who want to see a revenue-neutral carbon tax, aligned with the majority of Republican conservative voters who would support that, and aligned with the irrefutable nature of the science, and addressing the catastrophic and irreversible consequences in this strange new administration in which the new normal is abnormal. It is perhaps hard to expect much good to come, but let's hope and let's hope Mr. Mnuchin makes himself a part of the solution rather than just a part of the climate-denial problem that so infects us, particularly here in Congress.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, my distinguished friend, Senator Perdue, is actually right. There is something unprecedented going on around here with these nominations, but it is not the Democratic effort to try to make sure that those nominees get a fair hearing and some light on them before they get into office.

What is unprecedented around here with these nominees is, first of all, what a hash the Trump administration made of getting them ready. They were not ready to go. They were not prepared for the ethics reviews. They were dead in the water, and they have a lot of responsibility just in terms of the simple incompetence of getting a Cabinet ready to go.

That is not the Senate's fault. The Senate should not roll over in its advice and consent role because an executive branch can't prepare nominees. Then you get behind the incompetence of the executive branch in preparing nominees and you start looking at the nominees.

What else is unprecedented about them is the huge array of conflicts of interest they bring. We have never seen anything like this. We call it the ``swamp cabinet'' because it is, in fact, swampy with conflicts of interest. Many of these candidates have such massive financial complexities--because it is billionaire after billionaire after billionaire--that they have had to do all sorts of business contortions to try to get ready for their appointment.

That also is not our fault. That actually makes our responsibility greater so we can do our constitutional job in the Senate, as providing advice and consent, to look at potential conflicts of interest. It is part of why we have advice and consent, so we can screen for that. When we are not getting disclosure, we can't even do that.

There are still disclosure gaps for a lot of these nominees. The controversy and special interest connections of some of them are, frankly, appalling. So there are, indeed, nominees whom we would love to stop. If we could stop them, we would do it because we think they are going to do damage to the American people; damage to Medicare, which seniors rely on; damage to Medicaid, which so many sick kids rely on; damage to clean air, which I think everybody tends to rely on if they breathe; damage to clean water, which fishermen and sailors and people count on across the country. It is not a question here of doing the people's business, it is a question of trying to prevent these people from giving the people business because this looks like the special interest Cabinet of all time. If you go down one by one through the civilian Cabinet, you can more or less pick who the most influenced special interest is, the one who is most harmful to the American people in that particular area, and bingo, there is your nominee. So we should not slow down the advice and consent process just for the sake of slowing down the advice and consent process, but we should slow down the advice and consent process when we are not getting the basic information necessary to do our jobs, and we should slow down the advice and consent process when we are handing over agencies of government to big special interests. Those are two very good reasons to have the Senate's noble tradition of advice and consent followed scrupulously.

As to the nominee for HHS, Dr. Price, he is right in that list. He has conflicts of interest. He has real harm that he proposes to the American public.

I think Medicare is one of the great things the United States has done. It is one of our signal achievements. It has lifted seniors out of poverty in a way that very few other countries can match and that the United States had never seen before we did Medicare. It is probably the most efficient health care delivery system in the United States of America, and our seniors count on it and love it.

That is not good enough for the good Dr. Price, though. He wants to voucherize Medicare. What do you do if you are a Medicare patient who is elderly and infirm? How do you go shopping for health insurance? I can remember when I was quite capable as a fit lawyer, and I was given the H.R. forms by the U.S. attorney's office to make my choice. It is a complicated mess. And you expect some woman who may be in a hospital bed to sort through that? Great job giving her a voucher. It is just so unfair and so wrong.

Medicaid. Children across Rhode Island depend on Medicaid. If you are a family and you have a child with a significant illness, you are very likely to have that support for that child come through the Medicaid Program. This is a man who wants to block-grant Medicare and projects trillion-dollar cuts--trillion-dollar cuts? Who is going to make up the trillion dollars if we are not taking care of these kids? Is it going to go back to the families or the care just isn't going to be there for the Medicaid children? That is just wrong.

These are ideological candidates who want ideological victories that will hurt real people like Henry, from Warwick. A woman named Lisa wrote to me. She is a teacher and lifelong resident of Warwick, RI. She has a son, Henry. Henry was just born last year, and before he was even 1 month old, Henry was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis.

Cystic fibrosis, as I am sure we all know, is a genetic disorder. It affects more than 30,000 people in the United States, and it is one of the crueler diseases on the face of the planet. As cystic fibrosis progresses, it can cause infections, it causes difficulty breathing, and eventually it renders the child unable to breathe and respiratory failure results. There have been important advances and treatment for this disease, but there is no cure.

So Henry needs regular tests and treatment. He will need them for the rest of his life as doctors fight to extend his life as long as they can in hopes that a cure will arise. His parents are extremely grateful for the wonderful work of our doctors at Hasbro Children's Hospital who take care of Henry. But Lisa and her husband are also worried about their health insurance, and Henry's, because

Henry has a preexisting condition. If Secretary Price were to have his way, the Affordable Care Act would be repealed, and without it there would be no protection for people like Henry--a child like Henry with a preexisting condition. Either he would face outrageous health care premiums or be denied coverage altogether. Since then, having to face the scrutiny of confirmation, he has said: Oh, no, that part we are going to try to save. But when you go through the parts that my Republican friends are going to try to save, you end up with pretty much the whole bill. If you are going to try to save every part of the bill, why bother repealing it? Why not make it better and move on?

How irresponsible it was to say, ``Repeal,'' when all these points were in it. When repeal was the great mantra, nobody said: ``Repeal. Oh, but not that.'' ``Repeal. Oh, but let's protect the seniors from the doughnut hole.'' No, it was just ``Repeal ObamaCare. Repeal ObamaCare.'' Frankly, chanting ``Repeal ObamaCare'' I think is about as disqualifying to lead Medicare and Medicaid as chanting ``Lock her up'' would be to be Attorney General of the United States.

Catherine is a constituent of mine who lives in Cranston. She is a breast cancer survivor. She owns a small family business. Her family had health insurance before the Affordable Care Act, but their insurance company decided that their little company had too few employees to qualify as a small business, and it dropped them from their coverage. So it was thanks to the Affordable Care Act that Catherine and her husband could get affordable and quality health insurance through our exchange that we call HealthSourceRI. With this coverage, they go on about their business. They don't have to worry about whether their insurance company is going to change the rules and pitch them out again. Catherine and her husband tell me they don't understand how anyone could say they support small business and want to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Timothy wrote to me. He is a freelance writer in Rumford, RI. He has affordable health care for the first time in his life. There is no big company to help you if you are a freelance writer; you are on your own. But the Affordable Care Act has been there for Timothy. He has multiple chronic health conditions that require medication. Before he had coverage under the Affordable Care Act, Timothy was hospitalized for a heart problem. He couldn't afford the resulting hospital bills. Without health insurance, he couldn't pay for his prescriptions. Having health insurance, Timothy told me, has changed his life. He feels dignity, he feels peace, he feels assurance, and a lot of that is simply the reassurance that you can afford the medications you need to stay healthy. His chances of having to be hospitalized in the future are down. If the ACA is repealed, Timothy may be forced to forgo care that he needs, endangering his health, and potentially, by the way, costing the system a lot more.

Martha, who lives in Cranston, RI, knows well the dangers of being uninsured. Before the Affordable Care Act, Martha went several years without health insurance, gambling that she could get away with it because she couldn't afford it. A gall bladder infection required emergency surgery. She was taken to the hospital, the surgery was performed. It went well, but she was left with a $60,000 hospital bill. Unable to pay the bill, she declared bankruptcy.

Now she can have coverage, and by the way, when the hospital has to do the surgery, it gets paid with her insurance. That is why the American Hospital Association and the Hospital Association of Rhode Island are saying: Don't repeal ObamaCare. That would be reckless.

Martha and her husband and her 24-year-old son have all been able to purchase insurance through the Rhode Island exchange. By the way, our exchange is doing great. People may complain about exchanges in other States. We are seeing costs steady; we are seeing costs going down. One of our major insurers, Neighborhood Health Plan of Rhode Island, is advertising on TV. Whoa. Our rates are going down, and their coverage is fine, and Rhode Island is a success story under the Affordable Care Act. The $283 per month that Martha and her family now pay in total for insurance certainly beats the $500 a month that she and her husband each faced for individual coverage before the ACA.

Paula wrote to me from Cranston about how the Affordable Care Act has helped her and her husband bridge the gap until they get to the safe haven, finally, of Medicare. Paula is 63 years old. She works part time. Her husband who is 64 years old and retired has health insurance through our exchange, HealthSourceRI. Paula has beaten breast cancer once, but she is at high risk of recurrence.

If the Affordable Care Act is repealed, Paula would be at risk to lose her health insurance and the ability to have tests that would help her catch a recurrence of cancer in time. Paula and her husband worked hard and saved well, but as Martha's story shows, one illness can wipe you out if you don't have health insurance, and they are so content and comforted knowing they have a good health insurance plan through our exchange.

Travis is a social worker in Providence. He provides psychotherapy and counseling to recovering addicts who are receiving medication and assisted treatment. This is a particularly touching point in Rhode Island because we lost 239 Rhode Islanders to opioid-related overdoses last year. That is 239 fatalities in Rhode Island last year.

The Affordable Care Act, Travis believes, is the reason that many of his patients are actually able to get care and stay away from the risk of overdose. He wrote of his patients, many of them never accessed methadone treatment prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, let alone sought treatment for their psychiatric conditions which may underlie the substance abuse disorders. By the way, a recent report came out that said if you repeal the Affordable Care Act and its coverage requirements for mental health and substance abuse, you pull about $5.5 billion worth of coverage out from American families. Is that really what this Congress wants to be responsible for doing? I certainly hope not, not after all the fine statements we heard about the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act and the funding for it.

Let me make one last point because I see the Senator from Michigan here and I know she wants to add her thoughts. You can talk about the personal stories, and it shows how poignant and important having the Affordable Care Act around is in the lives of real actual people, but we also have to deal with budget issues in Washington, and I just want to show this chart.

This chart shows the spending projections for Federal health care spending. The red line on the top was the projection in 2010 done by the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office. In 2010, they said: Here is how we think our spending is going to be in Federal health care. They predicted that. Then they came back and they did another prediction in 2017.

One thing that happened is that after the passage of the Affordable Care Act back here, we came in well below predicted expense for Federal health care. We saved a lot of money in that period. Then when they rebooted the prediction in 2017, they started off actual and they did a new prediction right here. The difference in this 10-year period in Federal health care costs between what they expected to have happen in that 10-year period before the Affordable Care Act came along and what experience and the new projections show the savings are since the Affordable Care Act are $3.3 trillion--$3.3 trillion--and we have this person who wants to be the Secretary who wants to cut the program? We are saving money in the program under this. It doesn't make any sense fiscally, and it is cruel to the individuals and families who have found comfort and peace and security from the Affordable Care Act.

So I will leave us with that, but if we are going to be responsible about doing something about our outyear health care costs, find me something else that shows $3.3 trillion in savings during the period of 2017 to 2027, over 10 years. For these costs, we sometimes look out 30 years, and that number would grow even greater. We have saved trillions of dollars as a result of the Affordable Care Act, and CBO shows it.

Thank you very much. I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I wish to add a few Rhode Island voices to the voice of the Senator from Minnesota. By the way, I am not cherry-picking my correspondence to find the rare letters in opposition to this nominee. We have had an unprecedented avalanche of opposition to this nominee. It is running well more than 100 to 1 against her, and it is people from all walks of life.

Here is a letter from William, a 12th grader in Pawtucket, RI. William took the trouble to write to me. Let me start with the topic line: ``Concern over Betsy DeVos.''

Hello, Senator Whitehouse!

My name is William and I am a senior at Blackstone Academy

Charter School, a public charter school in Pawtucket, Rhode

Island. I am contacting you today due to my concern about

educational equality, specifically Betsy DeVos' ability to

commit to practices that ensure that the children who need

the most help aren't forgotten about and brushed under the

rug. These children are our kids of color, as well as our

low-income kids attending urban public schools with limited

resources.

Having attended a Pawtucket public school, I can

confidently say that there are some genuinely brilliant minds

here in this very city, in the areas where somebody like Mrs.

DeVos would least expect. Yet it also cannot be denied that

the students here begin their journey on ground that is

unequal to that of other kids who are not people of color, or

are not part of the public school system, etc. These bright

young saplings are being crushed before they are given the

chance to blossom, and that is a systemic problem that DeVos,

given her various shortcomings, will only serve to perpetuate

and make worse.

DeVos, given her support of the privatization of public

schools and her open disdain towards the LGBTQIA community,

has established that she will not improve the experiences of

marginalized communities. Her interest is not the betterment

of education for people, but the monetization of education to

put money in her pockets and the pockets of people like her.

DeVos will never spearhead movements that promote equity in

education and will continuously disappoint us all throughout

her term which will not be defined by deviating from the

status quo and creating a system that our troubled but gifted

youth can thrive in. In fact, she will do the opposite.

With this in mind I ask that you, Senator Whitehouse,

openly speak out against Betsy DeVos, and do everything in

your power to keep her out of the Secretary of Education

office. I also ask that you continue to remember me and

children like me; public school youth who could be incredible

if they are just given the opportunity to thrive.

Thank you for your time!

William.

Now let's hear from Da-naijah, a 10th grader from Central Falls, RI.

Dear Senator Sheldon Whitehouse,

My name is Da-naijah, and I am in 10th grade at Blackstone

Academy School which is a public charter school. I live in

Central Falls, RI. I'm writing today because I'm concerned

about kids being able to afford college, regardless of

background. I care about this because I have plenty of

family members and friends who go to public school, and

they either want or are trying to go to college. I know

they will need help with paying for college because they

don't come from a very wealthy background. Fair and equal

education is so important to me because I think everyone

should be treated fairly regardless of how they look

because we are humans. I am concerned about Betsy DeVos

being nominated for Secretary of Education because she

doesn't have any experience with classrooms. Also because

she basically doesn't like public schools since she is

trying to make public school private and is trying to take

resources away from public schools. With that being said,

I hope that you do everything you can to help the kids in

public school get equal education and fair education as

much as private schools do. Please read my email when you

can and I would like to thank you for your time.

Mr. President, I have a question. I guess it is in the nature of a parliamentary question, and that is, whether it would be in order to ask unanimous consent that the letter from which Senator Warren read be put into the Record as a confirmation that she was, in fact, accurately reading from the letter, that it be added as an exhibit in the Congressional Record.

The text of the letter as she read it, but not the complete letter.

I ask unanimous consent that the complete letter from which Senator Warren read be printed in the Congressional Record to confirm that she has in fact read from it.

Mr. President, pursuing Senator Merkley's hypothetical, if it came before the Senate that a Member of the Senate who was a nominee seeking the advice and consent of the Senate to the position was, for example, in fact, a horse thief, and we found the fact that he was a horse thief to be relevant to whether or not he should be confirmed, say, to the Department of Interior, which has authority over lands, does the ruling of the Chair mean that it would not be in order for the Senate or for Senators to consider what in my hypothetical is the established fact that the Senator was a horse thief as we debate his nomination here on the floor?

I guess, Mr. President, what I don't understand is that we have fairly significant responsibilities under the Constitution to provide advice and consent. It appears that the ruling of the Chair has just been that when a Member of this body is the subject of that advice and consent, then derogatory information about that person is not in order and is a violation of rule XIX on the Senate floor. And with that being the ruling, I don't know how we go about doing our duties. Are we supposed to simply blind ourselves to derogatory information, discuss it privately in the cloak rooms, not bring it out onto the floor of the U.S. Senate, this supposedly great debating society that actually has a constitutional responsibility to discuss both the advantages and the deficits of a particular nominee?

So the precedent going forward is that any Senator who discusses derogatory information that is a matter of public record, that may even include criminal behavior by a Senator who is a candidate for Executive appointment that requires advice and consent, is at risk of being sanctioned by this body by a simple partisan majority of this body under rule XIX if they raise those issues on the floor?

I yield the floor.

Madam President, the Attorney General of the United States holds a vital and also somewhat unique position in the Federal Government. The Attorney General of the United States is tasked with

significant responsibilities that must be executed independently, sometimes even in defiance of the White House's wishes and interests.

The Attorney General of the United States is tasked with enforcing our laws fairly, justly, and evenhandedly, as well as with protecting the civil and constitutional rights of all Americans of all persuasions, of all backgrounds. The Attorney General of the United States does not work for the President so much as for the people and does not serve the administration so much as the law.

I have served in the U.S. Department of Justice. I have felt its esprit de corps, its pride. That pride is founded on a firm sense of the Department's willingness to stand on what is right, even against the wishes of the White House. One fine example of this was Attorney General Ashcroft challenging and refusing to accede to the wishes of the White House on the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping of Americans. The Department of Justice is well aware of the importance of its independence.

A successful Attorney General must be stalwart in protecting the Department from political meddling by the administration or by Congress. We need only look back to Attorney General Gonzales's resignation to recall how badly things turn out when an Attorney General yields to political pressure.

An Attorney General also makes policy decisions about where and how to direct the Department's $27 billion budget and when and how to advise Congress to recommend new laws and modify existing policies. These are policy choices an Attorney General makes. It is no answer to questions about those policy choices to say: I will follow the law. That doesn't apply in this arena of funding decisions and legislative recommendations that are policy choices not dictated by law. Those policy choices can have a profound effect on individuals, on communities, and on the fabric of our Nations.

Americans should be able to trust that their Attorney General will not only enforce the laws with integrity and impartiality but stand up for Americans of all stripes and fight on behalf of their rights. That is the prism through which I evaluate Senator Sessions' nomination.

I have known Senator Sessions for a decade and have enjoyed working with him on a number of pieces of legislation. However, the standard by which I evaluate an Attorney General nominee is whether Rhode Islanders will trust that in the tough clinches, he will always be independent and always fair.

I have reviewed Senator Sessions' career as an attorney and as a Senator, as well as his testimony before the Judiciary Committee. I have reflected on my own duties and experience as my State's attorney general and as the U.S. attorney in Rhode Island. I have also served as an attorney in our State attorney general's office.

By the way, the attorney general in Rhode Island has full prosecutive authority. Many States have a division in which the attorney general has a narrow ambit of authority and district attorneys do the bulk of the criminal prosecution--not so in Rhode Island.

I have also had the occasion to listen closely to very strong and honest, serious concerns from Rhode Islanders who have made it plain to me that they fear what Senator Sessions would do as head of the Justice Department. For every constituent of mine who has expressed support of his nomination, 15 have expressed opposition.

Senator Sessions has fought against fixing our immigration system, opposing as the leading opponent of bipartisan legislation which, had it passed, would have spared us much of the current debate over walls

and immigration.

Senator Sessions fought against our bipartisan criminal justice and sentencing reform bill.

Senator Sessions opposed reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act--a bill which is vitally important to the Rhode Island Department of Attorney General and to the anti-domestic violence groups around Rhode Island.

Senator Sessions' record on support of gay and lesbian Americans has alarmed many Rhode Islanders. Public statements and confirmation testimony by Senator Sessions suggest that he brings a religious preference to the Department and that what he calls secular attorneys would be, to him, suspect compared to Christian attorneys. That distinction between a secular attorney and a religious attorney is one that runs counter to very solid principles upon which my State was founded. Roger Williams brought to us freedom of conscience.

Senator Sessions has called Breitbart News a bright spot. I must disagree. Breitbart News is not, to me, a bright spot. Breitbart has published baseless and inflammatory articles with titles like ``Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.''

In fairness, I should disclose that Senator Sessions' nomination carries an additional burden with me as the nominee of this President and this White House. The need for an independent Attorney General has rarely, if ever, been greater.

On the campaign trail, the American people witnessed Donald Trump glorify sexual misconduct, mock a disabled reporter, and make disparaging remarks about immigrants and minorities. We all witnessed chants at Trump rallies of ``lock her up.'' At his confirmation hearings, Senator Sessions excused these as ``humorously done.'' In mass rallies that also featured people getting beaten and the press caged and vilified, this didn't seem very humorous to many Americans. I think Americans know that the good guys in the movie are not the ones in the mob; the good guy is the lawman who stands on the jailhouse porch and sends the mob home. To me, that ``lock her up'' chant was un- American. I believe that across the country it made honest prosecutors' stomachs turn.

Not surprisingly, many Americans are fearful of what the Trump administration will mean for them, for their families, and for their country.

The problems with this President did not end with the campaign. President Trump and his family have brought more conflicts of interest to the White House than all other modern Presidents and families combined. The proposed Trump domestic Cabinet is an unprecedented swamp of conflicts of interest, failures of disclosure and divestment, and dark money secrets. We have not even been permitted, in the course of our nomination advice-and-consent process, to explore the full depth of that unprecedented swamp because the dark money operations of nominees have been kept from us. In one case, thousands of emails are still covered up. The Trump White House traffics in alternative facts, operates vindictively, and is a haven for special interest influence. None of this is good. All of this suggests that there will be more or less constant occasion for investigation and even prosecution of this administration.

Independence is at a premium. Nothing could have made this more clear than the first disagreement between the Trump White House and the Department of Justice, whose outcome was that the Acting Attorney General--a woman with 30 years' experience in the Department, a career prosecutor, former assistant U.S. attorney, former U.S. attorney, and someone recognized for her leadership throughout the Department--was summarily fired.

This is also not a good sign. In recent history, Attorneys General Gonzales, Meese, and Mitchell were politically close to their Presidents, and the Gonzales, Meese, and Mitchell tenures did not end well.

Attorney General Mitchell worked for President Nixon. They met when their New York law firms merged in the early 1970s, and they became law partners. John Mitchell was the campaign manager for Nixon's 1968 Presidential campaign. There were signs that things weren't quite right because when Nixon nominated Mitchell to be his Attorney General, he appealed directly to FBI Director Hoover not to conduct the usual background check. Mitchell ultimately resigned as Attorney General in order to run President Nixon's reelection campaign. So the political link between Mitchell and Nixon was very close, and sure enough, scandal ensued. Attorney General Mitchell turned out to be a central figure of the Watergate scandal. As the chairman of the reelection committee, the famous CREEP, Mitchell was responsible for appointing G. Gordon Liddy and approving the dirty tricks program while still Attorney General.

That dirty tricks program ultimately included breaking into national Democratic headquarters in the Watergate.

The upshot of this was that Mitchell was charged with conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and three counts of perjury. He was convicted on all counts, and he served 19 months in prison.

Attorney General Edwin Meese was also very close to President Reagan. Meese joined the 1980 Reagan Presidential campaign as Chief of Staff. He ran the day-to-day campaign operations and was the senior issues adviser. After the election, Edwin Meese was given the job of leading the Reagan transition, and once in office, Reagan appointed Meese as Counselor to the President. According to press accounts at the time, Meese was known as someone who ``has known the President so long and so well, he has become almost an alter ego of Ronald Reagan.'' That was the political background between Meese and President Reagan.

Again, it did not end well. Meese came under scrutiny for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. The congressional committee that reported on the Iran-Contra scandal in November 1987 determined that Meese had failed to take appropriate steps to prevent members of the administration from destroying critical evidence. An independent counsel named Lawrence Walsh finished a report in 1993 that stated that Meese had made a false statement when he said Reagan had not known about the 1985 Iran-Contra deal. Iran-Contra was not the only controversy that plagued Attorney General Meese. A company called Wedtech Corporation was seeking Department of Defense contracts in the early 1980s. The company hired Meese's former law school classmate and his personal attorney, a lawyer named E. Robert Wallach, to lobby the Reagan administration on its behalf. Attorney General Meese helped Wedtech at Wallach's urging get a special hearing on a $32 million Army engine contract, although the Army considered the company unqualified. Well, the contract was awarded to Wedtech, and then one of Meese's top deputies went to work for Wedtech.

The Federal criminal investigation that resulted led to the conviction of E. Robert Wallach, the former law school classmate and personal attorney of Meese, for whom he had set up the meetings with the government.

Independent counsel James McKay investigated the Wedtech contract, including investigating allegations of misconduct by Meese. While Meese was never convicted, he resigned following the issuance of the independent counsel's 800-page report.

Third is Attorney General Gonzales. Attorney General Gonzales was close to then-Governor Bush in Texas. He was his general counsel. When Governor Bush became President Bush, Gonzales came to Washington to serve as White House Counsel. He was appointed Attorney General in 2005. During his tenure at the Department of Justice, there were multiple investigations, many of which played out before the Senate Judiciary Committee, involving the Warrantless Wiretapping Program, the U.S. attorney's scandal, and inquiries into the Department's management of the torture program legal opinions.

Ultimately, Members of both Houses of Congress called for Attorney General Gonzales's resignation--or demanded that he be fired by the President--and Attorney General Gonzales resigned.

There is a track record here of Attorneys General who are politically close to a President coming into harm's way and doing poorly in the Department. One particular office that is vulnerable to this kind of undue proximity, and failure of independence, is a body in the Department of Justice called the Office of Legal Counsel. Jack Goldsmith, a former head of the Office of Legal Counsel--and a Republican, by the way--testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that ``more than any other institution inside the executive branch, OLC is supposed to provide detached, apolitical legal advice.'' And it has an honorable tradition of providing such advice to a remarkable degree, but under the Bush administration, the OLC departed from that tradition. It came up in a number of ways. The first was during our investigation into President Bush's Warrantless Wiretapping Program.

When Office of Legal Counsel memos supporting the program came to light, I plowed through a fat stack of those classified opinions that were held in secret over at the White House and pressed to have some of the statements declassified. Here are some of the statements that were declassified found in those OLC opinions:

An Executive order cannot limit a President. There is no

constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new

Executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms

of a previous Executive order.

So this means a President could issue an Executive order, have it published in the Federal Register, put it forward as the policy of the administration--a direction to all the attorneys in the administration--and then secretly depart from it without ever changing what the public is told about the policy. A theory like this allows the Federal Register, where these Executive orders are assembled, to become a screen of falsehood, behind which illegal programs can operate in violation of the very Executive order that purports to control the executive branch. That was just one.

Another one I will quote: ``The President exercising his constitutional authority under Article II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President's authority under Article

Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. President, may I ask the Senator, through the Chair, if the letter from which he just read has a date?

1986. And is the Senator aware of the occasion that brought this letter to the Senate?

What was that occasion?

And this letter was made a matter of record in that hearing?

But clearly the content of this letter has been a matter known to the Senate and, depending on what the facts may show, may actually have been a record of the Senate for more than 30 years.

So a Senator of the United States has been accused of violating a rule of the Senate for restating to the Senate a phrase that has been a matter of record in the Senate--if, indeed, that is the case--for 30 years.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, it is my understanding that the Senator will take us through the closing script, and as a part of that, I will be recognized in the order to make my remarks.

With that understanding, I yield the floor.

What if I suggest that I begin my remarks, that you give me the high sign whenever the closing script is prepared--it is. Never mind.

I yield the floor.

The high sign has been received.

Mr. President, we are gathered here this evening to seek to defend against the Congressional Review Act effort to overturn the clean stream protection rule. It is interesting that this first Congressional Review Act measure that we are taking up should be one that puts money into the pockets of the fossil fuel industry and lifts their obligation to clean up public streams that they have ruined with their pollution.

As I have been in the Senate, I am in my second term, and I am more than halfway through it. By Senate standards, I don't expect that is very senior, but it is enough that I have seen some patterns develop.

One of the patterns I have seen develop is that my friends on the other side of the aisle talk a really good game on deregulation, on regulatory reform. They give speeches on the burden of undue regulation. They give speeches about the cost of regulation. Over and over they seek deregulation. But when it comes time to actually do something, every single time that I can remember, the deregulatory effort goes to the benefit of two groups. One is Wall Street and the other is polluters. The rest is just talk.

Sure enough, here we are with the first Congressional Review Act effort, and the choices are money in the fossil fuel company's pockets versus our natural heritage of clean streams for ourselves and our children. And which way do we go? Put the money in the fossil fuel pockets--to heck with the clean streams. This would be 0.3 percent of coal industry revenues to clean up after the mess they have made.

I grew up and I was taught that if you spill something, you clean it up. If you make a mess, you clean it up. But in this building, if it is the fossil fuel industry, if you make a mess, too bad, we will take care of you. You are our guys. We don't care about the stream. We don't care about the people who live downstream. We don't care about people who might fish in it. We don't care about the fact that this is God's creation. We care about making the coal companies happy.

It happens over and over. If it is not polluters, it is Wall Street. If it is not Wall Street, it is polluters. As to all this talk about deregulation, watch where it goes--Wall Street and polluters. Here we are with the archetypical challenge between private benefit and public harm. The very purpose of government--even conservative commentators say--is to protect the public from being harmed by those who cause them harm as they pursue their private benefit. What could be more the case than coal waste polluting public streams? We don't care; we are going to go to bat for the coal companies. I tell you, there are special rules around here for the fossil fuel industry.

We heard President Trump's promises to drain the swamp of the outside influence of corporate special interests and lobbyists in our government. Well, particularly when it comes to fossil fuel interests, that oft-repeated promise seems to have evaporated in the murky haze of his transition. From the very outset, operatives of the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel interests have infiltrated his team.

Some of the biggest swamp alligators have floated up as his nominees to run federal agencies that protect our public health, that enforce our laws, that maintain our natural resources, and even those who carry out our international diplomacy. With all these nominations, the President isn't draining the swamp. He is filling it with exactly the kind of big special interests that most Americans voted to keep out.

Our Republican colleagues are jamming and stacking the confirmation hearings in a rush to fill in this swamp Cabinet before the American people can get a good look at the nominees. By the way, the byproduct of all of this is the swamp gas of climate denial.

A strong majority of voters polled since the election called on President Trump to do more to address global warming. So let us look at the record of this fossil fuel swamp Cabinet.

Today, we voted on ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to be our Secretary of State. Like President Trump, Tillerson and ExxonMobil have been talking out of two sides of their mouths about climate change. Sometimes Tillerson acknowledges climate change exists, pointing to a revenue-neutral carbon fee like the one I have introduced as the best way to address it. At other times, he plays up imagined scientific uncertainty and overestimates the costs of action. In 2012, Tillerson said:

I'm not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions

in the atmosphere is going to have an impact. It will have a

warming impact.

As far back as 2009, he backed a revenue-neutral carbon fee like the one I introduced as the best way to address the problem. But in 2013, he questioned whether we should do anything at all to slow climate change, asking: ``What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?''

That is the climate deniers' false premise--that humanity will suffer from our solving a problem that they face.

In 2015, Tillerson told an ExxonMobil shareholder meeting that he thought the world should wait for science to improve before solving the problem of climate change. He couldn't find one State university in this country that would agree with him. He says that because it is the fossil fuel industry stall strategy. It is so ironic coming from the longtime head of ExxonMobil to say we should wait because it has been well documented by the Los Angeles Times, by Inside Climate News, and by others that ExxonMobil--despite conducting some of the leading climate science for decades--has played a devious role in undermining public understanding of these dangers.

For years, Exxon has underwritten a shadowy network of denial organizations--we have called it here on the Senate floor the web of denial--with the purpose of delaying any steps to reduce the use of fossil fuel. Between 1988 and 2005, ExxonMobil contributed over $16 million to a network of phony-baloney think tanks and pseudo-science groups that spread misleading and false claims about climate science. In response to public outrage about ExxonMobil's role in funding climate denial--it knew it had been caught--it claimed that it would stop and that it had stopped. But in 2015, ExxonMobil was still funneling millions to groups pedaling climate denial. According to its own publically available ``2015 Worldwide Global Giving'' report, over $1.6 million, or one-fifth of ExxonMobil's public information and policy research contributions went to organizations active in deceiving the public about climate change--groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, the National Black Chamber of Commerce, the Hudson Institute, and the Manhattan Institute.

Under Tillerson's leadership, Exxon spent untold millions of dollars obstructing climate action and burying real science in a cloud of nonsense. The nonprofit research organization Influence Map found that ExxonMobil spent

at least $27 million obstructing climate action in 2015 alone. This was after they had said publically that they would knock it off. Tillerson even fought his own shareholders. The Institute for Policy Studies reports shareholders of ExxonMobil have introduced 62 climate-related resolutions over the past 25 years. Under his guidance, management has opposed every one of them.

Rex Tillerson once openly mocked a shareholder who asked about investing in renewables. Tillerson responded that renewable energy only survives on the backs of enormous government mandates that are not sustainable. ``We on purpose choose not to lose money,'' he said. Well, one of the ways they choose not to lose money is by spending huge amounts on a big, complex PR machine to churn out doubt about the real science and to protect the enormous market failure that forces the rest of us to pay for the cost of Exxon's carbon pollution. To say that renewable energy only survives on the backs of government mandates and subsidies is a bitter irony from the CEO of a company in an industry that has been calculated by the International Monetary Fund to get subsidies of $700 billion a year in the United States alone from not having to pay for the damage that its product causes.

Now, $700 billion a year is quite the subsidy. We heard this special brand of fossil fuel doublespeak in his confirmation hearing. ``The increase in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are having an effect,'' he said. ``Our ability to predict that effect,'' he continued, ``is very limited.''

Wrong. Our ability to predict that effect is clearly established. The scientists who study our planet's climate system know that is the case. They understand that our carbon pollution has already driven unprecedented changes in the climate, and they know that rising concentrations of greenhouse gases will bring rising temperatures, higher sea levels along our coast, a warmer and more acidic ocean, and changes in weather patterns.

None of this is subject to serious doubt in the scientific community. When asked whether he sees climate change as a national security issue, Tillerson replied, ``I don't see it as the imminent national security threat that perhaps others do.''

Well, let's talk about those ``others'' for a minute. They are the ``others'' who are in charge of defending our country and its interests, the people whose job it is to monitor global trends and prepare for future threats. They are intelligence and security experts like the former Director of the CIA, the Chair of President George W. Bush's National Intelligence Council, the former commander of the U.S. Pacific Command.

The ``others'' include the top brass at the U.S. Department of Defense, which has in its Quadrennial Defense Reviews for years described climate change as a ``global threat multiplier.'' These ``others'' might just know what they are talking about, and they are not burdened with the conflict of interest of being the CEO of a company that is sponging a $700-billion subsidy off the American taxpayers every year. Perhaps the problem is that Mr. Tillerson is too steeped in the fossil fuel industry to hear the ``others'' who have dedicated their careers to defending the American people.

The United States ought to represent to the world a model of democratic leadership and honesty. That is how we get away with saying that we are a city on a hill. That is how we explain to the world that we hold up a lamp in its darkness. The telling responses from Mr. Tillerson's hearing matter because he will be the one to direct or abdicate America's global leadership on this critical issue.

We may be blind in this Chamber to the fact that the fossil fuel industry is calling the shots, pulling the strings, has control over our democracy, and is going around breaking our democratic checks and balances in order to seize control. But the rest of the world knows. You don't think the rest of the world can see why this body will do anything on climate change when every American State university knows that it is coming on, when every American scientific society knows that it is coming on, when our defense professionals know that it is coming on and warn us about it, when NASA and NOAA know that it is coming on and warn us about it?

You don't think that the people of Russia and China and Germany know that we are the ones who have a craft driving around on the surface of Mars? You don't think they know how good our scientists are, and you don't think they know that the NASA scientists are telling us climate change is serious, it is coming at us, it is going to be catastrophic if we don't act--we have to do something? They know that.

Everybody sees it. It is in plain view. What is missing is that Congress will not act because the tentacles of the fossil fuel industry swarm through this place. The world sees it and knows it and history will judge us for it.

Tillerson has spent his career leading an international oil company that has been consistently and fundamentally dishonest with the world as to what ExxonMobil knew about climate change. His professional life has been centered on extracting--extracting fossil fuels from the earth, extracting drilling concessions from corrupt regimes, extracting special tax favors from Congress, and extracting profits for his shareholders.

Well, American leadership in a dangerous world is about more than that. That is why I could not support his nomination. He is just one of several individuals nominated by President Trump who cannot accept the science of climate change or who harbors close ties to the fossil fuel industry or both--usually.

Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt is Trump's nominee for Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the bureau most directly responsible for leading the U.S. effort to stave off the effects of climate change. Mr. Pruitt has such deep political and financial ties to fossil fuel companies and front groups that it is hard to tell where they give off and he begins. He has served as the industry's mouthpiece and attack dog for years.

When he was asked during his Environment and Public Works Committee confirmation hearing to explain his dealings with the fossil fuel industry through secretive, dark money groups that he operated, which have been tied to specific companies he would be charged with regulating should he be confirmed, he provided misleading, incomplete, and evasive answers.

So we submitted substantive followup questions, asking him to set the record straight. Once again, he chose to provide evasive and empty responses. Right now, his record is a black hole of special interest secrecy about his dark money links to the fossil fuel industry. That ought not to be acceptable to anybody in the Senate.

We have a constitutional duty to provide advice and consent on administration nominations. Any Senator who believes that Congress should have a role in overseeing this administration should take note of this. In response to questions following up on Pruitt's hearing, rather than providing information sought by the committee, he instructed the Senate to file open records act requests for the information with the State of Oklahoma.

If Pruitt is willing to tell Senators who are poised to vote on his nomination to go to the back of a very long, first-come, never-served line to learn more about his conflicts of interest, I can hardly imagine how unresponsive he will be when Congress asks for information about changes he wants to make to the renewable fuel standard, changes he wants to make to clean air protections, changes he wants to make to our clean water protections or to toxic regulations.

By the way, he has stonewalled for more than 2 years, producing 3,000 emails between him and his office and identified fossil fuel companies and front groups--stonewalled an open records request for 2 years. His office admits there are at least 3,000 of them. Of the 3,000 emails between him and the fossil fuel industry that his office has admitted exist, how many do you suppose he has produced for the Environment and Public Works Committee--out of 3,000? Pick a number. I will tell you what the number is: zero; not one.

The party that for a long time had a really determined interest in emails suddenly has no interest in these emails at all. Emails? What emails? If it is fossil fuel companies on the other end of the emails, suddenly it does not matter. Pruitt does not want the Senate and the American people to know

about his dealings with his polluter patrons. But we should know. It is our job to know. The public should know--but not when it is fossil fuels.

President Trump also nominated Senator Sessions of Alabama as Attorney General, the position responsible for enforcing Federal environmental laws, like the Clean Air Act. He has invented the notion that the sky is not right in Alabama for solar power, saying, ``In my home State of Alabama, one would think we have a good bit of sunshine, but in truth, we have a lot of clouds, and solar is not effective in our area.''

In a 2015 interview with the Family Research Council, Senator Sessions said he was not even sure that global warming exists. That same year in a hearing with the EPA Administrator, Senator Sessions claimed that ``carbon pollution is CO2, and that's not really a pollutant; that's a plant food, and it doesn't harm anybody except that it might include temperature increases.''

This is the man who wants to be Attorney General of the United States, who says he is going to follow the law. There is a Supreme Court case on point that says carbon is a pollutant. What does he say? Carbon pollution is CO2, and it is not really a pollutant. That is just plain not the law.

By the way, try telling my Rhode Island fishermen, whose stocks are disappearing from the warming waters off our coast, that CO2 does not harm anybody. Trying telling it to Senator Merkley's shell fishermen in Oregon who have had shellfish hatcheries wiped out by acidified seas coming in.

I asked Senator Sessions at the confirmation hearing whether, as Attorney General, he would make decisions in environmental cases based on scientifically accepted facts. Senator Sessions, to his credit, responded that he would and said that the ``theory'' of global warming ``always struck me as plausible.''

Well, if he is confirmed, he will have to hold a lot of these fossil fuel companies accountable under our environmental laws, and I hope he will familiarize himself with the science that he committed to follow because I intend to hold him to his pledge.

Last, over at the Department of Energy, Trump chose former Governor Rick Perry of Texas, a one-time Presidential candidate who campaigned on eliminating altogether the Department he now hopes to lead. Perry also does not accept the scientific consensus on climate change.

He has said:

Historically in Texas we've always had substantial periods

of drought. World temperatures have also been changing for

millennia. I truly believe the science is not settled on the

issue of man-made global warming.

Well, he had not checked with Texas universities when he said that. He was the Governor of Texas. He has not even checked with his own universities.

I went down to Texas. I had a hearing with climate scientists from the major Texas universities. They came in and said what they knew: It is real. It is coming. We are already seeing it. It is important. We have to get ahead of it. It is caused by CO2. We can solve that. Let's get to work.

It is not a complicated message. It is coming from his home-State universities.

Why would a Governor not follow the message of science developed and propagated by his own home-State universities? Why? Because the fossil fuel industry is so powerful that it will not let people recognize the truth. In the confirmation, Perry continued to hedge his bets. He said:

I believe the climate is changing. I believe some of it is

naturally occurring, but some of it is also caused by man-

made activity. The question is how do we address it in a

thoughtful way that does not compromise economic growth, the

affordability of energy or American jobs.

Well, if Governor Perry were actually being thoughtful about it, he would heed economic analyses like the Risky Business Project that show if we don't address climate change in a serious way, worsening storms, rising seas, warmer temperatures, and other extreme weather events will cost the United States billions of dollars. Just ask the insurance industry. In fact, ask our own CBO who testified today that these are concerns we need to look at.

President Trump's Cabinet nominees should be working for the American people. But their public records show that they are more likely to listen to the Koch brothers, to ExxonMobil, to Devon Energy, to Murray Energy, to the special interests and the fossil fuel industry, and that they will not listen to our military, they will not listen to our national labs, they will not listen to NASA, even though they have that rover driving around on Mars and presumably know a little something about science. They are more likely to protect the profits of polluters than protect the health of Americans.

Mr. President, there is too much at stake here to let Washington sink into the polluters' swamp. This whole scenario is an embarrassment to our country. It is going to be a lasting stain on our national reputation.

Bringing us back to this Congressional Review Act, here we go again. The Congressional Review Act action was brought to benefit coal company polluters at the expense of our natural heritage, our children, and our common good, just so they don't have to clean up the mess they left behind, just so they don't have to clean up ruined public streams. It is just the latest demonstration that in this Congress, fossil fuel is king, doesn't care for our future, doesn't care for anything but what goes into its own pockets, and it is a disgrace.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, Republicans in Congress have been on the warpath for a long time to repeal the Affordable Care Act. In fact, in this new Congress, their first order of business has been to pave the way for dismantling this law. Despite the fact that 20 million Americans have gained health insurance coverage thanks to this law, despite people no longer being denied coverage for preexisting conditions, despite big savings in health care costs, and despite everyone with insurance being able to access important preventive health services for free, my Republican colleagues have decided to repeal it. And, after 7 years to get ready, they have no replacement, not even a path to a replacement at this point.

Yes, they are set on repealing a law that has provided both health and financial security to millions of Americans, with no replacement in sight, just at this point some empty IOU for some future piece of legislation that may or may not be any good. It is a little like being asked to jump out of an airplane without a parachute and being told: Trust us. We will build the parachute for you before you hit the ground.

We don't know what this nonexistent Republican replacement would look

like, but we sure do know what a repeal would do; it would gut health insurance premium tax credits that help millions of Americans obtain health insurance they could not otherwise afford. It would unwind an expansion of the Medicaid Program that covers millions more Americans in some 30 States that have chosen to participate, casting tens of millions of Americans--men, women, and children--out of their health insurance.

At the same time, it would deliver an enormous tax boon to millionaires and billionaires, as usual for Republicans, by repealing the revenue we used to pay for ObamaCare. This tax boon is a 16-percent reduction in the taxes owed by millionaires and billionaires on their investment income.

Republicans want to take health insurance away from tens of millions of ordinary Americans and simultaneously reward those at the very top of the income pile with a big tax benefit. So much for all the talk we have heard from Republicans about the deficit.

At least in Rhode Island, the Affordable Care Act is working. The law launched accountable care organizations that are improving care while lowering costs. In Rhode Island, Coastal Medical and Integra Community Care Network--two primary care-focused ACOs--are not only driving down per person health expenditures but achieving high marks on quality and on patient experience. In total, Coastal has saved $24 million over 3 years and Integra has saved $4 million in its first year as an ACO.

The Affordable Care Act also has protected seniors from the dreaded drug price doughnut hole, and I can tell you I heard a lot about the doughnut hole from seniors in Rhode Island when I was running for the Senate. The Affordable Care Act has protected families where someone had a chronic condition and couldn't get insurance, and the Affordable Care Act has prevented insurers from throwing customers off coverage when they get sick.

It is true that some of the health insurance exchanges haven't attracted enough competition. We can fix that. Indeed, to help with that issue, Senators Brown, Franken, and I are today introducing the Consumer Health Options and Insurance Competition Enhancement Act, or the CHOICE Act, to add a public health insurance option to the health insurance exchanges. This public option would guarantee that consumers always have an affordable, high-quality option when shopping for health insurance and a strong health care fallback when markets fail.

ObamaCare may not be perfect, but it has done an awful lot of good. Millions of Americans who lacked insurance now have it, and the rate of uninsured Americans has fallen to 8.6 percent, about half of what it was in 2010. Projected Federal health care costs are down nearly $3 trillion.

Instead of demolishing a system that works well for millions of Americans with no replacement on the horizon, let's use our proposal to make it better. Let's add a public option to our health insurance exchanges.

Mr. President, if I could address another topic now and ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 15 minutes in morning business.