Michael Bennet

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I am glad to be here tonight with the Presiding Officer, a Member of this body who probably, more than most, understands the consequences of this government shutdown. Of the, maybe, 100 people in this body and of the 435 people in the House of Representatives, I would be surprised if there were somebody among us who would be less likely to close the government down over politics than the Presiding Officer from the Commonwealth of Virginia, because he knows how important it is, among other people, to the dedicated public servants who live in his State and work for the Federal Government. Tonight, I wanted to come to the floor to talk about a group of men and women who most people serving in this Chamber know very little about--or they may know nothing about. They are men and women whose livelihoods are at stake and are being held hostage by a small band of extremists dead set on shutting down the government for their own political purposes. And these are America's Federal wildland firefighters. This is a photo of Federal wildland firefighters who are responding to the Pine Gulch Fire in Colorado. The picture, in many ways, sort of says it all. One of the things it says is neither you nor I nor anybody on this floor really could fully imagine or describe what it must be like to do this work. I can't imagine parachuting through yellow skies that can't allow you to see where the ground is and dropping down in the total wilderness. I would be very surprised if anybody in this Chamber could comprehend what it must be like to hear nothing but the roar of chain saws and crackling brush all around you while tankers and helicopters overhead on top of you dump blood-red retardant and water to suppress the flames or what it is like to carry enough food to sustain you for days at a time. There is nobody who is going to come feed you, and you have axes and water and a sleeping bag all on your back, in a pack that is just made heavier by unrelenting smoke and unrelenting fire. You are doing the heartbreaking work of slashing away at brush and small trees. I am sorry--the backbreaking work. It is probably heartbreaking sometimes. You are doing the backbreaking work of slashing away at brush and small trees; using gasoline for a roaring wildfire; and making a fire line until you get to mineral soil. I don't know about any of that. I can't imagine the flood of relief, after 16 hours of grueling work, getting back to the ``black.'' That is the area that has already been burned, and that is a sign that, finally, after those 16 hours--or however many hours those are--you are in a safe spot. And for all of that effort, you are making $15 an hour--less than somebody could make at Subway or at another fast-food restaurant. I never have lived in my car as a price of doing the job that I was asked to do, sleeping cramped in the back seat after a 16-hour day because you can't afford a place to live--or the loneliness of being without your wife and kids for months and months at a time while working on a fire. I don't know how it must feel to work 1,000 hours of overtime every year for your country and know that your family is still on food stamps because, no matter how hard you work, you can't make enough money to put food on the table for your family. I don't know what that feels like, but that is the reality for America's wildland firefighters. Helicopter rappellers and engine operators and handcrews and hotshots and smokejumpers make up wildland firefighting crews. These men and women parachute into fire. They walk into fire. They drive into fire. There is a picture of a smokejumper parachuting through smoke. You can probably barely see it, but it gives you the sense of the danger of it. These are highly trained experts in their field. Believe it. Take it from me that they are in peak physical condition. In the last few decades, the wildfire season has extended and extended and extended by over 70 days. It is common for politicians to say we don't have a wildfire season anymore; it is all year round. But the reality for these workers is that they are having to work those fires all year round. And the fires have become increasingly intense. If you talk to people who have had to fight them on the ground, there are people who have been doing this--believe it or not--for 25 years, for 30 years. They have seen what it used to look like and what it looks like now. They can tell you the intensity has changed because of climate change and because of the historic drought that we face. By the way, it is important for this body to understand that this is not just in the West. We have, obviously, been beset by fires and by drought in the West; but right now, while we are here, there are wildfires in Louisiana. We have seen the total destruction--the tragedy--of Maui. Even New Jersey this year has seen wildfires. They have been ravaged by them in that State. I heard a firefighter say to me the other day that the wildland firefighters are like the Swiss Army knives of first responders because in the off season, they support hurricane relief efforts in the South. They administered vaccines at the peak of the COVID epidemic. They even helped with the space shuttle recovery. Two years ago during the infrastructure bill, as part of a recognition that the drought was creating a huge problem for us in the West, we made things a little better for our wildland firefighters. The bipartisan infrastructure law provided over 20,000 wildland firefighters a temporary pay raise, and that has been a godsend for them. By the way, it is only bringing them up to--I mean, it is barely what they should make, but, at least, you can make it on what we are paying them now. But that money is fast expiring, and this lifeline is almost gone. You know, for them, it meant that skilled firefighters were able to remain in the profession who might have otherwise quit. By the way, when you ask them about that, the reason they have stayed is because they have such a sense of mission. That is part of it. They also know that they don't know who would replace them. Who would take their job? Who would walk in their shoes who is, you know, making the kind of money that they are making? But they finally had a sense that maybe the Nation was recognizing their work and that they could, at least, provide for their families. On Friday, I met with a group of wildland firefighters in Grand Junction, CO, who shared their stories with me. I would encourage every Member of this body to do the same. They described being so disconnected from their families and friends during fire season that they feared they would lose them. They feared slipping into deep depression because of the grueling nature of the work and the months spent away from home. We talked about riding a bike back and forth to work because they couldn't afford to maintain a car; the feelings of having your passion for your job--remember, these are people who are, in theory, you know, inspired by the sunset--having your passion for your job exploited by the Federal Government which knows you will show up because you love the job even without getting the pay you deserve year after year, fire after fire after fire; grappling with the trauma of seeing other people's homes burn to the ground and losing crew members in the line of duty. One crew leader in Colorado told me she had lost three firefighters to suicide. Another just lost a friend to cancer likely due to smoke inhalation. Wildland firefighters are 10 to 20 times more likely to commit suicide than the average American, and they face a 43-percent increased risk for developing cancer. A firefighter told me: None of us wants to be millionaires. We just want to do good work, the work that we love. These are the men and women saving lives. These are the men and women saving homes and defending the 640 million acres--thank God--of America's public lands. The failure of Congress to act has forced talented firefighters to leave the profession, which is the last thing they want to do. It is going to cost us the next generation of wildland firefighters who are needed more than ever because of climate change and what it is doing to the West and fire seasons all across this country. Really importantly, the continuing resolution that you support and that I support--that we have passed miraculously with almost 80 votes in the Senate, showing the broad bipartisan support there is all across this country for keeping our government open--will extend their pay by a couple of paychecks. That is really important. But I am here to say that our wildland firefighters need a permanent raise. Something we could do today is to pass the Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act to permanently extend the pay increase in the bipartisan infrastructure law. Believe me, that is the least we could do for these men and women. We owe our wildland firefighters so much more than just fair pay. They deserve paid leave, housing benefits, and mental health care. That is why I have introduced Tim's Act with Congressman Neguse, who is also my colleague from Colorado, which would provide all of that and ensure that every wildland firefighter makes at least $20 an hour. That doesn't seem unreasonable. Our bill is named for Tim Hart, a smokejumper who lost his life after parachuting into a wildland fire in New Mexico. This is a photo of Tim Hart. I have been fortunate--more fortunate than you can imagine--to meet Michelle, Tim's wife, who is upholding his legacy through her relentless support of what she calls ``Tim's fire family.'' And that is what I meant the other day, was a family. That is what anybody here--if you had been here or had been in Grand Junction--would have thought. And Michelle has been kind enough to share a bit about Tim with me. Tim was a practical joker. He loved a glass of rye whiskey neat, and he loved Halloween. But mostly, he loved his calling. He loved his passion, being a wildland firefighter. Every year he would consider it all worth it: the bad pay, sleeping out of his truck, leaving Michelle to put his life at risk. And every year, the answer was yes. Every year, the answer was, yes, it is worth it. He answered yes for his country, his brothers and sisters in fire, and for his love of our Nation's landscape. These firefighters are much more than the blazes that they battle, and the least we could do is pay them a living wage. As I mentioned, there is a saying among wildland firefighters, which is, ``They pay us in sunsets.'' I am here today to tell you that is not enough. It is not enough. It is this country's duty to support these men and women, our Nation's duty to support these firefighters who are defending us. There is nobody else who is going to step into the breach if we lose them. Someday, there will be somebody who is coming to this floor, standing here from the State of Colorado or maybe the Commonwealth of Virginia who is going to say: If only we had done it differently back then. We need to keep this government open. The Nation depends on it. We need to permanently raise wildland firefighter pay. And after we do that, I hope we will come together to pass Tim's Act to give our wildland firefighters just a little bit of what they finally deserve. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I am sorry that the Senator from Alabama has objected tonight again. I think this is the seventh time that we have been out here having this conversation, when I have been trying to move ahead the promotions of our Defense Department and he has, in an unprecedented manner, opposed it. For 230 years, nobody in this Chamber has done what the Senator from Alabama is doing--putting a hold on the military promotions of people in uniform, of the flag officers of our Department of Defense, who ordinarily come through here in a customary way to get approved by the Senate, for obvious reasons--because we need them. They are for our national security. They have sacrificed their entire adult lives. They have sacrificed time with their families. They have sacrificed everything for this country. Now they have been put on a list to be promoted, and the Senator from Alabama has put a hold on them, which has never happened before in the history of the United States For somebody who has put this Senate to a grinding halt month after month after month, he has picked an odd argument with which to defend his position. He has said, time and time again, that what he is doing actually doesn't matter, that what he is doing in the face of Democratic and Republican--not that it matters, because the Secretary of Defense, you know, shouldn't think of himself as a Democrat or a Republican. But the people who have served in Democratic and Republican administrations have said over and over again that he is compromising our national security, which is, of course, exactly the conclusion that anyone who is looking at this with common sense would believe, which is that our generals and our admirals actually make a difference and that the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff actually makes a difference. If that is not the case, we are in worse trouble than I thought. If it is the case, if what he is saying is right and that it doesn't matter, that it doesn't make any difference, then how can he claim to be acting on this incredibly important principle since it doesn't matter? As he says, these military positions are being fulfilled by acting officials--by acting officials. He says the generals, as I say, aren't important, that the admirals aren't important, and that they can be filled by acting officials because we don't need a Marine Corps Commandant. In his mind, it doesn't matter. We don't need an Army Chief of Staff. We don't need a Chief of Naval Operations. We don't need a nominee for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. All of those positions are up for promotion right now, and every single one is being blocked by the Senator from Alabama and by the people in this Chamber who are supporting him on this unprecedented hold. By the way, I haven't talked about this in the seven times I have been out here, but I have heard from people about this since, so let me just mention the incredible unfairness of this hold to the families who are supporting and serving with them, who are living with these members of the Armed Forces, many of whom have spent their entire careers working to get to the point that they are in right now--to be promoted to positions with the most significant responsibilities they have ever held. As for the decisions that have been made on the way here--to miss the soccer games of their kids; to make a decision to accept a promotion that takes you to a foreign land that is distant from your family, that is distant from your community--there is a disruption in people's lives who now don't know where to put their kids in school because the Senator from Alabama has put on his blanket hold, which he says doesn't matter. These are people who wear the uniform of the United States. They are not politicians, not that that matters either, but they are people who wear the uniform of this country, who have given their lives and their careers to this country, and he says that holding up these promotions doesn't matter. By the way, I am not going to get distracted by this, and I am not going to criticize his coaching career tonight or his football record, as he said. The Senator from Kansas, I know, won't let me get away with that, so I am not going to do it. I would even say the Senator from Kansas would have to admit, I hope, that this is an odd position for a coach to take--that the coaches don't matter in our military and that our admirals and our generals and the people who rally the troops don't matter. You know, this is a little bit like saying the Denver Broncos didn't need Mike Shanahan to win two consecutive Super Bowls in 1997 and 1998 or that the Denver Nuggets, this year, didn't need Michael Malone to win their first NBA championship or--not to criticize his record--that the University of Alabama didn't need Nick Saban to win eight SEC championships. Of course, it matters. Leadership matters. Leadership matters probably more in the Armed Forces than it matters anywhere else, and that is the reason that we are here. He knows exactly what he is doing, and he understands the damage that he has inflicted, and there is a reason he is the only Senator in 230 years who has done this. What is it? What is it that he wants to bring the country's attention to? What is he asking the country to pay attention to? He is saying that he is standing up for the sanctity of life. He said that tonight. He is claiming that it is easy to describe these policies as the woke Biden administration distorting the Defense Department to serve their woke policy goals. What he wants the American people to believe is that he is stopping the government from paying for abortions, and that is simply not what he is doing because that is not what is happening. That is not what is at issue here. He says that the Dobbs decision doesn't have anything to do with what he is doing or with this case, and that is totally wrong. Last year, as everybody in America knows, the Supreme Court of the United States, for the first time since Reconstruction, stripped the American people of a fundamental freedom, a fundamental constitutional right. That has not happened in this country since Reconstruction, but it happened this year. It happened this year in the Dobbs case. It happened when Justice Alito, writing for the majority, said that if it wasn't a freedom in 1868, it is not a freedom today. And that was the most glorious--I would say inglorious, but he would say glorious--expression of his judicial ideology of originalism that we have ever seen on the Court. It came after 50 years--it is worth going through this history because he blew it off so quickly--after 50 years of a concerted political effort to overturn a woman's right to choose in this country; to run elections based on taking that freedom away, that right away; to pack the courts with judges who would take that freedom away; to create a judicial ideology that barely existed. The ink was barely dry on the law review articles that Justice Scalia--then-Attorney Scalia--was writing when I was in law school that were claiming that these originalists had a fundamental understanding of what the Founders' perspective was and understanding was when they founded this country, when they wrote the Constitution. Now we have seen it manifested in this opinion by Justice Alito, where he says that if it wasn't a freedom in 1868, it is not a freedom today. I don't want the pages or anybody else who is here tonight to be fooled just because they used the word ``originalism.'' That is the most brilliant political name, the most brilliant political label that has ever been attached to any ideology probably in the history of humankind--certainly in the history of our country--because it claims that they know what the Founders' actually wanted when they founded this country, which, of course, is ridiculous on its face for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the Founders had fundamental disagreements with each other about all kinds of things. Anybody who has studied our constitutional history to any degree knows that and knows the Constitution was a product of compromise and consensus and agreement and disagreement. Some of the Founders, I am sad to say, owned slaves and fought very hard for the protection of human slavery in the United States of America, and their legacy will be with us to the end of our days because of what they did at the founding. There are other Founders who fought, who were abolitionists, who said: This is wrong. We should get rid of slavery. The Constitution, just like our pieces of legislation around here, is littered with--is littered with--those kinds of compromises. Some of them are ones that are glorious, and some of them are ones that are inglorious. (Mr. OSSOFF assumed the Chair.) I dwell on this, Mr. President, because it is important for people to understand that this didn't come from nowhere. It is important to understand that we are at a moment when they have achieved their 50- year ambition, which is to create an originalist majority on the Supreme Court of the United States to reverse Roe v. Wade, among other things, but that is clearly the most important thing to them. In a moment of maybe political distress, realizing that they had actually succeeded in their wildest dreams to achieve something that, I can tell you, speaking for myself in my advanced age, when I was in law school, would have been unimaginable, which is that in the United States, we would reverse Roe v. Wade in the year 2023--that I would travel the streets of Colorado with my daughters, and we would look up at the billboards advertising certain stuff in Colorado and realize that we live in a country that was legalizing marijuana on the one hand and making abortion illegal at the same time. That is something we couldn't have imagined. That is something we would not have foreseen. But nobody, when I was in law school, would have believed that you could have gotten five Justices of the Supreme Court to agree with the logic that if it was not a freedom in 1868, when women didn't even have the right to vote in this country, it is not a freedom today, and it is as simple as that. It is as straightforward as that. When that opinion was reached in Dobbs, then you started to hear people say: Well, don't worry about it. That is just a State's rights issue. You don't need to worry about that. Laboratory of democracy--we are just going to see what the States decide to do. The first problem with that, of course, is that we are talking about a fundamental freedom. We are talking about a fundamental right. We are talking about, in my judgment, a civil right. That is the first issue. That is something that shouldn't be decided State by State by State. But it turned out that they actually meant what they said. This wasn't just an experiment in democracy; this was an attempt to ban abortion in the United States of America. Since Dobbs was decided, 21 States have banned abortion or restricted access. Last week, Iowa passed a 6-week abortion ban. Most women don't even know they are pregnant at 6 weeks. The leading candidate for President on their side of the aisle, who is not named Donald Trump, signed an abortion ban in his State, the State of Florida, that 65 percent of Floridians oppose, that bans abortion at 6 weeks, and he did it at 11 o'clock at night. Why do you think he did that at 11 o'clock at night? Maybe because he knew that what seemed like the thing to do on rightwing radio was going to be a lot less popular with the voters in Florida and, I would say, the voters across the United States of America who are deeply concerned about protecting this civil right, who are deeply concerned about protecting freedom and a woman's right to choose and all the implications for equality that come to the fore when you are facing questions like this. Those are the questions we are facing right now in the wake of the Defense Department in good faith trying to grapple with the change in the law brought about by the majority of the Supreme Court stripping away this fundamental freedom and stripping away this fundamental right. There was a time when women serving in our military would have some assurance that they were going to have minimal access to reproductive healthcare no matter where they served. That was the law of the land before Dobbs. That is what Roe v. Wade said. But now they don't have that minimal access. The Department of Defense, in the wake of the decision in Dobbs--not a decision, I assume, they would have wanted--is trying to grapple with that in ways that make sense for the men and women who serve in our military. They are basically trying to say: Let us treat women the same as everybody else who is serving in the military. In response to Dobbs, the Pentagon released three policies. Let me tell you something. Let me tell you something. We are going to have a debate in this country about what Dobbs means when it comes to access to a woman's right to choose, and the consensus that has existed around here for a long time has been upset by that. We are going to have a debate about that. I am sure about that. But I just want to say that it is absolutely false that the Defense Department has created a situation where--they are suggesting that they are funding--taxpayers-- abortions. That is what the Senator from Alabama says. I hope that people who are supporting him on this floor know that is false. They know that is not true. That is not what the Defense Department is doing. The Defense Department has not violated the Hyde amendment. The Defense Department, faced with this decision in Dobbs, did three things. They said: If you need reproductive healthcare or if you need an abortion, we will pay for your travel to go from a State like Alabama, where you can get jailed, I guess, for up to 99 years if you are a doctor who performs abortion, to a State like Colorado that has enshrined Roe v. Wade, that we will pay your way. That is not special treatment; that is the treatment everybody gets for a medical service that is not provided near their base. The second thing they said was that they were going to allow paid leave while you are getting your reproductive healthcare, just like everybody else who is going to get a medical procedure gets. And we are going to give you a little bit of additional time on this--what can be a very difficult subject for the reasons everybody here knows--to talk to your commanding officer and inform them that you are pregnant. That is it. That is it. That is it. It is not more than that. So what I would ask everybody in this Chamber, whether you are pro- life or whether you are pro-choice or something else, where everybody across America who is suffering now because we are not able to promote the flag officers in the U.S. military--what I would ask you to consider, please, is what Senator Tuberville will win if he wins. What will Senator Tuberville win if he wins? He will ensure that women are going to be treated worse than men in the Department of Defense. He will ensure that women will be treated differently, unequally, and unfairly because, unlike anyone else who needs a medical procedure, they will have to pay for their own travel out of, let's just say, Alabama or other States that have banned abortion, to be able to access an abortion. Unlike everybody else--unlike everybody else--they will have to take unpaid leave while they are trying to undergo that medical procedure or a medical procedure that could lead to an abortion. I don't think most people in this country who are pro-life would think that women should be treated differently in that respect, discriminated against. I think they would take the view that, if you are serving in the U.S. Armed Forces and you are serving in a State that has banned abortion and you are pregnant, and you have decided-- you have made a judgment on your own or with your family or with your doctor--that the right answer for you and for your family is to go to another State and have an abortion--I think most people would say that you ought to have the right to do that, that you shouldn't be discriminated against if that is your judgment. That doesn't mean you are pro-choice or pro-life. It means that people can make that determination and that people shouldn't be discriminated against. I have to say, Mr. President, it is almost as if he is punishing them for the rule that the Department of Defense has promulgated and that he wants to try to make this a case of the Biden administration overreaching, distorting the Department of Defense, bending DOD to its will, infusing the Department of Defense with some sort of woke strategy. I think it is really important for the American people to understand what is at stake here. This is not a game. This is not a game when you are holding up every promotion of every single flag officer at DOD. This is not a game when all you are talking about is whether we are going to have a country that discriminates against people or whether people are going to be treated equally. This isn't a game when the question is, Are you going to have the ability to have your leave paid for, your travel paid for, to have a little extra time to talk to your commanding officer about the decision that you are going to have to face? Why in the world would we want to make life more difficult for people who are in that condition or circumstance? Why are we blaming them for a rule that they had nothing to do with writing and that the DOD had the ability to promulgate? The Department of Justice has made that clear. It defies common sense. It defies common sense. And tonight we heard him say that he is here because he is trying to defend the sanctity of life. That is what he said. And I have said out here and I will say again that I believe that people in this country have strong differences of opinion when it comes to a woman's right to choose and when it comes to abortion and that I think it is really important that people respect that. The Presiding Officer and I actually have had this conversation over the years about that, and I believe it. I think that people can have very different moral points of view here. I think that people can have very different religious points of view about this. I have concluded, for myself, that I think this is a decision that is much better left--partly because it is such a difficult decision, it is a much better decision to be left to a woman herself, consulting with whomever she wants to consult with--her doctor, her family--than it is for Michael Bennet to impose myself on that decision or for Senator Tuberville to impose himself on that decision. Tonight, we heard him say that he thinks that DOD--that somehow this money could be used to pay for late abortions in this country and who wouldn't be for stopping late abortions in America; everybody would want to stop late abortions. I would think, if you studied the matter, if you asked the question, ``What is a late abortion in America? What does happen?'' that what you discover is, not surprisingly, that 1 percent of abortions in America, or less than 1 percent, are late abortions in America, and they are situations where women--moms, mostly moms--have made the decision I say it--because it is going to be moms and dads--but, often, mostly moms-- who have made the decision to have a child, to pick a name, to pick out the furniture for a bedroom, and then something has gone terribly wrong, something nobody in this Chamber would ever wish on anybody they knew. And sometimes those are circumstances where--against all expectations, against all promise, against all hope, against all joy-- somebody has to make a decision to have a late-term abortion. Is that really the moment that we want Senator Tuberville helping to make that decision? Is that really when we want the Federal Government helping to make that decision? I don't think so. But I think we shouldn't be surprised that we are here with this extreme measure that he has taken in the Senate, a reflection of what is an extreme ideology. He has called abortion ``infanticide.'' He has called abortion ``this generation's Holocaust.'' He won't be satisfied until he subjects women in his State to the draconian measures that Alabama has legislated. There are no exceptions for rape or incest in Alabama. If you are a doctor and you perform an abortion, you can go to jail for up to 99 years in Alabama. Just today, Mr. President, we found out that the Alabama attorney general--like the attorney general from Mississippi, I think it was-- wants to record information and is demanding that information be supplied to the government on women who have traveled out of State to seek abortion services. That is a pretty dystopian view of where we are as a country. I don't understand how you could say you are on the side of freedom and be trying to hunt the information down for American citizens who are making a decision that is in their interest or the interest of their family, to collect information on a lawful medical procedure, to try to prevent women from traveling across State lines in this country--in this country--in this democracy, this Republic. How do you say that you are on the side of freedom when you refuse to allow women to have the same opportunity to travel for medical procedures as men, unless you think that somehow women aren't entitled to the same freedoms as men? How do you make the case--I don't know-- that you stand for freedom? You might stand for something else than to stand for freedom when you say that you are in a better position, as an elected politician from a State, to make judgments about a woman's pregnancy than she is. This is a freedom to discriminate. This is a freedom to oppress people. We are in a tough place tonight because of what the Senator from Alabama has done. I acknowledge that his State is really different from mine. Colorado really values freedom, and Colorado really values privacy. By the way, I am sure the people of Alabama do too. I can't prove it here tonight, but I will bet you there are a lot of people in Alabama who think it is wrong to be holding up these flag officers and who, if they knew that this really was about paying, for example, for paid leave--not taxpayer-funded abortions, which is what we heard again tonight, which isn't true--that they would say: Man, this doesn't sound like the right battle that we are taking. It is like the 65 percent of people in Florida who are saying: What? Our Governor signed a bill at 11 p.m. at night to create a 6-week abortion ban in our State when there are women in Florida all the time who don't even know that they are pregnant at that time? Colorado has taken a different view. We are a libertarian State in some respects--a libertarian State, a Western State. We believe a decision about a woman's health belongs between a woman and her doctor and her family, if she chooses to involve them. We were the first State in America to decriminalize abortion before Roe v. Wade was even decided. We were the first State--Colorado--to codify the right to choose after Dobbs. And that is a totally different view of the world than Alabama has, and I accept that. But the reason why we are here is we have got to figure out what to do in a post-Dobbs world, where that minimum threshold, that constitutional freedom on which so many generations of Americans-- especially American women, but Americans--have relied has been stripped away. And in my opinion, in the meantime, we ought to be willing to say that this is a decision that should be left to women, to make this decision in their interest and for themselves. It is not my job or the Senator from Alabama's job to substitute his position, his decision, to effectively say that we are going to reward your service, your willingness to serve in the Department of Defense, when you have been sent, through no fault of your own or decision of your own, to a place like Alabama that has banned abortion in this country--we are not only going to allow you to make that decision, but we are going to say that you have got to pay your own way out of here; that, unlike any other person, you can't take paid leave. I think that is an extreme position, Mr. President, and I think it is an absurd position to believe that we are not hurting our national defense by not confirming these generals and these admirals and these other people who are up for promotion and that it doesn't somehow degrade our military readiness, when it obviously does. And every single person in this Chamber knows that it does. At a time when Putin is in Ukraine and China is saber-rattling in the Pacific, this is the last thing we need to do. There is a reason why our friends in Ukraine are working so hard to try to take out the leadership in Putin's army, for God's sake--because it matters who is in command, as a matter of your national defense, as a matter of your national security, as a matter of your willingness or your ability to be able to effectively fight. So I am at the end tonight, Mr. President. I apologize to the floor staff, once again, for keeping us here as late as I have. I apologize to the young pages who are here, in particular, not just for that fact but because they are coming of age at a moment in American history when we are coughing up fundamental rights, instead of extending those rights to people. But that is what this battle has to be about. That is what this battle is about. That is why it is so important that when something like this happens, that we call it out and that even people who are natural allies or otherwise would be natural allies of a particular political position might in this instance say ``Man, that tactic is really self-defeating'' or might in this instance say ``Please at least tell the American people candidly what it is you are doing.'' I think the American people, if they understood that, would say we should do our job and approve these nominations. I think the American people, in the years ahead and the decades ahead, are going to fix the decision that the Dobbs Court just did. There is no doubt in my mind that the American people are not going to stand for Justice Alito's America where if it wasn't a freedom in 1868, it is not a freedom today. We have come too far for that to be our point of view. We owe too much to this next generation of Americans and even the generation that is coming after them, believe it or not, for that to be our point of view. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the vote on the Cruz-Manchin amendment No. 926 be at a time to be determined by the majority leader, following consultation with the Republican leader, on Thursday, July 20, with all provisions in the previous order remaining in effect.

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to executive session to consider the following nominations en bloc: Calendar Nos. 46 through No. 52, No. 82 through 107, No. 110 through No. 113, No. 130 through 139, No. 180 through No. 205, No. 224 through No. 226, No. 228 through No. 234, No. 236 through No. 246, No. 248 through No. 249; that the nominations be confirmed en bloc; the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate; that no further motions be in order to any of the nominations; that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action; and the Senate then resume legislative session.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I rise to honor LTC James Harvey III, a Tuskegee Airman and decorated fighter jet pilot in celebration of his 100th birthday on July 13, 2023. Lieutenant Colonel Harvey flew as part of the 99th Fighter Squadron in World War II before becoming the first African-American U.S. Air Force pilot to fly in Korean airspace during the Korean war. The U.S. Army was segregated when Lieutenant Colonel Harvey joined in 1943, but his perseverance and heroism, both at home and in the skies, continue to inspire us all. Lieutenant Colonel Harvey excelled in high school as senior class president and valedictorian. Drafted in April 1943, he was initially assigned to the U.S. Army Air Corps as an engineer. It was there, on a train bound for Fort Meade, he first encountered prejudice and discrimination. While in the Army, he worked to carve airstrips out of jungle terrain before applying for cadet training. He later received his wings and commission in 1944 at Tuskegee Army Air Field. From there, Lieutenant Colonel Harvey was assigned to the 332nd Fighter Group's 99th Fighter Squadron, where he served as one of the original members of the ``Tuskegee Airmen.'' The 332nd Fighter Group was noted as one of the Army Air Forces' most successful and most-decorated escort groups and helped encourage the eventual integration of the U.S. Armed Forces. Lieutenant Colonel Harvey's skill stood out even among those decorated pilots. In 1949, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force arranged an aerial weapons competition among the best pilots in each group. In May of that year, Lieutenant Colonel Harvey joined his group's three- member team to compete at the inaugural ``Top Gun'' team competition, which was hosted at the Las Vegas Air Force Base, now known as Nellis Air Force Base. Lieutenant Colonel Harvey's team led the competition from the beginning to the end, ultimately winning against teams flying far more advanced equipment. Lieutenant Colonel Harvey's service to the Air Force did not end there. He was the first African American fighter jet pilot to see combat in the Korean war. On October 16, 1950, he led an element of four F-80s in close support to a bomber mission under adverse weather to attack enemy troops three miles north of Yongsan, Korea. Flying at a low ceiling of 800 feet, Lieutenant Colonel Harvey's flight found the enemy encampment and immediately inflicted heavy damage. For this engagement, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, along with multiple Air Medals. His heroism on that day and on the 140 total missions he flew during the Korean war will never be forgotten. After the Korean war, he served as a flight commander, test pilot, assistant group operations officer, flight safety officer, and battle staff training officer for the Commanding General of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, NORAD. Lieutenant Colonel Harvey retired from the Air Force on May 31, 1965, joined Oscar Mayer as a corporate salesman, and settled down with his family of four daughters in Denver, where he still resides. Lieutenant Colonel Harvey won numerous awards during his decorated 22-year career in the U.S. Army Air Corps/U.S. Air Force. These awards include the WWII Victory Medal, Air Medal with 10 oakleaf clusters, Good Conduct Medal, National Defense Service Medal, and the United Nations Service Medal. Lieutenant Colonel Harvey, along with every member of the Tuskegee Airmen, received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2006. As Americans, we owe a debt of gratitude to Lieutenant Colonel Harvey for his heroism. His service to our Armed Forces, recognized by 11 medals during his Air Force career through segregation and discrimination, is an inspiration for generations to come. It is in this spirit of gratitude that I rise today to honor Denver's own Lieutenant Colonel James Harvey III on his 100th birthday.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I am sorry I didn't have the chance to say thank you to our colleague from Connecticut for his speech tonight about loneliness in the United States. I was grateful that he gave it and grateful that he is in the Senate and grateful to know that another parent of young kids has the perspective that he has shared tonight because I think it is so important. And strangely enough, I am here to talk about something similar tonight. First, Madam President, I will put it away because it is not supposed to be on the floor, but I wanted to come here tonight to talk a little bit about this smartphone and the world of social media, the world of machine learning algorithms and generative AI that has now been put at our fingertips. The rise of smartphones and social media is one of the most rapid, profound, and, I would argue, poorly understood transformations in American life in our entire history. If you had asked me when I was the age of the pages who are here, when I was growing up, and you had said to me: Someday, Michael, there is going to be a device--well, here is the device--there is going to be a device that looks like this; it doesn't even have a wire next to it, that would have been astonishing in and of itself. How can an electronic device not have a wire? But it does not have a wire. Not only does it not have a wire, but you can FaceTime anybody on Earth the way Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock FaceTimed each other. The Presiding Officer knows what I am talking about. These folks may not know who Captain Kirk was or who Mr. Spock was. But the idea that you could reach somebody and communicate with them on video, on a telephone, or a device that had no wires, that alone would have been shocking. If you had said: Well, let me tell you something else about that device, I would say: OK. What else can you tell me about that device? And you said: Well, you can buy any book that has ever been written by humans, basically, on that device. And if you want it, you can make a choice. You can have it digitally, and it will just download immediately on your device, or you can order it, and it can be at your house by tonight, if you would rather have a print version of the book rather than getting it digitally. And I will tell you something else, Michael, it will translate any language that you care to hear. I was, today, with the CEO of Google who was in my office talking about how one of their projects now is to help recover and sustain lost languages or languages we are in danger of losing in this country and around the world, which I think is a worthy project. We definitely, in my State, are at risk of losing Native American languages that really are at risk. But in any case, if you said to me: You can translate any language or you can translate yourself into any language, and somebody would ask: What do you think that device is worth? In 1983 or 1987, when I was graduating from high school or college, I think I probably would have said that is probably--I can't imagine what it is worth--millions of dollars. Millions of dollars. To have every book that has ever been published that is in every library in the world? Millions of dollars, to be able to translate every language that you can translate? Millions of dollars. And if you told me that it actually only cost a few hundred dollars, which it does, and that everybody on planet Earth would have one, which is almost in many ways the case, I would have asked what you were smoking. But it is true. It is true. And that is the world we have inhabited for almost 20 years. It is not new: the digital age, the information age, the age of ubiquitous smartphones, social media, and a handful of digital platforms that control them. And for all of the extraordinary convenience and extraordinary productivity and entertainment that these technologies have allowed, as a country, we still haven't come to grips with the profound cost to our economy, to our society, and to our democracy, and that is before we even consider AI. This is what everybody around here is talking about, what some would call the most consequential technology for humanity since the invention of fire. But unlike fire, this technology can improve itself, and it has the potential to move faster and transform more than any innovation in our history, for better or for worse. Even in its early days, generative AI has already demonstrated the power to write the code to animate and even compose in ways that would have been absolutely unimaginable 20 years ago or 10 years ago, to say nothing of when we were in school. It is easy to forget how different the world was just 20 years ago. Twenty years ago, General Motors topped the Fortune 500 list. Apple was 285, and Amazon didn't even make the cut. Twitter was still an idea somewhere in the recesses of Jack Dorsey's head. Mark Zuckerberg was barely old enough to vote, even though he likely already acquired the undeveloped view of the First Amendment that he seems to hold to this day. No one on this planet had ever heard of Gmail or TikTok or ChatGPT. That was only 20 years ago, but it might as well have been 200 years ago. Today, Americans spend over 2 hours a day on social media, more time socializing online than in person. The average TikTok user in our country spends 90 minutes a day on the app--more than 3 weeks a year. Facebook now hosts 2.7 billion friends--a half a billion more souls than Christianity. Twitter has fewer followers, but they include every single politician--probably almost every single person in this Chamber--every journalist, every TV producer in America, withering our political debate to 280-character effervescent posts. In just two decades, a few companies--less than a handful, really-- have transformed much of humanity's daily life: how we amuse ourselves, how we discover, how we learn, how we shop, how we connect with friends and family and elected representatives, how we pay attention, how we glimpse our shared reality. This transformation is a staggering testament to American innovation. And we can all think of a dozen ways that platforms have improved our lives. I, for one, have been entirely relieved of the stress of sitting in rush-hour traffic, wondering if there is a better route. I am now confident that Waze is guiding me like my own personal North Star, and that has made an enormous difference to my sense of well-being. But this dramatic shift from our analog to our digital human existence has never been guided and has never been informed by the public interest. It has always been dictated by the unforgiving requirements of a few gigantic American corporations and their commercial self-interests. And what are those interests? To make us better informed citizens? To make us more productive employees? To make us happier people? Of course not. It is to turn a profit and protect their profits through their own economic dominance, and they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. This is the market capitalization of some of the largest industries in America. You can see at the top here that this is Apple and Microsoft and Alphabet and Amazon and Meta combined. They are at $9 trillion in market cap. To get to $9 trillion, you basically have to add up our entire banking sector, our entire oil and gas sector, and our entire pharmaceutical sector just to give you a sense of the size of the market cap of these companies alone and the reason they have become so dominant. Through it all, unlike almost any small business in Boulder, CO, or in any town in New Hampshire, these digital platforms have remained almost entirely unregulated--moving fast and breaking things, as they have famously said, and forcing the rest of us to sweep up the wreckage. There is another way these companies are different from the brick- and-mortar companies in Boulder, CO, or in New Hampshire. Digital platforms aren't burdened by the fixed costs of an analog world. Beyond the blinking lights of their energy-intensive server farms, their businesses are on the cloud, a place where no one works and that requires little physical investment. They have no need to use their profits to invest in America by building the kind of infrastructure these other industries do or had. Unlike their industrial forbearers, today's platforms have devised a new digital barrier to entry to protect their profits. It is different from the way it was in the past. They have figured out how to protect their profits and economic dominance, and we know that digital barrier as the network effect. The network effect means that platforms become exponentially more valuable as more people join and spend more of their waking moments there--more valuable to users because their friends and families are on it; more valuable to the platforms themselves, which hoover up our identities for their profits and train their machine-learning algorithms; more valuable for advertisers, who pay the platforms for our identities to barrage us with ads; and so valuable--so valuable--to the markets, where the top tech companies now equal, roughly, a quarter of the entire S&P 500. In the name of building this barrier to entry--this network effect-- they have stolen our identities and our privacy, and they have addicted us to their platforms. The platforms' imperative to grow big and stay big poses a very basic question: How do you get people on your platform, and how do you keep them there? For platforms like Apple and Amazon, it is to sell products that people want, to offer subscriptions, and, if they are lucky, to enmesh them in your closed ecosystems. For social media platforms with free services, like Meta and Twitter and TikTok, the answer is more sinister, I am afraid--to harvest as much data on your users as you can, to feed that data to your algorithms to serve up whatever content it takes to keep people hooked so you can keep selling ads. That is the core business model. That is the model that has led to these market caps. Although this particular business model has bestowed enormous value on a few companies, it has imposed profound costs on everybody else, even in places we don't necessarily expect it. A senior law enforcement official just told me, within the last couple of weeks, that social media is the ``last mile of every fentanyl and meth transaction in America.'' The Presiding Officer knows that in being from New Hampshire. It took my staff 20 seconds to find illegal drugs for sale on Instagram. I would ask the pages, please, to avert your eyes here. The image on the left appears to be pills of MDMA. The image on the right shows you how to contact the dealer through Whatsapp and pay him through another app called Wickr. Below that are all of the places you can purchase this stuff, including in Denver, CO, where we are having a terrible, terrible problem with fentanyl and with methamphetamines. Even though the vast majority of Americans never interact with content like this, we all pay a price. Millions of Americans have surrendered to private companies an endless feed of data on their lives, all for the convenience of being served up self-gratifying political content on YouTube, less traffic, or better movie recommendations. Most Americans have made that trade without ever really knowing it. The young people who are here today don't know a world where that trade was something that wasn't automatically made. Any suggestion that we have made that trade fairly, I think, is ludicrous. It mocks any sense of consent. These are contracts of adhesion, really. As a society, we have never asked how much of our identity or our privacy we are willing to trade for convenience and entertainment. We have never had a negotiation with Mark Zuckerberg about that. Until today, these questions have been resolved entirely to the benefit of the platforms' bottom lines. I suppose it would be one thing if the only consequences of the digital platforms' use of our data were to sell better advertising-- although even that would be a fairly pathetic concession, I think, of our own economic interests and of the precious value of our data and our privacy and our identities. But, as every parent knows and as every kid suspects, better advertising is not the only consequence of this model. Over the years, digital platforms have imported features from gaming and from gambling--from brightly covered displays to flashing notifications, to likes--and they unleash secret algorithms to reverse- engineer our most basic human tendencies, which are to seek out tribe approval, conformity, and to create an almost irresistible feed of content. Americans now spend a third of their waking hours on their phones, which we check an average of 344 times a day. In speaking as a parent who has raised three daughters in this era, we certainly have not agreed to run a science experiment on our children with machine- learning algorithms and generative AI chatbots that the companies themselves barely understand at all. While we are still coming to understand the specific role social media plays in the epidemic of teen mental health, the early evidence gives us plenty of reason to worry. Here is what we do know: In 2006, Facebook became available to the general public. The following year, Apple released the iPhone. By 2012, just 5 years later, half of Americans had a smartphone. Today, everyone has one. Everybody has got one, I think, except for Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, who is still using a flip phone. A similar story unfolded with teens and with social media. By 2012, about half of teens used social media. Today, 95 percent of teens use it. When my parents excoriated me--and they did, just like your parents excoriated you for being glued to the television in the 1970s--the average American teen watched TV for 4 hours a day. Today, teens are on their screens for twice as long. Half are online almost constantly, they say. More than one in five 10th grade girls spend 7 or more hours a day on social media. That is 35 hours a week. In France, that is a full-time job. As our children retreat into the digital world of someone else's making, they pay for it. They are paying for it with less sleep and exercise and time with their friends, as my colleague from Connecticut was talking about. All of this has contributed to an epidemic of teen anxiety, to depression, and to loneliness, especially among teenage girls. Today, girls who use social media heavily are two to three times as likely to say they are depressed, compared to those who use it less often or not at all. And since the introduction of smartphones and social media, we have seen a dramatic and unprecedented rise in serious depression among Americans under 25. To be fair, I am not saying social media is the only cause of this. But as the father of three daughters who have grown up in its shadow, I know it has played a role. Kids are in despair in our country. Today, almost half of teens believe they can't do anything right. Almost half of teens say: I don't enjoy life, and my life is not useful. All of these numbers began to rise around the time that smartphones and social media began to pervade the country and hook a generation to their screens. Over this same period, we have tragically seen the suicides of young people increase 60 percent compared to 2007. I see this crisis of teen mental health everywhere I go in Colorado-- everywhere I go in Colorado. Parents tell me about how social media has undermined their children's sense of well-being and especially-- especially--a girl's body image and sense of self. A teenager recently told me that the ``electronic bullying follows me home.'' ``There is no escape,'' she said, ``at any hour, on any day.'' And I felt the panic. I felt the panic of a parent who can't fix it and make it better. It felt like there was nothing that I could do. It was beyond my control to make it better. It has become common now, at the end of my townhalls, for parents to come up to me. They are usually not people--or they are often not people--who have come to the townhall to listen to the townhall; they are people who might be working the slide projector or who might have set the chairs out for people to sit in. They come to me after the talk is over, the conversation is over, and they will say something like: My daughter is 5 feet 10 inches, she is 105 pounds, and her confidence is in tatters because of the way she has interacted with social media and the way it has shredded her body image. All of my young staff and my two eldest daughters universally say how lucky they are to have avoided middle school in the age of social media or to have gone to middle school before there was social media. Their younger siblings aren't so lucky, and they know that about their younger siblings. Maybe the most poignant expression of this concern were the moms whom I met in the Mississippi Delta, in my wife's hometown of Marianna, AR, which is the county seat of Lee County, AR. One after the other of these moms told me that their kids in this rural, poor county in America just don't read because no book can compete with their phone-- even as the Silicon Valley executives who designed these phones send their kids to social media detox camps every single summer. That is not something that is available to these parents in Marianna. These parents work two or three jobs. They can't afford childcare. And they have to compete for their child's attention against algorithmic poison. They have never stood a chance, and neither have their kids. Now these parents also have to compete with generative AI, virtual reality, and the power they bestow to fully immerse yourself in the digital world. My constituents in Colorado are most worried about what digital platforms have done to their kids and their families. I will tell you, I don't have a bunch of data tonight about the causal link between social media and the phones and the mental health epidemic that is going on in America, especially among American youth, but there is no doubt that we are having that epidemic. There is no doubt that it correlates to the advent of the phone and social media. There is no doubt it has been compounded by COVID and the effects of that. This has been a hard time to be a young person in our country, to be a high school student, to be a college student, to have your life interrupted by a once-in-a-generation, once-in-100-years pandemic on top of everything else. I just think about all the kids like my daughter Anne, who spent so much of that time in her room at home on that phone. When I was superintendent of the Denver public schools 15 years ago, we were working, focused so much on student achievement. It is amazing the way things have changed. When I was asked about this--about education in America--long after I had been superintendent but before COVID happened, I had an easy answer back then. My answer was mental health. Mental health. Mental health. And that was pre-COVID. There isn't anybody in America who thinks things have gotten better since then. This is a tough time to be a kid in our country. It is a tough time to be a kid because of this dynamic. It is a tough time to be a kid because we haven't, as the Senator from New Hampshire has told us here over and over again, figured out how to stop this epidemic of fentanyl in this country, so that we are living in a time now, unlike when I was superintendent, where kids have to lobby their school nurses to be able to put antidotes in the nurse's office so their friends don't die because they took one pill that was labeled a prescription drug, and that pill killed them or almost killed them. We didn't do that--worry about that when I was superintendent 15 years ago. This is off-topic tonight, but add on to that the fact that in America--this is the only country in the world where the leading cause of death for kids is guns, and two-thirds of that is people killing people, other people, assaults or suicides. Only 5 percent are accidents. This is a tough time to be a kid in America. I would argue that a lot of what we are dealing with here is manmade, human-made. It is not just a natural occurrence out there, somehow, in the world. We have to come to grips with it. We have to understand it. Among other things, we need these companies, like other companies in the past, to share their data so that independent researchers can help us make the assessments we need to make in order to make the judgments we need to make to provide oversight--kind of like the tobacco companies finally had to cough up the data way back when. As I say, my constituents are most worried about this, these issues, about their kids and about their families, but they also worry a lot about the effect on our democracy, and they have a lot of reason to be concerned about that too. When I first joined the Senate, it was around the time of the so- called Twitter revolutions in Egypt and Libya and Tunisia that we then heralded as the Arab Spring. At the time, people in Washington and around the world hailed social media as a powerful tool for democracy. It didn't take long, though, for tyrants to turn those tools against democracy. The dictators who once feared social media soon harnessed it for their purposes--to track opponents, to dox critics, and to flood the zone with propaganda. Vladimir Putin understood this better than most. He saw the vast and unregulated power of social media over our democracy, and he wielded social media as a digital Trojan horse to inflame our divisions and undermine trust in our democracy. The damage inflicts us to this day. Ahead of the 2016 elections, Putin flooded our social media with disinformation. According to the Mueller report, the Russians ``conducted social media operations . . . with the goal of sowing discord in the U.S. political system.'' We know that, of course, now. They sought to fracture our country along every conceivable line-- race, religion, class, sexuality, politics--playing both sides. They didn't care. Half this stuff is pro-immigrant, for example; half is anti-immigrant. Half of it is pro-Muslim; half is anti-Muslim. What they wanted was to divide this country, to divide this democracy. By the way, it took us more than a year to figure out this was Russian propaganda and not just our own political discourse, which says a lot about our own political discourse, where we might want to reflect on that. The Russians played both sides over 10 million tweets and nearly 4,000 fake accounts. Imagine what Putin would have done with generative AI or could do with generative AI and the power to create fake images and videos that most of us would fail to distinguish from reality. Back in 2016, as I said, we let it all happen because we couldn't tell the difference between this discourse and our discourse. I published a book during my not-very-well-noticed campaign for President about this because I kept running into people--I can remember I ran into a senior at a nursing home in New Hampshire who was repeating stuff that I knew was Russian propaganda. He was saying: What are you going to do about it? I am not saying that you couldn't find something on the internet that is true. Obviously, there is a lot there. But he was repeating Russian propaganda, and he didn't have any idea. When I joined the Senate Intelligence Committee after that, I began to realize that this problem extended far beyond our borders and that it was serious. That is why 3 years ago I wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, warning him--warning him--that Facebook had become authoritarians' ``platform of choice'' to suppress their opposition around the world. The consequences have been horrific. In Myanmar, the United Nations named Facebook ``a significant factor'' in stoking communal violence against the Rohingya after it repeatedly ignored calls to remove hate speech and hire more staff who actually knew the country. Around the world, we have seen fake stories on these platforms spark violence--in India, in Sri Lanka, in Kenya, and on January 6, 2021, here in the United States of America. In the weeks before January 6, President Trump--our first President who ran his campaign and administration through Twitter--incited a mob to invade this Capitol. I remember sitting in a windowless room with the Presiding Officer in the Capitol on the 6th. We watched CNN as our fellow citizens invaded the U.S. Capitol with their racist banners and with their anti-Semitic t-shirts to ``save'' an election, they said, that had not been stolen. In these moments, we cannot bury our heads in our digital feeds. All of us are called upon to defend this democracy and to burnish our example at home. We can help--the people in this body can help by reining in the vast power of digital platforms and reasserting the interests of the American people and our public interest. The Americans who came before us would never have known about algorithms. They wouldn't have known about network effects. But they would recognize the challenge that we face, and their example should guide our way. The Founders themselves designed one of the most elegant forms of checks and balances to guard against tyranny. After Upton Sinclair exposed ghastly conditions in meatpacking facilities, in 1906, Teddy Roosevelt joined Congress to create the Food and Drug Administration. As broadcasting became more central to American life, in 1934, FDR and Congress created the Federal Communications Commission. After the 2009 financial crisis, President Obama and Congress established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In each case, Congress knew it lacked expertise to oversee complex new sectors of the economy, so it created independent bodies to empower--to empower--the American people. Today, we have no dedicated entity to protect the public interest, and we have been powerless as a result. That is why last year, I introduced a bill to create a Federal Digital Platform Commission. I reintroduced it earlier this month with our colleague Senator Welch from Vermont. We have essentially proposed an FCC for digital platforms--it is not really more complicated than that--an independent body with five Senate-confirmed Commissioners empowered to protect consumers, to protect competition, and to defend the public and the public's interest. The Commission would hold hearings, conduct research, pursue investigations, establish commonsense rules for the sector, and enforce violations with tough penalties. Most important, the Agency would finally put the American people in a negotiation with digital platforms that have amassed vast power beyond our imagination and over the American people's lives and the lives of our children. Previous Congresses knew they would never have the expertise to approve or disapprove new drugs, for example. We didn't have a debate on this floor about that because we knew that expertise would better lie with the FDA. We don't write the safety guidelines for airlines on this floor either. We have a commission that will do that. Why would we expect Congress to be able to regulate technologies that are moving at quantum speed like AI? It is not possible. And perhaps this is why Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT, testified that we urgently need a new regulator--assuming that he wasn't a deep fake. Some may say: We don't need a new government Agency. We already have the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice. These Agencies are staffed by hard-working public servants, but they don't have the expertise or the tools or the time to regulate this brandnew sector. And that was before generative AI. And I want to say, on that note, I am very grateful to Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, for his remarks earlier today. I completely agree that we need to chart a responsible course between promoting innovation in AI and ensuring the safety of our children and our democracy. And while I think a dedicated, expert Agency is the best solution, and I believe others will come to that judgment as well, I welcome the debate that we are going to have on this. And I am the first to admit that I don't have a monopoly on wisdom on anything but certainly on this. But whatever we do, we cannot accept another 20 years of digital platforms transforming American life with no accountability to the American people. We are still coming to terms with the harm from 20 years of unregulated social media. And we haven't come to grips with that. Every parent knows that. I shudder to imagine what our country will look like if we allow the same story to work its way out with AI. That particular technology may be new, but we face a familiar American juncture. We have been here before. In the late 19th century, when Gilded Age robber barons abused their dominance of the coal, steel, and railroad industries to stifle competition, to exploit workers and undermine democracy, government stepped in to assert the public interest. And, looking back, it is hard to imagine American life without the victories of that era--from basic antitrust laws and consumer protections to the direct election of Senators and the income tax. And I think, looking forward, we have similar questions to answer. What will our response be to the digital robber barons of our era that addict our children, that corrode our democracy and plunder our privacy, our identity, and our attention? Will we allow them to continue transforming American life according to their self-interest, or will we step up to safeguard the interests, civil liberties, and the freedoms of the American people? You know, especially for young people that are listening to this who might say: There is nothing you can do; the cat is out of the bag; you can't hold back the ocean--my answer to that is not very helpful because it is to recall something that young people here won't remember, but it is in my mind when I am talking to families and to young people in my State and I am listening to them talk about the mental health impacts of what they are facing. It reminds me of when the Cuyahoga River caught on fire in Cleveland. And that moment, for those of us who were around then, was so extraordinary because that unbelievable image of a river in America burning, catching on fire, flames shooting into the sky, that is what finally forced us to come to grips with the pollution that we were allowing to flow freely into our watersheds and into our communities. The same thing with our air. And we finally did something about it, and the country is better as a result. This is another case, by the way, just like those environmental regulations, where I think it is critically important for the United States, with our set of values and our commitments to democracy, to help set the international standards here and to not take standards from authoritarian regimes like China, for example. And that is a big risk if we don't act here. But I think we will, and I think we can. And I think that is going to not only give the American people a chance to negotiate with these companies but give America the chance to lead on questions that are fundamentally important for humanity. None of this is going to be easy. It never is. But when the stakes are nothing less than the health of our children and the health of our democracy, we have no choice but to try. And we should try. I think we have a unique responsibility to lead here, not just for the reasons that I just said but also because, after all, it was American companies that blazed the trail into the digital age and invited all of humanity to follow. And we now live in the world that they created, for better and for worse, with its wonders and with its conveniences but also with its risks and dangers and difficult questions. The same platforms that amplify a protester's cry for freedom in Iran also equip tyrants around the world to suppress democratic movements. The same technologies that liberated anyone to say anything also unleashed a perpetual cacophony, leaving all of us screaming louder to be heard. The dazzling features that brought the world online have also trapped us there, more connected but more alone, more aware but less informed--enthralled to our screens, growing more anxious, more angry and addicted by the day. Overcoming all of this will not be easy, but we can't simply hide under our covers or scroll through TikTok and hope these problems are going to solve themselves. That is our job. The health and future of our children lie in the decisions that we make or the decisions that we fail to make. Our objective, my objective to being here tonight, is not to hold the world back. In Colorado, we have always welcomed innovation, but we also understand that not all change is progress and that it is our job to harness these changes toward a better world. We are the first generations to steer our democracy in the digital age, and it is an open question whether democracy can survive in the world that digital platforms have created. I may be wrong, but the evidence so far does not fill me with confidence. It fills me with urgency--urgency to reassert the public interest; to reclaim our public square and exercise in self-government; to level the playing field for America's teens, for our parents, for teachers and small businesses who, for 20 years, have battled alone against some of the most powerful companies in human history. This is a fight worth having. This is a fight worth winning. And if we succeed, we may help save democracy not just in this country but around the world. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to legislative session and be in a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the en bloc consideration of the following set of resolutions: S. Res. 261, S. Res. 262, S. Res. 263, and S. Res. 264.

Mr. BENNET. I ask unanimous consent that the resolutions be agreed to; the preambles, where applicable, be agreed to; and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, all en bloc.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the President of the Senate be authorized to appoint a committee on the part of the Senate to join with a like committee on the part of the House of Representatives to escort His Excellency Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of the Republic of India, into the House Chamber for the joint meeting at 4 p.m. on Thursday, June 22, 2023.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I understand that there is a bill at the desk that is due for a second reading. The clerk will read the bill by title.

Mr. BENNET. In order to place the bill on the calendar under the provisions of rule XIV, I would object to further proceeding.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand adjourned until 10 a.m. on Thursday, June 22; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and morning business be closed; that following the conclusion of morning business, notwithstanding rule XXII, the Senate proceed to the consideration of Calendar No. 100, H.J. Res. 44, and that at 11:45 a.m., the joint resolution be considered read a third time and the Senate vote on passage; further, that following disposition of the joint resolution, the Senate proceed to executive session to resume consideration of treaty document 112-8, postcloture, and that at 1:45 p.m., amendment No. 136 be withdrawn, and all time be considered expired.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask that it stand adjourned under the previous order.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I have 16 requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders. Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate:

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, this is now the sixth time that I have been on this floor asking for unanimous consent so that the U.S. Senate can do its job to ratify, to approve the nominations of flag officers' promotions at the Department of Defense. That is something that we have done as a matter of course in the U.S. Senate for the last 230 years. No Senator in the history of the United States has ever prevented the Senate from proceeding with these nominations of flag officers. I certainly don't have to tell the Presiding Officer how important these promotions are, how critical they are. And observer after observer after observer has said that it is in the national security interest of the United States, not surprisingly, for this Senate to confirm these promotions, to ratify these promotions. We are compromising our national security when one Senator out of the whole 100 people decides that they are going to do something that no Senator has ever done in the history of the United States. No Senator has ever put a blanket hold on the promotions of flag officers, and there is a good reason for that, because if people are willing to play politics with that, they are playing politics with our national security. If they are willing to play politics with that, they are playing politics with the expectations of people who have spent an entire career defending the national security of this country, serving the public, serving in the Department of Defense, and who now have been promoted to a position of trust and responsibility. By the way, this doesn't just affect those people who are getting that promotion. It also affects the people who are below them who can't get the promotion that now is no longer vacant because they are stuck in the job that they are in. And I am shocked that somebody here would do this and pretend that this is just common: You know, this is the Senate. This is the way the Senate functions. This the way the Senate, as my colleague from Alabama has said, just does its business. This is not how the Senate ever does its business. It is not how the Department of Defense does its business. And it, particularly, I think, should be particularly grieving to the American people because of the reasons the Senator from Alabama is doing what he is doing. Tonight, we are here on basically the 1-year anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision. If you told me when I was in law school that a majority of the Supreme Court would join the majority opinion by Justice Alito that would say, if it wasn't a right or a freedom in 1868, it is not a freedom today-- if you told me that was the basis on which they were going to strip a fundamental freedom from the American people, I would have said that will never happen; it is never going to happen. That is what is happening, and that is the result of a 50-year crusade to overturn a woman's right to choose in the United States of America. It is the first time since Reconstruction that we have given up a fundamental right here. It is first time since Reconstruction that we have been stripped of our fundamental rights and our freedoms have been diminished, that they have grown smaller in the hands of a 50-year campaign that was waged to put four people on the Supreme Court--a majority on the Supreme Court--who subscribe to the best named doctrine I have ever heard named in American political history or anybody's political history, and that is the doctrine of originalism, a doctrine that was dressed up to create a scenario or a legal set of arguments that somehow there were a group of people in this society with such mystical powers that they were capable--unlike anybody else in America, they would be capable of divining the originality intent of the Founding Fathers, putting aside the fact, tonight, that everybody in this Chamber who studied the Constitution even for 10 minutes knows that the Founders had fundamental disagreements among themselves and that the Constitution itself was a product of these fundamental differences--not their fundamental consensus but the fundamental differences. There was consensus on some issues. There was compromise on other issues. But I dwell on that for a moment just to say, especially to people around here--maybe the age of the pages in the Senate--that you shouldn't give this theory of legal interpretation any great weight just because they dressed it up and called it something called originalism or they said somehow they could divine what the Founding Fathers said. Fundamentally, what it came down to in the case of the Supreme Court was that because abortion wasn't a freedom, as they said, in 1868--a country where women didn't even have the right to vote in the United States yet--that it was not going to be a freedom today, and they stripped the American people of this freedom. And there are people on this floor, people, you know, in the other party who spent 50 years trying to create a Supreme Court like this, basically since Ronald Reagan was our President. I think Ronald Reagan would be shocked by the extreme nature of the opinion that was rendered by Justice Alito, but who knows. What we do know is this has been a 50-year campaign that has been waged. And the second that the Supreme Court did what they have been shooting for the last 50 years, what they started to say was: Don't worry about it. It is not a big deal. This is just reverting to States' rights. This fundamental constitutional right, this fundamental constitutional freedom, it is just being reverted to the States. What has happened since then? Twenty States have banned abortion since that decision was made or restricted access. Nine of those States have no exceptions for rape or incest, like the State of Alabama, I think, which has an exception for the life of the mother. So there is a lot to worry about in this decision. There is a lot to worry about for our men and women in uniform. Before Dobbs, women in the military had at least some assurance that wherever the Pentagon sent them, they would have minimal access to reproductive care, a protected constitutional right, a protected freedom. That is no longer the case. One of the very first calls I got after Dobbs was decided was from a woman whom I know in Colorado who was an Air Force officer. She was a pilot. She told me her personal story, and then she said: I don't understand how they could have possibly made the decision they made because this is a fundamental readiness issue. Well, they didn't have to deal with that. They didn't have to deal with that fundamental issue of readiness. They didn't have to deal with the fundamental fact of how people every single day would be dealing with the loss of this right or the loss of this freedom because nothing in their interpretive doctrine requires them to do that. It only requires them to ask: Was it a freedom in 1868? Not a freedom today. And in response to this shocking development--and it is shocking. You know, if you are the age of the pages who are here, if you are my daughter's age--my oldest daughter is 23 years old--you are wondering how it is possible. We were having this conversation the other day. We were driving by a billboard in Colorado advertising some stuff in Colorado. Amazing thing that we could be, on the one hand, legalizing marijuana in this country and on the other hand, banning abortion. If you told me that when I was a teenager in America, I would have said: What are you smoking? That is impossible. That is impossible, and that is where we are. What the Supreme Court did in this case is fundamentally unpopular with the American people. The American people are angry that this has happened. It didn't happen by accident. This is a war that has been waged on a woman's right to choose. It is a war that has been waged for that doctrine of originalism. And a lot of people and a lot of institutions in America are having to make adjustments in the wake of this shocking development, and the Pentagon is one of those places. In the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, the Pentagon extended two policies that already exists for servicemembers if a medical procedure is not available near their duty station. One was the travel allowance. If you are not--if you can't get that knee operated on close to your duty station, we are going to pay you to travel. That is what the rules say today. By the way, that is not a law that Congress passed. That is the DOD making regulations, which is how this works, to ensure that people serving our country are able to get the medical care that they need. We say: You know what, you will have to travel and because you have to travel to do this, we are going to give you paid leave to do that, to go get that knee surgery. And what the DOD said in the wake of the Dobbs decision reversing Roe v. Wade is that if you are doing that because you made a decision to seek reproductive healthcare, you made a decision to have an abortion, we are going to apply the same rules to you that we apply for these other surgeries. We are not going to treat you differently. We are going to treat you exactly the same. That is what we are going to do. And if you need to travel because it is not available, you can do it. So if you live in a State like Alabama, where my colleague who is blocking every single appointment or promotion in the DOD, where he lives--where, if you are a doctor and you perform an abortion, you can go to jail for 99 years--if you are living in a State like Alabama where abortion is banned, and there are very limited exceptions, if any exception, that you can go somewhere else to do it or the DOD will actually pay for you to go, and the DOD will give you paid leave. That is true whether you are seeking women's reproductive healthcare or you are going for knee surgery. But knee surgery isn't banned in 20 States in this country. And there was one other thing that the Department of Defense said. They said: You know what, in the case of a pregnancy, you can tell your commanding officer, you can tell your command 20 weeks after you learned of your pregnancy. You don't have to tell people right away because things might happen in the early stages of pregnancy or you might make a decision to have an abortion in that time. This was an attempt by DOD to harmonize the rules at DOD for healthcare with the changes of the Supreme Court. It would be difficult, in my mind, at least, to imagine a more modest set of changes to the rules by DOD. I thought about what could be more modest than saying: OK. If we are going to pay people who are getting knee surgery or pay them paid leave, then we are going to do this for everybody else--for women who need reproductive healthcare. If we are going to pay people to travel for these other things, then we are going to let people travel. I would think most people who have disagreements about abortion in this country might say: Well, that is fair. People have the right to be able to make this decision on their own--or they should have the right to make this decision on their own--and we shouldn't discriminate against people just because we might have a disagreement about abortion. One thing this set of rules does not do in any shape or form is pay for an abortion. The Senator from Alabama has almost admitted as much on this floor. He said it is sort of tantamount to that. It is sort of this, and Senator Lee from Utah was saying it is sort of, but they know that it is not. That is not what the rules do. That is a debate that we are going to need to have here, but that is not what is happening here. What is happening here is the rules, as I stated. The Senator from Alabama was so enraged by this, so infuriated by this, so angered by this, that he has now put a blanket hold on 249 military promotions to unwind those rules, to change those rules, to force the DOD to retreat and for the DOD to say: OK. From here on out, here is what we are going to do. We will pay for your travel for every single operation that you can't get at your duty station except if you are a woman who is seeking reproductive healthcare. If you are a woman who is going to have an abortion, we are going to discriminate against you. We are going to treat you differently than anybody else for every other purpose. And we are going to give you paid leave because we understand that it is inconvenient to have to go somewhere else from your duty station. By the way, you haven't asked to be at that duty station. We are going to give you paid leave except if you are going because of reproductive healthcare, in which case, we are going to discriminate against women and say, uniquely: You do not get paid leave. And, I guess, you have to inform your commanding officer--somebody does--that you are pregnant sooner than the 20 weeks. That is the world that the Senator from Alabama is trying to pursue here on this floor by holding every single military promotion, every flag officer promotion in the United States of America when Putin is invading Ukraine and China is sailing their shiny new navy all over the South China Sea. And I know he knows. He can't think it is a good idea. He has come out here and said: Don't worry about it. There are acting people who are doing those jobs. Don't worry about it. The generals don't actually make decisions. It is the enlisted people who are doing all the work. Don't worry about it. Somehow this is going to help with the recruiting quagmire that he has pointed out. I don't think, by the way, it is going to help with the recruiting quagmire that he has talked about out here; that women who are thinking about joining the military are going to know that their life, their lives, are in the hands of politicians in Washington, DC. Their very lives are in their hands. Their destiny is in their hands. And DOD can send them to a place where abortion is banned and doctors go to jail for 99 years if they perform an abortion or they might be lucky enough to serve in a place like Colorado where we codified Roe v. Wade anyway. We are the first State in America to do it. And I don't have to tell the Presiding Officer, who, by the way, served and has been on the Armed Services Committee, how important these jobs are we are talking about: the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown; the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the Chief of the National Security Agency; the next military representative to NATO. You think that is an important job? Soon this hold is going to include the next Commandant of the Marine Corps, the Army Chief of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations, putting our national security at risk. Mr. President, I asked unanimous consent at the outset of tonight's proceedings if we could have unanimous consent on a number of these promotions. I ask unanimous consent that those names and ranks and positions be printed in the Record.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of the following nominations en bloc: Calendar No. 46 through No. 52, No. 82 through No. 107, No. 110 through No. 113, No. 130 through No. 139, No. 180 through No. 205, No. 224 through No. 234, No. 236 through No. 246; that the nominations be confirmed en bloc; that the motions to reconsider to be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate; that no further motions be in order to any of the nominations; that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

Mr. BENNET. Former Defense Secretary Gates, who, by the way, for those who don't know, was appointed by George W. Bush, said that the Senator from Alabama has made the military ``a pawn.'' That is a guy who served in a Republican administration. We have had Secretaries of Defense from both sides of the aisle who said the Senator from Alabama is hurting our national defense, hurting our national security, is playing politics with our Department of Defense. What is his justification again? Well, it is no different than what I already said. He uses different words. He says that the DOD has made-- the Department of Defense--by making these rules, into an abortion travel agency. Those are his words: abortion travel agency. Well, that is not true. We have already talked about the travel allowance and the absence without leave and more time to notify. I am sure there are some people--a handful of people in America--who couldn't see the wisdom in that, who would disagree with that. But I will bet you that the vast majority of people in this country, including people who have a different view on a woman's right to choose than I have, would say that women ought to have the right, in the Department of Defense, to get travel paid for just like anybody else and to get paid leave and to be able to have 20 weeks to be able to tell their commanding officer that they are pregnant. This is an effort to punish women who are seeking reproductive healthcare and forcing them, for reasons I don't understand, to tell their commanding officer the minute that they are pregnant. This is reminiscent to me of the States after Dobbs--after the Court overturned Roe v. Wade--that started to look at bills to try to prevent women from traveling from States that had banned abortion to States that had made abortion legal. It is kind of a shocking place for us to be in to hear people--a party--embrace freedom and talk about freedom all the time and still live in a place where we are talking about trying to ban Americans from traveling from one State to another or not allowing the Department of Defense to pay money or to use paid leave for women's reproductive healthcare the way they do for anything else. I mean, I do believe strongly--I believe strongly in a woman's right to choose, and I believe it should be a decision that is made between a woman and her doctor. Most Americans agree with that. I know that there is profound moral disagreement on this question, and I respect that. But I think it is fair to say that the Senator from Alabama's position on this to not allow paid leave, to not allow paid travel, to not allow women to get 20 weeks before they have to tell their commanding officers that they are pregnant--the vast majority of Americans, I think, would agree that those rules are appropriate. By the way, one of the other reasons the Senator from Alabama has objected to this is that he has said that if the Senate wanted those rules, it should have passed those rules. Well, the Senate doesn't write the rules like that. We didn't pass the rules that exist today that pay for people to be able to go get surgery or get paid leave in the military. Those are rules that the Department of Defense makes, having been delegated that authority by the Congress. But, man, he is in a totally different place on this. He says that he is going to keep this hold until the Pentagon follows the law or Congress changes the law; that is the way we do it here in the Senate. That is a reference to what I was just talking about in terms of the rules. By the way, this is not how we do this in the Senate. It is just not. It is not. And the evidence is that no one in the history of this body has ever done this--ever in the history of the country. Nobody has done this. Nobody has done it. And I would say that not only has nobody done it, nobody has done it and taken a political position that is so far outside the mainstream of conventional American politics. I think the American people should be asking their Senators where they stand on this. There are only 100 people here. It is not hard to find our telephone numbers or our addresses. They should be asking them: Do you agree that we should be holding up every single flag officer's promotion because one Senator thinks that we shouldn't have paid leave or paid travel for women who need reproductive healthcare? He says he is going to relent only when that is true. He is only going to relent when there is a DOD policy that pays for every other surgery that somebody could get, that has paid family leave for any other procedure that you could get, but bans that for abortion. That is an extreme position. That is an extreme position. It is an extreme position to say that we are going to not allow people to have 20 weeks to make this decision. There are no exceptions in Alabama for rape or incest. That may be part of the reason why he has the perspective he does. It is a State where, if you are a doctor and you perform an abortion, you could go to jail for 99 years. But that is not what the majority of Americans believe on this issue. It is not. It is not. I don't even think the majority of Alabamians believe that. But the majority of Americans certainly don't. The majority of Americans believe in a woman's right to choose. The majority of Americans believe that these questions are best decided between a woman and her doctor or her family and her faith if she has one. That is what my State believes. We were the first State that decriminalized abortion before Roe was even decided and were the first State to codify a woman's right to choose. That is, I think, what freedom actually looks like. Our State, Colorado, is the first State to codify Roe since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. And other folks were saying: You don't need to worry about the States. Now one of the largest States in America--a large State where something like 65 percent of the people support a woman's right to choose--the Governor of that State, the State of Florida, has banned abortion after 6 weeks. He signed that law at 11 at night when nobody would be around to see the way he was trampling on the freedom of his constituents. Most Americans, if they knew this debate was happening, would be shocked, I think, to hear that what we are trying to do here is prevent women from getting paid leave; that we are trying to prevent women from having paid travel; that we are trying to prevent women from having 20 weeks to tell their commanding officer. That is what the Senator from Alabama is saying, that until that happens--until we are preventing women from those things, until we are discriminating against women who are seeking reproductive healthcare--he is going to continue to hold all these nominations. Forever? I don't know how anybody can take that position and say they stand for freedom, but that is the position the Senator from Alabama has taken. I hope he will reconsider what he is doing because of the damage it is causing our national security at a moment when, as I said, Putin has invaded Ukraine and China is pressing, you know, its advantages in various places around the world. We need the Senator to lift these holds, and I am going to keep coming to the floor until he does. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I understand there is a bill at the desk, and I ask for its first reading.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the motion to reconsider with respect to the Rikelman nomination be considered made and laid upon the table and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to legislative session to be in a period of morning business with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I have two requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders. Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate:

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand adjourned until 10 a.m., on Wednesday, June 21; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and morning business be closed; that following the conclusion of morning business, notwithstanding rule XXII, the Senate resume consideration of the veto message with respect to S. J. Res. 11 and that the Senate vote on passage of the joint resolution, the objection of the President to the contrary notwithstanding, at 11:30 a.m.; further, that following the disposition of the veto message, the Senate proceed to executive session to resume consideration of the Merle nomination, and following the cloture vote on the Merle nomination, the Senate recess until 2:15 p.m. to allow for the weekly caucus meetings; further, that at 2:15 p.m., if cloture has been invoked, all time be considered expired and the Senate vote on the confirmation of the Merle nomination; finally, that if any nominations are confirmed during Wednesday's session, the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask that it stand adjourned under the previous order.