[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 68 (Thursday, April 26, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2461-S2463]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                               Dark Money

  Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, if I told you that a cabal of wealthy 
elites and special interests were spinning a web of deceit to lie to 
the American people and to rig the levers of power in their favor, you 
would think I was talking about the plot of some movie, some TV show, 
or some novel. But, as Senator Whitehouse and several of our colleagues 
have come to the floor to demonstrate this past week, this isn't about 
the plot of a movie; this is real life that it is happening here right 
now, and it is important that we as Americans and we as Members of the 
Senate face it squarely and understand how this manipulation is being 
designed to take our ``we the people'' Constitution and turn it on its 
head--turn it into a government of, by, and for the powerful rather 
than of, by, and for the people.
  Today, I am going to share with you a little bit of information about 
one piece of this web of deceit, and that is the Heritage Foundation. 
It is a well-known name here in Washington after decades of engaging in 
a mission of formulating and promoting rightwing public policies. 
People hear ``Heritage Foundation,'' and they know what it is.
  As Jane Mayer writes in her book ``Dark Money,'' it was created to be 
``purposefully political, priding itself on creating, selling, and 
injecting conservative ideas into the American mainstream.'' Well, that 
is a more complicated way of saying that it was created to be an 
advocate for the fossil fuel industry and to mislead Americans in every 
possible way in order for them to continue their deeply damaging and 
polluting ways. Ms. Mayer goes on to describe the organization as a 
``political weapon'' disguised as a think tank, and that pretty much 
sums it up.
  One of the organization's founders, Paul Weyrich, once said about 
solidifying power for the biggest corporations and wealthiest 
Americans:

       I don't want everybody to vote. . . . As a matter of fact, 
     our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the 
     voting populace goes down.''

  Thus there is this intense support to engage in voter suppression. If 
you are a red-blooded American, you believe in the vision of voter 
empowerment, not voter suppression. So that says a lot about what this 
organization is all about. It is not we the people, it is not voters 
empowerment but rigging this Nation and this process for the powerful 
and the privileged.

  The papers, reports, and journals that come from the Heritage 
Foundation work to muddy the water on established science. I did find 
it interesting that every now and then they promote an idea that 
actually makes some sense. Back in 1989 they promoted, in a publication 
entitled ``Ensuring Affordable Healthcare for all Americans,'' a plan 
to establish a marketplace with tax credits to enable people to be able 
to help buy policies. This was the foundation for RomneyCare in 
Massachusetts, and it became the foundation then for the Affordable 
Care Act.
  In fact, back then, long before the Affordable Care Act came along, 
people like House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whenever he talked about the 
possibility of improving government healthcare, he talked about the 
Heritage Foundation's plan for a marketplace, but the moment an 
administration came along that happened to be a Democratic 
administration that took that idea seriously, the Heritage Foundation 
immediately abandoned it, which goes to my point that they are engaged 
directly in the game of politics on behalf of the Koch brothers' cabal 
and sabotaging, in a partisan and political way, the blue team at any 
possible moment.
  In one brief, Heritage explained away their change of heart saying: 
``Analysts once supported a limited and qualified insurance mandate'' 
but now believed it was ``bad public policy'' because the mandate came 
from the Heritage Foundation.
  In 2012, Stuart Butler, the Heritage Foundation researcher who 
authored the original publication calling for an individual mandate, 
wrote an op-ed saying he had changed his mind, and he titled it, 
``Don't blame Heritage for `ObamaCare' mandate.''
  Well, why not? They put the idea forward. It actually was a key 
principle of insurance marketplaces, otherwise you created an insurance 
death cycle. So they put the idea forward. They promoted the 
marketplace. They said this

[[Page S2462]]

is what is necessary, and then they abandoned it, when it was 
advantageous, to a partisan, political attack.
  In fact, the then-president, former Senator Jim DeMint, went out in 
2013 on a multi-State tour to basically drive up support for stopping 
the very idea that Heritage had initiated.
  They certainly have gone out of their way in this effort for voter 
suppression, which is a complete affront to the most fundamental and 
basic right of our Nation. In reports, they make claims like ``there is 
no credible evidence that voter-ID laws have impeded turnout, 
especially among minorities and Democrats, as their opponents 
suggest.''
  Well, of course, the exact opposite is true.
  In regard to North Carolina, they said that ``there has been no 
`suppression' of the turnout of North Carolina voters by any of these 
reform measures.''
  OK. Not true. In fact, it was exactly the intent of impeding the 
turnout that was debated in the North Carolina Legislature. That was 
the heart of why they undertook it.
  In fact, when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reviewed it, they 
described it as ``almost surgical precision'' in the way it was 
targeted at suppressing the vote by minority voters. The U.S. Supreme 
Court reviewed it and they refused to hear a case appealing the lower 
court's ruling.
  Then there is the real heart of this web of deceit; that is, the 
Heritage Foundation's decades of efforts to say that carbon dioxide 
pollution is just fine, don't worry.
  I think about how back in 1959, Edward Teller was addressing the 100-
year anniversary of the oil industry. They invited him to speak, as an 
eminent scientist, and he said many good things about the role that 
burning fossil fuels could do to amplify the energy in America, but he 
also said there are two challenges this industry has. The first 
challenge is that there is a limited amount of fossil fuels in the 
ground and someday we will run up against that shortfall and we will 
have to switch to other forms of energy. It turned out there was a lot 
more fossil fuels around the planet than we ever anticipated in 1959.
  The second point he made was, you know, this may not seem like a 
pollutant because you can't smell it--this carbon dioxide--you can't 
see it, but it has the intriguing and problematic characteristic in 
that carbon dioxide traps heat. It traps infrared energy. As a 
consequence, it is going to cause great disturbances as it builds up in 
the atmosphere. He specifically talked about its effect on the Poles in 
raising temperatures, melting ice, and raising sea levels.
  Today we know it has many more impacts that Teller didn't elaborate 
on back in 1959 but come from this warming impact. We have seen global 
temperatures reach a record year after year after year, with some 17 of 
the hottest years occurring in the last 18 years, which is a phenomenal 
indication of the direction we are headed.
  When I was running for office, a billion baby oysters died in Oregon 
at a hatchery not because of a virus but because the acidity of the 
water had grown 30 percent over the course of the Industrial Revolution 
burning fossil fuels. How is that connected? It is because burning the 
fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide. The wave action takes that carbon 
dioxide and turns it into carbonic acid, and now we have a massive flow 
of acid into the oceans--enough to change its acidity level by 30 
percent, enough to kill baby oysters because it is so difficult to 
start extracting the chemicals for a shell out of the water when the 
acidic level is so much higher.
  We have seen the impact on our coral reefs--the ocean acidity 
combined with the temperature of the ocean. As many already understand, 
coral is an animal that lives in a symbiotic relationship with algae. 
When the temperature of the ocean gets warmer, the algae overwhelms the 
coral, the coral expels it and basically commits suicide. It is called 
bleaching. They throw the symbiotic algae out, and then the coral dies, 
and the acidity adds to that difficulty of the coral forming the coral 
structure itself.

  Lastly, we were sent a huge message by Mother Nature. Remember, 
Harvey and Irma and Maria, three dramatic hurricanes all hitting the 
United States of America. Why did they carry so much punch? They 
carried it because 90 percent of the heat that is trapped by global 
warming is trapped in the ocean, and that greater energy in the ocean 
then produces stronger hurricanes.
  If that wasn't enough, we had those raging forest fires from Montana 
on through to the northwest corner of Washington State, down through 
Oregon, deep into California and way late in the season, clear to 
December--a much longer season. Many acres burned in those fierce 
fires.
  So whether it was hurricanes or raging forest fires, Mother Nature is 
trying to say something is dramatically wrong, and you better act.
  The Heritage Foundation is there for political purposes. They are 
there to do the Koch brothers' bidding. So their purpose is to sow 
doubt, mislead Americans. It is like the tobacco industry misleading 
Americans about the fact that smoking cigarettes causes cancer. In the 
course of their greed, they are damaging the world in a colossal way, 
and we have to call them out. We have to strip away their pretense to 
be serious about policy and know what it is all about: the greed of the 
fossil fuel industry for short-term profits while deeply damaging this 
beautiful, blue-green planet that we have the responsibility to 
protect.
  They said climate change is ``a potentially serious issue'' that 
``might cause problems in the future, but the impacts cannot be 
determined with any degree of certainty.''
  What a colossal lie. It is not ``potential.'' It is here now. It is 
not ``might cause problems.'' It is causing problems. Scientists do 
measure it in all kinds of ways. They measure it with a thermometer 
when they measure the temperature of the air and water. They measure it 
with a yardstick when they measure the oceans, and they measure it with 
the movement of insects and animals that we see all throughout our 
Nation, from the spread of diseases like Zika to the spread of 
challenges like the pine beetle in the Northwest and the ticks in the 
Northeast. They blatantly distort and misrepresent the truth.
  They did this on a Royal Society's statement on climate. They edited 
it to change a powerful statement about the problem into one that casts 
doubt on the issue. They just did this.
  Now, let me explain that this is not--the Royal Society is not just 
any organization; this is the United Kingdom's national science academy 
and a fellowship of the world's most eminent scientists. It has been 
around since the 1660s, bringing scientific facts to policy debates. It 
included Sir Isaac Newton. It included Charles Darwin. It included 
Albert Einstein. It included Benjamin Franklin. It included the late 
Stephen Hawking.
  In 2010, the Heritage fellow, who happened to be a former Koch 
Foundation associate, just coincidentally, posted a blog on the 
foundation's site entitled ``U.S. Could Learn from U.K.'s Global 
Warming Reversal.'' The very title is saying the opposite of what the 
actual document said. It commented on this blog on a ``dramatic 
reversal'' of the Royal Society on climate, but the blog cut and pasted 
parts of the report to make it say the opposite of what it actually 
said. So 10 pages, 48 paragraphs, that laid out the impact of climate 
chaos were edited out in order to mischaracterize the Royal Society's 
conclusions.
  This is the type of truth-bending, misrepresentation, and outright 
lies the Heritage Foundation is involved in on behalf of the Koch 
brothers. The report summary even said the report ``shows that there is 
strong evidence''--this is the actual report, not the blog--``strong 
evidence of Earth's warming caused by human activity.''
  The Heritage Foundation proceeds to say things like the ``hysteria 
over global warming is now pervasive in the federal government.''
  They say ``hysteria'' because they want to dismiss it as some 
emotional response rather than the conclusion of virtually the entire 
scientific community. Every major scientific organization in the world 
weighing in on why it is they want to rein in EPA's regulatory 
excesses, what they say are--this is what they say: We want to rein in 
``EPA's regulatory excesses with respect to carbon dioxide and other 
greenhouse-gas emissions'' and that the reining-in is ``long overdue.''

[[Page S2463]]

  They go on to say: ``Congress should insist on preventing . . . 
regulators from mandating greenhouse-gas-emissions caps, or from using 
greenhouse-gas emissions as a means to promulgate a rule.''
  In other words, what they are saying is, we are misconstruing the 
science, outright lying to the American people, to prevent Congress 
from responding to this dramatic impact on our country--not just on our 
country but on the world.
  They also proceed to misrepresent a lot of information about the 
impacts of oil drilling. There is a 1985 piece in Heritage Today 
entitled ``Offshore Oil Drilling: Good for the Economy. Great for the 
fish.'' According to the article, the fears of proponents of the ban on 
offshore drilling that ``another disaster like the Santa Barbara 
Channel spill in 1969, when [up to] two-million gallons of sepia-
colored oil bubbled up from the ocean floor, covering hundreds of 
square miles of sea'' were not justified.
  Fears about another disaster were not justified. Why? They said 
because ``offshore oil and gas production is carefully regulated.''
  It went on to say that ``every offshore operation must include three 
blow-out preventers and casings for drills; drills must be cemented 
into the surrounding earth.''
  Then they said: ``Oil companies must submit an oil spill contingency 
plan'' and ``frequent safety inspections, scheduled and unscheduled, 
further reduce the risk of spills.''
  Tell that to the crew of the Deepwater Horizon, because what we 
learned when we investigated what happened with Deepwater Horizon and 
what happened at other drilling platforms all around the gulf was the 
exact opposite of what the Heritage Foundation put forward on behalf of 
the Koch brothers and the fossil fuel business. What we really found 
out is that the blowout preventers were poorly designed. They failed. 
An explosion sunk the rig, and a sea floor gusher flowed for 87 days, 3 
months.
  The Associated Press found that in the lead-up to the accident, 
Deepwater Horizon wasn't carefully regulated. It said a quarter of the 
required inspections were never carried out. It said the rig ``was 
allowed to operate without safety documentation'' that was required; 
that they had received five or six safety citations, the most serious 
of which occurred in 2002, ``when the rig was shut down because 
required pressure tests had not been conducted on the blowout 
preventer--the device that was supposed to stop oil from gushing out'' 
if things went wrong.
  The gulf coast is still trying to recover from this disaster: 4 to 8 
billion harvestable oysters killed; 51,000 to 84,000 birds killed; 
56,000 to 166,000 sea turtles killed; a 51-percent decrease in the 
dolphin population; an estimated $2 trillion to $5 trillion of newly 
hatched fish killed. The list goes on and on, hardly the vision the 
Heritage Foundation wanted to put forward.
  So how does this web of deceit work? Just follow the money. Since 
1998, they have received a huge amount of support from the fossil fuel 
industry--$780,000 just from one company, ExxonMobil. Over the course 
of a number of years, the Koch Foundation gave more than $5.7 million 
to fund their work. There was an additional nearly $5 million received 
from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, which happens to be one of the 
Koch Family Foundations. Heritage is also a member of the State Policy 
Network, a web of rightwing think tanks across the country that the 
Koch brothers own. Koch money is coming from every direction. Heritage 
Foundation is the puppet of the Koch cartel enterprise.
  That is only the tip of the iceberg of how this system works. We can 
trace back all of these pieces to the fossil fuel efforts to mislead 
the American public, to lie to the American public, and to spread doubt 
about actual scientific work.
  We see their connections all through the Trump administration. When 
the Koch brothers say jump, the President of the United States says: 
How high? Then he does whatever they ask. If they want Scott Pruitt as 
head of the EPA, that is who they are going to get. If they want the 
Congressman whom they have championed throughout his entire career to 
be our chief diplomat, that is what they get.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
  Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, if I can wrap up in two sentences, I will 
say that this web of deceit is enormously damaging to our Nation. Let's 
call it out. Let's have an actual debate based on the science and not 
let the Koch brothers do what the tobacco industry did and mislead the 
American public decade after decade after decade to the great damage of 
the citizens of this great country.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arkansas.