[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 51 (Friday, March 22, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2558-S2577]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
UDALL FOUNDATION REAUTHORIZATION ACT OF 2023
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Smith). The Chair lays before the Senate
the message from the House.
The legislative clerk read as follows:
Resolved, that the House agree to the amendment of the
Senate to the bill (H.R. 2882) entitled ``An Act to
reauthorize the Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Trust
Fund, and for other purposes.'', with a House amendment to
the Senate amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
Motion to Concur
Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, I move that the Senate concur in the
House amendment to the Senate amendment.
Cloture Motion
Madam President, I send a cloture motion to the desk.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The cloture motion having been presented under
rule XXII, the Chair directs the clerk to read the motion.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
Cloture Motion
We, the undersigned Senators, in accordance with the
provisions of rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate,
do hereby move to bring to a close debate on the motion to
concur in the House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R.
2882, a bill to reauthorize the Morris K. Udall and Stewart
L. Udall Trust Fund, and for other purposes.
Charles E. Schumer, Patty Murray, Jack Reed, Peter Welch,
Benjamin L. Cardin, Jeff Merkley, Catherine Cortez
Masto, Margaret Wood Hassan, Sheldon Whitehouse, Tim
Kaine, Richard J. Durbin, Richard Blumenthal,
Christopher A. Coons, Brian Schatz, Tina Smith, Jeanne
Shaheen, Chris Van Hollen.
Motion to Concur with Amendment No. 1790
Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, I move to concur in the House amendment
with an amendment No. 1790, which is at the desk.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The Senator from New York [Mr. Schumer] moves to concur in
the House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 2882,
with an amendment numbered 1790.
Mr. SCHUMER. I ask unanimous consent that further reading be
dispensed with.
[[Page S2559]]
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The amendment is as follows:
(Purpose: To add an effective date)
At the end add the following:
SEC. EFFECTIVE DATE.
This Act shall take effect on the date that is 1 day after
the date of enactment of this Act.
Mr. SCHUMER. I ask for the yeas and nays on the motion to concur with
the amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The yeas and nays are ordered.
Amendment No. 1791 to Amendment No. 1790
Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, I have an amendment to amendment No.
1790, which is at the desk.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The Senator from New York [Mr. Schumer] proposes an
amendment numbered 1791 to amendment No. 1790.
Mr. SCHUMER. I ask unanimous consent that further reading be
dispensed with.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The amendment is as follows:
(Purpose: To add an effective date)
On page 1, line 3, strike ``1 day'' and insert ``2 days''.
Motion to Refer with Amendment No. 1792
Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, I move to refer the House message to
the Committee on Appropriations with instructions to report back
forthwith with an amendment numbered 1792.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The Senator from New York [Mr. Schumer], moves to refer the
House message to accompany H.R. 2882 to the Committee on
Appropriations with instructions to report back forthwith an
amendment numbered 1792.
Mr. SCHUMER. I ask that further reading be waived.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The amendment is as follows:
(Purpose: To add an effective date)
At the end add the following:
SEC. EFFECTIVE DATE.
This Act shall take effect on the date that is 3 days after
the date of enactment of this Act.
Mr. SCHUMER. I ask for the yeas and nays on my motion.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The yeas and nays are ordered.
Amendment No. 1793
Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, I have an amendment to the
instructions, which is at the desk.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The Senator from New York [Mr. Schumer] proposes an
amendment numbered 1793 to the instructions on the motion to
refer.
Mr. SCHUMER. I ask unanimous consent that further reading be waived.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The amendment is as follows:
(Purpose: To add an effective date)
On page 1, line 3, strike ``3 days'' and insert ``4 days''.
Mr. SCHUMER. I ask for the yeas and nays on my amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The yeas and nays are ordered.
Amendment No. 1794 to Amendment No. 1793
Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, I have an amendment to amendment No.
1793, which is at the desk.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The Senator from New York [Mr. Schumer] proposes an
amendment numbered 1794 to amendment No. 1793.
Mr. SCHUMER. I ask unanimous consent that further reading of the
amendment be waived.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The amendment is as follows:
(Purpose: To add an effective date)
On page 1, line 1, strike ``4 days'' and insert ``5 days''.
Mr. SCHUMER. I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mrs. MURRAY. Madam President, we are nearing the end of what has been
a long, winding, and tough process. I just want to start by thanking
everyone who has worked with me to get here, and that starts, of
course, with my vice chair, Senator Collins, who has been a really
great partner throughout this process, and I so appreciate it.
I also want to thank our counterparts in the House, Chair Granger and
Ranking Member DeLauro. And I want to thank all of my staff and the
vice chairs who have worked tirelessly on these bills, all our
incredible subcommittee chairs: Senators Tester, Van Hollen, Murphy,
Baldwin, Reed, and Coons; our ranking members: Senators Hagerty, Britt,
Capito, Fischer, and Graham; Leaders Schumer and McConnell; and all of
their staffs; and so many others.
As I have said before, this is not the package I would have written
all on my own, but by working together, we were finally able to hammer
out an agreement on funding bills that protect and even strengthen
critical investments in our families, in our economy, and in our
national security.
Make no mistake, we had to work under very difficult top-line numbers
and fight off literally hundreds of extreme Republican poison pills
from the House, not to mention some unthinkable cuts, but at the end of
the day, this is a bill that will keep our country and our families
moving forward.
I want to talk about what is in this package before our final vote. I
want to start with something that is a top priority for families and
for me: childcare, which is far out of reach for so many people right
now.
I will seize every opportunity I can to help families get affordable
childcare. And in this funding bill, I am pleased to say that we
increased Federal funding for childcare and pre-K by $1 billion. That
is not even counting steps I secured to protect the CCAMPIS Program
that helps young parents who are in college who need childcare or
double the capacity for the universal pre-K program we have for our
servicemembers.
Ultimately, we need to pass, I believe, my Child Care for Working
Families Act to fix this crisis and make affordable childcare a reality
for every family. But until we get there, I will keep pushing for every
inch of progress to alleviate the stress families are feeling when it
comes to childcare.
Can we take steps to help our military families get childcare? What
about moms who are looking to get a college degree? What bit of
progress can we make to help folks? These are the questions that
motivate my thinking on this issue and many others like people's health
and well-being.
This package provides crucial health funding. It boosts research
funding for cancer, for Alzheimer's, for maternal mortality, and more.
It funds community health centers, local efforts to fight the opioid
and mental health crisis, and the new Federal office of pandemic
preparedness that I created with former Senator Burr.
In the face of House Republicans' push to gut funding to end HIV and
build our public health infrastructure, we protected those vital
efforts in this bill.
We protected family planning, not just from the House Republican
efforts to defund title X entirely but also from countless far-right
proposals to restrict women's reproductive freedom.
The American people should know that Democrats stood firm to reject
every single one of those.
We also stood together to make critical investments in education,
protecting increases we made to the maximum Pell award in recent years,
educator preparation initiatives, and workforce training programs.
We rejected House Republicans' unthinkable cuts in funding for K-12
schools, which would have reduced funding for nearly 90 percent of
school districts and force teachers out of our kids' classrooms.
Of course, this package does fund our staffs and Capitol Police here
in Congress, our election security, and other essential, basic
functions of government.
[[Page S2560]]
Then there are the crucial investments for our national security. At
a time when Putin is on the march in Ukraine, the Chinese Government is
growing its influence in an aggressive posture, and the Israel-Hamas
war is still raging, American leadership could not be more essential.
That is why it remains imperative the Speaker finally put that national
security supplemental bill that we passed overwhelmingly up for a vote,
and it is why this bill also includes investments to promote global
stability, to keep our country safe, to deter conflict, and to ensure
our military remains the strongest in the world.
That means investments in diplomacy, maintaining strong ties with our
allies, upholding our commitments, forging new partnerships, providing
more humanitarian aid, and promoting stability and global health.
It means investments in defense, not just funds for new equipment--
though that is important--but investments in the men and women in
uniform who are our true frontlines of defense.
The bill provides our servicemembers a pay raise. It invests in
childcare for their kids, like I mentioned earlier. It invests in food
security and strengthens our efforts to prevent suicide and address
sexual assault and harassment in the forces, and more.
This bill secured additional visas for brave Afghans who worked
alongside our servicemembers during the war in Afghanistan.
Finally, this package provides critical operational funding for the
Department of Homeland Security. It is certainly not a perfect outcome,
but let's not forget that Democrats were at the table. We were ready to
pass a bipartisan border policy deal until Donald Trump told
Republicans to kill that deal.
But in spite of that, the funding in this bill shows we can at least
agree to some extent that we must not shortchange crucial work:
stopping fentanyl from reaching our communities; stopping dangerous
human trafficking; cracking down on drug cartels; and ensuring our
borders are operating safely, efficiently, and humanely.
Now, I hope my colleagues will work with me to close the book on
fiscal year 2024, to avoid a shutdown and get this bill passed ASAP,
and then let's make sure we all learn from the hard lessons of the past
few months about how we do get things done in a divided government,
because what we have seen at every stage of this process is that when
we do work together, when we put our heads down and focus on solutions
and listen to our constituents, we can find common ground. We can craft
bipartisan bills.
But when House Republicans stopped everything to renegotiate the deal
they struck with the President; when they insisted on partisan poison
pills; when they listened to the loudest voices on the far right, who--
let's be real--were never going to vote for any bipartisan funding
bill, that gets us nowhere. It wasted months of precious time far
better spent crafting bills that grow our economy and protect our
country and make things better for folks back home. After all of that
delay, how different, ultimately, was the outcome? Think about that.
Yet now we are here, 6 months into the fiscal year, and Agencies will
just have 6 months left to leverage these full-year spending bills.
I believe we negotiated strong, bipartisan bills that will help the
American people. This outcome is so much better than a shutdown or a
full-year CR, which would have had devastating cuts, but it should
never have taken us this long to get here. We should not teeter on the
verge of a shutdown and lurch from one CR to another. Agencies should
not be dedicating so many resources to preparing again and again for a
possible government shutdown. Don't we all agree that the Pentagon and
the NIH have better ways to be spending their time and their tax
dollars? The far-right elements who forced this dysfunction claim to
care a lot about fiscal responsibility, but the constant chaos they
create is the opposite of fiscal responsibility.
The truth is, these appropriations bills are written over the course
of months, after dozens of hearings, with input from nearly every
Member, and they reflect the priorities of every State in America.
Working together, focusing on solutions, solving problems for people
back home--that is the responsible way to get things done, and it is
for the most part how we conduct ourselves here in the Senate.
Vice Chair Collins and I held bipartisan hearings. We gave every
Senator an opportunity to weigh in on these bills. We crafted 12 bills
that passed out of our committee overwhelmingly, many unanimously. I
think we need more of that as we begin our work now on fiscal year 2025
if we are going to keep this process on track.
So as we finally pass this bill, I urge all of my colleagues to
really take the lessons of the past year to heart. Congress can still
work but only when we come to the negotiating table in good faith and
leave politics at the door.
Before I turn it over, I want to submit into the Record a list
recognizing our incredibly dedicated staff, the people who truly keep
the trains on track and who poured so many long days and nights of hard
work into these bills.
I ask unanimous consent to have that printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
Appropriations Committee Staff
With great appreciation I thank the following staff for
their tireless dedication to the FY24 appropriations process:
Dianne Nellor, Rachel Erlebacher, Blaise Sheridan, Jessica
Berry, Lindsay Erickson, Michael Bednarczyk, Abigail Grace,
Brigid Kolish, Gabriella Armonda, Kate Kaufer, Katy Hagan,
Kimberly Segura, Laura Forrest (Mancini), Mike Clementi,
Robert Leonard, Ryan Pettit, Aaron Goldner, Doug Clapp,
Jennifer Becker, Laura Powell.
Maria Calderon, Diana G. Hamilton, Ellen Murray, Maddie
Dunn, Carly Rush, Dylan M. Stafford, Evan Schatz, Janie
Dulaney, John Righter, Josephine Eckert, Katelyn Hamilton,
Elizabeth B. Lapham, Emily M. Trudeau, Jim Daumit, Kami
White, Angela Caalim, Anthony Sedillo.
Melissa Zimmerman, Rishi Sahgal, Ryan Hunt, Richard
Braddock, Amanda J. Beaumont, Claire Monteiro, Erin Dugan,
Kathryn Toomajian, Mark Laisch, Meghan Mott, Michael Gentile,
Dylan W. Byrd, Jason McMahon, Michelle Dominguez, Alex
Carnes, Andrew Platt, Kali Farahmand, Sarita Vanka.
Dabney Hegg, Jessica Sun, Kelsey Daniels, Rajat Mathur, Ben
Hammond, Clint Trocchio, George A. Castro, Hong Nguyen,
Joshua Kravitz, Karin Thames, Leslie Logan, Lynn Favorite,
Penny Myles, Valerie Hutton, Karina Gallardo, Ryan Myers,
Amir Avin, Hart Clements.
Mrs. MURRAY. Madam President, I again want to thank my colleague, who
has worked with me side by side, through ups and downs and challenges,
for well over a year now to get us to where we are here today. We want
to get this bill passed and move on because we believe that by working
together, we make America better.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maine.
Ms. COLLINS. Madam President, I rise today in support of the final
six government funding bills before us. These bipartisan, bicameral
bills are the result of many months of hard work by the Appropriations
Committees in both the Senate and the House.
Let me start by thanking Chair Murray for her tremendous leadership
and hard work throughout the entire appropriations process. She has
really made a difference.
Since Chair Murray and I took the helm of the committee over a year
ago, we have been committed to an appropriations process that provided
Senators with a voice in funding decisions through robust committee
proceedings. Toward that end, we held more than 50 public hearings and
briefings. We televised our committee markups for the first time ever.
The Senate Appropriations Committee marked up and advanced all 12 bills
individually for the first time in 5 years, and we did so with
overwhelming bipartisan support. Every single bill--each and every one
of them--was subject to robust debate and amendments. Many of them
passed unanimously, I am pleased to say, and others with only one
dissenting vote.
This final package on the Senate floor today includes the fiscal year
2024 appropriations bills for the Department of Defense; State and
Foreign Operations; Financial Services and General Government; Labor,
Health and Human Services, and Education; Legislative Branch; and
Homeland Security. We are not punting through yet another continuing
resolution, nor is this an omnibus; rather, it is a package of six
individual bills that fund critical programs, important Agencies, and
essential Departments through the end of this fiscal year.
[[Page S2561]]
Now, Madam President, I would have preferred that more of these bills
would have been brought across the Senate floor, but no one can say
that they were not available for scrutiny since we reported the last of
them from committee way back in July.
In addition to my thanks for Chair Murray, I want to thank the
ranking Republican members on each of the subcommittees reflected in
the package today--Senators Graham, Hagerty, Capito, Fischer, and
Britt--for their outstanding efforts in assembling this package. I also
want to acknowledge the contributions of their Democratic chairs.
This legislation is truly a national security bill. Seventy percent
of the funding in this package is for our national defense, including
investments that strengthen our military readiness and industrial base,
provide pay and benefit increases for our brave servicemembers, and
support our closest allies.
This legislation also supports America's working families while
providing funding to better secure our borders and combat the
transnational criminal organizations that are flooding our communities
with fentanyl.
As part of the effort to address the crisis at the border--and it is
a crisis--this package includes funding for additional detention beds
and more Border Patrol agents and port-of-entry officers. Those are
longstanding Republican priorities--priorities that are shared by many
Democrats as well.
As the ranking member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense,
I want to take a few moments to highlight the bill in this package on
which Chair Tester and I worked extremely closely.
The bill avoids a devastating yearlong CR that every single service
chief told us would be a disaster for the Department of Defense. It
meets the complex threats that are facing our country.
Madam President, to say that things have changed since the fiscal
year 2024 budget request was first presented last spring would be a
drastic understatement. Putin refuses to end his war in Ukraine. Hamas
conducted its heinous, brutal attack on Israel on October 7. Iran
continues to fan the flame of violence and terrorism throughout the
Middle East, including against American forces. China's military budget
and armed forces continue to grow unabated.
But you don't have to take my word for it. In the past few weeks, the
Commander of U.S. Central Command, GEN Eric Kurilla, has described this
as the most dangerous security environment in 50 years.
On the other side of the world, the Commander of the U.S. Indo-
Pacific Command told Chairman Tester and me earlier this week that this
is the most dangerous time he has seen in his 40-year career, citing
cooperation between Russia and China as a key and growing concern.
In addition, just last week, the Commandant of the Marine Corps and
the Chief of Naval Operations wrote to the majority and minority
leaders describing the harm to the readiness of our Navy and Marine
Corps unless we quickly pass a full-year Defense appropriations bill.
This needs to be done before a large part--about two-thirds--of our
government would otherwise shut down at midnight tonight. We must not
let that occur.
To meet these challenges, our bill includes nearly $824.5 billion for
the U.S. military. It fully funds the 5.2-percent pay raise for
servicemembers--the largest pay raise in more than 20 years. It
includes a critical $123 million increase for bonuses for our new
recruits and junior enlisted soldiers. The bill also doubles the number
of children who will have access to full-day prekindergarten in DOD
schools--an important priority for Senator Murray and for me.
I also want to salute the work Representative Ken Calvert did in
this whole area of improving benefits and pay for our junior enlisted
soldiers.
As the Chinese navy rapidly expands to more than 400 ships over the
next 2 years, our legislation includes $33.7 billion for Navy
shipbuilding and downpayments for both an additional DDG-51 destroyer
and an amphibious ship--the largest shipbuilding budget ever provided.
Indeed, our legislation supports a Navy fleet that is six ships larger
than the President's woefully inadequate request.
The Defense bill also includes more than $2.2 billion for our
uniformed military leaders' highest priorities that were not included
in the administration's request. But, as the Presiding Officer knows,
we get a list of unfunded priorities from our service chiefs.
Our bill includes $273 million for long-range radars and sensors to
close the awareness gaps identified by General VanHerck when he was
Commander of Northern Command. It includes $50 million for the
INDOPACOM Commander to accelerate his top priority targeting capability
and $200 million to accelerate the development of the E-7 radar
aircraft that was a top priority for the Air Force.
To strengthen deterrence against China, our legislation keeps the
modernization of the nuclear triad on track. It funds the transition
from ``just-in-time'' to a ``just-in-case'' stockpile of munitions by
authorizing and funding, for the first time ever, six multiyear
procurement contracts for missiles and munitions.
Surely, that has been one of the lessons that we have learned from
Ukraine: how important it is that we have modernized an adequate
stockpile.
And $6.5 billion is also included to maximize this year's production
of Patriot air defense missiles, long-range anti-ship missiles, and six
other long-range precision strike missile programs.
Finally, in the area of defense, this bill also includes $500 million
for Iron Dome and David's Sling and Arrow--the cooperative missile
defense programs that are consistent with the 10-year memorandum of
understanding signed between the United States and our close ally
Israel. This will provide much needed assistance to Israel in its fight
against terrorism.
In addition to having a strong national defense, another priority of
mine is biomedical research. And this bill will continue the progress
that we are making in increasing funding for the National Institutes of
Health. It increases funding for NIH by $300 million, including $120
million in an increase for the National Cancer Institute and $100
million more for Alzheimer's disease and related dementia research.
I would note that it also increases funding for mental health, which
is so important--an area that has been neglected somewhat in the past.
Another cause of mine, as the cochair with Senator Jeanne Shaheen of
the Diabetes Caucus, has been to increase the funding for diabetes
research. And we have done so in this bill.
We also pay attention to the problems with opioids and have included
an increase in the funding for the Help to End Addiction Long-Term
initiative, known as the HEAL initiative. Palliative care research also
receives an increase. That is so important as our population ages. And
that is an area--long-term care--that we still need to do an awful lot
of work on in this country. I hope that this will start us on our path
to that end.
Again, there has been so much work done on this package of bills. And
I want to thank my Republican and Democratic colleagues on the
Appropriations Committee, the leaders in the House, as well on the
appropriations subcommittees and full committee. And I also want to
thank our Senate leaders on both sides of the aisle and our House
leaders for their extensive work on these bills.
Members throughout the Senate have contributed to prioritizing
funding and identifying how funding should be prioritized. And I want
to note for my Republican colleagues that the legacy riders that we
have traditionally included, such as the Hyde amendment, are included
in this bill.
Finally, I want to thank our extraordinary staff. They have worked
nonstop throughout this past year but particularly this past month,
without getting sleep, without seeing their families--just working
night and day.
I urge my colleagues to join me in voting for this final fiscal year
2024 appropriations package and complete our fundamental job of funding
our government.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. PAUL. Madam President, Congress is poised to do what no American
family would ever do. Congress is poised to spend one-third more
dollars
[[Page S2562]]
than they receive. This is essentially equivalent to a family at home
making $45,000 but spending $60,000. No American family can do that.
But that is what is happening here.
The spending that has been brought forward for our spending plans
this year will lead to a $1.5 trillion deficit. So we bring in about
$4.5 trillion, and we are going to spend $6 trillion. It is reckless.
It leads to inflation. It is a direct vote to steal your paycheck.
Because what happens, as we borrow more money, the Federal Reserve just
prints up more money, and they will pay for all the debt that is
created today. But that devalues your dollar.
So when you go to the grocery store and your prices have risen 20
percent, you can thank the people today that are all for you, and they
are going to give you everything you want. Every program under the sun
that grandmother and mother and apple pie wants, they are going to give
you. But they are going to borrow the money.
This is a bait-and-switch. It is like: What do you want, America?
Here, we will give it to you. It is free. You don't have to do
anything.
But it is borrowed. When they give you stuff that they buy with
borrowed money, they create inflation. This has been going on for a
while. But it has accelerated. It is at an alarming pace now.
With the COVID lockdowns, we were borrowing $3 trillion. Then with
the Biden years, we were borrowing over a trillion. We are still
borrowing at $1.5 trillion. Why? Because their spending proposals take
most of the spending off-limits.
Two-thirds of our spending is entitlements--Social Security,
Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps. That is two-thirds of the spending.
That equals all of the money you pay in taxes.
They have taken that off the limit. They have stuck their head in the
sand, and said, ``We will not ever touch entitlements.''
Well, if you don't, you are not a serious person. If you don't, you
are part of the problem.
Entitlements is two-thirds of the spending. Do I take joy in knowing
that we have to reform these? No. But if you don't reform them, they
are an anchor around the neck of America, and they are destroying us by
spending money we don't have.
So two-thirds of the spending they are not even going to address.
Now, of the remaining third of spending, that is what we vote on--
military spending and nonmilitary spending. They call this
discretionary spending. Of that remaining third, they took half of that
off the table.
So entitlements is two-thirds of the spending. That is going up at
about 5 to 6 percent. The remaining third that we vote on is military
and nonmilitary. They say: Well, we have to continue to expand the
military. It is going to go up to 3 percent.
So what are we left with? We are left with one-half of one-third,
one-sixth of government, about 16.6 percent. And we are going to say:
Oh, we are going to really try to rein in spending there. And there
what they do is, they almost slow it down to 1 or 2 percent.
This bill spends a third more than comes in. And what it is going to
lead to--and has been leading to--is the erosion of your paycheck, the
explosion of your gas prices, and the explosion of your grocery bills.
Nothing is changing.
And you ask yourself: Where are Republicans? We have a Republican
majority in the House, and, ostensibly, Republicans are for reducing
the debt.
We have a filibuster-proof minority in the Senate and, ostensibly,
Senate Republicans are for taking control of the debt. And yet what
happens? Nothing happens. The spending goes on apace. The deficit grows
by day.
So when did we get this spending bill? They have months and months to
do this. When did we get it? At 2:32 a.m. on Thursday. And now it is:
rush, rush, rush; we have got to shovel that money out the door, most
of which we don't have or a third of which we don't have. We have to
borrow it quickly, shovel it out the door because the government is
going to shut down Friday at midnight.
Why is the government shutting down, and why are we up against a
deadline? Because they didn't give us the thousand-page bill until 2:30
in the morning on Thursday.
Do you think we ought to read it? Do you think we ought to know what
is in it?
Republican and Democrat leadership gave this to us at 2:32 in the
morning--1,012-page bill, spends over a trillion dollars. No one will
be able to thoroughly read and know what is in this until after it has
passed. But it is rush, rush, rush; borrow more money; spend the money;
and then try to deceive you into thinking that we gave you--we brought
you manna from Heaven. We gave you all these gifts, these baubles. You
are going to get a lot of free stuff. Every cause you like under the
sun, you are going to get something for it in there. But they won't
tell you the truth--that it is borrowed, it leads to inflation, and it
is the biggest threat to our country.
We are not threatened by other countries invading our country. We are
a strong and mighty country to which I do not believe we have an
external threat. But we have a threat internally, and most of it
resides in this body. Most of it resides in this body and in the House
with profligate spenders who are not adequately concerned with spending
what comes in. They are just jolly well borrowing it. They are jolly
well borrowing it and sending it abroad.
You know, look, my sympathies are with Ukraine, but my first
obligation to my oath of office is to my country. We can't just borrow
money to send it to Ukraine.
You know, once the war is finally over, which one day it will be
over, the whole country is destroyed with bombs on both sides, and
someone is going to be asked to pay for it. That is going to be you.
Uncle Sam, Uncle Sucker will be asked to pay for it.
This bill that we are looking at has 138 pages and over 1,400
earmarks, totaling $2 billion. What is an ``earmark''? It is pork. It
is not acknowledged by the Constitution. The Constitution says we can
tax and spend money for the general welfare. We are allowed to spend
money up here, according to the Constitution, only if it is for
everyone.
So a bike path in Rhode Island is for people who live in one city in
Rhode Island. They should tax the people of Rhode Island. But you don't
tax everybody for a bike path in Rhode Island. That is against the
principle and the spirit of the Constitution.
Now, these 1,400 earmarks are on top of the 6,000 earmarks we had
last week for $12 billion. So total between the two bills in the last 3
weeks, we have over 7,000 earmarks for $14 billion. That is a lot of
pork.
Democratic and Republican leadership want this reckless spending bill
to pass quickly to make sure that no one has time to read or scrutinize
the bill. Likely, no one will ever have the time to review all of the
$2 billion worth of earmarks before this is passed.
Now, earmarks and pork barrel spending is not brand new; it has been
going on a long time. There was a conservative Democrat by the name of
William Proxmire. This was a long time ago, in the old days, when there
used to be conservative Democrats who cared about the debt.
And one of the programs that he talked about was--and he gave out a
Golden Fleece Award to point out waste--but he said it was one of his
favorites. He said the government, in their infinite wisdom, decided to
discover whether or not, if you gave gin to a sunfish versus tequila,
which would make the sunfish more aggressive?
Think about it. These are oppressing problems: $100,000 to give
tequila to sunfish and gin and see which one made them more aggressive.
Now, you would think that is so crazy, certainly it was one off and
that we discovered this kind of waste, and we made it better. He talked
about this for 15 years. And throughout the 15 years that he talked
about the research money going to crazy research like this that not a
penny should be spent on increased.
In fact, fast forward to last year--we are now like 30-some-odd years
after William Proxmire was talking about this--last year, the main
organization that is probably the most wasteful scientific accumulation
of grants up here is the National Science Foundation. What did this
body do, Republicans and Democrats? They voted to double the budget for
the National Science Foundation.
What else do they do at the National Science Foundation? Let's see.
Nearly
[[Page S2563]]
$1 million was spent studying whether or not Japanese quail, if you
give them cocaine, whether or not they are more sexually promiscuous--
your tax dollars.
Every time they are bragging about what they are doing--it is worth
borrowing the money--you remind them of what they are spending it on:
nearly a million dollars to study Japanese quail to see if they are
sexually promiscuous when they take cocaine.
Another one was ostensibly for autism. But when they got to the
autism and they subgranted it and sent it here and there, and you never
know where it is going to wind up, $750,000, and it went to some, let's
just call them eggheads--that is the nicest word I can think of--to
study what did Neil Armstrong say when he landed on the Moon. Was it
``One small step for man'' or was it ``One small step for a man''? So
$750,000 was spent studying what he actually said. They listened to the
crackly old audio from the black-and-white tapes from the Moon landing.
And in the end, $750,000 later, they couldn't decide, was it ``One step
for man'' or ``One step for a man''?
This is the craziness that goes on. Yet it goes on and on and on.
Here is what I will tell you. Even when it is something justified--I
have family members who have Alzheimer's. My mother-in-law died not too
long ago with it. So I have a great deal of sympathy for the disease. I
think we are a big, rich country and government; we could spend money
on Alzheimer's disease. At the same time, we can't bankrupt our
country.
Let's say we spent $100 million last year on Alzheimer's disease. Am
I a cruel person for saying we don't have enough money; we should spend
$95 million this year? That never happens. Nothing ever gets smaller
around here. Everything gets bigger. Everybody who wants something gets
it. Put it on Uncle Sam's tab. We have a $34 going on $35 trillion
debt. The biggest payment now in our budget within about a year is
going to be the interest on that.
Here are a couple of the new earmarks that are in this bill: $2
million for the construction of a kelp and shellfish nursery in Maine.
You might say: Well, kelp might taste really good. I like to eat kelp.
Good. There is already a $15 billion private market for kelp. There are
companies, including in Maine, that are growing kelp for farms. I say
wonderful. I am not so sure if giving it to the government or to
government universities is going to help these businesses or compete
with them. But I don't think it is the job of the Federal Government to
be involved in these parochial concerns.
Another earmark that we discovered in this bill is $1.5 million to
encourage video gaming in New York. Now, you know, I have nothing
against people who play video games, sure. But $1.5 million to
encourage people? I have seen kids. I don't think they need any
encouragement. In fact, we might be better off spending $1.5 million to
discourage kids from playing video games. I see no reason, when we are
down and in the hole this year $1.5 trillion, that we should do this.
This is an add-on. These add-ons are earmarks. They are in the name of
probably the Senators from New York. They decided they want this video
gaming thing in there. Maybe they know somebody in that industry, I
don't know--maybe a friend of theirs.
That is why you don't earmark things. That is why things are supposed
to be for the general welfare. You don't say: Here is something I am
going to give to a specific parochial interest in my neighborhood or my
State.
The third item we have is $388,000 for Columbia University. I am sure
the people who put this earmark in would be saying: I just love
education, and I am just for education. Well, so am I. I am a product
of public school education, private school education, lots of
education. I am all for it. But do you know what? Columbia University
has a $13.6 billion endowment. They make $388,000 in 20 days of
interest. You would think maybe they could spend their own money. If
you want to take a summer program to get into Columbia--which I think
this money may be related to--it costs $12,500 for a 3-week course at
Columbia. We are talking about extraordinarily wealthy people paying
this and going to this school. But there is no reason for the taxpayers
to be giving a rich university that has $13 billion any money.
The next earmark we found was $249,000 for the Baltimore Symphony.
People say: Gosh, I love the symphony, and I love music. So do I. The
thing is, the way government is supposed to work is if you think that
there is a general need for symphony money, you would pass a general
symphony bill and we give money to all the symphonies and make them
part of government. We don't have the money to do that. Instead, we do
something even worse. We shouldn't be in the symphony business. It is
not part of the general welfare.
What happens here is the people on the Appropriations Committee who
have seniority--that means you have been here between 50 and 100 years
most of the time--that is an exaggeration. Let's just say 50 years.
They have been here 50 years and rise to the top and, by golly, they
get money for their symphony in their city. That is not the way
government is supposed to work.
There might even be less complaints if we have a surplus. But this is
in the midst of borrowing it. So the $250,000 is going to be borrowed
from China. Everybody is all up in arms about China. We are borrowing
money from China. We are becoming weaker than China because we keep
spending money we don't have.
The next earmark was $1 million for Cambridge, MA, Community Center
to install some solar panels. I like solar panels as well as anybody. I
think it is kind of cool to get some of your energy from solar panels.
This is a rich community. This is where Harvard is. This is where some
of the largest, most successful corporations and research are in
Boston. You think they can't pay for solar panels? Solar panels aren't
for general welfare.
Our Founding Fathers said all spending and taxation had to be for the
general welfare. And they went one step further. In article I, section
8, they laid out all the powers of Congress, all the things we are
allowed to do. And not listed in those was to buy solar panels for one
town.
You would think all the wealth with MIT and Harvard and all that
wealth that is attracted to Cambridge, they would be able to buy their
own solar panels. It has no place in a budget that is $1.5 trillion in
the hole and only makes us weaker. The next earmark is $1 million for
Martha's Vineyard Hospital, one of the richest ZIP Codes in the United
States. I have been to Martha's Vineyard. It is beautiful. But I could
only afford to go one time.
The thing is, if you live there, that is wonderful. I am all for
wealthy people. I love that they have all these beautiful homes. I
think President Obama may have a place there. The thing is, pay for
your own hospital. I have little, tiny hospitals with 40 beds in a
really rural community that because of all the rules and resolutions,
are barely breaking even in Kentucky, and I don't see sending millions
of dollars to Martha's Vineyard.
Once again, why did it go to Martha's Vineyard? Because somebody has
been here for 50 years. They are on the Appropriations Committee. They
put an earmark and said: I want the pork to go to Martha's Vineyard.
Nobody makes a debate about whether Martha's Vineyard needs a bed more
than Harlan, KY. They stick an earmark in here and get it because they
have been here a long time.
It is a terrible way to legislate, but it is a terrible way to
legislate in the context of this enormous debt we are amassing.
This bill is teeming with about $2 billion worth of earmarks at a
time when we can't afford the additional debt. Just days into the new
year, the Treasury Department announced the U.S. debt had surpassed $34
trillion. That is hard to fathom. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve
came out and said it is an urgent problem. Jamie Dimon with JPMorgan
Chase came out and said it was an urgent problem. On the heels of
people saying it is an urgent problem, what happens? Congress rises to
the occasion and borrows more money. Talk about tone-deaf--completely
tone-deaf.
We are just going to borrow another $1.5 trillion on the heels of $34
trillion. We are spending at such a rate that right now, we are
averaging a trillion dollars to the debt every 90 days. If that pace
continues, instead of $1.5 trillion, it could be up to $4 trillion in
the next year. Since this year, the United States is borrowing money at
$7 billion
[[Page S2564]]
a day. Think about that. We are borrowing money at over $300 million
per hour, and $3 million per minute is being borrowed. We are borrowing
money at $85,000 a second. This is just spinning, literally, out of
control. If you look at the debt clock online you can see the numbers
just spinning like crazy.
If we are to judge the backroom negotiations between the ``uniparty''
leadership in Congress and the White House by its results, we can only
conclude that they do not take our spending problems seriously. Even
Republicans who talk such a good game about government spending and
respect for taxpayer dollars when they are at home cannot be depended
upon to fight for fiscal sanity when push comes to shove.
Our Nation's greatest threat comes not from abroad but from within
the Halls of Congress, which at every opportunity looks for ways to
ignore our spending problem and expedite our economic decline. The
nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts we will add an average
of $2 trillion to our debt every year for the next decade.
But there is a breaking point. There is a point at which they print
so much money that you can have a catastrophic loss of the value. This
is what has happened in South America for decades. It is what has
happened in Central America. And we don't want it--at least I don't
want it--happening in our country.
The CBO also estimates net interest payments will outgrow defense
spending this year and will become the largest item--over $800 billion
just in interest.
This reckless level of borrowing and spending is unsustainable. The
ever-increasing heights of our debt in a weak economy, high inflation,
and confiscatory tax rates--in other words, today's spending threatens
tomorrow's prosperity.
We are approaching a predictable economic crisis in the United
States. In my time in the Senate, I have proposed spending freezes,
balanced budgets, spending cuts designed to get our Nation back on
path. Today, though, instead of a balanced budget, I merely ask that
this bill be sent back to the Appropriations Committee and that they
report to the full Senate about how to responsibly cut 5 percent from
this bloated monstrosity.
We wouldn't eliminate everything, but everything you are going to
spend money on--grandma, motherhood, apple pie--is going to get 5
percent less. That is what it would take to start balancing our budget.
We wouldn't do it just on this bill because we would actually have to
do that to everything in all our spending. Doing it here today shows
somebody is serious about the spending.
My instructions even leave the Appropriations Committee open to
determine where to reduce the spending. This isn't asking that much. It
is a lopsided compromise in which the select handful of Members who
wrote this bill get 95 percent of everything they want. That is what it
would mean if we were to pass this cut.
Realize that when we vote on this cut though, not one Democrat will
vote to cut one penny. Seriously. If we offered an amendment to cut one
penny, every Democrat would vote no on it. They are resisting voting no
now because they are worried people at home will discover what they are
voting for.
It is more than just the Democrats. No Democrat cares about the
deficit. Many Republicans profess to care, but half of them will vote
with the Democrats as well. This is really a bipartisan problem. Don't
let anybody tell you this is just about Joe Biden; it is about the
previous administration as well. They borrowed $7 trillion. They shut
the economy down. COVID lockdowns led to extravagant borrowing, more
than we have ever seen, and we are continuing it now.
But this is a bipartisan problem. It means that rather than spending
$1.2 trillion in this package, my proposal would spend $1.14 trillion.
Some would look at that and say: Gosh, that is not very dramatic at
all. How did you become so moderate? And you know that is true; I am
quite the moderate. It would cut $60 billion--$60 billion.
But they will unanimously, on the Democrat side, vote against this
because they are against cutting one penny. And our side, half of our
people on our side will vote against any cuts also. This is a modest
cut and only the beginning of what you would have to do to bring fiscal
sanity. I am willing to accept a reasonable compromise, even one that
does not balance the budget significantly or even cut the necessary
spending. I am willing to vote for something to cut some spending.
By agreeing to this motion, which will be an amendment later today,
we can show to our constituents that we respect them as taxpayers and
are open to the most reasonable attempts to shave down the
unsustainable level of spending.
I ask that all consider a ``yes'' vote on my amendment when the time
comes.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Hawaii.
(The remarks of Mr. Schatz pertaining to the submission of S. 4063
are printed in today's Record under ``Submitted Resolutions.'')
Mr. SCHATZ. I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Hickenlooper). The Senator from Texas.
Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, clearly it is an election year, because we
are hearing more and more political speeches from the floor of the
Senate and precious little work doing the hard things that we actually
are elected to do, which is to legislate.
Here we find ourselves dealing with appropriations bills that should
have been completed last September. I don't know if people really
understand that. What we are doing today, lurching from one shutdown to
the next, is dealing with last year's work. But you would think that,
under the leadership of Majority Leader Schumer, we would have enough
things to do rather than squander the opportunity to deal with those
because we are dealing with last year's work.
I think we can do better next year. Hopefully, with a different
majority, we can actually pass a budget. We can take up and pass
appropriation bills on a timely basis, and we can get our work done on
time--something that has not happened under the current leadership.
I want to mention one hopeful sign, where, at least, one branch of
the legislature is actually moving things through committee and across
the floor and allowing votes, amendments, and debate. That would be the
House of Representatives, not the U.S. Senate, sometimes called the
world's greatest deliberative body.
To their credit, earlier this year, the House passed a bill that made
significant changes in our tax system, and that is what I want to talk
about for the next few minutes.
This legislation was negotiated by the chairman of the Senate Finance
Committee, on which I am privileged to serve, Senator Ron Wyden, and
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith. They released a
framework of this agreement in mid-January, and our colleagues in the
House immediately began work on the bill.
The Ways and Means Committee, for example, held hearings--actual
hearings, legislative hearings--and then a markup to debate the
legislation. Members offered and voted on amendments, and, ultimately,
this package passed the committee and the full House with strong
bipartisan support.
Given the polarization and partisanship that often grips Congress,
advancing a bipartisan bill is no small feat, especially during an
election year. But that doesn't mean the work on the bill is finished.
As every high school student knows who takes civics or American
history--they know that Congress is a bicameral body. The House and the
Senate have to work together. There are two Chambers, two sets of
Members with diverse views, Senators representing whole States--in my
case, 30 million Texans. The House Members represent a much smaller
Congressional District. But the process means that both Chambers need
to work through these bills to improve them and make sure they are as
good as we can make them before they are signed into law.
So my point is that the Senate is not a rubberstamp for the House,
and the House would say that they are not a rubberstamp for us. And
that is the
[[Page S2565]]
way it is. So be it. Members of both Chambers have a responsibility to
evaluate and shape legislation before it is sent to the President's
desk.
Congratulations to the Members of the House for doing their job. They
sent a bipartisan bill to the Senate at the end of January, and now it
is the Senate's turn to take a closer look at this legislation and see
how it might be improved.
I had hoped that Chairman Wyden would schedule a markup in the
Finance Committee and allow members to ask questions and offer
amendments to the bill. I am sure he thinks his negotiated bill with
Chairman Smith is perfect and doesn't need any improvement, but others
may have a different point of view.
After all, members of the House Ways and Means Committee had that
opportunity. That is called the legislative process. That is what we
are supposed to do.
So you would think that Chairman Wyden would want members of his own
committee to have the same opportunity that the members of the House
Ways and Means Committee had, but apparently that is not the case.
Nearly 2 months have passed since that bill passed the House, and
Chairman Wyden has shown zero interest in moving this bill through the
Finance Committee and across the floor of the U.S. Senate, giving all
Senators a chance to participate in the process and hopefully improve
the final outcome. In fact, the chairman has refused to schedule a
hearing or even a markup, as I mentioned, and has rejected commonsense
proposals by Ranking Member Mike Crapo and Senate Republicans.
Earlier this week, the majority leader virtually guaranteed that the
bill will not go through the regular order in the Senate. He took a
procedural step to put this bill on the fast track for a vote here on
the Senate floor, without any opportunity for the Senate Finance
Committee, which has jurisdiction over tax matters, to engage--no
hearing, no markup, just ``take it or leave it.''
Well, I have reviewed this bill, and while I will concede that there
are some portions that are very promising, there are problematic areas
that need more work. For example, this bill aims to incentivize
research and development here at home by easing the tax burden on
America's innovators.
Cutting-edge research and development is absolutely critical to our
competitiveness, and Congress needs to promote new investments in the
capabilities that will propel our economy and our national security
into the future. This legislation, to its credit, restores full and
immediate expensing for equipment and machinery purchases, which will
enable small businesses to make new investments in their business and
boost domestic manufacturing.
I have spoken to a number of my small business constituents in Texas
about the need for these types of reforms, and the House-passed bill is
a great starting point for a full debate here in the Senate.
I believe there is a lot of potential here, but I share Ranking
Member Crapo's concerns about some of the remaining provisions in the
bill. One example is the watered-down work requirement for the child
tax credit. Under the proposed change, parents with zero earnings would
still be eligible for a government check.
In other words, historically, tax credits have been tied to work and
have been a credit against taxes that you would otherwise owe. But a
refundable tax credit is merely a check from the Federal Government,
regardless of whether you worked or created any income whatsoever.
Under the proposal by Chairman Wyden and Chairman Smith, as long as a
person worked during one of the last 2 years--one of the last 2 years--
they would be eligible for the child tax credit. As I said,
historically, the child tax credit has been tied to work. I would think
we would want able-bodied people to be working, if work is available.
But this change would completely undermine that basic principle.
When the Joint Committee on Taxation analyzed this bill, they found
that the expanded child tax credit would cost more than $33 billion
over the next 3 years.
You heard my colleague--our colleague--Senator Rand Paul talk about
the fact that our national debt is approaching $35 billion. This would
add another $33 billion to that. And despite what the authors of this
proposal have said, the vast majority of that cost is not due to tax
relief.
According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, 91 percent of the cost
of this legislation is spending. It is writing a check. It may be
called a tax credit, but really it is a welfare payment. It is a
transfer payment. Mr. President, 91 percent of the money will be sent
as a check to people with zero tax liability because they have
insufficient income to cause them to have any kind of tax liability. So
it is not a credit against earnings or work; it is essentially a
welfare check.
Only 9 percent of that $33 billion cost is true relief for hard-
working taxpayers with children. The rest is a new welfare program by
another name. And it is not limited to the 3 years of the R&D tax
credit and the expensing of interest; it is permanent. And I have every
confidence that our colleagues across the aisle will come back for
another bite at the apple.
We would be doing a great disservice to taxpayers by allowing the
child tax credit to morph into another welfare program. We should not
set the stage for it to become a permanent fixture of entitlement
spending.
Again, you heard our colleague from Kentucky talk the fact that the
money that we are appropriating here today and that we did a couple of
weeks ago--this is only about a third of what the Federal Government
spends. The rest of it is on autopilot. It is mandatory spending. We
don't even vote to appropriate that money; it is automatic. Proponents
of this tax bill want us to add another $33 billion over 3 years to
that number.
The truth is, when it comes to the discretionary spending, the money
we appropriate, we have done a much better job controlling the rate of
increase of that spending, but right now, entitlement programs grow at
6, 7, 8 percent a year. That is one reason why our national debt is
approaching $35 trillion.
Well, supporters of this proposal have tried to downplay concerns
about the cost of the bill because they say: It is only a temporary
change. Well, that reminds me of Ronald Reagan's observation that the
closest thing to eternal life on Earth is a temporary government
program. There is no such thing as temporary around here. People come
back either to reauthorize it or to extend it or to grow it. Once
created, it doesn't go away.
As soon as the temporary change expires, supporters will argue it has
to be extended. They will frame anyone who opposes another extension as
trying to increase taxes on hard-working families. Well, as I said and
as the Senator from Kentucky said, our national debt is currently $34.5
trillion. A lot of that was money we spent during the COVID pandemic
trying to deal with the public health crisis and the economic crisis
caused by that virus. We did whatever we had to do to make our way
through that, but in doing so, we added a lot of money to the national
debt. We should not continue that.
The national debt is increasing by almost $1 trillion every 100 days,
and the permanent tax credit expansion would only fuel the debt crisis
we are facing. Someday--someday--there will be a terrible crisis as a
result of the trending national debt. Already you are hearing we are
spending more money this year on interest on the national debt than we
are on our own defense.
Well, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget,
this child tax credit expansion would cost $180 billion over the next
10 years. We need to pump the brakes on this expansion, this runaway
debt train, not stomp on the accelerator, which is what this proposal
would do.
Mandatory spending already represents nearly two-thirds of Federal
spending, and a permanent child tax credit expansion would drive that
number even higher. That is just one of the concerns that I and many of
my Republican colleagues have with this legislation.
Over the last several weeks, as we have been able to analyze the text
of the bill, even other concerns, more concerns, have come to light.
This legislation would have major impact on families and job creators
[[Page S2566]]
across the country. We need to be careful, we need to be deliberate,
and we need to make sure we understand what the impact of this
legislation would be before a vote on the Senate floor, which is the
reason why committees like the Finance Committee exist. Getting it
right is far more important than doing it fast.
If Chairman Wyden's goal is to build consensus, which is the way we
do things around here, he can't shut everybody else out of the process.
I understand building consensus in a diverse body like this is not
easy--it is hard--and I think some people are positively allergic to
the difficulty of that job. But that is the way we govern. That is the
way the Senate operates. We need an open forum to debate this bill and
make changes at the committee level, and I am disappointed that the
chairman of the Finance Committee himself has refused to do so.
Just as our counterparts in the House had their chance to evaluate
this legislation and make improvements at the committee level, Senate
tax writers need to have the same opportunity.
As each of our colleagues knows, Congress has developed a very bad
habit of abandoning the procedures that were designed to give every
single Senator a voice in the legislative process. For too long now, we
have had bills cooked up behind closed doors and plopped here on the
Senate floor, facing another deadline, another cliff, and being told:
You have no choice. You can't change it. All you can do is vote up or
down or else there will be dire consequences, like a shutdown.
Committees have been sidelined, and we have moved toward a process in
which a small number of Members make decisions and try to bully or
threaten everyone into voting yes.
Well, I can tell you that I, for one--and I know I am not the only
one--am tired of being cut out of the process and being treated like a
potted plant.
That cannot happen with this bill, so I will not vote to move this
bill on the Senate floor until we have a process that allows all
Senators to participate but starting with members of the Senate Finance
Committee. I hope my Republican colleagues will join me in requesting
that the Finance Committee be given an opportunity to do its job. Until
that time, I hope there are 41 Senators who will deny the majority
leader's request that we proceed to consider this legislation after
bypassing the Finance Committee process. But once we do that, the
majority leader must allow a robust floor debate and amendment process.
That is what we do. That is our job.
All Senators deserve a chance to participate, as I said, first in the
committee and then on the floor.
Many supporters of this bill are pushing for a truncated process in
the Senate because the tax season is already well underway. They
suggested that the Senate should just abdicate its job and rush to get
the bill done. But, as our colleagues know, the tax season began before
this bill even passed the House, and the chairman of the Finance
Committee completely undermined the urgency argument by sitting on this
bill for the last 2 months.
The majority leader and the chairman of the Finance Committee want to
ram this bill through the Senate without proper debate or amendment,
and Republicans must not allow that to happen. The way we gain leverage
and force a negotiation rather than being run over and treated as a
mere speed bump is for 41 Senators to stick together to deny cloture on
a motion to proceed.
Members deserve the chance to shape a bill before a final up-or-down
vote on the floor, and I urge Chairman Wyden and Leader Schumer to give
us that opportunity.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Global Happiness Survey
Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, we have had a lot of good news in the last
several months, over the last year. Unemployment remains at its lowest
level ever. For the last 2 years, the unemployment rate has been under
4 percent. That is the longest stretch that we have had less than 4
percent of Americans without a job in 50 years. Inflation has cooled to
the lowest level since the start of the pandemic. The U.S. economy is
booming. We have seen it grow faster than any other large, advanced
economy in the world. Crime is down. We saw a 12-percent reduction in
urban gun violence in 2023. That is the biggest reduction in the
history of the country in 1 year. That is a lot of good news if you
look at the metrics that we normally look to when we assess the quality
of our public policy.
But here is some other striking data: In a report released this week,
we come to find that despite unemployment going down, despite inflation
going down, despite GDP going up, Americans are more unhappy than
anytime before. This year in the global happiness rating survey, the
United States, for the first time since they started doing this survey,
fell out of the top 20. We are now No. 23 in the world.
Even more worrying, amongst young people, the United States ranks
62nd in the world. This is reflected by other surveys that show over
the last 10 years the rate of happiness and contentment and fulfillment
self-reported by Americans dropped despite the fact that the economy is
growing, more people have jobs, and crime is plummeting.
So I am on the floor for just a few minutes to ask this simple
question: Should we care about this disconnect between the quality-of-
life indicators that we normally look to to assess the measure of our
public policy and self-reported rates of happiness? My answer is pretty
simple: We should care because we are in the business of happiness.
I know that doesn't sound right, because your happiness comes from
your personal decisions, the priorities that guide your day. America
isn't--our government isn't in the business of delivering the last mile
of happiness, but we absolutely are in the business of delivering the
first mile of happiness. Why do we know that? Because that charge, that
mission, is in our founding document. The Declaration of Independence
says that amongst the inalienable rights enjoyed by all human beings is
the right to pursue happiness. So that means that our job, charged to
us by our Founders, is to set up rules of the economy, rules of
society, rules of culture, that give people the best shot at achieving
happiness.
So it is time that we take a big step back as policymakers and ask,
if a job or rising GDP or a safe neighborhood isn't bringing people
happiness, what does? And all I am suggesting today is that we engage
in a conversation together--an apolitical, nonpartisan conversation--to
try to discover the roots of American unhappiness, because it doesn't
appear that just dialing the knobs of public policy to the right, as
happened under Trump's Presidency, or to the left, under Biden's
Presidency, is changing this long-term dynamic of more Americans
reporting being unsatisfied with their lives.
Let me just tease this conversation with two routes to happiness that
we don't talk enough about. The first is connection. In fact, if you
look at longitudinal surveys of Americans' happiness, there is a
seminal study done by Harvard where they study, over the course of 75
years, Americans of every income bracket, of every race and ask them
questions every year: Are you happy, and, if so, why are you happy?
What they found and what many other surveys found is that it is not a
job or career or how much money you make but your relationships--your
connections to other human beings--that actually is most indicative,
most predictive of whether you will report being happy and fulfilled in
your life. And so it shouldn't be surprising or shocking to us that
during a moment where more Americans are reporting feeling deeply
lonely, we are also seeing more people reporting being unhappy.
There has been a sea change in this country, over the last 20 years,
when it comes to the amount of time that we spend with other human
beings, and the data is particularly acute for young people, but it is
true of adults as well. We spend nearly half as much time today with
other human beings in personal connection than we did just 30 years
ago. That is a catastrophic decline in socialization.
There are lots of reasons for that, but many of them are connected to
public policy choices that we have made. We decided not to regulate
this transformative new technology called smartphones, nor the apps
that dominate those smartphones, social media.
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That technology has facilitated this withdrawal from socialization,
from connection, from conversation.
We haven't meaningfully adjusted wages in this country. So people are
being forced to work 70 hours now to enjoy the same quality of life
that 40 hours of work would have 40 years ago. What does that mean?
People are robbed of leisure time. So they can't connect with friends
and neighbors through socialization in the evenings or on the weekends.
We have undermined the places where people often find connection,
like downtowns, which are less healthy, less vibrant than ever before,
as we created an economy where everybody just buys stuff from a set of
big monopolistic, internationalized companies.
And so what we know is that feeling connected to other human beings,
having strong relationships, is maybe most predictive of whether or not
you are going to be happy, but we make public policy choices
consistently to make connections harder, not easier. But we don't
measure it. We don't measure it. Instead, we just measure things like
unemployment and GDP, which are important, but not most predictive of
whether people are going to be happy.
Let me give you a second way that people find a route to happiness,
and that is living a life of purpose--knowing what your role is in the
world and living a life that fulfills that role.
Well, let's be honest. Many of the ways in which people found purpose
50 years ago are not available to them today. One purpose, for
instance, was passing along a better life to your kids, making
sacrifices as an adult--tough, difficult sacrifices--but knowing that
those sacrifices were going to allow for your child to be better off
than you. Well, that purpose feels further away than ever before today
because we have made it so hard for parents to be able to pass on that
better life.
College is 400 percent less affordable today than it was in 1980.
Economic mobility is more difficult than before, in part because we
favor legacy admissions in colleges, in part because we allow for so
much massive transfer of inherited wealth. Economic mobility is further
away.
So we have robbed from individuals that sense of meaning and purpose,
passing along a better life to your children. Other people found
purpose in serving God, living a life in accordance with religious
tradition, securing a place in the afterlife. But in a very short
period of time, we went from 70 percent of people belonging to church
to 50 percent of people belonging to church.
Now, I don't think there is a government solution to reverse that
trend, but we need to admit that it is another example of how very
quickly people have become unmoored from a place where they previously
found all sorts of purpose and meaning. And if we are not talking about
trying to create alternative places where people can find that purpose
or, perhaps, working together to find a way to make those institutions,
like churches, healthier places, then we are not connecting in to the
roadways, to the pathways to happiness, connection, meaning, purpose.
I get it. These are hard topics for policymakers to talk about. They
feel more natural for philosophers or academics or theologians. But our
Founders told us in the Declaration of Independence that we need to be
in the happiness business, and we have made some likely wrong
assumptions about what leads people to happiness. We have become such a
materialistic world, and we have become such a materially focused
institution that we make an incorrect assumption that, by changing the
rules of the economy, we are automatically providing people a route to
happiness. But it is not always economic change. It is not always
economic policy that provides people meaning, provides people purpose,
makes people feel happy.
So these are the questions that I think we should be answering. I
think it is a really lovely way for us to set aside some of the policy
fights that have worn this place out.
What brings meaning? What brings purpose? What makes you feel happy?
Ask those questions, and then let's let those answers guide the
policies that we can work on together. I frankly think that we would be
surprised to find out that inquiry and the policies that inquiry
commends us to pursue might not divide us as much as policy arguments
that currently dominate this business.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from West Virginia.
Government Funding
Mrs. CAPITO. Mr. President, as we near the end of the fiscal year
2024 appropriations process, I would like to thank Vice Chair Collins
and Chair Murray, as well as my fellow committee members. The Labor-HHS
appropriations bill, the largest non-Defense appropriations bill, is
one of the most difficult appropriations bills to negotiate.
I see my chair over there. So it is good to be together again.
It is not a stretch to say that every year, when we go into
appropriations season, it is assumed that Labor-H will be one of the
hardest bills to pass. And many times it is. This is the first year
that Senator Baldwin and I have been at the helm of the Senate Labor-
HHS Subcommittee, and I am pleased to say we were able to work together
to present a bipartisan Senate bill last summer that laid the
groundwork for this final compromise bill.
First, I want to thank all of my colleagues, and I want all of my
colleagues to know that in this bill we continue all longstanding
legacy riders, such as Hyde and Hyde-Weldon conscience protections. And
I want to make it clear that we worked together to avoid any new poison
pill funding for controversial programs, such as title X family
planning.
While we each approached this bill differently, it was important to
present a bipartisan result, including Member priorities, such as
greater investments in biomedical research, pandemic preparedness,
mental health, childcare and education, efforts to combat the opioid
epidemic, and rural health.
Our final bill includes $194.4 billion in base discretionary funding,
which is $12.9 billion below the 2023 enacted level. Even with
additional resources added, the Labor-H bill represents a 1-percent
reduction from 2023 levels.
The final bill also allocates limited resources to certain programs
by reducing funding by approximately $630 million across 35 different
programs.
The Labor-HHS bill provides an increase of $300 million for the
National Institutes of Health. This funding provides targeted increases
for research in specific areas that are so important, such as
Alzheimer's, mental health, and cancer, including funding--one that I
am particularly interested in--the Childhood Cancer STAR Act.
We also continue efforts to fight the growing prevalence of substance
use disorder. This bill provides $4.95 billion in funding across the
bill for addiction prevention, research, and recovery programs.
Investments to address this epidemic include $1.57 billion for State
opioid response grants to address the opioid epidemic in ways that suit
individual States' needs; $2 billion for the substance use prevention,
treatment, and recovery services block grant--again, giving our States
the ability to address the issues--and $640.5 million for the NIH, for
their program Helping to End Addiction Long-term, also known as the NIH
HEAL Initiative.
Additionally, we direct more resources to telehealth and rural
healthcare programs that help States like my State of West Virginia.
Rural healthcare will receive an additional $4 million to improve
rural maternity and obstetrics services, and an additional $4 million
for a new rural hospital stabilization program.
This Labor-HHS bill prioritizes our children, starting with early
childhood education to ensure children are ready to learn when they
enter school, and continues investments for students in high school and
college to make sure they are prepared for the jobs today and for those
jobs in the future.
Specifically, we provide a $725 million increase for the child care
and development block grant and a $275 million increase for Head Start,
both to support early childhood education; a $20 million increase for
title I grants to local educational agencies to support K through 12
students in low-income schools; and a $20 million increase for IDEA
grants to States, which provides special ed services for our students
with disabilities; additionally, $7,395 for the maximum Pell grant
award for
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the 2024-2025 school year to support low-income students pursuing
postsecondary education.
The Labor-HHS section of this minibus isn't what any of us would have
written individually. However, it reflects a four corners negotiation
with bipartisan priorities, it protects all legacy riders, and it did
not provide any new funding for any poison pill programs.
I stand here today to tell you that this bill can help our fellow
citizens, but I am also happy to report that this bill will have a
tremendous impact on the people of the State of West Virginia. One of
the reasons I am proud to be on this Appropriations subcommittee is
because of the impact that we can each have on our home States, and
this bill demonstrates that. The priorities that I have advocated for
since I started in the Senate and the experiences I have seen and
learned from advocates, community leaders, patients and doctors,
students, teachers, and parents throughout West Virginia are why I
wanted to help write this bill.
So this bill includes ways to grow nursing programs where we have
shortages and to look into addiction treatment and recovery programs.
It helps with hospital expansions and improvements and workforce
initiatives for medical specialties, along with aviation workforce, and
water and wastewater technicians.
I cannot list them all, but my partnerships and support for Marshall
University, West Virginia University, Bridge Valley Community and
Technical College, Shepherd University, the Martinsburg Initiative,
Lily's Place, Charleston Area Medical Center, Roane General, Minnie
Hamilton Health Center, and numerous other city and county programs are
evident by the millions of dollars that we dedicate to the mission and
work being done right back home in West Virginia.
Far too often, the Federal Government overlooks what local entities
can do to meet the needs and the challenges in their local towns and
communities. But do you know what? That is where the solutions are, and
they know best. That is why I have been listening to them, and that is
why I am bringing those resources home.
I would like to again thank Vice Chair Collins and Chair Murray--I
see her on the floor--and all of the members of this committee here and
in the House for reaching this deal.
Now I would like to briefly thank all of the staff who worked to put
this product together. Many of them are in the Chamber right now. On my
staff: Lindsey Seidman, Ashley Palmer, Emily Slack, Tom Pfeiffer, JT
Jezierski, Dana Richter, and Addie Bassali.
On Senator Baldwin's staff, I would like to thank Mike Gentile, Mark
Laisch, Meghan Mott, Kathryn Toomajian, Amanda Beaumont, Erin Dugan,
and Janie Dulaney.
With that, I would encourage my colleagues to vote positively on this
bill.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wisconsin.
Ms. BALDWIN. Mr. President, I am going to start where my vice chair
left off by thanking and appreciating our incredible staff for the hard
work and the long hours that they contributed to this product.
Then I want to join my vice chair in appreciating the heroic work of
Patty Murray, our committee chair, and Susan Collins, our committee
vice chair, for their leadership in ushering all 12 appropriations
bills to the finish line.
I also want to thank Senator Capito for her approach and cooperation
on the Labor-HHS-Education bill this year.
We started the fiscal year 2024 appropriations process nearly a year
ago, including marking up 12 appropriations bills in an overwhelmingly
bipartisan process last summer. The Labor-HHS-Education bill was
reported out of committee 26 to 2, and I am very proud of that. The
goal then was to produce bills free of extreme and partisan policies
that could pass the House, pass the Senate, and be signed by the
President, and that is what we are here to finish today.
The Labor-HHS-Education bill that is included in this package
addresses some of our country's most pressing issues. It invests in our
workers, our families, and our economy--from substance use and mental
health programs to childcare, to biomedical research, to education
programs and workforce training. This bill delivers for the American
people. This year, we received 9,185 programmatic appropriations
requests from Senators for important programs throughout this bill.
To Senators who might claim they didn't have a say in what is
included in this bill, our doors have been open since the process began
last year. We have tried to reflect the priorities of every Senator who
has engaged in the appropriations process. Balancing the many competing
priorities throughout the Labor-HHS-Education bill is difficult in any
year, but this year was especially challenging because it includes less
overall funding than it did last year. Consequently, this isn't the
bill I would have written alone, but it honors the terms of the debt
limit deal that was agreed upon last spring.
The Labor-HHS-Education bill included in this package is very much of
a compromise, but despite the challenges we faced over many months in
writing this bill, I am really proud of our finished product. It
rejects proposals included in the House Labor-HHS-Education bill to
completely eliminate critical programs. We saved programs such as those
that are working to end HIV, ensured initiatives that increase access
to contraceptives stay alive and well, and we kept programs in place
that deliver support for moms and babies.
It rejected devastating cuts found in the House bill that would have
gutted funding for educators and schools, gutted funding for biomedical
research, gutted funding for Head Start, and gutted funding for Federal
financial aid for college students and public health programs. So we
rejected those devastating cuts. It also rejects dozens of extreme
policy riders that would have restricted reproductive healthcare and
women's freedom to control their own bodies as well as attacks on the
LGBTQ community and workers' rights.
In doing so, this Labor-HHS-Education bill protects the vast majority
of investments made in the last 2 years and, in some cases, builds upon
them.
This bill addresses some of the most pressing needs that I hear about
when I am traveling in my home State of Wisconsin. In Wisconsin right
now, families are paying 20 percent of their income on childcare, on
average, and that is for those who can afford and access it. Over half
of Wisconsin is in what we call a childcare desert, meaning that, for
every open childcare slot available in their communities, there are
three or more children who need it.
I hear from families and businesses and educators about our dire need
to invest in childcare, and I am proud to have done just that in this
bill. This bill includes an increase of $1 billion for childcare and
Head Start, building on our major gains in the past 2 years. And I want
to recognize our full committee chair, Patty Murray, for making this
such a high priority.
Look, I know that more needs to be done to fix our childcare system
so that it works for families, providers, and our economy, but this is
progress. This will help kids get the strong start that they deserve,
get parents back into the workforce, and help our businesses get the
talent that they need.
I am also proud that we are investing in our future generations'
health. To cure the diseases that plague our families and communities,
we successfully boosted lifesaving and life-changing biomedical
research by $300 million. We are doubling down on Alzheimer's disease
research because we need to find new treatments, preventions, and,
ultimately, a cure. As cancer continues to devastate families of all
stripes, I am proud to report that we have increased cancer research
funding by $120 million. As we work to address the mental health crisis
in our communities, we also increased funding for mental health
research.
One issue near and dear to my heart is the issue of opioid use
disorder. My mother struggled with addiction to prescription
painkillers throughout her life. Sadly, my mother's story is all too
common, and the opioid epidemic knows no bounds--geographic or
ideological. But in recent years, this crisis has taken to new heights
with the increased prevalence of synthetic drugs like fentanyl. While
our country grapples with deadly poisonings and
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overdoses from fentanyl, this bill protects investments in substance
use programs. As an increasing number of individuals, especially youth,
are seeking crisis care, it includes an $18 million increase for the 9-
8-8 suicide prevention hotline that I was so proud to help create.
With more than 100,000 individuals on the organ transplant waiting
list, this bill invests in modernizing the Organ Network and
Transplantation Network to better serve those families and give those
families more hope.
Accessing healthcare in our rural communities is often a challenge. I
know we are acutely experiencing this in the western part of Wisconsin
right now, and our bill includes targeted increases to rural health to
help turn the tides.
Last but certainly not least, our legislation invests in our future.
It protects funding for foundational K through 12 and postsecondary
education programs that support students and educators. It increases
funding for career and technical education while maintaining
investments in workforce development programs to help prepare workers
for good-paying jobs in in-demand careers. This will help people find
careers that provide a stable, middle-class life and help grow our
economy.
I wish we could have done more. I am disappointed that this bill
isn't able to increase funding for family planning or include larger
increases to any number of programs that truly meet the needs of
families and communities, but given the hand that we were dealt, I am
proud of the investments that we were able to make and protect in this
bill.
Nearly 6 months into the fiscal year and nearly a year after we
started this appropriations process by soliciting input from every
Member of the Senate, it is past time for us to get serious. This bill
does that, and I look forward to supporting its passage today.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maryland.
Mr. CARDIN. Mr. President, before I start my remarks in regard to
Sudan, I want to thank Senator Murray for her incredible leadership in
regard to the appropriations issue and Senator Collins.
It took a lot of work to get us to where we are now. I urge my
colleagues to cooperate so we can get this vote before the government
shutdown at midnight. It is a bill that I think we all can support and
be proud of. It is not everything that we wanted, but I think the
priorities have been protected, and I thank the chairwoman for what she
has done in that regard.
Sudan
Mr. President, in 2018, as the Sudanese people took to the streets to
demand change after decades of war, a young woman climbed on the roof
of a car. Protesters captured the ``Lady Liberty'' moment. As she
pointed her finger in the air, she read a poem that would become one of
the slogans of the Sudanese revolution:
The bullet does not kill. It is the silence of the people
that kills.
It is the silence that kills.
I come to the floor today because we cannot be silent about Sudan. We
must hold those committing war crimes accountable. I urge the Biden
administration to take the critical diplomatic steps to end the
conflict in Sudan.
In 2018, when protesters brought down the brutal and genocidal
regime, two-thirds were women. They dreamed of a Sudan that was free of
oppression, harassment, and sexual violence, a Sudan that would
transition to democracy after nearly 30 years of authoritarian rule.
But, today, Sudanese women face the brute force of a vicious war
between two armed factions: the SAF, the Sudanese Armed Forces, and the
RSF, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
Both committed abuses during the civil war in Darfur. In the last
year, their actions have been absolutely brutal. They have killed
detainees and indiscriminately bombed civilians. They have conscripted
children as soldiers. They have looted supplies and attacked aid
workers.
One woman told NPR:
If they couldn't steal it, they burned it.
They are targeting non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur just as they did
20 years ago. Last month, videos emerged of troops chanting ethnic
slurs as they paraded the streets, holding decapitated heads.
According to the United Nations, 15,000 people were killed in just
one attack; more than 8 million people have fled their homes; 25
million, including 14 million children, need humanitarian assistance.
In addition, Sudanese women face the widespread use of rape as a
weapon of war. A 21-year-old survivor said:
I cannot even count how many times I have been raped.
Diplomatic efforts to end the conflict have failed. Cease-fire after
cease-fire has been violated. In fact, the violence has intensified.
Last December, I called for a special envoy for Sudan in S. Con. Res.
24. I am pleased to see that the Biden administration has named former
Congressman Tom Perriello as our Special Representative. I strongly
urge the administration to fully staff his office as quickly as
possible so that Mr. Perriello can hit the ground running. We have lost
too much time as it is.
Mr. Perriello has four Herculean tasks ahead of him. First, he must
establish a single diplomatic forum to negotiate a cease-fire. We need
one effort that involves Africa, Middle Eastern, and European partners,
along with partners from multilateral organizations. Second, he must
bring warring parties to the table.
The United States has imposed sanctions on the SAF and RSF. We need
others to join us as we pursue additional targets. We must make it
clear to the parties--and their foreign backers--that the cost of
continued conflict is higher than the cost of coming to the negotiating
table.
In the past, Middle Eastern nations, Turkiye, and even Russia have
picked sides in Sudan. A recent United Nations report found evidence
that the UAE was giving arms to the RSF. According to Sudanese and
regional diplomatic sources, Egypt is helping the SAF.
We must be clear: No nation should be providing arms or support to
these groups.
Third, the Special Envoy must galvanize the humanitarian response.
The SAF is blocking cross-border humanitarian assistance from Chad.
There are reports that they are obstructing assistance to areas
controlled by the other side. That must end.
At the same time, it is a moral stain on the international community
that the U.N. appeal for Sudan is funded at just 4 percent. The United
States is by far the biggest donor. We put our money where our mouth
is. Partners with interests in Sudan, including neighboring countries
and especially those in the Gulf, need to do the same.
Finally, the Special Envoy must start the conversation about
addressing impunity once and for all.
Last year the International Criminal Court announced an investigation
into war crimes and crimes against humanity. The United Nations Human
Rights Council established an independent factfinding mission to
investigate abuses. On December 6, Secretary Blinken announced he had
determined that members of the SAF and the RSF had committed war crimes
and that the RSF and allied militias have committed crimes against
humanity and ethnic cleansing.
The sad truth is, what is happening in Sudan is in, large part, as a
result of the lack of accountability for our previous abuses. Many of
those involved in today's conflict committed war crimes in the past and
were never held accountable.
Maybe things would be different if former dictator al-Bashir had been
tried at the Hague. Maybe the SAF would have reformed if high-ranking
officials had been held accountable for their atrocities. Maybe the RSF
would not exist if the Janjaweed had been accountable for their crimes
in Darfur. Maybe if General Hemedti had not been getting flown on the
Emirati jet and welcomed by Africa heads of state, things might be
different.
One thing is for sure, such crimes must not go unpunished. As chair
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I will continue to fight for
justice and a resolution of this conflict.
To those who continue to commit war crimes in Sudan, know that we
will keep fighting to bring you to justice, no matter how long it
takes.
To the women and the young people across Sudan who dream of an
inclusive political process with civilians in the driver's seat, do not
give up hope.
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And to the international community and those in the United States who
value human life and dignity, now is the time to step up. Now is the
time to put an end to this cycle of violence that has plagued this
region for generations. Now is the time to end the silence.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Nomination of Adeel Abdullah Mangi
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, for the first time in American
history, a gentleman of Muslim faith has been nominated to serve on a
Federal Circuit Court of Appeals.
What could and should have been a moment of pride has been stained by
the nominee, Adeel Mangi, having been subjected to a series--a
campaign--of baseless and gross attacks.
Senator Booker of New Jersey came to the floor yesterday and gave an
eloquent and thorough rebuttal of those attacks, so I won't rehash
that. But it is important that my colleagues understand where these
attacks came from. It is not just that they were untrue; it is that the
whole campaign is a fake.
These attacks are part of a coordinated campaign by the same dark
money interests that helped Donald Trump pack our Federal courts and
who now want to stop President Biden from confirming qualified nominees
who weren't handpicked by those billionaire special interests.
You don't have to search long to see their fingerprints all over this
smear campaign. We can start with the main culprit, the Judicial Crisis
Network. Let me give you just an overview of what the Judicial Crisis
Network is.
The billionaire operation to pack the courts had an operative who was
the staff person, essentially, who directed it. His name was Leonard
Leo.
Leonard Leo runs a whole array of front groups to obscure what is
really going on, sort of like a pea and shell game, only with lots of
shells.
This is a diagram that I use about one component of his front group
armada. What this reflects is his own companies up here: CRC Advisors,
CRC Strategies, and CRC Public Relations. They are the entities through
which he extracts money for services, so-called, from this array of
corporate entities.
To understand what it is, the real ones here--the real ones here--are
called 85 Fund and Concord Fund. Those are twin entities. They share
office space and funders and staff. They have around them this array of
other entities, none of which are real, all of which are registered
fictitious names--fictitious names under Virginia law--under which
their real entities are allowed to operate.
In this case, there are six of them, and one of them is this Judicial
Crisis Network. This thing is being run through a fake entity that
bears the fictitious name of a completely different organization.
Behind that are more anonymous funders and screeners of funding and,
ultimately, behind all of that, a bunch of creepy billionaires.
The story of the Judicial Crisis Network is that it was the main
group that the operative, Leonard Leo, used to help the billionaires
pack the Supreme Court with their handpicked Justices. It spent, for
instance, almost $40 million opposing Merrick Garland's nomination to
the Supreme Court and, thereafter, supporting the Trump Justices'
confirmations. It took in millions in dark money dollars and individual
contributions as big as $15 million and $17 million. This is not a
grassroots organization; this is a billionaire-funded, multimillion-
dollar contribution outfit. And it continues to work today in the
service of packing the courts.
It is an organization for the billionaires to work through from
behind the scenes through their operative, Leonard Leo.
It launched against Mr. Mangi a $50,000 ad campaign called ``Stop
Antisemite Adeel,'' in which a video plays saying the Senate should
reject ``anti-Semite Adeel Mangi,'' and--just to make the point even
more grotesque--showing a plane flying into the World Trade Center.
Classy stuff.
It has tweeted and promoted the false attacks that Senator Booker
described at length over the past 2 months. In recent days, as the
attacks on Mr. Mangi ramped up, the organization tweeted out ``It looks
like our ad campaign worked.'' This ad campaign had nothing to do with
truth. It was all about using secret billionaire money to derail a
circuit court nominee who had not been blessed by this outfit and the
billionaires behind them.
Leonard Leo, as the billionaires' operative, had his fingerprints all
over--smears by another dark-money group attacking Mangi. This one is
run by a former Neil Gorsuch clerk who also oversaw the Kavanaugh
nomination on the Republican side.
Because this is a dark-money group, we don't know all of its donors,
but we do know at least two. And the first is--guess who?--the Judicial
Crisis Network. It is the hand in the glove in the glove.
JCN--Judicial Crisis Network--helped get the second organization off
the ground with more than a quarter of a million dollars in 2018 and
2019. When the new organization launched, its leader tweeted:
Excited to work hand-in-glove with [a person named Carrie
Severino, who is a Judicial Crisis Network lead operative] my
other long-time friends at JCN, and many others on the
outside who understand the critical importance of the
judicial fight.
And, specifically, he means the critical importance to billionaires
to be able to control the judiciary and get things done that Congress
would never pass through courts that will do their bidding.
The dark money ties don't stop just there with the Judicial Crisis
Network front group and the front group for the Judicial Crisis
Network. The front group organization's vice president comes straight
out of the Koch brothers--K-o-c-h, not C-o-k-e--the Koch political dark
money network. That guy helped run multiple Koch political
organizations, including the dark money flagship of the Koch political
machine called Americans for Prosperity.
While there, guess what. He helped oversee Americans for Prosperity's
multimillion-dollar campaign to pressure Senators to confirm Justices
Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.
Who is the other big donor? Donald Trump. Earlier this week, it was
reported that Trump's PAC gave the organization $150,000 to keep up the
dirty work. The leader of this group wrote an op-ed calling Mr. Mangi
``Hamas's favorite judicial nominee'' and included a picture of Mangi
with the Hamas flag edited to appear over his face--classy stuff,
again--and tweeted that Mangi should ``Go serve as a judge in Gaza, you
antisemite''--just beautiful stuff.
Leonard Leo and Trump World are also propping up yet another dark-
money group attacking Mangi and other Biden nominees, the Conservative
Partnership Institute.
The New York Times recently called the Conservative Partnership
Institute ``a breeding ground for the next generation of Trump
loyalists.'' It has received millions of dollars from Donors Trust,
which is widely known as the ``dark money ATM of the right.'' It builds
no product; it offers no service. What it does is launders the identity
of donors so that if you are a big donor and you want to send money
into politics, you send it to Donors Trust first, and then the report
sent to the 501(c)(4) says the source is Donors Trust and not whoever
really gave it. That is what it lives to do, and hundreds of millions
of dollars flow through it. It also received $1 million from Trump's
PAC in 2021.
CPI is quite a cast of characters, folks like Mark Meadows, Steve
Miller, Cleta Mitchell, and Jeffrey Clark. One of its projects has been
to find bad-faith ways to sink qualified Biden nominees, and Mangi is
just the latest of its targets. This same group was behind the false
attacks on Ketanji Brown Jackson that smeared her as lenient on sex
offenders.
These groups are spending millions in dark money from Leonard Leo,
from Donald Trump, and from billionaires like the Kochs to keep the
Federal courts stacked in their favor. They want to stop President
Biden's nominees who weren't handpicked by them in some Federalist
Society back room by billionaires and their fixers.
It is not just Mangi who is their target. They have tried to smear
many other Biden nominees, and there is an unusual concentration in
their targets of people of color. They seem to have a particular
fixation with people of color.
They ran the despicable ads accusing Ketanji Brown Jackson of being
``more concerned about the well-being of
[[Page S2571]]
pedophiles than the safety'' of children. Judicial Crisis Network spent
$1.5 million on ads attacking Justice Jackson during her confirmation.
Again, that is the fake group with a fictitious name that actually is
Concord Fund but purports to be something different.
Judicial Crisis Network also spent more than $1 million on a smear
campaign against Vanita Gupta and $300,000 on a campaign attacking Dale
Ho, both extremely qualified candidates of color.
JCN's president has written numerous op-eds calling nominees of
color, like Judge Nancy Abudu on the Eleventh Circuit, the first Black
woman ever on the Eleventh Circuit, ``ideologues'' and ``extremists.''
These groups have waged similar smear campaigns in other committees
than Judiciary, with qualified nominees of color like Saule Omarova for
the Department of the Treasury and Lisa Cook at the Federal Reserve
getting the smear treatment.
Adeel Mangi is an eminently qualified nominee. He comes across with
all the dignity and decorum of an Oxford don. He is as well-trained and
intelligent as any candidate who has ever come before the Judicial
Committee. He has been the subject of vicious, bad-faith attacks, and
the attacks come from this billionaire-funded, rightwing apparatus.
It is a scheme. It is not just a smear; it is an op. It is a covert
operation designed to prevent the Biden administration from confirming
well-qualified, fairminded judges to our courts so that they can create
a vacancy so that if they can get Donald Trump elected in November,
they can then put another rightwing extremist who will do what the
billionaires want onto the court.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Bennet). The Senator from Nebraska.
Mr. RICKETTS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to enter into a
colloquy with the senior Senator from Maine.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
UNRWA
Mr. RICKETTS. Mr. President, UNRWA is a completely irredeemable
organization. Since October 7, we have seen how much Hamas has
infiltrated UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for the
Palestinians. In fact, some have called UNRWA a front organization for
Hamas.
UNRWA staff participated in the October 7 attacks. Some participated
in the attacks directly. Some helped with logistics. One hostage
alleges that her captor was an UNRWA teacher. Another UNRWA staffer was
actually a commander who participated in an attack on a kibbutz that
left 97 people dead and took 26 hostages.
Regrettably, this does not come as a surprise. Because of previous
U.N. investigations into UNRWA, we knew this was true before the
October 7 attacks. We knew that UNRWA was using schools to store
weapons and launch attacks on Israel. We knew that their textbooks
preached hate toward Jews and Israel and glorified martyrdom.
I introduced this amendment because funding an organization like
UNRWA that is so deeply embedded in Hamas is wrong. Our U.S. taxpayer
dollars should not be going to fund an organization that is essentially
a front for Hamas. This Chamber's ultimate goal should be to
permanently defund UNRWA--defund it the way the Trump administration
did.
I spoke with the Senator from Maine, and she and I have agreed that
we will continue to fight to ensure that future appropriations to deny
UNRWA access--she assured me that she will continue to fight against
future appropriations, to deny UNRWA access to U.S. taxpayer dollars.
This underlying bill does that for 1 year, and that is a start.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maine.
Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, I very much appreciate the comments of
the Senator from Nebraska. I agree with him that UNRWA cannot be the
conduit for humanitarian aid. It is clear that it has been infiltrated
by Hamas, and indeed Israeli intelligence indicates that specific
employees--employees--of UNRWA were involved in the brutal atrocities
of October 7 when Hamas attacked Israel. In addition, it is estimated
that many other employees of UNRWA are sympathetic to Hamas or
affiliated with Hamas.
So American tax dollars should not be going through an organization
that has been involved--some of its employees--in a terrorist attack,
one of the worst terrorist attacks we have seen, a terrorist attack
that resulted in the worst loss of Jewish life in a single day since
the Holocaust. How could we possibly allow American tax dollars to be
used by this organization?
Now, this is not to say there should not be aid. There are differing
views on that issue. But we know there are other organizations within
the U.N.--there is the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees
organization. There is UNICEF. There is the World Food organization.
There are many other organizations.
For me, Mr. President, what was most compelling is when I learned
that Hamas had a major communications and command control center
underneath UNRWA's headquarters, and there were additional Hamas
organizations that had locations in the tunnels underneath UNRWA's
schools. Now, tell me, how could UNRWA possibly not have known this was
occurring? How could they not have seen the tunnels being built, the
air-conditioners being brought in, the computers being installed, their
electric rate going way up? It is just not conceivable that UNRWA was
unaware of all of this.
As my friend from Nebraska has mentioned, we know that far too many
of the schools UNRWA is running in Gaza teach hatred in their
textbooks--teach hatred not only of Israel but of Jews in general.
It is totally unacceptable that American tax dollars would go to this
organization. There are alternatives. That is why, in the supplemental
appropriations bill, which I know the Presiding Officer feels so deeply
about, as do I--in that bill, we defunded UNRWA and we said that
dollars from previous appropriations could not be used by UNRWA. In the
bill that is incorporated and before us today--the State, Foreign Ops
bill, which is part of the six-bill package--we also defund UNRWA, and
we extended it beyond the end of this fiscal year. We extended it to
March of 2025 to ensure there wasn't a gap and give us time.
I do pledge to my colleague from Nebraska to continue to work on this
issue about which I feel so strongly. I will continue to work with him,
and I very much appreciate the opportunity to engage in this colloquy.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nebraska.
Mr. RICKETTS. Mr. President, I am grateful for the senior Senator
from Maine's commitment to defunding UNRWA and grateful as well for her
pointing out that there are other ways to provide aid to Gaza.
I would also like to point out that when the Trump administration
denied UNRWA funding a few years ago, the world did not come to an end.
So I do believe, as the senior Senator from Maine pointed out, there
are alternatives.
With her commitment, which I appreciate, for that reason, I will no
longer seek a vote on my amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maine.
Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, first let me express my appreciation to
the Senator from Nebraska.
I will ask unanimous consent that a story from the Wall Street
Journal on this very issue be printed in the Record. I would note that
this story estimates that approximately 10 percent of UNRWA's staff in
Gaza has links to the Hamas militants.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
Intelligence Reveals Details of U.N. Agency Staff's Links to Oct. 7
Attack
(By Carrie Keller-Lynn and David Luhnow)
Tel Aviv.--At least 12 employees of the U.N.'s Palestinian
refugee agency had connections to Hamas's Oct. 7 attack on
Israel and around 10% of all of its Gaza staff have ties to
Islamist militant groups, according to intelligence reports
reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Six United Nations Relief and Works Agency workers were
part of the wave of Palestinian militants who killed 1,200
people in the deadliest assault on Jews since the Holocaust,
according to the intelligence dossier. Two helped kidnap
Israelis. Two others were tracked to sites where scores of
Israeli civilians were shot and killed. Others coordinated
logistics for the assault, including procuring weapons.
Of the 12 Unrwa employees with links to the attacks, seven
were primary or secondary school teachers, including two math
[[Page S2572]]
teachers, two Arabic language teachers and one primary school
teacher.
The information in the intelligence reports--based on what
an official described as very sensitive signals intelligence
as well as cellphone tracking data, interrogations of
captured Hamas fighters and documents recovered from dead
militants, among other things--were part of a briefing given
by Israel to U.S. officials that led Washington and others to
suspend aid to Unrwa.
Intelligence estimates shared with the U.S. conclude that
around 1,200 of Unrwa's roughly 12,000 employees in Gaza have
links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and about half
have close relatives who belong to the Islamist militant
groups. Both groups have been designated as terrorist
organizations by the U.S. and others. Hamas has run Gaza
since a 2007 coup.
``Unrwa's problem is not just `a few bad apples' involved
in the October 7 massacre,'' said a senior Israeli government
official. ``The institution as a whole is a haven for Hamas'
radical ideology.''
An Unrwa spokesperson on Monday declined to comment, saying
an internal U.N. investigation into the agency was under way.
Two officials familiar with the intelligence said the Unrwa
employees considered to have ties with militant groups were
deemed to be ``operatives,'' indicating they took active part
in the organization's military or political framework. The
report said 23% of Unrwa's male employees had ties to Hamas,
a higher percentage than the average of 15% for adult males
in Gaza, indicating a higher politicization of the agency
than the population at large.
Nearly half of all Unrwa employees--an estimated 49%--also
had close relatives who also had official ties to the
militant groups, especially Hamas, the intelligence reports
said.
In the aftermath of Oct. 7, as Israel has waged war against
Hamas in Gaza, Unrwa has emerged as one of the loudest voices
decrying the impact of the fierce fighting on Palestinians in
the enclave, where authorities say more than 26,000 people
have been killed. Unrwa says at least 152 of its own staff
have been killed in the conflict.
The agency is also the main pillar of operations to move
food, aid, medicine and other humanitarian supplies into
Gaza.
The vast majority of Unrwa's 30,000 staff across the Middle
East are Palestinian, and Israel and some in the U.S. have
long accused it of nurturing anti-Israeli sentiment in
crowded refugee camps that have been important recruiting
grounds for militant groups, including Hamas.
The Trump administration suspended funding for Unrwa in
2018, saying the agency's mission was fundamentally
misguided. The Biden administration renewed funding in 2021.
The Oct. 7 intelligence reports seen by the Journal
identified an Unrwa Arabic teacher who the reports said was
also a Hamas militant commander and took part in a terrorist
attack on Kibbutz Be'eri, where 97 people were killed and
about 26 people were kidnapped and taken as hostages to Gaza.
Another Unrwa employee, described in the dossier as an
Unrwa social worker, played a role in absconding with the
body of a dead Israeli soldier, which was taken to Gaza, the
reports said. He also coordinated trucks and munitions
distributions for Hamas before being killed.
A person familiar with the dossier said that after U.S.
officials were briefed on the intelligence material, they
alerted Unrwa, which put out a statement announcing the
allegation that some of its employees were linked to the
attacks and saying it had fired the employees involved. It
provided no details, and didn't say how many employees were
involved.
On Sunday, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he
was personally horrified by the allegations.
Unrwa commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini criticized
Western nations for pausing aid at a time when Gaza is facing
a humanitarian crisis as the war between Hamas and Israel
rages. Guterres also implored nations to not suspend
humanitarian aid.
It is ``immensely irresponsible to sanction an agency and
an entire community it serves because of allegations of
criminal acts against some individuals,'' Lazzarini said.
Unrwa looks after more than 5 million Palestinians in
densely-packed refugee neighborhoods across the Middle East,
including the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. But its
biggest operations are in Gaza, where it looks after an
estimated 80% of the local population and runs hundreds of
schools and scores of clinics.
Israel says it has documented deepening ties between Unrwa
and Hamas since the militant group cemented its hold on Gaza
in 2007. Unrwa has admitted to finding Hamas weapons stored
in schools and Israel has repeatedly said Hamas tunnels run
under and through Unrwa buildings as well as other civilian
facilities. The former head of Unrwa's union in Gaza was
fired in 2017 after Israel found out he had been elected to
Hamas' top political leadership.
The dossier is the most detailed look yet at the widespread
links between the Unrwa employees and militants. It offers
telling details regarding the events of Oct. 7.
A math teacher belonging to Hamas was close enough to a
female hostage in Gaza that he took a picture of her. Another
teacher was carrying an antitank missile the night before the
invasion.
One Unrwa employee set up an operations room for
Palestinian Islamic Jihad on Oct. 8, the day after the
attack. Three other employees, including another Arabic
teacher at an Unrwa school, received a text from Hamas to arm
themselves at a staging area close to the border the night
before the attack. It was unclear whether they went.
A different elementary school teacher did cross into Israel
and went to Reim, a district where a kibbutz, an army base
and a music festival were attacked.
One of the intelligence reports seen by the Journal said a
13th Unrwa employee, who didn't have a discernible
affiliation with a terror group, also entered Israel.
Hundreds of Gazan civilians flooded across the border as part
of the Hamas-led attack, Israel says.
Teachers make up nearly three-quarters of Unrwa's Gaza-
based local staff. Unrwa schools, which use textbooks
approved by the Palestinian Authority, have come under fire
for using materials that allegedly glorify terrorists and
promote hatred of Israel. Unrwa says it has taken steps to
address problematic content, but a 2019 U.S. Government
Accountability Office report said that measures haven't
always been implemented.
Since Oct. 7, Hamas has stolen more than $1 million worth
of Unrwa supplies, including fuel and trucks, according to
the intelligence report. The intelligence assessment alleges
that Hamas operatives are so deeply enmeshed within the Unrwa
aid-delivery enterprise as to coordinate transfers for the
organization.
corrections & amplifications
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, known as Unrwa,
was incorrectly referred to as Unwra in one instance in an
earlier version of this article. (Corrected on Jan. 29).
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maine.
H.R. 2882
Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, before I suggest the absence of a quorum,
I do want to just briefly respond to some of the comments that were
made by my distinguished colleague from Kentucky, Senator Rand Paul,
earlier.
The first is that he is correct that a lot of the increase in
spending is on the mandatory entitlement side of the budget, but that
is not what the Appropriations Committee handles. That is not under our
jurisdiction.
The second point that I want to make is that in this six-bill
package, the amount of spending in the nondefense discretionary area is
actually below last year. It is 1.7 percent below last year. When you
factor in inflation, that means there are real cuts that these Agencies
and programs are going to be experiencing. There is a 3.3-percent
increase for defense, but that, too, is below the inflation rate. When
you look at the global threats our combatant Commanders have
identified, we should be spending more for defense than that.
The final point I will make is that we have adhered to the Fiscal
Responsibility Act caps on spending in this bill, the final six-bill
package, and the overall bills we have brought forth.
So we have also accommodated and followed the agreement that was
negotiated between the Speaker of the House and the Democratic leader
of the Senate. So these bills are not big spending bills that are
wildly out of scope. They are carefully drafted, they are conservative,
and they meet the requirements of the FRA and the top line established
by the leaders.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Ossoff). Without objection, it is so
ordered.
The Senator from Colorado.
H.R. 2882
Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I know my time might be short tonight
because we finally have come, I guess, to an agreement about a vote,
but I wanted to come tonight to the floor to talk about why I am voting
against this bill.
I am going to vote against this bill because the House has sent it
over here without funding in it to support Ukraine, and I think that is
shameful. I think that is a complete abdication of the House's
responsibility to our own national security and to democracy around the
world.
It is common to come out here and criticize the U.S. Senate. I have
done it many times. But I was grateful to be part of the Senate when we
had about a 6-month negotiation about whether
[[Page S2573]]
or not to pass what was called the supplemental, which was a budget
bill to, among other things, fund Ukraine. There was money in that for
Ukraine. There was money in that for Taiwan. There was money in that
for Israel. There was humanitarian aid in there as part of that deal as
well.
There was a lot of disagreement about a lot of things, but over a 6-
month period, we actually finally came to a bipartisan agreement and
got 70 votes. You almost never get 70 votes for anything in this place
unless it is easy.
You almost never get 70 votes for anything in this place that is
hard. Yet we were able to get 70 votes. We were able to put together a
coalition of Democrats and Republicans to send a message to the House
that funding Ukraine was very important and that the U.S. Senate,
despite our disagreements over many, many things, we are united in the
idea that we have an obligation to fulfill here on behalf of our
national security, on behalf of democracy, on behalf of the fight that
Ukraine has led.
We had to overcome, to be sure, isolationist voices--mostly in the
Republican Party--during that debate. There are people making arguments
from that isolationist wing of the Republican Party that we heard
before World War I, that we heard before World War II. It is not an
unknown tradition in American history that people would come out and
make those arguments. It is such a known tradition that the people who
are advancing those arguments are calling themselves by the same name
of some of the folks who were the most ardent isolationists before
World War II. America Firsters is what they called themselves back
then, and that is what they are calling themselves again.
You would have thought they would have learned history's lesson based
on the way history shone on the last version of the American Firsters.
They were trying to keep us out of World War II. When my mom was being
born in 1938 in Warsaw, Poland--a Polish Jew--the country was
completely run over or was about to be run over by the Nazis. But all
these years later, you hear the same people, the same wing of the same
party making the same arguments once again, and the arguments just
don't make any sense.
One of the ones that I think is hardest to understand is this
argument that we can't simultaneous support Ukraine--we, the United
States of America, cannot simultaneously support Ukraine and prepare
for a possible conflict with China, which I am sure nobody here would
wish. I certainly don't wish for that conflict. But it is more than
hypothetical; it is possible that someday we might be in conflict. But
the idea that we would stop supporting Ukraine in an actual conflict
against tyranny, in an actual conflict against fascism, in the hope
that we would somehow be better prepared for later makes absolutely no
sense.
Then when you look at the contents of the bills themselves, the bills
that we passed as part of the supplemental, and you see the money that
is being spent all across America, in 40 States, in 70 cities--our
industrial production for our military is up 20 percent since Russia
invaded Ukraine because we were not investing in our production before
that happened. That was a threat to our national security. And we are
doing it now all over this country, all over the United States. In big
cities and little cities, in rural communities and urban communities,
that is what we are doing. We are retooling our defense complex.
If I accept, if I grant the isolationist wing's view of this, what I
would say is that even based on your own arguments, you should be for
these bills because these bills are making the United States stronger;
they are refreshing our industrial base, our military base; and they
are making us more prepared not just for what is going on in Russia
today but for what could go on in China.
I mean, it is utterly self-explanatory, and that is why I think it is
actually an excuse for not engaging. I think it is an isolationist
impulsive tendency that we have seen before. We saw it when the United
States shamefully didn't get into World War II until years after we
should have, and we are seeing it again here. But this is a different
case than that because we are not talking about American troops; we are
just talking about American support.
So we are talking about retooling our industrial base. We are talking
about creating jobs here in the United States. We are talking about
spending the vast majority of money that we authorized in that bill in
the United States of America--not in Ukraine but here.
I suppose it would be one thing if Ukraine hadn't earned our support,
but on top of everything else, they have. In the last 2 years since
they were invaded--an invasion they did not ask for--they have done
everything the world could have asked of them--more than the world
could have asked of them.
You know, it is another point here, too, that we are not sending them
our fanciest equipment either. We are sending them older equipment that
is a lot better than the Soviet-age equipment they had. But it is
allowing us to have the newest versions of this. We are sending older
versions of that equipment to Ukraine, but they have used it
magnificently. I am on the Intelligence Committee, and the intelligence
community is telling us that the Ukrainian people have fought
magnificently.
I have heard some of the isolationists on the other side of the aisle
say: Well, we don't know where the money is being spent, and therefore
we shouldn't spend any more money. I think it is safe to say that there
is no enterprise in the world--I choose my words carefully--there is no
enterprise in the world that has a better set of receipts than the men
and women who have been fighting on the Ukrainian frontline. I
challenge any of those people to show me where they said that Ukraine
was going to throw Putin off half the territory he took from them, but
they have; that they would be able to attack his so-called, you know,
impregnable supersonic missiles, but they have. The Ukrainian people
don't even have a navy, really. I don't mean any offense, but it is
true. They don't really have a navy, and yet they have been able to
keep Putin out of the Black Sea. That has meant that wheat has been
able to be transported from Ukraine all over the world so people can
eat. These fighters have the receipts. It is in the success they have
had.
It is important to understand that this isn't just a fight for
Ukraine, which they have fought magnificently. It is a fight for the
West. It is a fight for NATO. It is a fight for democracy itself.
They didn't ask for this fight. President Zelenskyy never asked for
this fight. Three years ago, he was on a television program, and then
he ran for President, and he got elected because there was such concern
about corruption in the country. They said: You know what, we are going
to put a television guy in charge, and maybe he will do better.
Then Putin invaded his country, thinking that he was going to be able
to decapitate the regime in 72 hours, thinking that Zelenskyy was going
to run, thinking that they wouldn't stand up to his invasion--the first
invasion since we settled all this stuff at the end of World War II
with global order and commitment to the rule of law.
My mom is still alive, my mom whom I mentioned earlier. Born in 1938,
she is still alive. She can't believe she has lived long enough to see
another land war break out in Europe. I suppose, seen from a different
way, it is an incredible testament to the institutions that have been
built and the alliances that have been built that it has been so long
since we have had somebody with the audacity to do what Putin has done.
But thank God he ran into the Ukrainians--for all of us--because we
don't have to send our people there, and NATO does not have to send
their people there.
They are willing to fight and die for democracy, and they are asking
us to support them--not with our people but with our military support
and with a little bit of money.
As I mentioned earlier, we passed a bill with 72 votes over here to
fund the effort in Ukraine, and the House of Representatives has
completely ignored it. That same isolationist wing that is over here--
that is now over there in the House of Representatives is declining to
fulfill our responsibilities to the rest of the world, and they have
left town today without having supported Ukraine.
I want to say, by the way, as I stand here that there has been an
incident in
[[Page S2574]]
Moscow today or outside of Moscow, and I am very sorry for the
theatergoers who are there who lost their lives--further illustration
of how complicated this world is.
But let me tell you something: There is nobody more cheerful about
the House of Representatives' failure to pass the Senate bill than
Vladimir Putin. He reads our newspapers. He reads our social media. He
manipulates our social media. He knows what is at stake, and the
Ukrainians know what is at stake.
This is not fanciful, the questions that are at risk here. Look what
happened just in the last few weeks in Russia. Vladimir Putin got
reelected by something over 95 percent of the vote in Moscow, and of
course it was completely manipulated, and he went out and said: This is
an endorsement for my war. This fraudulent election is an endorsement
of my war.
Look what happened in Hong Kong last weekend, where the Chinese
Communist Party from Beijing has completely thrown out the rule book in
Hong Kong, which has a long tradition of commitment to the rule of law,
free enterprise, a place where you can predictably run a business or
have a newspaper, have opposition. This weekend, they sucked out the
last embers that were glowing there of the right to be able to do that
stuff. So now you can get a life in prison--maybe even worse than a
life in prison--in Hong Kong if you defy what Beijing says, just like
Alexei Navalny, the leading opposition figure in Russia, who was put in
prison by Putin and now, you know, died of natural causes in his early
forties because Putin killed him while--while--Members of this Congress
were at Munich during the Security Conference. He knew exactly what the
message was he was sending: I care so little about your opinion of this
that I am going to kill Alexei Navalny while you are all there.
So I am going to come to an end because I can tell people need to
move on to the next thing, but let me just say that, contrary to what I
have heard in the debate around here, the Ukrainians have succeeded
beyond anybody's wildest dreams.
The evidence is so clear that that is true. Even the most recent town
that was defeated, which was a smoldering ruin by the time the Russians
got there--Avdiivka--it took the Russians 6 months and 30,000 troops to
get that village. And the alliances held otherwise, notwithstanding the
fact that they are out of bullets, notwithstanding the fact that they
are out of artillery. At this point, in some ways they are kind of
fighting with their bare hands, which is how they started in this war.
We have a responsibility here that is not a service to Ukraine. This
is a service to our national security. This is a service to our kids
and to our grandkids. This is a service that is the same as the one
that was provided by the people who, before World War II, were able to
overcome the ``America First'' crowd back then so that America could
play its unique role in the world. And this is a service to anybody on
planet Earth who cares about freedom, who cares about the ability to
have a real debate and a real discussion, who cares about whether there
is actually a rule of law in place so might doesn't make right; so that
you can open a small business in your village on a corner and know that
a gang isn't going to come and steal your money; so that you know that
your parents and grandparents aren't going to be locked up with the key
thrown away just because they had a different point of view than the
ruler of the country.
In human history, it is much more common to see a situation where
might makes right than it is for people to exercise those freedoms, and
the Ukrainians know that from the guys who are on the frontlines to
President Zelenskyy and back. That is why they are fighting so hard for
this freedom.
That is why we need to pay attention when Putin takes out his leading
opposition. That is why we need to understand the implications for us
when China sweeps into Hong Kong and rips away people's freedoms and
people's rights in front of the entire world. That is what happens when
they shut down opposition newspapers. This is something we should be
able to agree on without respect to our political party.
I worry a lot about what is going to happen over the next 2 weeks,
because there are people out there who are not telling the truth about
what the battle has been in Ukraine. There are people out there--
amazingly, to me--who think the United States can't support Ukraine
effectively and prepare for what might be coming down the pike. There
are people who don't believe that our military needs to be retooled. I
am really worried in this moment that crossing our fingers and hoping
for the best is not a recipe for a good outcome here. That is why I
believe that it was critical for us to try to force, in this debate, on
this bill, the inclusion of Ukraine funding, and I have said that all
the way along.
The first funding bill that came over here 6 months ago, I threatened
to shut the government down over that bill because it didn't include
Ukraine funding. A deal had been cut behind closed doors, between the
then-Speaker of the House and others in the House, to allow a bill to
come forward without Ukraine funding, and I said to my colleagues here:
We have no plan to fund Ukraine.
We had no plan to fund Ukraine, and as a result of that threat, we
were able to get commitments from the leaders of the Democratic Party
and the Republican Party here that we keep working on it, and we keep
working on it.
Several months later, we had this same kind of moment, and we were
able to get the same kind of commitment, and because we all worked
together on this, notwithstanding the political divisions that exists
in our country, we were able to get to that 72-person vote. We were
able to show Putin that we were going to stand up against him here--
against him here. And, unlike some people here, he knows exactly how
things are going on the Ukrainian battlefield. He knows he has got real
problems on the Ukrainian battlefield because it took 30,000 people to
succeed at the last village that he was able to secure. He knows how
this nation of ``MacGyvers'' has shown up time and time and time again
to figure out how to take him on with their fists or with drones or
with our help.
But I am sorry to say this, Mr. President. I think it is true that
the battlefield that he is trying to succeed on is the battlefield of
the U.S. Congress. He thinks he is going to win on this battlefield. He
is trying to count on our dysfunction, our division, our petty
disagreements, and the lack of understanding about what is at stake
here from the historical point of view or from democracy's point of
view. With the message that we want to send to our allies and to our
foes around the world tonight, he is going to be able to sleep a little
better because the House failed to do it.
So I am not here to say that I am going to shut the government down.
There is nothing I can do at this point to bring the House of
Representatives back to Washington, DC. That is not possible. There
wouldn't be any benefit to doing it.
I am going to vote against this bill because it doesn't include the
Ukraine funding. And I would say to my colleagues who are here, every
single one of whom supported the Ukraine funding when it came through
the Senate, that we have got our work cut out for us over the next 2
weeks to make sure that we persuade the people in the House of
Representatives that there is no more time left; that the Ukrainians,
as I said, are out of bullets, out of ammo, and out of time. And we are
out of time too. The whole world is watching.
I don't know the Speaker, but I would be very surprised if he wants
to go down in history as the person or the politician who lost
Ukraine--who lost Ukraine--because he had to hold on to his job, or who
lost Ukraine because there were people in his party who couldn't resist
the celebrity benefit of going out and raising money on crazy politics
that doesn't recognize the stakes for what they are.
We were able to close over that here in the Senate, and I believe
that the House is going to have to do that as well. And we have got to
do everything we can to make sure we reach that conclusion, because the
consequence for our Nation's reputation will be as severe as anything
that we have ever certainly faced in the last decades around here.
Usually, I would end by saying I am confident. What I am confident in
is
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that there are people of goodwill in this body who have worked together
to get this done and who will continue to work together to make sure
the United States of America stands up for democracy, stands up for
NATO, stands up for our responsibilities to our children and
grandchildren and our responsibilities to this world.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority whip.
Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, before he leaves the floor, I want to
thank my colleague from Colorado. He has been steadfast in his support
of the Ukrainian effort, and it makes a difference. I think we all have
to speak out with what we are facing. We should have appropriated the
money long ago to stand behind the people of Ukraine. And the fact that
they are now in a moment of history where their fate may be decided
really underlines the importance of the statements of this Senator.
So while this bill we are going to be voting on this evening covers
so many areas, it still leaves a terrible gap, not only in our support
for Ukraine but also for the humanitarian assistance which was part of
our efforts.
When we read of the terrible humanitarian tragedy in Gaza and other
places, we realize the United States has to help provide water, food,
medicine, and basic supplies for them to survive, just as we need to
help the people of Ukraine fight this effort.
Let me just add, parenthetically, a point of personal pride: ``60
Minutes,'' in a show last week, highlighted Lithuania in the Baltics
and how this small country of 3 million people has become a haven for
political dissidents from Russia and other places. It is with some risk
that they would assume this responsibility, but they are part of a
commitment--this small nation--to democracy.
The United States needs to make that same commitment and put our
money where our values are. Your speech this evening highlighted that,
and I thank you for your leadership.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
Order of Business
Mr. SCHUMER. I ask unanimous consent that, at 6:15 p.m., the Senate
proceed to executive session to resume consideration of the Schydlower
nomination and vote on the confirmation of the nomination without
further intervening action or debate and with all the previous
provisions remaining in effect.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. SCHUMER. I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Ms. BALDWIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Ms. BALDWIN. Mr. President, over the last several days and weeks, I
have heard a lot of discussion from some of my colleagues here in the
Senate and in the House of Representatives about what they consider to
be inappropriate congressionally directed spending projects. The
majority of those projects appear to be objectionable simply because
the organization involved provides services to lesbian, gay, bisexual,
and transgender Americans.
First, let me say that all of the CDS projects identified in the
Labor-HHS-Education bill were in the Senate bill that was reported out
of the Appropriations Committee last summer by an overwhelming
bipartisan vote of 26 to 2.
Second, and more importantly, I am deeply concerned about why these
projects are being singled out. They are being singled out and
discriminated against because they serve a particular group of
Americans, a group of Americans whom every single one of us in this
Chamber represents. We all have gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender
constituents, and just like any other group of constituents, they are
deserving of getting healthcare, mental health care, affordable
housing, and a little help to lead a successful life.
However, the bullying campaign against organizations that help people
who are just living their true, authentic lives is just wrong. For
example, one project singled out provides services for LGBTQ seniors as
part of a housing project. The project is to help low-income seniors
age in place. The Labor-HHS-Education bill includes multiple CDS
projects that help our seniors get the care and housing they need as
they age, but this is the only one that has been on a list as being
somehow objectionable.
Another is a federally qualified community health center--basically,
one of our community health centers that provides services for
individuals struggling with substance use disorder. That organization
has noticed an increased need among members of the LGBTQ community and
noted in their CDS request that that is a population that they serve
and who needs service. For this, the CDS project was again, by some of
my colleagues, identified as somehow controversial.
In fact, several of the projects that have been identified as
problematic are to provide mental health services to people in the
LGBTQ community, including LGBTQ youth. LGBTQ kids are just like any
other kids. They have stressors in life. They face depression, anxiety,
and other challenges, and they need help navigating it. Some of this
criticism has been blatant misinformation, including one in my own home
State. An organization in Wisconsin has, for a long period of time,
helped kids who experience homelessness get help to get back on their
feet with employment help, mental health and counseling, with finding
housing, and more. I was proud to secure funding for a very specific
and narrow program of theirs that provides mental health support and
counseling for kids experiencing homelessness. This would be for all
kids. In fact, the organization does such great work that it has
received Federal funding for years, including under the Trump
administration, but since the organization has a program--which will
get exactly zero dollars of this Federal funding--to help LGBTQ kids,
it was ruthlessly attacked and smeared.
These attacks do not live in a vacuum, and they have real-world
consequences. When this body says to LGBTQ community members that they
are not worthy of our help, what kind of message do you think that
sends?
Also, considering that we agree that the country is facing a mental
health crisis, why would we be barring resources from helping a certain
group of people, particularly a group that is acutely feeling the
mental health crisis?
A recent survey of LGBTQ youth revealed that nearly half--nearly
half--of LGBTQ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in this
past year. Nearly one in four LGBTQ youth attempted suicide, and nearly
three in four reported persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness,
but almost 60 percent of LGBTQ youth who wanted mental health care in
the past year were not able to access it. These statistics are all
young people--someone's child, sibling, neighbor, student, or
classmate--and maybe one or more will occupy these seats, working
collaboratively with colleagues to serve their States and their
country.
I hope we can pause to consider that when we single out a group of
Americans, it has a real impact. Our work and our words here matter,
and I hope we can rise above the bullying and can, as we have for
months, work across the aisle to deliver for all of our constituents.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from West Virginia.
Mr. MANCHIN. Mr. President, I rise today in support of amendment No.
1725, which will be called up later. My amendment is with Senator Crapo
of Idaho, my dear friend. I want to speak a little bit about the EVs--
electric vehicles--and the tailpipe emissions rule that has been handed
down.
The administration's electric vehicle policy has been held completely
captive by the activist environmental groups and the radical advisers
in the White House. I can't put it any other way than that.
First, they tried to bribe Americans to buy EVs by giving them
$7,500, and now they are trying to mandate that we all must buy them
after 2032--because they won't be produced anymore. So they have
changed the rules. They basically tried to bribe them and still
couldn't move them as quickly as they wanted to. Then, on top of that,
they
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are saying that now we are going to pass a law to where you can't have
an option of buying another type of vehicle for transportation.
That is just not the American way. It is not the way we were raised.
It is not the way this country grew. Transportation is the foundation
of our economy. If you think about it, never in the history of our
country have we had to depend on other foreign supply chains--and
especially unreliable foreign supply chains--for our transportation:
our cars, our trains, our planes, and everything in between. We have
been able to do it right here, and now we have thrown everything onto
the backs of foreign supply chains because we don't have the critical
minerals. We don't basically manufacture, and we don't produce them. We
don't do anything with them, and we are trying to get up to speed.
The Inflation Reduction Act was and always will be an American energy
security and a manufacturing bill. When I negotiated and started
negotiating after the BBB was killed and then the war started in
Ukraine, there was one moving factor that urged me to do that
internally more than anything else. We couldn't help our allies--those
who fought and died with us who needed our help now--and Putin
weaponized energy. He weaponized his gas and his oil reserves that went
into Europe, and here we were not able to help them at all. I said we
had better do something. That is when we started negotiating and
working on some way that we could be energy independent.
I will tell the Presiding Officer that, for the first time in 40
years, the United States of America is producing more energy today than
ever in the history of this country. We are producing more energy than
any other country in the world, and we should be proud of that, but my
friends in the White House won't speak about it. All they want to tell
you about is the environmental bill. It is the greatest environmental
bill. We are producing more energy from wind and solar than ever
before. We are doing everything, and they can't accept an all-energy
policy, and it is unbelievable. We are replacing some of the dirtiest
fuels in the world because of what we are producing--cleaner than
anywhere else in the world. Venezuela--we let them back into the
market. They wanted more oil in the market. OK. They let Venezuela back
in. They produce oil with 80 percent more pollutants--more emissions--
than what we ever have.
So, anyway, the Inflation Reduction Act, like I have said before, was
an American energy security and domestic energy bill. That is it. Can
we have energy security, and can we basically have manufacturing coming
back that should have never left, but we allowed it to leave? Let's
bring it back so that we don't have to rely on unreliable foreign
partners, if you will, foreign entities.
The White House wanted money for EVs. I wanted domestic manufacturing
and a secure supply chain. We were at a standstill, and we couldn't
move any further. So we had to compromise, and the compromise was
pretty simple. The administration would only get money to incentivize
people to buy an EV if we were making and sourcing these ingredients
that we needed--the critical minerals--from America or a reliable
supply chain, and that supply chain was countries that we already had
free-trade agreements with.
Let me make sure you understand. Our main objective for this bill,
the IRA, was this: We will not be doing business with foreign countries
of concern, and those foreign countries were four, mainly: China,
Russia, Iran, and North Korea. There is no way we should be depending
on anything coming from them--that don't have our values--because they
will use it as a wedge.
But the administration has completely liberalized and, in fact,
broken the law that we agreed to and actually passed, and we have been
having this continuous back-and-forth. I cannot believe, dealing in
good faith, that we ended up with what we ended up with. We put strict
but achievable standards in the IRA to ensure that China and other
nations that don't share our values don't benefit off the backs of the
American taxpayers and that we don't willingly give Xi Jinping, the
President of China, a geopolitical weapon to use against us. I can
guarantee, when he watched Putin weaponize energy, he surely was going
to basically use the weaponization of all the critical minerals that we
are using and all the things that we depend on from China--that he
would have done the same thing with.
I remember waiting in long gas lines in 1974 to buy gasoline to go to
work. I can remember those days vividly. I couldn't believe that the
United States of America had gotten itself into that mess, but we did,
but we got ourselves out of it too. Do you think China is not going to
be using that to their advantage to bring us to our knees? Well, I am
not going to be waiting in line for a battery to come from China, sir.
Sorry.
But last year, the administration proposed cutting in half the IRA's
requirements. This is how desperate they are to, basically, disregard
the bill that we all agreed on in good faith and signed with the
purpose of bringing manufacturing back. But with their ambition to get
more EVs out the door quicker than ever before, they cut everything in
half.
This is exactly what is written in the bill. This is it. The language
is plain. By 2023, you should have 40 percent of the minerals that must
be extracted or processed in the United States or free trade agreement
countries or recycled in North America--40 percent.
Every year it went up so we would be more and more dependent on
America, building up and building, basically, our ability to
manufacture. This is exactly what they did.
Do you think it is a coincidence they cut everything in half from 40
percent? Now, this is what they admitted. This is what they are working
with. This is their--they call them their new rules they have coming
out, according to the Treasurer's proposed rules. I will get into why
they call them proposed rules too.
This is what we intended to be self-sufficient. This is exactly what
they intended to meet their political agenda to get these out the door
quicker, cut everything in half.
The IRA set deadlines. Like I said before, the deadlines were 2023,
2024, to completely remove the countries from the critical minerals and
battery manufacturing. We wrote language in the bill. If you read the
IRA bill, it is written in there that we cannot do business with China,
Russia, Iran, or North Korea. That was the whole purpose. If you are
going to go down this path, let's make sure we get something back for
the American taxpayers but also for American manufacturing.
But now the IRS is proposing ``temporary'' exemptions through at
least the end of 2026. When have you heard of temporary rules that
would go through--they are supposed to be, basically, done by December
31, 2024. They put in their rules 2026 or later--or later.
That is another 3 years of China and other foreign nations reaching
deeper into and controlling more of our electric vehicle battery supply
chains. The longer we allow this to happen, the longer we allow this to
happen by, basically, pushing our American energy and technologies
quicker, then basically all we are doing is supporting China and the
grip they have on us.
Worse yet, the IRS under this administration seems to have adopted a
new legal strategy to avoid any accountability from the courts or
Congress. Now, this is the real innovative, creative way they are
thinking.
By you issuing ``proposed rules'' like this and never finalizing
them, the IRS can break the law--legally break the law--implement it in
any way they wish it was passed. I have said this from day one: You are
implementing a piece of legislation you never passed. I tell the White
House that every day: You didn't pass this. The law we passed tells you
exactly what to do. You are trying to implement something that you
would like to do, but you never did.
And they do it with proposed rules because they think that basically
protects them from any litigation.
That is a breach of everything that we agreed, a breach of everything
that we agreed to in good faith and not the way the government in this
great country of ours should ever, ever operate.
Let me be clear, there is no question that the IRA will be one of the
most transformative bills in the way it was written. It is an all-of-
the-above. It was an all-purpose bill. It was a balance between the
energy that we need today,
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the fossil fuels, that we are going to do them cleaner, and the
technology of the energy we want in the future. That is exactly what
the bill was supposed to do. It was supposed to bring back
manufacturing that we let go, basically, with the NAFTA agreement--
North American Free Trade Agreement--way back when, in the 1980s and
1990s, and then now with what we are dealing with, with bringing China
and the WTO in the late 1990s, early 2000s. We have allowed things to
leave our country. We should have never allowed the manufacturing base
to ever leave.
Let's be clear, there is no question that the IRA will go down as one
of the most transformational bills that we have ever passed. It is
bringing opportunity. It surely is. It is bringing opportunity in areas
that got left behind.
Electric vehicle and battery makers announced $52 billion in
investments in North American supply chains before the IRS even started
loosening the rules. They want to come back to America. They want to
build. But as long as you basically allow the foreign entities of
concern--the Chinas of the world--to continue to flood the market with
cheaper prices, our people will never be able to have a foothold as far
as manufacturing in the United States. That is the problem.
We knew it would take a couple of years for us to get up to speed,
but we will never get up to speed as long as they can still buy cheaper
products somewhere else.
Numbers like this show that breaking the law doesn't get us more
investment; it just makes the costs go up for every American taxpayer
and sends our tax dollars overseas. We are trying to bring that
manufacturing back and keep those dollars here, not in China or Russia.
But even bribing Americans with a liberalized, unlawful $7,500 wasn't
good enough for the administration because it doesn't meet their
political timetable to eliminate gas-powered vehicles. If they had a
good enough product--a product in America--the market usually will
react. The market will reject or accept. They won't do it on your
timetable. But when you have the government behind you, pushing you in
a way to force the options you may have, that is not how we built the
country that we have. It is not how we built this capitalist mentality
or this entrepreneurship. It is just not who we are.
The EPA piled on by proposing these new tailpipe rules that force
automakers to limit consumer choice and force Americans to buy EVs full
of Chinese parts. That is exactly what is happening now.
The EPA wants more than two-thirds of the new cars to be electric by
2032, when there is only 8 percent of them that are electric today.
They can't meet that goal unless it is buying overseas, which is what
we tried to stop. Their intention is to continue to flood the market
any way they possibly can for their own political agenda by their
extreme environmental climates at the destruction, basically, of our
own jobs, our own economy.
The only way it would be possible to get anywhere close, like I said
before, is to do business with other foreign countries, because China
has a lock on most of all the markets--anodes, cathodes, 80 percent of
that; basically, rare-earth minerals, about 60 to 80 percent of that.
They have been doing this for quite a while. We want to get back up to
speed, but we can't do it by continuing to support them.
Xi Jinping is already showing that he will use critical minerals as
leverage to put Americans and the free world at risk by directing the
Chinese Government to implement new restrictions on exports of several
critical minerals. Now he really starts putting the choke on us. He
sees that we have legislation that is going to force us to buy a
product that he has control over.
Can you imagine us getting ourselves into a jam where we are going to
be dependent upon China for their critical minerals and the battery
components that we need to run the vehicles that we decide to change
our transportation mode to before we are ready to do it ourselves? I
would expect that from Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party, but
I can't believe that we would be dumb enough to play into their hands.
It is unbelievable. There is nobody who you can talk to in the industry
who doesn't understand exactly what I am saying.
I never could have expected our own government to give up so easily
and continue to let foreign--foreign--nations control our Nation's
transportation. You know, I even said this to--they told me about all
the charging stations that we have to spend billions and billions of
dollars on, the Federal Government, the Federal taxpayers. I do not
remember when Henry Ford, basically, was able to have the production of
the Model T and bring it into mass production where the average person
could buy it, that we said: Oh, oh, we have to go out and start
building filling stations. I don't think the Federal Government built
filling stations to meet the demands of the market. The market did it,
and the market will do it again.
They say: Oh, no, we can't do that. We can't take a chance on the
market, so let's go ahead and just commit billions and billions of
dollars of taxpayers' money to do what the market has always done for
America.
I will do everything in my power to hold this administration
accountable to the deal we made--and intended to deal; everybody knew
about it--to protect America's taxpayers and to secure our energy
supply chains.
If we are going to do it, let's do it and benefit from it. Let's
build America back. Let's do what we do best. Let's innovate and
create. Let's believe in the market and allow the market, basically, to
force us to work as it has always worked for America.
I urge my colleagues to support this amendment that is coming up
because I can tell you one thing: We have got to send a signal that
this country is able to take care of itself; we are able to compete for
ourself; and we should not depend on unreliable foreign supply chains
for the most critical building blocks of our country.
Transportation basically keeps the lights on. It keeps food on your
table. It does everything necessary for us to live a quality of life in
this country. To allow and give it up because we are not in control of
our transportation mode is absolutely criminal.
With that, I would say I hope all of my colleagues will look at this
amendment very seriously and see how important it is for us to maintain
this tremendous independence this country has always had.
With that, I yield the floor.
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