Floor Statements

Madam President, before last year, the committee I chair and one of the committees on which the Presiding Officer sits--the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee--was far too much about Wall Street and far too little about issues that matter to people's lives.

We have changed that. Instead of always listening to the biggest banks and their corporate lobbyists, we listen to workers and we listen to their families from all kinds of communities all over the country.

Last year, we held the committee's first-ever worker listening session where, as hard as it was for all of us, no Senator asked questions. We just heard from witnesses. We heard from workers--about a half-dozen workers--who just told us their story.

We know that workers power our economy. We heard from workers from all kinds of backgrounds, working all kinds of jobs. Some worked for banks, others worked for large tech companies, and some for other corporations. They talked about wage theft. They talked about being laid off during a pandemic with no severance pay. They talked about the danger in their workplaces. They talked about how, in some cases, their companies busted their unions.

Their stories make it clear that the real harm the Wall Street business model does is to workers' lives.

Yesterday, we held our second listening session, this time with renters from around the country whose homes are owned by deep-pocketed investors like corporate landlords and private equity funds.

One of those renters--some lived in the Presiding Officer's home State, I believe in North Minneapolis--told her story. It is an increasing problem in every region, from big cities to rural towns. Deep-pocketed investors come into a community they have no connection to, and they buy up homes; they raise rents; they cut services; and they don't deliver on their promises to their tenants.

These out-of-town and sometimes out-of-country investors are raising rents often by as much as 50 percent, issuing eviction notices, and leaving toxic mold and pest infestations to grow worse, all to pad their bottom line.

We heard from renters in apartment buildings and single-family homes and manufactured housing. We heard from renters in Las Vegas, NV; Great Falls, MT; and Hyattsville, MD--all sharing those stories.

One renter was told, when she asked why her rent suddenly increased by hundreds of dollars a month, ``We have to please the investors.'' Think about that. ``We have to please the investors.''

Renters in Nevada, in Maryland, in Texas, and in California had their homes repeatedly flooded with wastewater, lived with rodent infestations, and went long periods without working showers or hot water.

Listen to Juan Cuellar from Maryland. He said:

The ceiling in the hallways is falling in. The wood floor

is buckling. We don't have heat. There are cockroaches and

mice. The air conditioning units don't work. There is a lot

of mold. The refrigerator doesn't work. They don't want to

fix anything, including the stove and the refrigerator and

the heater.

They don't even have heat. These investors claim they are just running a business. OK. The business is supposed to be providing a decent place to live--that is part of the deal--in exchange for collecting people's hard-earned money in rent each month. If your building is full of mold and mice and doesn't have working heat or doesn't have a working stove, you are not holding up your end of the deal. You are not running a real business; you are running a scam. Families pay a very high price for it.

Rachel Jones is a working mother in North Minneapolis. She said her persistent complaints about her home's leaking sewage and dangerous garage went unanswered. The city itself was forced to step in because of code violations. This single mother said the company that owns her home bought it as ``essentially a money-grabbing tool. That's all they are doing.''

Ms. Nguyen, who lives in Brooklyn, talked about the firm that bought her building, Greenbrook. She said:

They and their business model do not care if I or my

neighbors become homeless--in fact, their business model

makes that possibility [much more] likely.

Cindy Newman, from Great Falls, MT, talked about her manufactured home community. She worked hard to buy her home, but she rents the land it sits on. That is how manufactured homes work, how mobile home parks work. She rents the land it sits on. She said they used to have ``a fair land owner who kept our community safe and affordable,'' until the private equity firm Havenpark Capital took over.

I would just add that Senator Sanders just walked in, and Senator Sanders and I have talked about when these private equity firms come in and buy mobile home parks and the damage that so often does.

She said her new owners in Montana have ``cut back on all amenities and strip value out of our communities. They are brutal, absentee landlords.'' Her line, her quote.

The group raised rents and added fees for water and sewer and trash removal. Ms. Newman said this company bought a number of these homes-- Havenpark--all over Montana and Iowa and other places around the country.

She said it amounted to about an 86-percent increase--her words--for the dirt that her home sits on. But they just can't pick up and move. Moving her home to a different community would cost $10,000 or $20,000.

Just picture these mobile home parks. These mobile homes they buy-- maybe $30-, $40-, $50,000 in some cases--they set them and then they build around them, and they aren't really mobile at that point. It costs, as this woman said, $10- to $20,000 to move them.

Most of her neighbors are seniors. They are on fixed incomes.

She continues:

It's hard to believe we could lose our homes and our life

savings to such uncaring, greedy people.

Remember, they moved into these places 5 years, 10 years, 20 years ago. A family owned it. The family rented the land out for $200 or $300 a month. Then a private equity firm came in and doubled their rent. I mean, think about what that does, just upending the lives of people who are not all that affluent. They are kind of living paycheck to paycheck or Social Security check to Social Security check anyway.

As apartments and houses and manufactured home communities that people can afford become harder and harder to find, families are left with an impossible choice: pay money they don't have for a home that may put their kids at risk or gamble and look for a new place to live with a fear they will end up with no place to sleep.

That is what these seven renters, who represent millions of renters across the country--that is what they told us yesterday. These renters and homeowners shared their stories. They have shone a light on this problem.

Tomorrow in our hearing--we will hold a hearing in our committee looking at how we ended up here, how this exploitive business model has exploded around the country. For Wall Street investors, rent increases are distilled down as returns to shareholders. Code violations and eviction violations are just the cost of doing business. But for Mr. Cuellar and Ms. Jones and Ms. Newman and millions of Americans, these are their homes. These are their neighborhoods. It is up to us to look out for them, not to look out for private equity firms' bottom lines.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Moran and I be able to complete our remarks prior to the scheduled votes.

Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting American manufacturing and support the nomination of Reta Jo Lewis to be President of the Export-Import Bank. As President of Ex-Im and chair of the Bank's Board of Directors, Ms. Lewis will lead our Nation's official export credit Agency as it supports U.S. workers and manufacturers, especially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and throughout our country. Ex-Im's job is to support American businesses in the face of competition--so often, unfair competition from countries like China.

Ms. Lewis is the leader we need in the fight to help U.S. manufacturers compete globally. She has 25 years of distinguished leadership experience in international affairs, law, and public policy. She is a historic nominee as the first Black woman to lead Ex-Im.

She serves as a senior fellow and director of congressional affairs at the German Marshall Fund, where she leads bipartisan efforts to strengthen transatlantic cooperation. Before joining the German Marshall Fund, Ms. Lewis served in the Obama administration as the State Department's first-ever Special Representative for Global Intergovernmental Affairs.

She will put American workers and exporters first. That has been the hallmark of this administration--putting workers at the center of our government; putting workers at the center of our economic policy.

Ms. Lewis understands that Ex-Im is vital to these manufacturing jobs and our Nation's economic competitiveness.

There are some 100 export credit agencies and credit programs around the world that support foreign manufacturers. China's export finance activity is larger--China's is larger--than all the export credit provided by the G7 countries combined. That alone is reason to move forward on Ex-Im. We know that the Chinese Government used export credit as a weapon to win manufacturing business in critical sectors and to undermine American companies and American workers. We must be in a better position to compete.

We have had so much good job news in Ohio over the last few weeks. It is not a coincidence that for the first time in my lifetime, we have a President who leads by talking about workers, who leads by talking about unions. As a result of his leadership, we are seeing more job creation in Ohio. We have seen more jobs created in 2021 than in any number of years in the past. We are seeing now tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs--Intel, Hyperion, GE Aviation--coming to my State. It is all made possible because we are putting workers at the center of our economy.

Look at the results we are getting. Last year--this is worth saying like five times--last year, for the first time in 20 years, our economy actually grew faster than China's. Our GDP grew faster than China's GDP. Again, that is because we have a President of the United States who puts workers at the center of our economic policy, who understands that carrying a union card means better wages, better benefits, and more control over your work schedule.

But we know that China and our other competitors aren't giving up. They are constantly finding new ways to cheat, new ways to undermine American jobs. That is why we need every tool possible to compete, including a fully functioning Export-Import Bank with an experienced, tenacious leader at the helm. Jobs in Ohio and jobs around the country depend on Ms. Lewis's success.

I urge my colleagues--as we voted overwhelmingly on cloture--I urge my colleagues to support the nomination of Reta Jo Lewis for the Ex-Im Bank.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

I ask unanimous consent that the scheduled vote occur immediately.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, we have had so much good news in Ohio and across the country over the last few weeks--rising wages, record job growth, a million jobs in 2 months.

Intel is bringing 10,000 new good-paying manufacturing and trades jobs to Central Ohio. That facility will be built by union workers-- electricians, carpenters, laborers, pipefitters, and other workers of the skilled trades.

Hyperion, a fuel manufacturer, is opening the largest factory built in Columbus in a decade, creating 700 jobs.

GE Aviation with Boeing signed a new deal exporting planes built with next-generation jet engines developed in Southwest Ohio, supporting thousands of Ohio jobs.

As I was flying into Columbus with Senator Portman a couple of weeks ago to join Intel to announce those jobs, I was thinking: Today we are finally burying the term ``rust belt.''

For too long, corporate elites on the coast have used that outdated, offensive term--a term that demeans our workers and devalues our work. Now Ohio--the center of the country, the heart of the industrial Midwest--leads the way in the next generation of manufacturing.

The State that founded the auto industry and gave us the Wright Brothers is today making the most advanced chips that go into cars and phones and appliances.

All of this is made possible because we are putting American workers at the center of our economy. It is not a coincidence we are seeing this record job growth, when we finally have a President who understands what carrying a union card means, who centers workers, who cares about wages, who comes from the industrial heartland--a union card that means better wages, a union card that means better benefits, a union card that often means a more flexible work schedule that workers have a decision and input into forming.

And look at the results we are getting. Last year, for the first time in 20 years, our economy grew faster than China. Think about that. For the first time in two decades, the American economy grew faster than China's economy.

We know that China and other competitors aren't giving up. They are, every week, trying to find new ways to cheat, new ways to undermine American jobs.

We need every possible tool to compete. It is why last year in the Senate we passed the Innovation and Competition Act. We passed what we are now calling the Make it in America Act. It is a serious effort to invest in manufacturing research and development and bring and build supply chains back in the United States.

It is going to mean jobs. It is going to bring down prices. For too long, we have had a trade policy and a tax policy lobbied in this body by corporate interests that wanted to move overseas for cheap labor. We have had a trade and tax policy that essentially hollowed out manufacturing in Ohio and across the Midwest. Ohioans know what permanent normal trade relations with China 20 years ago when Congress passed it--to be asked of corporate America and pushed by people like Newt Gingrich--people know what that did to our economy. Almost everyone knows the devastation the North American Free Trade Agreement caused to industrial towns in Ohio and across the country.

PNTR and admitting China to the WTO hasn't gotten the same media attention, but Ohio steel companies and

other industries know how big a problem it has been. It is how we ended up with empty factories, lost dreams, supply chains that are too long, too fragile, and that stretch all over the world instead of made in America.

That is why I wrote the Leveling the Playing Field Act that was passed into law in 2015. It is why Senator Portman and I are working to make sure that our bipartisan Leveling the Playing Field Act 2.0 is in the competition bill, the Made in America Act the House passed last week.

Leveling the Playing Field has been critical for Ohio companies, allowing them to file and win trade cases against foreign companies that cheat the rules. We know our competition hasn't stopped coming up with new ways to skirt these rules and distort the global market to benefit their own companies.

The Chinese Government still subsidizes steel. The Chinese Government engages in economic espionage to steal American trade secrets to prop up their own state-controlled companies.

Look at the most recent conviction of a Chinese spy trying to steal GE Aviation's pioneering jet engine designs to swipe them and take them back to China. We need our trade laws to keep up.

Both the Senate and the House bills include the CHIPS Act to invest in new semiconductor production in the United States, like the new Intel factory coming to Licking County, east and north of Columbus. Even though the United States started the semiconductor industry, today those vital chips are mostly made overseas.

Fewer than 10 percent of chips are made in this country. Right now, 75 percent of chip manufacturing is in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and China. It has meant severe shortages and long waits for those chips that are critical inputs to so many of the products Americans rely on.

We need to bring the supply chain back home, starting with Intel in Ohio, by passing the CHIPS Act. We must invest in domestic manufacturing innovation. It is what Missouri Republican Senator Blunt and I worked together to do with our provisions in the Senate bill to create more manufacturing hubs across the country.

The first one, as many in this body remember because they voted for it, was in Youngstown some years ago, something called America Makes. All of us in the Senate and the House need to get to work immediately to get these bills over the finish line.

If you want to get a sense of how important this is, how strong these bills are, just look at what China is doing. The Chinese Communist Party is lobbying furiously against this bill. That is right. The CCP and its cronies, the communist party in China, are lobbying against the bill that invests in American innovation, supports American manufacturing, takes on unfair and illegal trade practices. They are scared, pure and simple.

They know that pro-competition bills--the Make it in America Act-- will have real consequences for their cheating and their trying to undermine American workers.

A Reuters headline from November: ``Beijing urges U.S. businesses to lobby against China-related bills in Congress.''

I will say it again: ``Beijing urges U.S. businesses to lobby against China-related bills in Congress.''

Unfortunately--I won't name them on the floor, maybe I should--but there are U.S. businesses that are lobbying against this because they do enough business in China, exploiting Chinese workers, evading any environmental laws or worker safety laws that may be in place.

The Chinese Government threatens these American companies, recruiting them to lobby against the interests of American workers. This time we are not rolling over. We are going to stand up for American innovation, stand up for American manufacturing, stand up especially for American workers.

As I said, we have a President now who puts workers at the center of our economic policy. We have a President who puts workers at the center of our economy. We have a President who is not afraid to talk about unions, knowing carrying a union card means a better life for workers.

We are going to get a strong bipartisan bill that increases our economic competitors. We know how to speed up our supply chain and lower prices and end our reliance on China: make more things in this country.

That is the solution to many of our economic problems: make it in Ohio. I urge my colleagues in both parties and both Chambers to go to work. Let's get this done for American workers.

I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, it is an honor to speak today in support of three historic, highly qualified nominees to serve 6 million Ohioans in the Northern District of Ohio on the Federal bench. Each of these nominees brings with them not only impressive legal credentials but also diverse life experiences, empathy, and a deep commitment to justice that will make them excellent district judges. It is why Senator Portman and I together recommended these nominees to President Biden. It is why each of them was voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support. I urge my colleagues on the floor to support them.

Madam President, tonight, we will vote to advance the nomination of Bridget Brennan.

Bridget Brennan is the current acting U.S. attorney in the Northern District. She has served Ohioans as an assistant U.S. attorney for over a decade. She has taken on complex and difficult issues. She has focused on cases that help make our communities safer and more just.

Ms. Brennan has dedicated her career to making the Northern District of Ohio a safer place for victims of human trafficking, including children. She served as the lead prosecutor in the largest juvenile sex trafficking case in the history of the Northern District--a horrific case that included victims as young as 12. She achieved the country's first conviction for a sex trafficker's use of heroin to control his victims, convincing the court to recognize heroin withdrawal as a ``threat of serious bodily harm'' for the purposes of proving coercion.

She has been a champion for religious liberty. She successfully prosecuted 16 defendants in a single case, under hate crime statutes, for their roles in religiously motivated assaults after they viciously attacked members of Ohio's Amish community. She successfully prosecuted a man for arson and the destruction of religious property after he drove hours just to set fire to a mosque in northern Ohio.

Ms. Brennan received glowing recommendations from those she has worked with and from those whom she has prosecuted. People who she has prosecuted write to her from jail, seeking advice and guidance. She is someone whose commitment to justice is obvious to all of those who deal with her.

I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting Ms. Brennan's nomination.

Madam President, tomorrow, in addition to confirming Ms. Brennan, the Senate will consider the nominations of Charles Fleming and Federal Magistrate Judge David Ruiz, both of whom are nominated to also serve in the Northern District.

Mr. Fleming is an assistant public defender, which is not always the route to being a Federal judge, but it is a key, key, key part of our judicial system. He is an assistant public defender in the Northern District, serving as trial team leader in the Northern District's largest public defender branch.

A career public servant, Mr. Fleming has extensive trial experience in Federal court, having served as a Federal public defender for 30 years. If confirmed, he would be the only Black man currently serving as an active-duty Federal district court judge for the Northern District.

Mr. Fleming has received uniformly enthusiastic reviews from judges he has appeared before and from attorneys he has tried cases against. As a lead public defender, he takes on what his supervisor has described as the ``most difficult and challenging cases,'' as you can imagine. In his cases, he has always displayed exceptional empathy not only toward clients but also toward the victims of crime. One story illustrates his character well.

He was representing an individual charged with committing a violent crime. According to the judge, when making his arguments for what he believed was a fair sentence for his client, Mr. Fleming turned and faced the victim and her family. The judge said Mr. Fleming didn't alter his arguments, but he wanted to accord the victim and her family the dignity of hearing directly from him, the public defender.

That is the kind of empathy and respect we need on the bench. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting his nomination.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask my colleagues to join me in honoring the life of a lifelong champion for American workers across the country, the founder and longtime president of the Pension Rights Center, Karen Ferguson.

Karen came to Washington, DC, in the early 1970s to work with Ralph Nader as a public interest lawyer, fighting for consumers and workers against unchecked corporate power. As one of ``Nader's Raiders,'' she found her calling. Recognizing the void of public advocacy for retirees and pensioners, Karen founded the Pension Rights Center in 1976. This marked the beginning of a crusade that lasted more than four decades, on behalf of pensioners who so often did not have much of a voice in their own government. Over the next 45 years, Karen personally assisted thousands of workers who were denied the retirement benefits they earned, and she advocated for retirement security for millions more.

As one of our country's leading experts on pension law and a passionate advocate for workers and their families, Karen was a source of strength and guidance to her allies in Congress for decades. She was instrumental to the passage of a number of reforms that improved the cause of retirement security, including the Retirement Equity Act of 1984, a critical law that provided benefits to millions of widows and divorced women.

Most recently, Karen was a leader in the fight to protect and restore multiemployer pension benefits for millions of union members across the country, including 100,000 Ohioans. She worked directly with my office to help draft the Butch Lewis Act and fought for years alongside Mr. Lewis, his widow and leader in her own right, Rita Lewis, and other workers, families, and small businesses, for its passage. Because of their advocacy, we were finally able to pass the Butch Lewis Emergency Pension Plan Relief Act into law as part of the American Rescue Plan in 2021. We were successful in no small part due to the unwavering support she provided. Now, more than a million Americans who have worked hard all their lives and gave up raises at the bargaining table in order to put that money toward retirement are no longer at risk of losing the benefits they earned. And many American businesses-- often small, family-owned businesses--will be able to continue to support their workers and grow and create more good, union jobs.

Karen Ferguson will be remembered for a lifetime of service on behalf of workers and their families, and the compassion and skill she brought to our efforts. Her legacy will continue through the millions of past, current, and future workers and their families who will have a more secure retirement thanks to her work.

Madam President, 10 minutes ago there was a different Nevadan Senator sitting at the Presiding Officer's chair. Welcome.

I was at a roundtable this morning with a group of Ohio county commissioners from conservative counties like Warren and Medina and more progressive counties like Lucas and Hamilton--Republicans and Democrats alike; male, female; a good cross section of Ohio leaders-- talking about the projects we are going to build and the good-paying jobs we are going to create--jobs that will not be off-shored this time because we came together to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

Yesterday, I was on a media call with the Republican mayor of Findlay, OH, about the I-75 bridge project that they need in Hancock County.

The day before, I was at another roundtable with western Ohio leaders, talking with them about how we can leverage these investments. It is some of the most important work I am going to be doing over the coming months, working with local and Federal officials to make sure this investment translates into Ohio jobs.

The Presiding Officer understands this, that we pass legislation here. With it, sometimes, comes a good bit of money, like with infrastructure. But it is also up to us, as representing our States, to make sure those dollars are spent efficiently and effectively and quickly, frankly.

The infrastructure bill is some of the most important work we have done in the Senate in a long time. We are investing in our country.

For years, mayors and businesses and workers have been telling us, as their representatives, as their Senators, about the need to upgrade infrastructure, but we have noticed over the years that candidates of both parties have promised infrastructure. ``We are going to pass an infrastructure bill when I am elected,'' they say. Plenty talk about it, but now, with a new President and a new majority in the Senate and the House, we are finally getting it done with this bipartisan infrastructure bill.

Over the past few months, I have heard from communities about the projects that this is going to allow them to accomplish.

In Toledo, with the mayor, talking about the city's plans to replace lead pipes--my State has the dubious distinction of being the second leading State, if you will. Our State has the second-most lead- contaminated pipes from main water lines and the pipes going into people's homes. We have 600,000 pipes like that going into people's homes that have high levels of lead.

And science has known, paint companies have known, lead manufacturers have known that infants, babies ingest lead. It affects their brain development for the rest of their lives. So one of our goals, working with the mayor of Toledo, is over the next several years to replace those pipes.

Ohio will get someone $1 billion in new funding to improve water infrastructure.

The Western Hills Viaduct in Cincinnati, the Patterson Avenue Bridge in Dayton--Ohio has some 3,200 bridges eligible for upgrades. Some of them, like the Brent Spence, unbelievably, across the Ohio River, carries 3 percent of GDP every day across that river.

Some of those bridges are--when I grew up working the family farm, driving a tractor with a hay wagon crossing little culvert bridges that dot our countryside and all over my State, many of those are in states of disrepair.

We have seen the new pollution-free buses that communities like Akron and Canton, Columbus, and Lake County are rolling out through Laketran, their transit system. We have heard about how they are going to expand service so people can get to work and school.

We have some 60,000 buses--big city buses--and another 50 or 60,000 small transit, more rural buses, that need to be replaced. They are fossil fuel, mostly diesel engines, and we are going to replace those over the next several years with low-emission or zero-emission buses.

From the Port of Ashtabula, the community my wife grew up in, we are hearing about how upgrades to our ports will increase investment and help speed up and grow Ohio supply chains.

As the Presiding Officer knows, this Congress, this Senate and the House, frankly, over the years, at the behest of corporate lobbyists, sold us out on trade agreements, sold us out on tax policy, so that so many jobs left our country. The industrial Midwest was hit the hardest, but every State was hit by that job loss because of bad government policy, again, lobbied by some of the largest corporations in the world--the tech companies, the drug companies, the oil industry.

We now have a President who wants to get it right and bring those supply chains closer to home.

Now this, we also see how Ohio needs better rail infrastructure--new rail cars for Cleveland RTA, better Amtrak service, safer rail crossings.

But, fundamentally, this bill--the infrastructure bill--is a jobs bill. It will create construction jobs, to be sure. It will create jobs--union jobs: carpenters, millwrights, electricians, plumbers and pipe fitters, sheet metal workers, laborers. It will create those kinds of jobs but also create manufacturing jobs through the supply chain.

Senator Portman and I worked to make sure this bill has the strongest ``Buy America'' requirements ever in an infrastructure bill with our Build America, Buy America Act.

Every one of these projects will come with the strongest ever ``Buy America'' rules. No more bridges--no more bay bridges in Northern California--made entirely with Chinese steel.

We introduced the ``Build America, Buy America'' bill on President Trump's inauguration day. Unfortunately, nothing moved because everything got crowded out of President Trump's agenda so they could give a huge tax cut to the richest people in the country.

We worked with other leaders now, 4 years later, with a new President, to get it right.

With ``Buy America'' particularly, I call out Senator Baldwin from Wisconsin, Senator Peters from Michigan and their work.

We are putting in place a clear, permanent standard: If American tax dollars are involved, American workers should be getting the jobs. It is going to mean more contracts for Ohio businesses.

Cleveland Cliffs' new plant in Toledo, talking about what we are doing there, it is the cleanest steel making, I believe, in the entire world at that new plant.

Owens Corning in Toledo; Gradall Industries in New Philadelphia, OH, on the edge of Appalachia.

We have the potential for hundreds more bridge projects around the State using American rebar, American steel, American iron.

It is an investment in Ohio that will pay off, creating jobs now, both during construction and up and down the supply chain. It will help attract new businesses. It will help keep the existing

ones. It will connect people with their jobs and businesses.

I will spend pretty much every day, and my staff will too, making sure that our State gets its fair share of this investment and these jobs.

If you believe in the dignity of work, you fight for the people who make this country work. We are seeing results.

On Wednesday, the mayor of Findlay and I were talking about the Biden administration's announcement of $100 million in initial bridge funding already on the way to Ohio. That focus will continue.

We are doing roundtables. We are doing briefings with Federal officials, with local township trustees and county officials and mayors and city officials and State officials, talking about how they can apply for Federal funding, and to make sure communities are best positioned to make the most of this infrastructure.

Our goal is to leverage this investment to create jobs in every city, in every county, in every township across my great State.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate consider the following nomination: Calendar No. 638, Joseph Donnelly, of Indiana, to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Holy See; that the Senate vote on the nomination without intervening action or debate; that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate; that any statements related to the nomination be printed in the Record; and that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate consider the following nominations: All nominations placed on the Secretary's desk in the Foreign Service; that the nominations be confirmed en bloc; that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate; that no further motions be in order to the nominations; and that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.