Michael Bennet

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, before he leaves the floor, I want to thank my colleague from Arizona for his incredibly wise remarks this morning and for his indignation at the insanity of this so-called tax bill that we are considering on the floor. What he was saying was about the benefits of this bill and how they are all going to go to the wealthiest people in America, and I sat here wondering: Why? Why? Why would we pass a bill like that on the floor of the Senate when the American people have so, so many needs? Why, when we have had an economy that for 50 years, because of the trickle-down economic policies that have been pursued by Republicans and sometimes Democrats in this Chamber, we see that the country has less economic mobility than it has had, which is a fancy way of describing a situation where people in America no longer feel that if they work hard, they are going to get ahead or that if they work hard, their kids are going to get ahead. That is the American dream, is to know your kids are going to do better than you did. For the first time in American history, as I said last night on this floor, for the first time in American history, if you are 30 years old in this country, you have a 50-percent chance of earning a salary as good as the one your parents had. That has never been true before. Incomes are down for young men in their twenties in this country by 40 percent since the mid-1970s, and we continue to see the distribution of wealth and the distribution of income make it harder and harder and harder for people to stay in the middle class, to afford the middle class, to be able to afford childcare, healthcare, higher education, a vacation for themselves and their families, to say nothing of the families that are living in poverty in America. I used to be the superintendent of the Denver Public Schools before I came here. The parents and grandparents in my school district, which was mostly kids of color, mostly kids living in poverty, were very often working two and three jobs just to feed their families. No matter what they did, no matter how hard they worked, they couldn't get their kids out of poverty. That economic dislocation, I think, is one of the reasons why the American people elected Donald Trump again, because they were so frustrated with an economy that seemed to have no benefit for them or their kids that they were willing to take the risk of chaos to try to have some sort of breakthrough. While I wouldn't have wanted that chaos, I can understand the impulse since neither party has done a very good job of delivering for working people in this country in a long time. We are going to see how that chaos theory works itself out because the chaos is raining down on our country right now. The chaos is raining down on the American people right now. One of the things that are really interesting to me about this tax bill is that I don't think there is any mayor in America who would propose what has been proposed here. I don't think there is any mayor in America that would say ``My plan for my community is to borrow more money than we have ever borrowed in the history of our community.'' The debt adds up to another $4.6 trillion--I guess it is $5.5 trillion if you count interest. ``I am going to borrow more money than I have ever borrowed, but we are not going to spend it on roads or bridges or parks, the desperate need for mental health treatment across our country, especially among kids but also among seniors as well and everybody else. I am not going to spend it on parks or schools. I am going to take that money, and I am going to give it to the richest neighborhood in town and hope that somehow it is going to trickle down to everybody else.'' That economic theory, when you put it in the terms of any community in America, makes no sense at all. And America is a community. It makes no sense for our Nation to go into debt, to force the children and grandchildren of our teachers and police officers and firefighters to pay back this debt, to pay back this interest. For what? To finance tax cuts for the wealthiest people in America when for the last 40 or 50 years, almost all of the benefit of the economy has accrued to the people at the top. We need an economy in this country that when it grows, it grows for everybody, not just the people at the top. That is what we need to do to save our democracy. You can't run a democracy successfully if people feel like their kids aren't going to live a better life than they lived. You can't make a case that the rule of law is important or that our checks and balances are important or that our exercise in self- government is important if people feel like their kids aren't going to do better than they did. Show me a time in history when that has been true--in human history when that has been true. It would be unreasonable to expect that that is going to be the case here, and you can feel the strains of that. You can feel the strains of that every day I go home to Colorado and I see people in every single county who are worried that their kids are not going to be able to afford to live in Colorado. They are worried that their kids are never going to be able to afford the housing that they have been able to afford. I could imagine a set of tax policies that made a lot of sense to America. I have fought for years and years and years to expand the child tax credit in this country. In fact, we did it during the Biden administration for 1 year. We were able to expand the child tax credit. Over 90 percent of families in Colorado benefited, and 90 percent of kids benefited. We cut the child poverty rate in America in half. In the richest country in the world, we demonstrated that we did not have to accept the level of childhood poverty that we have as a permanent feature of our democracy or a permanent feature of our economy. We could fix it on this floor. We could pull a lever that actually mattered to the American people. And it did matter. That was a tough time during COVID. That was a tough time for families. Not only that, we were able to take that tax credit and pay it out monthly. There were a lot of people in this city who said that would be impossible, that the IRS could never do that. Well, they did it, and families had a little bit of an extra benefit at the end of the month to pay for schoolbooks or afterschool programs or clothes to go back to school at the beginning of the year. That is the time of year it was. You could feel the compression literally lifting off the chests of working people that I represented who could for a moment feel like they could make the rent and also buy a few extra hours of childcare so they could stay at work, so they could make more money to support their children. That is a glimmer of what it would look like to have an economy that, when it grew, it actually grew for everybody, not just the people at the very top; where people felt like they could work hard and get into the middle class, that they could work hard and get out of poverty--get their kids out of poverty, most importantly--and get into the middle class. We could expand the earned income tax credit, which rewards working people, again. That also would be a tax cut for the middle class. In fact, if you take those two tax cuts together--which we did during the Biden administration, but now that has gone away--those were the largest tax cuts for middle-class people, for working people I think in the country's history, certainly in modern history. It was the biggest reduction in childhood poverty in modern American history and probably in American history. I actually think we should end childhood poverty in this country. That is what I believe. I think the richest country in the world should see it being in our interest to end childhood poverty and reduce all of the ancillary problems that occur in our society because kids are living in poverty through no fault of their own. Everybody knows that. Better investment in early childhood education. Better investment in kids to get them out of poverty. Let's put them on the right path. We are going to pay for it one way or another, and I would rather pay for it with productive citizens as a benefit of a Tax Code that is actually investing in the American people. But here we are finding ourselves in a place where what we are being told is that we are going to pass a tax bill that blows a massive hole in our deficit that is about the size of all the money that we borrowed to get here to begin with. And for what? To give tax cuts to the wealthiest people in our country, to the wealthiest neighborhoods in America, and expect that somehow that is going to trickle down to everybody else. Why? Why would we do something that irrational when the needs in America are so great, when we have the lack of economic mobility that I was talking about? I can think of a lot of reasons for it, but one of the ones that I keep coming back to is the campaign promises that some people seem to make around here as a result of the distorted campaign finance system we have. Over the last couple weeks, there have been articles day after day after day and reports on television about the $20 million that Elon Musk spent in Wisconsin to try to elect one supreme court justice there. He was unsuccessful. The people in Wisconsin rejected Elon Musk's three-ring circus that he brought to Wisconsin. They rejected his $20 million. But one thing that is so amazing to me is how cavalierly we accepted the idea that he was spending $20 million to begin with. He is proud of that. He is proud of that. He spent roughly $290 million on Donald Trump's campaign. I think it is inarguable that he might have made the difference in Pennsylvania, for example, where he was practically handing money out. It is like it was a portrait of the Senate in the gilded age, where the Senate was dominated by special interests with cartoons of dollar bills falling out of their pockets. He wandered around Pennsylvania with dollar bills falling out of his pockets--hundred-dollar bills, thousand-dollar bills. In Wisconsin, million-dollar bills he was giving away for the benefit of Donald Trump and to keep the tax system as distorted as it is, as unhelpful to the American people as it could be. Now, here is the thing: He is so wealthy--I think he is worth something like $378 billion, something like that. I will check that. But he is so wealthy that that $20 million to him is such a small fraction of his wealth that it is like somebody in Colorado buying one hamburger from McDonald's. Would somebody in Colorado spend the money on one hamburger at McDonald's if they thought they controlled the outcome of the election in Wisconsin? That $290 million that he spent in the last Trump campaign--a big part of that in Pennsylvania but other places as well--that sounds like a lot of money to anybody here. And $290 million--that is a lot of money. If you look at that in the context of, you know, a teacher in Colorado, it is about $50. That is the cost of a steak dinner for a teacher in Colorado. That is not nothing. That is not nothing. But if you knew you could control the outcome of America's future by spending the equivalent of what a steak dinner costs, even if you were a teacher in my old school district where I was the superintendent, you might do it, which is a reminder about why we have to change the campaign finance laws in this country. We cannot accept Citizens United as a permanent state of affairs, as a permanent feature of our democracy. And sometimes people say: Well, what are you going to do about it? The Supreme Court made a constitutional ruling about it. There is nothing you can do to fix it. There are plenty of generations of Americans that have confronted problems with a constitutional ruling like the Supreme Court, and they have done something about it. They have amended the Constitution in their time. There are probably a number of things we should do to make our democracy work better, but one of those would be to make sure that the wealthiest people in the country can't buy elections and can't do it with dark money either. So we can understand what is actually going on here, and we can explain why we have got such a preposterous proposal in front of us right now. It cuts taxes for the wealthiest people and threatens healthcare for the most vulnerable people in our country. I will close just by saying, there are some crazy things in our tax law. Crazy. Crazy. There is this thing called step-up basis, where people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the wealthiest people in our country--and I don't begrudge them their success, but the wealthiest people in our country are evading all taxes on the money that they have made because what they do is they hold their shares, the stock in their company. They never sell. They borrow against that, which allows them to finance their lifestyles. But for their entire lifetime, no tax is ever paid on their stocks, on their shares. And then they die, and then those stocks go to their very, very, very fortunate ``nepo'' babies who get to inherit it at the original price that the stock was valued decades ago and pay no taxes as a result of that. No one else in America gets that treatment. No one else in America gets that tax treatment--and in our country today because of that unbelievable concentration of wealth, in our country today because we have found ourselves, frankly, living in a new gilded age, which is reflected in the tax bill that is in front of us. These guys are willing to spend a tiny fraction of their net worth to make sure that the Tax Code continues to serve them and not the rest of the American people. That is why we have a tax bill, even putting aside stepped-up basis, where 50 percent of the benefit goes to the top 5 percent, and 10 percent of the benefit goes to the top 0.1 percent. That is when we live in a time in American history when the bottom 50 percent of Americans own 2 percent of the wealth of our country; at a time when young men in their twenties are seeing their pay cut by 40 percent since 1976; at a time when half the 30-year-olds in America are going to earn less money, for the first time in American history, than their parents did. We have a job to do here. We have a job to do in this Nation. We have to create an economy that when it grows, it grows for everybody again-- and not just on the coast but throughout the entire country. That is what we should be focused on today. That is what the American people need. They should have a tax bill that reflects the interests of their kids, a tax bill that reflects the interests of the American middle class, the most significant invention of our democracy in modern times. That needs to be reinforced. It needs to be strengthened. We have got to drag our economy into the 21st century in a way that will produce those sorts of outcomes for everyone in our economy, not just the people at the top. And we need a campaign finance system that reflects the values and the principles of a majority of Americans to make sure that our democracy can continue to function as well. I see my friend from California. I will yield the floor, and I look forward to the opportunity of hearing his speech. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I am sorry it is the misfortune of the Presiding Officer to be in the chair again when I am speaking. I don't actually speak that often on the floor.

Mr. BENNET. Thank you, Mr. President, and thank you to the staff who is here as well. This actually is the third time I have been down here in the last couple of days to talk about some of the things we are confronting at this moment when we are passing the budget. I have spent a couple of speeches talking about how problematic I think, to be kind about it, this budget is--in many ways, devastating. But today I want to join my friends that are here to talk about our national security and our intelligence. Since President Trump took office as President just over 70 days ago, he has treated the American people to a dangerous parade of incompetencies that put our national security at risk. Most egregiously, he has repeatedly sided with Russia and Vladimir Putin rather than standing with the Ukrainian people as they defend themselves against Vladimir Putin's aggression. After President Trump and Vice President JD Vance embarrassingly berated Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in their February Oval Office meeting, the Trump administration temporarily halted all security assistance to and intelligence sharing with Ukraine. This outrageous decision resulted in losses for Ukraine on the frontline and emboldened Putin and other dictators around the world, like China's Xi Jinping, undermining Ukraine's bargaining position and ours and American national security. Given the stakes for the United States, democracy, and the West, this was, in my estimation, the worst decision the Trump administration has made so far, and that is a long, long list. Near the top of that list is the now-infamous Signal chat that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz created to share what was clearly classified information related to U.S. strikes on Yemen and Waltz's accidental invitation of Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg to that chat. If that weren't enough, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sent precise war plans for the U.S. strikes on Yemen--specific times and weapons types--in that chat. I am a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. I see classified information every day. I wish I could say that we saw, you know, anything more secret than what was related in that Signal chat by Secretary Hegseth. But the truth is that what he sent--that targeting information, the precision with the timing of that--actually required more security than anything that I see on the Intelligence Committee on a daily basis. I would say 99 percent of what we see in the Intelligence Committee, which is meant to be confidential and is meant to be classified, is far less significant than what Secretary Hegseth sent in his Signal chat. In fact, I would say if that information is not classified, I don't know what information is. Signal is encrypted, and it is acceptable for some government use. That is true. I use Signal but never ever for sharing sensitive or classified information. The intelligence community and national security Agencies across the government have clear protocols to protect the kind of information that Secretary Hegseth sent. All of the people in that Signal chat, which included the Secretaries of Defense and Treasury, know this. They have ultrasecure rooms and platforms where they are legally required to discuss classified information. People at home might not know this, but when you go into one of those rooms, you have to leave your cell phone outside. You have to leave your cell phone in a box when you go into the room because you can't know and we can't know whether an adversary has placed malware on that phone. I think there are a lot of reasons to throw our phones into the Potomac River, but that is one good one--to not bring it into meetings where you are going to have classified information because you can't know who is on it. These people know better than to use Signal or any platform the way they did, but they were reckless, and they were lazy, and they put our national security at risk. By the way, they won't admit to this day that what they did was wrong. Not a single one of them will say that what they did was wrong. They are denying that they passed classified information on that call, when anybody who is reading it knows that. The people of Colorado certainly know that. China and Russia and others are surely monitoring these officials' unclassified phones, and Signal is not immune. In fact, in late March, just a week before Jeff Goldberg exposed the Trump Signal chat, the Department of Defense itself sent a Pentagon-wide email warning of Signal's vulnerability, noting that Russian hacking groups were trying to spy on Signal conversations. It is remarkable that the Secretary of Defense couldn't even follow his own Department's guidelines. Now credible media reports indicate that Mike Waltz used his personal Gmail for government business and that his team created as many as 20 Signal chats to communicate about crises around the world. This utter incompetence and recklessness in the handling of sensitive and classified information is inexcusable, and it is a threat to our national security. When the truth comes out, that will be the judgment. They are putting the men and women of our Armed Forces and our intelligence officers and our allies at risk. They are eroding our standing around the world. They are going to make even our closest allies question whether they can even share intelligence with the United States. Why would MI6 or Mossad share their secrets with the United States if Pete Hegseth is going to post them in Signal for Jeff Goldberg to publish in The Atlantic? The Trump White House tried to declare ``case closed,'' they said, on their poor handling of classified information, but since then, the Department of Defense's acting inspector general saw through the lies, and they launched an evaluation of this administration's use of classified information. The acting inspector general is a senior civil servant with a strong record of nonpartisan public service, including Active Duty in the Army, and I am confident he will conduct an independent and thorough investigation. It is worth remembering, too, that the inspector general is only acting because President Trump fired the former inspector general in February, along with the inspectors general of 16 other Agencies because he felt he couldn't control them. He was worried that they were going to blow the whistle on what he was doing. Clearly, the Trump administration wants to hide their sloppiness and their incompetence, but unfortunately for them, Waltz was incompetent and sloppy enough to accidentally add The Atlantic's editor-in-chief to their Signal chat in which Pete Hegseth was sloppy and incompetent enough to share classified information. After Jeff Goldberg reported on the evidence of this chat, the administration's first action was to pretend like it had never happened. Then they lied about the information they shared--information that they never should have disclosed anywhere but in a classified space. It is an insult to the American people's intelligence to say that not only was this not classified but that nothing they did was wrong, that it was perfectly normal to have a discussion about targets in Yemen on a Signal chat that was made available to the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. I mean, how about apologizing to the American people for that? Jeff Goldberg didn't put himself on the chat; he was put there by Mike Waltz. By the way, he had the decency and the patriotism not to disclose the information that he was worried was classified and that might put at risk the troops that were doing that dangerous mission. These are issues of life and death, particularly for our troops and for our intelligence agents and professionals. And now the White House has fired several members of the National Security Council on top of all of this and the head of U.S. Cyber Command after Laura Loomer, a known conspiracy theorist and close Trump ally, told the President to do so. Why is the President taking national security advice not from the generals that have become the head of the NSA but from a dangerous conspiracy theorist who says 9/11 was an inside job and who has never abandoned it? How is any of this remotely acceptable to the American people--of course it is not--or to my Republican colleagues? The Trump administration's lies and incompetence are an insult. With their recklessness, they have already put Americans in danger and alienated crucial allies and partners around the world, making the world even more dangerous and weakening U.S. national security in the process. Otto von Bismarck, the 19th century German Chancellor, famously said that ``God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.'' We are, indeed, blessed by our size, our abundant natural resources, and our relative distance from adversaries that wish to do us harm. Our advantages are so great that the only country that can destroy the United States, as Lincoln told us, is the United States. No wonder why Xi Jinping thinks that the United States is in decline, that there are great changes unseen in the country, as he put it, and that he can simply wait for President Trump to accelerate our decline by tearing down the bedrock of America's national security and our prosperity. No wonder Xi and his strongmen friends like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un believe that the global order is up for grabs, that they are on the rise and that we are on the collapse, on the fall. Thanks to President Trump's wanton and self-harming recklessness, incompetence, and isolationism, that is how they feel. No wonder why Xi continues to ramp up pressure on Taiwan, with live- fire exercises around the island earlier this week, and Putin continues to wage his unjustified war on Ukraine while threatening NATO allies like Poland and the Baltics. Emboldening these dictators, as President Trump's administration has, will make the world more dangerous to the United States. I can see the leader is here, so I am going to bring my comments to a close, but let me just say that nothing has been more contrary to the national security interests of the United States, our allies, and the Ukrainian people than the undermining of the Ukrainian soldiers on the frontline by this President--nothing--from his telling the American people that Ukraine started the war to his constant coddling of Vladimir Putin. This is a generational moment for the United States of America to step up for democracy and for freedom around the world, and we are going to do it notwithstanding what President Trump said. This moment demands sober, careful, and calibrated policymaking on the international stage, not the Trump administration's recklessness. Their failure to meet this moment will be our shared failure. We will not let it happen. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 1646 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, with Russia rejecting President Trump's proposed 30-day cease-fire and continuing to attack Ukraine and with the administration briefly pausing military and intelligence assistance to Ukraine last month, the Senate must send an unequivocal message. The Ukrainian people did not ask for this war. They did not invite this war. They have fought with everything they have and with the American people's support. They have suffered 400,000 casualties and caused more Russian casualties than in all the wars that Russia has had since World War II. Those of us serving in this Chamber have a duty to the American people to demand moral and strategic clarity by making clear that any steps by this administration to cut off military and security assistance to Ukraine is unacceptable. This is a simple question; it is not a partisan one. And the answer is clear: This fight is not just for Ukraine. It is for democracy. It is for freedom. I urge my colleagues to stand with the Ukrainian people and vote yes.

Mr. BENNET. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I was necessarily absent for rollcall vote No. 162, on passage of the joint resolution, H.J. Res. 24. Had I been present for the vote, I would have voted nay.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Before he leaves the floor, I just wanted to thank my colleague from Georgia for the moral clarity of his remarks tonight. It is interesting to think for a moment of what we are dealing with and what the context of this budget is. We are living in the wealthiest country in the world, but unlike almost any other industrialized country in the world, we don't provide healthcare to everybody in the United States. This is the wealthiest country in the world. Per capita, we are far wealthier than any other country in the world. And, yet, we made the decision not to provide healthcare to everybody. And, shockingly, not only are we doing that, we are spending twice what any other industrialized country is spending on healthcare--for worse results. Do you know that, today, in the United States of America, our life expectancy is 6 years shorter than if you live in an industrialized country in the world that has a universal healthcare system that costs half of what this healthcare system costs? If you are African American in the United States of America, your life expectancy is 12 years shorter than if you live in a country that has a universal healthcare system that costs half of the one in the United States of America. And those systems, by the way, are very different. Some of them are all public systems. Some of them are a combination of for-profit and nonprofit and government healthcare. But the thing they share in common is that everybody is covered and that they cost much less than the healthcare that is delivered in the United States of America. I am sure my colleague from Georgia has the same experience I have in Colorado, which is to notice that every year it seems like healthcare actually becomes more scarce in America--less abundant--even though we are spending all that money. And don't even ask me about mental healthcare, which our families desperately need in the United States of America now. And as a former school superintendent, I can tell you our kids are facing a raging epidemic of mental health issues that are related to COVID, that are related to other challenges they are facing, that are related to the social media algorithms that are ripping their childhoods apart with absolutely no response from this place. So that is the starting point. And I think I heard my colleague from Georgia talking about how Martin Luther King had said that inequality in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane of all. And I wonder if one of the things he was thinking is that it is shocking and inhumane, in the richest country in the world, that not everybody is covered, even though in every one of these other industrialized countries, people are covered. And everybody in this room knows that no matter whether you are covered or whether you are not, if you have a sick child, you are going to try to get them a doctor. If you have a sick child, you are going to try to get them to the hospital, whether they are covered or whether they are not. And one of the reasons why our healthcare system is so expensive is that people don't have primary care; that is to say, they don't have the ability to go in to see a doctor in a timely way, just to get a wellness checkup for themselves or for their kids, just to make sure that everything is OK, so they don't develop a chronic healthcare condition that makes the healthcare much more expensive on the other end and shortens their life. That is why we have a 6-year life expectancy that is shorter than people in the rest of the industrialized world--unless you are African American in the United States. Then it is 12 years, more than a decade. And that is why this budget is so astonishing and so amazing. And I agree with my colleague from Georgia that every budget is a moral document. This document is an immoral document. This budget is an immoral budget. You would think that we lived in the poorest country in the world, not the richest country in the world, if you saw this budget. There is no way that any mayor in Georgia or any mayor in Colorado, whatever party they are in, Democrat or Republican, would put a budget like this in front of their people. There is no way they would come to them and say: We are going to make life even harder for people who are even hanging on by their fingernails just to get the healthcare they get because, as my colleague from Georgia said, we are all sicker if kids don't get inoculated. We are all sicker if this country of ours doesn't have people that have primary care. It just gets more expensive if families have to go to the emergency room to get care for their children because they have no other way to get healthcare. That is what is going to happen. Most of the people who are on Medicaid are children and senior citizens. That is who is on Medicaid--and disabled people and people who have spent their entire lifetime--they have spent their entire lifetimes working, and now they have spent their lifesavings down just for the privilege of spending the rest of their days in a nursing home, often in rural parts of our country, on Medicaid. So this budget has these cuts to healthcare. It is a way of saying it. I mean, we call it Medicaid, but it is healthcare for poor children, for poor seniors, for working people, for disabled people, for people that are living in nursing homes that have no other options. It is their healthcare. If you take this healthcare away, people are just going to get sicker. It is going to cost the society more. People are going to fill up these emergency rooms. We know that because people will try to get healthcare wherever they can, even if it is the most expensive way of doing it. We would be a lot better off having a conversation about how to cover everybody in a way that costs us as little as it costs in other countries around the world. But not only are we not having that discussion with this budget, we are having a discussion about a budget that cuts taxes and blows this massive hole in the deficit, no matter how much the healthcare cuts are, of about $4.6 trillion. And that is to extend the tax cuts that Donald Trump came here and passed in 2017. This is another shocking part of this budget. You know, we have very significant problems in our economy. This country relied, when I was growing up, on the idea that if you worked hard, you could get ahead; if you worked hard and your kids worked hard, they could live a better life than the life you lived. That was the American promise. That was the American promise. Today, for the first time in American history, half the people that are 30 years old are going to make less money than their parents. Think about that. Half the people that are 30 years old in the country today are going to make less money than their parents did. If you look at young men in the United States of America, they are earning 40 percent less income today than they earned in 1976. We tell ourselves that we are the land of opportunity. We need to be the land of opportunity, but we are seeing our economic mobility slide behind competition, from Southeast Asia to Europe. There is a lot of discussion these days about what the threats to our democracy are or the fact that our democracy is threatened. I don't think there is a greater threat to our democracy than the lack of economic mobility we have, than the fact that too many families in Colorado and across this country feel like their kids are not going to live a life as good as the life they live. In Colorado, there is not a county anymore where people feel like their lives are going to be better, where their kids' lives are going to be better than theirs. When you lose that sense of opportunity, when you lose that sense that if you work hard, you are going to get ahead, that is a danger to democracy because, inevitably, somebody shows up, as President Trump did, and says: I alone can fix it. You don't need a democracy. You don't need the rule of law. You don't need this exercise in self- government. I can fix it. You should expect your private sector and your public sector to be hopelessly corrupt, hopelessly bankrupt. That is a dark vision, but that is the dark vision that he was elected on twice. I think we would be a lot better off trying to figure out how to create an economy that, when it grows, it grows for everybody, not just the people at the very top; and an economy that, when people work hard, they feel like they know they will be able to propel their kids forward. It was an economy that reestablished the American dream for this entire country. We better do that. We better do that if we are going to have any hope of saving this democracy. But here comes a budget where a massive hole is being blown into the deficit and is causing a proposal to cut healthcare for the poorest people in the country and the poorest children in the country--here is what it is doing. It is cutting taxes for the wealthiest people in America. Fifty percent of the benefit of this tax bill will go to the top 5 percent of Americans. Fifty percent of the benefit of this tax bill will go to the top 5 percent of Americans. I have said it on the floor before. I am not going to dwell on it again. This is analogous. It is the same if a mayor in Denver or Grand Junction or Limon or Durango or Springfield came to see the citizens of those communities and said: I am going to borrow more money than we have ever borrowed before. You ask them: What are you going to spend it on? I am worried about that. What are you going to spend that money on? Parks? Public safety? On the mental health challenges that I described earlier? On our infrastructure? Our roads? Our bridges? Our schools? And the answer is: No, no, no. Well, what are you going to spend it on? We are going to give tax breaks to the two wealthiest neighborhoods in town and let it trickle down to everybody else. That is the Trump tax policy. That was the Trump tax policy in 2017, and it is the Trump tax policy this year. It is very unusual, by the way, to have a President who has been here twice with an interruption, but that is the case with President Trump. We now know the facts of the math that he claimed the last time. He said last time that the tax cuts would pay for themselves. We know that they cost the country $4 trillion; that the sons and daughters of teachers and firefighters and police officers all over this country who are not going to benefit in a material way from the tax cuts are going to have to pay back the debt that is incurred to give them to people who, as the Senator from Georgia said, aren't even asking, really. Many of them know we are in this situation where we have the worst income inequality that we have had since the 1920s and that we should be thinking about how to build that middle class again, give people the chance to get into the middle class, which is what we should be focused on. So there is a set of priorities here that somehow makes sense when it gets to Washington, DC, but surely doesn't make sense in the towns and cities of this country. There is a choice that would never be made--a choice to hurt the people that now are going to have to go without healthcare; a choice to blow a massive hole in the deficit--not to invest in the country but to cut taxes for the wealthiest people. Why don't we have a tax cut for working people? Why don't we have a tax cut for the middle class? Why don't we expand the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit for working people here? Mr. President, I am going to finish. I do want to read some letters that have been written to me from people in Colorado who are deeply concerned about these cuts to Medicaid. I want to also say a word of thank-you to the people that have come to my townhalls--sometimes with their children, sometimes with their children with disabilities--to advocate on behalf of their children, to advocate on behalf of children all over our State and all over the country whose lifeline is this healthcare program that is being cut in this budget. There were so many people that wrote in. The No. 1 issue--when we have these townhalls, we write down the questions that are asked. The No. 1 issue is Medicaid because the people that have loved ones who are on the program know it is going to be cut, know that they have nowhere else to turn. That is why they are there at 8 o'clock or 9 o'clock at night with their children when their children should be home in bed, because they want people here to understand what it is going to mean to their families if these cuts go into place. The first letter is from Barbara of Greenwood Village: We are 86 year old parents of our 53 year old, nonverbal autistic son who we had become physically unable to care for him in our home anywhere. We were able to place him in a host home May 29, 2024, where he is being provided a safe and caring environment. He requires 24/7 supervision, to be given his needed daily medication, and seeing that he gets to all needed doctors and dental appointments and continues to do so. Without continuing Medicaid's current level of support, we are terrified that these needs may not continue to be met! As aging parents-- Eighty-six-year-old parents-- --we are greatly concerned about these proposed huge cuts to Medicaid . . . It's so important for us to know that all these supports will still be in place after we are gone and unable to advocate for him. Please help us to do this by not cutting Medicaid benefits!!! The next letter is from Michell in Thornton: I am writing to urge you to protect and strengthen Medicaid for individuals with disabilities. My daughter, who was adopted at age 10, is now 21 but has the cognitive level of a five-year-old. She has Fragile X Syndrome, ADHD, PTSD, anxiety, and possible fetal alcohol syndrome. She requires constant supervision, behavioral support, and medical care beyond what private insurance covers. Medicaid is essential for her survival and quality of life. It provides funding for adult programs that give her purpose, medical equipment, and living assistance--expenses that most families simply cannot afford. No family could afford. Without Medicaid, she and many others like her would be left without critical care, increasing the risk of institutionalization or homelessness. Medicaid also plays a vital role in adoption. Many children with disabilities, like my daughter, find forever families because Medicaid provides the financial support needed to care for them. Without it, fewer families would be able to adopt, leaving more children to age out of the system without the care they desperately need. Please support Medicaid funding and policies that ensure individuals with disabilities receive the care and dignity they deserve. Thank you for your time and dedication to this critical issue. The care I say that all of us deserve. Erica from Johnstown: My son has Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. His care alone without Medicaid waivers will cost us at least $1 million per year. Medicaid allows me to be paid to take care of my child and not rely on nursing care. Medicaid has really helped him get the best care possible without having to worry about the cost. And to be able to have his parent there to take care of him. Samuel from Denver: My name is Samuel. I moved to Denver with my wife Cynthia and our son Joaquin just over a year ago-- Welcome-- in order to have his complex medical issues treated at Children's Hospital of Colorado. Medicaid has without exaggeration saved our lives; my wife is paid as our son's caregiver when she would otherwise be unable to work. Joaquin has received services ranging from medications that prevent constant pain to (before our move) air ambulance flights from Albuquerque to CHCO, including several life- saving surgeries. Losing funding for Medicaid directly translates to unnecessary suffering and even loss of life for Joaquin and countless children like him. Please do not allow that to happen. Mr. President, I can't tell you the number of parents I have met who have spent 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in care of their own children but who are able to do it because of the small payment that is made by Medicaid. What are these parents supposed to do if this is cut? How are we going to meet the moral obligation of this country to our children with this cut? A letter from Brittny in Denver: My son has autism, a developmental disability, and a speech delay. He cannot be in a typical daycare or even go to preschool due to the high level of support he requires. Medicaid pays for his speech therapy and occupational therapy. After just 6 months of ABA therapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy, Jackson is now speaking. He's not as aggressive and is getting better with managing the sensory issues that he struggles with daily. Without Medicaid, we would not be able to pay for our home or food as I am his paid caregiver through Medicaid. I cannot work a typical job. It is important that he receives these therapies and supports for Medicaid as well as me so that our family can survive and he has the brightest future possible. If anything is taken away from him or us, it will be detrimental. Please give my son and our small family a fighting chance. Thank you. Barbara from Greenwood Village: Our son Derek is autistic and nonverbal. His dad and I are 86 plus, and it became hard for us to take care of him. We wanted to be sure he would be in a safe and secure situation and happy there. On May 29 of this year, we were able to find a host home for him to live in. He is doing well there. He has people that take him out in the community 6 days a week to enjoy being out and about, which is so very important to his happiness and well-being. We pray that Medicaid will continue to support him in continuing this new way of life for him. Our community of people with disabilities desperately need help! Sasha from Fountain: I have a 9-year-old, wheelchair-bound daughter with cerebral palsy. She depends on me 100 percent. She depends on me 24/7, morning, day, and night. I change her, dress her, get her out of bed, feed her, bathe her, drive her to therapy and other appointments, exercise, massage, and physical therapy at home, give her her medications, get her ready for bed, and help her in the middle of the night if she wakes up. Because she depends on me, I'm unable to get a job outside of the [house, and that] is why I depend on this waiver. I would rather care for my daughter, give her the quality care and love she deserves, than hire a stranger and depend on them to take care of my child. Without the waiver, I wouldn't be able to afford to stay home and make sure she is safe and happy. Thanks to the waiver, she [has] the therapy she needs. It's a crisis, and we need Congress to ensure that everyone has access to home- and community-based services right now. It is a crisis. It is a crisis. It is a crisis in the richest country in the world. Now we are going to provoke this crisis. We are going to make it even worse. We are going to destabilize these families. For what--so we can give tax cuts to the wealthiest people in America? Why don't you just not do that part of the bill? Why don't you just not do that part of the bill? This economy has shoveled benefits for 50 years on the wealthiest people in our country. Do we want to compound that unfairness with a set of tax policies like the ones that are being pursued here and turn around and cut healthcare for the most vulnerable people in America? If you are concerned about waste, fraud, and abuse, go after waste, fraud, and abuse, but don't make people's lives even more painful. Don't make people's lives even more difficult. Don't force parents to actually leave their households when there is no one else to take care of their children. No one would make these choices in one of our communities at home. I would like to hear a city council meeting where these were the choices that were being made: Cut electric for the poorest people in the country. Borrow as much money as we have ever borrowed. Give the benefit to the two wealthiest neighborhoods in town. It doesn't make any sense. Here is a letter from Bryce in Denver: When I sustained a cervical spinal cord injury from a shallow water diving accident at age 20, the only thing I was certain of was that my future aspirations and independence were finished. I had plenty of time to think about what I had lost as a quadriplegic during my 45-day stay in the ICU. But as I began my rehabilitation, I learned about Medicaid and home- and community-based services. By the time I returned home, I had set up home health care services that allowed me to receive the needed care to be independent throughout the day and enabled my parents to continue working. By the time 1 year had passed after my accident, I was back living on my college's campus and taking a full slate of classes. As I write this, I am a staff attorney at the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition--an organization I dreamed of contributing to professionally when I was a volunteer advocate here over a decade ago. I continue to benefit from daily home health care through a consumer- directed program available through Colorado Medicaid, and can pay for medical appointments and services, physical therapy, and occupational therapy services, which keep me healthy enough to [continuously] contribute to disability rights advocacy across the state and [the] Nation. In no uncertain terms, Medicaid's home- and community-based services has repeatedly opened the door of opportunity for me to live a meaningful, independent life. Without these services, I would be unemployed, living either with my parents or in a nursing facility. Home- and community-based services represent American values of equal opportunity to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. They represent our societal commitment to providing and promoting those opportunities to all citizens, and these values and commitments--manifested in Medicaid services--are the sole reason that I have been able to overcome quadriplegia and live a purposeful, beautiful life. My name is Kalyn Rose-- She is from Denver-- --and I was born with a rare condition: osteogenesis imperfecta. My mother lost count of all my broken bones at a young age, but it is certainly over 100 fractures and likely 50-plus surgeries now. Because of my access to Medicaid, I have been able to get life-supporting surgeries, emergency room visits, and wheelchairs that I would not otherwise . . . receive. Thanks to Medicaid, I live a full life as an artist, educator, mentor, and community advocate based in Denver, CO. I would certainly not be who I am today without lifesaving medical expenses I would never be able to afford myself. I am currently caring for my now-disabled mother, who also relies on Medicaid and support services. Without Medicaid, I, my family, and millions of others would be left to die. Medicaid is a lifeline for so many of us, and we all deserve access to healthcare in the richest, most powerful country known to humankind. I couldn't have said that better myself. Nearly 1.3 million Coloradans like Kalyn rely on Health First Colorado and CHIP to get health coverage. Half a million of them are children. These cuts would affect more than half of Colorado's seniors who rely on Health First Colorado to help pay for nursing homes because they literally can't afford to die anywhere else. From birth to death, our Medicaid Programs are a lifeline for my constituents and for millions of Americans. My colleague from Georgia started his speech by saying that a budget is a moral document. I could not agree with him more. I think we should reconsider, in the face of the advocacy that we are hearing, whether these are the best choices we can make, and of course, they are not. In a rational world, we would be figuring out how to get everybody healthcare in this country and do it for less money than these other countries are spending, just as they are doing, and we would be able to use the savings from that to pay down our deficit if we wanted to do that or invest in our military if we wanted to do that or invest in our roads and our bridges if we wanted to do that or in the mental health of our children if we cared to do that. Those are the choices that we should be making tonight. I want to finish this by thanking again the people who have come to my townhall meetings; to the people who have brought their loved ones, especially their children, to those townhall meetings; to the people who took the time to write, who have not given up on the idea that they can have a voice in this democracy and that the decisions that this place can make can actually align with the priorities that they have. They are not asking for anything here except the chance to continue to take care of their children, to take care of their parents, to take care of their loved ones, and to be contributing members of our society. We should support their ambitions for themselves. We should support their ambitions for our country. We should find a better way of supporting them, and we should shelve this budget, which is going to do nothing but harm the American people. I thank the Presiding Officer for his patience. I thank the staff for being here so late tonight even though tonight's lateness is going to be nothing compared to tomorrow night's lateness.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, with that--if I can find my glasses--I ask unanimous consent to amend the previous order and that the Senate stand adjourned until 8:30 a.m., with all other provisions of the order remaining in effect.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Senator Booker, would you yield for a question?

Mr. BENNET. That is what I wanted to talk about.

Mr. BENNET. Sir, will you yield for a question?

Mr. BENNET. Let me ask you, Senator Booker--can I ask you directly how long a question you would like? I am happy to provide you with a 5- minute question or a 5-hour question. It depends entirely on you.

Mr. BENNET. My wife Susan--

Mr. BENNET. That is why I came down here.

Mr. BENNET. I say this to the Senator of New Jersey and the Presiding Officer: Thank you very much for being here, for enduring this. When I started here, I was sitting in the chair all the way to the right of where you are today, Senator Booker. I can remember the day you walked in to be sworn in. You came through those doors right there. I had a huge smile on my face because I knew when you were walking through those doors, when you were walking into this Chamber, you would bring with you the kids that you used to work for in Newark, NJ. The reason I knew that was that when you were working for the kids in Newark, NJ, as the mayor of Newark, NJ, I was working for the kids in Denver as the superintendent of Denver Public Schools. At that time in our country's history, we were engaged in a pretty profound effort to try to make better the schools in our respective communities--not that everything was perfect, but we were trying to drive achievement for the kids in Newark and the kids in Denver, and we talked about it over many years. And here you walked into this Chamber, a place where it would be easy to imagine has long had the habit of treating America's kids like they are someone else's kids, not like they are America's kids. I know that because if the kids in America were represented by the 100 desks that are in this Senate, roughly 9 of them would be graduating with a college degree in our country, 9 of these desks. If we thought about the rates of literacy, the failure in our country to be able to teach people how to read or do mathematics decade after decade after decade, the proficient students would consume just a few desks in this place and everybody else would not be able to do basic levels of reading and basic levels of math. But here you were, somebody who understands that, and here you are, somebody who understands that. One of the very first projects you and I worked on--this is coming to my question--was the child tax credit. This was an effort to turn back 30 or 40 years of trickle-down economics that said that what we are going to do is cut taxes for the richest people in the country and just have it trickle down to everybody else. Some people don't know what that means. Let me, if I could--

Mr. BENNET. Let me just say what that actually means. For you to understand that what tax policy is, that tax policy that Donald Trump has pursued now twice--once when he was President before and now again--you have to imagine that there is a mayor in Newark or there is a mayor in Denver or a mayor in San Diego or in Miami who is saying to the people that live in his community: I have an idea. I am going to go out and borrow more money than we have ever borrowed before as a community. I am going to go out and borrow a ton of money. Your constituents and my constituents would say: Wait a minute, Mayor. Wait a minute. That makes me nervous. What are you borrowing all that money for? Because I am worried about the fiscal condition of my city and my town. This conversation would happen in every city and every town in Colorado or New Jersey, whether they are Democratic or Republican mayors. You have to answer the question: What are you spending the money on? What are you going to borrow all this money for? Is it for our parks? No. Is it for our schools? No. Is it to give mental health services to kids who desperately need it? No. Is it for our roads and bridges, our infrastructure? No. Are you going to do something important for our water systems? No. What is the answer? What are you going to do with that money that you are borrowing, that you are mortgaging our kids' future? What is this important thing you are going to do with it? The answer is, we are going to give it to the two richest neighborhoods in New Jersey or Newark or Denver, and we are going to expect that it is going to trickle down to everybody else. That is the theory. That is what trickle-down economics is. That is what the Trump tax plan is. And there is a reason why no mayor in America has ever done it--because you would be run out on a rail because you couldn't explain it. You are going to borrow money from the kids of our police officers, our firefighters, our teachers in order to cut taxes for the richest people in the community in the hope that they will buy a little bit of an extra--I don't know--luxury, and then that is going to somehow generate economic activity for everybody else. It is demonstrably true that has never worked. By the way, these tax cuts, I say to the Presiding Officer and everybody else within the sound of my voice, have literally never ever come close to paying for themselves. That is a complete lie. That is why the Congressional Budget Office says this is going to blow a $4.6 trillion hole in our deficit. And for what? To give tax cuts to the richest people in America when they need them least and when the income inequality is as great as it has been in our country since the 1920s? Which brings me to my question. My cherished colleague from New Jersey, what was it we were trying to do with the child tax credit? There were a lot of people who believed that we couldn't even get it passed, that we couldn't even get the IRS to administer it. Then we did get it passed during part of the Biden administration, and lo and behold, more than 90 percent of the families in New Jersey got a tax cut. Lo and behold, more than 90 percent of the families in Colorado got a tax cut--not waiting for a trickle down from the wealthiest people, but they got a tax cut directly that did what? Cut in half--cut in half--the childhood poverty rate in America. In the richest country in the world, for one moment, we said we don't have to accept this level of childhood poverty as a permanent feature of our democracy or a permanent feature of our economy. We can do something different than that. Senator Booker, that is what you said when you were mayor of Newark. We don't have to accept these generational outcomes of poverty or of poor schools or of lead in water. We can do something different. And that is what you brought to the U.S. Senate as well. The tragedy, from my perspective, is--there are many tragedies about the election of Donald Trump--by the way, I will say again on this floor that I don't blame him for getting elected President. He ran, and he won. Those of us that were trying to offer a different vision have something to explain about why we were not successful. But one thing I am certain of is that the kids in Newark and the kids in Denver are completely invisible to our current President, that he is not concerned with their welfare or even loses a minute's sleep over the next generation. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about--this isn't a numbers and cents question because I know--even though you don't look tired, I am sure you must be tired after all these hours and hours and hours. But can you talk a little bit, Senator, about how a society should be judged with respect to how we treat the next generation of Americans; how a tax bill should be judged by how we treat the next generation of Americans; how almost nothing else matters except what we do with respect to the next generation of Americans? I can tell you that my daughters Caroline, Halina, and Anne understand better than most your commitment to them and your commitment to their generation because you have been such an inspiration to them, not just today--not just today but thank you for what you are doing-- but for basically their entire lifetime.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to speak for up to 6 minutes, Senator Tillis for up to 10 minutes, and Senator Sanders for up to 20 minutes prior to the scheduled rollcall vote.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I would like to thank Senator McConnell for his constancy over the last 3 years. We have been out on the floor together many times to speak about the need to support Ukraine. I also want to thank my colleague Senator Shaheen from New Hampshire, the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, for organizing this bipartisan gathering. Senator Tillis from North Carolina is here as well. It is nice to be here in a bipartisan way with people from both sides of the aisle to work on something of this critical importance to my State of Colorado, to the country, and to the world. Senator McConnell, not surprisingly today, talked about that very, very famous lesson that Ronald Reagan taught all of us, and that was his pursuit of peace through strength. I was on the floor talking about that last week. Today we have a corollary to Ronald Reagan's rule of peace through strength from Senator McConnell, which is, don't mistake surrender for peace. Don't mistake surrender for peace. The lesson Ronald Reagan was teaching when he said ``peace through strength'' was a lesson that history had taught him and history had taught the free world. Dust off your reliable 10th-grade Western civics textbook and look up President Woodrow Wilson's attempts to achieve ``peace without victory'' for either side--that is how he described it--as an example of the failure that weakness invites, the kind of weakness that Leader McConnell was talking about. Before the United States even had entered World War I, President Wilson tried to force both sides to accept a peace deal they didn't want by depriving them of weapons and depriving them of funds. In 1916--again, before the United States was directly aiding the allies--financiers from the United States were financing the UK, which was at war, and also funding their allies in mainland Europe. So Wilson's government cautioned U.S. investors against issuing short-term bonds to the UK and to France. This Presidential expression of disapproval had the effect of cutting off U.S. private assistance to Europe altogether, and the record is painfully clear. President Wilson's decision created a financial crisis in the United Kingdom, but it did nothing to end the war. Instead, Germany, in 1917, only escalated their attacks on civilian shipping from the United States, prompting Congress finally to declare war and approve a $3 billion loan to France and to England. By the way, just to amplify what the leader has already said this morning, that $3 billion loan was about $81 billion in today's dollars, when you think about the roughly $120 billion that we have invested in Ukraine. In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain even more famously than Wilson tried to appease Hitler with the infamous Munich Agreement, through which the UK, France, and Italy allowed Nazi Germany to annex part of peaceful Czechoslovakia. As our history textbooks show, Hitler never stopped in Czechoslovakia but continued his war throughout Europe. Just as Wilson and Chamberlain failed, friends of freedom in Ukraine and around the world should not pressure Ukraine into accepting an unjust peace that will never, ever last. Only with security guarantees from Europe and the United States can we have some assurance that Putin will not invade Ukraine again at a moment when he thinks the world is not watching. That is a guarantee. That is a guarantee. I visited Ukraine last month with my friends Senator Shaheen and Senator Tillis, who are both here today. We saw the courage of the Ukrainian people up close. We saw the courage they have forged to save their country and the suffering they have endured--43,000 deaths and another almost 400,000 casualties--not just on behalf of Ukraine but on behalf of Europe, the West, democracy, freedom, our national security. In cemeteries all across Ukraine, fresh graves are piled high with dirt and flowers, testifying to the Ukrainian people's sacrifice. To put it in American terms, Coloradoan terms, there is not a county in the entire country where somebody hasn't lost somebody to this war. But the Ukrainian people have not had to fight this fight alone. The American people have steadfastly and generously backed this fight to the tune of, as I mentioned, $125 billion. I won't go through all the reasons why that has been good for the United States, as Senator McConnell said--and that is a lot of money, but it is just about 0.53 percent of our GDP. That is about $365 an American. Our European allies and far-flung ones, like Australia and Japan, have stepped up as well because they know that supporting Ukraine means standing with people willing to do anything to fight for their country. They know that with American weapons and those of our allies, the American people have literally kept Putin's army at the gates of Europe while forcing him to squander more than $200 billion and staggering casualties of 700,000 people. We learned while we were in Ukraine that the Ukrainians are killing more Russians today than they were 6 months ago. We all want this war to end, which is why I was glad to see the United States commit today to resuming intelligence sharing and security assistance to Ukraine as part of the potential U.S.-brokered, 30-day cease-fire with Russia. But for the sake of Ukraine and the rest of the free world, we must not pressure Ukraine to silence their guns unless Russia commits to doing the same. We cannot force Ukraine to accept an end to this war that is anything other than a just and enduring peace. This requires that the United States, our allies, and Ukraine continue working together to establish terms of the peace and negotiate with Putin while the Ukrainians continue their brave fight. They are not asking to be relieved of this terrible burden. I couldn't even imagine the other day when we were in Kyiv how cold it must have felt to people who were on the frontlines of that war. It was cold enough just in the streets of Kyiv. It was cold enough just getting on the train from Poland to go to Kyiv. But they are embracing their responsibility because they know that any cease-fire without credible security guarantees will allow Putin to rebuild his army and attack again, and they know that how this war ends will determine whether Putin sets his sites on our NATO allies like Poland and the Baltics. To conclude that any other result is possible is to completely ignore history, is to completely ignore what Putin has said and whether dictators like China's Xi Jinping test our resolve by invading Taiwan, whether the post-World War II international order the United States and our allies created persists, and whether the United States continues to provide the leadership our parents and grandparents supplied since the end of that war. That is what Senator McConnell calls on us to remember. Throughout history, it has been too easy for some to ignore the moral responsibility we have to people who are sacrificing their lives a continent away on behalf of our shared values and interests. It is harder in these moments but important and, I would say, necessary for the living to stand for freedom and democracy and those willing to give their last breaths to make those values eternal. We in this Chamber have to demand moral and strategic clarity by continuing to support Ukraine's fight to secure a truly just peace through strength because, as the Ukrainian-born author Vasily Grossman wrote nearly 70 years ago, ``In the cruel and terrible time in which our generation has been condemned to live on this earth, we must never make peace with evil. We must never become indifferent to others or undemanding of ourselves.'' With that, I thank my bipartisan colleagues again. I look forward to the day when we are out here not with 8 Senators but 80 Senators in support of freedom and in support of the fight Ukraine is leading. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I am sorry. The Presiding Officer seems to have the misfortune of being out here every time I come to the floor to speak. I regret that, and I feel sorry for him. I am glad to be out here with my colleagues, today, on both sides of the aisle. We have heard the Senator from Mississippi refer to what he described as the greatest words of wisdom that came from Ecclesiastes. Those were words of wisdom. I think another set of great words of wisdom came from Ronald Reagan, who said, ``Peace through strength.'' Peace through strength is what Ronald Reagan represented. I know the President, last night, had a less clear message to the American people. I know that he said that he was the greatest President in American history. George Washington, I think, was second on his list. For most of us in this Chamber, I think we probably would say Ronald Reagan earned a place there, even those of us who disagreed with him. One of the reasons was that he did what he said when it came to the national security interests of the United States of America. Because we have been following that path of peace through strength in a bipartisan way, the American people have been extremely generous in their support of the Ukrainian people since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. The American people have earned a profound debt of gratitude from free people all over the world, including in the United States. Their courage and our weapons and the weapons of our allies have held Putin's army at the gates of Europe. Nothing else has. They have shown that democracies will stand up to defend themselves and will not roll over to dictators, whether they are in Moscow or Beijing. But unlike us and unlike the rest of the world, the Ukrainians actually have paid a huge human toll. They have had almost 400,000 casualties. They have had over 40,000 deaths in this war. Their cemeteries are bulging with new graves that are piled high with flowers that testify to the sacrifice of the Ukrainian people in every community in Ukraine. Anybody who has been there has seen them. It is impossible to avoid the cemeteries that have piled up with soldiers who have been willing to pay the ultimate sacrifice on the frontlines of this war in Ukraine. I delivered a speech just a few days ago, which the Presiding Officer may have had the misfortune of hearing, discussing President Trump's false accusation that Ukraine started this war with Russia. To my colleagues who say it doesn't matter what the President says, that it is only the outcome that matters--be patient about this great negotiator who learned everything at the heels of Mr. Cohen while he was doing commercial real estate in New York--some of us are worried about it because words do matter, especially the words that the President utters. Could you imagine anybody on this floor defending a President who said that Taiwan had invaded China when China had invaded Taiwan? That would be ridiculous. That would be absurd. But that is the situation that we face today. It is no different than that. It is identical to that. He has called President Zelenskyy a dictator--the freedom fighter who is leading this battle and who has led this battle at Ukraine. Ronald Reagan would turn over in his grave if he knew that the President has invited Russia to rejoin the G7, which is a group of the world's most powerful democracies--democracies--that suspended Russia after Putin invaded Ukraine for the first time in 2014. By the way, are we supposed to believe that he didn't invade Ukraine then; that he was invited in somehow to Crimea? Is President Trump really fooled by the little green men that Vladimir Putin sent there after his administration held supposed peace talks in Saudi Arabia without even the decency to include Ukraine, which has had more than 400,000 casualties? Every single one of these statements and decisions have emboldened Putin. You can see it in the newspapers in Russia. You can see it on TV. And they have weakened Ukraine's negotiating position, profoundly undermining our own national security. How this war ends will determine whether Putin sets his sights on our NATO allies, like Poland and the Baltics; whether dictators like China's Xi Jinping test our resolve by invading their neighbor, Taiwan; whether the post-World War II international order that the United States built and is today frittering away under this President's leadership remains intact; whether the United States can continue to provide the leadership on behalf of free nations all over this world and democracies all over this world that our parents and grandparents had the decency to sacrifice and build for us; whether we are going to face another conflict in this world that is actually started by a tyrant but ended by democracies. The last thing we should be doing is undermining Ukraine's negotiating position and ours when we have this much at stake. I know the Presiding Officer has spent his life in negotiations in the private sector. I have spent time--not as much as the Presiding Officer. I certainly have spent time in these negotiations as well. Our discipline, when I was in the private sector negotiating these deals, was that we would let every deal die at least three times because our theory was no deal worth doing could be done the first time or the second time. I can see the Presiding Officer probably--he probably said it is five times before you can do it. But the point is, you wouldn't undermine your own negotiating leverage while you are going into a deal. Today--today--the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency went on FOX News and told the world that we had shut down our intelligence- sharing with Ukraine. We met--I don't know if I can say. I am on the Intelligence Committee, let me be careful what I say. Today, the United States of America has said we have cut off Ukraine. I don't know what anybody is doing in this Chamber if they are not coming here saying the United States of America should not be cutting off Ukraine's intelligence in midstream, in the ramp-up to a negotiation. If you come out here on this floor and say it is the right thing to do; that you, in the private sector, would make an equivocally idiotic, compromising, self-defeating move in a negotiation like this, come and defend it out here. Come and tell us how that is peace through strength. We shut off our offensive cyber with respect to Russia and got nothing back from them. Ronald Reagan is turning over in his grave at a national security strategy that, I guess, has been concocted in the realm of social media and cable television but has nothing to do with the national security interests of the United States. It can't be defended. I want to also say, while I have the floor and for the record--and I hope people will look it up--I have never met President Zelenskyy where he hasn't started the meeting by thanking the American people and ended the meeting by thanking the American people. He has done it in every meeting that I have been in. But I don't want us to lose sight of the fact that we also hold a profound debt of gratitude to him and to his soldiers and to the Ukrainian people. The President doesn't seem to understand that. The President seems to think: Oh, my gosh, they are doing us a favor by using our weapons. You are in tough shape; your country is in tough shape, he stated the obvious in that embarrassing interaction in the Oval Office the other day, where he couldn't even keep his temper for 5 minutes on the global stage. The Ukrainians are not just fighting for Ukraine; they are fighting for democracy. They are fighting for Europe. They are fighting for freedom. They are fighting for the international order that we created, that we led after the Second World War. Should NATO pay its share? Yes, it should. But we are not some charity case. We have benefited from the casualties that Ukraine has suffered. We have benefited from the exposure of the weakness of Putin's corrupt army. We have benefited from Xi Jinping's new knowledge that if a dictator tries to invade another country, the free world will stand together, until Donald Trump became President of the United States. I want to say again, Mr. President, to you and to all of my colleagues here today, the United States has turned off our intelligence to the Ukrainian people. They are not in retreat. They are on the frontlines of this war today, in the middle of winter, on the steps of Europe, where 16 million people were killed by Hitler and Stalin, when my mother was born in Warsaw--a Polish Jew in 1938, the year before Hitler invaded Poland. And we turned off their intelligence. They are killing more Russians there every month than they were 6 months ago. This is a catastrophe. The other night when we had the budget reconciliation, I had a request for an amendment that simply would have said that it was the sense of the Senate that Russia invaded Ukraine; that Russia had started this war. I wanted to ask my colleagues just the basic question: Can we agree that Russia started the war in Ukraine? That seems like a shocking question to ask. I hope every schoolchild in America knows that that is true. Yet the President of the United States has said that Ukraine started this war. There are people around this city these days who are suggesting that Russia didn't start the war; that Ukraine started the war. And I am not even talking about people like the new head of Intelligence for the Trump administration who has taken the view that Ukraine had what was coming to them, who tweeted out at 11:30 the night that Putin's tanks invaded Ukraine, a peaceful country--for the first time in Europe since World War II, a dictator invading a peaceful country--who took to social media to say that Ukraine had it coming to them. I am not even saying that; I am saying people who are unwilling to say that Russia invaded Ukraine when it launched an unprovoked, an unjustified, full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, following their already illegal annexation of Crimea and their illegal occupation of parts of the Donbas. So that is all my resolution says, and that is it. That may seem like a basic and remedial task. I am sorry it is necessary. I want to remind every schoolchild in America who started this war and whose side we are on and what the legacy of Ronald Reagan's peace through strength is all about. This is a measure that will not in any way disrupt the progress in negotiations. I think quite the opposite. I think quite the opposite. I want us to assure ourselves that we are all clear here about who started this war. I want us to fulfill our responsibility to the American people. We are not here to repeat untruths from the Oval Office. We all have a patriotic responsibility to live up to. The President does as well. I want us to demand, on behalf of the American people, that the United States lead for the sake of the Ukrainian people and for our national security and for the security of the world. That is why this is not just a matter of how worried people in NATO are; it is how worried people in Southeast Asia are because they know if we don't get our act together here and support Ukraine, support our allies in Europe, the same thing could happen there. And China could invade Taiwan, and we could have an American President who claims he is the best President in American history, with George Washington second, saying that Taiwan invaded China. I want us to avow, as Ronald Reagan proclaimed 40 years ago, that ``freedom is America's core'' and ``[w]e must never deny it nor forsake it.'' That is what we risk today by withdrawing our support for Ukraine, allowing the President to promulgate falsehood after falsehood about who started this war and what is going on with this war. If we abandon Ukraine, we are going to abandon the core of who we are. This is a simple question. It is not a partisan one. And the answer couldn't be clearer. So, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 114, which was submitted earlier today; further, that the resolution be agreed to and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, let me say--I know my colleague from Vermont is here, so I am not going to go on, but I would just like to respond to my friend from Wyoming by saying that it is shocking to me that tonight, in the Nation's Capital of the wealthiest country in the world, the place that we think of as the freest country in the world, our intelligence sharing with Ukraine, which has been one of the most effective means of their ability to prosecute the war in Ukraine against Russia, has been shut off by the United States of America. And our arms have been shut off to some degree as well, in the middle of winter, while they are sacrificing on the frontlines for freedom and for democracy. It is shocking that we are in the position that we are in, and I hope, for the sake of our kids and for our grandkids, for the sake of the allies that we have all over the world, for the sake of democracy and freedom in this world, that we pull together as a Senate and articulate the importance of pursuing this negotiation out of a position of strength and not of weakness. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I wanted to come down here and talk a little bit about energy with my colleagues in the Senate today, and part of the reason why is that as you know, Mr. President, and others know, the President of the United States has declared an energy emergency, and he did it on the day he was inaugurated here in the Capitol, on a day when he had lots of comments about the fact that God had saved him so that he would be there to be inaugurated--that this was going to be the greatest moment in American history, and that we had an energy emergency because there was an insufficient production of oil and fossil fuels. As anybody who reads the newspaper in America knows--and there may not be anybody left who has access to a paper, but I encourage you to do it; it is a lot better than what you are reading on Twitter these days--the United States has actually produced more oil than we ever have produced in our history. In fact, last year, with the Biden administration, we produced more oil than any country in the history of humanity. The same is true for natural gas. The same is true for LNG exports. The United States produces more oil than any other country in the world. We produce more natural gas than any other country in the world. We are the leading exporter of liquefied natural gas, which, by the way, has been incredibly important recently because we have allowed our allies in Europe to get off the Russian oil that they were on and replace that with liquefied natural gas produced by American citizens, exported by American citizens, to break the back of Putin's ability to restrain Europe's participation in the war, because we were able to replace half their energy. I am so glad that we were able to do that. And we are also the world's leading producer of renewable energy, as well, and we have seen a huge amount of growth in solar, a huge amount of growth in wind, and I like to think of Colorado as the place that started an awful lot of that. We are both a producer of fossil fuels and a producer of renewables. We know it takes everything to drive this economy, but we want to do all of this in a way that is cognizant of the very real climate issues that our globe faces and that our country faces. The good news for the United States is there is no country in the world that is better positioned to lead the transition of our energy economy in this world than the United States of America. We are the wealthiest country in the world. We have the biggest and most abundant supply of fossil fuels and nonfossil fuels. We are less corrupt than almost any country on the face of the planet, and especially less corrupt than economies that are dominated by petrochemicals and by oil and gas around the world. We are the innovators in the world. We have a commitment to the rule of law. All of that puts us in this incredible position to lead. I believe, 30 years from now or so, we are going to be in a place where we are able to say, not just to the American people but to the world, that we are at net zero from a carbon point of view and that we were able to get there through American technology and through American leadership and American ingenuity and American exports; that we took a strategic approach; that we had a plan that made sense; and that we captured, along the way, every--every--molecule that we could find of fugitive methane from oil and gas and from agriculture and from landfills; that we said yes to wind and solar; that we said yes to nuclear and yes to geothermal; that we said yes to investing in emerging technologies, like hydrogen, like carbon capture, and like the carbon dioxide removal bill that I have with my friend Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, which just goes to show you that you can have a bipartisan approach; that we can move to a position of real leadership that can help us create an economy again that America, when it grows, it grows for everybody, not just the people at the very top--because we have got good energy jobs that are concerned with the production of oil and gas and the production of all those other forms of energy. By the way, just on that point--and I will be brief here because I know my colleague from Massachusetts wants to speak. On that subject, this Senate is about to get rid of the commonsense methane regulations that were passed in the last administration that are based on the work--that fee based on the work--that we had done in Colorado, working with industry, as the last administration did to create certainty, to create predictability, to send a message to the world that we want American gas to be the cleanest gas of any gas in the world. And having us capture that fugitive methane is a hugely important part of that. We are saying no to that now. We are saying yes to the air pollution that is going to result. We are saying yes to the climate pollution that will result. I say to my colleague from Massachusetts while she is here, I take no pleasure--and the President knows this--from the fact that Donald Trump is our President. I regret that he is our President, but he is our President. And one of the ways that he got to be our President is that he was elected twice. And, in fact, more people voted for him this time than voted for him last time. I regret that. I am sorry for that, and I think there are lots of reasons for that. But I think one of the reasons for that is that there is a mythology out there that the Democratic Party believes that we are going to turn fossil fuels off yesterday; or that we are going to turn fossil fuels off next week; or that we don't respect the men and women who work in our energy fields or in our energy processing across the country. If there are Democrats who feel that way, I disagree with them, because the worst thing we could do at this moment when we have the energy abundance that we have, when we have the economic freedom we have, when we have the lack of corruption that we have--the worst thing we could do is elect a climate denier to be President whose most creative approach to energy was Sarah Palin's shopworn ``drill, baby, drill,'' which is what he announced under the dome of the United States Capitol the day he was inaugurated President and said--completely untruthfully--that we were in an energy crisis, when what we have is an energy abundance and no excuse--no excuse--for not leading the rest of the world in making sure that this transition on net-zero carbon is accomplished and that we do it in a way that protects our economy; that we do it in a way that protects our national security; that we do it in a way that recognizes the contribution that people have made for generations in Northwest Colorado and all over our economy to be able to drive this economy forward. And to the extent that the failure is a failure of the Democratic Party to make clear our position, I want to own that failure and that responsibility. It is not Donald Trump's fault that he was elected. He ran; he won. We own some of the fact that he got elected. And I think on this issue, we have not communicated clearly to the American people what we believe. And as a result of that, once again, our children and grandchildren have a climate denier in the White House, even though a majority of the American people believe that climate change is real and that we should be doing something about it. And those of us who are advocates on this, on this side, have to be very clear--much clearer, he said poorly and unclearly--but let me say again--have to be much clearer about what we stand for, which is for a transition that makes sense and that science commands and for the respect of people that are working in the energy industry no matter what part of the industry they are working in. And the fact that Donald Trump--even when oil is at $73 a barrel at his inauguration and we are producing more than we have ever produced in the history of mankind for the United States--thinks we are in an energy emergency or he claims that we are surprises me not at all. Since he said he was going to drive prices down, the price of eggs are so high today as we meet here, you need a mortgage practically to buy a dozen eggs in the United States of America. We can do better than that, and we can do better than his ``drill, baby, drill'' energy policy. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, before I speak on the matter in front of us, I wanted to say that on rollcall vote 89, I voted aye. It was my intention to vote no. Therefore, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to change my vote since it will not affect the outcome.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I appreciate the opportunity to speak. I returned from Ukraine earlier this week, where I saw both the suffering that the Ukrainian people have endured over the past 3 years at Putin's hand and the courage they have forged to save their country and their children--the suburban town of Bucha, where Russian troops tortured and massacred hundreds of civilians in the first day of Putin's unprovoked invasion; the shattered children's hospital Putin's missiles nearly destroyed; apartment buildings in central Kyiv struck by Putin's drones; and lawyers searching for the thousands of Ukrainian children who have been kidnapped from their parents by Russian soldiers. By most estimates, at least 40,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed in battle and another 380,000 have been wounded since Putin's invasion. A draft of the general population in that country means that war has scarred nearly every neighborhood in this massive country. In cemeteries all across Ukraine, fresh graves piled with dirt and flowers testify to their sacrifice. At least 12,000 civilians have been killed. Amid this torment, the Ukrainian people continue to send troops to the front in the dead of winter and to mobilize to keep their businesses and their homes and their kids in school. They did not ask for Putin's thuggish invasion. From the very beginning, our intelligence Agencies have told us something that Putin never has understood--that the Ukrainian people will never submit to him; that if every weapon were denied them, they would fight with sticks and stones and their bare hands to protect their country from any invading tyrant but especially from Vladimir Putin of Russia. Fortunately for Ukraine and for the rest of the free world, they have not had to fight this invasion with their bare hands. The American people have steadfastly supported them. We have sent $66 billion in military aid and $51 billion in nonmilitary aid. That is a lot of money, but it represents just 0.52 percent of our GPD. Unlike the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, not a single American soldier has been sent to fight. Our European allies have stepped up as well. Together, they have actually committed more than the United States. But their sums represent a much larger percentage of their economy--which makes sense because they are closer to the danger that Russia poses. At the same time, even farther allies, like Australia and Japan, continue to support Ukraine as well. Our allies and our partners know the stakes of this war. They know that supporting Ukraine means standing with people that are willing to fight for the country they love. They know that rolling over to Putin will embolden other dictators around the world, especially Xi Jinping of China. The rest of us may not need this reminder, but the people sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue apparently do since they seem to be the only ones in the free world who do not understand the stakes of this war. Over the last few days, President Trump has chosen the side of tyranny of Putin, of Xi, and profoundly undermined our national security. Like someone reading Russian Twitter bots, he deliberately and falsely accused Ukraine of starting the war. He called Zelenskyy-- the freedom fighter who is leading the fight in Ukraine--a dictator. Mr. President, he invited Russia to rejoin the G7, a group of the world's most powerful democracies that has met regularly since the 1970s and which threw out Russia after Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014. Before negotiations have even started, President Trump's Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, took Ukraine's potential NATO membership off the table. And just this week, the Trump administration held talks with Russia in Saudi Arabia without the decency of even inviting Ukraine to the table. It pains me to say it, but our old colleague Secretary of State Marco Rubio even suggested that the United States should lift sanctions on and bolster economic collaboration with Russia while Russia shells civilians in Ukraine. Some of our Republican colleagues believe that it doesn't matter what President Trump says, only what he does; that it doesn't matter when he says that he is going to send American troops to Gaza or seize the Panama Canal or falsely accuses Ukraine of starting this war. But a President's words matter more than most, and President Trump's harmful words and policies will only embolden Putin. They will further convince Putin that he is winning, that time is on his side, and that he has no reason to accept a peace deal that is anything less than overwhelmingly favorable to his maximalist desire. In literally every one of his comments on Ukraine, President Trump has undermined our national security. Every time he opens his mouth, he weakens our bargaining position and makes the world more dangerous. We all want this war to end. On that, the President and I agree. But for the sake of Ukraine and the sake of the free world, it must only end with a just and enduring peace. While the United States and our allies and Ukraine work together to establish the terms of the peace and get ready to negotiate with Putin, the Ukrainians are going to have to keep fighting throughout this winter season--this freezing winter--where the civilian population is just doing everything they can to keep their houses and their businesses and their schools warm and livable. The Ukrainian soldiers are not asking to be relieved of this terrible burden. They are embracing it because they know that any cease-fire without meaningful security guarantees will allow Putin to rebuild his weakened army and attack again and again and again. Obviously--obviously--everyone in this Chamber knows that any meaningful negotiation has to include Ukraine. Doing anything else, as the Trump administration just did in Saudi Arabia, would be an insult to the memory of every soldier who has laid down their life in this war. I cannot claim to know Donald Trump well. It is obvious that I deeply regret his election, but I don't blame him for winning the election. He beat my party, the Democratic Party, badly in two elections. He even found a way to get elected after he was the first President in American history to take away a fundamental civil right from the American people--a woman's right to choose. He still got elected again. That is extraordinary, and it is a testament, I am sorry to say, to the Democratic Party's weaknesses and to his own skills and talents, particularly in this era. I don't doubt that his experience as a reality TV star taught him things that helped him get elected. I am much less certain, however, that his checkered commercial real estate background prepared him to negotiate a hotel deal with Vladimir Putin, much less a deal that concerns the fate of the free world. Donald Trump is not the only person with private sector experience in our government. I can tell you from my experience from working in Denver, when someone is having a negotiation who has deal fever, you can see it. You can smell it when they are so desperate for a deal on any terms. The people who I negotiated with in Denver had a lot more discipline than that. We told each other that we would never agree to any deal that hadn't cratered at least three times, because that was the only way you could tell whether you were getting the best deal. If you didn't have the guts to walk away, you were never going to get the best deal that you could. I have never seen a worse case of deal fever than Donald Trump's approach to the coming negotiation with Vladimir Putin. Never in my life have I seen it, and it has never been more important. I doubt the world has seen such an ill-conceived pursuit of negotiation since the infamous 1938 Munich Agreement in which the UK and France and Italy allowed Nazi Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia. The damage he is doing is not only that we will get a worse deal; it is that we will undermine Ukraine's position on the frontlines. Without security guarantees from the United States and from Europe, Putin will only bide his time, regroup, and invade again. After the fictions that President Trump has spewed about who started this war, not to mention the chorus of defeatism from his Vice President, his Secretary of Defense, and the Director of National Intelligence, does anyone--does anybody--including Putin and Xi Jinping, doubt what would happen if Putin invaded again? This is less the ``Art of the Deal,'' I am afraid, than it is the ``art of defeat.'' After all of these years, after all of these battles, it would be truly pathetic for the United States, the world's most powerful country, to accept a fever-induced deal with Russia, like the Munich Agreement. Look it up--not, perhaps, on Twitter but in your much more reliable 10th grade Western civ textbook. After that deal, Hitler did not stop at Czechoslovakia but continued his war on Europe. Left unchecked, Putin will do the same thing, as Putin's propagandists have told us repeatedly. To make matters worse, anyone concerned about Beijing's potential takeover of Taiwan knows that there will be no better test of how the free world will respond to Xi's potential invasion than how we respond to Putin. Come to think of it, if China does invade Taiwan, how would we evaluate the leadership capacity of an American President who claimed that it was Taiwan who had invaded China, not the other way around? That is the level of duplicity that we are seeing from Donald Trump right now. So why the deal fever? That is a good question. President Trump's aspiration for a Nobel Peace Prize is well known. He can hang it next to his gold-plated faucets and his first editions of the ``Art of the Deal.'' But if he heard from people in this Chamber, even he might think twice if he understood that walking down this path of appeasement makes him more likely to be remembered like Neville Chamberlain. Negotiations can end this war in a just manner only if Ukraine can negotiate them from a place of strength. The American people have been incredibly generous in our support of Ukraine, but, even so, this war has cost us less than 0.6 percent of our GDP while allowing us to send Ukraine old weapons when we invest in our own cutting-edge replacements, permitting us to learn from Ukraine's extraordinary innovation on the frontlines and its world- class use of new warfighting technologies, such as drones, and boosting our economy without costing a single American soldier's life. We and our European allies have to continue surging military assistance to Ukraine, not forever but so Ukraine is best positioned to make this deal not just for Ukraine but for us and for free countries all over the world. Contrary to what many people believed at the outset of this war and what President Trump apparently believes today, Putin's invasion of Ukraine has been costly to him--very costly to him. Three years of the Ukrainian peoples' tenacity and courage have degraded the Russian military. As we speak, Russia is losing twice the number of soldiers every month as Putin's war continues. In total, Putin has squandered more than $200 billion and suffered a staggering 700,000 in casualties at the hands of Ukrainian patriots. It is three times the number of soldiers Russia lost in Afghanistan--a country famously regarded as the graveyard of empires. We didn't ask for this war, neither did Ukraine, but Putin is in a weaker position to threaten Europe today than when he first swung his iron fist at the Ukrainian people. The last thing we should do now is weaken our negotiating position when we and Europe have so much at stake--when the world has so much at stake. Putin believes he can beat Ukraine not because he thinks Ukrainians are weak but because he thinks we are weak, and he thinks President Trump is a pushover and a sucker. At the beginning of his invasion of Ukraine, Putin, who was surrounded as tyrants are and as dictators are by yes-men who are scared to tell them the truth about their own weaknesses and, in this case, Russia's weaknesses, made three fundamental miscalculations going into the war. One was about the strength of his own army. He had invested billions of dollars planning for the invasion, but much of it was siphoned off because of Russia's endemic corruption. The second miscalculation was about the Ukrainian people's patriotism and willingness to fight to the death. No matter how President Trump tries to undermine this sacrifice, the honor roll of history will forever--will forever--record Ukraine's courage. Putin's third miscalculation was that the world would roll over and allow him to invade his peaceful neighbor. Unlike the other two mistakes, he had evidence for the final point. After all, when he began his invasion in 2014 by lawlessly sending his ``little green men'' to occupy Crimea, which is part of Ukraine, the world did nothing. The United States did nothing. He thought the world would do nothing when he invaded again. It turned out, unlike Putin, we actually learned from our mistake. The free world has stood up to Putin this time around. We have supplied arms and other support while the Ukrainian people have died on the frontline of their country and for the West. Their cemeteries are bulging with fresh graves. They have earned the free world's support. But even more important to us and our allies, we have protected our national security and affirmed our commitment to the post-World War II rules-based international order. How this ends will determine whether that order persists and whether the United States continues to provide the leadership our parents and grandparents supplied since World War II. World War II was another war started by a tyrant, but it was ended by the world's democracies. Many Americans inside this Chamber and outside understand the stakes. They know, as Ronald Reagan proclaimed 40 years ago, in advancing freedom, Americans carry a special burden: a belief in the dignity of man and that freedom is America's core and that we should never deny it nor forsake it. This is what we risk today by withdrawing our support of Ukraine. We will abandon both the Ukrainian people and the core of what America stands for, and we cannot do it. This is personal for me and so many of us. My mom was born a Jew in Warsaw in 1938. She and her parents and an aunt were the only ones who survived the Holocaust. The Nazis killed everyone else in her family. Authoritarian aggression left an indelible mark on my family and countless other families in Ukraine and Poland in the 1930s and 1940s, where Stalin and Hitler killed together 16 million human beings. These victims of fascism died, believing that they were invisible to the rest of the world, forgotten people in unforgettable years. The lesson I learned from my mom is that the United States can never let that happen again by trying to appease a dictator the way that Chamberlain did. That is not apocryphal, or a made-up story. I had dinner last night with my mom. She is 86 years old. She can't believe that she has lived long enough--I am happy that she has, but she can't believe that she has lived long enough to see another tyrant's invasion of their peaceful, democratic European neighbor. But she hasn't lived long enough to forget her generation's searing lessons. She knows the eternal truth--that the greatest enemy of fascism is man. Even if President Trump continues to ignore reality, my mother and millions of Americans who make up the ``greatest generation'' understand the United States has a special responsibility. It has always been far too easy for some in high office to ignore their moral responsibility to people sacrificing their lives a continent away on behalf of our shared values and interests. History occasionally records their names--like Chamberlain's--in blood. It is particularly easy today to play to self-defeating isolationist tendencies in the daily headlines, to make rash comments that are foolish and unpatriotic and that Russian trolls spread like wildfire across social media platforms. It is far too easy to do the wrong thing. It always has been. It is a lot harder, but necessary, for the living to stand for freedom and democracy and those willing to give the last measure of themselves for those eternal values. At this moment, the United States is the only country who can lead the free world against these dictators, against these tyrants. The Americans who serve in this Chamber must fulfill our responsibility to the American people and demand the President fulfill his patriotic responsibility in the days ahead. Everything now is in our hands. The moment demands that the United States of America lead-- for the sake of the Ukrainian people, for our own national security, and for democracy around the world. Our failure will not just be damaging; it will be devastating. I yield the floor.