Roy Blunt

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I won't be able to work with you and others on this in the next Congress. I am coming to the end of my 26 years here. In a couple more weeks, I will move on to whatever is the next chapter, and I am excited about that. But I am frustrated that we haven't been able to do a better job with this issue. First of all, let me say I heard maybe not all hundred-and-thirty- some of those speeches that Senator Durbin has given, but I have heard a lot of them. Like him, I fully am supportive of the kids who grew up here being able to stay here. We should want them to stay here. We should eagerly be looking for ways to be sure they stay here. One demographics matter, a younger society is a more healthy society in lots of ways, but also just the fairness of--asking somebody not to live where they grew up or even, more importantly, asking them to go back and try to live somewhere where they never lived before is a critical thing that we should easily be able to get beyond. I actually thought the plan that Senator Sinema and Senator Tillis had put together had a lot of appeal because it didn't try to do everything; it tried to do just enough things that were doable and get them done together. I have always thought, in 20-plus years of looking at this same challenge, that the comprehensive solution is unlikely to be the best solution we could achieve. I was the whip in the House when I was in the House. It takes 218 people to get something done in the House. And when you look at the challenges before us, how do you secure the border? What are the legitimate workforce needs of the country? What do you do about people who came or stayed outside the law? What do you do about people seeking asylum? The same 218 House Members that may be the best 218 House Members or the same 60 Senators that may be the best 60 Senators to deal with the issue of ``how do you secure the border'' probably aren't the best 60 Senators to figure out what we do about the legitimate workforce needs of the country. And neither of them may be the best 60 Senators to figure out what we do about people who came or stayed without documents. It is about half and half, I think. Or none of them may be the best 60 Senators to figure out what is the very best way we can wrap our arms around people who grew up here and let them know for sure that we need them here, we want them here, and find that quick solution. I, frankly, think the Dreamer problem is and should be the easiest problem of all of these problems to solve, because the alternative to solving that problem makes so little sense. It makes so little sense in a personal way. It makes so little sense in an economic way. It makes so little sense for our communities. Whether they are sitting here in caps or gowns or everyday doing hard things in America in adding to their educational capacity, again, we should want that to happen. The asylum system, clearly, is broken. It just can't work that you can walk up to the border in the United States of America and say: I come seeking asylum; I come with fear for my life, or whatever. Living in a poor, dangerous country is not the criteria for asylum. In fact, that is why when people do go to the court to have their case heard, about 1 out of 10 times do they qualify. Now, if somebody has told them before they got here that they would qualify or that the system just works in a way that, if you get here and get into the country, we are so far behind that you get to stay and who knows what might happen that allows you to stay longer than you think you might be able to stay. The border--securing the border--is definitely a definition of one of the responsibilities of the country. If you can't secure your own border--no matter what country you are talking about--you really don't meet one of the entry-level definitions of a country. It is just incredibly basic, and we are not doing that. Frankly, under the last administration, I think we were doing a lot of things right when it came to securing the border: a barrier where you needed a barrier, other things where you needed other things to monitor what was happening, being sure that people understood the likelihood that they would be able to make an asylum claim in court. All those things mattered and did matter--trying to be sure that people had the information they needed, and even a third safe country. If your goal is to try to get to a safe country, that should be your goal. If your goal is trying to get to a country with a better economic opportunity, probably, it should be trying to come to the United States of America. But as Senator Durbin said--and, I suspect, every Senator, when asked about this will say--everybody can't come here who lives in a country that is less safe or less economically successful than ours. It just can't happen. It is not possible. We can't have a border that allows everybody who has that desire and can get to the border to permanently be in the country. But I thought the bill that I was very interested in, that we just ran out of time to get to, that looked at the asylum system, that was gaining strong support from the border guards and immigration officials who came to see me and others and said: Here is what we need; here is where the bill is perfect; here is where it could be made a little bit better, and if this happens, we are going to be unanimously for it--I thought that was the good approach. It didn't try to do everything, but it tried to do enough things that people could feel like we were making progress, building around what should be the easiest thing--the Dreamers--moving on to get border patrol and others who work with people at the border back into their real job, rather than the job of detaining people who really aren't here for the reason they say they are here, who know or will soon find out that they won't have an asylum claim. That is just not working. It is not working that, no matter what anybody says, the border is clearly not under control. It is hard to solve these other problems with a border that is not under control, but I thought the idea that we would move toward that control and have some sign-offs before we move further was really one of the good things in the bill that I was looking forward to seeing presented and debated. It is time we had bills debated on the floor. It is time we shared more information and more thoughts. It is time we found the right number of Senators to solve these problems in the best way, rather than, frankly, not being able to find 60 Senators that have ever been able to come up with a comprehensive solution that will also pass the Congress. I hope we can continue to pursue the right thing for our country, the right thing for Dreamers, the right thing for our economy and the workforce, the right thing for people who meet the skill needs of our economy, to come here and find jobs that are at the level of jobs that they are prepared for. We need to move forward. Thanks to Senator Sinema and Senator Tillis for their efforts in this. I look forward to watching as, hopefully, we continue to move more dramatically toward the right goal for America and the right goal for people who want to be Americans.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, in calculating, it may be possible that I have served on the Intel Committee longer than anybody besides Richard Burr currently on the committee, with some time in the House--but not all of the time in the House--and in the Senate. It is truly amazing the depth of understanding he has of programs, of capacity, of the places we are all over the world. I think he and Senator Warner have done a great job of maintaining that committee as a bipartisan committee, working together, understanding that most of what we do and that most of what we talk about is only seen by us and the staff of that committee. It is an important responsibility to ask questions and hear answers that others Members can't. Richard's leadership has been incredible. I want to spend a few minutes talking about the other portfolio he has that I am also involved in as the appropriating chairman on the Health and Education and Labor Committee. In so many ways, particularly after COVID, Richard, we became the team--the authorizing and the appropriating--so we could make this all work together. Efforts are extraordinary as well. We heard the long list of things he did to create an understanding of what we needed to do--the whole idea of rapid response, of BARDA, of having a stockpile. All of this is--not only is so much of it Richard's idea, but also Richard has kept the idea alive. I will just tell you this is from absolute personal and occasional knowledge in the press--they are wondering: Now, why are you still spending that money on the stockpile? We didn't use it last year, and we didn't use it the year before. Why do you think we need to have things in that stockpile that are usable and have efficacy now? Richard has been there. Often, the only people advocating for the stockpile, advocating for being ready for things we hope don't happen, are the manufacturers who are willing to manufacture this and Richard Burr and others--that very small group of people who say: We have got to be ready. Now we are talking about, with Richard's leadership again, being ready in other ways, where we are ready to manufacture and have a rapid response like we did with COVID, where we now, maybe, have the capacity to figure out very quickly what we need and produce that, but you have to have the kind of relationship to have that rapid production. You know, when something like this happens, everybody is willing to do everything, and, frankly, everybody is willing to spend everything, but that is likely too late. You have to be willing to plan everything and be prepared to execute a plan rather than ``Now we have a problem; let's do whatever it takes.'' Richard Burr has been there in thinking about how we plan, how we prepare, what kind of relationships we need to have. On top of that, the biomedical research and the new interest in synthetic biology--so much of that leaves this building and this floor when Richard leaves. I think there are so many ways he can be and will be available to the country and will be a service to the country, but showing up every day, in every Congress, in every session, and to every meeting with the knowledge he has brought to those issues is incredibly important. We see the possibility of health used in a warlike way. We see the interest and the need to look into this to see what has happened or what could happen. Let me just say that, from the Health, Education, and Labor job that I have had, I have been able to see, maybe like nobody else has, the Health, Education, and Labor commitment and understanding he has. I am grateful for that. I am grateful for his friendship. I look forward to things he and I could continue to find to do together, but I am grateful for the fact that he has been here when he was so needed and stepped up in such a significant way. Our good friend Lamar Alexander on that committee, in the height of COVID, also very close to both of us, was very dedicated to this work. When Lamar left, I said one of the things I am most grateful for is that I got to serve in the Senate that included Lamar Alexander. I am also grateful that I got to serve in the Senate that included Richard Burr.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, a moment ago when I saw Senator Shelby and Senator Leahy shake hands warmly in the middle of the aisle, I thought of it as a century of service in the Congress. It is a century of learning lessons that fortunately they have both been able to share with us. I mentioned in my farewell remarks the other day Senator Shelby and Senator Leahy and how, working with both of them on the Appropriations Committee and the Rules Committee, I learned so much from them. But I was reminded today--I have heard a number of these speeches in the time I have been in the Senate, and I don't think anybody ever has reminded us quite so well of the oath we take--the oath we take to the Constitution, the oath we take to do this job as well as we can, and the promise we make, frankly, to find a solution. It is a lot easier in Washington these days and in the Senate it is a lot easier to find a fight than it is to find a solution. We have kind of fallen into a place where so many people now run for office talking about what they will never do. Frankly, when you start talking about what you will never do, that usually takes us out of the conversation of what can be done, and if anybody here has been a determined participant in finding what could be done, it is Senator Shelby. That certainly does not mean that he gives in easily. Many times I have been asked by other Members or the press: What do you think Senator Shelby is thinking about this final deal? I would say: I don't know what he is thinking, but I know he is thinking, and I know we are not going to find out what he is thinking until he is ready to tell us what he is thinking. But he is trying to figure out a way to come to a conclusion that can actually solve the problem. And in the appropriating process, that problem is usually keeping the government in business. The other thing I have noticed especially about Senator Shelby is how often he is willing to share things that he hears from his family. His older sister used to--I would hear from him: Well, I got advice from my older sister. And I must think--I am wondering, Well, how old is your oldest sister? So I would usually ask him and be reminded of that. But I benefit from the advice too. Just like his sister was calling him and saying whatever it was they were talking about that day, he was always talking about his sons and always talking about Mrs. Shelby. You know, I have such great respect for her. He said to me: You know, you are married to a strong woman too. I said: Yes, I am. He said: We better not forget it. And he hasn't forgotten it, nor has he forgotten to appreciate her and brag on her and understand what an important part of his life and his career she has been. I hope I have learned something from that as well. Team Shelby is pretty good. You know, Richard has surrounded himself with people who have stayed in his working orbit. They may go from one committee to another or maybe they stay right where they are, being sure they keep him on time. Maybe they find out that if you are going to travel, you are going to travel in a way that absolutely reaches the diplomatic conclusion and the helpful conclusion for the country and Alabama it was designed to make. So I have always been a big respecter of Team Shelby as well. I was particularly impressed to watch Team Shelby--whether they knew it or not, they just produced their own Senator. I think Katie Britt is going to be a great Member of the Senate. One of the reasons is she was such an important part of Senator Shelby's efforts here. He listened to her, she listened to him, and when it came time to step up, I don't think any Member in the Senate who I am aware of has ever made a greater commitment to try to be sure that they were replaced by somebody who would do the best possible job of following their legacy for the State. It has been wonderful for me to get to be on the Appropriations Committee and the Rules Committee and work with Senator Shelby but also all the many times we have had just to talk about what is going on that day, what was going on with his family, what was happening with his staff. I am glad to be here today and share with him how much I benefited from the great friendship we have had but more importantly the great example and to be reminded again of our oath to the Constitution and the importance of being a problem-solver rather than being the person who always wants to talk about the problem. Richard always wants to solve the problem, and the country is better for that, and so is the Senate. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, you know, it is often said here that everything has been said, but not everybody has said it yet. (Laughter.) This is actually a case where everything won't be said today and can't be said. The remarkable legislative accomplishments that Rob has made are truly that--they are just remarkable. When we were serving early in the House together, there was this big retirement bill. I thought, for a while, of Senator Portman that then- Congressman Cardin's first name was ``Portman'' because it was all about the Portman-Cardin Act, the Portman-Cardin ``this and that.'' (Laughter.) I had a little piece we were able to put in that was called the SIMPLE Plan. Maybe that is because the only thing I understood was the SIMPLE Plan. It was a helpful plan, but we probably wouldn't have gotten it done if Rob hadn't been constantly making the legislative things happen that he makes happen. As I have said in my remarks, I have never served on a committee with Rob Portman, in the House or in the Senate, in our more than 20 years of working together, but I have probably spent more time with him in meetings, as we have tried to figure out how to move forward, than I have with almost anybody else, whether they had been the House leadership meetings or have been the Senate leadership meetings. I knew so much about Rob that not only did Abby I and really know and appreciate the friendship with him and Jane--and I knew their kids--but there was a while when I knew the names of both of their dogs. That shows that you spend a lot of time with somebody if you know the names of both of their dogs. I did that with Rob. He has done so well here. I was the whip in the House when Rob was the U.S. Trade Ambassador, and those trade bills are always hard to get done no matter how easy it seems. There was the Central American trade deal that we took to the floor, and like with so many was the case, we just decided: OK. Now is the time to go. I think we are going to get this done today. The work is good. Now we have just got to get the Members willing to go home and admit that they did this. Trade agreements are good for the country, but often Members don't want to talk about them when they get home because you can always find, somewhere, somebody in your State who might think you could have done a better job in negotiating part of this. Then there is another thing, I think, that Rob and I had in common and understood. I just heard today, on NewsRadio, while I was driving in this morning, their talking about the new, highly competitive States. They mentioned, for decades, Missouri and Ohio were always considered to be the two bellwether States. Those were the two States. I think, in our State, for 100 years, we voted for the Presidential winner every time but one. Ohio had about that same record. We have also seen a political transition in our States--where they have gone from highly competitive, where you are really out there in so many ways on your own when running for office, to where the parties have changed in ways that we may appreciate more than a lot of other people here would. I had not thought about the support group. I am not sure--I hope I don't need that--but I sure do need and hope to have the additional time to continue our great friendship and times to talk. As several people have said, you always listen when Rob talks because he knows what he is talking about. That is a relatively rare currency anywhere-- even in the U.S. Senate. I hope we are going to spend enough time together that we won't miss each other, but, certainly, I will miss the times we have had to work together on both sides of the building. It was sometimes when you were with the administration and I was here, but congratulations on what you have done for America and what you have done for your family and the future of the country. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I rise today to recognize my good friend, Mark Gordon, who will be retiring from his position as the president of the Missouri Broadcasters Association next year after almost a decade of distinguished service. Mark has been a broadcaster for over 40 years. He started his career as a copywriter and an announcer before moving on to being a newscaster and then switching to the advertising sales side of the business. Before agreeing to helm the MBA, Mark spent 10 years running television stations in Springfield, MS, my home town, which is where we first met each other. Mark moved to Springfield to work for KY3 in 1997, shortly after I came to Congress. In a lot of ways, our professional careers have been intertwined ever since. He has been a tireless advocate for local Missouri communities and Missouri broadcast stations and has been a trusted voice on their behalf for as long as I have known him. Whether we were working together on spectrum issues, satellite television reauthorizations, or public service campaigns, Mark has always been a person I could rely on. And between seeing him back home in Missouri at one of his members' stations or on one of his numerous visits here to Washington, DC, I have always appreciated his advice and how he always worked on behalf of the communities we both serve. I remember the meeting in my office almost 10 years ago where Mark and his predecessor, Don Hicks, let me know that Mark would be taking over the reins of the MBA. Don Hicks had served as the head of the Missouri Broadcasters for decades and left large shoes to fill. I can honestly say that Mark not only filled those shoes but also has left his own legacy on our home State and a high bar for whoever succeeds him. Mark's proud legacy also lives on through his son Mike, who has made significant contributions in his own right to Springfield's broadcasting industry. I wish Mark, his wife Lucy, their children Jaime and Mike, and their entire family nothing but success in this next chapter of his life. Forty years is a long time, and he has seen, and been part of, so much change in his industry. I am proud to have been able to call him my friend for the last 25 years, and I know that whatever he decides to do next he will continue to be a tremendous asset to his community and our State.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to thank my good friend Senator McConnell for his comments this morning, and I have reserved some time this afternoon for what would be my official farewell address in the Senate. But as it relates to our leader, Mr. McConnell, he and I were whips-- when I was a whip in the House, he was a whip in the Senate. We met every week. We have had a long and close relationship. I am grateful for his advice, his friendship, and his comments today. Thank you.

Mr. BLUNT

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

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Jeremy Pinson, a military fellow from my office, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of the Congress.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, when I gave my first speech on the Senate floor 12 years ago or when I cast my first vote in the House 26 years ago, I had really no way to anticipate the challenges and opportunities that were ahead of us. I come to the floor today grateful for my colleagues on both sides of the aisle and on both sides of the Capitol. When we agree and when we don't, we are bound by the Constitution to seek a more perfect Union. Of course, I am most grateful to Missourians, who have given me the chance to work with them as a county official, as the Missouri Secretary of State, and in both the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate. Missouri is where the country comes together--the North meets the South, the East meets the West. No State has more States at its borders than us and only one with as many States as we have. We have been the population center of America for the last five decades in kind of moving down Interstate 44 as the population has moved west and south. We sit in the middle of the biggest piece of contiguous agricultural farmland in the world, and it is the only one that has its own built-in transportation system--the Mississippi River Valley. St. Louis is sometimes described as the westernmost eastern city, and Kansas City, really, may be more like Denver and Omaha than it is St. Louis. Springfield, where I live, kind of looks to the west and the south to Tulsa and to Fayetteville. The bootheel of our State is the Delta South in every way--the economy, the topography. What happens there is reflective of other places more than it is the rest of our State. I was in northern Missouri quite a bit this summer, and while in northern Missouri--those two counties that border Iowa--one of the people with me one day when I was the secretary of state said: When we are up here, I always feel like we are on top of the world. I never go to northern Missouri now unless I feel like I am on top of the world. Of course, every Senator thinks their State is unique, and it is. A couple of years ago, I spent a few minutes each day trying to figure out and, for about a period of 6 months, wondering how the other 99 Members got here. With a couple of exceptions, I was able to figure it out. (Laughter.) I have some question in my mind about a couple of our friends, but as I looked at it, I figured out somebody has unique people skills, and other people have extraordinary political skills. Maybe it is the ability to quickly understand complicated things or the ability to explain complicated things so that other people can understand them. Most of the time, however, we just have an incredible amount of wasted talent. If you could take the collective talent of the 100 U.S. Senators and make the most of it, there is absolutely no telling what might happen. Now, part of that is because the Senate isn't expected to work efficiently. We don't have many rules, and what does get done usually gets done by either unanimous consent or total exhaustion. Those are our two stopping points. Our Federal Government was designed by people who didn't trust government and didn't want too much of it. They made it hard to get things done. They opted for inefficiency, and that inefficiency is really mind-boggling to people who are more familiar with the parliamentary system, where, if it doesn't get done and it isn't efficient, it fails. We certainly aren't built that way. We have clearly found new levels of inefficiency in the past decade-- one big bill at the end of the year to fund the government plus whatever the four leaders of the House and Senate can agree to add to it. Once again, we are at that year-ending process to cobble together some kind of result. Now, the only thing worse than the way we do it would be not doing it. The only thing worse than the way we do it is just to decide not to get our work done and see what happens. So we are, once again, down to the next 4 weeks to get our work done or, even better, the next 3 weeks. It wouldn't be bad if we got it done in the next 2 weeks, but we are following the pattern here, in my view, we have followed for too long. You know, I have seen the standard process of regular order work. In my first decade in the Congress, it never worked perfectly, but it came pretty close to the standard that had been set for two centuries. There is good reason for how a bill becomes a law whether you first saw it on a filmstrip, like I probably did, or on ``Schoolhouse Rock!'' like my kids did. You know how it is supposed to work: Members of a committee and staff who know the most about an issue hold hearings; they mark up a bill; the bill is to be debated and amended on the floor of both the House and the Senate before it goes to the President to be signed or vetoed. For 225 years, the topics of what to fund and how to pay for it have dominated the congressional debate, and we, frankly, need to get back to that, where people see what is going on and Members feel bought in to what is going on. But then and now, during that whole time, whether regular order was working or not, the rules of the Senate really required finding someone on the other side to work with. There have never been more than 56 popularly elected Republican Senators and only a handful of times have there been 60 or more Democrats. Finding someone on the other side to work with produces the most lasting results. A couple of Congresses ago, there were 52 on my side and 48 on the other side. My staff decided it would be interesting--they came to me one day and said: We just thought it would be interesting to check and see how many of the 48 Democrats you figured out how to be the principal sponsor of a bill with. The answer was 44. I thought that was a pretty good number. My point then and now is you don't have to agree on everything to work together; you just have to agree on one thing. And if you find that one thing you agree on and, frankly, particularly if you are successful, both the Members working together and their staffs think: Well, gee, we could do that again. In healthcare research, Senator Murray and I, along with Chairman Cole on the House side and, eventually, the ranking member, then- Chairman DeLauro, worked together to significantly change NIH research. Senator Klobuchar and I have done lots of things together. We have worked on the travel economy, which is a big part of our economy. We have worked to rewrite the workplace harassment standards for the Senate. We have worked on adoption issues. Senator Brown and I passed a bill of advanced manufacturing. We had known each other for years. Once we figured out we could pass one bill together, we passed five. It has the good effect. Senator Stabenow and I have worked so hard on Certified Community Behavioral Health Centers. We have worked on this for well over a decade now, and we have made, I think, incredible progress. Neither of us would have gotten that done by ourselves. Senators Capito and Shaheen and Portman and Manchin all worked with me and our committee on opioid and dependency issues. We were making real progress. I think the pandemic set that progress back, but it shouldn't stop us from moving forward. Senator Coons founded with me the Law Enforcement Caucus. We worked, every time it came up, to expand it and the Victims of Child Abuse Act and the volunteer community efforts. There are other retiring Members I want to mention whom I have worked with as well: Senator Leahy and Senator Shelby, both on the Appropriations Committee and the Rules Committee. You know, on the Appropriations Committee, I got to see the last of Senator Inouye and Senator Cochran still at their best and Barbara Mikulski--people who didn't have to have a perfect result to have a result--and it was wonderful to get to watch them work. Senator Inhofe was, obviously, totally focused on what it takes to defend the country. He was here for his remarks, his farewell speech, the other day and pointed out that he found somebody he didn't agree with on hardly anything--Barbara Boxer--and they came up with public works bill after public works bill. Senator Burr, who is leaving, has been my chairman on the Intelligence Committee and has been so capable and so knowledgeable on that committee. He has been really, incredibly, helpful to me. Senator Portman and I have been at the leadership table in both the House and the Senate. I have been in more meetings with Rob Portman than I have ever been with anybody I have ever served on a committee with, and it has been great. Pat Toomey, of course, brings incredible understanding of finance issues and the economy. My longest relationships, of course, are with my House colleagues. Senator Thune, Senator Moran, and I all came to the House at the same time along with Senator Stabenow. Senator Moran and Senator Boozman and I all came to the Senate together from the House. Senator Cardin, Senator Graham, Senator Cassidy, Senator Blackburn, Senator Brown, Senator Wicker, and others have been part of my work life for a long, long time. Together, we have faced big challenges. You know, after 9/11, we saw a new terrorist threat. I was in the middle of that discussion of the continuity of government when I had the sudden realization that our government could dramatically change, and we had not thought about what might happen if it did change. Dick Gephardt--my fellow Missourian and who was the Democratic leader at the time--and I came up with this structure for post-9/11 compensation for victims, which worked. Unfortunately, it has worked following now with a number of tragedies, but it was something I was able to be there for as we put it together. You know, at that time, President Bush said: [W]e bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies. Four Presidents have now followed that standard. For me, the legislative highlights would, of course, include what happens at the NIH, where I have been able to be part of increasing by 50 percent, over 8 years, with Senator Murray and others, the commitment we made to healthcare research. I mentioned Senator Stabenow earlier, but as for the mental health efforts, the changing that I think we have all seen here in just the last few years in how we talk about that issue and how we understand we need to respond to that issue is something I am particularly proud of. Now, maybe a bill with Senator Heinrich, the Recovering America's Wildlife Act, which every conservation group in America is supportive of--maybe we can add that to the list of things I am going to consider a great accomplishment before we leave here, and it has to go in that big bill I talked about earlier that we put together here at the end. I have had an incredible opportunity to be responsible for two inaugurations. It is one of the most important things we do. That particular event, not me being responsible for it, 100 million people watched live. Tens of millions of people around the world watched all or part of it after that. It is so important we get it right. In 2017, I decided our theme would be the peaceful transition of power. I remember at both inaugurations I quoted--the only thing I repeated, I think, at those two inaugurations was President Reagan who said in 1981: What we do here today is commonplace and miraculous-- commonplace because we have done it every 4 years since 1789, miraculous because we have done it every 4 years since 1789. In 2021, I said, well, this time, let's talk about our need to have a more perfect Union. The Founders didn't promise a perfect Union. They were, in that place, pretty reasonable in their anticipation of what we could do and what we could be, but they did promise a more perfect Union. And that is the effort we continue to be a part of. To get all of that done, so many other people have to make it possible. All of us appreciate every one of our families. I think we all appreciate each other's families because, better than anybody else, we know what families mean and how important it is that your family is part of this. My mom and dad were dairy farmers. They never suggested there were any limits to what a person could do in America. There was no sense that you couldn't do everything you wanted to do. I am most grateful to Abby, my wife. I wouldn't be in the Senate and wouldn't have stayed as long in the House as I did if Abby hadn't been willing to work so much, so hard to make it easier for me to do what I love to do. We are full partners, and I am grateful for that. All of my children and even their children, we are too often being asked to defend what I did or what I believed or, more often, what people assumed I believed that they got to be a part of history too. Charlie Blunt was flying on Air Force One with President Bush on his second birthday. Who gets to do that? I will admit, though, however, no one in my family ever said, I wish you would quit. But when I did announce, did decide I was going to leave 2 years ago, I notice that no one said ``Are you sure?'' except Abby, who did say ``Are you sure?'' I have often said if you can only have one skill, that one skill should be hiring. And what a great staff that skill and good luck have produced for me. My incredible chief of staff, Stacy McBride, has been responsible for so much of what we have gotten done. My deputy chief for the State, Derek Coats, led a great team that did so much for our State and in helping people deal with the Federal Government. My deputy chief of staff here, Richard Eddings, is, along with me, completing 26 years in the Congress and 26 years of working together. He managed the details for the whip's office in the House and the details for our office in the Senate. The Rules Committee staff takes responsibility to help manage the daily infrastructure of the Senate. No issue is too small or too big. Everything from security decisions for the Presidential inauguration to a recent call to ask whether we could release someone's pet owl in the Russell courtyard so that the owl would have a home and we would all appreciate it. Senator Klobuchar and I quickly decided it probably wouldn't be good for the Russell courtyard or the owl, so that owl was not released. The Republican Policy Committee staff deals with every vote on the floor, every nomination, every issue. There is a paper out there explaining all of those things, every bill that has been filed, every amendment, even to the dreaded vote-arama that staff was getting an amendment ready so voters know what they see. Let me end this farewell with two things: One is another thank-you to Missouri voters. In my view, the need to find a solution to a problem really took place and took shape in the Greene County courthouse. I have been in all 115 of our counties since I announced I wasn't going to run again. There have been some question in my house as to the judgment of that schedule, but we are through that now, so it is done. In a lot of those courthouses, I was visiting with county officials and said: In my view, there is nowhere in America you are more likely to get a solution to a governmental problem than a county courthouse filled with local elected officials who want to do everything they can possibly do for you to feel like you left with everything done that could possibly be done. And then, going to be the first Republican secretary of state elected in Missouri in 52 years when I won that office in 1984, I never thought my leading argument was: Why don't you vote for the first Republican ever. I thought it was: If you vote for me, I will do this job, and you will be pleased that you did give me a chance to do it. So I am grateful to them and grateful for the experience. There is a story that Senator Klobuchar has told more often than I have. When I became the chief deputy whip, on my way to becoming the whip of the House, the first month of my second term in the Congress, I moved from the Cannon Building to the Capitol Building. And I looked on the top of the bookcase in my office, my new office in the Congress, and there was this bust of a person up there. And I said to my staff: Let's find out who that is. So they come back a couple of weeks later, and they have got these newspaper articles from the 1930s and 1960s, and they say: Well, nobody knows who that is. It is obvious when you get that bust down and look at it that it is a cleric. So it was the unknown cleric, and it has been with me ever since in one of my offices here. The point of the unknown cleric, this is a bust that was put in the Capitol probably no earlier than 1830, and by 1930, nobody had any idea who it was. I had lots of meetings with new freshman members in the House when I was a whip and a number of meetings with people who just happened to be around and would listen to this. I said: The point of this is somebody is famous enough that they made a bust, put it in the Capitol, and then forgot who they are. The point is: What we do here is more important than who we are. Thanks for letting me do part of it with you. I yield the floor. (Applause.)

Mr. BLUNT

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

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Wyoming (Mr. Barrasso), the Senator from Tennessee (Mrs. Blackburn), the Senator from Indiana (Mr. Braun), the Senator from North Carolina (Mr. Burr), the Senator from Louisiana (Mr. Cassidy), the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Graham), the Senator from Tennessee (Mr. Hagerty), the Senator from Mississippi (Mrs. Hyde- Smith), the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Inhofe), the Senator from Wisconsin (Mr. Johnson), the Senator from Wyoming (Ms. Lummis), the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Marshall), the Senator from Alaska (Ms. Murkowski), the Senator from Kentucky (Mr. Paul), the Senator from Ohio (Mr. Portman), the Senator from Florida (Mr. Rubio), the Senator from Nebraska (Mr. Sasse), the Senator from Florida (Mr. Scott), the Senator from Alaska (Mr. Sullivan), the Senator from South Dakota (Mr. Thune), and the Senator from Indiana (Mr. Young). Further, if present and voting, the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Marshall) would have voted ``nay'' and the Senator from Indiana (Mr. Young) would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to join my colleagues in my appreciation for the expansion of NATO--as others have said, the greatest alliance, maybe in history, certainly in the last 200 years, an alliance that has served great benefits and now is growing. NATO has been there since 1949. The two countries that we are going to be voting to admit today have resisted since 1949 being part of NATO, but with the recent actions, they decided you now have to choose a side. Now, they are not countries that have been on the sideline just hoping nothing would happen. They are countries that had significant defense capacities, significant military capabilities. They will be net security contributors to NATO. They bring to the alliance these advanced capabilities. They bring a neighborhood understanding of Russia, greater than maybe almost any other country, particularly Finland, which has been mentioned has an 800-plus mile border that will double the NATO border with Russia. They have been defending that border since World War II, and the Russians understand their capacity to defend it. They, frankly, bring good real estate and good location. I wish I had a map here on the floor with me, but I don't. The Baltic really becomes a NATO sea. And that is an important thing--Norway already in NATO, Sweden joining NATO, Finland joining NATO; right across from the three Baltic countries that are much more in need of assistance than these two countries that are joining an alliance that will give them that assistance. It is an incredible day for NATO. The Baltic Sea, the Arctic--I have heard more on this floor and in this country about the Arctic in the last 5 years than I think we have talked about in the previous 25 years. The Arctic basically becomes NATO territory with the sole exception of Russia. The United States, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland become the countries that are bound not only in the neighborhood of the Arctic but also in a supportive alliance. We have been hearing about how China wants to become an Arctic power. I think the change in NATO makes it incredibly harder for China to become an Arctic power or for Russia to become an Arctic abuser. And we are seeing that happen right here. Again, great capability. The Swedes have an Air Force, a Navy. They have the best cyber offensive and defensive capability in Europe--that large industrial base. Finland just agreed to buy 64 F-35s to replace their F-18s. Both countries have been working with us in military exercises for years. They are virtually immediately interoperable. They bring capacity to the NATO alliance that it doesn't have without them. I am grateful that they are joining. Finland is already at the 2 percent goal of their commitment to their own national defense. Sweden will be there by 2028. Senator Durbin, who is here on the floor with me, and I met with both of these countries recently. And they are absolutely committed that this is the moment when the NATO alliance takes on new meaning, not only to their two countries but I think to--and not only Western Europe but, frankly, to the world. This is an alliance that stands for shared values, that stands for border integrity, that stands for being sure that those things go into the future. I urge all of my colleagues to vote for this today. I am glad we are able to be among the first. We were hoping we would be the first country to approve the admission into NATO of these two countries, but we will be among the first. I think it sends a signal to the world and hopefully to all Americans that not only is NATO important, but it will be stronger with Sweden and Finland than it has ever been. And I look forward to the opportunity to cast this vote today.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I am glad to join you and the other Senator from Georgia, Mr. Ossoff, here today and join both of you in sharing some thoughts about Senator Isakson. Senator Ossoff has already said a lot of things that are easily said. Not that they were easy for him to say, but anybody that knew Johnny Isakson would make many of those very same points and, hopefully, make them as well. I was glad to join him as the original cosponsor of this bill. Johnny and I served together in the House from 1999 until 2005. I was the majority whip during most of that time. And he was one of the half dozen deputies that really are key to getting things done. And Johnny Isakson liked to get things done. In 2005, he came over here to be in the Senate and brought that same determination to get things done, to find the place--wherever that place was--where something could happen. And he was a master at making things happen. When I joined him in the Senate in 2011, I was pleased to get a chance to serve alongside him again. He was a fast friend and a friend that you could count on. He knew how to bring people together. He did view, as Senator Ossoff said, people as his current friends or people who--the only reason they weren't his friend is they hadn't become his friends yet. And that is quite a way to approach life. And Johnny did it really well. I don't think there was anyone more respected by the other Members of the Senate than Senator Isakson was. In September of last year, I had the opportunity to join you, Mr. President, along with Senator Coons and Senator Graham, in hosting a bipartisan lunch that Johnny first started 13 years ago. I think we are going to do that again in September of this year. We have Democratic lunches, and we have Republican lunches. The Johnny Isakson lunch every year was the bipartisan lunch. And I think that is a great tradition to at least one more time do in honor of his service here and his friendship. He understood the value of sitting down over a cup of coffee or over a meal, of talking to one another, of finding the things you agree on, and then working together. And one thing I found here--and I think one of the ways I found it was watching what Johnny did--when a Democratic and Republican Senator find something to do together and get it done, invariably, they start looking for the next thing to do together. And their staffs start looking for the next thing their bosses can do together. And it is an infectious kind of thing that gets things done. And that was one of the great understandings of the legislative process that Johnny brought to the Senate. I think when Johnny was in the Georgia House, there were a handful of Republicans in the Georgia House when he got there. He told me he got to be minority leader pretty quickly--maybe it was because he didn't show up in the room that day before they could choose who their leader was going to be. But he understood what it took to bring things together. He liked to help people. He liked to get things done. He especially liked to get things done for his fellow veterans. Now, we are going to approach this veterans issue this week. And I am sure we are going to get it done. We just had a discussion about veterans and our commitments to veterans. But as chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee, Johnny really led efforts particularly to increase accountability at the VA. And there was an accountability problem at the VA that Johnny was intent on making sure we got to the bottom of it, to be sure that veterans received the care that they were entitled to and the benefits they had earned. Under his leadership, Congress also passed a MISSION Act, legislation that gave veterans real and permanent choice in their healthcare. This is something that particularly younger veterans care about. They want to go to the doctor that they want to go to. They want to go to a doctor close to home, or they want to still have the option, as they would have, to go to a veterans facility or be referred from that facility to another place where their care would be more easily available to them. But what veterans really want was the idea of having not just a pilot project on choice, which was the case before Johnny Isakson as chairman decided, no, we are going to have a permanent process where veterans are going to have those choices in the future. And so here we have just passed legislation designed to designate the VA facility in Decatur, GA, the Senator Johnny Isakson Department of Veterans Affairs Atlanta Regional Office. I am certainly proud to join my colleagues today as we sought and received unanimous consent for this legislation to pass. I really can't think of a more fitting way today, as we talk about veterans, to honor Johnny's legacy than to have his name associated with an issue he cared deeply about. Another issue he and I cared about and worked closely on was health research and what was happening at the CDC. There will be a building-- the ground is being broken right now, as I understand it, for a building--at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta that will also be named for Johnny Isakson. Those are two very fitting areas of focus for what he did for the people in Georgia, what he did for veterans in Georgia, what he did for healthcare in Georgia, and what he did for all of those things as it related to the entire U.S.A. I am glad to see this legislation pass. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I just was able to watch the administration climb the inflation rate cliff, and I want to talk more about this problem of what happens when the administration ignores the warning signs that are going to produce the kind of results that they have produced. You know, Democrats, all by themselves, after five bipartisan bills the year before to try to fight COVID and save the economy, decided that the recovering economy needed even more help to recover and passed a $1.9 trillion spending bill in March of last year. And that money almost immediately went out. You know, we talk about $1.9 trillion. I don't even know quite how we compare that in a way that people can think about it. The normal annual spending for the whole discretionary budget is $1.47 trillion. So in one bill, in addition to the money that the government would be spending that year in the budget that we vote on--the discretionary budget we vote on--Democrats decided: We are going to spend that much and more. We are not going to spend just twice the normal discretionary spending. We are going to spend twice the normal discretionary spending plus another 25 percent or so. You know, we spend every year about 700, and last year we spent $780 trillion to defend the country. That is a third of the money, roughly, in the $2 trillion American Recovery Act. We spent less than $700 billion to do everything else that we vote on. All of the debates we have here about spending are spending that results in a little less than $1.5 trillion of spending that is part of the normal budget. So when you double that and then you add to the doubling of that, and you put all of that into the economy at one time, you are clearly going to create a situation where you have inflation. That is what Democrats in previous administrations, like Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury and people in the Obama administration, all said--that this will create runaway inflation. But if that wasn't enough, we hear that they want to spend even more. But over the next year, after they passed that bill, inflation kept skyrocketing. Cracks kept appearing in the economy. There were plenty of warning signs, but our colleagues on the other side kept pushing to write the biggest check they possibly could and to write another one. Their latest plan is a massive amount of government spending. This one will be really focused on the Affordable Care Act, sometimes called ObamaCare. Apparently, the Affordable Care Act wasn't all that affordable or isn't all that affordable, because if you believe the reason for this bill, almost nobody can afford it. If you don't get insurance at work, it is almost unaffordable. In the original healthcare law, there were government subsidies for people who didn't make much money so that they could afford to be in what turned out to be an overpriced system. But that law capped how much you could earn and still get a subsidy. The $2 trillion I talked about earlier, the reckless tax-and-spending spree from March of last year, got rid of those income limits. Apparently, the income limits--no matter how high they were--weren't high enough. So they eliminated the income limits. Now the amount you would get from the government would be based on how big a share of your income you were spending on insurance, no matter how big that income was. One study found that a typical family of four making $106,000 would almost immediately--and did almost immediately--get almost $10,000 in subsidies. Before that, they got zero in subsidies. Four hundred percent of the poverty level appeared to be enough in the original bill. That is the system that should have provided insurance that people could afford, but, apparently, it hasn't done that. The insurance on the government exchanges is so expensive in some areas that people making half a million dollars or more could qualify for thousands of dollars from the government under this new structure. This, by the way, is the structure that the next spending bill is supposed to be trying to make permanent or at least permanent enough that people will get so used to having it that they will never want to give it back. The bill was called the American Rescue Plan. Its supporters kept telling us it had to be big because there were still people in real need and the economy was struggling. But we now know that while there are always people in need, it is not because the economy is struggling. Now people are in need because the economy is spiraling out of control, and whether it is at the gas pump or the grocery store, you are having to make decisions you wouldn't have thought you would have to make. The health insurance subsidies in particular were meant to be temporary--at least if you believed the reason that was given when that bill was passed--and would only last until the end of this year. Now our friends across the aisle want to make these temporary subsidies permanent. For purposes of the law itself, they don't want to admit that. So they say: Well, we just want to extend this year for another couple of years. And, by the way, I think we are clear that when we get to the next deadline, once you have had these subsidies for 1 year, as it turns out--let alone 2 or 3 more--the whole idea is to get people so committed to getting this money that the government will never back up and take it away. It is just a budget gimmick--everybody knows that--a gimmick to extend the program to further redistribute taxpayer money to people who are making big incomes but have decided it is better for the government to pay for their insurance than it is to pay for their insurance themselves. This doesn't relate to everybody. In fact, the 400 percent of poverty, which many people thought at the time, and still think, sounds like an income where you ought to be able to pay your own insurance-- and, if you can't, there must be something wrong with the healthcare system. In fact, last year, my colleague from West Virginia, Senator Manchin, said he had serious problems with another version of this bill because there wasn't a cap. He said: ``What I see are shell games-- budget gimmicks that make the real cost of the so-called $1.75 trillion bill estimated to be almost twice that'' much during the full time of the bill. So the Congressional Budget Office looked into this health insurance study plan or subsidy plan. They found that when it actually gets extended, this extension over 10 years costs another $250 billion. If we have people who are making more than 400 percent of poverty--in fact, if we have people who are unlimited in their income--who somehow need to have government help to buy insurance, we ought to figure out what happened with the insurance marketplace that ObamaCare created. The CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, figured that $36 million of that $250 million would go to people who make more than 400 percent of poverty, which works out to be about $140,000 for a family of 4. They also say that 48 percent of the new people entering the program would be making more income than that $140,000 level. Even if you think someone who makes $140,000 is low income--as maybe our friends on the other side of the aisle do--and deserves a handout from taxpayers to buy their insurance, again, I would say there must be something wrong with the insurance plan. If we have an affordable healthcare plan that nobody can afford, that should be our focus instead of focusing on making other taxpayers pay for the unaffordable healthcare plan rates that we have. The Congressional Budget Office expects 2.3 million fewer people, by the way, to get their insurance on their job if the subsidies become permanent. Why should your employer pay for your insurance if the government will pay for it instead? Why would you pay some portion of the cost of your insurance if the government will pay 100 percent of the cost of your insurance? Another 200,000 people, because of this, would end up in Medicaid and the CHIP Program, or the Children's Health Insurance Program. This is a plan to get people committed to something that just simply doesn't work. All it does is prove what President Reagan said, which he once said: Nothing lasts longer than a temporary government program. So we are going to be discussing, in the next few days, about how we want this 1-year program to become another 2- or 3-year program, which clearly would become a permanent program. Temporary assistance in March of 2021 and the other things in that bill that were spent immediately--that $1.9 trillion bill--fed the fuel to the fire of inflation that we see right now. Combine that with terrible energy policies, and American families feel it every single day. We don't need to do more of the same. We need to figure out what we did that created this problem and stop doing it. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, that whole concept of going where real people live is an important one. When people are facing higher utility bills every month and a bigger bill every time they fill up their gas tank, it doesn't take long for them to figure out that policy decisions somewhere have changed something--and something that really dramatically affects their quality of life. And then it didn't take long to figure out that those policy decisions in Washington are the decisions that made that kind of difference. When a blackout causes the lights to go out and your refrigerator to stop working, the impact of energy policy becomes pretty tangible and you understand pretty quickly that this is impacting you. That is a prospect that a lot of Americans are facing this summer. It is not theoretical, but in too many places, it is happening and happening over and over again. In late May, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation released a report that said that nearly two-thirds of the United States could experience blackouts this summer as a result of reliability challenges of the electric grid. Now, that group is a nonprofit regulatory authority that monitors the grid in the United States and Canada and some of northern Mexico. They could see this coming and Americans can now see this happening. They said that it was sobering. They said that it was an understatement, really, in many ways, to see it any other way. The understatement is, in particular--and the report said--that in the West and the Midwest, there was a heightened risk of reliability challenges and energy shortfalls. This report on the electric grid cited several reasons for heightened risk people are facing. One of them is that there is simply too little electric-generating capacity in the middle of the country where I live following the closure of older baseload generators. You can't make these decisions about energy policy without having a replacement in mind and not expect to see bad things happen to families, to individuals, to our economy. And that is what we are seeing now. Earlier this year, the Energy Information Administration projected 85 percent of the generators closing this year would be coal-fired power plants. So, if you close these plants and don't have a replacement in line, look what happens. Maybe we should ask Germany what happened when they shut down one of their major energy sources without having a replacement. Before you know it, they were dependent on a source of energy and a kind of energy and a country to get that energy from that didn't work out at all. From day one, the administration has advanced policies to restrict the production of affordable and reliable American energy. We have gone from being a net exporter of energy to an importer--in fact, even a pleading importer of energy--in an unbelievably short period of time. Electric prices in that period of time have gone up nearly 20 percent. Gasoline prices have more than doubled. If you are at the gas pump and you fill up your tank, whatever you are paying, cut that in half. That is what you would have paid under the policies just a couple of years ago. Now you are paying 107 percent more than you were paying then. The push of a rapid transition to renewable energy sources will cause prices to go up even higher. We have already seen what happens. We should be able to figure out what happens if you do more of it without a plan. What the administration wants to do here doesn't have to be painful. Transitioning from fossil fuels over a period of time doesn't have to be a painful thing. You just have to have a replacement in mind. You have to understand the economic consequences and understand, if your timeframe is right, there are no economic consequences. Fossil fuels accounted for just over 60 percent of the electricity generated in the United States last year. Nuclear power generated nearly 20 percent of the electricity; wind, 9 percent; hydropower, 6 percent; solar power was about 3 percent. When you dedicate yourself to eliminating 60 percent of the electricity generated in the country, you have got to expect that bad things are going to happen, and they are. We are seeing what happened with reliability challenges in California in its leading the way in this transition. But last summer, the State was doing everything they could, as quickly as they could, to build gas plants, natural gas plants, to supplement its power and to avoid blackouts. You went from plenty of power to new sources of energy and then, suddenly, to not enough power and then back to fossil fuels to desperately try to replace the power. Surely, we can learn that this doesn't have to be the way you make these realistic transitions from one way of powering things to another. Just to replace every vehicle in the country with electric models would require 25 percent more electricity than we produce today. Forcing the electrification of homes and buildings will drive demand even higher and will cost more. Families will suffer. For now, all of the above still works. For the long term, we have to find out what works for all Americans and how we may have reasonable energy policy moving forward. All of the above is serving us well. As we move from that, we need to know what we are moving to, how we are moving there, and how we can do it with the least impact on the economy, on individuals, and on families. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to join with my five colleagues who have been here today and the two people who were with us, Senator Durbin and Senator Fischer. I would say one of the great things about this effort was the unanimous feeling that all seven of us had about both what is happening in NATO and our commitment to win in Ukraine. We were able to demonstrate that to every group we met with from every country we met with. I think with the strong leadership of Chairmen Shaheen and Tillis that it made an impression on where we were and the unity we have on this. It would be interesting to know if Putin was more surprised by the Ukrainian resistance, the poor performance of his own military, or my guess would be he may have been most surprised by what has happened at NATO--the great turnaround of the NATO--the current NATO countries and their commitment to NATO, their commitment to what they have been willing to do and pledged to do with NATO and then to see these two incredibly important security contributors join NATO after 73 years of being neutral and an important part of the world and saw that as part of their long-term commitment. But both Finland and Sweden, which, by the way, have been NATO contributors for some time now in terms of being willing to be part of NATO missions, training with their future NATO allies--all that is incredibly important, but these countries not only bring incredible security contributions to NATO, they also bring significant geographic contributions to NATO. When you look at a map, suddenly not just Norway, which has been in NATO, but Sweden and Finland in NATO has an incredible impact on the ability of what happens in the Baltic. That is important to us as we look to the future. Now, with the exception of Russia, every country that borders and has part of a claim on the Arctic will be a NATO country. This is a part of the world we have been talking about much more the last 5 years than we did the previous 25 years. To have this NATO unity as we look at the Arctic is an important thing. The 800-mile border that Finland has shared for years and defended for years against Russia doubles the NATO border in Europe. The intimate understanding that both Sweden and Finland have of Russia brings a different point of view and a helpful point of view to NATO. For the current members, particularly the new members of NATO, when you look at these Baltic countries of Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania and then look at Poland and Romania, seeing what happens when the unity is created and the force multiplier is there--I have heard my colleagues already talk about the jet planes, the submarines, the navy, the air force that both of these people bring, the cyber ability that both of them bring to the fight is real. You know, in a meeting that I was in before this meeting occurred with the Latvian Defense Minister, the Latvian Defense Minister, one of the newest members of NATO, one of the most vulnerable members of NATO as we have looked at NATO for some time, said: We don't want to be rescued by NATO; we want to be defended by NATO. I think today, as we see the growth of NATO, we see a NATO that is willing to do its job defending its members in this most successful alliance of all time. There has never been anything like it. President Truman was the leader in putting this together in 1949. Here we are 73 years later. In my view, NATO not only has its largest group of members but also its most powerful and committed group of members in the history of this alliance. I look forward to being on the Senate floor when the Senate does its job to welcome Sweden and Finland to NATO, and I am pleased that process has started. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I know we have a vote coming up. I have brief remarks, and I ask unanimous consent to complete them before the vote starts.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Just one final thought, we want to be sure that we are encouraging people to get the healthcare they need. You know, if this system works like it should work, you really never know what you are doing in terms of how you have changed people's lives in the future or the lives of people they might impact. We don't want to create any stigma here that a resilient, broad-based mental health system that is part of this bill means that you should be hesitant to seek mental health help. You know, if you have a mental health problem, you are more likely to be the victim of a crime than you are the perpetrator of a crime. But if those problems get out of control--often suicidal thoughts first before you have homicidal thoughts--but if this system works the way it should, who knows what good you have done by just letting people go through their normal lives as contributing citizens with treating their mental health and talking about their mental health. As Senator Stabenow said, being able to talk about somebody in your family that has a mental health challenge as readily as you talk about somebody in your family that has a cancer challenge or a dialysis trip that they have to make multiple times a week to go somewhere or medicine that they take for something else and talking about this in the context of the good it does in making our society safer should, in no way, be interpreted to mean that people with a mental health concern are unsafe. But if you don't deal with that problem in the right way at the right time, it has the potential to be unsafe. Most of these shootings we have seen, the shooter goes into that shooting clearly anticipating that they will not come out of that shooting alive either. So it is suicide; it is homicide; it is things that if you dealt with that problem a decade earlier--and maybe in some cases, the specific problem even a week earlier--but if you dealt with it a decade earlier, as people began to see that, you know, We need to get you some help. Just like if your hearing is going bad or your eyesight is going bad, people say, ``Let's get an appointment and go see what we need to do,'' and anybody can be seen at these certified community behavioral health centers. Anybody can be seen if you are covered by--it is very much based on the federally qualified health center model. If you have insurance that covers this, you can go there. If you have a government program that covers it, you can go there. If you need to pay cash, you can go there on a very affordable sliding scale. But people are seen, and nobody--in our State, at least, and I think this would be the case in all nine of the pilot States--nobody who needs to be seen that day is not seen that day. Nobody who needs to be seen that day is not seen that day. And nobody who needs to be seen isn't seen pretty quickly as you have time to schedule that appointment. It changes people's lives; it changes communities; it changes the way we talk about mental health. As Senator Stabenow said on the floor, the last 50 years after President Kennedy signed his last bill into law--now, here we are, almost 60 years after that bill was signed into law taking what would be, so far, the biggest step toward accomplishing what that Community Mental Health Act envisioned. And Senator Stabenow, I will turn to her for any final comments.

Mr. BLUNT. Yes. I think the point you are making here, too, are that these are--we now have 5 years of evidence in several States, multiple years in other States. So this isn't just assuming what will happen but looking at what we have carefully tried to keep track of, of what does happen. And as you pointed out, that de facto mental health system, mental health delivery system of the emergency rooms and police--nobody was well-served by that. Certainly, the police weren't well-served. The emergency rooms weren't well-served. And people had many mental health challenges that weren't served by that as well. And seeing those numbers go down dramatically of people having to go to the emergency room for mental health services or being kept in jail overnight or longer than overnight for mental health services, nobody benefits from that system. And so we are seeing real numbers where the people who work at the emergency room, the people who are in the police department are among the biggest supporters of this system when it gets in place. Also, the whole idea of crisis intervention, there are opportunities in this law for that to happen. In any of the new structures, whether that is drug court or veterans court or other places you would go to try to be sure somebody is getting the help they need when they need it, there also would be due process involved in anything added; that we use this bill to add to the system due process where people have a right. If there is an emergency moment, obviously, you have to deal with that as an emergency moment. But people then have a right to have their day in court as well, if they are not part of that crisis intervention moment of seeing that happen. And so that is important. But in Missouri, 150,000 people are now part of this excellence in mental health effort. That is about a 40-percent increase on what some of the same facilities were doing before, but now, they do it with more certainty that they are going to get their cost reimbursed. They do it with the right kind of staff, and 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, they have to be available. And the new States that enter the program will go through that same type of competition to be among the 10 States every 2 years that could enter the program and get us to all 50 States in that program and have the kind of staff they need, the kind of accessibility they need. I think, originally in our bill, which was 8 years ago now--2014--24 States applied to be one of the first 8 States in the pilot program; 19 of them went through the whole process, and 8 States were selected. But in the other States, there are now 30 States that have big units that were able to qualify as individual demonstration grant units to show what they could do. And we really, I think, both believe that those units in those States will become both the models and the incentive to bring the whole State into that program now that that is possible and seeing what we are seeing with results and also results on the nonmental health side. One of the unique things I think that this pilot did was--part of the pilot was to see what happens with the other healthcare issues that people have who have mental health concerns. And what has happened is that they have seen those costs go dramatically down. If you have a behavioral health problem that is being dealt with, you are much more likely to show up to your doctor's appointment. You are much more likely to show up to dialysis. You are much more likely to take the medicine that has been prescribed, whether it was for your mental health situation--and occasionally, that is the best way to deal with mental health--or your other health situations. And so those costs go down. And even in the immediate healthcare space, we are seeing that States believe they are saving money in the immediate space of healthcare. There has never been any question that in the long run you would save money if you treat mental health like you treat all other health. There has never been any question, whether it is the prison system or law enforcement or your personal income capacity, that all those were good things to do. I think what we have shown in these early States is that even in the immediate healthcare space, you save as much money or virtually as much money or even more money on the other health costs for the one in five adult Americans--and now big numbers among the younger Americans who have a mental health problem--you save as much space for their other health problems, and one in five adult Americans are going to have a lot of other health problems. It is a pretty big segment of our society. And I think, Senator Stabenow, seeing what happened there has also been persuasive to States as they are beginning to think about making this part of their permanent program when these pilot projects are over.

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, before I get to my topic today, I would like to say that when Senator Sullivan first came to the Senate, I hadn't been here very long, either, and this was my presiding time every week. I loved the Alaskan of the Week. I don't think they are ever going to run out of Alaskans of the Week as long as Senator Sullivan is here. So I was right back in that chair, where you are, thinking of the many times I heard Senator Sullivan do the presentation on the Alaskan of the Week and how much I enjoyed it.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I want to talk a little bit about the whole idea of loan forgiveness, student debt forgiveness. I have spoken many times on the floor about the importance of higher education--both college education and apprenticeships and other kinds of work preparation. I was the first person in my family to ever graduate from college, and later was the president of the university. And it is important, there is no doubt about that. I have often also talked about one of the reasons I think our system works so well is in post-World War II America, we have not tried to run higher education; we have tried to encourage and support higher education. You could use your student benefits, whether they were student loans or VA benefits or other benefits, at any accredited institution, and the Federal Government doesn't decide what is an accredited institution. I think the way that we have found that balance has been really important for higher education. I think it is why we have the best higher education in the world, but I think the balance is one that we ought to be thinking about maintaining. We should be concerned when we begin to get into that balance in a way that the government does more than it should do or, frankly, less than it should do. This is the 50th anniversary of the Pell Grant Program. I have been a big supporter of Pell grants. I know you have too. And during the time we have worked here together, we have expanded Pell grants to year-round Pell grants. One of the great ways to keep college costs down is to finish. If you have got a pattern that is working, particularly if you are a first-time college student in your family or an adult that has gone back to school, if you have got something that is working and you can keep it working, we ought to do that. There was about a 10-year period where we had two semesters of Pell grants and then there was a summer without Pell grants, that didn't really work out all that well. And every higher education person I know believes we did a really great thing by going back to year-round Pell. We have also increased the Pell grant award. In fact, in the last 7 years, we have increased the annual individual award by over $1,000-- $1,120. We have reinstated year-round Pell. The Pell grant is targeted. It is targeted to people who need help going to school. When we were talking, I think very wrongly, about free higher education--which I think would really be expensive if you had free higher education and the government became the payer. I have said the Pell grant is really the way to adjust that. If the Pell grant is not high enough, Congress can raise it. If the income levels are not high enough, if you had to have higher income levels or lower income levels to get the full Pell or partial Pell, Congress can do that as well. I think the one thing that would be a mistake here would be to ask the taxpayers of America to now pay the loans off of other Americans who made those loans. The President is talking about the potential, at least the administration is, of forgiving up to $10,000 in student loans for everyone who has a student loan and makes less than $150,000. You know, a lot of Americans make less than $150,000. I think the median family income in America today is under $70,000, but, suddenly, for those who make under $150,000, we would be giving them $10,000. And what did they get for that $10,000? They went to school. They got an education. They had choices they made as they did that, and we will talk about that in a minute. And also the legal problems here. You know, the President has said in the past that he didn't think he had the legal authority to forgive these loans. The Speaker of the House has said in the past that she didn't think the President had the legal authority to forgive these loans. And by the way, there is a way to get the legal authority--I will talk about that in a minute, too--coming to you and I with a proposal to give them the authority to do that. Even the New York Times Editorial Board says that loan forgiveness is--this is their quote--``legally dubious, economically unsound, politically fraught, and educationally problematic.'' Those are pretty good reasons not to do it. The best one would be the ``legally dubious'' one, and the President himself has thought that was the case in the past. You know, 87 percent of Americans don't have a student loan. The President is telling them, frankly, we are going to forgive the loans for the 13 percent that the other 87 percent don't have. People who decided not to go to college wouldn't get that $10,000, neither would those who avoided loans by attending a more affordable school, working harder part time, doing the things that lots and lots of people have done to get through school. The same is true of people who have gotten out of school, and as they are paying off their loans, they have sacrificed vacations or better cars or bigger houses or other things to pay the student loan that they agreed to pay back when they took it. So the President's plan disproportionately would benefit people who are in the upper income group, the top 40 percent of American households hold 60 percent of the student loans. The bottom 40 percent have less than 20 percent of the student loans. If you were going to talk about this at all, maybe we should be talking about the bottom 40 percent of incomes, not essentially the top 40 percent of incomes, which an across-the-board forgiveness of debt--and, by the way, that $150,000 would generally be in that higher percent. Student loan forgiveness under the President's plan would largely benefit people who, frankly, you could argue, just don't need the benefit as well as many other American families and American individuals do. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York estimates that student loan forgiveness could be as much as $320 or $350 billion. That is on top of the $100 billion that we already have cost the system by stepping back, maybe for too long, but certainly stepping back during COVID, and telling people they didn't have to make their loan payments. To put that in some perspective, that amount of money, $320 billion and another $100 billion, would fund the entire Pell Grant Program for about a decade and a half. So we ought to think about what we are doing here, how we are doing it. I think this plan would actually not drive college costs down; it would logically drive college costs up because colleges, just like students, would be told, when people make these loans, pay the school for the education they are getting, there is a good chance they won't have to pay it back, and there is a good chance we would have more income during this period of time. It is more likely that you would have higher college costs and you would have people borrowing more money and borrowing it quicker than they currently do because we actually would be setting the precedent that there is a real chance you won't have to pay this back. That is not a good precedent to set. What Americans really need right now is relief from the crushing inflation we see, not more bad policies that put more money into the economy and drive inflation to an even greater height. President Biden has been bragging, frankly, about how strong our economy is and how low unemployment is. Well, if that is true, why do we need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a program that is unfair, that disproportionately helps upper income Americans? You know, it is either the strongest job market since World War II, which the President said just recently, or he has also said that this economy is the strongest economy we have ever had. It is either that, or it is an economy in such rough shape that people can't pay their loans. Now, it really can't be both. And we are sending all kinds of messages here we don't need to send and, frankly, I think the administration shouldn't really want to send. People made the decision to invest in their education. They borrowed money to do it. The initial plan was that people would borrow money, and as they paid it back, that money would be available for the next generation of people who wanted to borrow money. If that had worked out that way, we would still be working off some of the first dollars that went into these student loan payments and student loan programs. If we say that this select special group of people who happen to have the exact kind of debt, at this exact moment, don't need to pay it back later, I think that is the more logical thing that would happen. What if we say that this group doesn't have to pay their debt so maybe we should figure out other groups shouldn't have to pay their debt? If it is a good economic policy not to pay your student debt, what if we decide we are not going to pay people's car loan debt, or we are not going to pay people's mortgage debt, or we are not going to pay people's credit card bills if they are somehow out of control? There are ways to deal with that in the legal system, but government forgiveness is not one of them. The same arguments really apply to forgiving those debts as would apply to forgiving college debts. If the President thinks it is a good idea, as I mentioned before, he could write a piece of legislation, hand it to one of his friends in the Congress and let us work through the process. Let's make the case as to why these debts should be forgiven. Let's debate which other competing priority is less important than forgiving these debts. You know, we have spent a lot of time acting like the money is not money that you have to take from somewhere else to use for a current purpose. And I think we are all realizing just how untrue that is. The President hasn't sent that legislation up. In fact, the President in his budget didn't even suggest that loan forgiveness should be part of his budget. It is not in legislation. It is not in the appropriations budget. It is not a priority in anything the administration has put out there for us to debate and talk about. We just had a hearing this week with the Secretary of Education about the education budget request. There was nothing in that request about specific student loan proposals. I really hope that the administration will pause, will think about this, will understand the overall impact of effectively suddenly deciding we are going to put $321 billion or so dollars back into the economy that otherwise would be coming back into the Treasury as the debt repayment that those individuals have agreed to do. We have got ways to help people go to school. We have got ways to debate whether or not this is a good priority to forgive loans, but I take the President's original position, which is the President doesn't have the authority to do that. I agree with the Speaker of the House's original position that the President doesn't have the authority to do this. If the President wants to make the case, let him make it right here, and that will be a debate that I think would be worth having. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I rise today to recognize the bipartisan accomplishment by the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee and the expanded support we are delivering for veterans living with illnesses as a result of toxic exposure due to their service in our Nation's uniform through the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act of 2022. This legislation ensures veterans who need help now can get it. We are all too familiar with the challenges that exist for veterans as a result of toxic exposure. I have been working to improve veteran services and benefits for more than 20 years as a member of both the Senate and the House VA Committees. During that time, I have heard a lot about toxic exposure issues and have come to understand the immediate need to make improvement to benefits and care for post-9/11 veterans who were exposed to toxic substances as a result of burn pits. This exposure is known to cause serious illness, including rare cancers and respiratory ailments. Those suffering deserve to know they have not been forgotten and their voices have been heard. The promise our Nation made to the men and women who served in these dangerous conditions must be kept. This bill fulfills that promise and delivers immediate access to healthcare for toxic-exposed veterans. It directs the VA to evaluate diseases for presumption of service connection and streamlines the process for toxic-exposed veterans seeking disability compensation for their illnesses without overwhelming the VA system. The Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson PACT Act also invests in the tools and resources to help the VA process disability claims in a timely manner and deliver quality healthcare to veterans living with toxic exposure illnesses. With this measure, we continue to correct past failures of the VA to provide healthcare and benefits to previous generations exposed to Agent Orange as well. These challenges have existed for decades, and it is time we fulfill our promise to Vietnam-era veterans once and for all. The legislation we are poised to approve updates VA policies to provide veterans like Bill Rhodes of Mena, AK--a marine who served in Thailand during the Vietnam war era--provide them access to the care he and the others who served in that area deserve. Mr. Rhodes has been a relentless advocate of toxic exposure benefits. The VA accepts that herbicides were used along the perimeter of military bases in Thailand but does not recognize the impact of the herbicides inside the perimeter. This current policy makes no sense and is not fair, preventing veterans like Mr. Rhodes from accessing benefits as a result of toxic exposure. After developing illnesses linked to herbicide exposure, Mr. Rhodes turned to the VA for help, but his claim was denied. I have been working with him for several years to advance a provision that corrects this mistake, and I am pleased that this act eliminates the bureaucratic hurdles that have stood in the way of veterans getting the care they earned. This legislation is the result of bipartisan cooperation. We can achieve great things for our country when we put partisan politics aside. I appreciate the leadership of Chairman Tester and Ranking Member Moran to get this bill to the Senate floor. I am proud to work with them to address these pressing needs that face our veterans and their families. I would also like to recognize and thank the countless veterans, the families, advocates, and veteran service organizations that continued their persistence to ensure Congress fulfills its promise to the men and the women who served in our Nation's uniform. This legislation is long overdue. We have heard the struggles of veterans and their families living with toxic exposure-related illnesses. We can end the hurdles they experienced and save lives by passing this landmark legislation. I encourage my colleagues to join me in supporting it. With that, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, normally I don't like to use numbers in speeches because I think numbers get lost in people's minds as they are trying to wrap their heads around numbers, but I do want to use some numbers today because the numbers are just so incredible. During President Biden's time in office, the Department of Homeland Security has encountered illegal immigrants crossing our border more than 2.8 million times. In not quite a year and a half, 2.8 million people were encountered crossing the border. Last month alone, they caught people trying to cross the southern border illegally 234,088 times. So a quarter of a million people just last month were caught trying to cross the border. That is the highest number in the Department's history. It is more than four times the average monthly number from 2018 to 2020. If you have a problem that is four times bigger than it was in the 3 preceding years, it is probably time to ask, what were they doing in those 3 preceding years that we are not doing now? Some of the people who cross the border got sent back and may have gotten caught later in the month. They may have been a catch-and- release, and then they come back. But some people who cross the border didn't get caught at all. I am not sure that number is not bigger than the other number. But even if you had double-counting, it is still an incredible number: a quarter of a million people coming across the border illegally in 1 month who were caught--not who were coming across the border but who were caught coming across the border. We have never seen such a massive or prolonged effort by people to illegally enter our country as we are seeing now. It has created a giant humanitarian crisis at the border. Ask anyone who lives in a border community the problem that has been created by this. The Biden administration's response has actually been to tie their own hands by removing the most effective tools we have to try to manage the situation. We developed a reasonable approach to the border based on lessons we learned from previous surges--one in 2014 when President Biden was Vice President and one in 2019. These policies helped cut the number of people trying to cross the border illegally. They allowed us to deal with legitimate cases of people seeking asylum in a much more responsible way. People who actually qualify for asylum come to the United States like people don't come to any other country in the world. We are still the most welcoming country in the world for people who have a legitimate request for asylum, but that doesn't include everybody who lives in a poor and dangerous place. In contrast to what we have been doing to make it easier for people to seek asylum and harder for people to illegally cross the border, the Biden administration has over and over again reversed the progress that is being made. As Senator Ernst just well pointed out, on their first day, they halted the construction of the border wall. The logical debate to have there was finish the wall in progress and then have a debate with the new administration about whether you needed more border wall, but they halted construction of the border wall. The material was there. The wall was in progress. In fact, the wall, in some places, had been removed so you could put the more effective wall up, so now there is no wall. There were places where we had known for several years now that people would come across if they could where there was no wall and there was no building the wall. They revoked a 2017 Executive order calling for stricter enforcement of the immigration laws. They canceled the Migrant Protection Protocols. They suspended asylum cooperation agreements known as safe third party agreements, third country agreements. If someone is unsafe where they live and has a legitimate claim for asylum, this is not a legitimate claim for entry into the United States; it is a legitimate claim to get to a safer place for them. Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador all had agreed to those third party, third country agreements. Even the leaders of even Guatemala and Mexico said that President Biden's policies are incentivizing illegal crossings at our southern border, which, of course, create a lot of illegal transit through their country as well. Now the administration seems intent on ending the public health policy known as title 42, which allows authorities to turn back many of the people caught crossing the border illegally. A Federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking the efforts to eliminate title 42, but the administration immediately decided they would appeal that decision. Now, that is exactly the wrong decision at this moment, particularly when the administration is arguing that we need billions of dollars of more money to fight COVID, and I think there is some merit to that argument, but you can't argue that we need billions of dollars to fight COVID and COVID is over at the border and is no longer a problem there. In fact, just the latest example of the administration over and over again responding to the crisis at the border with the wrong decision. Time after time, the White House could have looked at problems that it was causing with its immigration policies and reverse course. And time after time, it responded by going ahead anyway, doubling down on more than one occasion. According to the New York Times, there are tens of thousands of people who have been waiting in the border region for title 42 to be lifted. They are watching the Biden administration and the signals it is sending now and how it intends to deal with them the next time they cross the border. Most of them will be allowed to stay in the country while they go through immigration proceedings, many of which can take years to just get a hearing. That is why waiting in another country like Mexico was a policy that we should have continued to improve and move forward with because most people, when they are waiting, would find out that they didn't have a legitimate asylum claim; that they weren't going to successfully get into the United States and disappear into the country that we live in. And they would wind up going back and making it easier for other people who had a legitimate asylum claim to have that asylum here. What makes it worse, the administration has proposed taking away essential resources to enforce immigration law. With the budget that they requested for this year, the Department of Homeland Security specified cutting the enforcement and removal budgets to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement by $614 million. It doesn't sound like, to me, that that is the way to deal with a problem that is the size of the problem that almost every American has a sense of. In April, the Homeland Security Secretary said that he will need to reprogram funding from other DHS accounts to respond to increased activity at the border, while the administration--his administration-- is asking for $614 million in cuts. Other parts of the Department, like the Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, could have their operational funding diverted to process paperwork for illegal immigrants at the border. The human tragedy unfolding on our border is due, in large part, to the policies of this administration, a massive turnaround that occurred on day 1 and hasn't stopped since. We need that act--and they need to act on border security effectively and restore order to our immigration process. It is long past time for the administration people to be honest with the American people about the crisis it has created and to do something about it.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, Dara Lindenbaum is the President's nominee to be a Member of the Federal Election Commission. We are scheduled to vote on that nomination today. On April 6, the Committee on Rules and Administration held a hearing to consider this nominee. She shared her credentials for the job and her understanding of the agency's mission and the role of a commissioner. On May 3, she was favorably reported out of committee. I supported her nomination to be voted out of committee. The Federal Elections Commission plays a vital role for Campaign Finance Committees. As a former Secretary of State, I work with the FTC on a regular basis; and since that time, I have run in many Federal elections. I know how important a fully functioning FEC is to Federal candidates who need to avail themselves of the FEC's guidance and advisory opinions. I also know how important the stability of the agency is to the regulated community. While the commissioners to the Federal Election Commission are, by design, partisan, it is unlikely that every Senator will agree with the views of all nominees. Ms. Lindenbaum has expressed a willingness to work with the other commissioners and find consensus to do the important work of the agency. I am a Republican and Ms. Lindenbaum is a Democrat. This Commission only works with if there is an equal number of Republicans and Democrats. Sadly, with the three Republican nominees from the last administration, the vote on the floor was 49 to 43, 49 to 47, 50 to 46. These should not be partisan nominations. They are partisans nominated to a partisan job; and, frankly, we have to do a better job than 49 to 43, or 49 to 47, or 50 to 46, which, again, was the vote on the floor of President Trump's Republican nominees who are currently serving. Ms. Lindenbaum enjoys the support of a bipartisan group of election law practitioners. Senator Klobuchar and I received a letter from 30 practitioners on both sides of the aisle highlighting Ms. Lindenbaum's decade of relevant experience, especially her experience representing clients on matters of State and Federal campaign finance and election laws. I look forward to supporting her nomination today. I hope many of my colleagues will join me in supporting her. This a commission, one, that doesn't work without an equal number of Republicans and Democrats, and it doesn't work if the commission doesn't have at least that equal number. Unless there are at least four commissioners, the Commission ceases to function. For too many months of the last dozen years, we had a Commission that wasn't fully functioning, couldn't make final decisions, couldn't issue opinions. I am looking forward to a six- member Commission. I look forward to voting for Ms. Lindenbaum today when her nomination comes up early this afternoon.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, in late 2016, soon after the Presidential election of that year, there was a significant portion of the political left that began referring to itself as ``the resistance.'' Apparently, these people were bent on fighting whatever the new President might try to do, only because of who the new President was. There were signs in yards. There were people who painted their garage door with ``the resistance'' on the garage door. They weren't arguing against specific policies; they weren't making a rational effort to win support for their side; they were just trying to throw sand in the gears of the executive branch and interfere with how the government serves the people. One Senator on the floor of the Senate said: ``The resistance starts here.'' Now, they did it while trying to cloak themselves in maybe the compelling language of ``the resistance,''as if in their minds they were starring in the World War II movie ``Casablanca,'' where the resistance was the heroes as they were all over World War II. The damage ``the resistance'' was willing to do to the executive branch of our government was bad enough. On the floor of the Senate, at virtually every nominee the President nominated, the minority insisted on 30 hours of debate. We finally had to change that rule to 2 hours of debate, which those in the majority now know is a big enough challenge without 30 hours of debate. And I think the average time used was closer to 20 minutes, during that 30 hours, than 30 hours. But 30 hours still had to be set aside. No other business could occur. People were nominated early on for Ambassadors to countries, for instance, that they eventually got to serve 1 year in because that ``resistance'' element appeared right here as well. Then the group of political activists began to insist that we degrade the legislative branch as well, trying to change the Senate to get rid of the motion to proceed. And, frankly, ever since Democrats got control of the Senate, by the smallest margin possible, there has been a constant discussion of why we should change that rule. Of course, many of us understand the so-called filibuster rule is what makes the Senate. President Biden said, when he was a Senator: [A]t its core, the filibuster is not about stopping a nominee or a bill, it is about compromise and moderation. End the quote that he made at the time that I agree with now. Many of the people who have been calling to end the filibuster changed their tune, not because something changed in America but because they are now in charge. And without the filibuster, we would see wild swings in policy when different parties would take control of the majority of the Senate, and we see that constantly in the House now. A lot of bills pass, and very few of them get to the President's desk. When the other party gets in control, they pass bills that reverse what the earlier majority passes, and, frankly, very few of them get to the President's desk either because the Senate has to take a little more time to think about what direction the country really wants to go in. In the last 20 years or so, complete control has happened four times, alternating between Democrats and Republicans. That is a lot of time for the pendulum to swing and the potential for bad ideas to become law without something to make us think about that before we head in that direction. At a time of razor-thin margins in the House and Senate, activists should be extra careful about getting rid of institutional guardrails. Their efforts have failed so far because there aren't enough Senators from both parties who are willing to make that change, but that doesn't mean they won't keep trying. In fact, I am confident we will continue to hear that, and I am also confident their position will change as soon as they are in the minority and don't get what they want. This brings us to the disappointing effort we have seen to damage the third branch of government: the judiciary. For more than a year, we have seen some people on the left try to apply political pressure on the Court to rule in a particular way. The Senator from Utah just gave us an example of that. I am going to repeat it. It is probably worth repeating. In March of 2020, the Democratic leader of the Senate spoke to a crowd in front of the Supreme Court Building, and he said: I want to tell you Gorsuch, I want to tell you Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. Now, what would that possibly mean? If you are in the Supreme Court you have got a lifetime job, so the price clearly was not losing your job. What price was the Democratic leader suggesting and saying on the steps of the Supreme Court you would have to pay? And this is while the Court was inside hearing arguments on the case. And the Leader added: You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions. That kind of language has no place and really no legitimate purpose. This is not the kind of language that we need to use. Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle have talked about introduced legislation to add new Justices to the Court to pack the Court. Judges should rule based on the law, not on their partisan allegiance. That is not a new idea, but countries rarely manage to put it into practice. The American judicial system became the envy of the world precisely because of its independence. Renowned historian of the American Revolution Gordon Wood has described it as the creation of judges who are ``agents of the sovereign people somehow equal in authority with the legislators and executives.'' An independent judiciary is a critical element of the unique balance of power the Constitution created. Justices have frequently ruled against Presidents and parties that put them on the Court. Some of the most prominent, politically sensitive Supreme Court cases in history have involved Justices ruling against the parties that put them in power, including United States v. Nixon in 1974. And Harry Truman, who put his name on the desk that I am speaking from, would certainly have preferred not to lose the so-called steel seizure case of Youngstown Sheet and Tube v. Sawyer, but he accepted it without threatening any of the Justices, without plotting to increase the size of the Court, even though the vote against it by, for instance, Fred Vinson, the Chief Justice who had been his Secretary of the Treasury and lifelong--in terms of Senate service--friend and his nominee to be the Chief Justice, voted the other way. The supporters of these changes are calling very loudly, but, just like the damage that they sought with their resistance of the executive branch, their efforts to break the Senate, they could do lasting, even permanent damage to the judiciary. Once the Court has been clearly politicized, it would be hard to ever bring it back. I am concerned about the anti-institutional fervor we see going on today. I hope it does not produce the stated results and goals. I yield the floor.