Congressional Record, Volume 164 Issue 47 (Monday, March 19, 2018)

[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 47 (Monday, March 19, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1780-S1784]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

LEGISLATIVE SESSION

______

ALLOW STATES AND VICTIMS TO FIGHT ONLINE SEX TRAFFICKING ACT OF 2017--
MOTION TO PROCEED--Continued

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Cloture having been invoked on the motion to
proceed to H.R. 1865, the Senate will resume legislative session and
consideration of the motion to proceed.
The Senator from Ohio.
Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, we just had a vote in this Chamber on a
very significant piece of legislation. It was the motion to proceed to
it. It was agreed to with good Republican and Democratic majorities,
with both sides of the aisle supporting moving to this debate.
Because we have cosponsors from both sides of the aisle, I feel
confident that we will get to an end point, and we

[[Page S1781]]

must. This issue of trafficking human beings is something the Senate
must stand up against, particularly because there is a Federal law that
now permits trafficking online that otherwise would be considered a
criminal act. I want to talk a little about that legislation tonight.
We probably will not have the final vote until Wednesday, and some of
the information I will provide tonight will be setting the reasons, the
basis for doing this legislation. Then, between now and Wednesday, we
will have to learn more about the specifics of it, what is happening
online, and how the U.S. Senate can step in and provide the legislation
to remediate what is an obvious problem to anyone who looks at this
issue.
Human trafficking is such an egregious crime. We all, I hope, agree
with that. It is also a very lucrative crime--$150 billion a year is
the estimate, and that is probably second only to the drug trade in
terms of the amount of money involved. Think about this. This is
selling human beings.
The Senate has taken steps in this body in a bipartisan way over the
past 6 or 7 years to focus on this issue, and I certainly commend my
colleagues for that. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, and I, as
a Republican, started a bipartisan caucus to stop human trafficking
about 6 years ago. We started with the two of us, and now there are a
couple of dozen. There are many Members who are engaged and involved in
this.
Over those past 6 years, the Senate has passed legislation to
increase the penalties on those who buy children for sex. For the first
time in a decade and a half, we increased the Federal penalties.
We have helped to stop international trafficking by U.S. Government
contractors overseas with legislation that was signed into law.
We have helped with regard to finding missing children by requiring
for the first time that those missing children have a photograph
attached to them. Unbelievably, until that legislation, most kids in my
home State of Ohio and other States who went missing did not have the
information provided to law enforcement and others--people who work in
shelters, people who are in the juvenile justice system--to be able to
find those children. Why is that so important? Because, as you can
imagine, kids who go missing are sometimes the most vulnerable to being
trafficked.
We also passed legislation to improve the data on trafficking. There
is legislation called the Sex Trafficking Data and Response Act, which
we passed in this body to provide better information about this problem
so we could come up with better solutions by understanding what is
going on. Trafficking is in the shadows. It is very profitable, but it
is an illicit activity. So that legislation was critical.
By the way, the primary author of that legislation was Senator Ron
Wyden of Oregon. Senator Wyden will probably be on this floor over the
next couple of days talking about some of the concerns he has about the
online legislation we have, but I want you to know that Senator Wyden
has been out front on opposing trafficking through this Sex Trafficking
Data and Response Act. I was the lead Republican on that legislation,
so I worked with him, and I commend him for that.
We also passed legislation to change the paradigm in Federal law and
treat these children who are trafficked as victims rather than as
criminals. The key is to get these young people into treatment, longer
term recovery, and deal with what is, as you can imagine, a very
traumatic situation--often related to drugs as well, so drug treatment.
Something that I think is perhaps the most important thing we can do is
to understand that these are victims who, in order to get back on their
feet, need to be taken from the criminal justice system and put into
the kind of treatment they need.
Despite efforts here in the Senate--and by others around the country,
by the way--to deal with this trafficking issue and raise an awareness
of it, unbelievably today, as we stand here in this country, we are
seeing an increase in one type of trafficking, and that is sex
trafficking. You might ask, how could that be possible? We passed all
this legislation to help. We have gotten increased consciousness about
the issue. People are more aware of the problem, and certainly there is
a consensus that this is something we ought to crack down on. Yet it is
happening. I will tell you what the experts say. They say it is
happening for one simple reason, and that is that more and more women
and children are being sold online--the ruthless efficiency of the
internet. So that is where this legislation focuses, and it focuses
there because that is where we see the problem.
Traffickers are using the internet to sell women and children, and we
have a responsibility to act. If we don't act, we will allow a Federal
law that was passed by this body 21 years ago, which I think
inadvertently has created part of the problem by shielding these
websites, to remain.
I will talk more about this later in the week as we get into the
specifics of our legislation and why it would address the problem, but
the bottom line is that we have a real problem.
The anti-trafficking group Polaris--we recently received its 2017
report. The report illustrates the true nature of the crisis. This is
the heat chart put up by Polaris. It shows the locations of cases
reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline last year alone, in
2017. As we can see--and this explains why we see such strong,
bipartisan support for our legislation--this is happening everywhere,
in every State in the Union. Unfortunately, it is increasing, not
decreasing, despite all the efforts locally and even here at the
Federal level.
The national hotline that Polaris runs--and I hope to be at that
hotline, by the way, later this week, as they are opening a new
facility and expanding what they are doing--experienced a 13-percent
increase in reported cases nationwide just last year. So despite all
the efforts, they are actually seeing an increase. In my home State of
Ohio alone, 371 cases of human trafficking were reported to the
hotlines. Across the country, their hotlines handled a record 8,759
cases in 2017, up from 7,737 reported cases in 2016. Again, these are
only the cases that are reported. That doesn't mean there aren't many,
many more cases out there that are not reported to the hotlines.
In the 10 years they have operated these hotlines, by the way, human
trafficking reports have increased 842 percent. Again, it is
unbelievable that this is happening in this country in this century and
increasing.
I chair the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. A couple of
years ago, being interested in this issue, we started to talk to some
of the experts around the country. I met with people back home--
particularly the victims of trafficking and some of the survivors--and
I kept hearing the same thing from everybody, whether it was the
advocacy groups for those being trafficked, law enforcement, or the
social service agencies that are helping to treat these women and girls
who are dealing with the trauma we talked about earlier. The one thing
I kept hearing was the word ``backpage.'' That is just one website, but
it seemed as though there were a lot of people being trafficked on that
one website. I certainly heard it back home, where these women and
girls said to me: Rob, this has moved from the street corner to the
smartphone, and backpage is where I was trafficked.
Nearly 75 percent of all child trafficking reports that the National
Center for Missing and Exploited Children receives from the public
involved backpage--75 percent of the reports.
Another anti-trafficking organization called Shared Hope
International says that service providers working with child sex-
trafficking victims have reported that more than 80 percent of their
clients were bought and sold on backpage.
We talked earlier about how lucrative this business is, but one
website seems to have practically monopolized it.
With that knowledge, in 2015 the Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations, led by Ranking Member Claire McCaskill from Missouri
and me, conducted an investigation. We spent 18 months researching
this. We looked at every angle of this issue, and specifically we
looked into how backpage operates. It wasn't easy because backpage was
not willing to cooperate, as you can imagine. What we did find was that
the company was far more complicit in these crimes than we had
previously thought.

[[Page S1782]]

We subpoenaed backpage for their company documents, and they refused
to comply. When you refuse to comply with a subpoena around here,
normally we can kind of tell people: Well, if you don't comply, we will
bring the full weight of the criminal law on you. They still wouldn't
comply. So we had to come to the floor of the U.S. Senate to enforce
the subpoenas, which hadn't been done in 21 years around here.
Fortunately, when we made our case to our colleagues here in the
Senate, everyone in the Senate said: Yes, let's be sure they do comply
by taking this to the criminal justice system and allowing our lawyers
here to take this case. So we did.
We thought, well, we will win a case at the district court level,
which we did, and that will be it. No, they appealed that. We won a
case at the circuit court level, and we thought that was it. No, they
appealed that. Are you getting the drift here that they did not want to
supply these documents and did not want to testify? Finally, we took it
all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Supreme
Court agreed with us and told them that they had to comply, with the
threat of criminal sanctions if they did not.
Having won that, we then found ourselves in possession of over 1
million pages of documents. In other words, they flooded us with
documents, and our lawyers did a good job going through them. Through
this investigation, we found what some of us had kind of thought might
be the case, which was that this company was actually complicit. In
other words, they knew what they were doing, and they were knowingly
facilitating criminal sex trafficking of vulnerable women and children.
They actually coached traffickers on how to edit the adult classified
ads to post so-called clean ads for these illegal transactions. Then,
of course, they would cover up evidence of those crimes in order to
increase their own profits.
In 2006, as an example, backpage executives instructed staff to edit
the text of adult ads--not to take them down, mind you, but to edit
them--which is exactly how they facilitated this type of trafficking.
By October 2010, backpage executives had a formal process in place, we
learned through all these documents, of both manual and automated
deletion of incriminating words and phrases in ads.
This is an email from one of backpage's executives in 2010. It says:

I'm attaching a spreadsheet with the most current list of
coded items to be stripped out. Email your lists to me by the
end of the day. . . . Thanks.

In other words, they were telling these people who were posting ads:
Oh, you can't say this word or that word because then law enforcement
will know that we are engaged in selling underaged girls online. So
they told them to take out those words. It is unbelievable.
What kinds of words were stripped out of the ads, allowing sex
trafficking posts to stay up without violating the posting words? These
are the kinds of words they took out: ``teenage,'' ``little girl,''
``school girl.'' ``Cheerleader'' was one of them. For those of you who
are literary types, one was ``Lolita,'' which is a novel about an
underaged girl and an older man, and also ``fresh'' and ``AMBER
Alert.''
These are the kinds of people we are dealing with here. Once these
incriminating words were removed, the posts could then go on the
website. That is how backpage coached the traffickers on how to get
away with their crimes. Again, this filter didn't stop the ads, even
though they knew it was illegal activity; they only edited them to try
to hide that. So it didn't change what was advertised--the fact that
these were underaged girls; they only edited the way it was advertised.
Of course, this did nothing to stop the criminal activity, but it
facilitated it knowingly.
The incentive? Why would backpage go through all of this? Quite
simply, profits. This is a very profitable enterprise.
What is the cost of these crimes? It is very profitable, but the cost
is human dignity, trauma. The cost is far more than money; it is
suffering and sometimes human life. I have heard stories about this. I
know my colleagues in the Senate have heard stories about it, and that
is why there is so much support for this legislation across the
country. These individual stories are compelling, they are powerful,
and they are heartbreaking.
Imagine for a moment that your daughter is missing. She has been gone
for several weeks. She is 14 years old. Someone says: You ought to look
on this website called backpage. So you do. You look on backpage--you
are a mom--and you find your daughter.
This is the story of Kubiiki Pride and M.A. She told her story
bravely before our Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. She told
us the details, and we were able to use that as part of our
investigation and to come up with a legislative response. She said she
actually told backpage--she called them and said: I found my daughter.
She has been missing for weeks. She is on your website. Thank you for
taking down the ad and helping me to connect with my daughter.
As you can imagine, these were sexually explicit photographs of a 14-
year-old girl. She didn't know whether she was alive or dead, so she
was excited to find her but appalled by what she saw, as any of us
would be.
What did backpage say? We can't take down the ad because you didn't
pay for it, did you?
She said: Of course, I didn't pay for it; she is my daughter.
That is the level of evil we are talking about.
This is another story of another brave individual who has come
forward. This is Nacole, the mom, and J.S. Nacole also bravely
testified in front of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
J.S. was a 15-year-old when she ran away. She loved her family, and she
wrote them a 5-page letter saying how much she loved them, but she
chose to leave the safety of her family and home, and she ended up in a
homeless shelter for teens. A 22-year-old woman who was posing as a
teen there approached her and said, ``I can help you make some money''
and then introduced her to a pimp, who then sold her on backpage. For
more than 3 months, she was sold online multiple times a day.
Finally, an undercover police officer posing as a customer rescued
her. Thankfully, he did, because for some many of the girls, the story
goes on and sometimes ends in a very tragic way.

This is Yvonne Ambrose. Yvonne actually testified before the Commerce
Committee. She and her mom did a beautiful job talking about her
heartbreak and her tragic encounter with backpage. Yvonne got a call on
Christmas Eve in 2016 that every parent dreads. It was about her
daughter Desiree. They said in the call that her 16-year-old daughter
had been murdered after being exploited and sold for sex on
backpage.com. One of the backpage customers apparently was the one who
murdered her beautiful daughter.
Yvonne is honoring Desiree's memory by working with us to try to hold
these websites accountable, and Kubiiki and Nacole are fighting for
justice.
These are only three examples tonight, but there are so many others
and so many I have experienced back home. Again, these are
heartbreaking stories. One girl told me she started to be trafficked at
age 9 by her father. Some others have told me of not having parents at
home, being in foster homes and leaving the foster homes either when
they were emancipated at age 18 or earlier and the horrible situation
they found themselves in.
I have had the opportunity to meet with survivors in cities around
Ohio--in Dayton at Oasis House, in Columbus at Alvis, in Akron, Toledo,
Cincinnati, and Cleveland. The majority of these young women tell me
the same thing about backpage. Usually there are drugs involved as well
that create a dependency.
Unbelievably, for years, these websites have gotten away with this
because when parents like Yvonne, Kubiiki, or Nacole file a lawsuit for
damages to try to stop what is going on, they are told: We are immune.
When the prosecutors in these local communities step up and ask: ``How
could this illegal activity be going on? This is illegal to do on the
street corners, certainly it is illegal to do online,'' the judges say:
We are immune.
We will get into this later as to why that happens, how it happens,
and what

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we are doing about it in this legislation. I look forward to that
discussion. I look forward to the debate on the Senate floor as to how
we came up with a very targeted and very specific approach to this that
doesn't interfere with the freedom of the internet at all, but it does
stop activity that never was imagined. When Congress passed a law 21
years ago, it never imagined it would permit this kind of criminal
activity online.
Tonight I thank those families who had the courage to step forward,
tell their stories publicly, and channel their grief into something
constructive, which is to come up with a legislative solution that
helps address this problem so the next 14-year-old daughter or 16-year-
old daughter does not find herself in these same horrible situations,
with all the trauma and all the heartbreak that occurs.
Justice cannot be seen, but its absence can be felt, and that is what
is happening now, an absence of justice. Those who have been trafficked
online only see the websites that knowingly facilitated it to prosper
and escape legal consequences. That has to stop. That is an injustice
to me.
I look forward to further debate again this week. I look forward to
the vote on Wednesday. If we can pass the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers
Act, we will make a difference. We will save lives. We will save women,
girls, and boys from going through this traumatic experience and
instead enable them to achieve their God-given potential in life.
I yield back.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.

Yemen War Powers Resolution

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I come to the floor tonight to discuss
America's role in the crisis in Yemen.
I have here a picture of the fractured remains of buildings, people
fleeing from those buildings, and a small child, probably in her
father's arms. This represents the challenge of the bombing that is
going on in that nation. I am here tonight to discuss America's role in
that bombing and the fact that here in the Chamber we need to debate
how it is we have come to the point of supporting this bombing when the
War Powers Act clearly says we should not be.
When our Founding Fathers wrote our Constitution, they designated the
President as the Commander in Chief, but they gave Congress, the House,
and the Senate the sole power to declare war. Article I, section 8
states unequivocally: ``The Congress shall have the power . . . to
declare war.''
It is only Congress that can take our Nation from peace to war. If
one has any doubt about that, consider the words of James Madison
himself, the father of our Constitution. He said: ``In no part of the
constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which
confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to
the executive department.''
Now, the clearly stated responsibility in our Constitution was
reinforced by the 1973 War Powers Resolution, often referred to as the
War Powers Act. That particular piece of legislation stated as its
purpose the following: ``It is the purpose of this joint resolution to
fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United
States and insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and
the President will apply to the introduction of United States Armed
Forces into hostilities.'' It goes on to say: ``The constitutional
powers of the President as Commander-in-chief to introduce United
States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent
involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances,
are exercised only''--and that is a critical word--``pursuant to (1) a
declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a
national emergency created by attack upon the United States.''
The picture I showed you showing the fractured remains of buildings
and people fleeing that bombing in Yemen, that activity is not taking
place subject to a declaration of war by this body--we have done no
such thing--nor is there any specific statutory authorization for our
assistance in that, nor is there a national emergency created by an
attack upon the United States where that is justified.
Tomorrow this Chamber will take up this issue. We will be voting on a
resolution put forward by our colleagues Senator Sanders, Senator Lee,
and Senator Murphy calling for the removal of our Armed Forces in this
role of supporting Saudi Arabia in this war against the Houthis.
There are two basic components of our presence in Yemen, and those
are very distinct and not to be confused. The first is counterterrorism
efforts in which we are directly engaged against associated forces of
al-Qaida. This is a role that stems from the authorization for the use
of military force that we passed in this Chamber in 2001. Members may
come to the floor and argue about whether that initial authorization
for use of military force involving al-Qaida in Afghanistan has been
stretched beyond recognition. I would argue it has been stretched
substantially and perhaps beyond recognition, but that is not the issue
we are debating this week.
This week we are addressing the central issue of whether our
involvement in supporting Saudi Arabia in its role in war against the
Houthis in Yemen has violated our Constitution and the War Powers Act,
and we have to confront and face how our assistance is contributing to
a vast humanitarian crisis in that country. We may not have boots on
the ground in support of the Saudi war against the Houthis, but we are
very involved.
As we judge whether this involvement is violating the Constitution
and the War Powers Act, we should turn to section 8, the interpretation
of the joint resolution. It says:

Authority to introduce United States Armed Forces into
hostilities or into situations wherein involvement in
hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances shall
not be inferred--
(1) from any provision of law . . . including any provision
contained in any appropriation Act, unless--

This is the key--

such provision specifically authorizes the introduction of
the United States Armed Forces into hostilities.

It is very clear. The interpretation of this joint resolution says
there is no room here to be participating in hostilities--that is a
war--even in a supporting role, unless it has been specifically
authorized by Congress. This interpretation of the joint resolution
section of the War Powers Act goes on to say:

You see the language here--

the assignment of member of such armed forces to command,
coordinate, participate in the movement of, or accompany the
regular or irregular military forces of any foreign country
or government when such military forces are engaged.

There is the key fact that was laid out when we passed the War Powers
Act. This War Powers Act doesn't just address us directly engaging in
hostilities or directly confronting an enemy on the battlefield, it
includes these provisions of commanding, coordinating, participating in
the movement of, or accompanying military forces of a foreign country.
There is no question that we are coordinating and participating in
the movement of the Saudi forces, so let's take a look at exactly how
we are involved. The administration comes back and says: Yes, but we
are not directly bombing the Houthis. We are not directly putting boots
on the ground and shooting them.
It is clear the War Powers Act includes coordinating with,
participating with, supporting, and partnering, if you will, with a
foreign country involved in such a war. We are very involved.
First, we are involved by refueling Saudi planes en route to bombing
the forces of the Houthis in Yemen. That is pretty direct involvement,
and it goes to that language which says ``participate in the movement
of'' those foreign forces. If we are refueling their planes en route to
bombing the Houthis, we are participating in the movement of their
military forces. A plane, a bomber, is a part of a military force.
Second, we are providing intelligence and thus very directly
supporting this war of the Saudis.
Third, we are selling the weapons to them that they are using in this
war on the Houthis.
Fourth, we are providing targeting assistance. We have even
established a

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joint combined planning cell, an operation center, to conduct military
intelligence activities in partnership with Saudi Arabia.
Here is why this matters so much: It has a huge impact on the lives
of the people in Yemen. It is very possible the planes we refueled are
responsible for conducting a series of three airstrikes in Saada last
month, killing 5 civilians and wounding 14 more, including 4 children,
as well as paramedics trying to pull survivors out of the rubble after
that first strike, or that the planes we refueled played a role in
striking a hotel last August that turned the building's ceiling black
with the charred blood of 50 farmers who were staying in that
building. We know that the bombs we have sold to the Saudis are killing
many civilians. It is time for us here to reckon with that fact.

A lot of Americans may not even know we are involved in this war. It
has not been widely discussed. There are so many things going on across
the planet at this time--so much going on in Syria, for example, that
perhaps Americans in general are not paying attention. But we should be
paying attention because of the carnage that is occurring: 10,000
civilians have been killed since this conflict began. The great, vast
bulk of those civilians are dying from air strikes conducted by Saudi
Arabia that we are supporting through intelligence and target
assistance and refueling. Then there are the consequences of that
bombardment. The result is just a tremendous humanitarian crisis.
The Saudis have been involved in blockading the ability to get
humanitarian supplies into Yemen--food and medicine and fuel. This has
resulted in what the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for
Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Mark Lowcock,
has warned could become ``the largest famine the world has seen for
many decades.'' Seven million Yemenis are on the verge of starvation
because of this war that we are involved in and the related Saudi
blockade of food and medicine.
About every day, 130 Yemeni children die from extreme hunger and
disease--130 a day. One of the factors that is killing people is
cholera. Since October of 2016--so roughly a little less than a year
and a half ago--1 million Yemenis have contracted cholera. More than
2,000 have died from it. It is the largest cholera outbreak in recorded
history. Let me say that again: 1 million Yemenis have contracted
cholera, and it is the largest cholera outbreak in recorded history. So
7 million Yemenis are on the verge of starvation, 1 million have
contracted cholera, and so many are dying because of this war we are
involved in.
The death and destruction in Yemen is unimaginable, and the United
States needs to take a hard look at the role we are playing--a role we
are playing in violation of our Constitution and in violation of the
War Powers Act of 1973. That is the issue we are going to be discussing
here on the floor.
I know there is some popularity in saying: Let's not look at that
humanitarian crisis and our role in it; let's just look at the
relationship we have with Saudi Arabia and know that they have helped
us in other cases--for example, the war on ISIS. Let's know that they
are a good customer for many of our products and for many of our
military products. But I say to my colleagues: This issue is bigger
than simply a good marketplace or a good relationship with Saudi
Arabia. This goes to our involvement, our culpability in the deaths of
thousands of Yemenis and 130 children a day through bombs falling on
them, through hunger, starvation, through cholera.
It is hard for me to think about this young child in this picture,
this young Yemeni, who clearly is the victim either of cholera or
starvation or some other consequence of this conflict. But imagine 130
of these children dying every day.
It is our responsibility to honor the Constitution, and it is our
responsibility as humans on this planet to wrestle with the fact that
our involvement is contributing to this vast humanitarian disaster. Let
us not abdicate our responsibility on the basis of friendship with
another nation based on the fact that they are a good market for our
products or that we think they may be future partners in some other
agenda. We have a direct responsibility in war and peace that we have
not fulfilled, and this week, with this coming resolution tomorrow, is
a point that we must wrestle with this. Let us wrestle with it and
honor the Constitution and give some integrity to the 1973 War Powers
Resolution.
Thank you.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that cloture on
the motion to proceed to H.R. 1865 be vitiated, and that at a time to
be determined by the majority leader in consultation with the
Democratic leader, on Wednesday, March 21, the Senate proceed to the
consideration of H.R. 1865; further, that the only amendments in order
be Wyden amendments Nos. 2212 and 2213; finally, that there be up to 4
hours of debate concurrently on the amendments, and that following the
use or yielding back of that time, the Senate vote in relation to the
amendments in the order listed, with a 60-vote affirmative threshold
required for adoption of each amendment, the bill be read a third time,
and the Senate vote on passage of the bill, as amended, if amended,
with no further intervening action or debate.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Without objection, it is so ordered.

Unanimous Consent Agreement--S.J. Res. 54

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that following
the resumption of the motion to proceed to H.R. 1865, on Tuesday, March
20, Senator Sanders, or his designee, be recognized to offer a motion
to discharge S.J. Res. 54; further, that there be up to 4 hours of
debate, equally divided between the opponents and the proponents of the
resolution, and that following the use or yielding back of that time
the Senate vote in relation to the motion to discharge.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Without objection, it is so ordered.

____________________