Floor Statements

Madam President, I am here to speak to the nomination of David Wright to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and to express my opposition. Not only will I be casting my vote against the nomination of Mr. Wright, but I truly urge all of my colleagues, Republican and Democrat alike, to do the same, at least until things settle down at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

At his hearing, I had intended to vote for Mr. Wright and to support a speedy confirmation through the Senate. But things started going haywire at the NRC. Mr. Wright has the qualifications to serve on that Agency and assured us that he wanted to bring expertise, competence, and independence to the Agency--or I should say, protect the expertise, competence, and independence of that Agency.

The background here is that Congress created the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to be an independent Agency to regulate nuclear facilities and materials. And when Congress did that, we deliberately separated it from the Department of Energy, and we have protected, for years, that as an important firewall.

Well, where are we now? The DOGE boys and the Department of Energy are infiltrating the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, compromising its integrity, its competence, and its mission. If you support expanding America's nuclear energy, this situation should alarm you. Even now, right now as I speak here, conditions aren't getting better at the NRC. After we pointed this out, they are still deteriorating.

While Mr. Wright committed to Congress that he would promote NRC's full authority and retain qualified staff and fulfill the Agency's commitment to the safe use of nuclear energy, that is not what we are seeing. What we are seeing is a DOGE-DOE detailee who has entered the top ranks over at the Agency without any Nuclear Regulatory Commission supervision. He is just planted over there, reporting to who knows who but, presumably, the Energy Secretary who is supposed to be on the other side of that firewall.

This DOGE-DOE detailee has been up to some bad business over there. He has been pushing out the Agency's top experts. Expertise in nuclear science and nuclear safety is a pretty precious commodity. People who worked there for years--for decades--are being shoved out. He has been pursuing reductions in force when, at this moment, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission needs more staff and help than ever.

And he has been pulling tricks like sidelining the general counsel over there to put her out of the equation--she, who must be approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission--and slip in a DOGE- and Department of Energy-driven, so-called chief counsel who the NRC hasn't approved and doesn't have to approve.

So the way we set it up was the Commission would pick its counsel, would have to approve it. And that person is being sidelined--the woman is being sidelined--so this other character can come in a slightly different role that doesn't require the approval of the Commission and just elbow her out. This guy is a fossil fuel lawyer. He doesn't know anything about nuclear energy except that it competes with fossil fuel. There is no good reason for that shift and a lot of bad reasons.

So my suspicions are up. All of this interference is threatening the NRC's independence and credibility at a time when the NRC's independence and credibility matters so much as we try to meet our unprecedented new demand for nuclear power.

I say this as a longtime champion of nuclear reform. I have been the top Democrat--the lead Democrat--on all of the nuclear reform bills that we have passed. It started with the Innovation Act with Senator Crapo. We went on to the Innovation and Modernization Act with Senator Barrasso and, most recently, the ADVANCE Act with Senator Capito.

I have put a fair amount of my credibility on the line because I believe that there is a new renaissance possible with nuclear power because of the small modular reactors and the safety components that can be done when you are building the same thing repeatedly and can test and test for safety; and the next-gen nuclear power that can be far safer than the older stuff and, if done right, could even burn through the nuclear waste stockpile, for which we have no other use, to provide a value power, clean power out of what is now a liability-- nuclear waste.

We really do have a huge opportunity in this industry. The industry is responding. People are hiring. People are going back to school. This is really happening, and I want to it happen. I want it to succeed.

So it is really dumb for the Trump administration to be recklessly interfering with the NRC right now. It ought to be as offensive to Senator Capito, Senator Crapo, Senator Barrasso as it is to me. Supporting America's nuclear industry has been a bipartisan project, and it is working. The NRC has moved. It has changed. These new projects are moving forward, the small modulars and the next gen. Things are happening over there.

It is not like they have fouled it up and now deserve to be taken over by DOGE characters--who don't know anything about nuclear power-- and by the Department of Energy. We are busting a thing that is working by doing this, and it doesn't seem to be a sensible plan other than the Department of Energy would like something else to run, even though they are supposed to be a firewall, and the DOGE people want stuff to wreck. But the DOE wanting something to run and DOGE wanting something to wreck is not a justification.

So to send a signal, I will be voting against Mr. Wright. And if--if, if, if--we could get a few votes to actually stop this nomination--not for long; just long enough to send a signal to the Department of Energy: Hands off the NRC; you are not supposed to cross that firewall, and the NRC itself: Hey, wake up; stand up and get those DOGE folks out of your shop, and to the nuclear industry, a burgeoning industry right now: Hey, defend the regulator upon whose credibility you depend,

then I think we could make some real progress.

So this is not just an angry shout against an incompetent nominee. I have done that. This is trying to protect an important Agency because it is essential to accomplishing a key bipartisan goal to renew America's nuclear industry safely and productively.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the Trump corruption of the Environmental Protection Agency continues apace, so I am here today in opposition to the nomination of Aaron Szabo to serve as the Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation over at EPA.

The Constitution provides the President the power to nominate ministers and officers of the United States and the Senate advice and consent power over his nominees.

I think we probably agree that the Constitution means something, that advice and consent is not a mere rubberstamp. But when a nominee comes before your committee, they should provide straight answers to questions. Well, this nominee dodged our questions and then doubled down with more obfuscation when we gave him a chance to clarify through questions for the record. That alone should be sufficient reason to withhold consent until proper answers are obtained.

This character Szabo is credited by name as a contributor to the EPA chapter of Project 2025, the extremist, rightwing, fossil fuel-funded blueprint for dismantling the Federal Government, which President Trump is now dutifully implementing. Some of the environmental highlights from Project 2025? Weaken the Clean Air Act by reversing the endangerment finding. Purge the Agency and bring to its staff ``trauma.'' In case you aren't keeping score at home, EPA Administrator Zeldin is already hard at work on these.

Szabo was an advisor to the America First Policy Institute--the Trump-aligned think tank funded by fossil fuel and aligned with Big Oil interests. He worked as a lobbyist, pushing the interests of major polluters like members of the American Petroleum Institute. Well, chief on the wish list of his former clients is rescission of the EPA's endangerment finding. That is a 2009 evidence-based determination that greenhouse gases are, in fact, harmful to human welfare and the environment. When that rule was adopted back in 2009, it had actually already been settled scientific fact for decades that greenhouse gases harmed the public and the environment. Now, 16 years later, the evidence has only gotten stronger, and the looming economic dangers of climate collapse have only gotten more evident. The only people who benefit from repealing the endangerment finding are the planet's biggest polluters--Mr. Szabo's former clients.

To me, Mr. Szabo's recent work and professional affiliations should also render him unfit for the role to which he has been nominated. Is this really what we want for the EPA? Is this really how we protect clean air--by helping polluters rule the roost?

It gets worse.

When questioned at his hearing about his ties to Trump's donors' extreme anti-environmental agenda, Szabo provided obfuscatory answers. He acknowledged that he was a contributor to Project 2025, which he could hardly fail to do since his name was on it, but he stated that he kept no records--no records--of his contributions to that effort. He was asked whether he had no records because he never had any or because he had deleted them. He couldn't answer. He bumbled, stumbled, bobbed, weaved, dodged, and, ultimately, refused to answer, although he did concede that some of the advice he had provided was written advice.

Following up with subsequent QFRs on the topic, we got from Mr. Szabo a sudden response, albeit one that does not seem credible, particularly in light of his previous inability to answer the question.

He wrote:

Like millions of other Americans, I have been the subject

of attempts to steal personal information through electronic

means. I, like many federal government employees, had their

completed Standard Form 86, titled ``Questionnaire for

National Security Positions,'' stolen in 2015 that included

sensitive information. I periodically delete old messages and

documents that are no longer necessary to help ensure privacy

and security to my family, those I interact with, and myself.

Seriously? Szabo had plenty of time to provide that response during his confirmation hearing, but he never mentioned anything of the sort. His contribution to the anti-environmental portion of Project 2025 is hard to connect with any issues of family, privacy, and security.

To be clear, this is not entirely about whether you approve or disapprove of Project 2025. What is relevant here is the extreme degree of evasiveness in answering or, more exactly, not answering our questions. Senators are constitutionally obligated to provide advice and consent on the President's nominees. So we should demand better than this in the people we confirm to serve in the most senior positions in our government. The current status of ``dodge `em'' in our nomination hearings is a disgrace.

Beyond Mr. Szabo's own questionable qualifications and his deceptiveness and his troublesome testimony, we also cannot ignore the full-on corruption of the EPA on behalf of Trump's polluting

fossil fuel donors--corruption well underway. I already mentioned the endangerment finding, but there is more. Proposed deregulatory efforts will make cars dirtier and less fuel-efficient. Why? So Trump's donors in the oil industry can sell more gasoline. They will let powerplants and oil and gas facilities spew more carbon dioxide and methane without limits. Why? So Trump's fossil fuel political donors can sell more oil and gas to those facilities. The EPA is even attempting to shut down the program that keeps track of how much carbon pollution industrial facilities emit.

See no evil. Hear no evil.

The Trump corruption train rolls on, and to allow one of the architects of the EPA section of that fossil fuel-funded Project 2025 free rein to dismantle an office that is so central to the Agency's core mission and to the protection of all our constituents will do nothing to help anyone except the interests of the polluters who fund President Trump and, if I may add, the Republican Party.

I will vote no on his nomination, and I strongly urge my colleagues to do the same for a multiplicity of good reasons.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, there is a legend about a woman who finds an injured snake by the side of the path, and she picks it up to take care of it. She brings it home. She cares for it. She feeds it. She nurtures it. It heals. She takes it back to put it back into where she found it. And as she does so, it bites her. And as its venom goes through her veins and she is dying, she asks the snake: Why did you bite me? I cared for you. I fed you. I nurtured you. I saved your life when you were wounded.

And the snake said: It is my nature. You knew that when you saved me.

For many of us, to our colleagues, this is a ``mark my words'' moment about an individual who will continue to disgrace himself and the rule of law if we put him on the bench. We know that because, in 6 short months at the Department of Justice, he has been involved in three significant instances of prosecutorial misconduct--not little technical violations of a rule but truly grotesque abuse of a prosecutor's powers.

Not long ago, my Republican colleagues would have prevented even the nomination of a character like this, somebody with a lawless character for the bench.

The mad dash to jam through this nominee, first in the Judiciary Committee and now on the floor of the U.S. Senate, is a new low for the way this body handles its responsibility to vet these lifetime appointments.

Let's go through the prosecutorial misconduct instances. This is a nominee who told a room full of DOJ lawyers that if the courts didn't back off on restricting unlawful deportations, they would have to tell courts--I won't use the word on the Senate floor--``f you.''

We know he said it. We know he said it because it is abundantly corroborated in realtime communications among the lawyers present who heard him say it. They talk about the ``f you'' comment in contemporaneous texts in that very matter. You really don't get--I am looking at a bunch of lawyers around here--you really don't get better corroboration than that. That is the corroboration that you take to the defense counsel and say: Maybe you should think about pleading this case out.

Why would colleagues think someone who would tell courts ``f you,'' someone who does not believe a judge's rulings need to be followed, is fit to be a judge?

We are also on solid ground concluding that this character lied to us about it in committee. He said he didn't recall. That is a heck of a memory lapse, telling a room full of Department of Justice lawyers that they should be ready to tell courts ``f you.''

Somehow--somehow--he seemed to know that he would get away with it, that he would not be forced by the majority to actually answer our questions.

He also said he never instructed anyone to disobey a court order. Too cute by half. What he said was: They should be prepared to violate a court order.

And, by the way, they did. This is all consistent with his lawless character.

He also cooked up an improper deal in a criminal case against the mayor of New York where they were going to hang a suspended criminal prosecution--well-founded and grounded--over the head of the mayor to assure his cooperation with the Trump immigration agenda in his city.

You don't do that as a prosecutor. That is unimaginably bad abuse of that power.

We had the corroboration in the first instance. What do we have here?

We have his own DOJ colleague calling this effort a quid pro quo, calling it an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case. That was the deal, the arrangement that was reached.

And that colleague, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, then resigned rather than go through with the rotten deal.

Not enough corroboration? Trump's border czar Tom Homan admitted the scheme. He went on FOX News with Mayor Adams and said--I am quoting here, so excuse some of the language:

If he doesn't come through, I'll be back in New York City

and we won't be sitting on the couch. I'll be in his office,

up his butt saying ``Where the hell is the agreement we came

to?''

The agreement--the agreement to hold back a prosecution in order to force the mayor to go along with the immigration agenda.

Not enough? OK. This nominee separately tried to confect a fake criminal investigation to allow an improper seizure of funds that Congress had appropriated, obligated, and disbursed to the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.

You don't invent fake prosecutions. In this case, his office, the U.S. Attorney's Office, said: There is no there there. We can't sign that pleading.

He drove out the criminal chief. The rest of the lawyers also refused to sign. The U.S. attorney went in himself, all by himself, just a political appointee, no Federal prosecutorial experience, no idea what he was doing. The magistrate judge shot him down.

Each one of those things is a giant red flag in the Department of Justice, and they all attach to this case.

A principle that prosecutors follow is that you must not publicly disparage subjects of your investigation. It is enough that you have the law on your side and the power of prosecution to bring them to justice. You don't throw on a larding of disparagement. Bove's client in that matter, the EPA Administrator, made repeated public statements accusing the fund and its administrators of being ``corrupt'' and ``criminal'' and engaging in ``kickbacks,'' ``theft,'' and ``graft.'' These accusations are defamatory, per se, under the common law.

This person led these truly evil abuses of DOJ's powers. It is his nature.

Those are the problems with the nominee. Now let's look at the problems with the process that got him here. First, in the Judiciary Committee, he was prelicensed to refuse to answer questions. The committee, the majority, conceded something that Congress has never conceded before: that deliberative process and attorney-client privilege overcome our constitutional powers of oversight and advice and consent.

Senator Kennedy and I noted this in our bipartisan report on Executive privilege back in 2022. Here is our quote:

Congress maintains that all other components of executive

privilege--

Besides Presidential communications, which was at issue--

that the executive branch recognizes--including

deliberative process and attorney-client privilege--are not

constitutionally grounded and therefore cannot supervene

Congress's oversight authority.

To grease Bove through the committee, they threw all that history out the window. And having made that astounding concession, they then didn't even follow the rules for assertions of these supposed privileges, neither as to their scope where they apply and don't apply, nor as to what it takes to actually claim them.

These privileges need to be asserted, and the witness never actually asserted them. He probably didn't actually assert them because as a lawyer he knows they didn't actually pertain, and he would have been mocked and criticized for asserting those privileges in this circumstance.

He knew from the free pass he had been given not to answer questions that he didn't have to answer, and he didn't have to make the assertions. With his nonanswers blessed in advance, he hid behind vague claims of inappropriateness.

That is not a privilege; that is not a defense.

Attorney-client privilege and deliberative process privilege, even if they pertain here, don't apply to administrative decisions within a department. And deliberative process--indeed, any Executive privilege-- does not apply where the allegation is misconduct. We just went through the three instances of prosecutorial misconduct.

Again, from my report with Senator Kennedy, quoting the DC Circuit here:

The privilege ``disappears altogether when there is any

reason to believe government misconduct occurred.''

The only Executive privilege that Congress does recognize also requires proximity to the President. It is not applicable in ordinary Agency administration, and the President must invoke it, and he didn't.

The Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General even showed up at the hearing to give committee Republicans the eyeball. The result was a hearing that more resembled a racketeering from ``The Godfather'' than a nominations hearing from a circuit court of appeals judgeship.

One last point, while this mischief is going on in the Judicial Committee and on the Senate floor, something else is going on. This is a two-ring circus, and the second ring is over at the DC Circuit Court of Appeals where Trump Judges Rao and Katsas, over objection, stopped the court hearing into Bove's potential contempt in the deportation cases. Obviously, there in court, under oath, real answers would be achieved.

The administrative stay procedure those Trump judges use usually only last days. Justice Barrett recently chided a court for an administrative stay that lasted 2 weeks. These two Trump judges have blocked Bove's contempt hearing for 3 months.

If my colleagues keep rubberstamping Trump's lawless nominees, he will just continue lowering the bar, further degrading the judicial system.

This has the earmarks of a coordinated play, and I suspect very much that we have not heard the end of this as facts continue to come out in future Judiciary Committee investigations and in the contempt hearing of Judge Boasberg.

I yield the floor.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I rise today to celebrate and wish a very happy 90th birthday to Paula Bradley, who serves as a senior field representative in my Providence office. Paula has served in the Federal workforce for 30 distinguished years, first for former Congressman Patrick Kennedy before joining my team in 2011.

Paula is a fixture in senior communities all across the State of Rhode Island. She is a walking encyclopedia of the State and Federal programs available to help our seniors. And she is a tireless advocate when redtape gets in the way of a senior accessing their hard-earned benefits. From restoring interrupted Medicare coverage, to reinstating Social Security benefits, to facilitating a ride or a Meals on Wheels delivery, Paula consistently gets results when called into action.

Paula is beloved by the seniors she assists and the senior center staffs she interacts with on a daily basis. She is an excellent listener, quick to remember faces and names, and is always checking back in with her seniors to ensure their problems remain resolved. She is loved and admired by my staff for the care with which she treats her seniors and the hopeful spirit she embodies.

A proud Portsmouth resident, Paula has generously devoted herself to volunteer service in her local community on Aquidneck Island. Though Paula has never sought publicity for her hard work, she recently received a 2024 Vision Award from the East Bay Community Action Program for decades of service in their Retired and Senior Volunteer Program. Kim Wetherald, East Bay Community Action Program's director of volunteer services, said it best: ``Paula makes things happen for people.''

I know how important Rhode Island's senior community is to Paula, but nothing is more important to her than her beloved husband Dale; her children Mary-Ellen, Bill, Peter, and Paul; her grandchildren Jennifer, John, Stephanie, James, Andrew, Brad, and Veronica; and her many great- grandchildren.

Thank you, Paula, for your dedication to the people of Rhode Island. My team, Ocean State seniors, and our State as a whole are better off because of your decades of exceptional service. I wish you all the best as you celebrate with your cherished family and friends. Happy birthday, my friend.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, as ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, I wish to correct the record on one small piece of the big, terrible bill that the Senate barely passed last week and which the President signed into law on July 4. There are many things to say about that legislation, and I will continue to daylight concerning provisions buried in it over the coming weeks.

But today, I want to focus on section 60002 of the so-called ``One Big Beautiful Bill Act,'' which repealed and rescinded all unobligated funds from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. There has been some spin put on this section, including in court filings. And so I aim to fix some misconceptions, with the help of the Congressional Budget Office and the relevant Republican House subcommittee chair.

I have spoken a lot about the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund over the past several months, on the floor and in the Judiciary and Environment and Public Works Committees. Most of the time, I have focused on the many red flags raised by outrageous behavior of top DOJ and EPA officials in their attempts to claw back nearly $20 billion in grant funds that were awarded in April 2024 and fully dispersed into private bank accounts by August. After terrorizing grantees with false allegations of fraud and trying to open bogus criminal cases that went nowhere, EPA froze and then announced the termination of these fully obligated and dispersed grants. The grantees, rightfully, sued EPA for these arbitrary and capricious actions. The dispute is being actively litigated in the D.C. circuit.

The Justice Department continues its mischief. On July 3, 2025, DOJ ran to the court with news of the repeal and rescission of unobligated funds from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, claiming that this was Congress rescinding a full $17 billion, including all of what EPA claimed to terminate on March 11, 2025. That simply is not so. The DOJ reads too much into the repeal of Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund language. Two pieces of evidence support my contention here.

First, when this provision came up through the Environment and Public Works Committee, it was ``scored'' by the Congressional Budget Office. That means the Congressional Budget Office provided an estimate of the funds saved by rescinding unobligated funds. The CBO score for rescinding all unobligated funds from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, as provided to us by the majority on June 24, 2025, was $19 million. That is 19 with an m, not a b. CBO confirmed, further, that the repeal of the program language did not create any additional savings. The repeal and rescission together only saved the $19 million EPA had remaining to oversee the program. All of the grant funding was out the door, in private bank accounts, and in some cases, tied up in firm legal commitments with third parties. At no point in our discussions with the majority, directly or in our several conversations with the Parliamentarian, was this score disputed.

The majority did express concern about EPA prevailing in litigation and suddenly having nearly $20 billion back and, for this reason, pushed to repeal the language. But the fact of the matter is, section 60002 only rescinded EPA's administrative dollars and not a cent of the grant funding.

Second, Republicans made clear that rescissions from environmental grant programs only touched funding that had not yet gone out the door. During the markup of the Energy and Commerce Committee title for the House version of this bill, the chair of the Environment Subcommittee Mr. Griffith of Virginia made the following statements:

On page 244, lines 5959-64:

I just want to point out that these provisions that we are

talking about only apply as far, as this bill is concerned,

to the unobligated balances. So if a grant was already given,

as far as this bill is concerned, then that would still be

going forward.

On page 244, lines 5968-70:

If the grant has already been granted and the money is

obligated, then this--then our language does not affect that.

On pages 247-48, lines 6055-57:

. . . [W]e can't rescind expenditures that have already

been obligated.

Neither CBO nor Republican Members understood the repeal and rescission of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund to save anything more than EPA's unspent oversight dollars. Not a cent of the grant funding was touched by section 60002. Wishful thinking on the part of DOJ does not moot the ongoing litigation.

I ask unanimous consent that the June 21, 2025, CBO score for the Environment and Public Works title, including section 2, the repeal and rescission of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, as well as excerpts from the House Energy and Commerce Committee markup transcript be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, first of all, thank you, Senator Murkowski.

I rise today for the 300th time with my trusty, increasingly battered ``Time to Wake Up'' chart to try to rouse this Chamber to the looming dangers caused by fossil fuel pollution.

I am not sure whether this is a triumph of persistence or an exposition of failure or a little bit of both. I will say that Speaker Pelosi, whom I admire immensely, called out my persistent

and relentless work on climate. But on the other hand, it is hard, given our peril, not to feel a bitter sense of failure about where we are.

The arc of these speeches has gone from climate science and warnings through effects in oceans and specific localities, particularly red State localities, to the political obstruction that went toxic in 2010, and then from that political obstruction through to the climate denial apparatus behind it, and behind that, to the dark money from the creepy billionaires who have been driving the obstruction, and then an exploration into essentially the covert op of climate denial and dark money and Supreme Court capture.

The result is that we have been through some eras along the way. Era No. 1 would be the science era which lasted quite a long time. By the way, God bless the scientists. They got it right. Even the Exxon scientists got it right. Then, that era ended, and the era of climate politics began. That is what has been the bitter failure.

We have badly let down our people with the failure in Congress to do anything significant about climate. As a result of that failure, we have now entered the era of consequences, when the stuff that was so predicted is now starting to actually happen in people's lives.

So I want to focus today on how and why we are where we are in this era of well-predicted consequences and political failure, and that takes us to this covert op that I briefly described.

It is entirely possible that history will show that the three most consequential disasters for America in our lifetimes were the capture of the Supreme Court by rightwing billionaires, the influx into our elections of floods of corrupting special interest dark money, and the success of the fossil fuel climate denial operation at blockading solutions to the fossil fuel emissions crisis.

It is entirely possible that fossil fuel interests were the driving force behind all three disasters. Indeed, it is likely.

What makes these disasters the three worst is that their damage will be lasting, and perhaps even irrecoverable. Our common failure in all three disasters as Democrats was showing up too late. Each of these disasters was a victory for the insidious political forces behind the Court's capture, behind the corrupting dark money operation, and behind the climate denial fraud. Remember, those disasters didn't ``happen.'' They were done. And much of the work done by those insidious political forces was covert and clandestine.

But there were plenty of signals of what was going on to anyone paying attention. If you paid attention to the Court-capture scheme and the dark money operation and the climate fraud, you would quickly notice the overlap of the shadowy political forces behind all three.

You would notice the common thread: fossil fuel. Think of all three special interest campaigns as a single covert operation. A covert op run against America by forces within our country, an enemy within of creepy billionaires, fossil fuel interests, and far-right foundations, determined to impose on the country a blighted and unpopular vision that they could never achieve democratically.

Up against a covert power-seizing plan like that, you need to move fast; you need to engage early. If you wait too long, you will show up too late. Why did we always show up too late? It wasn't because these disasters were minor matters. A captured Supreme Court puts an entire branch of government under hidden political control, with no electoral remedy to its bad decisions thanks to lifetime appointments of the captured Justices. Capture of our Supreme Court has caused lasting damage already, deforming our constitutional order. The same interests always winning is observable, as is the statistical improbability of that, that it degrades faith in the Court.

Capture rocks the Court from within. A billionaire gift program to reward the most amenable Justices with lifestyles of the rich and famous twisted the Court into knots as it tried to prevent facts from coming out, even potential tax cheating, and to defeat any real ethics code.

That is all a devilish and rotten business in a great Republic. As to dark money, well, dark money influence has corrupted Congress, and dark money political spending denies citizens--American citizens--the basic information they need to do their constitutional job of policing the public square. Knowing who is out, doing what to whom is essential.

Well, the donors and the candidates and the party leadership, they all know the players in the game. Donors don't spend billions without making sure the politicians know. It is America's citizenry that is left in ignorance. What citizens do see and feel is that they are not being listened to. They don't matter so much anymore, not when tens of millions of dollars of secret funds can be dumped into an election by a billionaire.

Politicians are drawn to the money, inevitably. Remember the famous saying:

Money is the mother's milk of politics.

Climate denial fraud may be the worst of the three. Climate denial fraud success may have cost us our children's futures--the looming physical catastrophes made inevitable by fossil fuel pollution, damaging Earth's natural systems. They are first prefigured economically in insurance markets, and it is happening. Insurance markets are seeing what is coming.

Unlike fossil fuel, the insurance industry can't lie about our future. Insurers are under a fiduciary obligation, reinforced by trillions of dollars in bets, to predict future risk honestly and well, and they are telling us that an economic storm is coming, driven by climate upheaval. The leading edge of that economic storm is already upon us in homeowners' property insurance markets melting down in Florida and other coastal and wildfire risk areas. We are heading into that storm unprepared while being lied to at industrial scale.

Three terrible things were done. Much of the scheme was covert, but there was plenty to see. So what went wrong? I would say that my party fell into a rut. We too often allowed pollsters to determine our priorities. There are uses for pollsters in politics, but pollsters should not set priorities.

Politicians worth their salt should set their own priorities, using their own judgment based on their own interactions with their own constituents and their own powers of foresight and anticipation. Those capacities are important in politics. Depending on polls can make those capacities flabby and weak.

Polling also depends on getting the questions right. When pollsters aren't asking the right questions, it leaves massive blind spots. I have seen polling presentations supposedly telling us what we should care about that didn't even ask about climate change pollution or dark money corruption.

Plus polling is inherently backward-looking, at least back to the time the survey was taken, obviously, but truly well before that into the lived experience of the polls' audience from previous months and years that informed their answers to the polling.

So polling is ``reverse Gretzky.'' It tells you where the puck was. How often have we been told in the Senate: That issue isn't very high up in importance to voters. What a dumb and irresponsible way to think. That way of thinking suffers from a huge readiness problem. By the time a captured Supreme Court reveals its bad effects in voters' lives, it is too late. The Court is captured.

By the time dark money influence invades elections, it is too late. Dark money, the sin that makes possible all the sins dark money pays for, is devilishly hard to root out.

And climate change, climate change is physics. Once that fossil fuel pollution unleashes natural forces that will destroy our climate safety, they are not always possible to call off. It is too late.

The lesson here, if you wait to fight until the polls tell you an issue is important, the battle can be over before you show up. Republicans' big donors want lower taxes for the rich, freedom for polluters to pollute for free, less safety regulation of business.

None of those results is politically popular, so Republicans use polling as a tool to manipulate and move public opinion. The purpose is dynamic. Democrats think of polls like goalposts. Show me where the goalposts are, and I will kick my policy football through those goalposts. Static. Being static fails us.

When danger looms, it is irresponsible to wait until everybody sees the danger to give warning. If it was your house on fire, would you wait around for your family to wake up and ask for your help? Of course not.

And when you are up against strategy, particularly covert strategy, you have to fight strategy with strategy. You have to prepare, not wait around. And third, if you are always meeting voters where they already are or were, they will begin to notice over time that you never have anything new to say; that they never learn anything from you; that you are not a leader but a follower of polls.

That sense of political listlessness quietly sinks in and informs the political refrain: Republicans are shameless; Democrats are spineless.

Look now at the climate mess we are in. We are sailing toward economic catastrophe, kicked off by collapsing insurance markets, followed by physical catastrophe as Earth's natural systems collapse. The fossil fuel polluters who caused this mess aren't penalized. They float instead on an economic subsidy in the United States of $700 billion per year.

That subsidy comes from getting to pollute for free, a violation of basic economic market principles. That $700 billion annual subsidy roughly reflects the annual damage fossil fuels cause, a $700 billion negative externality, as economists would say, that should be baked into the price of the product.

But Republicans in Congress desperately protect that $700 billion subsidy for their fossil fuel donors. Think of how that subsidy motivates the fossil fuel industry in politics. To protect a $700 billion annual subsidy, would you spend, say, $7 billion a year in politics defending the pollute-for-free subsidy? Seven billion dollars a year to defend $700 billion a year?

At that rate, fossil fuel's political operation is likely the most profitable facet of the entire industry. So they have an immense, well- funded, covert, purposeful operation. And we wait until the pollsters tell us the public is alert to it before we do battle? Ridiculous.

How do we recover? How do we recover from all the years we skated to where the puck was and ignored the massive fossil fuel covert op because the public hadn't seen it yet?

Well, first, we had better get on it. We have let a lot of sand run through the hourglass as we dawdled, and we lost a lot of credibility from missing those fights.

On climate, we have to face the facts. The facts are grim, and the stakes are high.

The corporate consulting firm Deloitte has estimated a $220 trillion difference in global GDP by 2070, depending on whether we succeed on climate, thereby generating $40 trillion in global economic growth, or continue failing and take a global $180 trillion economic hit. The spread is $220 trillion, and Deloitte is not the lone voice.

The Potsdam Institute has warned of a $38 trillion annual hit to global GDP by midcentury. Predictions of multitrillion dollar hits abound.

And the international Financial Stability Board just warned the global banking sector to buckle up.

The warnings focus on insurance, mortgage, and real estate markets. The Economist magazine has reported a looming $25 trillion hit just to the global real estate sector.

Fed Chair Powell testified earlier this year before the Senate Banking Committee that climate change will make insurance and, therefore, mortgages unavailable in entire regions of the United States.

Voices at Allianz and Aon have warned that climate change threatened to upend their entire industry.

The former chief economist of Freddie Mac told the Budget Committee last Congress how insurance becomes unavailable, making mortgages unavailable, driving down the value of your home. Similarly, when insurance premiums--if you can get insurance. But if the premiums double or triple, then property values fall as the carrying costs of your home dramatically increase.

Average insurance costs in Florida--$14,000 a year--predicted to double, triple, or quadruple. What does that do to the home price?

Together, the chief economist said, the crisis in insurance availability and affordability can cascade into a 2008-style economic meltdown that clobbers the entire economy.

Many of these warnings use the word ``systemic.'' Boring sounding word but perhaps the most dangerous word in the economic lexicon. It means the whole system gets hit, not just the particular sector--like 2008, or worse, 1929. Everyone suffers as the economy implodes.

The way out from this danger is clear and simple: It can't continue to be free to pollute. There must be a global price or penalty on carbon emissions. Nothing else works, not after the time we have wasted. We have squandered every other option.

``Polluter pays'' is not just the right thing to do morally and economically and environmentally, it is our last lifeboat. And it is a lifeboat the fossil fuel industry is trying to sink, even after pretending for years that that was the solution they wanted. Big surprise. They lied. Hydrocarbons and lies are their twin products.

Our best prospect on carbon pollution right now is the European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, called the CBAM. It is a tariff on the emissions associated with carbon-intensive goods like steel and aluminum that are imported into the EU.

Our scenario for success--if we still have one--is that the EU sticks to its guns and doesn't chicken out; the UK honors its commitment to join the CBAM--the two economies, by the way, just coordinated carbon prices, a key step--and Australia and Canada and Mexico and other economies follow suit.

There is actually even a sliver of Senate Republican interest in a U.S. carbon border tariff.

A price on carbon pollution in international trade, at last, moves things. It begins to offset fossil fuel's global multitrillion dollar free-to-pollute subsidy. It aligns market incentives properly, and it creates a revenue proposition--a revenue proposition for pollution reduction and carbon-capture technologies, boosting an innovation pathway to climate safety that presently does not exist.

Dark money corruption got us into this pickle, and the way out of there is also clear and simple: Pass the damn DISCLOSE Act. Require that donors over 10 grand into a political race show the public who they are. No more front groups and shell corporations.

The dark money battle is a race against time to stop the dark money influence operation before it gets its claws so deep into all three branches of government that the whole system is too corrupted to care how badly voters want transparency.

When that disclosure bill passes into law, the public will feel immediate relief. People will notice the political class beginning to turn its attention back to voters rather than to the billionaire donors and the corporate polluter elite running the foul dark money operation.

And political ads, that tsunami of slime, will diminish as real entities would have to own political messages. Many players behind the tsunami of slime will actually back off. Because once voters understand who is behind a message, sometimes, they get the joke, and you can't go forward any longer. And even if they don't back off, at least someone can be accountable for the slime and lies that permeate our politics.

Less special interest money, less slime and lies, less secrecy, voters heard again--you might call it morning in America.

Fix dark money and you break the grip of fossil fuel. Look at what fossil fuel dark money gets the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress to do for them every day. Right out of the gate, day one of his regime, Trump issued an Executive order that took wind and solar power out of the definition of ``energy.''

Forget the politics; that doesn't even comport with the dictionary.

Trump's Interior Department set out to kill offshore wind, halting the permitting process, even attempting to stop projects under construction.

Trump's Energy Department choked off loans and funding for the development and deployment of low-carbon technologies and proposed slashing research budgets at our National Labs.

Trump's Environmental Protection Agency--now better called ``Polluter

Protector Agency''--illegally terminated billions for clean energy products around the country. It set up California's Clean Air Act vehicle emissions standards to be killed by the Congressional Review Act, a gambit first floated by fossil fuel industry lawyers in an op-ed in the polluter-run Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

And to pull this off, my Republican colleagues even went nuclear: overruled the Senate Parliamentarian.

The Trump EPA announces it will repeal rules limiting air pollution from powerplants and vehicles, reverse the 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger humans, suspend the collection of emissions data--they don't even want the data?--and eliminate the social cost of carbon, the rule that quantifies that $700 billion in fossil fuel emissions harm.

In Congress--because bad things happen here as well--here is my favorite: Republicans undid our fee on excess methane emissions. You have to know that this fee only applied to emissions exceeding the industry's own industry standards. And half of those methane leaks could be eliminated at no net cost since methane--natural gas--if not leaked, can be sold. So Republicans in Congress took the side of the industry's worst leakers to relieve them of having to pay for their mess.

And just last week, Republicans passed Trump's megabill, a many- headed hydra, turning the power of government to help fossil fuel billionaires throttle their clean energy competition. This will kill thousands of jobs, cede dominance of clean energy to China, drive consumers' electric prices way higher, and turbocharge the carbon pollution that is already making insurance, groceries, and electricity more expensive.

There is one simple goal behind all of this: help Republicans' fossil fuel donors to sell more oil, natural gas, gasoline, and diesel. Every electric car that is never produced means one more internal combustion engine that will spend years consuming their gasoline. Every solar array or wind turbine that is never built will mean more of their natural gas combusted to produce electricity.

It doesn't matter to the creepy billionaires that the ownership cost of an EV are already less than those of a combustion engine or that solar power is now the cheapest form of energy there is. All that matters is the narrow self-interest of the polluting fossil fuel industry that funds and controls the Republican Party.

Every indication is that the fossil fuel industry dark money operation orchestrated the Republicans' energy agenda. Every indication is that they have burrowed into the executive branch and are running it from the inside.

Russell Vought, for instance, running OMB, has spent, essentially, his entire career on fossil fuel's dark money payroll. His counsel there is Mark Paoletta from that infamous painting of the Court fixer Leonard Leo, billionaire donor Harlan Crow, and their pet Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas from the Court capture operation.

Which brings us to the captured Court, the Court that dark money built. Freeing the Supreme Court from its captured state will not be easy. Too many Justices are willing participants in the capture scheme.

If the Supreme Court Justices wanted to redeem their Court, they could have done it already. They could do it on their own any day. But captured is as captured does; they don't want to.

It matters on climate. A rejuvenated Court would take the evidence of climate harm seriously. Over and over, the Court that dark money built has favored fossil fuel interests. For instance, it threw out the Clean Power Plan, saving industry tens of billions in compliance costs and allowing more than a dozen years of continued pollution.

Let's say that $700 billion fossil fuel subsidy number is close to right. If the Clean Power Plan would only have shaved 10 percent off the harm, that one decision cost Americans nearly $1 trillion in pollution harm. That is worth capturing the Court for if you are the fossil fuel industry.

The Court created the major questions doctrine to give the fossil fuel industry a legal weapon to stop future climate regulations. The Court withdrew the Chevron doctrine, taking away from experts in the regulatory process the benefit of the doubt.

In all these cases, the fossil fuel industry got free legal services from Republican attorneys general, undoubtedly grateful for their fossil fuel political funding. What a rotten misuse of that badge of office.

To reform the Court, Congress will have to act on two fronts. One is to require a proper ethics code for the Court, including the essential elements of proper legal process: actual factfinding and neutral decision making. Not complicated stuff. Rule of law is based on those two principles. The Justices shield themselves from both.

The present Court and its political defenders pretend that fixing this is impossible, but it is not. Every State supreme court faces the issue of administering a proper ethics code for itself, and every single one has figured it out.

Forget impossible; it is not even hard.

The problem is that the Justices--or certain of them--enjoy being the only nine people in government immune from proper ethics scrutiny. Look at that billionaire gift program, and you might see why.

They violate an ancient principle so ancient it is in Latin: ``nemo judex in causa sua''--no one should judge their own case. As an ethics scholar recently put it, it is a conflict of interest to judge one's only conflict of interest.

The public is ready for more than just real ethics, however. The present Court's legacy of scandals, destruction of precedent, doctrinal leaps, false factfinding in cases, and striking, striking patterns in what interests always win is damning. Add the unhealthy secrets--around who chose Justices and why, and around the billionaires' campaign of gifts to amenable Justices, and around tax mischief related to those gifts--and it is a mess. The public is ready for term limits and turnover.

A Court rejuvenated with regular turnover, with its secrets disclosed and a proper ethics procedure going forward, is a Court that can again merit the confidence of the American people and perform the judicial function honorably.

So can we win a pathway to climate safety, rid our politics of dark money, and liberate a captured Court? Yes, we actually can, but it won't be easy.

The successful fraud of climate denial, the insidious corruption of our politics by dark money, and the special interest capture of the Court all are political prizes that will be defended to the death by the fossil fuel industry. The fossil fuel-funded infrastructure of front groups that propagates the climate lies, that launders and funnels the dark money, and that captured and now cossets and guides the Justices will be fighting for its very survival. The front groups are many, but like keys on a piano, they are part of a larger instrument: a fossil fuel instrument of secret influence and corruption now operating our government from within. That instrument must be defanged to revive American popular democracy.

In this battle, yes, we have disadvantages. The infrastructure built for Republicans by their fossil fuel billionaire backers is immense. They can run media operations that drown us out. They have unlimited money. They plan years in advance. They have whipped the Republican Party into exceptional battle discipline.

Don't get me wrong; we have some super talent on the Democratic side. But it is ballet dancers against centurions. Ballet dancers may be better athletes than centurions, but 100 centurions against 100 ballet dancers will end predictably. We don't have much muscle memory for fighting either, as recent Democratic administrations have tended to be conflict-averse. We have been less aggressive--lambs versus wolves. The wolf doesn't much fear the bite of the lamb, and they don't much fear us.

Imagine Winston Churchill trying to defend Britain without radar or Spitfires or his war room under the streets of London. Proper defense infrastructure can be outcome-determinative, and we haven't had that.

We do have one big advantage: The whole crooked apparatus of the rightwing fossil fuel billionaires depends on secrecy to work its evils. We don't have to match fossil fuel front group for front group, propaganda mouthpiece

for propaganda mouthpiece, lie for lie, even dollar for dollar. It doesn't have to take $7 billion on our side. Our cause can win by shining a bright light on their mischief and their motives.

Americans love solving mysteries, love to hear what Paul Harvey called ``the end of the story.'' Fossil fuel has to lie and connive and hide behind masks to win. We can be truth tellers and win. People don't like being lied to. The truth--that is our superpower.

Even with that superpower, it is still not going to be easy. We have to face that there is some real work ahead of us. I was a prosecutor. You have seen the TV shows. Prosecutors investigating gangs build careful diagrams of all the gang's members, showing who reports to whom, who is connected to whom, what phone numbers and addresses we have, what evidence we have got, where they get their guns, and where they distribute the drugs. All of that goes up on the cork board.

You have to know your adversary. Intelligence Agencies do deep research into the personnel of opposing services. Know your adversary. We don't. Until recently, few Democrats even knew who Leonard Leo was-- the top operative of the billionaires' Court-capture scheme. Most Democrats couldn't pass a basic test of what front groups are arrayed against us. That is not the fault of individual Members of Congress. We have just had no war room to organize the information, no offense coordinator to plan strategy, no batters' book to tell us who can't hit inside pitches, no cork board to pin up the gang's information. Corporations do better research on rivals when prepping a corporate takeover than we did trying to defend our country from this political takeover.

The idea of a realtime, anti-fraud, climate cleanup operations center calling out the lies, following the money, and spotlighting who is behind the front groups may seem beyond our reach, but it is not. The military has had op centers for years. You have seen the Hollywood versions with the TV screens up on the walls and the satellite feeds and the drone feeds coming in. The RAF, back in World War II, had a simpler one during the Battle of Britain, with those little ships and plane models being pushed around with the long sticks on the big map table. Radar told the RAF war room when to scramble the Spitfires, where to send them, and what enemy to expect when they got there. We haven't built that--no radar, no Spitfires, no war room under London-- but we can.

Remember those three evils: the fossil fuel industry's climate denial fraud, the capture of the Supreme Court, that dark money infiltration of our politics. They didn't ``happen.'' They were all done very deliberately, using an armada of front groups and carefully scripted fakery. It is best to think of it all as a single beast--a beast that has now burrowed in and is running the government for Trump. It is a takeover by a shadow government, working for rightwing extremists and fossil fuel polluters.

If we don't see it for what it is and call it out for what it is, how can we warn people of what is happening? And if we don't warn people of what is happening, how can we possibly believe we have done our duty in this moment of peril?

Climate change makes this a battle with a ratchet. There are some things you just can't come back from. The ratchet has clicked, and there is no return. So it is urgent. It is time for us all to wake up and fight.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, in this place where big money now rules and in which fakery is now the order of the day and numbers no longer have to be real, there is one point that stands out, and that is that the fakery on the floor is belied by the language of the bill. If these assertions were true, they would not need to raise the debt limit.

All of these fun and games, all of this parliamentary mischief that is happening right now crashes into the fact that, in real markets, in the real world outside of this fakery, the debt limit is actually a real thing.

I will take a moment to read from page 754 of this midnight monstrosity, what it actually says, where it collides with the real world.

Subtitle C--Increase in Debt Limit.

Thank you, Senator Merkley.

I mentioned earlier the history of the section that the Republican Budget chairman is using to perform this multitrillion-dollar magical act of making huge, deficit-busting numbers disappear. It is called section 312. It has been used before, but it has always been minor, corrective, and bipartisan.

I mentioned earlier the adjustment that was made on a bipartisan basis to the Power Marketing Administration's numbers to return the CBO to an agreement that the Senate had previously made. That was not enormously consequential. This is almost certainly the first time you are hearing about it.

Again, in 2023, as Budget chair, with Republican Chair Jodey Arrington on the House side, we made a $105 million adjustment to a dairy program. Today, we are talking about trillions. This was a $105 million adjustment--again, bipartisan, minor, and corrective, fixing a technical issue on a bipartisan basis.

Last year, Speaker Johnson and Leader Schumer agreed to direct CBO to score a feed program with an OMB estimate, and they used this rule again--collaborating on a bipartisan basis on a matter that was minor and corrective.

Well, this is different. This is trillions, and Republicans are using this rule to pretend that it is not.

There are a lot of ways to look at who is right. Time, obviously, will tell, but this bill actually has a ``tell'' right in it. Page 754 of this bill is the reality check on whether or not they are running up the debt by trillions. We know they are running up the debt by trillions because they say so in this bill.

You can play Senate procedural fakery, you can wave magic wands around numbers all day long, but someday soon, you hit reality, and you hit reality in the real world of markets and selling Treasury bonds and having a legal debt limit.

If this did not raise the debt by trillions, they would not need to raise the debt limit by trillions.

Here is the text:

Subtitle C--Increase in Debt Limit.

Sec. 72001. MODIFICATION OF LIMITATION ON THE PUBLIC DEBT.

The limitation section 3101(b) under title 31 . . . is

increased by $5,000,000,000,000.

They are dodging the Parliamentarian's ruling by letting the Budget chair make a trillion-dollar magic-wand maneuver because they know pretty darn well what the Parliamentarian's ruling would be. And how do they know what the Parliamentarian's ruling would be? Because the answer is in their own damned bill.

I yield the floor.

Of course.

Were they on a reconciliation bill? I don't believe they were.

Would the Senator yield for a question?

When I was budget chairman and we were trying to focus, for instance, on the impending economic nightmare coming our way through climate-caused property insurance failures, what I would get is nonstop regular lectures from Republicans on the Budget Committee about how we had to take responsibility for the deficit, we had to reduce the debt. Nothing else mattered as much. It was absolutely vital.

Now, of course, we see that, as their very first shot with the power to do anything through their majority and using reconciliation, they are raising the debt, and they are raising the deficit--and not by a little but by trillions.

And I am wondering if, in the Senator's time as chairman or perhaps if in Senator Murray's time on the committee or perhaps in Senator Van Hollen's time over on the House committee, you were favored with such constant lecturing by Republicans about the debt and the deficit and how credible that all seems right now.

The bill, actually, is required to raise the debt limit by $5 trillion. So, in reality, there is a huge hit to our debt, huge additions to our deficit.

And it makes me a little bit frustrated to think back to all those lectures that I had to receive as budget chairman, which the Senator from Maryland witnessed as a longtime member of the Senate Budget Committee, which the ranking member witnessed in his time on the Budget Committee, and which Senator Murray experienced when she chaired the Budget Committee. We have been lectured to death by our colleagues. And at the very first instance when they had the power to do something about it, they went 180 in the other direction and are cranking the national debt in order to give big benefits to the rich people who fund their campaigns.

I would only add as my last words: Watch. Everybody who is here, watch as this goes forward, because we will give the Republicans a chance to reduce the increase to the debt and the deficit by peeling back just the tax cuts for the greedy billionaires.

We would be voting for working-class tax cuts, I am almost certain. We will have a chance to bring into stark focus through our amendments what really matters to the folks on the other side of the aisle. And that is the tax cuts for the superwealthy, for the billionaires, for the corporations that are offshoring jobs, and for the biggest polluters in the country. That is where their sweet spot is, and we will expose that through these votes.

Mr. President, I rise today--and I will confess, I rise today a bit angry about this bill--this bill cooked up in back rooms, dropped at midnight, cloaked in fake numbers, with huge handouts to big Republican donors. It loots our country for some of the least deserving people you could imagine.

When I first got here, this Chamber filled me with awe and wonderment. Our leader, Harry Reid, frequently called me his happiest Senator, such was the awe and wonderment that I felt here.

Today, I feel disgust. This piece of legislation is corrupt. This piece of legislation is crooked. This piece of legislation is a rotten racket. This place feels to me today like a crime scene. Get some of that yellow tape and put it around this Chamber. The midnight transfer of wealth in this bill is disgusting.

There is a backdrop here. The backdrop here is the wealth inequality in our country already, in which the wealthiest 1 percent of our population owns 30 percent of the wealth and the poorest half of our population, together, only own 3 percent of the wealth--the top 1 percent, a third of the wealth; the bottom half of the population by income, 3 percent of the wealth.

And against that backdrop, this bill transfers wealth from middle- class families to giant corporations, billionaires, and megabillionaires. And it transfers wealth from our children and grandchildren to present-day billionaires by adding $5 trillion to the debt limit to run up the debt of the country to fund the tax giveaways to these special interests and wealthy billionaires.

How do they do that? They take away healthcare from 16 million Americans and give huge tax breaks to billionaires.

Most families have someone sit down once a month and go through the bills, and you try to figure out what bills you can pay. You may not pay the whole insurance bill; you may just pay the minimum. You may not pay your whole credit card bill; you may just pay the minimum. You are aware exactly how much money you have because you need to make those payments. That is kitchen-table world.

Billionaire world is different. You have a family office. You never see bills. You don't even know how much money you have, not even to the nearest $100,000. And you don't care because you have more than you could ever spend in your life.

You could pay taxes, like regular people, but there is something about your acquisition of wealth that can't stop. So you won't pay taxes like a normal person. You demand special treatment. You pay less of a tax rate than a firefighter, for God's sake. And that is not enough for you?

Now you come here to this Senate floor wanting even more favors. You already don't know how much money you have. You could pay regular taxes, and it wouldn't take a day from sunning on your private island, a day from cruising in your private yacht, a jet trip on your private jet, a ski trip to your private chalet. Nothing in your life would change if you had to pay taxes like a regular person, but you just don't want to.

And the third is--I should add that, on the tax breaks, a lot of it goes to corporations. This bill doesn't just give big tax breaks to big corporations; it gives big tax breaks to big corporations that move jobs and investment offshore, away from America. And it just doesn't give tax breaks to corporations that move jobs and investment offshore, away from America. It gives tax breaks for doing that. It gives tax breaks for offshoring American jobs and offshoring American investment.

It is the world's worst tax policy. It takes an already-corrupted Tax Code and bends it even further in the favor of megabillionaires and big offshore corporations.

And last, what does this bill do? It causes this transfer of wealth from regular people to the wealthy. It raises your costs to raise their profits.

I am here to talk about one way that happens. Because of this bill, your electric bills will go up. The people behind this bill are counting on you not to know how that works. So I am going to take a minute here, and I am going to tell you how that works.

There are some rules for the grid about how this works. Generators who want to sell power to the grid put in a bid, and they give a price in which they will sell their electricity. You can imagine on this graph that each of these little hash marks is a different generation facility, and each has made a bid at its best price. Once it has the stack of bids, the grid manager, as the load comes onto the grid, dispatches the cheapest generators first and then goes up the stack to the more and more expensive ones. As demand rises, the costs go up. The last one that is called on--the most expensive one that is called on-- sets the price for the whole grid, and this last one, the one that is the price setter on the grid, almost always is a fossil fuel plant, OK? It is almost always a fossil fuel plant.

So, if you look at this graph, you will see here that this measures the price that is charged to put those electrons on the grid for consumers, and this is the energy demand, how much consumers are asking. What does the grid need to supply?

If you look at the top line, this is the world without renewables. This is an all fossil fuel system, let's say, a baseload nuke. OK. Throw that in. As the demand goes up, the prices go up because more and more of these generators have to come online.

Eventually, let's say you get to this point, where you have this much load on the grid and you have this much supply, and the price is set by that generator.

That is the world without clean energy. Now you add clean energy. You add renewables to this equation. What do we know about the renewables? They are almost always cheaper. They are almost never the price setter. So they fill in down here, and they fill in below the price of the fossil fuel plant. So if you have load requirement X and you live in ``fossil fuel only'' world, you are going to be paying that price for energy on the grid--all of it--because it is set by that price setter generator. But if you filled in with renewables, then you are down here for price for that much load. You are saving huge amounts of money. The grid is way more efficient with renewables in the mix.

By the time you get to the same price that you had here for load X, for fossil fuel, you are all the way out

here. You have all of this extra load served before you raise that price. That is the theory. That is how the system works.

Let's see how clean energy fits in this specific area. Let's look at Texas.

Oh, by the way, last year, 95 percent of the power that came on the grid that filled in here was clean energy. If this bill kills clean energy growth, which is its intention, then it is going to kill off the power source that provided 95 percent of what was added to the grid last year. It is going to be a big, big hit.

So let's look at the Texas grid, which is easy to talk about because it is a stand-alone grid. Somebody just did a study of the Texas grid, and they found that with renewables--and Texas is 30 percent renewables, OK? So we are in the ``with renewable'' situation. With renewables, the average price last August was $39 per megawatt hour. This was $39. Then they calculated what happened if you backed out all the solar that had been added. If it weren't for the solar driving this price down, instead of $39 per megawatt hour, it would have been somewhere between $55 and $90 per megawatt hour--a minimum $25 differential, maybe more than twice the cost.

The punch line:

Had there been no growth in solar energy between 2018 and

2024, wholesale electric prices in `24 would have been at

least 40 percent higher.

Without the clean energy growth of that 95 percent of supply that came out of the grid that was clean energy last year, electricity prices would have been 40 percent higher. And where would that 40 percent have gone? It would have gone into the pockets of the fossil fuel industry that was setting that price as everybody had to pay more and more and more.

So when you see the fossil fuel industry come here and take this shot at its clean energy competition in this bill, after having flooded that side with political money, they are going to make a fortune off of this, and consumers--consumers--will pay. That is how this bill robs you. It puts you back onto the fossil fuel side of that curve, not onto the clean energy added part of the curve, which lowers prices so dramatically.

The report concluded:

This isn't speculation or modeling; it is what actually

happened in one of America's largest electricity markets.

By the way, while the fossil fuel polluters are out trying to damage their competition by using the power of government and the influence of their dark money operation to do so, they are also damaging America's competitiveness against China.

China has already put in 25 times the solar that we are putting in onto their grid. That gives them huge advantages as they construct solar panels, design solar technologies, and offer that to the rest of the world.

We are in a world market for solar technology just like we are in a world market for electric vehicles. The fossil fuel industry's desire to destroy the American solar market and to destroy the American electric vehicle market is about as unpatriotic as you can get because it is taking these two technologies and saying: Go for it, China. We are out. We are out. Have the entire international market for solar and for energy. We are not going to compete. We are going to load up our people with new taxes. We are going to tear away the subsidies.

By the way, the fossil fuel industry that is telling you this--they are the recipients of the biggest subsidy in world history. They get $700 billion a year in the United States alone from being allowed to pollute for free. It violates market economics to pollute for free. Milton Friedman, the most conservative economist, will tell you it is not proper market theory. When somebody is polluting for free, the cost of the pollution should be in the price of the product.

So they already benefit. The fossil fuel industry already benefits from the biggest subsidy in world history--$700 billion with a ``b''-- $700 billion every single year to compete unfairly against clean energy. On top of that, they want to rip away the investments that have been made, and they want to put a new tax on clean energy, and they want to drive consumer prices back up to their fossil fuel model.

There are some really big losers in this big loser of a bill. For anybody who cares about adding $5 trillion to our national debt, that is a big loss. It comes through in interest rates for people with car loans and home loans. Healthcare--16 million people are getting chucked off their healthcare. Hospitals and nursing homes are facing receiverships as their revenues dry up from a nearly trillion-dollar hit to their revenue streams.

Taxpayers are getting clobbered by an already corrupt Tax Code that this makes even worse, for the individuals benefiting the most from the corruption of the Tax Code and who are the least deserving of our solicitude and who are the most able to pay.

I promise you there are people who will not know they even got this $300,000 individual billionaire benefit. Because they are so rich already, it won't even count.

On the flip side of the coin, if they had to pay taxes like a normal American, they wouldn't even notice that either. They would still be able to sun on their islands, cruise on their yachts, ski at their chalets, and jet on their jets. Yet we are breaking the bank to the tune of $5 trillion to take care of those people--creepy billionaires who can't even count their wealth but for some reason insist on coming to Congress and just seizing even more and looting the public trough.

Offshoring corporations get a special tax benefit for offshoring jobs and investment, moving them away from America. Remember, this was the ``America first'' agenda--but not when you look into the weeds of this crooked bill.

So creepy billionaires, offshoring corporations, and, of course, fossil fuel polluters who want to pollute have got all the money in the world. They have made massive profits. They could do their own carbon removal and make their products safer. They choose not to. They choose not to because they want to pollute, and they want to kill their competition so they can pollute more and profit more and drive up consumer prices, as I showed here.

And guess what. The creepy billionaires, the offshoring corporations, and the fossil fuel polluters--what do they have in common? Huge donors to the Republican Party. That is what this bill is about. It is not about taking care of the economy. It is not about taking care of the public. It is payback to big special interests and billionaires who provide the dark money funding that floats the Republican Party, and now they are demanding payback for the majorities that they bought.

There is a wasp that lays its larvae inside another bug, and the larvae of the wasp inside that other bug are able to take over the nervous system of that other bug. They can take over the command and control system of the bug, and they start driving the bug around from the inside. They make it do what the larvae want it to do. They make it go where the larvae want to be. They make it hang where the larvae want it to hang. And then the larvae consume it from the inside. They eat it, and they turn into the next generation of wasps.

That is a pretty good analogy for what has happened here. Those creepy billionaires, those fossil fuel polluters, those big offshoring corporations have taken over the command and control system of the Republican Party. The bug over there is being marched around by those special interests, doing exactly what it is told. And it doesn't care about the 16 million people coming off insurance, it doesn't care about the added pollution, it doesn't care about the increased costs, it doesn't care about the unfairness, and it doesn't care about making the Tax Code more corrupt because the special interests are in that bug, running that show.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I will say that I am here today because we are about to go to the motion to invoke cloture on the nomination of David Fotouhi to serve as the Deputy Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and I very much hope that colleagues will oppose his nomination because he is, essentially, 100 percent on the side of the polluters and not interested in protecting the public health or the public safety or the public's well-being.

If you think about the EPA at its most basic, its mission is to protect clean air and clean water and a safe climate. But in this guy's two jobs since law school, as a corporate lawyer and as acting general counsel of the EPA during the first Trump administration, Mr. Fotouhi has served the interests of polluting industries that do everything in their power to avoid, weaken, or kill the rules that protect our clean air, our clean water, and our safe climate. He has consistently been on the wrong side.

As a partner at a prominent law firm Mr. Fotouhi defended a raft of big polluting interests, including megapolluters Chevron and Sunoco. Now, that is just the tip of the iceberg. Other polluter clients included Aethon Energy, Cibolo Energy Partners, Energy Transfer Partners, Matador Resources Company, and ProFrac Holding.

What did he help them do? Well, he defended one company for dumping tens of thousands of tons of PFAS into drinking water. He defended tire manufacturers for poisoning salmon with their rubber additives. He defended an automobile company against claims of greenwashing concerning their so-called clean diesel cars. He defended another for failing to obtain proper permits, resulting in illegal emissions of sulfur dioxide. And he represented a major defense contractor seeking to shift responsibility onto the United States for environmental remediation necessitated by the company's release of hazardous waste. The list goes on.

As counsel and then acting general counsel at EPA during the first Trump administration, Mr. Fotouhi worked hard to repeal environmental regulations meant to protect human health and the environment by doing two primary things: First, he developed the legal justifications for these attacks; and, second, when they were challenged in court, he orchestrated the strategy to defend against those legal challenges.

Well, which regulations were involved? Actually, a lot of them: rules covering CO2 emission standards for light-duty vehicles, greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft, methane emissions from the oil and gas industry, lead and copper in drinking water, State water quality certification processes, and the management of coal combustion residuals. In other words, lots and lots of rules meant to make our air, water, and climate cleaner and safer became the targets of this individual.

Now, Mr. Fotouhi is nominated to be second in command as the Agency implements the poisonous agenda of President Trump's fossil fuel donors. Chief on those polluting donors wish list is the rescission of EPA's ``endangerment finding,'' a 2009 science-based determination that greenhouse gases are harmful to human health and the environment.

Yes, that was 2009, and when that rule was adopted, it had been settled scientific fact for decades that greenhouse gases harm public health and the environment.

Now, here we are, 16 years later, where the evidence has only gotten stronger, and the looming economic dangers have only gotten more evident, and, yet, he wants to undo that rule. The only people who benefit from repealing the endangerment finding--the only people--are the planet's biggest polluters, who just happen to be among Trump and the Republican Party's biggest donors.

Mr. Fotouhi has served those polluters' interests for years. He is their boy.

Clearly, like everyone, polluters have a right to counsel. But it remains difficult for me to understand how someone who has made a career representing the very industries that destroy our environment, defending their practices that did that damage, now has any business being entrusted to protect us. He will obviously serve their interests and not the public interests. Always has, always will. Even before Mr. Fotouhi's nomination, the corruption of EPA by Trump's polluting fossil fuel donors is already underway.

Where even to begin?

Administrator Zeldin continues his assault on clean air and clean water at what he now contemptuously calls the climate religion, contrary to his repeated and obviously false and empty promises when he came before us in committee.

The list of congressionally authorized and appropriated funding that EPA continues illegally to hold hostage is too long to list here today. Obviously, the biggest target is the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which drives Administrator Zeldin and his enablers at DOJ crazy, and it drives them to conduct that merits both legal and professional liability. I have talked about this frequently as it relates to the repeated misconduct of the unconfirmably corrupt Ed Martin over at DOJ, who is part of this scheme.

Beyond illegally blocking grants, this EPA has put the Office of Research and Development--responsible for conducting EPA's scientific research--on the chopping block with RIFs, reductions in force, and reorganizations imminent because, after all, who wants science where big polluting donors' interests are involved?

Then we have the coming onslaught of deregulatory actions, which will make cars dirtier and less fuel-efficient and more expensive for their owners to run so that Trump's big donors in the oil industry can sell more gasoline; deregulatory actions, which will let power plants and oil and gas facilities

spew more carbon dioxide and methane so Trump's fossil fuel political donors can sell more oil and gas.

EPA is even attempting to shut down the program that keeps track of how much carbon pollution industrial facilities emit. They don't even want to keep score any longer.

``Hear no evil, see no evil'' is Administrator Zeldin's motto over at the EPA.

The corruption in this administration is endless, and the corruption related to the fossil fuel industry is particularly evil and damaging. And the service of David Fotouhi in the cause of the polluters who fund Trump and the Republican Party is, in my view, completely disqualifying. On the other hand, for the polluters, it is the reason they like him.

I will vote no on his nomination, and I urge my colleagues to do the same.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am here to ask unanimous consent on

a very simple measure to make sure that the data systems of Social Security were not compromised--that no data was exfiltrated, no bugs were infiltrated, and no back doors were left in when Elon Musk and his little gang of miscreants went into Social Security.

I will talk more about this afterward, but the chairman of the Finance Committee has elsewhere to be. So I will speak after I have offered this, and he has responded. I will go directly to my unanimous consent request.

As if in legislative session, and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of my bill, S. 1943, introduced earlier today; that the bill be considered read three times and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

These remarks would ordinarily precede the exchange we just had, but as a courtesy to the distinguished chairman of the Finance Committee, we are going a little bit out of order. I will now fill in the statement that I would have made.

Senator Crapo is obviously well aware of my concerns here. As I said at the very beginning, we have reason to believe that Elon Musk and his little gang of frat boys, tech bros, miscreants--call them the ``Muskrats,'' the ``DOGE Boys''--whatever you want. They went into Social Security with bad intent.

The cover that they went in under was they were going to look for waste, fraud, and abuse. But I think we know that the waste, fraud, and abuse veil in which the ``DOGE Boys'' wrapped themselves was a fake, because if you were actually concerned about waste, fraud, and abuse, you wouldn't fire all the inspectors general.

You would actually try to recruit the inspectors general into your so-called government efficiency effort because what inspectors general do all day is actually look for waste, fraud, and abuse.

And you could go through their files and say: Here, what are the biggest areas that we should be paying attention to?

And you would work with the inspectors general. Instead, they were fired. That whole apparatus to actually seek waste, fraud, and abuse was set aside and in came the ``DOGE Boys,'' a little bit like in ``The Cat in the Hat''--``Thing One'' and ``Thing Two''--except there were 100 more of them running around doing considerable damage to government Agencies and government systems.

And to a very significant extent, doing damage to government Agencies and systems was the point. This was not the bug. This was the feature. They went in to try to wreck stuff, and it became particularly dangerous around Social Security because, first of all, there was a propaganda campaign to talk down Social Security, to pretend, falsely, that it was riddled with fraud. That took place, including right over on the House floor, when the President came to speak to Congress and repeatedly lied about Social Security fraud.

Then you had the infiltration of people who were from tech bro world and from private equity world, exactly taking over Social Security. Then you had people talking up benefit interruptions like that was an OK thing. Well, a benefit interruption would be an excuse to go in and take over Social Security to privatize it with tech bros and with private equity people.

I think the noise that we made about that headed it off, but there remains the lingering danger that when they got into Social Security's data systems, they exfiltrated data because data has enormous value, or they infiltrated bugs to do damage to the old systems of Social Security; or, worst of all, perhaps, they left back doors so that Elon Musk or other folks who were interested in getting access to massive amounts of Americans' data can find their way into Social Security's data systems secretly.

So this is a very simple measure. It asks for an audit of Social Security data systems to make sure that those things did not happen. That really ought to be a bipartisan, if not unanimous, expression of Senate intention. That is why I hoped we could generate unanimous consent for it today.

I yield the floor to the distinguished ranking member of the Committee on Finance Senator Wyden.

Mr. President, I am here now for the 299th time in my

effort to alert our somnolent body to the looming dangers of climate change.

Since President Trump's inauguration in January, he has embarked upon a series of actions that quite simply defy reality. They obey the fossil fuel industry, but they defy reality--or maybe it is the other way around: They defy reality to obey the fossil fuel industry.

On his very first day in office, he issued an Executive order declaring that wind energy and solar energy are not energy. This defies even the dictionary, and it ignores the fact that humans have been harnessing wind and solar power since well before we started combusting fossil fuels.

In March, Trump's EPA Administrator announced his intention to undo the Agency's finding that carbon pollution endangers human health and welfare, despite the fact that the harms and causes associated with climate change become more evident every day.

In May, Jeff Clark, who runs the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at OMB--part of the OMB fossil fuel stooge platoon--best known for his involvement in crooked Keystone Cops efforts to overturn the 2020 election, issued a memo directing Agencies to stop using the social cost of carbon in Agency decision making--again despite the fact that we know that carbon pollution costs the government and the public lots of money.

Now we hear that Trump's EPA is ready to rescind a rule limiting carbon pollution from certain fossil fuel-fired powerplants on the pretense that emissions from these plants do not significantly contribute to climate change, despite the fact that the carbon pollution from fossil fuel-fired U.S. powerplants is greater than all the carbon pollution from all but six countries in the world. It is a major contributor.

Put simply, in Trump's world, facts don't matter, and the truth is whatever his fossil fuel donors say it is.

And now this fossil fuel influence operation has actually infiltrated its way into government, and it is affecting the fossil fuel industry's desires from inside.

This would be a sorry enough state of affairs by itself: a President of the United States who ignores facts and lives in a phony alternate reality of a polluting industry's making. But it gets worse when others modulate their own world views and actions to rely less on facts, on the immutable laws of nature and economics and, instead, on nonsensical utterances about climate change and wacko energy policy.

Take our Fed Chair Jerome Powell. After admitting to Senator Tina Smith on the Senate Banking Committee in February that climate change would make it impossible to get insurance and, therefore, impossible to get mortgages in certain coastal and wildfire exposed regions of the country, he fell into line behind Trumpian denialism. Three days before Trump's inauguration, he pulled the Fed out of an international network of central banks that researches climate-related financial and economic risks. The European Central Bank and the central banks of China, Canada, Mexico, Japan, the UK, and more than 80 other countries are members, but not us. Not anymore.

Then in May, the Fed pressured an international banking supervision organization to disband its task force overseeing climate risk. Thankfully, the other central banks refused. Last, the Fed dissolved its own climate risk working groups. We can't have those anymore, not when our polluter-funded dear leader says it is all a hoax.

Or take Daniel Yergin, Peter Orszag, and Atul Arya--three people who should know better. They waited barely a month after Trump's inauguration before publishing a 5,000-word manifesto in Foreign Affairs in defense of what they call energy pragmatism. What is energy pragmatism you might ask?

Basically, it is a Trump-friendly and factually challenged theory that transitioning to green energy is too complicated and expensive, so we may as well resolve ourselves to using fossil fuels for a long, long time to come. Despite its 5,000-word length and despite its inclusion of a section entitled ``It's The Economy,'' this piece never mentions the massive costs and systemic economic risks already looming from climate change. Quite an omission--literally only one side of the case--which brings me back to the social cost of carbon.

There was a time when Republicans were the great champions of cost- benefit analysis. Ronald Reagan was the first to mandate its use in the regulatory process. Obviously far from perfect, it does make sense to have a monetary estimate of the costs and benefits associated with a particular regulatory action. That is the social cost of carbon. It calculates the climate-related costs from adding an additional ton of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere or, alternatively, the benefits from removing or eliminating a ton of carbon pollution.

The social cost of carbon is not a new concept. Economists have been using it for decades. Yet Clark's memo argues that the social cost of carbon shouldn't be used because a monetized estimate of the costs of 1 ton of carbon pollution is too uncertain. So they recommend zero.

Well, first of all, we do know one thing about this, and that is that the cost isn't zero. Our own lived experiences teach us that. And there is actually case law to the effect that the number is not zero. We also know it is not even close to zero. Every serious academic estimate of the social cost of carbon is well north of $50, with most well over $100 per ton.

EPA's last estimate, informed by copious academic research, was $190 per ton in harm from carbon dioxide. The International Monetary Fund calculates that there is a subsidy to the fossil fuel industry in the United States every single year of $700 billion, which is their valuation of the ``pollute for free'' fossil fuel business model.

You can back-calculate from that to an effective cost of carbon pollution of around $150 per ton. Whether $150 per ton or $190 per ton, these weren't even the highest estimates out there. There are incredible estimates in the hundreds of dollars per ton.

Much of the variation among the costs comes from the choice of what damage you attempt to quantify. For example, that EPA estimate at $190 per ton only looked at four harms. It only looked at increased mortality, damage to agriculture, increased energy costs, and damage from sea level rise. Those four things--four things.

It did not consider the systemic financial and economic risks from climate change of the sort that I have discussed so frequently in this body--the ones to which Fed Chair Powell alluded when he admitted that climate change would render parts of our country uninsurable and hence unmortgageable.

That is a huge, looming, economic blow not in the EPA calculation. In other words, almost all estimates of the social cost of carbon are underestimates because they do not attempt to quantify all climate- related costs and damages.

Trump's polluter-run OMB wants us to ignore all of this. The logic is really stunning here--or I should probably say the illogic--because they say it is not clear what number is right, we will use zero, a number we know is wrong. That simply doesn't make sense, but it does solve the problem of the fossil fuel industry having to account for the harm that it causes. It is a massive favor to the fossil fuel industry.

So be clear, this is yet another oily fossil fuel thumb pressed down on the scale to help big polluters. Climate pollution is a global problem. Our emissions harm Americans and the rest of the world. Chinese emissions harm the Chinese and the rest of the world. And harms that occur to people in other countries end up having real costs here at home as well.

Some of them fall in the national security space. Take the Syrian civil war which destabilized the Middle East and led to periodic American military intervention. A long-term severe drought, exacerbated by climate change, is widely understood to have played a role in that conflict.

Look at nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, which have been at odds for decades. As glaciers shrink in the Himalayans due to climate change, water becomes, eventually, more scarce, raising tensions as these adversaries compete for a dwindling supply of that essential need.

Then there are the Northern Triangle countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras hit hard by a drought made worse by climate change. The drought made it harder for subsistence

farmers to eke out a living, contributing to the surge in migration to the United States. Faraway events have economic effects here at home as well.

A drought in Panama lowers water in the Panama Canal and slows shipping, making it more expensive. A drought or flood hits a major agricultural exporter and makes food here at home more expensive.

A flood in Thailand swamps factories and provokes a shortage here in car parts. The global economy is interconnected; climate-related droughts, floods, fires, and storms in foreign lands impose real costs on Americans here at home.

The legions of bootlickers who orbit around Trump remind me of the legend of King Canute. King Canute, like President Trump today, was surrounded by hordes of flattering courtiers. Unlike President Trump, King Canute was displeased by his courtiers' relentless flattery that he was all-powerful. So to give his courtiers a lesson, King Canute set his throne by the sea edge and commanded the incoming tide to halt so as not to wet his feet. Well, of course, the tide took no mind of King Canute's words, continued its advance, and washed over his feet.

King Canute exclaimed:

Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of

kings, for there is none worthy of the name but he whom

heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.

Well, those words should particularly resonate today because climate change is real, and it is driven by eternal laws, by the natural laws of chemistry, for instance, and physics. And a latter-day ersatz King saying otherwise makes no difference at all to the natural systems of this planet driven by nature's laws.

Climate change is going to be very expensive, very disruptive, and very damaging. The warnings are already everywhere. And Florida's insurance crisis is a preview of coming attractions for all of America's coastal communities.

I won't dwell in this speech on that list of warnings. I spoke over and over about the many different Agencies and experts, from insurance industry CEOs to insurance industry board members to the Chairman of the Federal Reserve to the chief economist of Freddie Mac to the Economist magazine to the International Stability Board, and on and on and on. It is over and over the same warning: the warning that climate change is disrupting the planet so much that risks are becoming so unpredictable that insurance is becoming either flatout unavailable, or unaffordable on its way to unavailable, and that that insurance crisis quickly spills over into a mortgage crisis because you cannot get a mortgage on a property on which you cannot get insurance. And that mortgage crisis cascades into a crash in property values because if you bought your home with a mortgage, you probably need to sell it to somebody who needs a mortgage; and if you can't sell to that entire population of human beings who need a mortgage to buy your house because your house won't sustain a mortgage because it can't get insurance, then your market just crashed and the value of your home did as well.

I have shown here at this podium the map from First Street that predicted what, in the time period of a 30-year mortgage, is going to happen to home values around the country from this ``insurance to mortgage to values'' cascade.

And in some places, the loss of value was at 100 percent, a zeroing out.

But even where the loss of value is going to be 20 percent or 40 percent, think what that does to that community where all of the property in that community has lost that much value. Think of what that does to the community bank in that community and its solvency, its loan-to-value ratio, when the value of the collateral for its loans has crashed 20 to 40 percent.

This is coming. And there is an answer: renewable energy and low carbon technologies. Already cheap; getting cheaper. Plus, whoever dominates those industries will dominate the 21st century.

So let's protect ourselves from that looming threat. Let's make sure that who dominates the 21st century in energy is the United States. Let's not give away America's position in that competition to our foreign rivals just to humor a corrupt political influence effort here at home. That would be a disgraceful outcome, but it is the one we are headed for.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I take the Senate back to June 9 of 1772, and I read from Rory Raven's ``Burning the Gaspee.''

A handful of longboats glided across the water on a

moonless night. The men--some at the oars, other nervously

fingering muskets or clubs or handspikes--were silent as they

drew closer and closer to the silhouette of a schooner a

short distance away. A white British ensign fluttered from

the schooner's topmast in a humid breeze.

A sentry on deck peered into the darkness, catching sight

of the approaching boats.

``Who comes there?'' he called.

The men in the boats bristled at the sentry's English

accent.

``We mean to come aboard,'' replied a big man in the lead

boat. ``You cannot,'' the sentry shouted back. ``You cannot

come aboard.''

A moment later, the schooner's commanding officer came on

deck. Roused from his bunk, he stood at the rail in his

shirtsleeves. Raising a pistol, he warned the men not to come

closer.

Another man in another boat rose to his feet and declared,

``I am the sheriff of the county of Kent''--

That would be Kent County, RI--

``I am the sheriff of the county of Kent, God damn you. I

have a warrant to apprehend you, God damn you. So surrender,

God damn you.''

The officer drew his sword and repeated his warning. Some

of the sailors under his command joined him, weapons at the

ready.

In one of the boats, a man turned to the friend seated next

to him, saying, ``Reach me your gun--I can kill that

fellow.''

The gun was handed over. Shouldering the musket, the man

took aim and the shot echoed over across the waters.

The officer doubled over and fell.

The officer involved was Lieutenant Duddingston of the Royal Navy. The ship he was on was the HMS Gaspee, a naval vessel deployed as a revenue cutter to harass the trade of the Rhode Island Colonials.

There is a bit more of a story around this because before the challenge to the Gaspee that led to that shooting, the Gaspee had been harassing other Rhode Island shipowners. One of them was a very prominent individual.

The Gaspee seized a boat called the Fortune, and this reading is from the chapter ``The Dark Affair, The Gaspee Incident'' from ``An Empire on the Edge'' by Nick Bunker.

Unwilling to trust a local judge, he sent the Fortune round

to Boston, a step of doubtful legality that only made matters

worse. Unwittingly, the Gaspee had antagonized a family of

Rhode Islanders who embodied all the values for which the

colony stood.

The rum [on board] belonged to the Greenes, Quakers with a

farm or two, a saw-mill, and a forge for making anchors. The

navy had not the slightest idea who they were or why it might

not be wise to upset them. But one of the men who owned the

cargo was Nathanael Greene, who would soon shed his Quaker

beliefs to become the youngest general in George Washington's

army and his closest aid from Bunker Hill to Yorktown. As

Greene wrote soon after the arrest of the Fortune, the loss

of her cargo created ``such a Spirit of Resentment that I

have devoted almost the whole of my time in devising measures

for punishing the offender.''

Well, of course, Nathanael Greene was not only George Washington's aide-de-camp and administrative officer, but he was also deployed to lead the southern campaign in the South, which caused Lord Cornwallis to write home to his wife to say:

That damn Greene is more dangerous than Washington.

So the Gaspee launched that spirit of resentment that led to a General Greene more dangerous than Washington, a Rhode Islander.

The story of that day is fairly simple. On July 9, 1772, another ship, the Hannah, is making her way north toward Providence when the Gaspee comes after her, seeking to stop and board her and seeking to seize her cargo.

Well, the Hannah was having none of it and continued sailing north, so the Gaspee gave chase. In the course of the chase, the captain of the Hannah steered the vessel over a sandy spit that sticks out where a river comes into Narragansett Bay at a place called Namquit Point and delivers a column of sand.

Now, the captain of the Hannah knew those waters well, and he knew the depths well, and he slid over the shallows in his lighter boat. The big-armed Gaspee coming along behind foundered on the sand in a falling tide and was stuck. The despised Gaspee and the despised Lieutenant Duddingston became a target.

The Hannah continued up to Providence that night. It was owned by the Brown family, who ended up giving their names to Brown University, were prominent merchants in 1772, and they rallied several longboats full of men who that night, presumably after some refreshment, rode down from Providence--miles down--to where the Gaspee was stranded.

That is where that incident began. It was those men in those longboats on that moonlit night who decided they were going to rid their beloved Narragansett Bay of the wretched and detested Gaspee, so they ended up shooting the captain of the vessel, Lieutenant Duddingston. He survived his wounds. They took the vessel. They captured the crew. They took everybody ashore. They saw that medical care was given to Lieutenant Duddingston. They came back out, and they set fire to the Gaspee.

This painting, which hangs in my office, is a depiction of the Gaspee on fire that night. As the fire burned, it came to the powder magazine, and the powder magazine exploded. The Gaspee was blown to smithereens across Narragansett Bay, and that was the end of her.

Now, the episode got rather lost to history. I will put it in a time context. This is June 9 of 1772. This is more than a year before the Boston Tea Party up in Boston Harbor. On that occasion, Massachusetts Colonials painted their faces and boarded a civilian vessel and pushed tea bags off it into Boston Harbor. That was Massachusetts.

Rhode Island's effort a year and a half before was to trick the military vessel into grounding herself, come down the bay in longboats at night, shoot the captain, capture the crew, and blow the boat up.

What more did we need to do to be in the history books? Well, we are getting there. I give this speech every year.

Rory Raven wrote ``Burning the Gaspee.'' ``The Burning of His Majesty's Schooner Gaspee'' by Steven Park. Makes an entire book.

And I just read ``An Empire on the Edge,'' from an entire chapter on the Gaspee incident.

What happened afterwards is nearly as interesting as the destruction of the Gaspee. King George was furious. Parliament was furious. An enormous bounty on the heads of the men in those longboats was offered by the King--over $100,000 in today's money.

And officials were sent from England to go and put on a trial. Find these men, try them, and hang them. No one would talk.

About 60,000 people lived in Rhode Island back then, but it was a close community, gathered mostly around the shore, a very prosperous community because of its trading. And nobody would talk.

There was never any satisfaction to King George for his rages.

So, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Washington Post article be printed in the Record.

And you can recognize the picture I just showed you, it is in the article, and it does quite a good job of putting into context this rebellious act by Rhode Island that took place nearly a year before the Boston Tea Party and yet is mostly overlooked by historians.

Here is another version of the Gaspee aflame before it explodes, and here are the men in the longboats coming away from it having lit that fire.

So it is important enough that I thought I might try a poetical hand to it. I have read this before, and I will read it again.

Listen, my colleagues, and you shall see

How Rhode Islanders blew up the dread Gaspee.

Great Britain was fearsome, she ruled the sea,

But Rhode Islanders burned with the fire to be free.

So when George sent his frigate to tax our coast,

And its arrogant captain was heard to boast

That he'd soon have Rhode Island under his sway,

Well, a course was set for a fateful day.

Narragansett Bay sparkled bright and blue June 9 of 1772,

The trading ship Hannah was making her way

With cargo for Providence that fine day.

King George's Gaspee pursued in chase,

But the Hannah decided to give her a race.

Away fled the Hannah with wind in her sails,

As the Gaspee's cannon fired from its rails.

Evading the Gaspee's cannon balls,

The Hannah sailed for the Namquid shoals.

Fast and light, Hannah crossed the shallow,

But when the Gaspee attempted to follow,

She ran aground on the Warwick shore,

In a falling tide, and could move no more.

That night dark longboats with muffled oars,

Came slipping quietly down the shore,

To rid our Bay of the dread Gaspee,

And show old King George that Rhode Island be free.

The battle was fierce off Warwick Neck.

When the gunsmoke cleared from the Gaspee's deck,

The Rhode Islanders had her as their prize,

And her crew bound up in chains and ties.

When the crew was ashore, Pawtuxet's Rangers

Assured they'd present us no further danger.

Back to the Bay, in the dark of the night,

Went the Gaspee Raiders to set her alight.

The fire spread through the Raiders' prize,

'Til a blast filled the Narragansett Bay skies.

The fire had reached the Gaspee's magazines,

And her gunpowder blew her to smithereens.

Away sped the raiders into the dark,

Leaving in the embers freedom's spark.

``I want their names!'' King George demanded,

And ordered the Raiders be apprehended.

But his call for hangings came to naught:

His nooses hung empty; no charge was brought;

Because never a traitorous tale was told.

Rhode Island stood steady, silent, and bold.

The spark that was struck in the Gaspee Raid

Lit a flame that still burns in our hearts today.

And the lesson from then is a lesson now,

That every American still will avow.

``However majestic your powers may be,

You should heed our warning: don't tread on me.''

So that is the tale of the Gaspee. And one day it will get its appropriate notice in history.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the series of votes that we have concluded in the last 24 hours, with the last vote that just concluded, brings to its completion a sad and a sordid moment in the history of the Senate. I want to just wrap up to leave a record of what took place.

Before we got into this parliamentary rigmarole, there were two things that were pretty clear: one, a Congressional Review Act, a statute in American law, that allows Congress to override a very narrow set of Executive actions for a very narrow time period. The narrow set of Executive actions is EPA rulemakings. And the timeframe is set by the Congressional Review Act, but it is, at most, months. That is the law, or was the law until our procedural shenanigans intervened, and it had been the law for quite a long time. The Congressional Review Act goes back 30 years. So there was a long, long, long tradition of obeying this law.

It is not hard to figure out what a rule is because rulemakings have a very distinct procedural set of steps that they go through, and the Congressional Review Act was carefully crafted to deal just with those rules, including a provision that if the executive branch tried to hide a rule by not submitting it, that our Government Accountability Office was authorized to blow a whistle and say: No, that is actually a rule, in which case, it would have to come over here for a review under the Congressional Review Act.

So the question of what a rule was has long been considered during the course of the Congressional Review Act and over those 30 years, and it has always, always, always been a rule.

Before the Congressional Review Act came along--in fact, 20 years earlier--the Clean Air Act was passed by Congress. The Clean Air Act was a healthy respect for federalism and the role of sovereign States, and the role of California--what is now the fourth biggest economy on the planet--allowed California a waiver in order to be able to make its own clean air auto emissions rules.

So beginning with the passage of the Clean Air Act, California took advantage of this, and these waivers were filed with the EPA and processed by the EPA. Sometimes, they created the waiver. Sometimes, they amended a waiver. Sometimes, they renewed a waiver. Sometimes, they modified a waiver.

The first action was taken on July 11, 1968, by the EPA--so 50-plus years ago. The most recent one, until our current procedural rigmarole, was December 17, 2024--a week before Christmas, last year. Between July 11 of 1968 and December 17 of 2024, California's clean air standard was reviewed under this waiver process 131 times--131 times--and every single time, it was determined to be a waiver and not a rule. It was never--across that half century-plus--ever treated as a rule. It clearly was a waiver. It is described as a waiver in the statute. That is actually the law.

So that is where we stood: California had a legal right to run its own clean air program for 50 years, EPA was obliged to treat it as a waiver, and the Congressional Review Act did not apply because the Congressional Review Act only applied to rules, and this was not one.

The problem was that the fossil fuel industry, more or less, runs this place right now, and it wants to sell more gasoline. So California's Clean Air rules to make cars either be more efficient and get more miles per gallon or become hybrid and be able to run back and forth between gas and electric or be fully electric interfered with the impulse of Big Oil to sell more gasoline and, of course, do more pollution.

What was Big Oil to do in that circumstance? Well, there were a couple of things that they could have done. They could have, for instance, negotiated with California. Indeed, they could have asked the President to negotiate with California and, perhaps, with States like Rhode Island that joined the California Clean Air standard so we would be in the room and have more voices heard too. There could have been a robust, healthy, political, and democratic negotiation. But, no, Big Oil chose not to do that because it knew it had a fast lane through this body.

They had another alternative, which is to amend the Clean Air Act or the Congressional Review Act to solve this problem. You could amend the Clean Air Act to call the waiver a rule or make it proceed by rule, or you could amend the Congressional Review Act so that it wasn't limited to rules anymore but a waiver could fit in. You could do either one of those things by what my Republican colleagues usually like to cheer about, which is regular order--the regular order of the Senate, the regular order of Congress.

Of course, the problem for Big Oil in that was that they would have to get the law passed in the House, and they would have to get the law passed in the Senate. And in the Senate, that was subjected to having to negotiate with the Democrats in order to get past cloture and get 60 votes and then get the bill signed by the President. That is the proper way to proceed when you want to amend a law. But Big Oil didn't care to do that because it knew it had a fast lane through this body.

The third way they could have done this, which was actually commenced in the first Trump administration, was to have the EPA undertake an administrative review of the three key predicates that have to be checked off in order to grant the waiver to California and proceed under ordinary administrative Agency process; indeed, one that had already been commenced in the previous administration. They could easily have done that. But, of course, whatever Big Oil convinced Big Oil's representatives at EPA--Lee Zeldin--to do would have then had to survive scrutiny in court because you can't do administrative procedures in this country if there is no rational basis for the decision at the end of the day. You can't do administrative decisions in this country if they are--to use the magic words of administrative law--``arbitrary and capricious.'' So they chose not to follow the administrative process either because they knew they had a fast lane through this body.

Unfortunately, the fast lane that Big Oil knew it had through this body ran right over the Parliamentarian because the Parliamentarian is obliged to police what is appropriate under the Congressional Review Act. She is our referee here over whether we are doing things legally and by the rules or not. And she determined--which, in my view, was an extremely easy determination based on 131 to 0 in previous waivers, never in 30 years under the Congressional Review Act something that wasn't a rule and the statutory waiver for 50 years for California in the Clean Air Act--hard to do much of a stronger case than that. So we got a decision, a proper decision, from the Parliamentarian saying, no, the special expedited procedures of the Congressional Review Act don't work in the Senate because it would be illegal because this is not a rule; this is a waiver. And it, obviously, was not a rule. It, obviously, was a waiver. So she wasn't wrong.

But the Parliamentarian is vulnerable to the political power of this body. This body can overrule the Parliamentarian. The majority can do it with a simple 51 votes.

Imagine a football game in which one team has more players than the other. One team commits a foul. The ref blows a whistle on the foul that the majority team committed, and the majority team gets--by vote-- to overrule the referee.

That is a crummy way to go about doing business in an orderly, deliberative body like the U.S. Senate, and that is why it happens so rarely. Overruling the Parliamentarian on a matter is considered going nuclear--going nuclear--and this is the first time in the history of the Senate in which the majority has gone nuclear, overruling the Parliamentarian on a matter affecting legislation--both the Congressional Review Act and the Clean Air Act.

So the complex procedural rigmarole you saw last night and today was all designed to do a parliamentary end run around the Parliamentarian, overruling the determination that this was not a rule, changing the Congressional Review Act and the Clean Air Act, but without the proper procedures under the Constitution that we are obliged to follow when we are passing or amending laws.

There is a particular other problem here, which is that if they had gone the negotiation route with California, all of us who like clean air and want strong vehicle emissions regulations would have had a voice. Something would have had to have been agreed to. There would have had to have been some compromise. But Big Oil didn't want that because they knew what they had here in the Senate: a fast lane to whatever they want, whenever they wanted.

They could have gone through the court process, but the court process is bounded by laws, by fair procedures, by the opportunity for affected parties to be heard, and by the standards of having a rational basis and not being arbitrary and capricious. In this forum, the majority can have no rational basis and be 100 percent arbitrary and capricious and ram its view through. So the court thing wasn't quite as appealing because what has happened here would, by any standard, have had no rational basis and been arbitrary and capricious.

They could have gone the legislative route and passed the bill properly--amended the bill properly and used the constitutional procedures--but again, we would have had a voice in that.

So this ram job was the solution. Rolling over and overriding the Parliamentarian was the method, and serving the fossil fuel interests behind the Republican Party was the goal. But the outcome is going to be bad outside the Chamber, and it is going to be bad inside the Chamber. Outside the Chamber, the bad outcome is going to be a lot dirtier air; a far worse competitive position for our auto industry against China, which is already running ahead of us in the future technology of electric vehicles; and worse health outcomes, particularly in busy areas where there is lots of traffic--not to mention having the majority of the country's economy overruled by a minority of the country's economy, where the majority of the country's economy chose cleaner air.

So those are all the bad things that happened outside this body, and, as Senator Schiff said earlier, that will be measured in things like cancer diagnoses. This gets personal pretty quickly when it is clean air and health matters.

Inside the body, we have just opened an entirely new avenue for mischief. It could be mischief by any 30 of us. Frankly, it could be mischief by a minority of the majority who want to drive something through that most of the majority don't want. They can do it now using the Congressional Review

Act, which requires 30 signatures to get in. You can go back to any Executive action taken since the passage of the Congressional Review Act, and you can drop that into the Federal Register and submit it here and say it is a rule. Even if you are lying, even if it is not a rule, we have just opened the gate so that every Executive action ever taken can now be considered a rule, whether it is or not, for purposes of the Congressional Review Act. And a powerful special interest that controls a powerful party can ram whatever it wants through this body without constitutional procedure, without judicial safeguards, and without compromise.

So they broke wide open the window of what can be brought through the Congressional Review Act in time. It used to be just a matter of usually just a couple of months--depends on the change in elections--60 days or thereabouts. Now, 30 years of stuff is available to be dropped into the hopper in this process and shoved through this body.

The other is that it is not rules anymore; it is anything. So we have gone from a very narrow, carefully guardrailed provision to provide a short-term opportunity for Congress to overrule an offending regulation immediately after that regulation is passed to a wide-open sewer for political influence and interference into any Executive decision ever rendered that can be pulled out of the past, dropped into the Federal Register, submitted over here under the pretense that it was a rule, and with 30 votes and a majority behind it, off you go to the races.

So this is a bad, bad day for the Senate. It signals a willingness of this majority, after so much talk about defending the filibuster--oh, defending the filibuster. When we were in the majority, you never heard them stop talking about how important the filibuster was, but now that they are in the majority, it is only a little over 100 days--and this started some time ago. They immediately started the plot to bring this chore for the fossil fuel funders through the Senate floor and break the filibuster in order to accomplish their goal.

So give me a break.

I yield the floor. I see my friend Senator Cassidy from Louisiana waiting to speak.

Mr. President, let me describe what I think is going on here on the Senate floor. Today is an unusual and interesting day.

What we understood the plan was, was that the majority was going to move to the Congressional Review Act regarding the California clean air rule in an effort to overrule the Clean Air Act rule for the fossil fuel industry, which the majority so diligently serves.

The problem with that is that the Parliamentarian has ruled that the Congressional Review Act does not apply to the waiver that California gets, allowing it to do its own clean air standard. So they had a problem. The problem was that Democrats were going to make a point of order saying: Hey, you can't do that. We have argued this matter. We both went before the Parliamentarian. We made our case. We filed our pleadings. We got a decision. In our view, it was not even a close call of a decision. But that is in our view. And what you are really doing here is, for the fossil fuel industry, going nuclear, overruling the Senate Parliamentarian to accomplish a legislative task--to amend, basically, the Congressional Review Act--and then open the door for that to undo a 30-year tradition of California and other States like Rhode Island being able to operate under better clean air standards and the vehicle emissions standards than the Federal Government may be willing to accomplish.

So that is where we thought we were. Now, what is happening is that we have gone to a different CRA, this one having to do with hydrogen vehicles. The minority has 5 hours. There is a total of 10 hours, evenly divided. I suspect the majority is not going to use much of that time. But the minority has 5 hours to talk about what is going on.

We are now in the 5-hour debate period on the hydrogen vehicle CRA, as the majority moves toward making its play on the California clean air standard.

This is a slight bump in the road for them, but our understanding is that there is a new plan. The new plan is, at the conclusion of our 5 hours, to make a new point of order that allows them to do the California CRA effort and create a new way to get around the terms of the Congressional Review Act.

The predicament for them is that the Congressional Review Act, as a law--passed by the Senate, passed by the House, signed into law by the President--says: In the Senate, which is where we are, when a committee is discharged from further consideration of a joint resolution, which is where we are, all points of order against the joint resolution are waived.

They intend to create a Senate exception to that. We expect the Parliamentarian will say, when they offer this point of order, based on the statute, based on the law, well, that is not in order. Then they will go nuclear on this. They will bring everybody back to, by a simple majority vote of 51, overrule the Parliamentarian as to that new point of order.

The purpose is to create a point of order that allows a bypass of the Parliamentarian's decision--a very sound one, a clear one, in my view, based on precedent, law, history, tradition, all of it--that the CRA effort to undermine California's clean air standard does not work under Senate rules.

In a sense, this is like a double nuclear option. They are going to overrule the Parliamentarian to create a new point of order under the CRA that will amend, in effect, the CRA. It will make the law regarding this no longer effective because they will come in and overrule the Parliamentarian.

And, then, even though the Parliamentarian's ruling is that you can't use the CRA to go after the California waiver, they don't have to overrule that directly because they will have, by overruling the Parliamentarian, created this little end-around.

So I guess this is a demonstration of how many hoops the Senate majority is willing to jump through for their fossil fuel supports.

And it ends at the same point, which is the purpose of the exercise. It ends with the Parliamentarian being overruled, and it ends with an attack on California and other sovereign States' ability to require cleaner air and lower vehicle emissions in their States.

Now, why does that matter? Well, obviously, if you are the fossil fuel industry, one of the things you sell is gasoline, and one of the things that the California clean air and emissions standards do is to require the auto industry to make automobiles more efficient--maybe even make them hybrid, maybe even make them electric. And whether they are more efficient or hybrid or electric, it all ends in the same place for the fossil fuel industry, which is: We can't sell as much polluting gasoline, and we want to sell more gasoline, and we don't like clean air standards that get in the way of us selling as much gasoline as we want to.

So we are here through this complex parliamentary rigmarole to overrule the Parliamentarian to get around her ruling that the Congressional Review Act only covers rulemakings, not the California waiver and other things. One of the problems with that is that--you know, if you give a mouse a cookie--it doesn't stop here; it opens the Congressional Review Act, which was very specifically designed to address rulemakings within a period of time after the conclusion of the rulemaking. And this would allow essentially anything you could put into the Federal Register to be submitted to Congress for Congressional Review Act review, no matter when it was done. All you have to do is re-up it with a submission and send it in to Congress, the California waiver being an example of that in the sense that it has been around for about 30 years now.

So one of the Congressional Review Act's limitations was it had a brief time window in which you were allowed to come to Congress to disapprove a rule, and that time period is now blown to smithereens if they go through with this parliamentary scheme.

The second thing is, it had to be a rulemaking; that it added a process at the end of the Administrative Procedure Act rulemaking, when the rule was finally enacted into law as an Agency rule. You always had the ability to go to court and sue and say that the Administrative Procedure Act was violated, it is arbitrary and capricious, was a violation of the law or whatever. This gave it political extra opportunity, which was to jump straight to Congress and just ask us to disapprove it. You don't have to prove, then, that there is anything wrong with the rule; just, politically, we don't like it so we are going to jam it.

And so, when you expand beyond just APA rulemaking to essentially any Executive decision that can be dumped into the Federal Register to create a submission that can then be brought here, you have opened a massive, massive array of Executive actions to Congressional Review Act disapproval.

As my colleagues have said, it could be as simple as a lease, as simple as a permit, as simple as a license. Essentially, any Executive decision since the passage of the Congressional Review Act can now be brought here on a purely political basis and--boom--blown up.

If my colleagues on the other side don't think that we will use this if they do this, they have taken leave of their senses. Of course we will. They are about to create a new Senate in which the CRA can be used for an immense array of purposes, well beyond what the actual law says.

(Mr. SHEEHY assumed the Chair.)

They don't have to be doing this. Let's be clear. They do not have to be doing this. There are other ways to serve their fossil fuel industry friends in the industry's desire to attack the vehicle emissions standards, the clean air standards. There are a whole bunch of them. One, they could do it administratively.

In fact, in 2019, the Trump administration withdrew a previously granted Clean Air Act waiver. And to do that, it made findings per a Clean Air Act process--administrative findings per a Clean Air Act process--as to the three criteria established under the Clean Air Act that determine whether a waiver application gets granted or denied.

So they already tried that once. They know that that is an avenue. Why did they not want to do that? Well, for starters, it is amenable to challenge if it is done unlawfully, if it is done arbitrarily and capriciously--the magic words of administrative mischief. And you end up in a forum like a court where you have to defend your facts, unlike here where all you have to do is have a majority and ram it through. So they didn't want to do it administratively, but they could have, and they already tried in the last Trump administration.

What else could they have done? Well, this is California's Clean Air Act standard. They could have gone and negotiated with the sovereign State of California and the other sovereign States that have attached themselves to the cleaner standard of California, which includes Rhode Island. This could be done through a regular process of negotiation.

We just had the Administrator of the EPA in the committee this morning for a lively exchange, and he repeatedly talked about how interested EPA was in cooperative federalism; that the Federal Government has to be a real partner with sovereign States; that we shouldn't be lording it over the sovereign States; they have expertise and interests of their own and cooperative federalism means that the Federal Government and the State governments should work as partners to accomplish goals.

Well, that was pretty rich, while EPA is trying to roll a sovereign State that is the fourth biggest economy on the planet without any hint of negotiation or cooperative federalism or effort--because when you are negotiating, the other side gets a vote, too, and you have to come to an agreement. And it is much easier to come here and have your friends in the Senate do your bidding in the Senate without any standard other than: Do we have the votes?

But they could have done it that way. There is a totally clear path to negotiate with California--say: Hey, circumstances have changed in this way or that. We have new policy issues that we want to argue to you, and let's try to figure out if we can work this out.

Nope. Didn't even try.

The other way to do this would be to go back and actually change the Congressional Review Act, right? It is a statute so we can amend it. And we could go through the process of amendment and say: OK, we don't want the Congressional Review Act to be limited to rulemakings any longer. We want to open it up to more stuff. And we could have a conversation about what should and should not be included in an expanded gateway to the Congressional Review Act. The House would have its say. You would end up doing what we call around here regular order. And in the Senate the minority--because you would have to get through cloture, the minority would have a chance to make our points. And you could do an amendment using regular order. Again, they would have to listen to us, and they would have to pay attention to facts.

Now, all they have to pay attention to are interests--and the fossil fuel interest is their dominant interest--and votes, do they have the votes. And those make it easy to choose this way, to go nuclear in the Senate rather than do the work either of amending the Congressional Review Act by law or negotiating with a sovereign State in ordinary Federal-State cooperative federalism or pursue that Clean Air Act administrative process that they had begun back in Trump 1.

Again, the reason not to do all those three is you can't just roll everybody and do what the fossil fuel industry wants. So here we are. This is because

this is the shortcut. This is the thing that does what the fossil fuel industry wants.

And the price is going to be very, very high because, in my recollection, there has never been a legislative outcome in this body determined by overruling the Parliamentarian. We have gone back and forth on nominations, but on a legislative outcome which changes the Congressional Review Act and which allows an attack on a statutory waiver in the Clean Air Act for the State of California--those are legislative in their effect. And so, to me, that is not the right way that we should be going about this.

So there are a bunch of problems with what is going on here, but to understand the floor machinations we are about to go through--the overruling of the Parliamentarian to create an end-around so we don't have to overrule but can only violate the order of the Parliamentarian on the CRA--you really have to understand the baseline story here. And the baseline story here is that this is the fossil fuel industry in action. It may look like it is a majority and a minority in the Senate having an argument. No. It is the fossil fuel industry in action, trying to create a shortcut for itself so it can sell more gasoline and pollute more and ignore all the States that have joined with California to demand cleaner air for their constituents.

The fossil fuel industry essentially runs the Republican Party right now. The fossil fuel industry hates this clean air standard because it sells less gasoline in the States where the clean air standard is there. And it sells less gasoline in other States because it is hard to market both a clean vehicle and a dirty vehicle side by side. So to get to the enormous number of States that are with California on this and to sell into their markets, they have to make more efficient vehicles everywhere so that everybody enjoys the benefit of spending less on gasoline, getting better vehicle mileage, and having cleaner air.

So it actually works out pretty well for everybody except--except-- the fossil fuel industry, which, of course, wants to sell more gasoline, period and end of story. And what they have is a willing Senate majority that will basically do whatever it is that they want, and they have an executive branch that has been infiltrated by fossil fuel interests and is now essentially run by fossil fuel interests.

In my previous ``Time to Wake Up'' speeches, I have described--I am probably not going to get this perfectly right because I am going from memory here, but there is a kind of wasp that injects its larvae into another bug; and as the larval wasp begins to grow, it takes over the neural system, it takes over the command and control system of the other bug. So the other bug is still alive. It still looks like the other bug's shape and size and all of that. It doesn't look any different than a regular other bug, but it is being driven from inside by the larval wasp, which tells it to go do things that then create a place where the larval wasp can grow, can nest, can feed, whatever it needs to do.

It takes over the bug from the inside and takes over command and control, and steers it around. That, to me, is a pretty good analogy for what the fossil fuel industry is doing with the U.S. Government right now.

All of their front groups, all the machinery they created over the years to propagate the fraud of climate denial and to exert wild political influence all over the country, all of that just slots right into positions in government that are taken over by people who say, you know, that the concern about climate change is crud, climate change is a religion and not science.

They speak utter nonsense. It is like the worship of Baal back in Biblical times, bowing down to fossil fuel and doing whatever it is the great god Baal wants.

Well, things didn't work out too well for the priests of Baal, if you followed that analogy, but that is where we are. And what all of this overlooks is the coming storm.

When the President pretends that climate change is a hoax, he disables government's ability to prepare for a coming storm. When the executive branch sensors the use of the terms ``climate change,'' demands that they be struck from government documents, that prevents the executive branch from preparing for the coming storm.

When the executive branch--as we heard just today in the Environment and Public Works Committee--goes around and terminates grants based on a heresy hunt, where they are looking through the grants for language they don't like--like ``equity,'' there is a bad word; ``inclusion,'' can't have that; ``climate,'' definitely worth terminating a grant over that--they are destroying the programs that would help communities prepare for the coming storm because they have the word ``climate'' in them.

They even went so far in the executive branch as to have an Executive order on energy that refused to include either solar energy or wind energy in the definition of ``energy.'' Like, you can say what you want about whether you like solar or whether you like wind, but all you have to do is go to a solar facility or go to a wind facility, and you can see the electrons coming off of it.

The idea that that is not energy, that is not just a violation of law and common sense, that violates the dictionary. But that is how far the fossil fuel industry wasp will drive the Trump administration bug to ignore the coming storm.

What does the coming storm look like? Well, let me start.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to use a larger than usual graphic in order to show an old page from the New York Times.

Mr. President, now this is always good to remember because it wasn't always this way with President Trump. Here in 2009, there was a full-page ad in the New York Times. President Obama was getting ready to send a crew to Copenhagen for the COP, the climate change conference, and business leaders spoke up about that, saying, as business leaders, here is what we have to say:

[One,] if we fail to act now, it is scientifically

irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible

consequences for humanity and our planet.

Well, that is kind of the point here, and I will get into, in a moment, what some of those catastrophic and irreversible consequences look like.

And it goes on to demand that the Obama administration show leadership on climate change:

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

modeling the change necessary to protect humanity and our

planet.

Signed by Donald J. Trump, chairman and President; Donald J. Trump, Jr., EVP; Eric F. Trump, EVP; Ivanka M. Trump, EVP; and the Trump organization.

So there have been times when the Trump family understood what climate change was all about, understood the catastrophic and irreversible consequences that were looming, and were willing to say so.

But in between came exposure to politics, exposure to the power of fossil fuel on the Republican side and the understanding that if you really want to make it in Republican politics, you have got to do whatever the fossil fuel industry wants, whenever the fossil fuel industry wants it. That means we are ignoring some pretty serious warnings.

One of the earliest warnings came from Freddie Mac. Freddie Mac is not a green organization. Freddie Mac is a huge mortgage company, a federally chartered giant mortgage company. And as a giant mortgage company, it has a very distinct interest in the mortgage market.

And what did the chief economist for Freddie Mac warn? He warned that climate change was making coastal properties uninsurable. Climate change was making coastal properties uninsurable, either because sea levels were rising and they would flood or because storms were worse and there would be more damage by hurricanes and massive rains or because, who knows, they would lose access to the fresh water in their wells because of the infiltration of salt water underground. There are all sorts of ways in which climate risk hits coastal properties.

So the chief economist said: Here is how that works. The climate risk disrupts the insurance industry as to certain properties--meaning, those properties also can't get a mortgage any longer.

Freddie Mac is a mortgage giant. It knows what is needed for a mortgage. What is needed for a mortgage is an insurance policy. No insurance policy, no mortgage.

So now you have got properties along the coast that are at risk, that can't get insurance and can't get a mortgage. What happens to the value of those properties? Well, it goes down, he predicted. He predicted a coastal property values crash as a result of that cascade from climate risk to uninsurability to no mortgages.

And the coastal properties values crash he predicted was going to be so severe that it would look like 2008--that mortgage meltdown--all over again, and he stands by that testimony. In fact, he came when I was chairman of the Budget Committee to reiterate it.

Something else has changed in the meantime, though. It is not just coastal property risk. Ask any of our Western colleagues about wildfire risk and about what is going on in areas that have wildfire risk that the insurance company can't figure out, can't predict; and, therefore, it backs away from.

We are seeing that all across the country. The coastal property values crash warning now has an evil sibling: the wildfire adjacent property values crash warning. And either one of them, or both, could create that cascade from uninsurability to unmortgageability to crash in property values to nationwide recession.

He is not alone. A little over a month ago, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Chairman Powell came and testified in the Banking Committee. What did Chairman Powell have to say? He said that in 10 to 15 years, it will be impossible to get insurance or a mortgage in entire regions of the United States; exactly that cascade--climate risk, uninsurability, can't get a mortgage, property values crash.

Here is the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, also not green, just a guy who is interested in dealing with risk to the financial system, and he is saying: Here it comes, buckle up. We are going to see that in 10 to 15 years.

Well, if we are going to see that in 10 to 15 years, who is looking at that now? Investors are; insurance companies are. You can't wait 10 to 15 years for the effects of entire regions of the country that can't get mortgages to start to be felt. That is going to start to happen now, and, in fact, it is. Look at the high-risk areas in the country.

Here, we see things like--from our Budget Committee work--these are nonrenewal rates around the country. And you can see in high-risk areas--Florida or coastal, California for both coastal and wildfire, that nonrenewals are spiking up in areas of climate risk.

What is nonrenewal? A nonrenewal is when your insurance company says to you: You know, thanks for all the premium you paid all these years, but your piece of property has now become uninsurable. We can't manage that risk any longer. Therefore, you are fired. Go find another insurance company.

Well, that is a big mess.

Then we go onto First Street, which took some of this data and others and started predicting forward. This is where home values are headed because of climate change.

You can see in these darker red areas, you are looking at actual reductions in home value, right? Not your home is your castle and it is always going to be valuable but, actually, the value of it goes down.

Some of the marks go as much as 100-percent loss of value. Eighty percent is this color. Sixty percent is this color. And you can see it speckled throughout the country. Places where, in the time of a 30-year mortgage--in the time of a 30-year mortgage, you are going to see property values actually go down--the property values crash that was predicted by Freddie Mac and the loss of mortgage availability that was predicted by Chairman Powell.

Here is another one: Where do insurance premiums go in the next 30 years? Well, in a lot of places, like down in Florida, we have already seen double, triple, and quadruple. An average home insurance payment in Miami Dade County is $17,000 a year. You look down here at Miami, and it is in the dark zone where it is supposed to go up 300 percent. That is a quadrupling, just so you know.

So if you are at $17,000 now and you are going to quadruple in 30 years, that means you are going to end up--do the math. I am not doing it right now in my head, but let's say it is $70,000 a year, right? Quadrupling $17,000--$68,000 a year.

If you have a property that has a carrying cost for the buyer of $68,000 a year, how valuable is that property? What is the present value of that liability that comes with the property? It is a huge liability, and it knocks down the value of the property.

So that is why the home value evidence that First Street collected here relates to the insurance premium expense. You don't just lose the value of your house when your property isn't mortgageable any longer and you can't find anybody to buy it other than a cash buyer; you also lose the value of your house when the carrying cost of your home insurance becomes so great that nobody wants to buy into that annual $68,000 liability.

How much would you pay to have to write a $68,000 check every year? Not much. It would have to be a pretty darn nice house to cover that. And for a lot of people, that just erases the value of the home, which is why we get there.

So, First Street, their estimate was that climate change could erase $1.4 trillion in U.S. residential real estate value by 2055 due to these concerns that they put on the chart. And they are not alone. It is not just Freddie Mac; it is not just First Street Foundation; it is not just Fed Chair Powell.

Here is the Mortgage Bankers Association. You think that is a green group? Fat chance. But they do care about mortgages, and what they say in their report is:

Chronic physical risk associated with climate change--i.e.

the insurance risk--may exceed the capacity of insurance and

government assistance to sustain some areas.

That kind of tracks with Jay Powell saying there are going to be whole regions of the country where you can't get a mortgage any longer--even with government help, even with insurance, it just doesn't work any longer.

So when an advocacy group like that for the mortgage bankers is giving this warning, it might be worth paying attention to. It might be worth not just dismissing it: Oh, climate change is a hoax. None of us need to worry about that.

The Economist Magazine, also about as ungreen as it can be. And the Economist Magazine--this is a cover story. If you can't read it, it says: ``The next housing disaster,'' and it is a house on a piece of land that is being eroded by seas.

If the size of the risk suddenly sinks in and borrowers and

lenders alike realize the collateral underpinning so many

transactions--

Like those mortgages--

is not worth as much as they thought--

Because those prices have fallen as insurance rates climbed--

a wave of repricing will reverberate through financial

markets.

Here is the punch line:

Climate change, in short, could prompt the next global

property crash.

Another way they say it in the article is this:

At present, the risks of climate change are not properly

reflected in house prices. A study in Nature, a journal,

finds that if the expected losses from increased flooding

alone--

That is that coastal value crash risk; not the wildfire one, just flooding--

were taken into account, the value of American homes would

fall by from $121 billion to $237 billion.

Again aligning with what First Street predicted--changes in Americans' home values because of climate risk uninsurability and unmortgageability.

Mr. President, $121 billion to $237 billion is a pretty big hit on those homeowners whose properties have lost that value.

Globally, what they say is that we are looking at a $25 trillion hit to global real estate markets. The largest asset class on the planet is real estate, and it is looking at a $25 trillion hit. Yeah, let's ignore that and believe the fossil fuel-funded White House that says it is a hoax. That makes a lot of sense.

Obviously, if there is going to be a property values crash and if mortgages are going to be in the center of it, that is not great for the banking industry. Why? First of all, the banking industry makes a lot of money off of mortgages.

If a whole bunch of properties won't sustain a mortgage any longer, that shrinks the market, so there is less revenue to be had for the banking industry.

Also, if you have a mortgage on your books as a bank, the liability-- what the owner owes you on the mortgage--gets offset in your solvency determination by the value of the collateral that you hold against that liability. The collateral is the value of the home.

What happens to a bank in a region where the value of the home has fallen by half? What happens when the homeowner owes more money than the property is now worth? That hits the bank's loan-to-value ratio. That is a determinant of bank solvency.

So, guess what, this is not just me saying this; the International Financial Stability Board just did this report in January giving a warning to the global banking system: Look out. Buckle up. Climate risk is coming. Uninsurability is coming. Unmortgageability is coming. You need to plan to stay solvent through and survive that crisis.

So I will tell you, this is a very technical report done by very technical people. The Financial Stability Board is, again, not a green organization, but they do have an obligation to look forward and predict risk, and they are predicting this risk to the global banking system.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, during Trump 1, by the way, issued this report--``Managing Climate Risk in the U.S. Financial System''--saying that climate change poses systemic risk to the U.S. economy across multiple sectors ``simultaneously and within a short timeframe''--this is coming at us--undermining the U.S. financial system's ability to sustain the economy.

Let me read the opening sentence from the report, from the executive summary:

Climate change poses a major risk to the stability of the

U.S. financial system and to its ability to sustain the

American economy.

Precisely as the other experts argued.

Risk to insurance, to mortgage, to property values crash, to economic collapse.

On the next page, they say among findings of the report:

A central finding of this report is that climate change

could pose systemic risks to the U.S. financial system.

Let me say a word on systemic risks because it sounds like a pretty dull term. It is not like apocalyptic risk, catastrophic risk; it just says systemic risk. What does that mean? That means that the whole system takes a hit. That means that the damage is not contained to the sector where the damage is happening.

That is like 2008 all over again. We had that set of bad mortgages, but when that set of bad mortgages--when it became apparent that that was fake and phony and that there was not real value there, it didn't just harm the mortgage holders, it took down entire investment firms, and that crash cascaded out through the entire economy.

Those of us who were here in 2008--I can remember the financial agony of Rhode Islanders when that recession hit so hard and so suddenly. I can remember the people who were at the Treasury and at the Fed who were supposed to prop up our economy in a state of absolute, sweating panic about how this crash was going to wipe out the U.S. financial system. That is what systemic risk is. It means the whole thing goes down, the whole system.

So it sounds like a pretty mild term, but if you are familiar with economics, you know that is one of the scariest words in the economic lexicon.

What else have we here? We have Deloitte--not very green, either--a big consulting powerhouse. Here is what they say about continuing to fiddle around on climate change, pretend it is a hoax, censor the term, and act like idiots about a true coming risk with abundant warnings about the risk. They say that we have a range of outcomes. By 2070-- that was their target period--they said that if we can start getting climate right, if we can start addressing this problem before these systemic harms happen, then what is going to happen is the global GDP will increase by around $40 trillion; i.e., the world will be better off financially by $40 trillion by our making the right decisions to get climate change right. That is one outcome.

The other option is that we continue goofing off. We continue fiddling around and lying about climate change or believing the lies about climate change. We continue ignoring the evidence. We continue ignoring what we are seeing with our own eyes in the insurance industry in regions of the United States right now, already.

Go around Florida and talk about property insurance and tell me what you hear, because I am pretty sure I know because I have been there and heard it.

The other is a $180 trillion hit to global GDP, which means there is a $220 trillion swing that will come to pass in the lives of children now. The world can be $220 trillion poorer or $220 trillion richer depending on whether we continue to screw up responding to climate change, ignore it, and listen to the worst people in the world to listen to--the fossil fuel industry, which is wreathed in conflicts of interest on the subject, crawling with conflicts of interest, infested with conflicts of interest, and eager to shove those conflicts of interest into our politics with lies and dark money, secret influence. It is one of the fouler things that have been done, what has been done in our Congress by the fossil fuel industry.

If Deloitte is right, that $220 trillion swing is a hell of an outcome for people who will be alive then--all because we won't make good decisions now.

Potsdam Institute says that climate change losses by 2049 could hit $38 trillion and then get bigger after that.

So, again, we are dealing with a sooner window than 2070, but we are dealing with very, very, very big numbers--$25 trillion hit to the global real estate sector; $38 trillion hit from lost agricultural yields, labor productivity, and infrastructure; $220 trillion globally, depending on whether we get this right or continue to be fooled by those with the worst conflicts of interest.

Recently, Allianz, which, by the way, is the biggest insurance company in the world, a trillion-dollar company--two things about the insurance industry and Allianz in particular. The insurance industry needs to predict accurately in order to price its insurance correctly. So, first of all, they are making like trillion-dollar bets on what the future is going to look like. They are not just lying to make up stuff so that they can sell more gasoline next year in California and Rhode Island and other States; they have to look out.

When they do look out, not only do they have that huge bet that they are placing on what the world is going to look like, what risk they are insuring, they are actually under a fiduciary obligation. They can be sued by their shareholders and by their members if they are not doing proper due diligence and getting it right.

So when the insurance industry is doing signals like this, it is worth paying attention. The insurance industry is under a fiduciary obligation to get it right, the fossil fuel industry has a massive conflict of interest to tell us stuff that is wrong, and we are believing the fossil fuel industry? It is madness or it is politics or worse.

Well, here is what the Allianz board member wrote:

We are fast approaching temperature levels--1.5 degrees

[centigrade], 2 degrees [centigrade], 3 degrees

[centigrade]--where insurers will no longer be able to offer

coverage. . . . Entire regions are becoming uninsurable.

Sound familiar? Fed Chair Powell used almost the exact same language. They are seeing the same thing.

This is a systemic risk. Remember what I said about systemic risk? Here is a board member of the largest insurance company on the planet, with a trillion dollars at stake, saying that this is a systemic risk that threatens ``the very foundation of the financial sector''--just like the Commodity Futures Trading Commission report threatened, just like the International Financial Stability Board warned.

This is a systemic risk that threatens ``the very foundation of the financial sector.'' How? He continues. If insurance is no longer available, ``other financial services become unavailable'' too. A house that cannot be insured cannot be mortgaged.

This is the same deal that the chief economist of Freddie Mac was predicting. No bank will issue loans for uninsurable property.

Credit markets freeze. This is a climate-induced credit crunch.

He also points out in his article something that I hadn't paid attention to. I was looking at the ``insurance to mortgage to property values'' crash. But what he points out is that, if you go to the financial sector, big wheeler-dealers in the financial world do big deals and transactions, and very often those transactions depend on an insurance component to make the deal work. And in areas where the risk involved in that transaction is uninsurable, then the transaction can't happen any longer.

So it is not just mortgages and the mortgage market that are imperiled by this insurance risk. It is the whole swath of other financial transactions, which is why the title was ``An End to Capitalism.'' That is what we are dealing with.

There is a lot more that I could go through. Here is my current binder on the economic risks of climate change, which includes these articles and more. I have circulated it to Finance Committee members. I have circulated it to Budget Committee members. I have circulated it to Environment and Public Works Committee members. I don't think anybody really wants to read it because, in this place, the fossil fuel industry gets what it wants, whatever it wants, whenever it wants. And the fossil fuel industry does not want the Senate or the House paying any attention to these looming risks, to these storm warnings that are coming.

I have been through small insurance collapses in Rhode Island--two of them. One was a banking insurance--State-backed banking insurer--that failed just as I was coming in as a new Governor's legal counsel. And as we saw this beginning to fail, he asked me to handle the issue. So it was a handful of an issue, I will tell you, because we knew that the insurer was going to fail, and we knew that all of the insured banks would no longer be able to honor their accounts. And we knew that about a third of Rhode Islanders had money in those various banking institutions and that they would lose access to their funds until we sorted this out. And it happened the day that the new Governor was sworn in.

I can remember preparing the needed papers to take over the closed institution in an all-nighter in a law firm and, in the morning, running the papers up to the Governor's office through the cold weather of a Rhode Island January as the guns were firing, signaling the start of the new administration--the ceremonial guns of probably the Newport Artillery Company.

And on day one, we had to close all of these banking institutions, and I spent the next many months of my life trying to figure out how to get them back, get depositors repaid, and clean up the insurance system.

So I know that when Ernest Hemingway was asked, ``How did you go broke?'' he said, ``Gradually, and then all at once.'' That is how these insurance crises happen.

The Rhode Island Share and Deposit Indemnity Corporation went broke gradually and then all at once. It was just a matter of days from steady state status to complete calamity, and we had to dig our way back out of it.

The next one was workers' compensation insurance--that too, gradually and then all at once.

Like the California FAIR Plan, we had a backstop insurance entity that, if you couldn't get insurance in the regular market, you would go to the State entity, and then your risk would be farmed out to all of the other companies--which is fine if it is 2 or 3 or 4 percent of the market. But when that company starts to have a huge share of the market and huge losses, the insurance companies look around and say: Wow, we are going to own our share of those losses. I don't want to do business here any longer.

They came in, and in a matter of a day or two, every single workers' comp insurer in Rhode Island had said: We are out of here. We are done. We are closing.

And we had until the end of their policy to stand up a whole new workers' compensation system that paid for itself and was fair to workers.

Between those two things, I don't think I have ever worked so hard in my life. But we solved both of those problems.

Now, you may say: Well, that is just a little problem in a little State. Yes.

Many years ago, my father set up Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict in the Defense Department. He was the first SOLOC, as they called it. And one of the things that people in Special Operations really didn't like was being told that what they were doing was low intensity.

Mr. Whitehouse, when it is you that is being shot at, it is not low intensity. We have got to get rid of that name.

So small fights can be brutally intense fights, and these were small but brutally intense situations in Rhode Island. And the lesson to me is really clear: These things happen gradually and then all at once. And we are well into the gradual part of what climate change is doing to insurance markets, and the cascade from that into mortgage markets and into property values and into economic recession is now entirely predictable--indeed, predicted by essentially anyone who is, A, paying attention to this, and, B, not on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry.

So when we are messing around with Senate parliamentary procedures, when we are actually threatening--maybe cooler heads will prevail-- threatening to go nuclear, threatening to overrule a ruling of the Parliamentarian just to run a political errand for the fossil fuel industry to help it sell more gasoline, we are doing two really evil things at once: We are doing real damage to this institution that will be very hard to walk back from; and, two, we are indulging an industry with a massive special interest and a massive conflict of interest that is simply out to sell more gasoline and that wants us to ignore the risk that its emissions are creating in the world.

And we are now, in this building, so overwhelmed by that fossil fuel political influence infrastructure--all its dark money running through super PACs, all its lies being spouted out by phony front groups, all of the fake scientists making up stuff that isn't science but sounds good because it was cooked up on Madison Avenue to sound good. And now they have actually infiltrated the office of government, and they are running the U.S. Government from the inside with a view to making sure that nobody pays attention to the climate harm.

And I will close with a different point, which is that I have spent my time so far on the floor talking about how a corrupting industry has used its influence in Congress to steer us away from paying attention to a massive economic risk that numerous expert voices have warned us is in peril--and not just expert voices but many who are under a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders.

We had in the Budget Committee the CEO of Aon, which is one of the biggest insurance companies in the world. He is their U.S. CEO. He came in to testify and give that same warning. Over and over and over again, we are getting that warning about the economic peril that is looming, where we are now in it gradually, and we are waiting for ``all at once'' to happen.

And I talk about that as an economic matter because this is the ``House of Mammon,'' where the worship of the fossil fuel god Baal and money is the No. 1 thing that we do. So I am speaking in the terms that the Senate and the House most pay attention to, which is money--money.

But know that behind the economic peril is real natural disaster, is real tumult in the natural systems of the Earth that have allowed our species to develop for 20,000 years in a relatively safe harbor of limited atmospheric carbon, a healthy climate range, moderate storm activity, and a robust ecosystem around us where that security and that safety have allowed the ecosystem to flourish.

And it happens in a million small ways. One of my favorites was the red knot. There is a bird; it is called the red knot. It lands in Delaware every year, and lots of them land in Delaware every year, and they come to Delaware every year because the horseshoe crabs in Delaware Bay come ashore to lay their eggs. So it is like social hour for horseshoe crabs, but it is also feeding frenzy for birds that like to eat the horseshoe crab eggs.

But here is the deal about the red knot. I bet you don't know where they come from to get to Delaware Bay for that moment when the horseshoe crabs are laying their eggs. They come from

Brazil. They have come from all the way down in Patagonia. They have flown up to Brazil, and then they go from Brazil over the water to Delaware Bay.

Imagine how long it takes to fly from Brazil to the east coast, to Delaware, in a jet plane. These little birds, they do it on their own. They are not big. They are about that big. And they fly all that way on their own.

It is such an arduous journey that their bodies actually metamorphose a bit during the journey to make it possible. It is one of the miracles of creation that this little bird can make that astonishing journey and have the physical changes to its body that take place during that trip make it possible for that little bird to make that journey.

And the reason that species makes it and survives is because, in God's great ecosystem, they have figured out that if they land at this time in this bay, the food will be there for them. And if we screw that up with fossil fuel emissions so that the schedule of the horseshoe crabs' egg laying goes off and those red knots come all the way from Brazil and there are no eggs there for them--they are too late; they are too early--that is how populations crash.

That is just one tiny example. That is one thread of this beautiful interlocking natural planet that we have, and there are a million more such threads that put the world together that we take for granted.

Behind the looming economic risk is a disruption of the Earth's natural systems that goes well beyond just economic harm.

It means that the creek where your grandfather taught you to fish and where you want to teach your granddaughter to fish isn't going to have the fish in it any longer. Can you put a price on that? No. It means that the water flowing out of the Himalayas--fought over between Pakistan and India forever--becomes less because there is dramatically less glacier in the Himalayas to provide the glacial flow down into those rivers.

And now you have a conflict between those countries over that most elemental need of humans--water. Can you put a price on that risk? Coastal homes all over the world are being lost to sea level rise.

After Superstorm Sandy, I walked the beaches near Matunuck, RI, and there was a man standing on the shore near his house. His house was tipped over because the storm had eroded the foundations of it, and he was looking at his house. They spent time going into it. It was tipping over. It was dangerous to go in, but they were getting out as much stuff as they could.

I asked him: Tell me the story of this house. It was a nice old house, been there a long time. He said: Well, I remember being here as a baby. It was my grandparents' house. They came here in the summers. It was beautiful. We had all this beach in front of us. We even had a lawn in front of us. The thing I want most in my life is to be able to pass this home on to my grandchildren; to have that family tradition, generation after generation after generation, to be able to come to this beautiful place and enjoy this beautiful shore and continue this glorious family tradition.

How do you put a price on that when that is taken away because we are too damned lazy and indolent to clean up the fossil fuel industry's mess when they won't do it?

My point is that as I focus on the economics of this--because that is what people care about in this place--there is a whole other set of costs to mankind and to our Earth that we will be forcing future generations to bear that have nothing to do with the almighty dollar but actually may be worse in terms of humankind and the human spirit.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, notwithstanding the distinguished majority leader's accusations of mendacity and hypocrisy and misrepresentation, the facts at heart here are quite simple: The waiver at issue is not a rule and was never a rule. Thirty years of precedent and practice at EPA and in this body prove that. So what the GAO did here was not unprecedented.

What was unprecedented was for the House to send over a document claiming falsely, according to the Parliamentarian, that the waiver is, in fact, a rule under the CRA. And to blame the GAO or the Parliamentarian for that is to mistake the referee for the player who committed the foul. The foul here is pretending that a waiver is a rule, and both the GAO and the Parliamentarian independently blew the whistle on that foul. Those are the facts.