James Lankford

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, 8 days ago we started the process of trying to pull together this economic bill--8 days ago. We have been in continuous session every day since then. It was our belief that we would vote on this bill 2 days ago, on Sunday. The negotiations have gone on for this entire 8-day time period. Republicans and Democrats have been meeting together every day, working through the process--Republican chairmen, Democratic ranking members, sharing ideas. Eight days ago, Senator Schumer presented a list 10 pages long of ideas and priorities that the Democrats wanted to include in the economic relief package. Multiple of those areas are included in this final package, in this compiled package that had all come together and was all headed toward trying to vote on it on Sunday. Then Sunday happened, and it was: We are close. That wasn't the answer of, We are voting on it. It was suddenly the negotiations are ``We are close,'' and a whole new set of priorities suddenly appeared from our Democratic colleagues to say, well, we have a few more things that we want to do and a few more things that we want to evaluate. ``We are close'' is all we heard. We thought we were done. For the sake of the American people, we need to be done. We have folks at home across the entire country who are trying to figure out if they can get a loan, if they can keep their business going, if they can keep their employees. They have no income coming, and all that is coming out of this body is: We are close. We have a few more things we want to discuss. Here is a sample of the calls that I got yesterday: A lady from Southwest Oklahoma called, literally in tears, saying she has a small business, and there is little to no business going on right now, with no cashflow, and she doesn't know about she and her husband's retirement and she doesn't know why the bill didn't pass yesterday. All we could say to her was we don't know either because it was suddenly a new set of issues. It seemed to be all day long Sunday, Monday, and now we are deep into Tuesday, and we still can't get a set of answers. Painfully enough, I caught one of my Senate colleagues on the Democratic side and just asked: What is the problem? What is the holdup? Their answer was: We are compiling our list from everyone right now to try to get down to what our priorities are. This was yesterday, Monday. We thought we would be done on Sunday. All I could say back to them was: You are compiling your list? You still don't even know what all you want to be able to include in this bill, and we are just stalling and waiting until we can figure out what to do? We have been done, and now we are stuck waiting for the other side to say: I am thinking of a few more things we want to include. I had a lady from Southern Oklahoma call me because the daycare center where her daughter works has closed down. She doesn't know what is going to happen and wanted to know--she has heard about this possibility of a check being sent out to every American--that would sure be helpful right now--and wanted to know when that was coming. All I could say was: I don't know. We are waiting on our Democratic colleagues to finish compiling their list of the other things they want to add into this bill so we can even discuss it. All I can say is: I keep hearing we are at the 2-yard line or we are this close. But we never seem to get past the 2-yard line. It is always: We are close. Folks at home don't need ``We are close.'' They need this done. So let me just say, really quickly, what is in this bill and why it is so important to us: Additional money for testing, additional money for work on vaccines, additional money on trying to be able to go through treatments, ventilators, literally billions of dollars that go to hospitals and clinics and nursing homes and senior centers. One section of the bill has $75 billion and another section of the bill has $40 billion--just for hospitals and for healthcare. The hospitals are all telling us the same thing: We need help, and we need help right now. And I would say back to them: Would love to, except we seem to be parked on the 2-yard line while other folks are saying: We are close. We are still thinking of a few other things we want to get in. There is an immediate check that is to go out to every American to provide some support for utilities and the basic things because so many people are unemployed. To those folks who are calling us saying: When are they coming, all I can say is I don't know. All I hear is that we are close because the other side wants to include a few more things they are thinking about on their list. Already in the bill is $250 billion for unemployment insurance, with an increase on the amount that would come on each check. We would love to get that started, except we are on the 2-yard line, and we can't seem to get past that because the other side is still making a list of the other things they want to include in the bill. So we can't get help to hospitals. We can't get immediate support checks out the door. We can't get additional unemployment insurance going because they are thinking about a few other things they want to add into the bill. Already in the bill is help for small businesses: helping people retain their full salary if they work at a small business--that is, a business of 500 or less--so that they can stay connected to their employer so that, when we get through this virus, they actually have a job, and they can continue their same salary. That is an immediate offer. It is not like the one that passed last week that is small businesses are expected to pay for the coverage out of money they don't have, and someday the Federal Government will figure out a process to reimburse them. This is totally different. This is an immediate, upfront infusion into small businesses, and they don't have to come up with the cash. It is come up with for them, for them to be able to cover their employees. That helps their employees from going into unemployment insurance, and it helps this economy recover a lot faster because they are able to come right back to it. I would love to tell them: Go to your bank right now; that loan is ready--except I can't because the other side is still thinking about a few more things they want to add into this bill. And while small businesses can't make it through the week because of their cashflow because they have been forcibly closed, the other side is thinking about a few more things they want to add in. There is help in this for nonprofits that are doing amazing work all over my State--and they probably are in States all over the country right now. Nonprofits out there that I have talked to recently-- homeless shelters, but they are at max capacity right now. They are actually not allowing additional residents in some of the facilities there. The YMCA and YWCA, they are feeding youth in the community. The schools are stepping up, doing remarkable work feeding folks. The free community clinic has had to close in some of my communities just because of COVID-19, so they are trying to find ways to help out in other ways. The Hope Center that is in Woodward is doing a drive-through food distribution right now instead of having people come in. So they are getting food to them. We have got some of the Youth & Family Services' facilities that are doing amazing work right now, but they cannot make payroll right now. They are needing some help. Well--guess what--there is help in this bill for those nonprofits to keep their payroll going and to be able to keep going because we desperately need those nonprofits to still be able to provide that help in those communities. I would love to tell those nonprofits help is on the way, but all I can tell them is we are on the 2-yard line waiting for the other side to determine a few more things that they still want to put into the bill. So it is ready--maybe. A lot of large businesses that employ a lot of people in my State are not asking for grants, though they would love to get those, obviously. They are asking for capital. They are asking for access to loans. They are asking for the opportunity to take out a loan and to be able to make a payment. That is in this bill. There is not a bailout for big companies in this bill. This bill provides an opportunity for medium and large companies to get access to credit so they can get a loan to carry their company through. I would love to tell them: You can go take out that loan. But I can't because the other side is still thinking about a few other things that they want to do. We are waiting. Time is important right now. While one of my colleagues made a public statement yesterday saying: This is a $2 trillion bill; we should really get it right--oh, I agree, but this doesn't seem to be a matter of making sure the text is correct. All that I have heard for the last 48 hours is: There are a few more things we are thinking about that we want to be able to get into the bill. Yesterday it was solar energy panels and solar credits, which I don't know how it connects with COVID-19. It was forcing airlines to be carbon neutral by 2025. It was union representatives on corporate boards. It was limiting the ability of corporations to have any kind of access to doing stock buybacks for the next 10 years. All those things may be fine to debate. Why in the world are we holding up small businesses and holding up checks to individuals and cutting off support for nonprofits because we are thinking about a few things like solar panels and carbon-neutral footprints for airlines? Why don't we get this done? Time is important. People at home who have real lives and real families and a small business have no income coming in right now. They have no cash flow, and they are trying to pay their employees and figure out what is going to happen next, while the other side is thinking about something else they might want to add to this bill. I am fine with thinking through the details, but in our office, it is really difficult to continue to answer the phone and hear people say: I don't know how we will stay open any longer. I will tell you what--why don't you answer this call for me while you are thinking about what else you might want to add to the bill? A hotel owner in my State just closed their doors while you are thinking about what you want to do next. I am asking the other side. The bill already has these elements in it, and while I am confident people will step out of negotiations at some point and say ``We miraculously saved the bill because we changed five lines in it and because we added additional dollars into this account'' or ``This account was too low, so now we didn't give $75 billion to hospitals; we gave $100 billion to hospitals. So, look, we fixed it. And we didn't give $10 billion to cities; we gave $15 billion to cities, and so we saved it''--well, while you are arguing about adding a few more dollars at the end of these different things, in the meantime, small businesses and people across the country are saying ``Can I get the first dollar while you are arguing about the fifteen- billionth dollar? Can I get some help now?'' Time is important. Let's stop pretending it is not. It may not be to some folks in this room; it is to the 4 million folks in my State. We were ready on Sunday with this bill and thought we were voting on it to finish it. Now, 48 hours later, the other side is still thinking about something they might want to add to this. Let's vote. I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, we are at an odd spot right now not just as a Senate but as a nation. We have millions of people who are gathered in their own homes, trying to figure out what is going to happen next, waiting for a virus to die down. We have people in a hospital who are afraid because there is no tested treatment yet. We have firefighters; we have law enforcement; we have hospital workers all with not enough personal protection equipment because they do not know who is a citizen without the virus and who is a citizen with the virus. The most basic elements of decision making of how you take care of your neighbor have become a distraction across the country as Americans have become afraid of a stranger and of a friend. This is a huge shift in where we are as a country. What this demands is immediate action. Three weeks ago, the Senate and the House passed $8.3 billion, and we did it with an overwhelming bipartisan support, to add additional funding for diagnostics, for testing, and for rapid work on a vaccine. All of that work is advancing quickly. We have human trials on a vaccine happening right now because we came together, and there weren't extra things added to it. We focused in on the problem, which is the virus. This body has a lot of things we disagree on, there is no question. There are lots of moments to debate the things we disagree on, but this is a time we need to focus in on what is the problem, and the problem is dealing with COVID-19. There was a bipartisan bill that was put together in the Senate. A week ago today, Senator Schumer released a 10-page list of--here are the things the Democrats would like from the Senate. It was a 10- page, very detailed list. Twenty-eight of those items on that list are included in this bipartisan bill--28 items from it, of that 10-page list of items. So much of that list that was released a week ago is included in this bipartisan bill. Republican chairmen and Democratic ranking members of the committees of jurisdiction met and talked about this. The chairman and the ranking member of Appropriations worked together on an appropriations package for a quarter of a trillion dollars on just that one section that they worked on together to get resolution. Put all of those items together, and let me tell you what I mean by that: $250 billion dealing with things as distant to believe as things like getting Peace Corps volunteers back home, away from where they are now. We have to get them back home and away from harm's way. There is funding in there for that as well as $88 billion for hospitals, trying to help them through this; help for nursing homes; help for individual firefighters and their departments; $10 billion for community development block grants to help cities as they are rapidly trying to work through this process--$250 billion allocated just to things like that to help people get testing, personal equipment, travel and additional expenses, teleworking capabilities that have to be done for cities and communities and Federal entities. All of those things were put together and agreed upon. There is a lot of work on the medical side, rightfully so. Testing makes a world of difference on this. Getting access to a vaccine--there are billions of dollars in that particular area. All of that is included in this proposal. In addition to that, there are direct payments that we had agreed upon to send out, literally, to every American. We had set up $1,200 for every American to receive. That is a stopgap method to help folks who are having trouble with their utilities or whatever it may be, or extra expenses so they will have something. It was not just that for the individuals. It was also unemployment insurance. This is something the Republicans and Democrats had worked on together, to do a plus-up of unemployment insurance because we have millions of people suddenly unemployed with no advanced warning at all. There is a significant increase of unemployment insurance that is built into this, about $250 billion additional that is put into that amount. Small businesses--the goal is not to have people on unemployment; the goal is to have people employed. A very creative thing was built into this that I happen to be a part of in the design, and that was small businesses--a business with 500 or fewer employees--could actually apply for a rapid loan. That loan would be given to them quickly. If they used it for payroll, it would be forgiven entirely. If they used it for their lease, it would be forgiven entirely. The goal was to not have small business go out of business and to keep employees currently connected to their company, not to put them out on unemployment but to keep them employed so they have the same system. So when we get through this virus, which we hope we do soon--they still have the same job, they are not on unemployment and later looking for a job. They are able to keep their same job. We thought that was very significant. It is a brandnew strategy for how to do this. It is a much better idea than just pushing people on unemployment--although, we do have great aid for unemployment. That program is $350 billion. As I have already laid out: healthcare, hospital, first responders-- that is the first piece of this--working on testing, vaccines. The second piece is direct payments to individuals, direct payments for unemployment insurance, and then assistance for small businesses to stay in business and help their employees stay connected to their business, and then, on top of that, loans for the largest businesses in America. It is not a bailout--loans for the largest businesses in America. My Democratic colleagues keep saying over and over again that this is a bailout for the biggest companies. It is loans for the largest companies because--you know what--they employ a lot of people, and we would like those businesses to also stay in business. All of that seemed to be going well and negotiating well until the last 36 hours when it suddenly blows up. Here is what I heard first: It is not enough. It is $2 trillion. It is $2 trillion. It is suddenly: Well, it is not enough. We need to plus this up to be even bigger. And then suddenly it has become this whole transition into the most random of things: Well, if a corporation gets a loan from the Federal Government, then someone here in Washington, DC, should determine how that corporation is run. We should have a member on their board or a union representative on their board. We should have some kind of stake in their board to do that. This was my favorite one. We should be able to tell the board, if they are considering layoffs, someone here in DC should be able to go to the company, evaluate the rest of their portfolio and tell them other ways they can do their business besides laying people off. Are you kidding me? We are now going to create a whole new Federal bureaucracy that goes to every company, and if they take out a loan in this program, they are able to tell them how to manage the day-to-day operations of their company. There was a requirement that every company had to do a $15 minimum wage for their company. There was a requirement they couldn't do stock buybacks. By the way, I have no problem with prohibiting the use of these loan dollars to use for stock buybacks, but that is not the concept. The concept was for the next 10 years, you can't ever do stock buybacks on anything, regardless if it is with these loan funds. It became this bizarre shift into--oh, we have an opportunity to run every company in America and tell them how to operate, and that became the goal. Then it became--we need to also add solar grants. The latest proposal that just came out today was $600 million for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for Humanity--$600 million. It is not connected to anything COVID; it was just that they need a plus-up of an additional $600 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities. The other one was that we need to have a forgiveness of all debt for the post office, ever--all post office debt. That was just released today. The list is going on and on. My frustration is that I have people at home who are suffering, with small businesses teetering on the edge, about to go out of business, trying to figure out if there is going to be a proposal to come out of the Senate while folks are discussing whether we need to do more solar grants and if we are going to take over corporate boards and require a $15 minimum wage at the end of this. Can we just deal with COVID-19? Can we just deal with one thing, with COVID-19, to say, Let's help businesses and workers and families who are struggling? That is what I thought we were trying to do with this bill, but now suddenly it seems to be everything but. Let's just do that, and then there is plenty of time to argue about the other issues. We can do those in the future. We will have the debate on solar panels, I promise, but let's deal with COVID-19 and the families and individuals who are struggling and stop holding everything up, trying to add one more thing in to say: It is a really big bill. I am going to try to get my one piece. One thing we worked on in a bipartisan way--Senator Coons and I--was this one area of not-for-profits. The not-for-profits are part of our social safety net. Our communities are put together by our families, and the people who walk alongside our families are local nonprofits. When those can't meet the needs, then government steps in to meet the needs. Our nonprofits are teetering on the edge right now. This bill allows the nonprofits to be a part of this whole focus on small businesses being able to get a loan and sustain their personnel. It also allows individuals who want to donate to local nonprofits to write that off as an incentive for folks to be more engaged in that. This is a reasonable proposal on how to help. It is a bipartisan solution that Senator Coons and I have, but we can't get to it and vote on it because we being held up by some bizarre new thing that is thrown in every couple of hours that is unrelated to COVID-19 or the perpetual statement of: It is only $2 trillion. It is not enough. This government is not even set up to distribute $2 trillion. Let's get this out the door. Let's get something started, and let's keep the battle going for the other things. But for the sake of our nonprofits, for the sake of our small businesses, for the sake of people who want to stay employed, the people who are small business and restaurant owners and coffee shop owners and retailers--for the sake of them, why do we not just go ahead and get this vote on and stop delaying it, trying to add one more special interest something into it? I move that we get going and get this done. I encourage my colleagues on the other side to stop trying to renegotiate everything we have already negotiated and to stop adding one more thing. Let's make the one more thing a vote. With that, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. LANKFORD

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

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, 3 months ago, no one in the country-- in fact, no one in the world--had heard the term ``COVID-19.'' The term ``coronavirus'' was around, but most folks didn't use that because it was connected to SARS or to MERS in the past. In December of 2019, an infection started in China, and it spread rapidly through the Wuhan region. By January, there were thousands of people affected before most of the world even knew it existed. Now, almost every country in the world has infections. We have hundreds of thousands of people who have had contact with this virus, and unfortunately we have lost thousands of people worldwide. In the United States, the numbers continue to increase as we are continuing to increase the number of people we can actually test. Fortunately, the vast majority of the people who get this virus have little to no symptoms. It is a cold; it is a mild flu to them. But for our vulnerable populations--our elderly populations, those with heart issues, those with lung issues, smokers, diabetics--this can be a very, very serious thing. The challenge we face in our healthcare is that every person who walks in to get tested is face to face with one of our healthcare workers, especially in rural areas of our State, who may be the only healthcare professional for that entire county. If that person--who has not been vaccinated as well because there is no vaccine yet--is not able to serve the rest of the population, that health situation becomes even worse because of diminishing care. We, as Americans, have taken this seriously, as we should. We are paying attention. The younger population is spending time trying to get away from other individuals, to self-isolate, to self-quarantine-- ``social distancing'' is the new term--to find some way to not be close to someone else so they don't accidentally pass the virus on, because although the virus may be within them and they are not personally physically affected much, the effect on someone else could be pretty dramatic. So, out of respect for others, they are trying to manage that distance and be attentive to that. There have been multiple actions from the government over the past several months. There are the travel bans we all know very much about, starting with China and now in multiple areas of the world, and lots of encouragement to limit gatherings, first to 250 and then to 50 and now to 10. Now it is a series of just keep social distancing, to make sure you are aware of that. There have been emergency declarations. CMS has changed coverage, as recently as yesterday, dealing with issues like telehealth, making sure individuals who may have other care needs don't have to actually go in to a healthcare professional--for their fear of who else is sitting in the waiting room--but they can get access to telehealth, which is a much needed change. The FDA has been very aggressive in giving access to different States to do their own testing regimens. The CDC has been active in trying to get to a point where they can get a testing system that can actually get out to the entire country. The challenge was, early on, many other countries did tests and developed tests with a high false-positive rate. The CDC was very focused on trying to get as accurate as it possibly could. That meant it took longer, and we don't have the tests out. The tests are more accurate, but we don't have the tests in the numbers we need at the moment we needed them, which was last week. So now we are still struggling to catch up on testing all over the country. Multiple other labs and multiple universities are also coming on board. In fact--it is interesting--multiple other countries are also developing their own testing processes. In the days ahead, we will be able to catch up on the testing so that any American could be able to get testing, but for now, it is limited. In States like my State of Oklahoma, where the virus is beginning its acceleration--we were late in actually getting the virus coming to Oklahoma, but now that the virus is there, it starts to accelerate, and testing is exceptionally important to us, as it is to everyone else. The Department of Transportation is engaged on things like waivers for hours of service to allow the movement of goods all over the country dealing with livestock and with food. There has been a big push from just about every retailer in the country to make sure they are cleaning facilities more and being open and accessible and having hours early in the morning for those in the most vulnerable populations so they are not shopping with people who may have the virus and don't even know it. There has been a shift around the country to encourage people to telework or to find ways to separate in their place of work. All of these things have occurred just in the last few months. Again, 3 months ago, none of us knew this term or this virus existed. All of this is happening extremely rapidly. Three weeks ago, Congress and the President agreed on a proposal--it was a wide bipartisan proposal--to deal with additional funding for testing, additional funding for vaccine development, additional funding for State and local departments of health to make sure they are taking care of that. My own State of Oklahoma has already received almost $7 million to help with what is happening in our county, and we are in desperate need of those dollars to get that done. Vaccine development is already in human trials now. It is in phase 1. It will take multiple months to get that done, but we have already begun that process. That is important to us. The bill that was on the floor today dealt with multiple helpful things. It expands SNAP--what some people still call food stamps, but it is supplemental nutrition. It is assistance for those families. It is an expansion of that. It also deals with unemployment insurance benefits to make sure those are staying consistent and those get extended to people who are going to need them because in the past week, unemployment has dramatically increased all over the country. In the days ahead, when we see the numbers, we will see the difference between what is happening this week versus the week before versus the week before that. The struggle is, my phones have been filled with one other element that is in that bill, and that deals with a mandate on small businesses for sick leave. Small businesses in my State are closed. Many retailers and restaurants--many small businesses are really struggling with how they are going to pay for this when they have no income coming in right now. They are hearing the promise of a Federal reimbursement coming to them, but they don't know when that is coming, and they are literally teetering on the edge right now. Their struggle: Please don't do something that pushes us over the edge. We need help, but we don't need a bureaucracy that is going to be slow to respond or a way that is actually going to get us some help but help that comes to us too late. I have heard these terrifying words from multiple employers: I cannot make it with that structure. I am going to have to lay people off and hope to be able to hire them back when this all ends. For those families who are laid off and in unemployment now, this is a very different day for them. My fear is that some of what pushed some of those individuals over the edge into unemployment was a nudge to say we are going to add one more mandate to you at your worst possible economic moment. The first principle we should have as Congress is, do no harm. We need to step in and help those folks who need help. There are lots of ideas being bantered around by the Senate and the House, from both sides of the aisle, to figure out how we can get help as rapidly as we can to as many people as we can. This is a moment unlike what we have seen before where it is not that the economy is crashing because of some economic foundation that is not there; it is fear and panic that is global, that literally we are struggling with ``what if'' and the CDC and our own governments saying to employers: It would be best if you closed for a season. And they, being good citizens and good neighbors, quite frankly, are complying with that out of fear for their own business and for their own employees. I finished my day yesterday--late last night--talking to a small business owner in Oklahoma who related to me what he is going through right now and the struggles he is having keeping the doors open. Quite frankly, he was fairly blunt with me to say: The things that are being passed in the bill tomorrow will affect me, but my competitors that are big companies--it doesn't affect them. It is already hard enough for me as a small business to compete with them, and now I have a new mandate on me that is not a mandate on them, and it makes it even harder, and I don't think I will have the cash flow to be able to make this work. Toward the end of the conversation, he paused and literally began to cry, and he pulled himself together and said: I am having to call people and tell them ``I don't have hours for you next week,'' and these are people I care about. We need to take action, but we need to take action that helps people keep their jobs, helps people stay employed, and helps us deal with the dip in the economy right now to help them pull back out. My fear is that we didn't do that just now. We might have just made it worse. There are important things for us to do, and many of those things we are working on this week. We have to get help to as many people as we can, as fast as we can. It is my hope that the Senate will continue to stay in session--as the leader has already said and promised that it would--until we actually come to some proposals where we have wide bipartisan agreement that can get help rapidly to the people who need the help the most: those workers, those individuals who are struggling, the folks who are hourly, those folks who are waiters and waitresses, those folks who work at the coffee shop and own the coffee shop, and those folks in retail locations that are shut down. They need us to stand with them, and this is our moment to do it. Let's do it together I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, there are a lot of things going on right now in DC and a lot of moving targets. A lot of Americans are looking closely at what is happening with the COVID-19 virus. We are tracking what is happening overseas in Afghanistan and multiple other issues on the stock market, as well as what is happening with oil and gas right now. We are spending a little bit of time, in the middle of all those things, to also say that we can't lose track of structural issues in government, to see if we can work on those issues that are, right now, in front of us, but we also have to look at long-term issues, to look at basic government transparency and basic accountability for government. So I want to highlight--several of my colleagues are here, as well, highlighting some of the things that are actually on the floor or have moved recently or we think we can move on those. One of those things is the GREAT Act. This is a bipartisan bill that deals with basic transparency for grants. If you go back 20 years ago, the Federal Government gave away very few grants. Now, $600 billion a year is just for grants. My colleague, Joni Ernst from Iowa, just highlighted some of those wasteful grants that are out there that, as we go through them, we say we can try to get those one at a time or we can try to get a system in place where all grants have to go through a centralized data system where we can actually all look at the data and compare it across the government to basically look for areas of inefficiency. That is what the GREAT Act does. It creates standard data elements so that we can look at how the money is being spent--America's money--so we can actually evaluate it. That has overwhelmingly already passed. We are grateful to get that done this year. Another one we were able to get done this year that has passed the Senate but has not yet passed the House is providing accountability through transparency. Now, this may seem super simple, but let me just begin with the most basic principle. No small business owner in America gets up every day and reads the Federal Register. It just doesn't happen anywhere. If you are running a small business, you are running your small business. You are not getting up every day and reading the Federal Register to see the latest regulation. Even if you did, with the pages and pages and pages of regulations there, you can't make sense of it. This basic providing of accountability through transparency asks a simple question: Can we force the agencies, when they actually do a new regulation, to condense it down to 100 words or less in plain English so that you can actually figure out what this regulation is trying to do, so when you see a regulation come out, you can actually understand it without having to hire an attorney to go interpret it for you? That has overwhelmingly already passed the Senate, and we are waiting for that to pass the House, as well--basic simplification of some of the government entities, in trying to be able to help out. We passed by a majority--and it has already been signed into law--the one dealing with representative payee fraud. Now, again, this was a simple piece that was just needed in government. We discovered that if someone is a trustee for a Federal retiree for their retirement account and, as a trustee, they stole the money out of that person's account, we couldn't actually enforce the law on them. We could in several other areas, if it was Social Security or if it was disability, but we couldn't on Federal retirees. So we were able to get a bipartisan agreement to pass this to take care of that. It was a very simple bill, but it is the way we need to react when we see a problem--to actually go to solve that problem rather than take forever to do it. Speaking of ``forever'' to be able to solve it, what I think is the most basic government transparency piece we can put out there to force real dialogue on budget issues is a simple bill we have on shutdown prevention. If we can end government shutdowns, we can actually have more debate on budget issues here in this room, where it should occur, and take the pressure off of Federal workers and Federal families facing a shutdown and furloughs. Maggie Hassan and I have a very simple bill. The bill simply says: If we get to the end of the fiscal year and if we don't have all the issues resolved on our budget, we continue debating those things here. We remain in session 7 days a week until it is actually resolved. But in the meantime, Federal workers and their families are unaffected because the budget automatically continues at last year's budget level until we get things resolved here. But in the meantime, we can't go home until we actually solve that problem. It is a straightforward solution to say: We are not going to have government shutdowns. We are not going to have chaos across the whole country. We have had 21 government shutdowns in 40 years. We have to stop that chaos. So it stops that chaos, and it puts the pressure where the pressure needs to be--on us. When we finish our work, then we can move to the next thing. But if the budget work is not done, the most basic elements of those appropriations bills, if they are not finished, we remain in session 7 days a week until they are finished. We need to find ways to be more efficient as a government. Government shutdowns waste money by the billions. Rob Portman and his team did a remarkable study to look and see how much money was wasted in the last shutdown, and it was in the billions of dollars, and not even every agency turned in all their information to Rob Portman and his team. We can't keep losing money that way. We can't keep that chaos going for all the Federal workers and their families. We should have arguments about the budget. We have big ones that need to be resolved, but we should keep it here. So, this week, as we pause for just a moment on all the other big issues that are pressing on us right now, I am grateful that we are also pausing for a moment to say: What are the big issues that we should look long term on, and how do we solve some of those issues for the future, as well, to make government more efficient and try to make government more transparent? I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

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

Mr. LANKFORD

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

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, I come to the floor today to unashamedly brag on the people of Southwest Oklahoma. It is a pretty remarkable group of folks. In the community around Lawton, OK, and surrounding communities, there are people who serve their neighbors every day. There is a remarkable group of churches and nonprofits, ministries, Federal workers, State, city, and county staff who are there and do a pretty amazing job of taking care of their neighbors. This weekend is above and beyond. This weekend, Southwest Oklahomans organized what they call Southwest Oklahoma Embrace Hope--so 1 day, on Saturday, where the whole community will be having neighbors serving neighbors to see what they can do to help each other. Serving your neighbor is not about how much money you have or a title you hold or a certain house you live in. Taking care of your neighbor is just basic honoring each other and finding a way to love your neighbor. The vision behind the Embrace Hope event is about stepping up and saying as individuals that we can do more if we do it together. The Embrace Hope community event in Lawton will offer Oklahomans an opportunity to access a lot of free services and some basic help. There are partners from all over the State of Oklahoma who have donated their time, their services, their finances to help those in need all over Southwest Oklahoma--all in one place, all at one time. If someone needs housing--shelter, information, or a referral, food--there will be folks there who can help them. There will be agencies there to talk about long-term needs and people needing short-term needs. If someone needs a job, there will be folks there who will show them opportunities for hiring. If someone needs to get their resume together so they can get a job, there will be folks there who can take a picture so they can use it with their resume. In fact, if folks need a suit to wear to an interview, there will be folks there to help them get a suit so they are able to prepare themselves for a job. There will be health services there. You can schedule an appointment with a local health center, and there will also be ways to get dental services, optometry, pregnancy resources, or even a breast exam, if that is needed. There will be folks there who can give them a haircut if they need a haircut and haven't been able to get access to that. There will be folks there who are mental health professionals and counselors so they can interact with folks who may struggle with substance abuse or dealing with the stress of life. There will be folks there who can help them with legal assistance. These are communities coming together; ministries, churches, organizations, and government agencies are all coming to one place at one time to help. There are a lot of needs in the area. In fact, in Oklahoma, according to DHS statistics just from this last year, we had 78,000-plus households that needed winter heating assistance in our State. More than 378,000 Oklahomans receive food benefits, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. These are Federal resources and Federal programs. As Members of Congress, we work together to help in whatever way we can to help those in greatest need to be lifted out of poverty and to be able to walk through some of their low points in life. But a government check or a check-in with a Federal entity is no substitute for a neighbor helping a neighbor. When you are at your low point of life, a check is helpful to get you through a hard time, but you need a person; you need a mentor; you need a friend; you need a neighbor. The Embrace Hope event is all about that. It is neighbors helping each other to be able to walk through this process, but it is also about opportunities for people who live in Southwest Oklahoma. It is not just to help someone one day, but also to understand that we could do this throughout the course of the year because there are lots of folks who say: I want to be able to help. They just don't know where to go to be able to help their neighbors. They might help the folks who are around them; they might help people in a small group at their church; they might have family members they help, but they say that they want to be able to do more. The Embrace Hope event allows volunteers by the hundreds who have signed up to serve their neighbor one day, but it also allows them to take a test drive with a bunch of other ministries and nonprofits in the area and say: What do you do that I can volunteer one day to help people, but maybe I can plug in and help you at other times? It allows those nonprofits and ministries to reach out to a whole pool of people, who maybe are not involved all the time, to say: If you enjoyed helping your neighbor that day, why don't you come work with us the rest of the year? It is a way for them to meet each other. Quite frankly, it is a way for us to build a stronger State, a stronger community, and stronger connections with our neighbors so that we don't default by saying ``They get help from the government, so that is probably all they need,'' when we know in our heart it is not. They need help from somebody local. They need a friend, and they need somebody who can look them in the face and say: How can we help? That is Embrace Hope. There have been hundreds of people who have volunteered already, and as they are preparing for this Saturday, it will probably be a cold and wet day, which is a perfect day to help people in need. As we get together on this Saturday with all the volunteers and all the folks, there will be one person who will be in the background whom the whole event will circle around, but a lot of folks will not know it. Her name is Brenda Spencer-Ragland. She is the lead event coordinator for Embrace Hope. I can't even imagine how many hundreds of hours she has put in behind the scenes to be able to bring this to reality. Her title is event coordinator, but that title doesn't remotely do justice for the work she has done to bring Embrace Hope to reality. She is one of those incredible individuals who everyone wishes lived around them, but Southwest Oklahoma actually has her. She has a servant's heart and a servant's attitude. It is who she is, quite frankly, more than just what she does. Brenda served our Nation as a civilian with the U.S. Army for 32 years before assuming her current role. She was Director of the Family and Morale, Welfare and Recreation Program at Fort Sill in Lawton. Her title was a fancy way of saying that she took care of military families in whatever way she possibly could, and she did it well. She loved serving those who serve us. On her retirement, she grieved because she loved serving those folks at the post. Now, after dealing with morale at Fort Sill and after serving also as the Housing Director at Fort Sill, she has found a new way to serve-- Embrace Hope. She has built around that same mission. She came to Oklahoma City, and she saw an event called Love OKC, which was similar to this. She brought a whole group of volunteers to come take a look at what was happening in Oklahoma City and the remarkable Love OKC event that has happened for 7 years in a row. She took that vision back to Southwest Oklahoma and created Embrace Hope. Meeting after meeting, donor after donor, long night after long night of organizing--it is about to happen. Brenda, for all of the folks in Lawton who don't know you, they should because, if they did, they would give you a warm hug and a very grateful thank-you for blessing so many people. Thank you for answering the call to serve your friends and neighbors and stepping up when you saw a need and tirelessly giving back to Southwest Oklahoma and the community that you love. It is an honor to call you a friend and a neighbor. I look forward to serving alongside you this weekend in Embrace Hope, doing whatever you need me to do to help you as we love our neighbors together. God bless you. I look forward to seeing you there, Brenda. I love getting a chance to be able to brag about what is happening in the great Southwest Oklahoma. I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 10 a.m., Wednesday, March 11; further, that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and morning business be closed; further, that following leader remarks, the Senate resume consideration S.J. Res. 56 and that all time expire at noon; finally, that following disposition of S.J. Res. 56, the Senate be in a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, in the fall of 2001--it seems like forever ago--Trae Young, the great OU point guard and now Atlanta Hawks phenom, was just 3 years old. Darius Bazley, a player for the Thunder right now, one of the young guys, he was just barely 1 year old in the fall of 2001. At that same time period now, almost 20 years ago, there was a man named Osama bin Laden working with a small group of people in a country called Afghanistan that most Americans could not even find on a map at the time. He was meeting privately with them to organize an attack on Americans that we could have never imagined. He was training individuals and sneaking individuals into the United States, training them further to be pilots and preparing them for an attack that happened September 11, 2001. There is not a soul who was alive during that time period who doesn't remember where they were and what was happening on September 11, 2001. All of us, we were locked to our TVs watching an airplane fly into a side of a building and kill thousands of our friends and neighbors. On September 14, the U.S. Congress passed an authorization for the use of military force for those individuals who carried out this attack, 3 days after that attack. By October 7, the first troops had landed in Afghanistan. They were organizing an effort to find Osama bin Laden and to eliminate the threat of them carrying that out again. The very clear mandate at the time was to work with the government at that time in Afghanistan, the Taliban, who were a ruthless dictatorship. They had spread their hatred across Afghanistan, but they had also made a deal with al-Qaida to hide them inside of Afghanistan. And the Taliban, who willingly allowed Osama bin Laden and the terrorist group they knew was a terrorist group to remain there, became the spark for us to go to the Taliban and say: Either turn Osama bin Laden over to the United States for trial and those who were with him in al-Qaida or we will come get them. And the Taliban's choice was to say: Come and get him, which we did. Over the years, 775,000 American troops have deployed to Afghanistan at least once--775,000. There were 40 different nations that participated with us in Operation Enduring Freedom to remove the threat from that region of al-Qaida attacking us. Our twofold purpose was: Remove Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida's leadership organization and their ability to attack the United States and our allies, and No. 2, remove the Taliban from leadership in Afghanistan because they allowed al- Qaida to function and to operate in their country, and they would willingly do it again, so they could not be allowed to remain in Afghanistan as leaders. Those were our two agendas going into Afghanistan. I am proud to say that the United States has won this war with Afghanistan. Al-Qaida has been decimated. We hunted down Osama bin Laden until, in 2011, we found him and took him and his core leadership out at his facility in Pakistan. We continue to drive al-Qaida into chaos and oblivion. We continue to hunt down the Taliban and their leadership, pushing them out of any semblance of leadership in Afghanistan and isolating them in every area we can. They have sanctions from all over the world against them, and their name has become synonymous with those who allow terrorism. Since the time period that we moved in and we won this war, four Presidential elections have happened in Afghanistan. As they have seen the peaceful transition of power, as messy as it is in many other parts of the world--including us--they have seen four elections happen there. Previously, under the Taliban's ruthless thumb, women could not work or attend school. Now, 36 percent of the country's workforce is female, 40 percent of elementary students are female, and 33 percent of university students are female. There has been a tremendous transition in what is happening in Afghanistan. They are still a Third World country and still struggling in many areas. We have seen Afghanistan begin to start to get some traction there. Their military training has partnered with American leadership-- generals all the way down to the infantry level--to meet with Americans and learn how to have a professional fighting force there. Now, are there issues that still remain in Afghanistan? Absolutely. Afghanistan has a long history of being a tribal region, with tribal leaders in multiple areas, and a difficulty in uniting a very large country. But after four Presidential elections and through multiple areas of peaceful growth, it is time to bring this war to an end. To answer the question: Why did we go to Afghanistan in the first place and has that been accomplished, the answer is, we went to remove the Taliban from the leadership there so they would not allow al-Qaida to thrive. Al-Qaida is decimated; Osama bin Laden is dead; and the Taliban have been removed from power. Now, is everything perfect in Afghanistan? Far from it. The goal was not peace and daisies when we left. The goal was to accomplish what we chose to accomplish, to establish a functioning government so they would not have to go back to the Taliban, and then to leave. The President's team has been negotiating an agreement with the leadership of the Taliban and with the leadership of Afghanistan to determine: Can we begin the process of a peaceful transition out? That conversation has gone on for 2 years. Obviously, the Afghan leadership likes our forces to be there. It is a stabilizing force for their country, but we have no intention to remain in Afghanistan forever. Our intention is to accomplish what we need to accomplish and then to withdraw. Now, I think it entirely likely that we will have a long-term agreement with Afghanistan and to have troops remain in the region, much like we do in Honduras right now. We are not fighting a war in Honduras, but we do have a base in Honduras so when there are disasters in that area or in order to fight drug trafficking that comes through that area, we have a base of operations. I am one of those who believes long term we should have a base of operations in Afghanistan. It would be wise to do that. What is called ISIS-K or ISIS in the Khorasan--they are thriving in that region, and it would be wise for us to keep our eyes on other terrorist organizations that may try to rise. We have no intention to stay long term and forever or to control, manage, or be the security forces for the Afghan Government. We are the United States of America. We have issues we want to take care of at home, and we want our sons and daughters to live life with their sons and daughters. Now, in the last 48 hours, since this peace treaty, this organization, this reduction of hostilities--whatever you want to call it--since this has kicked into place in the last 40 hours, we found out just how fragile things are. The Taliban reached out and conducted several attacks at some security checkpoints in Helmand--not against our forces but against some Afghan forces. They actually reached out just yesterday and brought a defensive attack against the Taliban in that region. It is the first violence we have had in 11 days. We fully expect there will be moments like that, and there is no expectation that everything is going to be perfect when we leave Afghanistan. Quite frankly, the United States does not operate in every location and expects there to be peace and harmony in every location across the world. That is not our standard. Right now, in Venezuela, that government is in great chaos, but we don't have troops on the ground trying to manage that situation. We are diplomatically working to engage and bring a peaceful resolution to what is happening in Venezuela. We are putting aggressive economic sanctions in that place to do what we can to help. We will continue to stay engaged with Afghanistan. We have many friends there. We have people whom we worked with for a very long time, side by side. We will stay engaged with Afghanistan, but it is not our intent to stay and remain forever. Our sons and daughters need the ability to come home and live their lives. There are folks like Terry Hill--Terry Hill, from Kellyville, OK. He enlisted in the Army in 2003, right in the heat of the war with Afghanistan. He served as an engineer and then later became an officer and a pilot of a helicopter. He flew 750 combat missions in Afghanistan--750. After 13 years of serving in the Army and after some very hard landings, including one final hard landing for him, Terry came back home. He is back home in Oklahoma, where he runs the Rapid Application Group. It is a 3D printing company. It is a really remarkable place. It started at his house and has now grown into a thriving company, and that 3D printing company does some really remarkable work for a lot of great customers. He hires a lot of veterans. He loves to hire other veterans, in fact, and knows the unique needs and issues there. Every Friday, Terry and a whole bunch of others across the area and all the folks there all will wear shirts--what they call RAGFriday. It is to recognize and bring awareness to veteran suicide because he has way too many friends he wishes he had back. Terry is one of the 775,000 people who served in Afghanistan from the United States. We are glad to have Terry home. We are proud of his company and what he is doing and the leadership they have. We are proud of his continued engagement in the veterans community, continuing to make a difference. We want all of these folks to be able to come home and to be our neighbors again and for us to hang out with them. So in the days ahead, I look forward to a peaceful resolution and, after winning this war in Afghanistan, to be able to come home, to have continued diplomatic engagement with them, with a small military footprint, just to be able to help them in the region when needed. I am grateful that we are directing our Nation and directing our military toward home. I could not be more grateful for folks like Terry and the 775,000 others who have done everything their country has asked them to do--to push back on al-Qaida and their ruthless attacks on the United States and to make sure that that does not happen again. I am proud of them for what they did. Our family lives in safety and freedom, and millions of Americans live in gratitude because of those 775,000 folks who went there to keep the war from coming here again. With that, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, the country is deeply divided on multiple issues right now. The impeachment trial is both a symptom of our times and another example of our division. At the beginning of our Nation, we did not have an impeachment inquiry of a President for almost 100 years with the partisan impeachment of Andrew Johnson. After more than 100 years, another impeachment inquiry was conducted when the House began a formal impeachment inquiry into President Nixon in an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote of 410-4. Within a period of weeks, President Nixon resigned before he was formally impeached. Then, just over two decades later, President Clinton was impeached by the House, on another mostly partisan vote leading to a partisan acquittal in the Senate. This season of our history has been referred to as the Age of Investigations and the Age of Impeachment. We have had multiple special counsels since 1974 over multiple topics. This is more than just oversight; it has been a unique time in American history when the politics of the moment have driven rapid calls for investigation and impeachment. Over the past 3 years, the House of Representatives has voted four times to open an impeachment inquiry: once in 2017, once in 2018, and twice in 2019. Only the second vote in 2019 actually passed and began a formal inquiry. The Mueller investigation that consumed most of 2018 and 2019 answered many questions about Russian attacks on our voting systems-- although no votes were changed--but it was also a $32 million investigation that took more than 2 years of America's attention. For the last 4 months the country has been consumed with impeachment hearings and investigations. The first rumors of issues with Ukraine arose August 28 when POLITICO published a story about U.S. foreign aid being slow-walked for Ukraine, and then on September 18 when the Washington Post published a story about a whistleblower report that claimed President Trump pressured an unnamed foreign head of state to do an investigation for his campaign. Within days of the Washington Post story on September 24, Speaker Pelosi announced that the House would begin hearings to impeach the President, which led to the formal House vote to open the impeachment inquiry on October 31 and then a vote to impeach the President on December 18. But after the partisan vote to impeach the President, Speaker Pelosi held the Articles of Impeachment for a month before turning them over to the Senate, which began the formal trial of the President of the United States on January 16, 2020. After hearing hours of arguments from both House managers and the President's legal defense team and Senators asking 180 questions to both sides, the trial concluded February 5, 2020. There are key dates to know: April 21, 2019, President Zelensky is elected President of Ukraine. May 21, President Zelensky sworn in. After the ceremony, President Zelensky abolishes Parliament and calls for quick snap elections on July 21. July 21, Ukrainian Parliamentary elections. President Zelensky's party wins a huge majority. July 25, President Trump calls President Zelensky to congratulate him and his party. August 12, An unnamed whistleblower working in the U.S. intelligence community filed a complaint that he had heard from others that the President of the United States had tried to pressure President Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden on an official phone call July 25, 2019. August 26, the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community declares the whistleblower report ``an urgent matter'' and asks for its release within 7 days. The Justice Department looks over the report and notes that although it was written by a person in the intelligence community, it is not related to intelligence matters, so it does not fall within the Inspector General's jurisdiction and it is forwarded on to the Department of Justice for review. August 28, POLITICO publishes a story that the annual military aid for Ukraine is currently being slow-walked. September 9, the Inspector General contacts the House Intelligence Committee to let them know that he has not been able to release the whistleblower report to their committee. September 13, the House Intelligence Committee subpoenas the whistleblower report. September 18, the Washington Post prints a story with ``unnamed sources'' that there is a whistleblower report about the President talking with a foreign leader about a campaign matter. September 24, the House began an informal impeachment inquiry after Speaker Pelosi announced it at a press conference in the U.S. Capitol. September 25, President Trump released the official unredacted ``read out'' of the phone call with President Zelensky from July 25. September 26, the whistleblower report is declassified and released publicly. October 31, the House formally votes along party lines for an impeachment inquiry. December 18, the House votes to impeach the President with two articles--abuse of Power and obstruction of congress January 15, Speaker Pelosi releases the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate. January 16, Senate trial on impeachment begins. February 5, Senate trial concludes with acquittal on both articles. Ukraine became independent in 1991 when it broke away from the Soviet Union, but the Ukrainians have faced constant pressure from Russia ever since. In 2014 Ukraine forced out its pro-Russia President, and Moscow retaliated by taking over Crimea--and stealing the Ukrainian Navy--then rolling tanks into eastern Ukraine and taking all of eastern Ukraine by force. Russian and Ukrainian troops continue to fight every day in eastern Ukraine. The people of Ukraine face an aggressive Russia on the east and pervasive Soviet era corruption throughout the government and the business community. President Trump met the previous President of Ukraine in 2017 to talk about other countries helping Ukraine with greater military support funds and to ask how Ukraine could address corruption on a wider scale. The two Presidents also spoke about lethal aid--allowing the Ukrainians to buy sniper rifles, anti-tank Javelin missiles, and other lethal supplies--to help them fight the invading Russians. The United States also started sending a couple hundred American troops to train Ukrainian soldiers in the far west of Ukraine. On April 21, 2019, President Zelensky was overwhelmingly elected as the new President of Ukraine. He was a sitcom actor/comedian who had no political experience but was well known for his television show in which he played the part of a corruption-fighting teacher who was elected as President of Ukraine. His television popularity helped him win the election, but when he was sworn in on May 21, he was relatively unknown to most of the world. On the same day as his inauguration, May 21, President Zelensky abolished Parliament and called for snap elections to put his party in power. With a new President in place and parliamentary elections in Ukraine coming, starting in June of 2019, the President ordered foreign aid to Ukraine to be held until the end of the fiscal year, but agencies were informed that they should do all the preliminary work needed before the aid was sent, so it would be ready to release at a moment's notice. The leadership in Ukraine was not notified that there was a hold on their foreign aid. The new Parliament was elected on July 21, and President Zelensky's party won by a landslide. By mid-August, the new Parliament was working on anti-corruption efforts and trying to establish a high court on corruption, which they put in place September 5, 2019. There was a tremendous amount of uncertainty in the early days of the new administration, but by mid-August there was clear evidence of actual change in a country that desperately needed a new direction from its corrupt past. On July 25, when President Trump called President Zelensky, the President congratulated President Zelensky for the big win in Parliament and talked about ``burden-sharing''--other nations also paying their share of support for Ukraine. The two Presidents talked about their disapproval of the previous mbassadors to each other's countries. But instead of following all the staff preparation notes written by Lieutenant Colonel Vindman, the National Security Council staffer assigned to Ukraine, and just talking about ``corruption'' in general, the President brought up a question about Ukraine and the 2016 election interference, which I will note below. President Zelensky also brought up to President Trump that his staff was planning to meet with Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's personal attorney, in the coming days, which led to a conversation about Joe Biden and the firing of the previous prosecutor in Ukraine. After the call, Lieutenant Colonel Vindman contacted an attorney at the National Security Council to express his ``policy concerns'' about the call. It is interesting to note that Lieutenant Colonel Vindman's boss, Tim Morrison, was also on the call, but he did not see any problems or concerns with the call according to his own testimony in the House impeachment inquiry. Within a month, a whistleblower filed a report about the call, saying he heard about the call secondhand and was concerned about the implications of a conversation about elections on a head-of-state call. To keep the July 25th call in context with other news, the day before it took place July 24 Robert Mueller had testified before Congress as the last official act to close down the 2\1/2\ year Mueller investigation and clear the President and his campaign team of any further accusation of election interference. During the impeachment trial in the Senate, the House managers repeated over and over that the President was planning to cheat ``again'' on the next election, but the final conclusion of the Mueller report was that ``ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the (Trump) Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.'' This is especially notable because for years a rumor circulated that Ukraine was part of the 2016 election interference and that someone in Ukraine was hiding the Democratic National Committee, DNC, server that was hacked by the Russians in 2016. As the conspiracy theory goes, it was actually the Ukrainians who hacked the DNC, not the Russians. This is the ``Crowdstrike'' theory that President Trump asked President Zelensky to help solve during the call. Agencies of the U.S. intelligence community have stated over and over that they did not believe that Ukraine was involved in the Russian election interference from 2016. I personally agree with the intelligence community assessment but Rudy Giuliani and multiple others around President Trump believed there was a secret plan in 2016 to hurt President Trump's election from Ukraine. This accusation was amplified by bits of truth, including that the Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States wrote an editorial in support of Hillary Clinton in 2016 right before the election, and several other Ukrainian officials publicly spoke out against Candidate Trump in 2016. There is nothing illegal about a foreign nation speaking out for or against a Presidential candidate, whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in 2016 or anyone else in the future. It may not be wise to take sides before an election, but it is not illegal. Just because some Ukrainian officials took sides does not mean that the whole Ukrainian Government worked on a cyber attack on our elections. But since this rumor had persisted, and it was a new administration now in Ukraine, President Trump asked President Zelensky to help clear up the facts if he could. That is certainly not illegal or improper, and it is certainly not something that could help the President in the 2020 election, especially since the 2016 Russian election accusation had just been closed the day before. The 2016 ``Crowdstrike'' theory is the issue that President Trump asked President Zelensky to ``do us a favor'' about, not the Bidens or Burisma. During the July 25 call after the question about ``Crowdstrike,'' President Zelensky mentioned to President Trump that one of his advisers would be meeting with Rudy Giuliani soon. Then, President Trump affirmed that meeting and encouraged them to talk about the Biden investigation and the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor. That may seem out of the blue, but in Washington, D.C., that week, the city was buzzing about a Washington Post article that had been written 3 days before July 22, 2019--detailing Hunter Biden's giant salary--$83,000 per month--for doing essentially nothing for a corrupt Ukrainian natural gas company and how it undercut Vice President Biden's message on corruption. It is important to get the context of that week to understand the context of the phone call that day. I have no doubt that the story was just as big of news in Kiev, Ukraine, as it was in Washington, D.C., that week. President Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, had been in and out of Ukraine since November 2018, meeting with government officials and trying to find out more about the ``Crowdstrike'' theory or any other Ukrainian connection to the 2016 election. During that time, Rudy Giuliani met several former prosecutors from Ukraine who blamed their departure on Vice President Biden. It is clear that Rudy Giuliani was working to gain information about both of these issues in his capacity as President Trump's private attorney. It is not criminal for Rudy Giuliani to work on opposition research for a Presidential campaign or to work on behalf of his client to clear his name from any issues related to the 2016 campaign, which he had done since November 2018. Some have stated that since this was ``foreign information,'' it is illegal. That is absolutely not true. In fact, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee in 2016 paid a British citizen, Christopher Steele, to work his contacts in Russia to create the now debunked ``Steele Dossier,'' which the FBI used to open its investigation into President Trump, leading directly to the appointment of Special Counsel Mueller. That dossier was opposition research done in Russia by a British citizen, paid for by the Clinton campaign team. Their opposition research was not illegal, but the use and abuse of that document by the FBI to start an investigation was certainly inappropriate and is most likely illegal. But the FBI warrant issue is still being investigated by the ongoing Durham probe. During the July 25, 2019, call, President Zelensky brought up the issue of Rudy Giuliani, and President Trump replied to his statement. You can argue that President Trump should not have discussed the issue with President Zelensky when he brought it up, but it is certainly not illegal or impeachable to talk about it, especially when there are serious questions about Hunter Biden's work with Burisma. That is not a conservative conspiracy theory; the issue of Hunter Biden's employment in Ukraine was a problem for years at the State Department. It had been raised to Vice President Biden when he was still in office. Every State Department official interviewed for the Trump impeachment investigation noted that at best it was a clear conflict of interest, and it was the center of a huge story on corruption in the Washington Post on July 22, 2019. It had the appearance of high-level corruption by using a well- placed family member on the board of a known corrupt gas company in Ukraine to shelter it from prosecutors. Hunter Biden had only resigned from the Burisma board a few months before the July 25 phone call, just prior to when his dad announced his run for the Presidency in 2019. After the July 25 phone call, Attorney General Barr did not have any followup meetings or calls with Ukrainian officials. Rudy Giuliani did have additional conversations with Ukrainian officials, which are legal to do since he is a private attorney representing the President. Text of July 25, 2019 Phone Call Between Presidents Trump and Zelensky The President: Congratulations on a great victory. We all watched from the United States and you did a terrific job. The way you came from behind, somebody who wasn't given much of a chance, and you ended up winning easily. It's a fantastic achievement. Congratulations. President Zelensky: You are absolutely right Mr. President. We did win big and we worked hard for this. We worked a lot but I would like to confess to you that I had an opportunity to learn from you. We used quite a few of your skills and knowledge and were able to use it as an example for our elections and yes it is true that these were unique elections. We were in a unique situation that we were able to achieve a unique success. I'm able to tell you the following; the first time you called me to congratulate me when I won my presidential election, and the second time you are now calling me when my party won the parliamentary election. I think I should run more often so you can call me more often and we can talk over the phone more often. The President: (laughter) That's a very good idea. I think your country is very happy about that. President Zelensky: Well yes, to tell you the truth, we are trying to work hard because we wanted to drain the swamp here in our country. We brought in many many new people. Not the old politicians, not the typical politicians, because we want to have a new format and a new type of government. You are a great teacher for us and in that. The President: Well it is very nice of you to say that. I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time. Much more than the European countries are doing and they should be helping you more than they are. Germany does almost nothing for you. All they do is talk and I think it's something that you should really ask them about. When I was speaking to Angela Merkel she talks Ukraine, but she doesn't do anything. A lot of the European countries are the same way so I think it's something you want to look at but the United States has been very very good to Ukraine. I wouldn't say that it's reciprocal necessarily because things are happening that are not good but the United States has been very very good to Ukraine. President Zelensky: Yes you are absolutely right. Not only 100%, but actually 1000% and I can tell you the following; I did talk to Angela Merkel and I did meet with her I also met and talked with Macron and I told them that they are not doing quite as much as they need to be doing on the issues with the sanctions. They are not enforcing the sanctions. They are not working as much as they should work for Ukraine. It turns out that even though logically, the European Union should be our biggest partner but technically the United States is a much bigger partner than the European Union and I'm very grateful to you for that because the United States is doing quite a lot for Ukraine. Much more than the European Union especially when we are talking about sanctions against the Russian Federation. I would also like to thank you for your great support in the area of defense. We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps specifically we are almost. ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes. The President: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike. I guess you have one of your wealthy people . . . The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you're surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it's very important that you do it if that's possible. President Zelensky: Yes it is very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier. For me as a President, it is very important and we are open for any future cooperation. We are ready to open a new page on cooperation in relations between the United States and Ukraine. For that purpose, I just recalled our ambassador from United States and he will be replaced by a very competent and very experienced ambassador who will work hard on making sure that our two nations are getting closer. I would also like and hope to see him having your trust and your confidence and have personal relations with you so we can cooperate even more so. I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr. Giuliani just recently and we are hoping very much that Mr. Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine. I just wanted to assure you once again that you have nobody but friends around us. I will make sure that I surround myself with the best and most experienced people. I also wanted to tell you that we are friends. We are great friends and you Mr. President have friends in our country so we can continue our strategic partnership. I also plan to surround myself with great people and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly. That I can assure you. The President: Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that's really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what's happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it . . . It sounds horrible to me. President Zelensky: I wanted to tell you about the prosecutor. First of all, I understand and I'm knowledgeable about the situation. Since we have won the absolute majority in our Parliament, the next prosecutor general will be 100% my person, my candidate, who will be approved, by the parliament and will start as a new prosecutor in September. He or she will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue. The issue of the investigation of the case is actually the issue of making sure to restore the honesty so we will take care of that and will work on the investigation of the case. On top of that, I would kindly ask you if you have any additional information that you can provide to us, it would be very helpful for the investigation to make sure that we administer justice in our country with regard to the Ambassador to the United States from Ukraine as far as I recall her name was Ivanovich. It was great that you were the first one who told me that she was a bad ambassador because I agree with you 100%. Her attitude towards me was far from the best as she admired the previous President and she was on his side. She would not accept me as a new President well enough. The President: Well, she's going to go through some things. I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it. I'm sure you will figure it out. I heard the prosecutor was treated very badly and he was a very fair prosecutor so good luck with everything. Your economy is going to get better and better I predict. You have a lot of assets. It's a great country. I have many Ukrainian friends, they're incredible people. President Zelensky: I would like to tell you that I also have quite a few Ukrainian friends that live in the United States. Actually last time I traveled to the United States, I stayed in New York near Central Park and I stayed at the Trump Tower. I will talk to them and I hope to see them again in the future. I also wanted to thank you for your invitation to visit the United States, specifically Washington DC. On the other hand, I also want to ensure you that we will be very serious about the case and will work on the investigation. As to the economy, there is much potential for our two countries and one of the issues that is very important for Ukraine is energy independence. I believe we can be very successful and cooperating on energy independence with United States. We are already working on cooperation. We are buying American oil but I am very hopeful for a future meeting. We will have more time and more opportunities to discuss these opportunities and get to know each other better. I would like to thank you very much for your support. The President: Good. Well, thank you very much and I appreciate that. I will tell Rudy and Attorney General Barr to call. Thank you. Whenever you would like to come to the White House, feel free to call. Give us a date and we'll work that out. I look forward to seeing you. President Zelensky: Thank you very much. I would be very happy to come and would be happy to meet with you personally and get to know you better. I am looking forward to our meeting and I also would like to invite you to visit Ukraine and come to the city of Kyiv which is a beautiful city. We have a beautiful country which would welcome you. On the other hand, I believe that on September 1 we will be in Poland and we can meet in Poland hopefully. After that, it might be a very good idea for you to travel to Ukraine. We can either take my plane and go to Ukraine or we can take your plane, which is probably much better than mine. The President: Okay, we can work that out. I look forward to seeing you in Washington and maybe in Poland because I think we are going to be there at that time. President Zelensky: Thank you very much Mr. President. The President: Congratulations on a fantastic job you've done. The whole world was watching. I'm not sure it was so much of an upset but congratulations. President Zelensky: Thank you Mr. President bye-bye. Based on a whistleblower report about the July 25 call, the House Intelligence Committee subpoenaed the report on September 13 and started its impeachment inquiry on September 24. In the Senate impeachment trial, House managers stated their belief that the President had carried out a ``scheme to cheat in the 2020 election'' by withholding financial aid to Ukraine and withholding a White House meeting with the new President of Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine announcing it would investigate Joe Biden, Burisma, and 2016 election interference. Let's discuss the facts of both. White House Meeting There is no question that President Trump had offered a White House meeting to President Zelensky three times: once in May on a phone call after President Zelensky won his election, once in June in a letter, and finally in the July 25 call after President Zelensky's party won the parliamentary elections. But Tim Morrison--State Department official called as a witness by the House--also testified that they were working on heads-of-state meetings with 12 other heads of state during that same time period. Many nations were trying to line up meetings in the White House during the summer of 2019. During the July 25 call, President Zelensky offered to instead move their meeting from a White House meeting to a face-to-face meeting in Warsaw, Poland, when they would both be there on September 1, 2019. The Presidents agreed, and planning began on the meeting in August. By August 22, the meeting planning was in full swing, as noted by emails in the House hearing's evidence. However, Hurricane Dorian slammed into the United States in the hours leading up to the September 1 meeting, causing a last-minute shift to the Vice President traveling to Poland so the President could stay in the United States to monitor hurricane relief. We know that Vice President Pence met face-to-face with President Zelensky, and they spoke about other nations paying their fair share to help Ukraine and the issue of corruption across Ukraine. We know from the preparation materials and the meeting notes themselves that during the meeting the Vice President did not bring up or discuss the issue of Burisma, Joe Biden, or any other campaign conversation with President Zelensky. The White House found the next available time when President Trump and President Zelensky would both be in the same place at the same time to set up a face-to-face meeting: September 25 at the U.N. Assembly in New York. That meeting was set up, and it took place as scheduled. In the Senate impeachment trial, the House managers maintained that only a White House meeting was sufficient and that it was being withheld, but the facts show that President Zelensky himself floated the idea of a meeting in Poland and that the meeting was not barred or withheld. In the early months of President Zelensky's term, there was a great deal of concern about him, his staff, and his plans because he was an unknown political figure. Until more was known about him, it was entirely appropriate to show caution in coordinating a meeting, but once his nationwide anti-corruption efforts began in August, it was clear that face-to-face meetings were planned and carried out. There was no withholding of a face-to-face meeting with President Trump and President Zelensky. There cannot be a quid pro quo if the meeting was not withheld from Ukrainian officials. The House managers claimed that there was a secret plot to ``extort'' or ``bribe'' the leadership of Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden in exchange for around $400 million of U.S. aid. The aid was State Department and foreign military aid that had been provided for the past 4 years, since Ukraine had been in a war with Russia. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and its occupation of Crimea and the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, the United States started sending aid to help the Ukrainian Government. Congress allowed lethal and non-lethal aid to support Ukraine, but during the previous administration, only non-lethal aid was sent. Under President Trump's administration, it was determined that the United States would give the leadership of Ukraine lethal aid to help them fight off Russian tanks, which was President Zelensky's reference to ``javelins'' in the July 25 phone call and his gratitude to President Trump for allowing those tank killing rockets to flow to Ukraine. To be clear, the theory of funds being withheld from Ukraine in exchange for an investigation does not originate from the July 25 call read-out. There is nothing in the text of the call that threatens the withholding of funds in exchange for an investigation. The theory originates from the fact that aid was held back by the Office of Management and Budget, headed by the President's Acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, and the ``presumption'' of U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, that the aid must have been held because of the President's desire to get the Biden investigation done, since the President's attorney, Rudy Giuliani, was working to find out more about the Biden investigation. Ambassador Sondland told multiple people about his theory, but when he finally called President Trump and asked him directly about it, the President responded that he did not have any quid pro quo; he just wanted the President of Ukraine to do what he ran on and ``do the right thing.'' Obviously, people who assume the worst about President Trump take this as a secret message that there actually was a quid pro quo, but the most important fact is that Ambassador Sondland did not read it that way after his call with the President. Ambassador Sondland believed that the President was serious. Unfortunately, the White House Counsel was never allowed to cross examine Ambassador Sondland during the House investigation to get the facts about who he talked to and why he came to believe for a while that there was an effort to push for investigations in exchange for money. During the Senate trial, I listened closely to the facts surrounding the withholding of aid money to Ukraine. This was by far the most serious charge against the President. Two key questions had to be answered for me: Why was the aid held, and why was the aid released? There was no question the aid was held for a of couple months. The question was why? Statements from the House witnesses during the House impeachment inquiry answered the two key questions: The aid was held because there was a legitimate concern about the new President of Ukraine and his administration in the early days of his Presidency and the aid was released on time when the new Ukrainian Parliament starting passing anti-corruption laws in August and after Vice President Pence sat down face to face with President Zelensky on September 1 in Poland to discuss their progress on corruption. We should not lose track of what was happening in Ukraine in 2019. A new President was elected who was a TV actor with no political experience and no record on how he would handle Russia or the issue of widespread national corruption in Ukraine. He ran on a platform of anti-corruption at all levels, but no one knew how he would govern. His campaign was funded by a Ukrainian oligarch who owned a major media outlet, and one of his first advisers was the former attorney for that oligarch. I personally spoke to many of the State Department officials in Ukraine in May of 2019 and heard their concerns about the new government. Then, newly elected President Zelensky used his power to dissolve their Parliament the day he was sworn in and called for ``snap elections'' in which the vast majority of the newly elected leaders were from his newly formed party. To our State Department and the White House, this was either a really a good sign or a really bad sign. Either Ukraine was about to take a major change for the better with new leadership, or this new young leader was about to assume real centralized power. No one knew for certain in May, June, and July of 2019. Within a few weeks in August, the new Parliament got to work passing anti-corruption laws and making significant changes in their accountability and for the country. This was a very good sign. When Vice President Pence met face to face with President Zelensky September 1, both sides had confidence the country was taking a new direction. On September 10 Vice President Pence and Senator Rob Portman met with President Trump to tell him about the progress that had been made, and both advised lifting the hold on aid. The aid was lifted the next day, September 11. No investigation into Hunter Biden or Burisma was ever done by Ukraine, and no part of the U.S. Department of Justice was ever involved in any investigation of Hunter Biden or Burisma. Although the aid was frozen in June, there was no public announcement of the hold, as explained by the White House Counsel, to keep this from becoming a public issue while the White House monitored the progress and status of the transition in Ukraine. On August 27, POLITICO published an article that noted that the foreign aid had been held by the United States. This caused President Zelensky's office to reach out to the State Department and ask why. During the House impeachment proceedings, four of the House witnesses-- Ambassador Voelker, Ambassador Sondland, Ambassador Taylor, and Tim Morrison--all testified that the Ukrainian leadership learned about the temporary hold in aid after the POLITICO article was published. The issue of the hold was also the first question from President Zelensky to Vice President Pence when they met on September 1 in Poland. The idea that the leadership in Ukraine had pressure placed on them to do an investigation fails the most essential test. Did the leadership of Ukraine even know that the aid was being held? The answer from multiple American and Ukrainian leaders was no, they did not know there was a hold on the aid from the White House. You cannot have pressure to act on an investigation if they did not even know the aid was being held. It is interesting to note, when I researched the records of past foreign aid payment dates and times to Ukraine, I found the 2019 aid was in line with the date the 2016, 2017, and 2018 aid was sent. The vast majority of the military aid to Ukraine was obligated in August or September for the past 4 years. Although the aid was ready to go out the door a couple months earlier in 2019, it was certainly not late, based on the record of the previous 3 years. In fact, the State Department aid was obligated September 30 in 2019, but it was obligated September 28 in 2018. As quoted by the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, ``The aid was held such a short time, we did not even notice.'' During the 2 days of question-and-answer time, I asked a specific question related to this issue because I felt it was important to get the context of the aid, since there had been so much made of the issue during the trial. Here is the full text of my question to the White House Counsel: House Managers have described any delay in military aid and state department funds to Ukraine in 2019 as a cause to believe there was a secret scheme or quid pro quo by the President. In 2019, 86% of the DOD funds were obligated to Ukraine in September, but in 2018, 67% of the funds were obligated in September and in 2017, 73% of the funds were obligated in September. In the State Department, the funds were obligated September 30 in 2019, but they were obligated September 28 in 2018. Each year, the vast majority of the funds were obligated in the final month or days of the fiscal year. Question: Was there a national security risk to Ukraine or the United States from the funds going out late in September in the two previous years? Did it weaken our relationship with Ukraine because the vast majority of our aid was released in September each of the last three years? In response to my question, White House Counsel detailed the fact that military aid from the United States was not for immediate use. It was designed to help the Ukrainian military buy materials for the next year, so it was common for the aid to be obligated at the end of the fiscal year--September 30--and it was also common for some money to be left unobligated and carried over into the next fiscal year, as it was in 2019. While it is easy to create an intricate story on the hold placed on foreign aid to Ukraine, it is also clear that President Trump has temporarily held foreign aid from multiple countries over the past 2 years, including: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Lebanon, and others. There is no question that a President can withhold aid for a short period of time, but it must be released by September 30, the end of the fiscal year, which it was in this instance. Article I, section 2 of the U.S. Constitution grants the U.S. House of Representatives ``the sole power of impeachment,'' while article I, section 3 states that ``the Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachments.'' The Constitution is clear that the House does not control the Senate process and the Senate does not control the House process; however, during the impeachment trial of President Trump, the House tried repeatedly to dictate to the Senate how it should conduct its trial. The ``sole power to try'' means laying out rules for the trial, including when and if to call additional witnesses or request more documents. In addition to laying out roles and responsibilities for impeachment, our Constitution also provides basic rights for the accused. The Fifth Amendment ensures due process. However, the receipt of due process is not contingent upon waiving another right, like immunity or executive privilege. But that is exactly what the House tried to force President Trump to do. The President is not above the law, but neither is the House of Representatives. If there was a question as to the scope and proper use of the President's right to assert immunity or executive privilege regarding conversations he had with his closest advisers, that question is proper for a court to determine, not Congress, and surely not the House on its own accord. To put this in constitutional terms, the legislative branch cannot prevent the executive branch from having access to the judicial branch. The House wanted to move quickly and prevent the President from ever going to court to resolve any issue. That has never been done for a good reason, the separation of powers. In previous legal battles with the President, it has taken months to resolve critical issues, like Bush v. Gore in 2000 or even in the Clinton impeachment trial, when the House took 2 months to resolve an issue with witnesses in court. It does not have to drag on for years. The House also wanted the Chief Justice of the United States to ``rule on'' any issue quickly instead of allowing the President to go through the courts. This would have created a new judicial executive branch by putting all the judicial power of the nation in one person, not in the judicial branch, as is stated in the Constitution. It would have also ignored the text of the Constitution where it notes that the Chief Justice ``presides'' in the court of impeachment, not ``decides.'' The sole power of impeachment is in the Senate, not the Senate plus the one Justice. The Chief Justice keeps the trial moving along, based on the rules of the trial, but he or she is not a decider of fact; that is reserved to the Senate. The House managers wanted to ignore that part of the Constitution to move the trial faster for expedience. We cannot ignore the Constitution or create bad precedent, no matter which party is being tried for impeachment. Further, the Sixth Amendment guarantees that the accused has the ability to both confront the witnesses against him and to have the assistance of counsel. The majority of the impeachment inquiry in the House was done without a meaningful opportunity for the President to participate, and administration witnesses were denied the ability to have counsel present for depositions. The Constitution lays out a clear separation of powers but importantly also provides a system of checks and balances. For something as important as impeachment, it is imperative that the process be one that is squarely within the bounds of the Constitution and is one that the American people can trust. Unfortunately, the process undertaken by the House to impeach President Trump falls wildly short of the standards put in place by our Founders. Article II, section 4 of the Constitution states that ``the President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.'' During the trial of President Trump, there was a lot of conversation about what constitutes a ``high crime'' or ``misdemeanor.'' Notably, the House did not charge the President with any crimes; rather, the House chose to impeach the President for ``abuse of power'' and ``obstruction of Congress.'' The House theoretically could have chosen to file Articles of Impeachment for crimes such as bribery, extortion, solicitation of interference in an election, or violations of the Impoundments Clause Act. For any of these crimes, the House would have had to prove specific elements of each. Since they couldn't prove any of those crimes, they chose to charge the President with abuse of power. As was noted in the trial, 40 Presidents have faced accusation of abuse of power, going back as far as George Washington. The abuse of power charge for President Trump was based on allegations that he improperly withheld aid to Ukraine and conditioned a meeting with President Zelensky at the White House in exchange for an investigation into former Vice President Biden and his son Hunter. Over the course of the last 4 months, we heard the term ``quid pro quo'' used over and over again, but the facts do not show criminal quid pro quo. As previously mentioned, President Zelensky asked to meet with President Trump in Poland, and that meeting was set up. Further, while the aid to Ukraine was delayed, it wasn't delayed more than it had been the previous 2 years, and the aid was released without an investigation--or even an announcement of one--into the Biden's. The second Article of Impeachment, obstruction of Congress, had an even weaker constitutional foundation. The investigation was announced September 24 did not officially begin until October 31. The impeachment vote in the House was December 18. This very short time table and the accusation that the President refused to follow the law, honor the courts, and that he acted like a ``King'' did not meet even the most basic constitutional standards for justice. For example, during the Mueller investigation, the President's team fully cooperated with the investigation that included over 2,000 subpoenas and 500 witnesses, including the President's Chief of Staff, multiple Cabinet officials, and many lower level officials who were all made available. It was clear throughout the investigation that the President did not like or agree with the Mueller investigation, but he also fully cooperated with every subpoena, each witness, and every document. In fact, they released over a million pages of documents to the Mueller team. President Trump also made his disagreement with the courts very clear on issues like the census, whether travel restrictions can be put in place to ensure national security, or whether particular funds can be used to secure our southern border. But each time the President lost in court, his administration complied with orders from the judiciary. That is how our system of government is supposed to work. When disagreements happen between the legislative branch and the judicial branch, they usually lead to resolution, not impeachment. The Fast and Furious investigation, which lasted more than 3 years in the Obama administration, led to a vote in the House to hold then-Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt, but it never led to an impeachment inquiry, even though there was a clear and consistent refusal to cooperate with Congress or turn over key documents for 3 years. In this case, the accusation that President Trump ignored subpoenas or refused to follow the law is not correct. The President's team made it very clear that they would cooperate during the impeachment inquiry with properly authorized and issued subpoenas, but the House refused to issue subpoenas that were consistent with the law to seek resolution for documents and witnesses. The House was focused on speed, not legal process. The House, in a rush to impeachment last fall, issued multiple subpoenas for documents and testimony before the House had given authority to the committees to issue subpoenas for an impeachment inquiry, which happened October 31. Since there was no authority to issue the subpoenas, they were not duly authorized. The House also demanded testimony from the President's inner circle without working through the legal questions, and the House demanded executive agency witnesses appear without allowing them to bring agency counsel with them. All of those issues created very real legal and constitutional problems. Agency individuals have always been allowed to have legal counsel with them when they are deposed, except this time. As a Member of Congress, I cannot demand the President turn over documents or give testimony in any fashion that I would prefer just because I have oversight responsibilities. In the same way, the President or other executive branch officials cannot demand I turn over my notes or provide my staff for testimony without going through the courts and gaining a legal subpoena. Congress has vigorously and rightfully protected its rights from unwarranted investigations from any President and Presidents have done the same. But in all cases, the law must be followed and the proper process must be pursued to get the information in a legal way. From the very first moments of the Senate trial, the House managers fought for additional witnesses and documents from the President. Their argument and justification for the second Article of Impeachment centered on the White House's refusal to turn over documents and make every witness available without going through the normal legal process. Per the resolution adopted by the Senate, the House record was part of the trial record. The Senate had the testimony of the witnesses the House chose to question as part of the overall information of the trial. The House already had 28,000 pages of documents that were part of the evidence they submitted to the Senate, although, the House managers admitted during the Senate impeachment trial that they still have not released all of the documents and witness testimony that they had gathered in their investigation to the White House Counsel or to the Senate. We do not fully know why the House held back some of its witness testimony and released others. The House witness testimony was used extensively in the Senate trial. These are the witnesses who testified live or via video in the House and Senate Impeachment: David Holmes, Political Counselor, U.S. Embassy Ukraine, State Department; Dr. Fiona Hill, White House Advisor, National Security Council; David Hale, Under Secretary for Political Affairs, State Department; Laura Cooper, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense; Gordon Sondland, U.S. Ambassador to the European Union; Tim Morison, Former White House Adviser; Kurt Voelker, Former Special Envoy for Ukraine; LTC Alexander Vindman, National Security Council; Jennifer Williams, aide to the Vice President; Marie Yovanovitch, Former Ambassador to Ukraine; George Kent, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State; Bill Taylor, Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine. The House managers repeated over and over that additional witnesses would only take a week to depose, which is a clearly false statement. New witnesses took longer than a week to depose in the House inquiry; clearly it would take just as long or longer in a Senate trial. The remaining ``wish list'' of witnesses all had clear issues that needed to be resolved in the courts, which would take a couple of months to resolve, which is why the House managers did not push for their testimony in the House impeachment process. They valued speed more than legal process. House managers repeatedly stated that witnesses only took a week to depose in the Clinton Senate impeachment trial, but they know that during the Clinton Senate trial, all three called witnesses previously deposed in the House inquiry or in the grand jury investigation, and all issues of executive privilege had already been decided through the courts. There were no new witnesses in the Senate trial of President Clinton. Also, the Clinton White House had already had the opportunity to cross-examine witnesses or the investigators in the Clinton impeachment inquiry. This time, the Trump White House had been denied that right. So, if new witnesses would be added for the Senate trial, the White House should have the right to also cross-examine the previous House witnesses they had been denied the right to cross examine in the past. This would all take much longer than a week, and the House managers knew that. During the Clinton impeachment trial in the Senate, there were no additional documents requested, only previously deposed witnesses. The House managers did not go through the legal process to get documents, like the Mueller investigation had done, so all of the new document requests from the House managers would take at least 3 to 5 weeks to complete, once a legal subpoena is delivered. It takes time to search all databases, review the documents for classified materials, determine any legal issues, and release them to the investigation. Once the documents are turned over, both legal teams need time to review the documents. Again, the House managers knew these facts, but they continued to repeat over and over that it would only take a week to get all the documents. The first question for the Senate trial was, do we have enough evidence and testimony to answer the questions the House presented in their Articles of Impeachment? If the answer is yes, then we do not need additional witnesses or documents. If the answer is no, then we do need additional information. There were many leaks and newspaper stories during the trial designed to push the Senate to vote to ask for more testimony, but that did not change the primary question. We already knew from evidence that there was no quid pro quo, no Ukrainian investigations, and no withholding of a public meeting with President Trump. The New York Times story on January 26 and again on January 31 are clear examples of an attempt to bring doubt on the information and witness testimony. Both stories stated that someone had read the pending John Bolton book manuscript and that in the book, Bolton stated that President Trump had talked about investigations in exchange for aid funding for Ukraine. The New York Times also wrote that the book would state that Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone were also a part of the scheme. I looked at both stories closely and noticed that the reporters had not read the manuscripts or quoted the manuscripts; they were reports from someone who stated that they had read the manuscripts. Both stories took significant liberties to describe the intent in the manuscripts, but the reporter had apparently also not spoken to John Bolton. On January 23, 2020, the National Security Council lawyers sent a letter to the legal team handling the book publishing for John Bolton to inform him that the manuscript contained some classified information and it would need have some edits before publication in March. Then, on January 26, the New York Times published a story that someone had leaked some of the details of the book, but they had not released the actual manuscript. While I am interested in seeing the actual manuscript, I am also very aware that this selective leak was designed by the New York Times and whoever leaked the information to influence the ongoing trial. It was clear from the earliest days of the trial that the House had a clear political strategy as well as a courtroom strategy. During the trial. I had the responsibility to hear the facts but also to separate the politics from the facts. Politically, it was best for the House to move as quickly as possible through impeachment so that vulnerable Democratic Members could vote for impeachment and then move quickly to other topics. But since the Presidential election is in full swing, it was politically better for Democrats to make the Senate trial move as slow as possible to hurt the President during the campaign. That explains why the House did not take the time to formally request documents or testimony from many individuals; they needed to move fast and try to force the Senate to move slowly. It also explained why the House passed impeachment on a party line vote, then held the Articles of Impeachment for a month before delivering them to the Senate to start the trial. The House managers said repeatedly that the evidence was clear and that they had proved their case, but if that was true, why would the Senate need to call additional witnesses? I think the reason is that the witness process was about delay, more than facts. The facts do not support the accusation in the Trump impeachment, and it certainly did not need to come to this moment of national division. While it was clear that the House managers wanted to drag the trial on for months in the Senate, through the primary election season, their case consisted of hypothetical story lines and ``presumptions'' more than facts that warrant the removal of a President. This does not meet what Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 65 described as the ``due weight'' for the arguments. But impeachment has certainly created the division in our society that Alexander Hamilton predicted. Over 200 years ago he wrote, ``The prosecution [of impeachments], will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused.'' This has been an incredibly divisive season in our Nation. It is not about one person; it is about all of us. We individually choose how we handle disagreements with family, friends, and people on the other side of particular issues. Our government represents us, so it is up to us to model for our government how to handle disagreements. We are now past impeachment, and it is time to work on the issues that matter most to the American people. As we move forward, every American should speak out on the issues that are important to them and the voices that speak for their point of view. But we should remember that we have much more in common than we have that divides us. It is my hope that our Nation does not go through a season like this again for a very long time and that we can move past this age of impeachment to an age of oversight and accountability. I appreciate all the engagement with our office during the impeachment proceedings. We had thousands of calls and emails over the past month. We had hundreds of thousands of views on the nightly Facebook Live updates each day during the trial. While not every Oklahoman agrees with every decision I make on behalf of our State, I am grateful most choose to be respectful in expressing their points of view. At the end of the day, we are Oklahomans. We may not all agree on each issue, but we can be respectful of each other in our disagreement. I am honored to serve our State and Nation. We have many important issues to address in the coming days I pray we can work on them together for the future of our State and Nation.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, I rise to have a dialogue. Let me start it this way. My brother and I did not always agree on things. I know that may be shocking that two brothers did not get along on everything. Maybe in your house you got along on everything, but my brother and I, growing up, did not agree on everything. In fact, growing up, I distinctly remember the day we reached epic levels, and we actually got masking tape out in our room and put a line down the floor that ran from one wall across to the other wall. We had an old-school stereo record player in our room. The line ran up the record player so that on one side he had the tuning knob and on the other side I had the volume knob. We would have to reach some sort of detente to listen to anything. If he turned it to a station I didn't like, I could turn the volume all the way down. We would have to work things out. The line even went through our closet, with his clothes and my clothes on it, and we had a clear line of separation that you could not cross that line. The rules were very clear in our room. For whatever reason, our mom put up with it for quite a while as we had our ``Don't cross the line into my side'' kind of moment. It is interesting that today in the Senate there was in some ways kind of a line-drawing moment to not draw a line but to try to figure out where are our lines, where are our boundaries on an issue that Americans talk about all the time, in many ways, but always get nervous in that dialogue. It is the issue about when is a child a child. We have this weird dialogue as a nation because we have a great passion for children. We spend a tremendous amount of money, personally, on our families and in our communities and in nonprofits and Federal taxpayer dollars to walk alongside children to do everything we can to protect the lives of those children. We have some in this body who have proposed Federal taxpayer dollars for children in their very first days of life to have childcare that is available for them, but literally 3 days before that, they have also proposed Federal tax dollars for abortion to take that life. It begs the question: Where is your line on life? What is that moment? For me, I go with the science. It is conception. That is a dividing cell that has DNA that is different than the mom and different than the dad. That dividing cell is a uniquely different person. Every science textbook, every medical textbook that you look at would identify that DNA is different than any other DNA in the world. That is a different person. As those cells grow and divide and as that child grows and divides, whether they are 50 years old or whether they are only days old still in womb, the DNA is the same. All the building blocks are in that child from their earliest days. Others will look at it and will ask the question--like the Supreme Court did in 1973, when they ruled on Roe v. Wade on the issue of viability. That is when the Supreme Court said, in 1973, that States can engage and try to make some laws dealing with abortion, which is based around this issue of viability. Viability, in 1973, is very different than it is now. We have many children who are born at 21, 22, 23, 24 weeks gestation who are prematurely delivered, spend months in a NICU facility, and thrive as adults. That viability question is different now than it was in 1973, but we also know more about the science now than we knew at that time as well. We know that a child--some would say on the science side of it--as early as 12 weeks old of development, still in the womb, can feel and experience pain. Certainly, by 20 weeks, 21, 22 weeks, they have developed a brain and have developed a nervous system. The system of experiencing pain is all in place. If anything happens to that child, that child will experience the pain and the effects of that. The New York Times had a really interesting article in October 2017, talking about a young man, Charley Royer. When he was just at 24 weeks development in the womb, the parents made a very difficult decision to have a surgery in utero. It is spina bifida. The child would be paralyzed. The New York Times writes about how they did this surgery-- this very intricate surgery--that happened at Texas Children's Hospital at Baylor College of Medicine. They basically delivered the child, doing surgery on that child, reinserting the uterus and the child back into the mom's womb, and then stayed all the way through until full gestation and was delivered. Charley is apparently doing very well. It was a remarkable surgery. During that surgery, they made sure they helped that child and gave him additional medications to protect him from pain because they were doing surgery on someone who felt the effects of the surgery at 24 weeks. Today we had a vote in the Senate to ask Senators, if you don't agree with me on this that the line should be conception, to consider that child a child at conception, would you consider that child a child when they can experience pain? They have a beating heart. They have a functioning nervous system. They have 10 fingers, 10 toes. This is not a tissue we are talking about. This is what a child looks like in the womb at 20 to 22 weeks. That is a child. The question is, Is your line when that child has a beating heart, has a functioning nervous system, can experience pain? Is that your line? We had that vote today. Unfortunately, this Senate body said no. The line is not at conception, and the line is not even when they look like this and can experience pain. That bill was voted down. There are only four countries in the world that allow abortion on demand at any time--four countries left in the world that still abort children who look like this, who experience pain, who are in late term. It is the United States, North Korea, China, and Vietnam. That is all that is left in the world that looks at this and says that is just tissue; that is not really a baby. This Senate voted again today to affirm that same club that we are in with China, North Korea, and Vietnam. That is not a club I want our Nation to be in. They are some of the worst human rights violators in the world, and they don't recognize the value and the dignity of life. We do, or at least I thought we did, but that is not where our line is, apparently. Today we took another vote in the Senate, and it was a very clear line as well to say: OK. If your line is not at conception, and if it is not when the child can experience pain, and it is not a late-term abortion when the child is actually viable, maybe your line is actually when they are delivered, when they are fully out of the womb. We took a vote on a bill called the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. It is a very straightforward bill. It is not about abortion at all. It is about a child who is fully delivered. In medical practice, there are times when there is a late-term abortion that in the procedure itself to actually conduct the abortion, instead of the child being aborted and killed in the womb, it is a spontaneous birth that actually occurs, and the child is actually fully delivered. The intent was to destroy the child in the womb, but that is not what happened. What happened, instead, in a small percentage of abortions, was that child was actually delivered. Now the question is, the child is no longer in the womb. The child is literally fully delivered and is crying on the table in front of you. What do you do? We asked the question of this body: Where is your line? Is your line at delivery? Even if the intent was originally abortion, that didn't occur, is your line at delivery? Unfortunately, this body voted no. We could not get 60 Senators of 100 to say even if a child is fully delivered outside of the womb, crying on the table, that is a child. That is a frightening statement about where we are in our culture. I have had all kinds of folks say: Well, this is not about infanticide. Infanticide is already illegal. I said: Yes, that is true. In 2002, there was unanimous support in this body, in the Senate, to pass a bill saying that if a child is delivered, that would be infanticide. The problem was, it left no consequences at all and allowed what still happens today where if a child is fully delivered, there are no consequences for allowing them to die on the table. A couple of years ago, Kermit Gosnell was fully delivering children in his abortion clinic. He was fully delivering them, and then he would take scissors, flip the child over, and snip their spinal cord to kill them. He is in prison right now for carrying out that act because that was considered infanticide. But what is still legal is allowing the child to just lie there on the table until they slowly die. Jill Stanek is a nurse who has practiced for years in Illinois. She gave testimony in a hearing not long ago and testified multiple times about what is going on in some of these abortion facilities and what happens when a child is fully delivered and they are still alive. In her experience, what she has watched before, she has noticed that children will live outside the womb. These are viable children lying on the table, or in her particular hospital, they literally took the child to a linen closet and closed the door and left him there. They would live somewhere between an hour and, some children, as long as 8 hours, just waiting to die. Ladies and gentlemen, in ancient times, it was called exposure when you would take a child and set them outside to die without medical care. Our vote today was, if a child is fully delivered, should they get medical care, or should we just allow medical facilities to just back off and allow them to slowly die? And today this Senate could not get 60 votes to say we should at least give medical care to that child instead of allowing them to slowly die on the table on their own--a child literally crying, kicking their feet, but ignored. I would hope we are better than that as a country, but apparently the line has still not been discovered for the value of a child. I am one who believes that a child has great value, a child has great worth. Whether that child is a kindergartner or in the womb, that child has value. As a culture, we should stand for the value of every child. I am amazed, absolutely amazed when I think about the fact that 100 years ago, my wife, my mom, and my daughters would not have been able to vote. I can't even process that 100 years ago, my wife, my mom, and my daughters would not have been allowed to vote in America. What were we thinking as Americans that we did that? I am amazed that there was a time in America not that long ago where if you were of Japanese descent, they rounded you up, put you in camps, and held you, as an American citizen, just because you were of Japanese descent. I can't even process the fact that we did that as Americans. I cannot believe there was a time in America where we looked at African Americans and said: That is three-fifths of a man. I cannot even process that was in our law, that we declared a human being three- fifths of a person. I am so grateful that we no longer round up people because they are of Japanese descent, that we allow women to vote, and that we consider all people equal. I am so grateful that time has passed. I long for the day, which I believe is coming, that we as a nation look back and say: What were we thinking that we allowed children to live or die based on our convenience? And if a child was inconvenient, we just killed them or we set them on the table and allowed them to slowly die from exposure because they were inconvenient in the moment. There will be a day when we will look back on this season in American history and we will say: What were we thinking that we considered some children more valuable than others, that we considered some lives worth living and some to just be thrown away? What is your line? When is a life worth protecting? When does life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness actually apply to you in America? I wish it was conception or at least when they can experience pain or at least when they are fully born, but this body has not yet found the moment when we can agree that life is valuable. I long for the day that we do. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, in 1924, when Oklahoma was a very young State, a young lady named Ada was born in Chickasha. Now, you would get that joke if you are from Oklahoma because we have a town in Oklahoma called Ada and a town in Oklahoma called Chickasha. This is a young lady named Ada born in Chickasha. She thrived. She was an excellent student. In fact, she was the valedictorian of her high school, Lincoln High School. She left that and went to college. She stayed 1 year at one college, then transferred to another college and graduated with honors in 1945. She dreamed of being a lawyer. She had graduated with honors. She had graduated valedictorian. She had all the credentials and all the capabilities to do it, but she had one big problem: She was Black. In Oklahoma in the 1940s, there were no law schools that would allow a Black student to attend. So, in Oklahoma, the policy was to help Black students who wanted to be a lawyer leave the State to study somewhere else. She really didn't want to do that. She had graduated from the great Langston University and had a great education there and had every ability to do that. She interviewed with the University of Oklahoma-- interviewed, actually, with the president of the school at that time-- to go through the process to get into the University of Oklahoma law school. She was found to be fully qualified, but the problem was, again, she was Black. And it wasn't just a problem with the University of Oklahoma. At that time, there was State law that did not allow Black students and White students to study together--and certainly not to study law together. So she did a radical thing. On April 6, 1946, she filed a lawsuit against the State of Oklahoma saying that she wanted to study law at the very good University of Oklahoma law school. A young lawyer took up her case, a gentleman named Thurgood Marshall, a young lawyer who later became Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Young Thurgood Marshall took up her case to argue in front of Oklahoma district court, where they lost, arguing it all the way to the State supreme court, where they lost, lost, lost. Then they took it into Federal court, saying that, constitutionally, neither the United States of America nor any State in the United States could block a student from studying law simply because they were Black. They won that case. Probably returning back to Oklahoma to study, the Oklahoma Legislature hurriedly put together a new law school and called it Langston Law School and opened up a room in the State capitol and put a few books there and said: There is your law school. Thurgood Marshall and Ada Fisher did not accept that--nor should they have--and started the process again of saying: We can't have a separate but ``equal'' law school in Oklahoma. They argued again in State courts, eventually ending up again heading all the way back to the Supreme Court. Before it got to the Supreme Court and Oklahoma would lose again in front of the same nine Justices, they determined that they would break, and they would give. On June 18, 1949, more than 3 years after she started the process of getting into law school, she was admitted into the University of Oklahoma College of Law, where she was given a seat in the back of the room with a sign directly in front of her that read ``coloreds only,'' and she could sit in that row in the back of the room. In 1950, just the next year, those barriers would come down, and in August of 1952, Ada Fisher graduated from the University of Oklahoma law school and became a lawyer. She set the pace for thousands and thousands of others who are lawyers behind her now and get the chance of having that same joy. Interestingly enough, if you were to visit the courthouse in Oklahoma City, the Federal district court there--if you were there a couple years of ago, you would have bumped into Vicki Miles-LaGrange. That African-American judge, the pace was set for her by Ada Fisher. If you drop by and visit it today, you would bump into Bernard Jones, that African-American judge who serves there for the Western District of Oklahoma. The pace was set for him by Ada Fisher decades before. Quite frankly, we can't even fathom, in this current time period, how different things really are, but it is interesting to notice that time period and that generation and some ladies who really stood up and made a difference in Oklahoma because at the same time that Ada was at Langston University, another lady named Clara was at Langston University. We know her affectionately in Oklahoma as Clara Luper. Now, some folks may not know Clara Luper's name, but they know what she did. Clara Luper was at Langston University as well in the early 1940s. She finished her study, got her bachelor's degree there, went and got a master's degree, and continued on through the process. She became the Youth Council leader for the NAACP in 1957, and in 1958 she helped her students--her youth whom she worked with--do a really, really radical thing to deal with segregation in Oklahoma. She talked about nonviolence, and she talked about how to step out and take a stand. She and a group of kids went to Katz Drug Store in Oklahoma City and sat down at the counter and ordered Cokes. And they sat there all day, never being served--all day. It was the birth nationwide of what we know of as the sit-in movement, where young men and women who were African American would go and sit down at a place and just wait to be served. It started a movement that shook the Nation into this issue of segregation. Those two ladies made a remarkable change for the better in our history: Clara Luper and what she did; Ada Fisher and what she did. As we look back on tomorrow, Frederick Douglass's birthday, and we celebrate February as Black History Month, we realize how much history has really happened around us--just in the past 100 years even. We can go back as far as we want to and talk about the great Frederick Douglass and the influence he had on Abraham Lincoln and the influence he had on the Nation. Quite frankly, in Oklahoma, there are Black leaders today who are making history, and 50 years from now and 100 years from now we will be talking about them like we talk about Clara Luper and like we talk about Ada Fisher. We will be, 100 years from now, still talking about Russell Perry and the business work that he and his son Kevin have done in radio, what they have done in real estate, and what they have done in leadership in our State. Russell Perry was a barrier breaker. He was a cabinet member for a Governor. He has been a great leader and is a great leader in our State. We will still be talking, years and years from now, of Dr. Kent Smith, the current president of Langston University, and what he has done at Langston and the leadership model that he has in our State. For years, we will be talking about the members of the 1921 Race Massacre Commission and those individuals around Tulsa who have gathered around to say: What are we doing to help bring a community together and break down the barriers of segregation and of racism that still exist? We will be talking for years about Hannibal Johnson. He is a lawyer and a brilliant man, a historian, and a leader in his community. We will be talking for years about Wayland Cuban, an Oklahoma City police officer and a person who has spent a tremendous amount of time helping those around him and helping youth, especially those in trouble, to have a radical turnaround. We will talk for years about Terry Munday and what he has done on the radio. We will talk for years about pastors scattered all over our State that, in the African-American community, have made a very real difference in the lives of a lot of families. We will talk for years, quite frankly, about Dr. Lester Shaw and what he has done at A Pocket Full of Hope and how he has helped so many kids. He has, for years, mentored students and has had a 100-percent success rate, year after year after year, of just loving on kids and helping them in every way he can. Dr. Shaw has made a remarkable difference in our State. We will talk for years about Clarence Hill and about what he has done for race relations in our State and how he is quietly bringing people together to sit down around a dinner table and develop friendships that should have existed long ago. We will talk for years about Stephan Moore and his family, what they have done in the inner city, what they have done to pull kids out and look at them eyeball to eyeball and give them a sense of hope and a sense of joy. See, in our State and around my city, Oklahoma City, where Frederick Douglass High School is, February is not just another month. We understand what Black history really means because we are living it with legacy-leavers like Ada Fisher and Clara Luper and so many others who have left such a mark. I am proud to say I have neighbors and friends all around me who continue to make history in what they continue to do in our State. I am grateful to call them friends, and I am grateful we have the opportunity to celebrate Frederick Douglass's birthday together. I yield back. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LANKFORD

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

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the votes following the first vote be 10 minutes in length.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, we are in our third week of the impeachment trial right now. After thousands of documents being reviewed and over a dozen witnesses that we have heard, well over 100 video testimony clips that we have gone through, we are nearing the end. The country is deeply divided on multiple issues right now, and the impeachment trial is both a symptom of our times and another example of our division. The Nation didn't have an impeachment inquiry for almost 100 years, until 1868, the partisan impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Another impeachment wasn't conducted for over 100 years after that, when the House began a formal impeachment inquiry into President Nixon with an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote of 410 to 4. Just a little over two decades later, there was another partisan impeachment process--President Clinton, when he was impeached on an almost straight partisan vote. Tomorrow I will join many others to vote to acquit the President of the United States. His actions certainly do not rise to the level of removal from office. This is clearly another one of our partisan impeachments, now the third in our history. Over the past 3 years, the House of Representatives has voted four times to open an impeachment inquiry: once in 2017, once in 2018, and twice in 2019. Only the second vote in 2019 actually passed and turned into an actual impeachment inquiry. For 4 months the country has been consumed with impeachment hearings and investigations. First, rumors of issues with Ukraine arose on August 28, when POLITICO wrote a story about U.S. aid being slow-walked for Ukraine, and then September 18, when the Washington Post released a story about a whistleblower report that claimed President Trump pressured an unnamed foreign head of state to do an investigation for his campaign. Within days of the Washington Post story, before the whistleblower report came out, before anything was known, Speaker Pelosi announced the House would begin hearings to impeach the President, which led to a formal House vote to open an impeachment inquiry on October 31 and a formal vote to impeach the President on December 18. The House sent over two Articles of Impeachment, asking the Senate to decide if the President should be removed from office and barred from running for any future office in the United States--one on abuse of power; the second on obstruction of Congress. Let me take those two in order. The abuse of power argument hinges on two things: Did the President of the United States use official funds to compel the Ukrainian Government to investigate Joe Biden's son and his work for the corrupt natural gas company in Ukraine, Burisma, and did the President withhold a meeting with President Zelensky until President Zelensky agreed to investigate Joe Biden's son? To be clear, the theory of the funds being withheld from Ukraine in exchange for an investigation doesn't originate from that now-infamous July 25 call. There is nothing in the text of the call that threatens the withholding of funds for an investigation. The theory originates from the belief of Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland's-- what he said--presumption--and he repeated that over and over again-- presumption that the aid must have been held because of the President's desire to get the Biden investigation done, since the President's attorney--his private attorney--Rudy Giuliani was working to find out more about the Biden investigation and Burisma. Ambassador Sondland told multiple people about his theory. When he actually called President Trump and asked him directly about it, the President responded that there wasn't any quid pro quo. He just said he wanted the President of Ukraine to do what he ran on and to do the right thing. Interestingly enough, that is the same thing that President Zelensky said and his Defense Minister said and his chief of staff said. The aid was held because there was legitimate concern about the transition of a brand-new President in Ukraine and his administration in the early days of his Presidency. An unknown on a world stage was elected, President Zelensky, on April 21. His swearing-in date was May 21. During his swearing-in, he also abolished Parliament and called for snap elections. No one knew what he was going to do or what was going to happen. Those elections happened July 21 in Ukraine, where an overwhelming number of President Zelensky's party won in Parliament. There was an amazing transition in a relatively short period of time in Ukraine and there were a lot of questions. I will tell you, I was in Ukraine in late May of 2019, and our State Department officials there certainly had questions on the ground about the rapid transition that was happening in Ukraine. It was entirely reasonable for there to be able to be a pause in that time period. Those concerns were resolved in August and early September when the new Parliament started passing anti-corruption laws, and Vice President Pence sat down face-to-face with President Zelensky on September 1 in Poland to discuss the progress and corruption and their progress on getting other nations to help supply more aid to Ukraine. As for the meeting with the President being withheld, as I just mentioned, the Vice President of the United States met with President Zelensky on September 1. That meeting was originally scheduled to be with the President of the United States and all the planning had gone into it, and there was documentation for that. There was a meeting happening between President Zelensky, which was actually the place and date that he asked for to meet with President Trump, except in the final moments of that and the final days leading up to it, Hurricane Dorian approached the United States and that meeting had to be called off by the President while he stayed here, so the Vice President went in his stead. There was no quid pro quo in a meeting. The meeting that was requested actually occurred. It was interesting to note, as well, when I researched the record about the aid dates for Ukraine in the past 3 years, I found out that, in 2019, the aid arrived in September. It is interesting, from 2016 to 2018, the vast majority of military aid for each of those years--2016, 2017, and 2018--also went to Ukraine in September. Well, it is easy to create an intricate story about the hold of foreign aid. It is also clear that President Trump has held foreign aid from multiple countries over the last 2 years, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Lebanon, and others. There is no question that a President can withhold aid for a short period of time, but it has to be released by September 30, which it was to Ukraine on time. The hold did occur. There are messages back and forth about being able to hold, but it is entirely reasonable to have the hold, and it was such a short period of time--the aid arrived at the same time as it usually did each of the past 3 years--that the Minister of Defense for Ukraine actually stated that the hold was so short, they didn't even know it. What is interesting about this is this is stretched from not just an ``abuse of power,'' but also ``obstruction of Congress.'' That is the second Article of Impeachment. The House argument was that the President didn't turn over every document and allow every witness without submitting everything to Congress immediately. They argued that, if the President challenged any subpoena, he was stalling, he was acting guilty, and so it was grounds for impeachment. Remember how fast this all happened. The investigation started September 24. The official start of impeachment started October 31 and ended on December 18, with a partisan vote in the House for impeachment. If President Trump obstructed Congress because he didn't turn over documents that didn't even have a legal subpoena within 2 months, then I would say President Obama was not impeached, but maybe he should have been, though I don't think he should have been. But you could argue in that same way because President Obama did not honor three subpoenas in 3 years on the Fast and Furious investigation when that happened. For 3 years, he stalled out, but there was no consideration for impeaching President Obama because he shouldn't have been impeached. He was working through the court system as things moved. This was a serious issue that became even more serious when the House managers moved, not just to say that this is obstruction of Congress if the President doesn't immediately submit, but they took this to a different level by saying the President should not have access to the courts at all, literally stating: Does the Constitution give the legislative branch the power to block the executive branch from the judicial branch? House managers said, yes, they can rapidly move through a trial, then bring the case to the Senate and have it only partially investigated and then try to use the power of the Senate to block the executive branch from ever going to court to resolve any issue. That has not been done in the past, nor should it be. The President, like every other citizen of the United States, should have access to the courts, and it is not grounds for contempt of Congress to block the President from ever trying to go to court to resolve issues that need to be resolved. Every other President has had that right. This one should have had that right as well. This tale that President Trump thinks he is a King and doesn't want to follow the law begs reality. Let me remind everyone of the Mueller investigation, where 2,800 subpoenas were done in over 2\1/2\ years, with 500 witnesses, including many of the President's inner circle. All of those were provided. None of those were blocked by the administration. After 2\1/2\ years, the final conclusion was there was no conspiracy between the President's campaign and the Russians. The President did honor those subpoenas. The President has been very clear in multiple court cases that he did not like it and he did not agree with it. He has been outspoken on those, but he has honored each court decision. It would be a terrible precedent for the Senate to remove a President from office because he didn't agree that Congress couldn't take away his rights in court like every other American. The difficulty in this process, as with every impeachment process, is separating facts and the politics of it. There are facts in this case that we took a lot of time to go through. Each of us in this body sat for hour upon hour upon hour, for 2\1/2\ weeks, listening to testimony and going through the record. We all spent lots of time being able to read, on our own, the facts and details. That was entirely reasonable to be able to do. But we have to examine, at the end of the day, what is a fact-based issue that has been answered--and each of the key facts raised by the House all have answers--and what is a politics issue--to say in an election year, what is being presented by the House that says: What can we do to slow down this process and to try to give the President a bad name during the middle of an election time period? To separate out those two is not a simple process. But we begin with the most basic element. Do the facts line up with the accusations made by the House? They do not. Are there plenty of accusations? Yes, there are. My fear is that, in the days ahead, there will be more and more accusations as we go. There have been for the last 3 years. But at this moment and the facts at this time, in the partisan rancor from the House and into the Senate, I am going to choose to acquit the President of the United States. This certainly does not rise to the level of removal from office and forbidding him to run for any other office in the future. It certainly doesn't rise to that level. In the days ahead, as more facts come out, all of history will be able to see how this occurred and the details of what happens next. I look forward, actually, for that to continue to be able to come out so all can be known. I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. Chief Justice.

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. Chief Justice, I send a question to the desk on behalf of myself, Senator Ernst, and Senator Crapo.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent, for myself as chairman of the Select Committee on Ethics and for Senator Christopher A. Coons, vice chairman of the committee, that the Annual Report for the Select Committee on Ethics for calendar year 2019 be printed in the Record. The Committee issues this report today, January 28, 2020, as required by the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007.

Mr. LANKFORD

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

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, as we go back through the calendar just a few months and get some context of what has been building for a while, in May of 2019, four different vessels that were traveling just outside of the Gulf of Oman were hit by mines laid by Iranian leadership. In June, just a month later, two different vessels hit Iranian mines. Those mines weren't just placed in the water flippantly; they were actually placed on the ship. In June of 2019, a U.S. Navy surveillance drone was flying through the Strait of Hormuz in international airspace and was downed by an Iranian missile attack. As we continue to move forward, we tracked an increase in Iranian activity in cyber attacks across the United States, but at the same time, individuals within our military bases in Iraq were facing more and more of a push against them in not just an external conversation, an actual kinetic attack. Our supply lines in the fall of last year, as trucks that were leaving from Baghdad and driving down to Kuwait for our supply lines there, were increasingly facing improvised explosive devices, something we had not seen in a long time. Those explosive devices were created and placed by Shia militias with materials provided by Iran. Then, in October, there were multiple attacks on our facility in Baghdad. In November, there were multiple attacks again on our facility in Baghdad. In December, there were multiple attacks again, each time increasing with more and more attacks. We hear that term ``attack,'' and it seems almost flippant, but we realize, for the thousands of Americans who work in that area of that diplomatic mission that is there in Iraq, there is a day that happens-- it could be the middle of the night, it could be the middle of the afternoon, but a moment happens, month after month, week after week, and sometimes within that, day after day--where the sirens go off, and everyone on campus runs into a bomb shelter, and then the explosions begin around the grounds. These were not just random attacks. These were designed kinetic rocket attacks coming into our Embassy that built up toward an attack on the U.S. Embassy on December 31, where thousands of people broke through the outer section, setting fires to the building, attacking the facility, smashing against the glass, trying to get into the next layer that they were not able to penetrate--into the inner layer in the Embassy. But thousands and thousands of rioters were moving toward the base. As calm was restored on the outside and a security perimeter was established on the outside, they could read what was written on the walls, spray-painted now on the Embassy: ``Soleimani is our leader.'' I was interested in talking to a friend of mine just a couple of weekends ago, and he made an interesting comment to me. He said: I didn't know who Qasem Soleimani was. I had never heard that name before, and then I went back and started doing some research to find out who this guy is and what he is all about. His comment to me was: I went back and did some research and found out he is a bad guy. I said: Yes, you don't know the half of it. Soleimani is the leader of the Quds Force for the Iranians, was responsible for training the Shia militias in Iraq on how to kill Americans. Over 600 Americans died because of the training and equipping that Soleimani did for the Iraqis who were fighting against us at that time, specifically the Shia militias that Soleimani actually directed. My neighbor was surprised to learn that Soleimani was the one who actually organized all things with Hezbollah in Lebanon. He had organized Hezbollah also in Iraq. He is the one who was coordinating all that was happening in Yemen, in the civil war that is currently ongoing in Yemen. He was surprised to see that he was in Syria working with Bashar Assad and to see all that he was doing for that ruthless leader that murdered thousands of his own people. That was Soleimani. For those of us who are tracking the direct threats against the United States, we are very aware of who he was and what he was all about because he was the point person to try to take the fight to the United States. In the past 6 months, that fight had gone from an ``I am going to try to find individuals within Hezbollah or Shia militias somewhere to attack the United States'' to being more strategic to bringing the attack directly from his forces under his command to try to take the attack to us. He had become more and more overt and more and more obsessed with attacking the United States. Over the course of that time period, the Trump administration, over and over again, sent a message to the Iranian leadership: You are playing a very dangerous game, continually attacking American facilities, launching rockets randomly in there, starting fires, stirring up militias to attack us at every turn, attacking our supply lines. If an American is killed, President Trump made it very clear, the United States will respond. In December, Soleimani pushed it to a whole new level, with a multiple rocket attack into an American facility, killing an American and wounding four others. The President responded with a very reasoned response: taking an attack to where the Shia militias and Hezbollah were storing the munitions they were using to attack us, destroying that facility, destroying those munitions, taking the fight to four different training facilities where they were equipping the people to bring the attack to us but then also tracking very carefully the person who was actually planning the next set of attacks--Soleimani himself. The time came in January, when Soleimani had been traveling through Syria, through Lebanon, working with Hezbollah, and then back into Iraq, and he was personally meeting with another terrorist leader in Iraq--one terrorist leader, Soleimani, leading a terrorist organization, meeting with another terrorist leading a terrorist organization there. Both of them were planning together and met up that morning at the airport. A little after 4 o'clock in the morning, they left from the airport, headed to go have their next meeting and planning their next set of attacks. At that time, the Trump administration took the opportunity, while they were both far from civilians and no one else was on the road, to have a surgical strike and take out two different terrorist leaders, both in the process of planning their next attacks. What has been interesting to me has been the response of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House and some of the debate there. We should debate issues like this. These are difficult moments in difficult days. We are not at war with Iran, nor should we be at war with Iran. There are millions of peaceful people in Iran. Thousands and thousands of those people are protesting on the streets right now in Iran against their own government. They are furious at the corruption in their government. They are furious that the people in Iran can't get food and can't get fuel because the regime there is spending their money attacking Yemen, attacking Syria, feeding money to Hezbollah and Iraq, feeding money to Hezbollah and Lebanon. The money that should be going to help their own people, the Iranian regime is sending out all over the region to spur their terrorism. The people there are frustrated and upset with their own government, and they are taking it to the streets under a threat of their own life. In the not-too-recent past, Iranians--whether it be the Green Revolution 10 years ago or just in days past and months past--had taken to the streets by the thousands, and some of them have faced all kinds of retribution coming back at them. We should be supporting the good people of Iran who are miserable living under that regime. We are not at war with the people of Iran, but we are very clear as a nation, when you are planning an attack against us, and we are aware of that attack and you have shown the due diligence to take prior attacks, we know you are not just thinking about it. You are actually planning it and about to carry it out. We have learned our lesson from 9/11, and for the last three administrations, the policy has been very clear. If we know you are in the process of bringing an attack to us in the days and weeks ahead, we will strike first to protect American lives. We will not wait until you kill Americans to come bring a strike to you. That is what happened with Soleimani. The debate that is happening on the floor now about a War Powers Resolution has been interesting to me because much of the language just affirms the current law. It almost seems to imply the Trump administration didn't follow the law when they did. The Trump administration continued to track an imminent threat that was coming into the United States. There has been some argument about how imminent is imminent. Some of my colleagues want to know that Soleimani was in the process of carrying out an attack within the next 30 minutes, and if he wasn't carrying out an attack immediately, in the next day or next hours, we shouldn't respond. I will tell you, intelligence is not that exquisite. You only know in the movies that someone is about to attack an exact spot at an exact time. That is not real life. With real-life intelligence, you gather information to track what you think is coming, but you don't get exact dates and exact locations like that. We knew he was planning this attack. They were zeroing in on the locations, but he was very specific as to the Americans he was coming after. To be able to bring the attack to him and to notify Congress within 48 hours, which is the law, is consistent with the War Powers Resolution. The President did follow the law. He was justified in being able to carry out the strike against a known, declared terrorist leader--in fact, two of them--in the process of planning their next attack against Americans. The key thing I join my colleagues in talking about is not trying to be able to press back on the administration but to say that none of us want a war in Iran, including the Trump administration. In every conversation I have had with anyone in the administration, they have all been very clear. They are not planning a war with Iran. They don't want a war with Iran, but they do want Iran to stop their belligerent terrorist activities against us, against our allies, and against any American they seem to find in the region. I join my colleagues in warning Iran and assuring Iran at the same time that we have no desire for a war with the regime or with the good people of Iran. We should be able to find a way to work together. Since 1979, when this regime was coming into power, they have taken the fight to Americans and to all of our allies. It is time we pushed back and said: Stop shedding blood, and let's sit down at the table and be able to work this out. In the meantime, let's not assume that Soleimani was some innocent bystander. He had a lot of American blood on his hands. Let's take into real life what it really means to live in Baghdad and serve in our diplomatic mission and hour after hour run to bomb shelters as rockets are raining down randomly on your facility. There is plenty of provocation. Now it is time for diplomacy. Let's get this worked out. I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, if I go back 2\1/2\ years, there was a lot of turmoil and a lot of conversation about the President of the United States' stepping into the issue of trade, specifically in North America, for it was a settled issue between Canada and Mexico. Yet we asked the question: Should we revisit NAFTA? At that time, a lot of people said that the trade agreement was complicated and hard and that we shouldn't touch the trade agreement, that we should just leave it alone. With all of its warts and all of its faults, it is what it is. Don't touch it. Instead, the President chose to step into the North American Free Trade Agreement and say: No. We are going to renegotiate this deal. It is 25 years old, and it needs a revisit. Against the many people who were pushing against him, he pushed through that and said: Let's start all over again. In the past 2\1/2\ years, the Trump team has renegotiated the deal and brought it back to Congress, where it passed with overwhelming bipartisan support--finally--in the House. It sat on the House's desk for 14 months before those in the House took it up. Finally, after 14 months of their not taking it up, they passed it with overwhelming bipartisan support. It has now gone through the Committee on Finance here in the Senate with a vote of 25 to 3, and it is headed toward the floor of the Senate, to the President's desk, and finally to getting this issue resolved about North American free trade. Now, with this issue between Canada and Mexico, I have had some folks ask me: Why is it such a big issue? It is a big issue because Canada and Mexico are our No. 1 and No. 2 trading partners in the world. Far and away, Canada and Mexico are our biggest trading partners. Our trade relationships are essential not just to every border State but to States like my State. In Oklahoma, Canada and Mexico are also our biggest trading partners. They are vital to our economic success and have been key to what has happened in NAFTA over the last 25 years. Yet now, after all of the negotiations and all of the noise, we finally have a revised area in trade that has needed to be addressed with things like intellectual property, which is a new chapter in what is now called the USMCA or what people call NAFTA 2.0. This simple change is not so simple when trying to deal with intellectual property theft, whether it be a camcorder recording in a movie theater somewhere in Mexico, whether they sell pirated copies, which has been an issue, or whether it is just the ownership of patents and how things actually move from place to place. Can you confiscate property that is illegally produced at each border crossing, and how is that managed? That is addressed for the first time in this agreement--trying to protect American patent owners from not having their patents stolen once they leave and go to Canada or Mexico. Twenty-five years ago, digital trade was not a major issue in NAFTA. Obviously, it is a very significant issue for us now, and it is finally addressed in this agreement, as well as how we are going to handle digital services and digital trade. There is something very important to my State, and that is agricultural trade and how agricultural goods are going to move. Now, the vast majority of this USMCA agreement lines up exactly with the NAFTA of the past, but there are some areas that were problems in the NAFTA of the past that had to be addressed, one of those being wheat, for instance. When wheat moved from the United States into Canada, Canada downgraded that wheat to a lower grade so that our Oklahoma farmers would get less profit for that because they downgraded that wheat as it moved across the Canadian border. This agreement settles that issue. That was just Canadian protectionism. It wasn't that the wheat was of a lesser quality; it was just that they were trying to protect Canadian wheat instead of having an actual free market. This is a free trade area. The tariffs and the fees go away across North America if we can have a level playing field. In areas in which we don't have a level playing field, like with Oklahoma wheat competing with Canada's wheat, we are taking that on. I feel confident that Oklahoma wheat is going to win that fight, and given this new trade agreement, we get the opportunity to win that. There are lots of areas in the agreement that help us in agriculture. There are areas in digital trade and intellectual property, as well as in multiple other areas of manufacturing. That is why so many groups and so many individuals have looked at this and have gone back to the Trump administration, with some of my Democratic colleagues begrudgingly swallowing hard and saying: This is a good agreement for America in the future. This does help us keep jobs here. This helps us continue to have a level playing field for trade. I congratulate the Trump administration for its 2\1/2\ long years of very hard work to get to this agreement. I am grateful that we are nearing an agreement with China, a phase No. 1 agreement. It is much needed because China has been a major problem in intellectual property theft and in its having an unfair trading platform. I am grateful the administration has also completed the first stage of a major, new trade agreement with Japan. Those are our four largest trading partners, and it is significant to our economy not just in the short term but in the long term that we continue to have stable free trade areas in as many places as we can. I am confident in the American worker. When given the opportunity to compete, we win because of the quality of our work, the quantity of our work, and the creativity of the inventions we put out from this country. Let's keep doing that. Let's keep winning around the world in our trade agreements. I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the remaining votes in this series be 10 minutes in length.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, very shortly, the Senate will vote on the motion to concur in the House amendment to the Senate amendment to accompany H.R. 1865, Further Consolidated Appropriations Act. As part of this appropriations package. a version of my bill, the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act of 2019, is included in section 903. This bipartisan bill seeks to restore U.S. court jurisdiction over the Palestinian Authority, PA/Palestine Liberation Organization, PLO, while promoting U.S. foreign policy interests in the Middle East through the resumption of U.S. security assistance to PA security forces. It is a testament to the hard work of my Democratic and Republican colleagues in this Chamber that we are about to take up this important legislation. In 1992, Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism Act, ATA. This law, as well as future amending legislation, sought to deter and defeat international terrorism by giving American citizens who are victims of terrorism overseas the power to sue perpetrators in U.S. court. I was privileged to work with the original ATA's author, Senator Grassley, in drafting the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act of 2019. What our bill--also sponsored by Senators Duckworth, Coons, Blumenthal, and Rubio--does is strike a balance between Congress's desire to provide a path forward for American victims of terror to have their day in court and the toleration by the Members of this body to allow the PA/PLO to conduct a very narrow scope of activities on U.S. soil--such as activities pertaining to official business at the United Nations, engagements with U.S. officials necessary to our national interest, and legal expenses related to adjudicating or resolving claims filed in U.S. courts--without consenting to personal jurisdiction in civil ATA cases. This delicate balance is supported by a bipartisan coalition of Members of Congress, the executive branch, and American victims of international terrorism and their families. For 25 years, the Federal courts struck this balance by holding that the PLO's and PA's presence and activities in the United States subject them to jurisdiction in our courts unless they can demonstrate that their offices in the United States deal exclusively with the official business of the United Nations and that their activities in this country are commensurate with their special diplomatic need for being present here. The courts correctly held that the PLO's and PA's fundraising and public relations activities such as press releases and public appearances, whether characterized as diplomatic public speaking or proselytizing, are not essential to their diplomatic functions at the United Nations Headquarters. The bill codifies the distinction recognized in these cases while giving the PLO and PA a clear choice. Unless they limit their presence to official business with the United Nations and their U.S. activities commensurate with their special diplomatic need to be in the United States, they will be consenting to personal jurisdiction in ATA cases. In this regard, the exception in the language for ``ancillary'' activities is intended to permit only essential support or services that are absolutely necessary to facilitate the conduct of diplomatic activities expressly exempted in the bill. By applying the bill to any case pending on or after August 30, 2016, we are making clear Congress's intent that courts have the power to restore jurisdiction in cases previously dismissed for lack of jurisdiction after years of litigation. It is to be liberally construed to carry out the purposes of Congress to provide relief for victims of terrorism, and it specifies Congress's intent to enable victims to pursue justice without being subjected to repetitive, unnecessary, or protracted litigation, which would just reopen the pain that many Americans have already suffered through. As the Congress finishes its final week of the first session of the 116th Congress, I look forward to voting in favor of this important legislation and urge my colleagues to do the same.