Michael Bennet

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 540 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, this amendment reinstates the thousands of fired National Park Service, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Land Management employees. Our public lands are the crown jewel of America. With drought, wildfire, and record visitation, our public lands are facing more pressures than ever before. Now is not the time to fire dedicated public servants who perform wildfire mitigation, manage visitors, clear trails, permit grazing and mining and oil and gas operations. Fewer boots on the ground means more wildfire risk and less access to our public lands and puts enormous burden on communities across the country, from Alaska to North Carolina, to Maine.

Mr. BENNET. Do I have any time left?

Mr. BENNET. I urge my opponents to vote for this amendment. I ask for the yeas and nays. I yield back my second. Vote on Amendment No. 540

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, we may not be in a quorum call, but I can tell you this, we are in the midst of a 1,200-year drought in the American West that challenges us in extraordinary ways--from vast new insect and disease outbreaks to catastrophic wildfires. Instead of having fire seasons, there are many people now who observe that it has become trite, I would say, to observe, as the fire season lasts all year. Our national forests in Colorado and throughout the Rocky Mountain West are the headwaters of America. In those forests is the origin of the streams and rivers that flow to the rest of the Western United States. In the case of just the Colorado River Basin alone, 40 million people rely on it. It is the lifeblood of the American West, the lifeblood of the Western United States, and of every town and every community no matter how big and no matter how small. In Colorado and on every farm and ranch across the American West, they depend on this water, and they depend on the forests where this water stops. The critical aspect of this, I think, is that everybody who is downstream from us needs to care about the health of our forests and also our public lands. As many people know, since COVID ripped through the United States of America, our public lands have become a place for the American people to find refuge, for the American people to be able to get away from each other, for families to have the time to also be together on America's public lands. And as many people now say, our public lands are being loved to death. We have had Americans from all over the world come and discover the public lands in Colorado and throughout the West, but it has created new pressures on our communities, new pressures on the lands themselves and also on the communities that are surrounding them. Now, when we find ourselves in a place where we are facing these challenges and where we have done a little bit of work just over the last few years because of the money we were able to get into the bipartisan infrastructure bill, it is not the forests that we are thinning; it is the Forest Service staff that has been clearcut by what the Trump administration is doing and has proposed to do. Even before the Trump administration began their across-the-board cuts on the Forest Service, the Forest Service had 30 percent less of a workforce than it had 30 years ago. Think about that. While the stresses and strains have grown, while the effect of that 1,200-year drought and climate change has grown, now we find ourselves in a place where the Forest Service is getting whacked by the administration. Last year, even before the Trump administration came back to town, I met with Forest Service employees in Colorado--actually, not just the Forest Service but the other western public land Agencies from the Western Slope of Colorado to the Eastern Plains of our State--who told me that they can't hire anybody to work for these Agencies because Federal pay has not kept up with the cost of housing. They were the best jobs in our communities years ago. You could live on one person's salary. You could have a household. You could raise kids in a community. You never had to leave the community you grew up in if you had one of these jobs. Today, nobody can afford housing in Colorado. That is a huge problem for America, not just for my State, but it is certainly true of the public employees in the Forest Service. To add insult to injury, it takes months and months and months of bureaucratic nightmares to hire people. Now, Donald Trump has come here without any understanding of the needs on the ground of the American people and of our States and of our watersheds, and he has decided to impose across-the-board cuts that, I suppose, he is going to use in the end to try to justify the $4.6 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. You heard that right. At a time when we have had the worst income inequality than we have had since the 1920s, Donald Trump wants to extend his tax cuts for the wealthiest while he is doing things like cutting the Forest Service across the board. Forty-five percent of the benefit of that bill goes to the top 5 percent of Americans. I never understood the priority the last time he cut taxes for the wealthiest people and claimed it was a middle-class tax cut, but I especially don't understand it when he is slashing the Forest Service. This isn't about the Forest Service employees, although I think they should be treated better; it is about the people whom they serve. They are public servants who are doing the work we need them to do in our forests. It is already challenging enough to do it without these cuts. To level an across-the-board cut--terminating 3,400 employees, including at least 90 in Colorado--is the wrong thing to do. These unfounded layoffs are just the latest offense to an Agency that is already working, struggling to keep up with the demands of the American people and the reality on the ground. In the last few days, my office has heard from a number of Forest Service employees who were fired last week. We heard from a Forest Service program manager whose first Forest Service job was as a wildland firefighter at just 19 years old. That is a very, very common way for people to come into the Forest Service. And she recently returned to the Forest Service to manage high-priority recreation and restoration projects for one of the busiest national forests in the United States and help the management plan process for the Camp Hale National Monument, which honors our World War II veterans. I have also heard from a 40-year career civil servant who has worked for multiple Agencies in rural Colorado, including over 25 years in the Forest Service. As a result of her vast experience and years of service, she was recently promoted which put her in probationary status, not because she was a new employee but because she was--with all of her vast experience, she had been elevated, she had been promoted. But she was, nevertheless, a probationary employee because of the way the bureaucracy works. Over the weekend, she was let go; and she worries that she will never have her well-earned position. These people have done absolutely nothing wrong. We heard from a lifelong Coloradan who is a national leader for forest conservation and deeply respected in our community. This person moved across the State for a position with the Forest Service. Their work informed local efforts to reduce wildfire risks and restore forest health, creating a safer landscape for wildland firefighters to work in when a fire does break out, which, by the way, is almost all the time these days. Ironically, the administration fired a member of a Colorado National Forest leadership team--get this, Mr. President--who was actually involved in planning for staff reduction. But it wasn't the across-the- board reduction that came from Washington, DC; it was the thoughtful reduction that you can only do if you are close to the local level. Our forests look nothing like Central Park, and I am not sure President Trump understands that. This person was responsible for teams of people working on energy production, wildfire prevention, and the responsible use of our public forests. And there are countless other stories already of people who recently signed up for seasonal work to help manage recreation, rangeland, and wildlife habitat who are now unemployed. Trump and Musk's actions aren't about increasing efficiency or repaying American taxpayers. These cuts don't root out fraud or government waste, but these actions do place an immense burden on the citizens of Colorado, on the citizens on the West. We are hanging out communities to dry all over--all over--the American West. I am glad my colleague from Oregon is here, the former chairman of the Finance Committee, who also has had to watch these crazy tax cuts-- which by the way, Mr. President, I will say to my colleague: That is not even a speech I was supposed to give. It is about the across-the- board layoffs of people in our forests who already are totally undermanned and aren't able to keep up with the demands of the public. But, really, for what? So you can pass a tax bill--not you but these guys on the other side--where 45 percent of the benefit goes to the richest people in America, or more? Cutting staff that put out unattended campfires, that manage timber sales and support wildland firefighting efforts means that our communities will face much more wildfire risk come spring. These cuts undermine businesses that require permits to operate on our public lands--from outfitters and guides to oil and gas companies-- and mean fewer boots-on-the-ground staff to manage visitation--from clearing trails to cleaning bathrooms. That means we the American people risk losing our access to our most cherished public lands. Our Federal workers have devoted their careers to making our communities and our country better. They put the American people first, and I am grateful for their service. Does that mean they couldn't do their job better? No. Does that mean they couldn't do it in a more efficient manner? No. In fact, that is one of the reasons why we have fought to put more money in the budget for fighting fires themselves, because waiting until the fire happens is the most expensive way you could possibly deal with it; but the second most expensive way would be to lay off the very people who help prevent the conditions from arising that are going to lead to those fires, which, by the way, cost $50,000 an acre to fight. The Forest Service employees throughout the West are fundamental to our economy and to our communities in Colorado. In fact, the fact that it has been hard to hire them has compromised our communities in really fundamental ways, and we ought to double down on the Forest Service's mission, investing in wildfire resilience, watershed health, recreation management, rooting out waste, and cutting redtape to make the Agency a better partner for rural communities across the country. That is what we would be doing. Instead, President Trump and Musk's actions to eviscerate the Federal workforce take a torch to that approach and tear at the fabric of our communities. It is an insult to Colorado and all Americans. There is no reason they should do it, and they should rescind these cuts. With that, Mr. President I thank my colleagues for their indulgence. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I was here to speak on the across-the- board cuts that the Forest Service is facing in Colorado, but I was so glad to hear my colleagues from Connecticut and Virginia and Oregon talking about this tax bill. I want to add just a couple of thoughts to it. First of all, I appreciate so much what they were saying because the American people are struggling, and it is not just with inflation. It is with an economy that, for 50 years, has worked incredibly well for the wealthiest people in our country and hasn't worked for anybody else. It used to be the American dream. That is how we knew our country was working--when, if you worked hard, you could get ahead. Even more important to most Americans, when you worked hard, you knew your kids were going to get ahead. And we are at a moment in American history, for the first time, when our kids, people that are 30 years old, are going to earn--half of them are going to earn--less than their parents. And people all over the country are looking at it and saying: That is not the America that I recognize. That is not the American dream. And it is not the American dream. Today, in the United States, the top 1 percent of people own 20 percent of our income. The bottom 50 percent own 10 percent. The bottom 50 percent own half of what the top 1 percent have. Some people might say: Oh my God, that is just a natural feature of the way our economy works or the way capitalism works. It is not, even in this country. Twenty-five years ago, that wasn't true; it was reversed. Twenty-five years ago, the bottom 50 percent earned twice as much income as the top 1 percent. And that has flipped since Ronald Reagan came here with his trickle-down economics that my colleague from Connecticut was talking about, with a tax policy that was all about rewarding the wealthiest people and the folks who were outsourcing jobs from the United States of America. And now Donald Trump is here to do it again, as he did when he was President the last time. He went to the Mahoning Valley in Ohio, after passing that tax bill, and said: You are welcome for your middle-class tax cut. But 50 percent of it went to the wealthiest 5 percent in our country. He gave a little tip, as the Senator from Connecticut was saying, to working people in our country to obscure the fact that what he was doing was giving massive tax cuts to the wealthiest people. And I will finish just by saying this. Sometimes people say: That is not surprising, Michael. They are the richest people. So maybe they pay the most in taxes; maybe they should get the biggest benefit. The reality is very different because somebody is going to have to pay for this bill. It is either going to be the cuts that they are going to make to Medicaid, which are cuts to a program for healthcare coverage for people in this country that are poor or working poor, or they are not going to pay for it at all. And if they don't pay for it at all, the people who are going to have to pay for it are the kids of police officers and firefighters all over our country who are going to have to pay the debt that is incurred by Donald Trump's tax bill, which is what happened the last time. The chairman will remember that. They didn't pay for it the last time. And when they didn't pay for it the last time, every working person in America is having to pay for it because of the interest rates that are on our national debt. My friend from Virginia was the mayor of Richmond. This tax policy is one--and I know my colleague from California wants to go; so I am going to stop. But this tax policy is equivalent to the mayor of Richmond waking up one morning and saying: I am going to borrow more money than we have ever borrowed in the city's history. And I would say to him: I am worried about that. What are you going to do with that money? I am worried about what you might spend it on. Tell me what you are going to spend it on. Are you going to spend it on parks? No. Are you going to spend it on infrastructure? No. Are you going to spend it on mental health, which we desperately need all over the country? No. Early childhood education, K-through-12 education, the university in our community? No, no, no. What are you going to do with all this money that you are borrowing? Well, I am going to give it to the two richest neighborhoods in Richmond, VA, and I am going to expect that it will trickle down to everybody else in Richmond. You would be run out on a rail for doing that, which is why no mayor in America has ever done that. No Governor in America has ever done that. And Donald Trump is about to try to do it for the second time-- for the second time. And I hope that people in this body won't be fooled by it, because we saw it before. And we could get a big bipartisan vote in this Senate to begin to reestablish a set of economic rules that is actually lifting the fortunes of the vast majority of people in this country, instead of giving these tax cuts to the people in America who need it least. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome the Presiding Officer to the U.S. Senate. I hadn't had a chance, really, to do that, as you sit in the chair. We are now going to get somebody else, but I thank the Presiding Officer for being here. (Mr. HUSTED assumed the Chair.) I also want to thank my colleague from the Commonwealth of Virginia, Senator Kaine, for his heartfelt remarks. I think we are through the looking glass in many ways, and there is a pattern here that is reflected in what you were talking about, this idea of being able to tell the difference between fact and fiction-- fact and fiction. I know that when you were the mayor of Richmond, it was probably pretty important for people who were working with you to know the difference between fact and fiction. When you were the Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, it probably was pretty important for you to do that as well. It does seem like, in President Trump's administration, he is really at war with the facts and trying to muddle what is fact and fiction, to be kind about it. I can't think of a time in the history of this country when families have wanted to know more about what is real and what is false--with their kids, what is real and what is false. I was the superintendent of schools in Denver, as the Senator from Virginia knows, and it is a great irony that at a time when parents want their kids to be able to distinguish between what is real and what is false--because of all the falsehoods that are coming over social media and other places--the President has decided to nominate the head of the WWE to be the Secretary of Education in this administration. You were talking about the inability of Bobby Kennedy to pick which side he was on when it came to what happened on 9/11. It reminds me exactly of the situation with Congresswoman Gabbard, who decided over and over and over again that she was going to choose not America's side but our adversaries' side, whether it was the chemical weapons in Syria--I mean, it is hard to even contemplate that--or the fact that at 12:30 at night, or I guess it was 11:30 at night, literally the night that Putin invaded Ukraine, a country that was at peace, a crossing of a peaceful border--the first time a tyrant had done that in Europe since World War II when the United States had led the international and global order that created these incredibly important institutions, NATO being one of those. And she had to reach out at 11:30 at night to basically mimic the talking points from Vladimir Putin. And I am not saying that she was a Russian spy or anything; I am just saying that it is the same stuff that he was using. Two days later, the Russian propaganda television in Moscow was running that stuff on the TV in Moscow. So I think it really does matter that people are telling the truth to the American people and that, where possible, where there are differences of opinion, that we try to get to the bottom of the truth. There are a lot of reasons to have differences of opinion. We live in a democracy, and we have the freedom to have differences of opinion. We have the freedom to have a different understanding of the facts, but we need to be pretty certain about that when it comes to public health, when it comes to healthcare in this country. Mr. President, we live in the richest country in the world. We are blessed to live in the richest country in the world. If you look at our national wealth as a function of our population, there is nobody who is remotely even close to us. That is the reflection of an economy that has been much more dynamic than economies across the world, innovation that is much more dynamic, and, I would say, a culture that is not beset by corruption in the way many countries around the world are. But even though we are the richest country in the world and the richest per capita, shockingly, we have some of the worst health outcomes of any country that is wealthy. We have the lowest life expectancy among large, wealthy countries. We have the highest maternal mortality rate of any other high-income country in the world, and it is getting worse every single year. We have the highest hospitalization rates for chronic conditions--like congestive heart failure and diabetes and asthma--of all our peer countries. We spend twice as much per capita as any other industrialized country for worse results. It is a bad deal for patients, and it is a terrible deal for taxpayers. This isn't just about our physical health. We have the highest suicide rate among high-income countries. We have the second highest drug-related death rate among high-income countries. We have some of the lowest numbers of mental health practitioners per capita in many parts of the country. In my own home State of Colorado, there are entire counties that really don't have any mental health expertise at all. And at a time when there is an epidemic in our country, I would say especially among young people, that is a shameful failure on our part. Americans in every corner of our country are getting sicker in 2025. They are spending more on healthcare, they are traveling farther, and they are waiting longer to see fewer doctors. The citizens of Colorado, I can tell you, are deeply, deeply unhappy with our healthcare system--deeply unhappy. I will actually say I was here when we passed the Affordable Care Act during the Obama years, and it has not fixed the issues we are facing. My constituents, when they think about healthcare, they think about scarcity; they think about the unavailability of drugs that their moms and dads have been prescribed but they either can't get or they can't afford even though they have been prescribed. Unlike other countries around the world, this is a nation where our senior citizens actually spend their retirement going from pharmacy to pharmacy to pharmacy to get the drugs they have been prescribed by a doctor, to be able to get the inhaler that will keep them healthy so that they don't end up in the emergency room. This is a country, unlike our competitors, where it is very common for moms and dads to spend 2 hours or 3 hours or 4 hours on the phone with an insurance company denying their claim--their legitimate claim-- for their kid. This is a country, as I mentioned, where we do not have ready access to mental health care, which people living in other countries far less wealthy than we are have as a reasonable expectation of being a citizen of that country. When we are in the midst of a physical and mental health care crisis like this, unlike many of the other Cabinet positions we are going to fill--and for some of them, it is true as well--the Secretary of Health and Human Services is a job of life and death. That is why Mr. Kennedy's confirmation, I think, would be so dangerous. We are on the precipice of allowing a practiced trafficker of vaccine conspiracy theories--admitted, of these theories--to administer healthcare to over 29 million children in America who receive routine, lifesaving vaccines through Medicaid; a man who has made his fame and fortune by treating our most vulnerable children as his personal science experiment. Mr. Kennedy has peddled bunk science that claims vaccines cause autism, sowing confusion and fear and causing heartbreak among parents who are now afraid to vaccinate their kids because they are so worried that it is going to cause autism--that they won't have a vaccine for their kid for fear of autism. But the failure to get that vaccine means their kids are exposed to profoundly important childhood and serious childhood illnesses. He makes his claims with incredible conviction. He is not shy about it. He claimed that the measles vaccines ``poisoned an entire generation of children'' and went further to say that the ``only thing that cures measles is nutrition and clean water.'' Before the measles vaccine was developed in the 1960s, hundreds of American kids died every year, and measles is a completely preventable disease with two vaccines administered in childhood. Without it, measles can spread like wildfire, leaving behind serious complications like blindness and encephalitis. We don't know that. We don't remember that because the pages that are on this floor can't remember a time when we weren't having the measles vaccine in the United States of America. It would be a very different world if we hadn't had them, but we do. Doctors in sub-Saharan Africa, where measles runs rampant, describe watching children die from this preventable disease in their dire warnings they are now sending to the United States. The CDC warns that kindergarten MMR vaccine rates have dropped below the 95-percent threshold needed to prevent worldwide measles outbreaks. As I stand here tonight, as the Presiding Officer sits here tonight, five States have reported measles cases. An outbreak in Gaines County, TX, has rapidly grown to 24 reported cases, all of them unvaccinated children. Nine are in the hospital. Nine of these children are in the hospital. Vaccine exemptions in Gaines County are among the highest in the State of Texas. Mr. President, 17.5 percent of Gaines County kindergartners have vaccine exemptions. That is almost 20 percent. It is not just Mr. Kennedy's vaccine conspiracies that are of grave concern, however. He has spent 50 years muddying the waters of scientific consensus with half-truths and misinformation and bad science. In his hearing before the Finance Committee, Mr. Kennedy showed an alarming inability to answer simple questions about his past statements. He appeared to have selective memory regarding some of his most outlandish claims. I asked him point-blank about his claims that COVID-19 was a genetically engineered bioweapon--these are his words: genetically engineered bioweapon--that targets Black and White people but spared Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. He never denied this. He never denied that he said it and instead pointed to a debunked theory study as flimsy proof of his claims. I asked him further, based on what he had said--again, quoting him: Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon? To this he answered: I probably did. ``I probably did'' say that Lyme disease was a militarily engineered bioweapon. How can we consider someone for the highest health office in the country who believes that America's own military engineered Lyme disease and uses it as a weapon against us? What could go wrong? He said on his podcast that exposure to pesticides could cause children to become transgender--a statement he claims not to remember, but he said it. It is on the record. He insisted he forgot writing in his own book that ``it's undeniable that African AIDS is an entirely different disease from Western AIDS'' and could provide no explanation for this false statement either. Mr. Kennedy likes to talk about the need for more research. In fact, that was his answer to many of my colleagues' questions. He even told me to look at an NIH study when I asked him about some of his unfounded claims about COVID-19. Now, the NIH, as you know, is under attack tonight as we are here, and all Mr. Kennedy has to say about that is that he will look into that. The NIH is the gold standard worldwide for scientific research and innovation. The University of Colorado is telling me that the system could lose $85 million a year in research dollars to study Alzheimer's, brain injuries, mental illness, and heart disease. If confirmed, Mr. Kennedy would oversee NIH. I guess I really think that we could do better than a known peddler of junk science to run the most important medical research in the country. Is a vaccine denier the best we can do for our doctors who are working around the clock and our nurses, too, in the midst of the worst flu outbreak in 15 years? Is a man who became a millionaire many times over by claiming vaccines cause autism the best we really can do for our kids? Do we really want parents making a choice that is unsafe for them and for their communities because people at the highest offices in the country are making false statements about science? Out of 330 million Americans, we can surely do better than this. I appreciate the Presiding Officer's patience. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I am grateful to be on the floor here tonight with my colleague from California, Senator Schiff, and others to talk about the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard--now the successful nomination, I guess, of Tulsi Gabbard--to be the Director of National Intelligence. To say the least, I never thought that we would see a moment in the history of the United States, in the history of our attempt as a Congress to ensure that the American people and that the President get the intelligence they need. In all of these years and over all of these decades, I never imagined we would see someone like Tulsi Gabbard approved on the floor of the U.S. Senate for that job, and I wanted to speak tonight, just briefly, to say why I think that was the wrong direction for the Trump administration and, more importantly, the wrong direction for the American people. Let me say, first of all, intelligence--and being a member of the Intelligence Committee, I know this is unlike anything else we do around here, because a lot of what happens--my colleague Senator King from Maine is here--is done in secret. One of the great privileges of being on the Intelligence Committee is that--I think, in part--because it is in secret, there isn't the kind of partisanship that you see on a lot of the other committees. There isn't the jockeying for position or for political notoriety; that people on that committee are very serious about our work. In part, it is because we all have a responsibility, on behalf of all of the Senators who are not on the committee, to be able to transmit, as well as we can, the intelligence needs of our country, the intelligence findings of the intelligence community, and to play a very important role in oversight, because if we didn't provide that role, the intelligence Agencies could run amuck without the American people ever knowing about it or their Representatives knowing about it. In fact, the whole reason we have the Intelligence Committee in the Senate is because so many terrible decisions were made by the intelligence Agencies in the postwar period, in the 1950s and 1960s-- some of it well-intentioned, you know, during the Cold War, but a lot of it were really bad judgments--that included things like, you know, the attempt to assassinate foreign leaders and to plot revolutions around the globe. This Congress, this Senate, decided that we needed to have oversight for the American people, and we created the Intelligence Committee to do that. It means that we have an institutional structure that ensures that the American people get the best service out of the intelligence community and that the President gets the best intelligence. And that structure was put in place by people who thought it was important for intelligence Agencies not to run amuck and for the President to get the best intelligence possible. Now we are putting somebody in the job of Director of all of the intelligence Agencies, in a sense, the ODNI, so-called--that is sort of the clearinghouse and the coordinator for all of the intel that the President gets--Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. Now, look, she has had a record of public service in the Congress and in the military. I don't dispute that, and I am not calling into question whether or not she is serving the interests of other countries. But I do want to say--and I will be brief--that I think her judgment has been extraordinarily--I would say, exceptionally--bad. I share her view that there were profound intelligence errors in the lead-up to the Gulf war and in the lead-up to the war in Afghanistan. In the Gulf, in particular, you will remember, you know, the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein was supposed to have had. He didn't have them. It was a terrible, terrible failure of our Intelligence Committee and a terrible failure of oversight from this Congress, and she is right about that. The problem is she has, I think, learned the wrong lesson from that, and over and over and over again, when she has the opportunity to support the interests of the United States--I hate to say it--versus those of our adversaries', time and time again, she picks our adversaries or even our allies. I have heard her say how worried she is about what she describes as the remilitarization of Japan, which, of course, Japan is doing because of the threat from China, with our very, very close cooperation. That is of concern to Tulsi Gabbard. She went to Syria and famously came back disputing our own intelligence Agencies' findings about Assad's gassing of his own people. To this day, she hasn't really taken that back, and it makes no sense at all. But the thing that drives me the craziest is that she has been an apologist for what Vladimir Putin has done since the day Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Ukraine was a peaceful country with a peaceful border, and Vladimir Putin was the first tyrant since World War II ended. We had set up all of these multilateral institutions across Europe and across the world to prevent the kind of hostility that we had seen break out in World War II, and Vladimir Putin decided he would invade a peaceful country next-door to him. In his mind, he had a right to do that because Ukraine has been viewed by czars--going back hundreds and hundreds of years--as Russian territory. That is not the way the Ukrainian people look at this. They think of themselves as an independent country. They think of themselves as living in a place where history actually has moved on over the last 500 years or 1,000 years, and they were sitting there, peacefully, when Vladimir Putin invaded them with no provocation at all. On the evening that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, Tulsi Gabbard tweeted out at 11:30 at night--her local time--referring to the war, Putin's invasion of Ukraine: This war and suffering could easily have been avoided if the Biden administration and NATO had simply acknowledged Russia's ``legitimate security concerns'' regarding Ukraine becoming a member of NATO, which would mean U.S.-NATO forces right on Russia's border. Now, she gets mad when people read that stuff. That is what she said, and she says: Well, don't tell people that I am carrying propaganda for the Russian Government or for Putin. That is not fair. I don't have to say that, but the Russian television put on TV, in the days after the aftermath of Putin's invasion, the very thing that Congresswoman Gabbard had said about his invasion because they saw it as something that ratified what they had done. And it was so consistent, so aligned with his position--and it continues to be his position today--that he thought it would muddy the waters with people around the world about what they were doing in Ukraine. I believe Ukraine's battle, from the very beginning, has not been a battle for Ukraine. I think it is a battle for democracy. I think they are on the tip of the spear, you know, in a way that nobody has been since World War II. The Ukrainian people have been unbelievable, and the Ukrainian soldiers have fought magnificently. There was a view, when Putin invaded Ukraine, that, in 3 days, they were going to be in Kyiv--the Russians-- and because of the bravery of the Ukrainian people, because of the bravery of the soldiers, many of whom have given up their lives, they have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of anybody on this floor, of any of the Monday-morning quarterbacking that has happened in this Capitol and in other capitols around the world. And our allies all around Europe--but also in the Pacific area, as well--all have seen what the Ukrainian people have accomplished. When she had an opportunity to say something about the Ukrainians and when she had the opportunity to stand with the United States and stand with our allies, she made another choice. She is entitled to that choice. She is entitled to that choice, just as she is entitled to her views about the intelligence failures during the Gulf war. But the fact that she has the idiosyncratic views that she has, whether it is Putin's invasion of Ukraine or her writing a bill in the House to give Edward Snowden a pardon, doesn't qualify her to be the lead intelligence official for the United States of America. As I said--and I will finish here--we work well in a bipartisan way on these issues. The American people need the President to get intelligence in a way that is trustworthy, that is not shaded in one direction or another, and we all need to be able to trust each other in the delivery of that intelligence. I will say that I think the President, in nominating Congresswoman Gabbard for this position, has fallen short. I voted for the CIA Director. This is not an issue of his appointments to the intelligence Agencies. But in the case of Congresswoman Gabbard, I think he missed the mark. I apologize to my colleague from California for going on for so long. I will yield the floor to him.

Mr. BENNET

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

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I would ask unanimous consent of the Presiding Officer to set aside the pending amendment so I may offer my amendment No. 90; that there be up to 15 minutes for debate on the amendment; and that upon the use or yielding back of time, the Senate vote on the amendment without further intervening action or debate.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Alabama for her work on the Senate floor and for coming over. I know this is a big day around the Senate. It is a big day for America, and it is appropriate, I think, that we should be here on this issue today because, over the coming months and years, we are going to be confronting a lot of choices to make. And I think it is critically important that, as we make these choices, we do it in a way that is consistent with our values. Throughout our history, generations of Americans have tried to secure our heritage as a nation of immigrants and a nation committed to the rule of law. Both of those are important. And when we have fallen short, which we have from time to time, we have battled back to reclaim these moral values. Our enduring commitment to this imperfect but principled work is why 21st century America has one of the most dynamic economies, vibrant cultures, and an important reputation throughout the world as a beacon of freedom. That reputation, by the way, is not assured. That is a reputation that has to be earned by our Nation every single day. Although our Founders were famously suspicious of overreaching by the Federal Government, they recognized the obvious national imperatives-- the national security and foreign policy imperatives--and the problems that would arise if every State and county and city were to enforce its own immigration laws. And that is why the Constitution of the United States says that the Congress, working with the President, should administer those laws, and, therefore, logically assigned the responsibility to our national government--not to our State government, not to our local government--to enforce our immigration law. Throughout our history, the American people have been welcoming to new immigrants--and sometimes less so. Understandably, chaotic and changing circumstances like the ones we face today sometimes raise alarms among the American people. Unfortunately, in our time--and I would agree with the Senator from Alabama on this--we have not addressed the chaos at the southern border of the United States, and politicians have used this crisis for years to divide the American people on one side of the partisan divide and as another. And as a result, the failing immigration system that we have has only become more broken. The thing that I want to make sure of is that, as we think about the chaos that we are facing, the complexity that we are facing, is that we don't--as we have occasionally in the past--abandon our values and our commitment to the rule of law. In more inspired times, we have used these crises to actually burnish our great global advantage as a nation of immigrants that is committed to the rule of law. In 2013, we had what was, in my view, an important chance to embrace those values with the Senate's work on the Gang of 8. The Senator of Alabama might remember it. To her, that seems like ancient history. I was one of the members of the Gang of 8. I was a lot younger than I am today and so were the other members of that gang too. But we seriously tried to take on meaningful immigration reform in this Chamber. We had a tough but fair pathway to citizenship for those who could earn it in the United States. We included the Dream Act. We had a massive overhaul--massive overhaul--of our visa system so our farms and ranches and high-tech industries, even our ski industry, could continue to compete with the rest of the world. We had $46 billion of border security money in there--I hate to think what that money was in real dollars today, what that $46 billion would look like today; I bet you it is around $60 billion--that 68 people in this Chamber agreed to support together. There was so much money in that bill that Lindsey Graham--Senator Graham from South Carolina, who was another member of the Gang of 8, used to say there were going to be so many border patrol agents that they could literally hold hands from one end of the border to the other across the United States of America. I can see that the Senator from Alabama has heard that story before. There has been a huge cost of inaction, not just the money that if we had spent it then would have made such a huge difference but the painful consequences the Senator from Alabama and others have talked about, I have talked about, for the American people and for our country. In the end, after months of going through the legislative wringer, as I mentioned, we got 68 votes over here in the Senate. If it had been given a chance--read Speaker Boehner's book; he will tell you this. If it had gone to the floor, it would have gotten a majority vote on the floor of the Senate. But the Freedom Caucus killed that bill in a legislative back alley before it could see the light of day on the House floor. And since then, like with so many of the American people's most fundamental concerns, the Federal Government and this Congress has been immobilized on the subject of immigration, for sure, under both Republican and Democratic Presidents. In the meantime, transnational gangs have seized full opportunity of our inaction, raking in billions of dollars smuggling human beings and drugs and weapons to the southern border of the United States. These criminal syndicates have perfected their worldwide smuggling operations. They have trained people how to exploit our asylum system, and they have weaponized social media to enable thousands of people to travel all over the globe to present themselves at the southern border of the United States or to come through the southern border. And the result of that paralysis has been, at times, an overwhelmed southern border. For this reason, in 2022, I urged the Biden administration never to lift title 42 without a plan and without the resources to execute it. They were unprepared for what was to come, and they were too slow to act. It is clear to almost everybody today that our system isn't built for today's conditions. We need to fix it, and we need to give the American people confidence that we have a fair and secure system in place. So how do we do that? Well, tonight, we are going to vote on the first response from the Congress, the Laken Riley Act, which I think is neither focused on driving resources to the border or establishing a more robust and rigorous system of immigration. Instead, contrary to our constitutional obligation, today's bill devolves authority away from the President and Congress to 50 State attorneys general, in ways that seem extremely counterproductive to me. I hope I am not right about this; although, you can already see a battle brewing in the administration about this. This bill provides State attorneys general the power to seek nationwide injunctions to completely block certain countries, like India and China and El Salvador, from sending immigrants here. Imagine a Salvadorian farmworker on an H-2A visa living in Florida or Louisiana committing a violent crime leading to a deportation order. He should be deported. I am not here to dispute that. I don't dispute that. But with this bill, if El Salvador doesn't accept his deportation, Florida's attorney general could ask a court to force the Federal Government to ban all visas from El Salvador or all H-2A visas or all H-1B visas for high-tech workers for all that matters. Nearly 5,500 people in Colorado today are working on an H-2A visa. Why should Florida's attorney general be able to dictate Colorado's need for these workers? Why should any State attorney general be able to hammer the economies of 49 other States? It doesn't make any sense. It is because Congress and the administration have abandoned their responsibility here that we find ourselves in this position. Second, this bill creates mandatory detention policies for immigrants accused of committing nonviolent and also violent crime. And as I said, I believe we should be going after transnational gangs, street gangs, and people who pose a threat to our community. When a brutal crime is committed, as in the case of Laken Riley, we should respond. We have to respond. And we should stand with her family--as the Senator from Alabama has done--and her community and ensure that something like that never happens again. But in my opinion, this bill is not targeted enough. It would force ICE, working with local law enforcement, to detain immigrants who are accused--not just convicted but accused--of a very broad set of crimes, including shoplifting, without regard to how young they are or, more important, whether they are a threat to our community or a threat to public safety. There is a good reason--and I know the presiding officer may not agree with this, but I know he knows the logic. There is a good reason why we seldom pass legislation with mandatory detention or jailing. We tend to believe that law enforcement is in the best position to determine in realtime who the threat to public safety actually is. And we know we don't have the resources--we never have the resources--to lock up every nonviolent offender without regard to whether they are a threat to public safety or not. I know this sounds crazy, but this bill is so broadly drafted that it would compel law enforcement to put a mandatory detention on--you heard it--an 11-year-old immigrant in New York accused of stealing a soda from a gas station. I think most law enforcement agents across the country would tell you that their time would be much better spent tracking down and detaining, for example, a violent criminal who has bludgeoned their neighbor with a hammer. But this bill doesn't distinguish between those two cases. Instead, it strips law enforcement of their ability to make their best judgment about whom to arrest and not to arrest, whom to detain and not detain, and how to focus their precious resources on protecting our public safety. The proponents of this bill do not deny that children will be swept up in its administration. This is not a drafting error. In this bill, every undocumented person accused--not just convicted but accused--of a list of crimes that is in this bill must be detained. That might sound like law and order, but it is easy to see how this encroachment on law enforcement's ability to do its job could spiral out of control. To make matters even worse, this bill does not provide ICE with the resources it needs to implement what is now a massive unfunded liability. And I know that the proponents of the bill say they are going to fix that problem. But just so you understand, ICE says this bill is going to cost $27 billion a year. That is their number. I have heard much higher numbers than that. Let's take their number: $27 billion a year. That is three times ICE's annual budget of $9 billion. Many of us are used to Congress passing bills without ever paying for them, but this may be one of the worst cases that we have seen. And I know there may be an attempt here through reconciliation--you know, a tax measure to try to fund this in some way or to pick some other place to do it--but choices are going to have to be made between the mandatory detention of people who may not be a threat to our community and other choices like the funding for border patrol or the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office at the Homeland Security, the disaster relief fund--just three that come to mind. Put another way, every dollar that ICE spends incarcerating kids is a dollar the border patrol doesn't have to spend on the border itself. Wouldn't the American people be a lot better off if Homeland Security were left to focus on violent criminals and enforcing the border, not on kids accused of nonviolent crimes? I assume no one here really thinks that mandatorily incarcerating children accused of nonviolent crimes is the best, most strategic way to fix our immigration system. We certainly don't want a repeat of the images of children caged in chain-link enclosures screaming out for their parents. Federal law enforcement does not want a repeat of that, least of all, least of anybody, and I doubt any of us would want private prisons managing that outcome either. That episode was a shameful part of our history. It falls into that chapter of our history. In another one of our more shameful immigration failures, Congress has never addressed the status of the Dreamers. The Senator from Alabama made this point when she said that there isn't a Dreamer in the country that is less than 17 years old. That is because notwithstanding the American people's overwhelming support for Dreamers who know no country other than the United States, that we have been unable to rationalize their presence in the country. But 3 million Dreamers--who, after all these years, are now middle- age nurses and teachers and small business owners with families of their own--are also vulnerable.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask for 2 additional minutes.

Mr. BENNET. We can make this bill better and stronger by focusing on the actual threats to public safety and protecting nonviolent kids from getting locked up, stripped away from their parents, schools, churches, and communities. We can make this bill better by protecting nonviolent Dreamers from mandatory incarceration in the only country they know. I know my time is almost over. The American people want us to fix our broken immigration system. They want us to feel safe in our own country. They want us to secure the border and cut down on illegal border crossings. They want us to strengthen rigorous legal pathways to support our economy and attract top talent. They want us to improve our partnerships with other countries so there is a reason for people to stay at home and not just come here. As we fix our broken immigration system, most Americans want people treated with dignity, especially if they are children. Immigration is one of the many challenges facing our country today. It touches every aspect of our economy. It directly affects families and often implicates our core values. In their best moments, our parents and grandparents managed to navigate these tough issues by upholding the law and honoring our values. We must not abandon that aspiration in our time. Mr. President, I am grateful for your patience. I apologize for going over a minute or two. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, in a moment, I will ask for unanimous consent to pass H.R. 3433, the bipartisan Give Kids a Chance Act. I would like to highlight how important this legislation is for children with cancer all across this country. The Give Kids a Chance Act finally authorizes the FDA to direct companies who are conducting research for adult cancer drugs to study those drugs in combination with others to see whether they also can work well for kids who have cancer. The bill continues the work that Senator Rubio and I started in 2017, when we worked together to pass the RACE for Children Act, which required sponsors of certain adult cancer drugs to study the benefits or the effects and their use in children. Since then, Senator Rubio and I have both learned that combination therapies can be effective treatments and reduce the risk of side effects significantly, both for adults and for kids. That is why this legislation is so important. This bill can help save the lives of children all over our country who have the most aggressive forms of cancer. It would ensure that pharmaceutical companies are being held accountable to study how their drugs affect children who may have the same kind of cancer as adults but who need more tailored treatment in combination with other drugs. I know Senator Rubio and I have both heard numerous stories from patients who have asked for themselves and parents who have asked on behalf of their children and who have advocated on behalf of children who have passed away. This bill also authorizes the FDA to take enforcement action against companies that do not conduct the pediatric trials that are required under the Pediatric Research Equity Act and requires the FDA to report on enforcement of this act. Additionally, the bill reauthorizes the FDA rare pediatric disease priority review voucher program through fiscal year 2029, which incentivizes drug development for rare pediatric diseases. This bill has the support of dozens and dozens of organizations that represent kids and parents all across our country. I ask unanimous consent that their names be printed in the Record. In the interest of time this evening, I won't read them on the floor, although I want to say how deeply I appreciate their efforts.

Mr. BENNET. I would also like to highlight the bipartisan nature of this work--Senator Rubio, as a cosponsor, with Senators Casey and Mullin, who cosponsored provisions of this House bill as well. This bill has passed unanimously out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It has passed the House by voice vote. Now is the time to pass this bill. If we pass it tonight, it will go to the President for his signature. Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions be discharged from further consideration of and that the Senate proceed to H.R. 3433; further, that the bill be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I just want to say how deeply I regret the objection of the Senator from Kentucky. That is, of course, his right. I gather that he is objecting because he objects to the lateness of the hour and the time with which this request was made. At least, that is what I was told earlier tonight. I think after we have been held here in place for hours and hours and hours, the idea that we are not going to be able to pass this legislation is deeply, deeply disappointing to the people who have advocated for this for all of these years. It is a reflection, I think, of how broken this place is in the way that it puts its own interests ahead of the interests of the people who we represent. But we will be back to fight another day. Mr. President, I wish you and the staff here in the Senate at this late hour, and my colleagues who are here as well, happy holidays and Merry Christmas. We will see you in the new year.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 714, H.R. 9592.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 9487, which was received from the House.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate consider the following nominations en bloc: Calendar Nos. 859, 860, 861, 862, 863, 864, 865, 866, 867, 868, 869, 871, 873, 874, 530, and all nominations on the Secretary's desk in the Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Navy, and Space Force; that the nominations be confirmed en bloc; that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate; that no further motions be in order to any of the nominations; and that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged from further consideration of S. 5062 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. BENNET. I ask unanimous consent that the Blackburn-Ossoff substitute amendment at the desk be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, as in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 7365 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. BENNET. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.