Michael Bennet

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I want to take just a few minutes to speak about my colleague from Colorado, Senator Cory Gardner--a kid from Yuma, as he described himself a minute ago--and to recognize the work that we have done for our State together in a bipartisan way. Over the past 6 years, one of the most common and sometimes surprising questions I have gotten from reporters and constituents was: How is your relationship with Senator Gardner? Can you work together with Senator Gardner? It is really an innocent question, but I have come to think about it as a reflection of the sad state of our politics and the Senate for the moment, in particular. Behind the question is the assumption that because Cory is a Republican and I am a Democrat we, somehow, can't work together for the benefit of our State. That hasn't been the case, far from it. Sometimes he would say and sometimes I would say that we felt like there were times when we were working together better than States that were represented by two people from the same political party. In this Congress, Colorado is 1 of just 10 States that isn't represented by Senators from the same party. Think about that--just 1 of 10 States with a split caucus in this body, just 10 out of 50. You would think it would be a lot higher, given how evenly divided we are as a country. A lot has been written about the divide in our country today, and one of the divides is the rural-urban divide in America, which reporters like to talk about. In our delegation, Cory and I have tried to bridge that and, I have to say, it has helped a lot that Cory was born and raised in Yuma, CO, a town on the Eastern Plains with a population of 3,500 people, roughly. It is the place where Cory grew up, working in his parents' implement dealership--the red tractors, not the green tractors--where community tradition and ties to the land, like a lot of places in our State, run very, very deep; a place where rush hour means getting behind a tractor. It is a beautiful place, and Cory was kind enough to invite me to Yuma after he was elected. During that visit we made a commitment to work together despite our political differences, which we certainly have, and that is exactly what we have tried to do over the past 6 years. We worked together on legislation to ban Members of Congress from becoming lobbyists. I tell my colleagues today that I think there would be no bill we could pass that would do more to lift the reputation of this body than that one. Over half the people who leave here don't retire but become lobbyists. It was hard to find somebody to cosponsor that legislation. Cory saw the benefit of it, and we have been fighting for it ever since. We wrote bipartisan legislation to prevent government shutdowns; to make our energy grid more resilient; to secure funding, as Cory mentioned, for the Arkansas Valley Conduit, a critical water project that Washington has been promising Colorado since John F. Kennedy came to Pueblo, when he was President. We fought to hold the VA accountable to care for our veterans across the Rocky Mountain region. With Cory's leadership, we fought to keep the U.S. Space Command in Colorado. We partnered to fund critical improvements to our infrastructure, from I-25 along the Front Range to the Southwest Chief. And just last week, Senator Collins, 127 years after Colorado became the first State to grant women the vote by popular referendum and 100 years after ratification of the 19th Amendment, the Senate passed our bill to install America's first outdoor monument honoring the women's suffrage movement here in Washington, DC. That was typical of the legislation that we carried together, because the idea actually came from Fort Collins, CO. It didn't come from Washington, DC. So many of the best ideas that we worked on together came from Colorado. Cory is a student of Colorado history and the country's history, and he understands the significance of a bill like that. Over the years we have worked together late into the night to help communities across our State get back on their feet after devastating floods, wildfires, the Gold King Mine spill of 2015, and now the COVID- 19 pandemic, where Cory's leadership was absolutely essential. I could go on all afternoon. The point is, even though Cory and I have had plenty of differences over the years, there is a real record of bipartisan accomplishment for our State, and one of the reasons for that is because, whatever our differences on policy, I have never for a moment doubted Cory's commitment to serving the interests of Colorado and his genuine appreciation for what makes us the best State in America. In a lot of ways, Cory has embodied many of our State's best qualities. We are a young and restless State, and Cory has represented it always with energy and with drive. Agree with him or not, you can't say he hasn't worked hard every single second that he has been here. You have probably also heard that Colorado has 300 days of sunshine a year. As it turns out, so does Cory Gardner. It is probably why my staff always told me to smile more at our events together. He has been a consistent source of warmth and optimism in a body desperate for both. He has brought a lot more of that to the Chamber than I have, and I have been trying to make up for it now that he won't be here this year. All of that is to say that I have been extremely grateful for the opportunity to work with Senator Gardner over the past 6 years to do a lot of work together for our State. On a personal level, I would like to say to his family that I also want to say how much I appreciated the consistent kindness Cory and Jaime have shown to me and my family, even at moments that have been difficult ones for them. My staff are also deeply grateful for the close collaboration with Cory's team over the years, and I want to thank them for their extraordinary work. I know there are a lot of folks today who have things to say about my colleague from Colorado. So let me just end with this. Serving in this body, as he said, is an enormous privilege, but as everyone here knows, it does not come without a cost, especially for a parent with young children. I have watched Cory, as his kids have begun to grow up, put his family first at all times and our State a close second behind them. To watch him get on a plane, as I did this week, with his family and the care and attention he paid them is a reminder to me--and has been over the last 10 years--of what is really most important. I will miss our work together, but I suspect Senator Gardner is not done with his contribution to the country, to the State of Colorado, and to his community, and I look forward to continuing our work together in whatever capacity he ends up choosing to serve. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I was not planning on speaking today, but I was so inspired by what Senator Alexander had to say about his career and about the Senate that I wanted to share a word or two of reflection on what he said. Anybody who has spent any time around Washington, DC, or even around this Capitol knows there are statues built all over this town of people nobody remembers. When I go by one of those statues in Washington-- whether it is in a circle somewhere in a traffic stop or in the hallway in the Capitol--I think about the importance of dying at the right time. You want to die at a moment when statues are in vogue if you are going to have a statue. But there is no--none of these people are ever going to be remembered in the long view of history. The stoic philosophers on whom we base so much, or at least attempt to base so much of what we do here, had a solution to that. Their solution was--whether it was the Greek or Roman philosophers--their solution was: Do your best. Show up and make a contribution. Do your best. Don't worry about how people are going to remember you. Don't worry about your own mortality. So few of us follow that advice. I think Lamar Alexander embodies that. As President of the University of Tennessee, as Governor, as the Secretary of Education, as a Senator, in every one of those jobs, it has always been about doing his best. In a Chamber filled with people who think they have a monopoly on wisdom, Lamar has never stopped learning. He has always been curious. Up to this day--I will bet today, he probably got up and asked somebody on his staff or one of his colleagues to tell him about something he wants to learn more about so he can be more effective and make a greater difference so he can do his best. The Senate is going to be diminished by Lamar's absence. It is hard to believe we can be any more diminished than we are, but we are going to be diminished by Lamar leaving. Susan and I were lucky enough to be invited to his home, spend a weekend there. I am going to say something now I never said to Lamar Alexander. He gave us the great privilege of standing in the family cemetery in Eastern Tennessee, in his beloved Smoky Mountains, where he will forever keep the windmills out. As I stood there a little awkwardly in the cemetery--because that is not usually part of a tour-- all I could think about was how lucky Lamar and Honey were to know that would be the place where they would be and that long after they were remembered by anybody, they would know that they had done their best; that they had always done their best. What I would say to my colleagues today is, we have an opportunity to follow Lamar's example and take him up on what he said. We are not memorializing Lamar today. He is going to have a lot more years left to contribute to his State, his community, and to the country, but he won't be in the Senate, and we are in the Senate. We could work in the Senate that works 5 days a week or even 6 days a week. Sign me up for that Senate. We could work in a Senate that has 25 amendments in a bill instead of 25 amendments in a year, as we did last year, because there is no other body in America or in this democracy, as Lamar said, that is set up to decide the hardest questions that our country is facing and to make those decisions stick. That is what Lamar Alexander said to us today. He has left us with a challenge, and I hope we will take him up on it because there is no excuse for the way this place has worked, and the American people are tired of hearing that it has been the other side's fault. There are 100 people who can fix this place, and I hope we will. I can't think of a greater legacy for Lamar to leave than that of a Senate that actually works. That is what the country deserves, and that is the inspiration that Lamar Alexander has set for me. I thank the Presiding Officer.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, before I begin my remarks about the nomination, I want to acknowledge that tonight, as we are here, there are fires in many places across the State of Colorado. There are people who are out of their homes and out of their communities, who have had to evacuate their towns, and there are first responders on the ground in Colorado who are fighting these fires bravely every single day. They have been stretched all summer through a fire season that has lasted into the fall because of our inability to deal with our forests and because of climate change. My hope tonight, as we are here, is that the snow that has fallen is going to be more of a benefit than a curse to everybody who is out there. So, with that, I thank the Presiding Officer for recognizing me, and I will now give my remarks about this confirmation

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, 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. Madam President, I was interrupted, but let me go back. When he became majority leader, he said the first priority would be to ``restore the Senate to the place the Founders, in their wisdom, had intended, not the hollow shell of the institution [Harry Reid had created].'' Harry Reid was his predecessor. I think I remember him being on the floor, calling Harry Reid the worst majority leader that had ever existed in history. I don't think he was sanctioned for that. He promised ``to open up the legislative process in a way that allows more amendments from both sides.'' Last year, we voted on 26 amendments. In the entire year last year, we voted on 26 amendments. Only eight of those amendments passed, and I think Senator Paul, of Kentucky, had four of those amendments. Sometimes it's going to mean [actually] working more often. Sometimes it's going to mean working late, but restoring the Senate is the right thing to do. We are not working late around here. He said we were going to work on Fridays. Half the time, when Harry Reid was the majority leader, I couldn't go home until Friday. Since the majority leader has been here, I have been home for dinner every Thursday night. He said we need to recommit to what he called a rational, functioning appropriations process. This year, we haven't passed a single appropriations bill in the Senate. Last year, we had the longest government shutdown in American history. ``We need to return to regular order,'' he said. This is from the majority leader who put a bill on the floor to strip healthcare from 16 million Americans, a bill we didn't even see until a few hours before the vote. There are so many of these things that we don't even remember them anymore. He claims to be an institutionalist, but he has brought this institution to the lowest it has been. It is no different than his claim to being a fiscal conservative. I have heard him say over and over again that our debt and deficits are the single biggest threat to America's future. He called it ``the transcendent issue of our era.'' He said, ``Until we fix that problem [the deficit], we can't fix America.'' He said Americans are ``tired of the spending, debt and government takeovers'' and complained that our debt ``makes us look a lot like Greece.'' He claims to be a fiscal hawk--he has done it his entire career--but the truth is there is not an American, living or dead, who has put more debt on the balance sheet of this country than Mitch McConnell--$17 trillion--and that is just over the last 20 years. And for what--to invest in education? to build our roads and bridges? to do something about mental health in the country or water infrastructure? For what? It has been to cut taxes for the richest people in the country and to borrow it all from China, which is the opposite of what he said he was doing, the opposite of what he promised. He said the tax cuts would pay for themselves. They never have. He said they would benefit the middle class, but two-thirds have gone to the top 20 percent at a time when we have had the worst income inequality that we have had since 1928, when we have had an economy that, for 50 years, 90 percent of the American people haven't seen a pay raise. That means, in the first 25 years of this century, we are on track to spend $6.8 trillion on tax cuts for the richest 20 percent of Americans. It is exactly the same thing as if a mayor in any one of our communities in our States had said to their neighbors and to their city councils and to the press: I am going to borrow more money than we have ever borrowed before You would say: Well, that worries me a little bit. What are you going to spend the money on? Are you going to spend it on our roads? No. Are you going to spend it on our bridges? No. On our water system? No. On mental health? On COVID? On our public health infrastructure? I am going to take that money that I am borrowing from the Chinese, and I am going to give it to the two richest neighborhoods in town. That is the majority leader's tax policy, and that is what it has been since 2001. This speech isn't about spending, but while I have the microphone, here is what we could have done for $6.8 trillion: We could have created universal preschool for every child in America. These are not either/or by the way. That is how big a number $6.8 trillion is. We could have invested in the 70 percent of Americans who don't graduate from college so that they can earn a living wage when they graduate from high school, not the minimum wage. We could have made public college affordable for every middle-class American, given every teacher in America a 50-percent pay raise and paid them like the professionals that they are. We could have cut child poverty by 40 percent in this country. We could have protected Social Security so that we would know it would be there for our children and our grandchildren. We could have rebuilt America's roads, bridges, tunnels, and airports. We could have laid high-speed broadband in every community, lowered the cost of prescription drugs, covered everyone with high-quality healthcare by creating a public option. We could have passed paid family and medical leave, invested in science and public health so that we could have been more prepared for the global pandemic. We might have even paid down some of our debt and actually acted fiscally responsible. In other words, we could have changed the destiny of America. We could have added to Justice Ginsburg's legacy by making this country more democratic, more fair, and more free. We still can, but we can't do it as long as the majority leader is continuing to pursue these policies. We have to choose leaders in the Senate who will build this country better than we found it, not leave it in tatters for our children and grandchildren to pick through the rubble. Instead of making the Senate work on behalf of the American people, the Senator from Kentucky has run roughshod over this institution, doing whatever he can get away with politically. We are at a point at which what you can get away with here is the only rule that is left. As I said last night in this Senate, words have lost their meaning, and when words lose their meaning and when promises mean nothing and when commitments mean nothing, that is when institutions fail. It is moments like this that I remind my colleagues that this is not the first Republic to risk failure because of all of this--the Senate, the Supreme Court, the centuries of rules, written and unwritten, that have guided this Republic. We are not preserving them for us. We are preserving them for the American people because, without our institutions, we can't do what we need to do in this democracy, whether it is regarding climate change or healthcare or education or any issue that the American people care about, no matter what side of the political aisle they are on. Justice Ginsburg appreciated this. She described her philosophy this way: I think I am an originalist in the sense of what these great men meant--a Constitution that would govern through the ages. At least, they hoped it would provide an instrument of government that would endure. That is what is at stake in this election--whether we will accept this sorry chapter in our history as the new normal or insist on a government that can actually govern and is focused on the needs and desires of the American people. I hope deeply that we are going to put this era behind us, and I am not for going back to some old era but to build a democracy that is worthy of the 21st century, worthy of the example Ruth Bader Ginsburg set, worthy of the expectations that our kids and grandkids reasonably have of us and that most of us have for America in this world. That is the choice in this election, and to borrow a phrase from the majority leader, the ``American people should have a voice'' in the outcome. It is my hope that in 41 days they will. Madam President, I thank you for your patience and thank the staff for their patience. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I want to say how much I appreciate your staying late this evening for this. Last night, I had the chance to speak about the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, somebody who, as much as anyone in our history, advanced the cause of equality between men and women. When President Clinton named her to the Supreme Court, she had already transformed American law through her trailblazing work as a professor and litigator. It is why her nomination sailed through this body with 96 votes--a reminder of a time not so very long ago when the Senate understood its constitutional duty to advise and consent, when a qualified judge would get the vast majority of Senators to vote for that person. Every single time we did that, we reestablished the idea that the judiciary is independent-- independent from what hopefully are temporary, insane partisan battles. After earning that 96 votes, for more than a quarter century on the Court, Justice Ginsburg authored rulings that promoted fairness, advanced equality, and secured hard-won rights. They upheld affirmative action and protected a woman's right to choose. At the same time, she could never accept a decision that nullified our right to vote or otherwise limited our democratic values, even when it was hard for some of her colleagues on the highest Court in the land to perceive the systemic racism in our country. As I said last night, because the young Joan Ruth Bader knew America would be worse off without her, without her talent, Justice Ginsburg fought hard to make America more democratic, more fair, and more free. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the majority leader of this body who now seeks to ram a replacement through the Senate. As a Senator and as a majority leader, he dedicated his career to undo the work of Justice Ginsburg and those who have fought beside her for a better America. Pick almost any issue--from the degradation of our courts and our democracy to the sorry state of our government's fiscal condition--and for decades, you will find the majority leader's fingerprints all over the crime scene. Let's start with the courts; that seems an appropriate place to start today. Justice Ginsburg cared deeply about what she called public respect for a confidence in the judiciary. No one in America has done more to destroy that confidence and respect than the Senator from Kentucky. I first came to Washington as Colorado's Senator during President Obama's first term. The majority leader, who was then the minority leader, Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, led the blockade against virtually all of President Obama's nominees. He filibustered the nominee for Secretary of Defense who was a Republican. In the history of the country, no nominee to be Secretary of Defense was filibustered. From George Washington to George W. Bush, Senators had used the filibuster against 68 Presidential nominees; from Washington to Bush, that entire period, there were 68 filibusters of Presidential nominees. During President Obama's first 5 years, Republican Senators, led by Mitch McConnell, used it against 79 nominees. In 5 years of a brand-new President, they used the filibuster more times than in our history going back to George Washington. The obstruction was relentless. It finally led Senate Democrats to change the rules in 2013 with the so-called nuclear option, allowing us to confirm judicial nominees, except for the Supreme Court and other executive appointments, with 51 votes instead of 60 votes. I am sorry about that vote. I have apologized on this floor before about that vote. It has led us partly to where we are today. After Republicans won a majority in this body, Senator McConnell made his prior obstruction look like a game of beanbag. He wasn't in the minority anymore. Now, he was in the majority. The next low point came on February 13, 2016. I will never forget it. I was speaking at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Colorado when I saw the crawl come on CNN announcing the death of Justice Scalia. It was a Presidential election year, and there were 342 days to go before the end of President Obama's second term--a term made possible by the American people deciding, once again, to hire, to give him the power to appoint people to the Supreme Court. Let the people decide. One hour after Chief Justice Roberts confirmed Scalia's death, Senator McConnell declared the American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice; therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President. That is not what the Constitution says. When there is a vacancy, the President shall nominate, and the Senate shall advise and consent. Today, we have a Senate with this majority that is not even interested in advising. As we stand here tonight, they have given their consent without even knowing who the nominee is going to be. Hoping cooler heads would prevail, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland, someone a Republican Senate had previously confirmed with 76 votes and whom the former Republican Senator from Utah, my friend Orrin Hatch, once called ``a consensus nominee for the Supreme Court.'' I have known Merrick Garland for a quarter of a century. I worked for him fresh out of law school when both of us served in the Deputy Attorney General's office at the Department of Justice. I have never heard another lawyer or anyone, for that matter, refer to Garland without the highest admiration. He set the standard for excellence. He was a lawyer's lawyer. Senate Republicans, led by the majority leader, refused to even meet with Judge Garland, let alone give him the courtesy of a hearing so the American people could see what an outstanding person he was, how brilliant and fair-minded he was. The majority leader would go on to say about this disgraceful moment in our democracy's history that ``One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and said, `Mr. President, you will not fill this Supreme Court vacancy.' '' We know what happened next. We are still living in ``next.'' For the rest of 2016, the majority leader held the seat open all year, 342 days with no hearings, no meetings, no vote. One of the Senators in this body went home--I was proud they went home and said: I am never going to vote for Merrick Garland, but I think it is wrong for us not to have a vote. We should have a vote. I should go home and explain why I voted the way I voted and have to defend my vote Two days later, a super PAC run by a former clerk of Justice Scalia started to threaten they would run a primary against him if he didn't change his mind, and he did. We know what happened. Majority Leader McConnell kept the seat open. He helped elect Donald Trump who ran for office waving around a list of judges that he would appoint to the court and made Donald Trump, of all people, the first President in American history with the power to fill every judicial vacancy with a simple majority vote because Senator McConnell later used the nuclear option to change the rules again without really having any debate here. As a result, he has used that power to confirm 217 judges. Nearly a quarter of the Federal bench are now Trump appointees. In 2017, Senator McConnell detonated his own nuclear option to lower the required votes for Supreme Court Justices from 60 to 51, as he warned--in fairness to him--as he warned he would do. He installed Neil Gorsuch in what should have been Garland's seat. In 2018, he jammed through the nomination of Judge Kavanaugh under his new regime, delivering the confirmation by a margin of two votes, the narrowest margin for a Supreme Court nominee since 1881. Throughout it all, he seated a roster of judges across the Federal bench who otherwise could not make the ``B'' team. The Senate confirmed a judge who opposed the State proclamation honoring an association of professional women because it had dared to talk about glass ceilings and pay equity. The Senate confirmed a lawyer who wrote blog posts peddling conspiracies about Barack Obama and comparing abortion to slavery; an attorney who suggested judges can ignore judicial precedence they deem incorrect and who justified denying habeas corpus to enemy combatants with the brutal ancient dictum: In times of war, the laws are silent. Then the Senate confirmed its first-ever nominee rated ``Not Qualified'' by the American Bar Association. It had never happened before in American history. But once was not enough. The Senate went on to approve six more Trump nominees rated ``Not Qualified'' by the ABA. You can't find qualified lawyers? You can't find a lawyer who can just--not even exceeds--just meets? These people are unqualified. What qualifies them is many of them are in their thirties and are going to be on the courts for my lifetime. I thought that was all rock bottom. Then last Friday, 1 hour after we learned of Justice Ginsburg's passing, the majority leader issued a press release saying: ``President Trump's nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.'' That is the opposite of what he sent out when Justice Scalia died. When the majority leader blocked Judge Garland, when he said the American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice, there were 342 days left in President Obama's term--342. There are 119 days left in President Trump's term, and there are 41 days left before this election. Here is what the history really is, not the masquerade that the majority leader has been engaging in with the American people: From the founding of this country until today, we have had nine Supreme Court vacancies arise in the first 6 months of a Presidential election year. Nine vacancies have arisen in the first 6 months of a Presidential election year. The Senate confirmed every single one of them, except Merrick Garland. The Senate has never confirmed a Supreme Court nominee this close to a Presidential election, never in the history of America. Now, we have given our consent, apparently, before we even know who the nominee is. Because of Donald Trump's magical powers, we are willing to somehow take it on faith. But these traditions make no difference to the majority leader. Thanks to him, we now live in a world where confirming judges has become one more vicious partisan exercise, where confirmation votes will now break on party lines for the foreseeable future--and, perhaps, forever--and where every ruling a Justice makes is going to be viewed as that is what we would expect from an Obama judge, that is what we would expect from a Trump- appointed judge. It is the opposite of the way this worked when I was in law school. The majority leader says: I am just putting it back to the days before we had a filibuster of circuit court judges because now there is no filibuster when it comes to Justices or judges. It is not accurate, and it is not right because, in those days, if you were qualified, you would get 96 votes like Ruth Bader Ginsburg got and like Justice Scalia got. I think he got 95 votes. Yet now we have exported the vicious partisanship out of this Chamber and into the highest Court of the land. Senator McConnell has not only damaged the integrity of our courts-- something the late Justice Ginsburg cared deeply about--but he has also worked to sabotage her legacy of an America that is more democratic, more fair, and more free. Over his 36 years in office, the majority leader has voted against nearly every piece of legislation that has promoted equality and advanced civil rights. Again and again, he has voted against banning discrimination based on someone's sexual orientation, prosecuting hate crimes, and improving equity in the workplace. He even voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. More than anyone in America--and I say he is actually proud of this--he is responsible for exposing our democracy to a deluge of money, special interests, and foreign interference. The majority leader has voted against every major campaign finance reform bill that has come to this floor. In fact, he led the fight against the bipartisan reform bill that was written by the late Senator John McCain, and when he failed to stop it in the Senate, Senator McConnell went to the courts to have it overturned, paving the way years later for the disastrous ruling in Citizens United, which has allowed billionaires to flood our political system in the name of free speech when average working people are being drowned out. He voted against the bipartisan National Voter Registration Act, which allowed people to register to vote when they got their driver's licenses. Ahead of the 2016 elections, he refused to join President Obama and issue a bipartisan statement to alert the American people to the threat of Russian interference in our elections. He refused to do it, and the American people didn't know until after the election was over that Vladimir Putin was putting his thumb on the scale. To this day, he refuses to let us vote on bipartisan bills to protect our elections from foreign interference or even bills to fully fund our elections so that people can vote safely in the middle of a pandemic. There is only one person who gets to decide whether we vote on something around here, and he is the majority leader. I would like to see which Senators would vote against protecting our elections from Russian interference. I would like to see it, but we can't know because he won't allow it to come here for a vote. I would like to see who in this Chamber actually is against universal background checks, something we haven't been able to take a vote on because the majority leader won't allow a vote. Come out and vote. It has been over 570 days since the House passed the For the People Act, a bill that would ban gerrymandering, expand early voting, create automatic voter registration, and make election day a national holiday, among other reforms. The majority leader refuses to bring it to a vote. He called it a power grab. That is the Orwellian language that he uses. The only power grab that is, is a power grab by the American people to try to pry a little bit of power away from the majority leader from Kentucky on behalf of himself. I am not sure any majority leader in our history has had this low of regard for our democracy and for our institutions than the Senator and, I would say, less regard for the American people as well, because every time he has taken a knife to our institutions, he is in front of the cameras, talking about what an institutionalist he is. When he became majority leader, he said his first priority would be to ``restore the Senate to the place our Founders, in their wisdom, had intended, not the hollow shell''----

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, in the summer of 1920, America ratified the 19th Amendment. This breakthrough in our history, born of decades of setback and struggle by many unremembered women who never lived to actually cast a vote for what to us now is a self-evident proposition that women in this country should have the right to vote, moved this country one step closer to equality. That is why I think it is so fitting that, a century later, we pay our respects to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who, more than anyone, advanced the cause of equality between men and women over her remarkable career. Justice Ginsburg's commitment to equality was not the result of lofty idealism but the hard experience of her life. Thirteen years after ratification of the 19th Amendment, Joan Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born to a working-class family in Brooklyn. It was the middle of the Great Depression, and her father sold furs at a time when no one would buy them. Tragically, her mother died of cancer before Ruth graduated from school. But these challenges, like others she would face, did not defeat her. They didn't prevent her from graduating first in her class at Cornell. They didn't exclude her from Harvard Law School, where she was one of only 9 women in a class of 550 and had to justify to the dean why she had taken the place of a man. She finished her law degree at Columbia, where she once again was first in her class, and not a single law firm would hire her. She applied to clerk for Justice Felix Frankfurter on the Supreme Court, who said that, although she was an impressive candidate, he wasn't ready to hire a woman. She understood these early firsthand experiences with discrimination not merely as barriers to her obvious talents and potential but as a vicious threat to our country's full potential. She knew that any country that would deny a single person's chance to make a contribution on account of their race or their gender or their religion or whom they loved will never fully flourish. Tearing down these barriers became the cause of her career. She rose to become a full professor at Rutgers Law School and founded America's first law journal on gender issues. Later, she returned to Columbia Law School, where she became the first woman to hold a full professorship. She worked pro bono for the ACLU, cofounding their Women's Rights Project. She quickly became one of the most accomplished litigators in the country, writing a brief the Supreme Court cited in Reed v. Reed to rule for the first time that discrimination on the basis of sex violated the 14th Amendment. Ruth Bader Ginsburg's argument led the Court to overcome centuries of narrow views about the proper role of women in American life. As a result, the Court's holding redefined American law. Ruth's accomplishments led to an appointment to the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, and in 1993 President Clinton named her to the Supreme Court. Her nomination sailed through this body with 96 votes--a reminder of a time not so very long ago when the Senate actually understood its constitutional responsibility to advise and consent and what that actually meant. For more than a quarter-century on the Court, Justice Ginsburg authored rulings that promoted fairness, advanced equality, and secured hard-won rights. They upheld affirmative action and protected a woman's right to choose. Her dissent in one gender discrimination case was so powerful, it inspired the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the very first legislation President Obama signed. At the same time, she could never accept decisions that nullified the right to vote or otherwise limited our democratic values, even when it was hard for some of her colleagues to perceive the systemic racism in our country. When they were gutting critical protections to the Voting Rights Act, she had the common sense to tell them, you are ``throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.'' As always, she cut legal convention and saw with clear eyes the enduring threat discrimination poses to our elections. She knew voters still deserved the protection of the law, and all these years later, after State after State after State has passed laws dispossessing people of important rights with respect to the right to vote, she has been proved right As we reflect on her legacy in a real sense, I would say Justice Ginsburg herself should be thought of as a founder of our country, not because she had an important title or wore a black robe--although, she wore it as well as anyone in the countless images of her reproduced on T-shirts and tote bags and onesies, as the ``Notorious RBG''--but because she knew where we had fallen short and dedicated her life to calling America closer to our best traditions of equality, liberty, and opportunity for all, because the young Joan Ruth Bader knew America would be worse off without her. Justice Ginsburg made America more democratic, more fair, and more free. Mr. President, before I turn it over to my hard-working colleague from Michigan who is here later than he should be only because that is the kind of person he is, working so tremendously hard on behalf of the people of Michigan and the people of this country--let me just say one word about where we find ourselves in the Senate. I am just going to take 2 minutes to do this. I believe that American history can be best understood, from the very founding of our country until now, as an epic battle between the highest ideals that humanity has ever expressed in our founding documents and the worst instincts of human beings. That is the founding that took the form of the institution of slavery. You can draw a straight line from those days to these days. There is no doubt in my mind which side of that line Ruth Bader Ginsburg was on. There is no guarantee that this country is going to become more democratic, more fair, and more free. That took the work of suffragettes; it took the work of enslaved people like Frederick Douglass--another founder of this country who, in his lifetime, changed the entire approach of the abolitionist movement to argue that the Constitution was not a pro-slavery document, as they were arguing at the time, but that it was an anti-slavery document and that we weren't living up to the ideals of that Constitution. That is another self- evident fact today, to us, but it wasn't at the time that Frederick Douglass made those arguments. There is no doubt in my mind that if we find ourselves with a 6-to-3 Court, and we have replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg not with somebody who has an appreciation for the direction this country needs to go, which is to enable all of us to participate fairly and justly and equally in the society, but one where the most powerful and the most well connected are able to get the courts to pay attention to them, while working people all over this country can't have the basic health insurance that everyone else in the industrialized world has come to expect, we are going to be a poorer country for it. My final point is--before I turn it over to the Senator from Michigan--the fact that we got here with a majority leader who has completely undermined any sense of integrity in this body with respect to the rules--not speaking personally about him--is a real problem. It is hard for me to see how this place will ever make enduring change that we need to make if the American people have completely lost faith in it. In Mitch McConnell's Senate, words have lost their meaning. The rules are what you can get away with politically. That is the outer boundary of where you can go. It is moments like this that I remind them this is not the first Republic that has failed. When words lose their meaning, when promises mean nothing, when commitments mean nothing, that is when institutions fail. I, for one, hope that we will put this era behind us and not return to some old era--I am not interested in that--but build a Senate that is actually worthy of the 21st century, worthy of the example Ruth Bader Ginsburg set, worthy of the expectations our kids and grandchildren have of us and that we have of them and of America's place in the world. We are not going to do it this way. We can't do it this way. We have a chance to make a change, and I hope that we will. I yield the floor. I say to my friend from Michigan, thank you for your patience and indulgence.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, if I could just ask--

Mr. BENNET. The Senator from New Mexico was so kind to refer to the CORE Act, the Colorado Outdoor Recreation Economy Act. Just a reminder: At the heart of that bill, which is 400,000 acres of public lands in Colorado--70,000 of which is wilderness area to protect our critical watershed--is the Camp Hale National Historic Landscape, which is the first such national historic landscape designation in the history of the United States. It memorializes the incredible work of our veterans who came to Camp Hale to train, to fight in the mountains of Northern Italy, pushed the Nazis out of Northern Italy. And that wasn't even enough for them. Then they came back, and they started our entire outdoor recreation industry, our ski resort. It was the same generation of people. That is an exact, perfect example--I am so glad Senator Udall brought it up--a perfect example of why we need to treasure our public lands. With that, I will yield the floor and turn it back over to Senator Udall.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I appreciate very much my colleague from Nevada. Let me start by welcoming the Presiding Officer back to the Senate. We are glad that you are here and that you are feeling better. I thank my colleague from New Mexico, my neighbor, the senior Senator from New Mexico, Senator Udall, for organizing this today. This is, I know, a matter that is very close to his heart. Thanks in large part to Senator Udall's leadership and the leadership of the Senator from Arizona and others, we have worked really hard to not have public lands be a partisan issue in the Senate, and I think that reflects the way it is out West, where our public lands really are the foundation of our economy and who we are. They make us who we are. They are a cultural touchstone for all of us in the West. Instead of comprehending this, President Trump, as he has done in so many other areas, has pursued a public lands agenda that is way outside the mainstream of conventional American thought. Few decisions better capture how extreme that position is and how frenzied his agenda is than his decision to hire William Perry Pendley to lead the Bureau of Land Management. As we have heard today, Mr. Pendley doesn't even believe in the idea of public lands. He has argued that the Founding Fathers intended for all Federal lands to be sold. Think about what that would have meant if we had sold off the public lands of the United States. They are the envy of the world. They are the envy of the world, and all of the work that Teddy Roosevelt and others had done to make sure that our generation would be able to benefit would have been lost if Pendley's constitutional interpretation had controlled. Asking someone like that to manage our public lands, including 8.3 million acres in Colorado, is like asking somebody to be Secretary of Education who doesn't believe in public education. Given the track record of this administration, I guess it is not that surprising that he would put somebody in charge of public lands who believed that they are actually illegal or unconstitutional. Mr. Pendley is by far the most extreme anti-public lands nominee in my lifetime. You have heard the Senator from New Mexico talk about his attacks on people of color. You have heard about the fact that he doesn't believe in climate change. Pendley's ideology on public lands, on climate, and on so many other issues doesn't look anything like the consensus we have worked so hard to try to establish in Colorado. I think fundamental to this is that his extreme ideology does not perceive or conceive the economic reality in Colorado or New Mexico or Nevada or Arizona or Montana, where public lands sustain local businesses and climate change is undermining our farmers and ranchers. Since the BLM moved to Colorado, sort of, we have had a front row seat to this extremist agenda. This spring, Pendley signed off on a resource management plan that opened up the North Fork Valley of the Gunnison--one of our most beautiful agricultural valleys in Colorado-- to more oil and gas development. Local leaders worried that his plan failed to protect the region's watershed and will threaten the area's agricultural and outdoor economy. Instead of listening to Colorado, Mr. Pendley signed off on a plan, as he so often does, written in Washington by a bunch of special interests here who want to plunder our land out there. As Senators, we have a constitutional responsibility to ensure that the people entrusted with leading our Federal agencies are, at a minimum, qualified for the positions they hold and I would hope are within the mainstream of conventional American political ideology, but we have not been allowed to do that in this case. Mr. Pendley was nominated by the President to lead the BLM. The response was so negative that I have to imagine there were Senators on the other side of the aisle who said: Senator McConnell, please don't make us take this vote. Please. I have a tough election coming up. Don't make me take this vote, Mr. President. I am scared to take this vote. As a result, they withdrew his nomination because it couldn't pass the Senate. That is how the system is supposed to work. You can always put it on the floor and see whether we will support it. In this case, the response was so negative, they withdrew the nomination. That happens regularly. What is incredibly unusual in this case is they left him in his job. Having demonstrated that there was no public support in the Senate--the Senate unwilling to take a vote for fear of how unpopular it would be in the Western United States--they said: Well, you can be the Acting BLM Director. That is a disgrace. I don't know how anybody in this Chamber could call themselves committed to the U.S. Constitution if a President can nominate somebody, see the votes aren't there, withdraw it, and make them the Acting Director of the agency. That is the work of a dictator, not the President of the United States. Every now and then, you would expect the leader of this body to stand up for the prerogatives of this body, to stand up for the separation of powers and for the rule of law--particularly if you call yourself a constitutional conservative. We have a choice to make: to do nothing or to do our jobs. The American people want us to do our jobs. They are sick of the dysfunction here. From the perspective of Colorado, the decision on Mr. Pendley is simple: Someone who spent his entire career opposed to the very idea of public lands is unfit to lead a land management agency, period. He should do the right thing if the President won't: Step down immediately and allow somebody to take on the responsibility who actually understands how important it is to preserve the legacy our parents and grandparents created for us so we can preserve it for the next generation of Americans and the generation after that. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. I would like to thank Leader Schumer and the ranking member of the Finance Committee, Senator Wyden, for bringing this commonsense proposal to the floor. I have long advocated for the idea that we should tie benefits to the conditions of the economy rather than simply politically convenient dates or inconvenient dates that don't matter, don't make any sense to working people in our country, and create idiotic fights here that don't help the people we all have been sent here, in theory at least, to serve. Right now, we are facing an unprecedented set of conditions in our country. We are being racked by an economic downturn. It is different from any that we have ever seen before and at the same time, we are facing this incredible health crisis. One in six workers in this country is unemployed. One in six workers is unemployed today. But for once, thankfully, we were able to come together in a bipartisan way in March and pass the CARES Act, which is benefitting these workers in two ways. First, we expanded unemployment benefits to cover almost 10 million self-employed workers, gig workers, and others who are usually left behind in circumstances like this. That is something we should have changed a long time ago, but we finally got it done, and we did it in a bipartisan way. Second, as Leader Schumer and Senator Wyden said, we added $600 per week to normal unemployment benefits for all 30 million workers claiming benefits. That $600 weekly benefit has prevented a level of severe hardship that is almost impossible to describe. It has paid rent and prevented evictions. It has kept food on the table so families don't go hungry. It has kept the lights on and paid for the internet so our kids can learn. The bottom line is that the $600 weekly payment has been an essential lifeline to families in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. In Colorado alone, over 450,000 workers are receiving the expanded benefit, and it has put a total of nearly $2.5 billion into our economy. Nationwide, the numbers are staggering. One analysis showed that these additional payments help keep 12 million Americans out of poverty and keep poverty rates from rising. Without these payments, wages across the entire economy would have declined by 10 percent from February to May. We completely offset that decline. You know what that means is that working people actually were able to continue to buy things in this economy. The leader might be interested to know that I was talking to an economist recently, Raj Chetty, from Harvard, who has done a study, including other places, of New York. That study shows that the biggest loss in terms of consumer spending has come from the wealthiest areas in New York. That resulted in the biggest unemployment. In other words, if you have a small business in a wealthy area in New York, your small business is cratering because wealthy people aren't spending money on services because they are scared of getting COVID. In other parts of New York, there has been much less destabilization, and that is because of these unemployment benefits--directly because of these unemployment benefits--because where the unemployment rate has gone up, people's incomes have been able to be stable. I am the first to say that not everything we have done with the CARES Act has been perfect. As we know, the CARES Act left out too many families, and too many States have been too slow to get these benefits out. That is the result of delivering benefits through 50 different systems that have been underfunded and undermined for 50 years. But once they have gotten out, these benefits have made a transformational difference. Everyone in the Senate should be proud of that. I come out here all the time and complain how terrible this place is. I was amazed to hear the majority leader this morning talk about the ``incompetence'' of local officials. There is no body in the world more incompetent than this Senate. But here is a moment when we can actually be proud of something that we did here. Even President Trump has been running campaign ads touting these benefits. Even as he is running these ads--which, as Senator Wyden said, he is running because this unemployment benefit is popular--he is threatening the take away the benefit by allowing the $600 to sunset at the end of July. That would be a profound mistake. Right now, even with these enhanced benefits in place, 17 percent of American families can't cover 3 months of basic expenses. Without the extra benefits, that number wouldn't be 17 percent. It would be 43 percent, almost half of the families in our country. Today, nearly 10 percent of Americans can't make the rent. Without the extra benefits, that number would double or triple. If we let these benefits expire, we are going to throw tens of millions of Americans who rely on them into a profound financial crisis. We will be cutting their monthly income by $2,400. If we go over that cliff and completely cut off benefits, not only will it cut incomes by 50 percent or 60 percent or 70 percent for literally millions of Americans who can't go back to work, but it will cause extreme damage to the economy. Nothing has kept our economy afloat more than this investment in unemployment. Allowing these benefits to expire would remove $50 billion a month from the economy, reducing the GDP by 2.5 percent in the second half of this year. That would lead to 2 million jobs lost and a significant increase in the unemployment rate. So we would be right back here again. We shouldn't be doing that, at this point, with this very fragile economy and when COVID-19 is spreading in far too many places. Some of the industries are facing extreme crises in my State as well as across the country. Hotels are projected to suffer revenue losses of almost 60 percent in 2020. Between March and May 2020, total restaurant sales were down more than $94 billion from expected levels, and 90 percent of independent concert venues are at risk of permanently closing down in a few months without receiving additional relief. We can't tell people who are working in all of these industries--when there is no way these businesses will even be close to being 100 percent in the near future--that they are just on their own. That is why we need to pass an expanded unemployment benefit that continues after July. We should tie that expanded benefit to the unemployment rate, as Senator Schumer and Senator Wyden have designed, so that it steps the benefit down as the economy heals. That makes sense. Nobody here wants to be in a place at which the unemployment benefit disincentivizes people from working, which is why they step it down, but it needs to stay in place until this economy heals. It is the wrong approach for the country and for the working people in this country to send them over the cliff right now, and it will be the wrong approach to send them over the cliff in 6 months or even in 2 years if the unemployment rate is still elevated. We need to extend expanded unemployment benefits, and we need to do it until the economy recovers. It is the right thing for the workers and families who are wondering how they are going to get through one of the most difficult challenges of their lives. It is the right thing to do for the broader economy in order for it to come back as strongly as it can as we work toward a vaccine. I thank my colleagues again for their tremendous leadership. I hope that we will be able to work on this in a bipartisan way, as we did before, and that we will be able to pass these extensions for the American people.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. I would like to thank Leader Schumer and the ranking member of the Finance Committee, Senator Wyden, for bringing this commonsense proposal to the floor. I have long advocated for the idea that we should tie benefits to the conditions of the economy rather than simply politically convenient dates or inconvenient dates that don't matter, don't make any sense to working people in our country, and create idiotic fights here that don't help the people we all have been sent here, in theory at least, to serve. Right now, we are facing an unprecedented set of conditions in our country. We are being racked by an economic downturn. It is different from any that we have ever seen before and at the same time, we are facing this incredible health crisis. One in six workers in this country is unemployed. One in six workers is unemployed today. But for once, thankfully, we were able to come together in a bipartisan way in March and pass the CARES Act, which is benefitting these workers in two ways. First, we expanded unemployment benefits to cover almost 10 million self-employed workers, gig workers, and others who are usually left behind in circumstances like this. That is something we should have changed a long time ago, but we finally got it done, and we did it in a bipartisan way. Second, as Leader Schumer and Senator Wyden said, we added $600 per week to normal unemployment benefits for all 30 million workers claiming benefits. That $600 weekly benefit has prevented a level of severe hardship that is almost impossible to describe. It has paid rent and prevented evictions. It has kept food on the table so families don't go hungry. It has kept the lights on and paid for the internet so our kids can learn. The bottom line is that the $600 weekly payment has been an essential lifeline to families in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. In Colorado alone, over 450,000 workers are receiving the expanded benefit, and it has put a total of nearly $2.5 billion into our economy. Nationwide, the numbers are staggering. One analysis showed that these additional payments help keep 12 million Americans out of poverty and keep poverty rates from rising. Without these payments, wages across the entire economy would have declined by 10 percent from February to May. We completely offset that decline. You know what that means is that working people actually were able to continue to buy things in this economy. The leader might be interested to know that I was talking to an economist recently, Raj Chetty, from Harvard, who has done a study, including other places, of New York. That study shows that the biggest loss in terms of consumer spending has come from the wealthiest areas in New York. That resulted in the biggest unemployment. In other words, if you have a small business in a wealthy area in New York, your small business is cratering because wealthy people aren't spending money on services because they are scared of getting COVID. In other parts of New York, there has been much less destabilization, and that is because of these unemployment benefits--directly because of these unemployment benefits--because where the unemployment rate has gone up, people's incomes have been able to be stable. I am the first to say that not everything we have done with the CARES Act has been perfect. As we know, the CARES Act left out too many families, and too many States have been too slow to get these benefits out. That is the result of delivering benefits through 50 different systems that have been underfunded and undermined for 50 years. But once they have gotten out, these benefits have made a transformational difference. Everyone in the Senate should be proud of that. I come out here all the time and complain how terrible this place is. I was amazed to hear the majority leader this morning talk about the ``incompetence'' of local officials. There is no body in the world more incompetent than this Senate. But here is a moment when we can actually be proud of something that we did here. Even President Trump has been running campaign ads touting these benefits. Even as he is running these ads--which, as Senator Wyden said, he is running because this unemployment benefit is popular--he is threatening the take away the benefit by allowing the $600 to sunset at the end of July. That would be a profound mistake. Right now, even with these enhanced benefits in place, 17 percent of American families can't cover 3 months of basic expenses. Without the extra benefits, that number wouldn't be 17 percent. It would be 43 percent, almost half of the families in our country. Today, nearly 10 percent of Americans can't make the rent. Without the extra benefits, that number would double or triple. If we let these benefits expire, we are going to throw tens of millions of Americans who rely on them into a profound financial crisis. We will be cutting their monthly income by $2,400. If we go over that cliff and completely cut off benefits, not only will it cut incomes by 50 percent or 60 percent or 70 percent for literally millions of Americans who can't go back to work, but it will cause extreme damage to the economy. Nothing has kept our economy afloat more than this investment in unemployment. Allowing these benefits to expire would remove $50 billion a month from the economy, reducing the GDP by 2.5 percent in the second half of this year. That would lead to 2 million jobs lost and a significant increase in the unemployment rate. So we would be right back here again. We shouldn't be doing that, at this point, with this very fragile economy and when COVID-19 is spreading in far too many places. Some of the industries are facing extreme crises in my State as well as across the country. Hotels are projected to suffer revenue losses of almost 60 percent in 2020. Between March and May 2020, total restaurant sales were down more than $94 billion from expected levels, and 90 percent of independent concert venues are at risk of permanently closing down in a few months without receiving additional relief. We can't tell people who are working in all of these industries--when there is no way these businesses will even be close to being 100 percent in the near future--that they are just on their own. That is why we need to pass an expanded unemployment benefit that continues after July. We should tie that expanded benefit to the unemployment rate, as Senator Schumer and Senator Wyden have designed, so that it steps the benefit down as the economy heals. That makes sense. Nobody here wants to be in a place at which the unemployment benefit disincentivizes people from working, which is why they step it down, but it needs to stay in place until this economy heals. It is the wrong approach for the country and for the working people in this country to send them over the cliff right now, and it will be the wrong approach to send them over the cliff in 6 months or even in 2 years if the unemployment rate is still elevated. We need to extend expanded unemployment benefits, and we need to do it until the economy recovers. It is the right thing for the workers and families who are wondering how they are going to get through one of the most difficult challenges of their lives. It is the right thing to do for the broader economy in order for it to come back as strongly as it can as we work toward a vaccine. I thank my colleagues again for their tremendous leadership. I hope that we will be able to work on this in a bipartisan way, as we did before, and that we will be able to pass these extensions for the American people.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I want to thank my friends, Kamala Harris from California and Cory Booker from New Jersey, for leading us in this fight for so many years. I remember well when I first went to work for the city and county of Denver. One of the first tragedies that we had in the city at that time was the shooting of a young man named Paul Childs in Park Hill by police under circumstances that should never have happened. That was almost 20 years ago, but these headlines haven't stopped. If anything, matters have gotten worse. As the country has grappled with the pandemic over the last few months, I heard a lot of people talk about how it has revealed a profound sense of inequality in our country, how it has exposed all this injustice in the United States of America. We should not have needed a pandemic to expose the injustice that exists in the United Stated of America. It should not have taken a pandemic to alert people to the injustice in our country. If you have been paying any attention, if you have listened at all to the Black voices in the United States of America, then you know these injustices have been with us for generations. In the case of our law enforcement system, they have literally had life-and-death consequences for Black Americans, and it just keeps happening. One reason it keeps happening--the one reason it happened to Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, or George Floyd--is that what happened to them would never happen to my three daughters; what happened to them would never happen to me. It has never occurred to me once, when I am walking around my neighborhood in Denver, that what happened to them could happen to me or my children. That is what is meant, in part, by White privilege--a privilege that almost everybody in this Chamber enjoys. I think we can never accept that we live in a country where one group of people is less safe than another for no reason other than the color of their skin. We have to refuse to accept it, but that is the country in which we live. We have to acknowledge, finally, what Kamala Harris and Cory Booker and others have been telling us, which is that our criminal justice system in this country is broken. Our long history of unequal treatment of poor and minority criminal offenders--especially Black Americans--has evolved into a system of mass incarceration unlike that of any other developed democracy. A network of dystopian, privatized prison spreads across the land to house people who, in many cases, shouldn't even be behind bars, who were convicted for infractions relating to things that are legal in the State of Colorado today. According to Ta-Nehisi Coates' definitive article on the subject of the U.S. mass incarceration, our country accounts for less than 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of those who are incarcerated. Our closest competitor--and it is hard to find one--is Russia, a virtual police state. In our country, there is nothing equal about who is incarcerated. Black males between the ages of 20 and 39 are incarcerated at a rate 10 times the rate of their White peers. Every one of these issues needs to be reexamined and formed not by ideology but by pragmatism and, most important, the moral commandments of a just society. That is what the patriotic Americans in our streets in downtowns demand. They are not calling for one more commission. They are not calling for one more study. They are calling for real reform. That is what people mean when they say: This moment calls for real reform. That is what the people are saying in the streets. With respect to my colleagues on the other side, the proposal Senator McConnell has put forward doesn't come close to meeting that test. His bill, his proposal, which is meant to paper this over and get through to another chapter, not address the issue--his bill still allows the use of choke holds, the same choke holds that suffocated the life from Eric Garner. It doesn't ban no-knock warrants, the same practice that led police to break down Breonna Taylor's door and shoot her eight times in her own apartment. It doesn't make it easier for families like the family of George Floyd to seek justice when their loved ones have been victimized by police brutality. It doesn't even ban racial profiling. There is virtually nothing in this bill to respond to the families calling for justice or to save lives from police practices that have no place in America in the year 2020. This is not a time for half measures, for one more attempt to use talking points and legislative tricks to make it seem like we are doing something when we are not. The idea that the country isn't ready for a comprehensive approach is not true. I will yield to my colleague from Connecticut in just a minute. Last week in Colorado--my State, a Western State, a purple State--we became the first State in America to pass a sweeping police accountability bill into law. It is almost exactly like the one we have proposed here. We passed that bill 52 to 13 in the State House and 32 to 2 in the Senate--32 to 2. Only two Republicans in the Senate voted against that bill. Every single Democrat voted for that bill. And that is Colorado, out in the middle of the country. It sets a standard for what we need to do in Washington, which is to pass the Justice in Policing Act that Senator Harris and Senator Booker have put forward because we will never heal as a nation, as a country, unless we confront and dismantle the systemic injustice and the systemic racism that still plagues America, running as it does in a straight line from slavery to Jim Crow, to the redlining of our housing and banking system, to the mass incarceration that we have, to the prisons that Ta- Nehisi Coates refers to as ``The Gray Wastes.'' As I said on the floor the other day, anyone who studied the history of our democracy knows how tough it is to make progress. The struggle has always been a battle from the very beginning of our founding, between our highest ideals and our worst instincts as a country. More often than not, the fulcrum of that battle from the founding until today has been race. Progress on these lines has never been easy. It has never come easy. Among us are still people whose politics are aimed at stripping some citizens of their rights and opportunity, who despise pluralism, who succumb to fearful hatreds like racism or who care nothing for anyone but themselves. Their presence means that the rest of us, most of us, who Martin Luther King, Jr., called the great decent majority, must share an even deeper understanding of our patriotic obligation to our fellow Americans and to our Republic. Right now, that obligation means doing everything in our power to answer the call of Americans in our streets and downtowns, from DC to Denver, and beyond, who are calling for an America where no one is denied protection of the law or justice or their own life because of the color of their skin. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I want to thank my colleagues from Oregon, Senator Wyden, for his remarks; Senator Merkley, for his leadership on the bill; and Senator Baldwin from Wisconsin, for her extraordinary leadership and service to our country. It is a great privilege to be here today. My friend Cory Booker from New Jersey has been fighting for these issues for his whole career. Who knows, as I know, that anyone who studied the history of our democracy knows it has always been hard to make progress. This struggle has always been a battle of our highest ideals and our worst instincts as a country. It has been true since our founding, when the same people who wrote that ``all men are created equal'' also perpetuated human slavery and denied equality to so many others. In fact, I don't think it is too much to say that our history is a story of our struggle with that contradiction between the promise of equality and the reality of inequality in America--between our highest ideals and our worst instincts. We struggle with that today. Since he took office, over and over, President Trump has called on our worst instincts in almost everything he has done, including his attacks on access to healthcare, housing, and education for LGBTQ Americans. Just last week, he went out of his way to strip transgender Americans of their access to healthcare, but just as President Trump was depriving hard-won rights, dragging us backward again, in Colorado, on the very same day, our State legislature passed a law to make it harder to wage violence against LGBTQ people in my State. And listen to this: The vote was 63 to 1 in the Colorado House. It was 35 to 0 in the Colorado Senate. Notwithstanding President Trump's anti-civil rights, anti-civil liberties agenda, in Colorado--a Western State, a purple State-- Republican and Democratic elected officials, in their legislative season, are fighting for our highest ideals and rejecting our worst instincts. In fact, my State passed our version of the Equality Act over a decade ago. It is why we banned conversion therapy and passed Jude's Law, which makes it is easier for transgender Americans to change their name and government documents. It is how we have elected our State's first openly gay Governor, Jared Polis, and our first transgender State legislator, Brianna Titone. It is why we were one of the first States in America, I say to my college from New Jersey, to pass real accountability for police brutality with a bill led by Leslie Herod-- Colorado's first LGBTQ State legislator of color. This week, we passed that bill 52 to 13 in the House and 32 to 2 in the Senate. It contains many of the same reforms that Senator Booker and Senator Harris are leading on here. So I am here to tell you that there are more and more in Colorado and in the country who understand what equality has come to mean in America and how to resolve some of these contradictions in the year 2020, and, this week, even the U.S. Supreme Court seems to understand it. Just in the last week, a Republican-appointed Justice rejected Donald Trump's arguments and wrote for a majority of the Court, affirming equality for LGBTQ Americans. Then, this morning, the Court overturned President Trump's malicious attack on Dreamers, reaffirming the rule of law and, for the moment, protecting three-quarters of a million people who know no other country but the United States of America. Now it is time for the Senate to do our work, finally, and pass the Equality Act. The House passed the Equality Act 13 months ago, and we have not acted in our typical fashion. That is another 13 months when LGBTQ Americans could get married on a Sunday and be fired on Monday, another 13 months when our neighbors could be denied housing, denied healthcare or be turned out of a store because of who they are. Americans understand that no good comes from hoarding freedoms and equality. When we take the opposite view, we act against our traditions. As a nation, we will never flourish if we choose to depend on a permanent underclass that is deprived of some or all of the rights and freedoms others enjoy. Free people do not remain free by denying freedom to others. We should vote on the Equality Act and pass it today. I yield the floor

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I rise to honor the career of Dwight Gardner, who recently announced his retirement after providing decades of service to the State of Colorado. He most recently served on my staff as the regional director for southeast Colorado. Dwight has been a tireless advocate for the farmers, ranchers, and communities across our State. For decades, he has worked on behalf of communities throughout the region, from Pueblo to Raton Pass on the New Mexico border, and from the headwaters of the Arkansas River in Leadville, high in the Rockies, to the town of Holly in Prowers County. Early in his career, Dwight worked alongside his brother to support the farmers of the Arkansas Valley as a cropduster. Living through the era of ``buy and dry'' land purchasing to divert water to meet the needs of a growing Front Range, Dwight understood early the value of advocacy for rural Colorado. In 2000, he was elected to the first of two terms as a Crowley County Commissioner, and in that role, he was selected as chairman of the Southern Colorado Economic Development District to represent the interests of the 14 counties in the region. In 2007, my predecessor, Senator Ken Salazar, asked Dwight to join his office. I was fortunate that Dwight agreed to continue his service in my office in 2009. Dwight employs a formidable array of skills to serve the southeast region of Colorado effectively. He builds strong relationships with people; he possesses a deep knowledge and respect for the heritage of Colorado; and he provides a constant presence when the issues demand it. He has engaged in the battle for Federal funds to build the long- promised Arkansas Valley conduit. He was witness to the important preservation of our national heritage at Camp Amache and Sand Creek. He helped shepherd the critical economic opportunity represented by the continuation of the Southwest Chief railroad line. From local food production to manufacturing, from the decommissioning of the Pueblo Chemical Depot to establishing good neighbor relations at Fort Carson's Pinon Canyon Maneuver site, Dwight has been a steady presence and road warrior as he has advanced the common good across hundreds of miles of beautiful southern Colorado. Going forward, I will miss Dwight's humility, his candor, and his keen understanding of what it means to be a son of rural America, attributes so needed as we work our way toward a better future. I am comforted to know that the next generation, represented by his grandsons Noah, Devlan, and Gatlan, have the benefit of his guidance. Colorado is grateful for his service.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I would like to thank my colleague from Connecticut for his remarks tonight and for the hopefulness that he has expressed. I have been here now for 11 years, and I can't predict success here, and I can't say it is assured, but I think it is very likely that we are going to come together in a deal. I hope we come together in that deal today, and I think the American people are going to be able to assess the progress that has been made for workers as a result of taking a little bit of extra time, for hospitals as a result of a little extra time, for State and local governments that are going to benefit mightily because of the work we have done. I rise tonight not to get into this back-and-forth about this because I think we are going to address it, and I think we are going to address it in a way that is meaningful and in a way that is bipartisan and in a way that can help give the American people a measure of confidence that we are doing our job. For those of you who have heard me over the years on this floor, I don't always come here with a report that optimistic. But tonight, given everything I have heard over the course of the day, I want to say that this is a serious problem. It is an unprecedented challenge. We have to rise to this challenge together, and I believe that when the votes are counted on this bill, it will have been a better bill for the work that has been done, and the vote will be a big bipartisan vote, which will be a shot in the arm for the country and for the American people. I want to talk not about this back-and-forth, but I want to talk about something that is confronting us; that is, the worst pandemic in a century. Just a month ago, just 30 days ago, nobody here would have imagined--30 days ago we had 30 confirmed cases in the United States. Today, there are over 41,000 cases, the most anywhere outside of China and Italy. The President is right. He goes out and says that there are 140-some countries that have this. That is true. We are in the top three of those countries. There are 379 Americans who have died as we are here tonight. In the middle of the worst public health crisis in a century, our medical community doesn't have the basic supplies and equipment they need to respond. This matters because if we don't get our doctors and nurses protective gear, they are going to get sick. If they get sick, they can't help everyone else who is sick. That is a huge problem, and our medical professionals in Colorado, as in the Commonwealth of Virginia and all across this great country, have been begging for us to pay attention to this for months--for months. The chief medical officer at Denver Health--which is our fabulous public hospital in Denver, one of the leading hospitals in this country--says that they do not have enough tests or swabs to keep pace, and the turnaround time for tests is taking much too long. ``Our ICU right now is full of patients awaiting test results,'' she said. ``We need faster testing.'' Hopefully that is coming, but it has been a long time getting here. And every single healthcare worker who is tested in this country but does not get a result for 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 days--even if they don't have the coronavirus--can't go back to work. As a result of that, we face a severe shortage of healthcare workers in this country. At Denver Health, they say: ``We are burning through our personal protective equipment to the point that we are on short supply, as is every other health care institution in Denver and likely in Colorado.'' If this continues, she said they are going to have to put two patients on a single ventilator. That is not how it is supposed to work. In Colorado, our nurses are sewing masks because they don't have masks. My wife was sewing a mask at our home in Denver yesterday--in the United States, in the 21st century. We have doctors who are getting just a single mask and being told to use it indefinitely. I was on the phone this evening with doctors and administrators from our hospitals who are telling me that they are having to ration swabs for tests. It is a two-swab test, but they are only using one swab because they don't have enough swabs to do it properly. There are doctors who are having to use the same mask patient after patient when the mask is designed for it to be only one patient; that is the way it is supposed to work. They are violating protocols of the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control because they are rationing equipment. There is no excuse in this country--the richest country--that they should be rationing in this public healthcare crisis. Gowns, masks, shields, clothes--America's healthcare workers don't have any of it. And do you know what they spent today doing? They spent today scrolling through ads--not all of them, not the ones with patients, but the ones who have to equip our medical professionals. They were scrolling through ad after ad after ad--from where? China--saying that their masks are for sale in China. They have no idea whether these are fly-by-night organizations. These companies are requiring Denver Health and other hospitals to put the money upfront and say: You will get the masks 3 or 4 weeks from now. They don't even know whether those masks will come. They don't know what the quality of those masks will be. We were told yesterday by the President that China was sending us masks, and now all of those seem to be being sent to Italy. I saw a quote from a doctor in California who said it is like ``We are at war with no ammo.'' That is not their fault. That is not their fault. They are on the frontlines of this war. We should be ashamed. We should be ashamed. I am. The question is, How are we going to make sure our medical community has the supplies and equipment they need? Perhaps it would be useful to be honest about where we are, to start with. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that we are going to need 3.5 billion masks to fight this pandemic this year. When you hear me tonight use the word ``mask,'' in your own mind add the word ``gown,'' add the word ``glove,'' add the word ``shield'' because they need all of that--3.5 billion masks to fight this pandemic this year. The administration came with their first supplemental requesting $1.8 billion; today we are at $2 trillion in just the last month. They came and said 1.8 billion. We said we need 350 million masks. We need 3.5 billion masks--billion masks--this year. Today in America, we have exactly 35 million masks. That is 1 percent of what we need--not 80 percent but 1 percent of what we need. Nationwide tonight, our hospitals have 160,000 ventilators among all the hospitals we have in the greatest country in the world. Johns Hopkins estimates that we are going to need another 40,000 ventilators by the time this is done. In Colorado tonight, I heard--this might be of interest to the other Senators who are here tonight because New York represents half of the cases in this country right now. The concern from Colorado, and I am sure from your States as well, is that all those ventilators are going to go to New York, as they should right now because that is where the greatest need is. What is going to be left for the rest of us? What is going to be left for the rest of us in 7 days or 10 days or 20 days? How can we be this foolish? How can we be this blind? The administration hasn't taken this crisis seriously enough from the beginning. When it comes to the equipment that people on the frontline need--the ``ammunition,'' to use their word, that the people on the frontline need--they are being ignored or dismissed with a bunch of happy talk about how we are going to solve this problem--if we can even admit that there is a problem. The result is something I never thought I would see in the United States of America, the country I grew up in. States like New York and New Jersey are literally being forced to outbid--States like New York are being forced to outbid New Jersey and California to secure critical supplies while they are fighting through the worst public health crisis in a century. Yesterday, during his press conference in the White House, the President said: We want them to be on that open market because we might lose money if we are not on that open market. Exactly the opposite of what he thinks is happening, is happening. Governors like Andrew Cuomo are being forced to pay $7 for surgical masks that just a week ago cost 85 cents. My doctors in Colorado told me tonight that stuff yesterday that was five times the cost of what it ordinarily is, today is seven times the cost of what it ordinarily is. In Colorado, our children's hospital is paying 70 cents a mask. That is 10 times what they were spending a month ago. Ventilators that used to cost a few thousand dollars now cost up to $40,000 because the President won't act. He will not provide the national leadership that we need. Ten days ago, when talking about the test, he said: ``I don't take any responsibility at all.'' That is what he said. He may think that he doesn't have the blame for everything that has gone wrong--and I am sure he doesn't--but he does have a very profound responsibility now that only Presidents of the United States have. When Governors from across the country raised the supply shortages with him last week, he told them to ``get it yourself.'' He told them that the Federal Government is not ``a shipping clerk.'' He said: The governors, locally, are going to be in command. We will be following them, and we hope they can do the job. . . . We are there to back you up should you fail. We are failing, Mr. President. We are failing to address the seriousness of the public health crisis this country is facing. And we are going to rue the day that we said it was the hospitals' problem to solve, that it was the Governors' problem to solve, that it was the States' problem to solve. I want to say this to the American people tonight because it is really important that you know what the facts are. It is important for you to know that we don't need tens of thousands of masks or millions of masks. We need billions of masks and all the other equipment that I talked about earlier--gowns, shields, swabs, the elements of tests, the reagents that are necessary to take those tests. When I say ``we,'' I am talking about the healthcare professionals we are relying on to be the frontline in this effort. What is the President's response to this? He has touted about the shipments coming out of our national stockpile. I am coming to think this national stockpile must be more like a really small national warehouse. Colorado received that shipment yesterday. We are grateful for it. We are grateful for the shipment we got from the national stockpile. I want my colleagues to hear me. The Department of Public Health in Colorado estimates that those supplies will last for a single day of statewide operation--1 day. Then the President comes out and talks about the tens of thousands of masks that are going to New York or California, as if that can make the difference. It won't make a difference when you need millions of masks. Then, at the press conference yesterday, he suggested that the new commitments by private businesses will somehow be enough. He said: The numbers are quite large, and we have tremendous numbers of companies making equipment. We have respirators. We have ventilators. We have a lot of things happening right now. We have millions of masks that are coming. Millions of masks, not billions. They will be here soon, he said. They will be shipped directly to the States. He failed to mention that soon actually means 18 months from now. That is not going to help us. We don't have 18 months. It is literally life and death. It is for all of these reasons that we ask the President to invoke his authorities under the Defense Production Act, which gives him and him alone the ability to mobilize private industry so we can ramp up production in a coordinated and coherent way, so we can have a national approach to fixing this broken supply chain, to fixing the empty storerooms, and to putting these critical supplies and equipment on the frontline. I was so pleased that he invoked those authorities 5 days ago, but instead of using them, he has equivocated. He said things like we have the act to use ``just in case we need it. But we have so many things being made. . . .'' He didn't finish the sentence, but he meant this voluntary effort--which I deeply appreciate, by the way. Don't get me wrong. Every single mask and every single gown and every single shield that can be manufactured and every single respirator that can be manufactured and lent to the people on the lines--that is important, but it is not going to solve this crisis. It is not going to keep us in a position where we can actually flatten the curve. He said yesterday: ``We're a country not based on nationalizing our businesses. Call a person over in Venezuela, ask them how did nationalization for their businesses work out?'' As every Senator here knows, the Defense Production Act doesn't nationalize businesses. It is our tool. It is a mechanism to create a coherent strategy for our public sector and our private sector to produce goods based on an urgent national need. The government pays market value for those goods and has a strategy for how those goods will be distributed around the country as the epidemic moves from place to place. It is unacceptable that we are in a situation where States are having to bid against each other, where the hospitals in Colorado are having to bid against each other. They said to me tonight: Michael, if you could just get us 5 million masks and send them to Colorado, we can distribute them. But it makes no sense for us to be looking up the yellow pages in China to buy masks. I said to them: I wish that were enough. I wish that would be enough. But as long as Colorado is going to have to compete with New York, which is going to have to compete with New Jersey or compete with Florida or compete with Texas, it won't work. It is not just the price, although that is shocking. The fact that there are people gouging at a moment like this is appalling. It is not just the price; it is the availability. The nurses and doctors in Denver, CO, or in any city in this country tonight should not be using one swab for a test. It takes two. They should not be wearing one mask all day long--a mask that is designed to be worn with just one patient. The President said yesterday that he looked into this as a businessman. He was shocked at all the masks being thrown away. We ought to be able to sterilize the masks. There are important reasons why we have those rules--to protect our healthcare workers and so we don't spread disease. By the way, I asked: Does it solve your problem that the President has said we can use construction masks now in our healthcare facilities? They said: We are grateful for the additional masks that we are getting, but it is not remotely helping fix the scale of the problem, and a lot of these masks actually aren't appropriate in a healthcare setting. They will do anything. They are not looking down their noses at it. I had somebody say to me today--one of the people on the call said that they had gotten masks from a finger nail salon and that they had no idea what quality the masks were. There was Asian writing on the outside of the package. They don't know what it is, but those masks will be there when they run out of all the other masks. That is what they are going to use. That is what we are using in the United States of America tonight? That is what we are telling the people we are asking to save our lives, to save our parents' lives? That is what we are saying? I am sure the other Senators have had the same experience that I have had, which is I have been in touch with companies all over my State that stand ready to help produce supplies and equipment. The President said yesterday that one of the problems he had or one of the challenges he had was, you wouldn't have any idea where to begin. I don't know who makes ventilators. Maybe they made them a long time ago and they have forgotten how to do it. Surely he doesn't believe that we couldn't figure that out in a split second, where the manufacturing capacity is in this country to do what needs to be done. Yet these companies have said to me that nobody in the administration has been in touch to tell them what to make, how much to make, or where it should go. I say thank you to my colleagues for their indulgence, but the truth is--and the truth needs to be understood--that I think this is a moment in time when we have to get this done, but we are getting it so wrong. The truth is, as much as we welcome all of the citizens and businesses that are stepping up on their own, it will not be enough. Hanes can't produce 3.5 billion masks. It is a great company. As the President said yesterday, it is involved in cotton products, but it can't make 3.5 billion masks, and it can't do it in the time we need it done. GM and Tesla can't manufacture 40,000 ventilators. As for the 2 million masks the Vice President trumpeted yesterday from Apple, we appreciate it, but it is an infinitesimal amount. It sounds like a big number. That is why the President actually said yesterday that the reason he came out and read those big numbers was so that you would know they were sending out lots of stuff. He said that, and I think that gives a complete misimpression that, somehow, this is being handled or that we have it together. We are one nation under God for a reason, and that is to respond to a challenge just like this one. It cannot be one hospital at a time, one State at a time, or one business at a time. That will not work. It is not a strategy. In fact, it is making matters worse because not only are we not fixing the supply chain, but the pricing is getting completely distorted, and people are competing with an incredibly scarce number of goods. This is not a substitute for a coherent national strategy to figure out how we are going to meet these critical supply and equipment shortages across the country, and every single day, it gets worse. You can hear the panic in the Governors and in the people who are working in our hospitals and in the people who are working with people who are having to go into unsafe conditions, who are willing to do it. They are on the frontline of this war with no ammunition. As much as the President may not want to make these hard decisions, for whatever reason--because he hopes for the best; because maybe the medical thing will work itself out; because maybe, instead of 18 months, it will be shorter for a vaccine; because maybe the hot weather will make things better--he is literally the only one with the authority to call America to this challenge. The President is portraying himself as a wartime President, but he is leaving it up to Hanes to plan D-day. It will not work. He needs to give the frontline of this war the ammunition it needs, and he is the only one who can do it. No one else can do it. This Senate can't do it. There has been a lot of back-and-forth today about a brief delay in passing this economic package. As I said, I hope very much it will pass. I hope very much we will have a deal soon. I hope very much it will be bipartisan. We should do our work, and we should get that done. Yet I beg of you--I beg of you, my colleagues in the U.S. Senate--for every Member of this body to call on the White House and ask why, after weeks, there is still no plan to make sure our doctors and nurses have the gear to protect themselves; why our hospitals still don't have the ventilators they need to treat people; why it is not obvious where those ventilators are going to come from; and why we still don't have a clear strategy from this administration to arm the frontline that is waging this war while we are here tonight. This is, perhaps, the greatest challenge our country has faced since the Second World War. It probably is, and it is scary. We have risen to challenges before, and I think we can rise to this one. I may not have voted for the President, and I may not agree with much of what he does, but I urge him to act. I urge him to use the authority that is granted to him uniquely in America. Out of 330 million Americans, only the President of the United States has that authority. He won that election. He has that authority. We can't do it without him. Lives are literally at stake in Colorado and across the country. We need him to lead, and I beg of all the Members of this Chamber to do whatever they can, if they have influence on him, to get him to understand the gravity of the situation we are facing, the scale of the situation we are facing--the scope that we are facing--and the lack of preparedness that needs to be addressed by his invoking his authority under that statute. I thank my colleagues for their patience and their indulgence. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this bill. I thank my colleague Senator Udall, of New Mexico, and my colleague Senator Merkley, of Oregon, for their extraordinary work. I don't know if they have ever had the experience that I have often had or the Presiding Officer has had, but there are times, in my having spent a week here after having done absolutely nothing, when I am walking through the Denver International Airport, and I want to put a paper bag over my head because I am so embarrassed about the failure of this institution to live up to even the barest responsibilities that we have. I mean, we can't even pass a basic infrastructure bill around this place while China is building 3,500 miles of fiber-optic cable to connect Latin America with Africa and back to China to export the surveillance state from China. That is what China is doing there while we are doing nothing here. We have become the land of flickering lights, whereby the standard of success is whether we have kept the lights on for another 2 hours or another 4 hours. What the American people need to understand is that this is the ideological end state of what the Freedom Caucus came to Washington to do. It has become the ideological end state of what Mitch McConnell can do because, in the rubble of our institutions, they can achieve the objectives they want to achieve. They can put rightwing judges on the courts without our institutions working. They can come out here and cut taxes for rich people and claim it is a middle-class tax cut without our institutions working. Yet what we are unable to do without those institutions working is invest in our infrastructure, is make sure that we have an education system in this country that is actually liberating people from their economic circumstances instead of reinforcing their economic circumstances, is ensure that we are doing something on the climate and doing something on guns. It has been more than 20 years since Columbine happened in Colorado. My State--the Western State, a Second Amendment State--passed background checks after Columbine. My three daughters grew up knowing they lived in a State that was actually trying to respond to what was going on in their schools--not true of the U.S. Congress. The reason for much of this inaction is the Supreme Court's decision with regard to Citizens United. I will not belabor the point, for I know my colleague from Hawaii was kind to let me go ahead of her, but let me just repeat this: After Citizens United, 10 donors over the past decade have contributed $1.2 billion to our policy. That has created a corruption of inaction in the U.S. Senate. It is not corruption that you see because it is a corruption of inaction. It is the bill that is not introduced. It is the committee hearing that is not held. It is the vote that is never taken for fear that, if you do that, some billionaire is going to drop $30 million on your race and run a primary against you in your next election. Do you want to know why we can have a Senate in the United States that votes on only 22 amendments in a year? That is the reason. Do you want to know why we have a Senate wherein 75 percent of the votes are personnel votes and 25 percent are actually on amendments? That is the reason. We have to overcome it, not for Democrats or Republicans but for the American people because this is their exercise in self- government. This is the way they make decisions. I know these reforms can work because they have worked in Colorado with a bipartisan commission to end gerrymandering, mail-in voting, and automatic and same-day voting registration. The result is that we have the second highest voter participation rate in America. How can that not be good for our democracy? So my hope is that at some point, when he hears the voices of the American people, Mitch McConnell will relent and allow these bills to come to the floor. He described this bill last year as a power grab--a power grab--and I will accept that if it is understood that it is a power grab by the American people, which is what it is--an effort to get money out of our politics and to put people back into our politics so we can start doing the work that the American people sent us here to do. With that, I thank my colleague from Hawaii again for her indulgence. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I rise to celebrate Robert S. Fraser's retirement from the Federal Government after 50 years of faithful service to our country. Mr. Fraser traveled for over 40 years with the U.S. Air Force, both as a dependent and serving on active duty. He attended the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he graduated in 1973 and received the Outstanding Cadet in Engineering Sciences. In 1993, he retired as a major in the U.S. Air Force and began a distinguished career at the National Security Agency, where he received multiple achievements and awards. Throughout his career, Mr. Fraser has had a selfless dedication to duty and professionalism.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I rise to honor the life and legacy of Marie Greenwood, who passed away late last year at the age of 106 years old. Marie, a teacher by trade, spent her life dedicated to the idea that each child--regardless of their race, gender, or class-- deserves a quality education. Her intellect, compassion, and vigor propelled countless children through the Denver Public School system and towards lives of purpose. Marie's work as Denver's first tenured Black teacher and an integration pioneer increased educational equity in our schools and helped shape Denver into the great city that it is today. An only child, Marie was born in Los Angeles in 1912 before she and her family relocated to Denver in 1925. As a Black family in segregated Denver, they faced no shortage of obstacles. Despite being a star student who time and again overcame the bigotry leveled against her, Marie was told by her high school guidance counselor not to apply to college because it would be a waste of her parents' money. Thank goodness Marie did not heed this wrongheaded advice. She went on to graduate third in her class and earned a scholarship to Colorado Teachers College. Marie had set out on a path that would eventually lead to touching the lives of generations of Colorado's students. Marie was a trailblazer in civil rights and the ideal teacher. In 1938, she earned tenure in the Denver Public Schools, the first Black teacher to do so. Throughout the 1940s, Marie was involved in local activism that challenged discriminatory policies. In 1955, Marie made history again when she became the first African American in Denver to teach at a segregated school. In the 1960s, she served on a Denver Public Schools committee tasked to study racial inequities in district funding and staffing. All the while, she was a kind and determined teacher who ensured that her students always tried their hardest. In retirement, she authored two books, one outlining her philosophy on teaching children facing difficulties and the other her autobiography. In 2001, her legacy was further solidified as the school district named a new elementary school in her honor. She will continue to be remembered by students who participate in the Greenwood Scholars program, which teaches the history of Denver through her life story. As the former superintendent of Denver Public Schools, I can confidently say that our students would be well-served if Marie was the lodestar for our teachers. Her grace and passion for the profession made a tremendous difference in the lives of our young people, and we are all in her debt. Thank you, Marie. May she rest in peace.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, when I was in the second grade--which I did twice because I was dyslexic, so I don't know which year of the second grade it was, but one of those 2 years--we were asked to line up in order of whose family had been here the longest period of time and whose family had been here the shortest period of time. I turned out to be the answer to both of those questions. My father's family went all the way back to the Mayflower, and my mom's family were Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust. They didn't leave Warsaw because my grandfather had a large family he didn't want to leave behind. And in the event--everybody was killed in the war, except my mom, her parents, and an aunt. They lived in Warsaw for 2 years after the war. Then they went to Stockholm for a year. They went to Mexico City for a year, of all places. And then they came to the United States--the one place in the world they could rebuild their shattered lives, and they did rebuild their shattered lives. My mom was the only person in the family who could speak any English. She registered herself in the New York City public schools. She graduated from Hunter College High School. She went on to graduate from Wellesley College in Massachusetts in one generation. My grandparents rebuilt the business they had lost during the war. I knew from them how important this symbol of America was to people struggling all over the world. They had been through some of the worst events in human history, and their joy of being Americans was completely unadulterated. I have met many immigrants across this country, and I still haven't met anybody with a stronger accent than my grandparents had, and I have never met anybody who were greater patriots than they were. They understood how important the idea of America was, not because we were perfect--exactly the opposite of that--because we were imperfect. But we lived in a free society that was able to cure its imperfections with the hard work of our citizens to make this country more democratic, more free, and more fair--a country committed to the rule of law. Nobody was above the rule of law, and nobody was treated unfairly by the law, even if you were an immigrant to this country. From my dad's example, I learned something really different. It might interest some people around here to know he was a staffer in the Senate for many years. I actually grew up coming here on Saturday mornings, throwing paper airplanes around the hallways of the Dirksen Building and Russell Building. He worked here at a very different time in the Senate. He worked here at a time when Republicans and Democrats worked together to uphold the rule of law, to pass important legislation that was needed by the American people to move our country forward, a time when Democrats and Republicans went back home and said: I didn't get everything I wanted, to be sure, but the 65 percent I did get is worth the bill we have, and here is why the other side needed 35 percent. Those days are completely gone in the U.S. Senate, and I grieve for them. My dad passed away about a year ago. I know how disappointed he would be about where we are, but there isn't anybody who can fix it, except the 100 people who are here and, I suppose, the American people for whom we ostensibly work. In the last 10 years that I have been here, I have watched politicians come to this floor and destroy the solemn responsibility we have--the constitutional responsibility we have--to advise and consent on judicial appointments, to turn that constitutional responsibility into nothing more than a vicious partisan exercise. That hasn't been done by the American people. That wasn't done by any other generation of politicians who were in this place. It has been done by this generation of politicians led by the Senator from Kentucky, the majority leader of the Senate. We have become a body that does nothing. We are an employment agency. That is what we are. Seventy-five percent of the votes we took last year were on appointments. We voted on 26 amendments last year--26--26. In the world's greatest deliberative body, we passed eight amendments in a year. Pathetic. We didn't consider any of the major issues the American people are confronting in their lives, not a single one--10 years of townhalls with people saying to me: Michael, we are killing ourselves, and we can't afford housing, healthcare, higher education, early childhood education. We cannot save. We can't live a middle-class life. We think our kids are going to live a more diminished life than we do. What does the U.S. Senate do? Cut taxes for rich people. We don't have time to do anything else around here. And now, when we are the only body on planet Earth charged with the responsibility of dealing with the guilt or innocence of this President, we can't even bring ourselves to have witnesses and evidence as part of a fair trial, even when there are literally witnesses with direct knowledge of what the President did practically banging on the door of the Senate saying: Let me testify. We are too lazy for that. The reality is, we are too broken for that. We are too broken for that. And we have failed in our duty to the American people. Hamilton said in Federalist 65 that in an impeachment trial we were the inquisitors for the people. The Senate--we would be the inquisitors for the people. How can you be the inquisitors for the people when you don't even dignify the process with evidence and with witnesses? I often have school kids come visit me here in the Senate, which I really enjoy because I used to be the superintendent of the Denver Public Schools. When they come visit me, they very often have been on the Mall. They have seen the Lincoln Memorial. They have seen the Washington Monument. They have been seen the Supreme Court, this Capitol. And there is a tendency among them to believe that this was just all here, that it was all just here. And of course, 230 years ago, I tell them, none of it was here. None of it was here. It was in the ideas of the Founders, the people whom we call the Founders, who did two incredible things in their lifetime, in their generation, that had never been done before in human history. They wrote a Constitution that would be ratified by the people who lived under it. It never happened before. They would never have imagined that we would have lasted 230 years--at least until the age of Donald Trump. They led an armed insurrection against a colonial power. We call that the Revolutionary War. That succeeded too. They did something terrible in their generation that will last for the rest of our days and that is they perpetuated human slavery. The building we are standing in today was built by enslaved human beings because of the decisions that they made. But I tell the kids who come and visit me that there is a reason why there are not enslaved human beings in this country anymore and that is because of people like Frederick Douglass. He was born a slave in the United States of America, escaped his slavery in Maryland, risked his life and limb to get to Massachusetts, and he found the abolitionist movement there. And the abolitionist movement has been arguing for generations that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document. Frederick Douglass, who is completely self-taught, said to them: You have this exactly wrong, exactly backward, 180 degrees from the truth. The Constitution is an anti-slavery document, Frederick Douglass said, not a pro-slavery document. But we are not living up to the words of the Constitution. It is the same thing Dr. King said the night before he was killed in Memphis when he went down there for the striking garbage workers and he said: I am here to make America keep the promise you wrote down on the page. In my mind, Frederick Douglass and Dr. King are Founders, just as much as the people who wrote the Constitution of the United States. How could they not be? How could they not be? The women who fought to give my kids, my three daughters, the right to vote, who fought for 50 years to get the right to vote--mostly women in this country--are Founders, just like the people who wrote the Constitution, as well. Over the years that I have been here, I have seen this institution crumble into rubble. This institution has become incapable of addressing the most existential questions of our time that the next generation cannot address. They can't fix their own school. They can't fix our immigration system. They can't fix climate change, although they are getting less and less patient with us on that issue. But what I have come to conclude is that the responsibility of all of us--not just Senators but all of us as citizens in a democratic republic--230 years after the founding of this Republic, is the responsibility of a Founder. It is that elevated sense of what a citizen is required to do in a republic to sustain that republic, and I think that is the right way to think about it. It gives you a sense of what is really at stake beyond the headlines on the cable television at night and, certainly, in the social media feeds that divide us minute to minute in our political life today. The Senate has clearly failed that standard. We have clearly failed that standard. The idea that we would turn our backs and close our eyes to evidence pounding on the outside of the doors of this Capitol is pitiful. It is disgraceful, and it will be a stain on this body for all time. More than 50 percent of the people in this place have said that what the President did was wrong. It clearly was wrong. It clearly was unconstitutional. It clearly was impeachable. What President would run for office saying to the American people: I am going to try to extort a foreign power for my own electoral interest to interfere in our elections? It is exactly the kind of conduct that the impeachment clause was written for. It is a textbook case of why the impeachment clause exists. But even if you don't agree with me that he should have been convicted or that he should be convicted, I don't know how anybody in this body goes home and faces their constituents and says that we wouldn't even look at the evidence. So I say to the American people: Our democracy is very much at risk. I am not one of those people who believes that Donald Trump is the source of all our problems. I think he has made matters much worse, to be sure, but he is a symptom of our problem. He is a symptom of our failure to tend to the democracy--to our responsibility--as Founders. And if we don't begin to take that responsibility as seriously as our parents and grandparents did--people who faced much bigger challenges than we ever did--nobody is asking us, thank God, to end human slavery. Nobody is asking us to fight for 50 years for the self-evident proposition that women should have the right to vote. We are not marching in Selma, being beaten for the self-evident prospect that all people are created equal. Nobody is asking us to climb the Cliffs of Normandy to fight for freedom in a World War. But we are being asked to save the democracy and we are going to fail that test today in the Senate. And my prayer for our country is that the American people will not fail that test. I am optimistic that we will not. We have never failed it before, and I don't think we will fail it in our time. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. Chief Justice.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. Chief Justice, thank you. I would like to send a question to the desk on behalf of myself and Senator Warner.

Mr. BENNET. Thank you. I send a question to the desk from myself and Senator Schatz and Senator Menendez.