Mike Lee

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I appreciate the care, attention, and detail shown by my friend and colleague, the distinguished senior Senator from North Carolina. I do disagree with him for 10 independent reasons. No. 1, as to the suggestion that the proponents of the unanimous consent request now before this body--that is, the very simple, clean reauthorization of the expiring provisions for 45 days, giving the Senate an opportunity to spend just a few weeks to debate and consider these amendments after dealing with the coronavirus crisis--he suggested that I, as the proponent of this measure, have--I think the words were--never supported any of these tools, never in my entire time in the Senate lifted a finger to support these tools. That is curious because I was the author and lead sponsor of the USA FREEDOM Act, which, in 2015, extended and reauthorized these very same provisions. So his first argument is factually incorrect. No. 2, he points to the lone wolf and roving wiretap provisions as things that he is concerned about. I understand that they want those. Now, lone wolf isn't used, but it is sort of a security blanket. People like knowing that it is there within the government, and I am willing to let that go. Roving wiretaps are used from time to time. I am willing to let that go. In fact, I have offered repeatedly--and I will offer again right now, if it is helpful--that I am willing to reauthorize those right now without a single modification, without a single limit beyond what has already been put in for the other provisions. I am willing to do that free of charge on anything. So those arguments are frankly disingenuous. No. 3, as to the suggestion that I am somehow holding this bill hostage, I say to the Senator: You, sir, have it wrong. You have it precisely backward. What I am doing is saying: Let's preserve the status quo. We have a crisis to deal with, with the coronavirus. It is of great frustration to me that this body, through its majority leadership and through its other leadership has known for years--I put them on notice for years, for basically the entire time I have been at the U.S. Senate--that I am concerned about these provisions. I have made known ever since 2015, when we reauthorized these provisions at issue, that I would continue to want more reforms. Why we waited until the final days before the expiration of that period is beyond my ability to understand. But it is factually incorrect and manifestly unfair to suggest that I am the one holding this hostage. I say to the Senator: It is quite the other way around, sir. As to the suggestion that these are FISA reforms, not PATRIOT Act reforms, well, yes, they are all part of this package that we refer to collectively as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The Senator is right as to the provisions, especially the provision that I am most concerned about, section 215, as we call it--section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. I give him that one, but that doesn't address the substance of the problem here. As to Senator Burr's argument that we should err on the side of keeping Americans safe, I absolutely agree with that. There is no dispute about that. I also agree with the findings of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that concluded a few years ago that our privacy and our security are not at odds with each other. This is not a zero-sum game between those two objectives. Our privacy is, in fact, part of our security. One of the reasons we became a nation, one of the reasons we don't fly the Union Jack or sing ``Hail to the Queen'' or wear wigs and robes in court has everything to do with the excessive abuse of the rights of English subjects, including those on this continent, while we were existing as British Colonies. Our privacy and our security are not at odds with each other. They are in fact part of the same cohesive whole. No. 6, the argument made by Senator Burr that this provides uncertainty for law enforcement, well, let me tell you why that is the case. The only reason there is uncertainty for law enforcement on this, for our intelligence community and law enforcement agencies that handle this stuff, has everything to do with the fact that he just objected to this unanimous consent request. We could, right now, eliminate their uncertainty. We could have, likewise, at any point in the months leading up to this, at every point in which I would have been willing to debate and discuss these things. For years I have had reforms on the table that we could have considered. We could have brought those up. We could have done it then. It is not me who is creating the uncertainty for law enforcement. It is instead the unreasonable objection to receive any of my offers, including passage of the Leahy-Lee bill, including passage of lone wolf and roving wiretap independently, including simply extending and cleanly reauthorizing the three expiring provisions for 45 days, giving us the chance to consider a handful of amendments. So I say to the Senator: Don't talk to me about being the one who has created uncertainty. That, sir, is you. No. 7, Senator Burr argues that a President of the United States can do all of this, in any event, without the three expiring provisions on the books. Well, my response to that is that is kind of curious. If that were the case, why is he fighting so hard for these provisions? Why should anyone be concerned about their expiration? He suggests somehow that we would not have guardrails--any guardrails in place--if, in fact, these were allowed to expire. If they were allowed to expire, I am not familiar with any authority that would provide language identical to that found in lone wolf or roving wiretap or 215. So if that is the case, perhaps you, sir, would rather have them expire. I really don't know, and I don't think that advances your argument. No. 8, the suggestion was made that these amicus provisions--which are not the limit; they are one of six amendments that I would like to propose and I would like the Senate to consider. But the FISA Court already has the authority to appoint an amicus. Well, this is true. We put that in the USA FREEDOM Act in 2015. The court does have that authority. That doesn't mean it happens as often as it should. In fact, as we saw with the abuse that took place in connection with Operation Crossfire Hurricane targeting the sitting President of the United States when he was a candidate, in many cases, the FISA Court judges are not themselves terribly careful. Perhaps it would be helpful to have somebody else in the room. I don't know why we should be so afraid of that. No. 9, to the extent that anyone is going to let this program go dark and if that concerns you, then you ought to agree to this unanimous consent request. This unanimous consent request will result in it not going dark. I have made it entirely foreseeable that I would want to have amendments at least debated, discussed, and considered before we got to this moment. It is not unreasonable for me to ask. I am not asking that you accept these amendments, that you incorporate them into existing law; I am instead simply asking that we be given the opportunity to vote on them. Finally, No. 10, Mr. Burr argues that this legislation was carefully crafted by the Attorney General, the Speaker of the House, and several other officials and that some 270 or so Members of the House of Representatives voted for this. Well, good for them. That is their prerogative. I have my own election certificate. I serve in a different legislative body. I am aware of no obligation on my election certificate that requires me to defer to the Pelosi-Nadler-Schiff bill. In fact, I refuse to do that. It is insulting to this body. Had the Founding Fathers wanted to create a unicameral legislature, they could have done so. Had the Founding Fathers wished to create the Senate of the United States as simply a rubberstamp that would review what the House of Representatives did and then have a veto, yes or no, open or closed--a binary reaction to what the House of Representatives did--they could have, they would have, and they should have done so. They did not. We have our own independent obligation to review this legislation. I have done so. I find it inadequate. I am not demanding that all my amendments be accepted as a condition precedent for my willingness to keep these from going dark. All I am saying is that I want the opportunity to have amendments considered-- bipartisan amendments--introduced by several Members. So I am going to make another request. I will tone this one down. I will modify this one. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of the Senate bill at the desk providing for a 45-day extension of FISA. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table; further, that at a time to be determined by the majority leader, in consultation with the Democratic leader, the Senate proceed to the consideration of H.R. 6172; and that the only amendments in order be five amendments offered by the following Senators: Senators Lee, Leahy, Daines, Wyden, and Paul. I further ask that upon disposition of the amendments, the bill, as amended, if amended, be read a third time and that the Senate vote on the bill, as amended, if amended, with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, you might notice a pattern here. This pattern is going to continue. This pattern is going to continue because this is unjust. This is unrealistic. This is unsustainable. This used to be a body that prided itself on being the world's greatest deliberative legislative body. It is a body that has its own unique protections attached to it. Article I of the Constitution sets out the parameters of the Senate, and it makes clear that it will consist of exactly two Members representing each State. The one and only kind of constitutional amendment that is preemptively unconstitutional, that cannot be adopted, is that type of amendment that would undo this fundamental, sacred principle of equal representation among and between the States in the Senate. You cannot do that. They did this with a distinct purpose in mind: that we would have the ability to represent the States as States; that we would not be just a roving commission on what was satisfactory or whether the House of Representatives had done its homework but that we would be our own independent legislative body. We would be betraying our oath to the Constitution and those whom we represent if we didn't do this. This used to be a place, for that very reason--in fact, until quite recently, it was a place where any Senator could have any amendment considered on any legislation. Basic standards of collegiality, of decency and respect for each other and for the rule of law itself convinced Members over centuries--literally centuries--to defer to each other in at least their opportunity to propose and vote on amendments. In recent years, we have seen this deteriorate. We have seen it deteriorate, sadly, under the leadership of Republicans and Democrats alike. We have seen it deteriorate at the expense of the representation of each individual State. This simply isn't acceptable, that we would get to this point in legislation and we would be unable to vote on or consider basic amendments to so important a law. They are asking us to reauthorize these expiring provisions--provisions with profound implications not only for national security but also for privacy, which are part of the same cohesive whole--and they are asking us to reauthorize those until December of 2023 with only minimal reforms--reforms that, I would add, are modest at best, that are perhaps well-intentioned in some ways, but the Pelosi-Nadler-Schiff bill doesn't cut the mustard. It doesn't do the job. I have just asked for six amendments. That was too many. And I have asked for five amendments, and that was too many. Surely they are not suggesting that we can't ask for any amendments, because if they did, that would be patently ridiculous. That would be uncollegial. That would be uncivil. It would be unsenatorial. So we will try this again. We will see what we can do with four. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of the Senate bill at the desk providing for a 45-day extension of FISA. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table. Further, I ask that at a time to be determined by the majority leader, in consultation with the Democratic leader, the Senate proceed to the consideration of H.R. 6172 and that the only amendments in order be four amendments offered by the following Senators: Senators Lee, Leahy, Daines, Wyden, and Paul. I further ask that upon disposition of the amendments, the bill, as amended, if amended, be read a third time and that the Senate vote on the bill, as amended, if amended, with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. LEE

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

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Madam President, it is disappointing that when we take a look at something that is controversial like abortion and we peel it back a layer further, we make it noncontroversial by making the discussion about something that most Americans--the overwhelming majority of Americans--agree about, which is, regardless of how you feel about abortion, you don't necessarily want your government taking your taxpayer dollars and the taxpayer dollars of a whole lot of people who have very strong feelings against abortion and using those to fund organizations that either perform abortions or that engage in promoting or lobbying or counseling or referring in order to encourage abortions. The overwhelming majority of Americans don't want that regardless of how they feel about life. This shouldn't be a controversial issue. It is a non sequitur. It is a straw man argument to suggest that this somehow limits anyone's options. It doesn't. In fact, it expands options of individuals by saying: We are not going to take your money at the point of a gun, which is what governments do at the end of the day when they take money, in order to spend it on something that--depending on how you phrase the question and which pollster you are talking to, it is either a sizable majority or a bare majority of Americans who find that morally problematic. But an overwhelming majority of Americans say that, no matter what, you shouldn't be taking all taxpayer money and then using that to fund abortion or abortion-related advocacy. Last week, the Senate had a chance to adopt some measures that would protect the dignity of human life--not just unborn human life but also born human life, including babies who had been born alive following a failed abortion attempt. Unfortunately, due to a minority of this body, we lost the opportunity to enact those reforms. Those colleagues opposed to these measures did so largely on the claims that they were, as they put them, anti-woman or anti-healthcare. They claim somehow that these measures interfered with what should be considered personal--the personal nature of healthcare between women and their doctors. I could not agree more that healthcare is personal. It is, after all, about healing, preserving, and prolonging the life of a human being, the life of a person. In the case of a pregnant woman, it is about two persons, sometimes three. If it is a woman who is pregnant with a single baby, it is two persons with two beating hearts, two distinct sets of DNA, and two unique and eternally valuable, unrepeatable souls--two persons with equal dignity and worth. We ought to value both of them and provide opportunity and care and rights and protection to both. In the spirit of our founding, we ought to affirm through our laws and through our taxpayer dollars the truth that every member of our society--every woman, every man, every unborn child--is entitled to the right to life and to the full protection of that right under the laws of the United States. Our healthcare ought to heal, preserve, and protect those lives. Unfortunately, many of our laws themselves permit and subsidize exactly the opposite of life in our country and even, tragically, abroad. Congress allows and helps fund the most radical abortion policy in the Western world, enabling procedures that impose barbaric violence upon women and unborn children and ending the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent babies in our Nation every single year. It allows our foreign aid money to go to organizations that fund and promote abortions overseas, taking the lives of thousands of innocent babies across the globe--especially, by the way, baby girls. In some of these countries, abortions happen in much higher numbers to female babies precisely because they are female. Abortion is, in many cases, the knife's edge of sexism--the exact tool they use to denigrate women's equal dignity and value and worth and right to breathe. In some of these countries, women don't even want the abortions. In some cases, these organizations force their own so-called enlightened values on them, pressuring these women to take their own children's lives whether or not they really want to. This form of cultural and imperialism is not pro-woman, it is not pro-child, and it is certainly not pro-healthcare. It is pro-sexism and pro-violence. And we must end it. Today, we can, through the passage of the Protecting Life in Foreign Assistance Act. This bill would permanently stop the use of our foreign aid money for funding or promoting abortions overseas. We ought to uphold the equal dignity of women, whether born or unborn, in America and across the world, and we should treat their bodies with reverence and dignity and respect, the respect they deserve, not because any government decided to confer that respect upon them but because they exist. Today, we can choose that, too, through Senator Braun's bill, the Dignity for Aborted Children Act. That measure, as Senator Braun has explained, will ensure that aborted children's bodies are not treated simply as medical waste to be crudely disposed of and that they should instead receive a proper burial or cremation, just as we accord to all other human beings. We have to support and value women and babies everywhere. In our laws and for our lives, we ought to uphold the dignity of each and every human person, regardless of race, sex, appearance, abilities, or age. The measures before us today--those I have outlined and those that have been proposed by Senator Braun--do just that, and we should support them for the very same reasons that we should pass them. They shouldn't be objectionable. It is tragic that they have drawn an objection today. It is tragic that any American, much less any Member of the Senate, which calls itself the world's greatest deliberative legislative body, would object to these measures. After all, it is difficult to fathom how someone wouldn't want to protect babies. It is difficult to fathom why someone wouldn't be in favor of something at least protecting the conscience rights of U.S. taxpayers who don't want to see their hard-earned taxpayer dollars going to fund an operation, a procedure that they know is designed to end a human life--a human life that in many cases is deliberately ended because of the sex of the person whose life is being taken. This is tragic, it is unacceptable, and it shouldn't happen--not here, not on this soil, not on our watch. We are not going to give up. The fact that we have endured these setbacks today, the fact that these well-conceived, non-objectionable pieces of legislation have drawn an objection today, doesn't mean this issue is going to go away. It doesn't mean these proposals are going to go away. I yield the floor.

Mr. LEE. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Foreign Relations Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. 3259 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration. I further ask that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, in a message to Congress on July 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln wrote that the leading object of government was to ``elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.'' It is no coincidence that he gave this message on the anniversary of our Nation's birth. Lincoln was echoing the profound legacy of our founding--a legacy that shaped our Nation and thereafter rippled across not only the Western Hemisphere but the entire world. When the Founders broke off from the yoke of British tyranny, they declared all men to be endowed with certain inalienable rights--rights that come not from the State, a church, any man or woman, or even from a government, but, rather, from God himself. The first of these inalienable rights was life. Never was any nation in the history of human beings born of a higher principle or a deeper connection to human happiness and flourishing. Here, the people would rule. Here, government would serve the people and not the other way around. Here, for the first time ever, each person, no matter his or her station in life, was endowed with these rights and entitled to their equal protection. Today, 159 years since Lincoln's message to Congress and 244 years since the Founders' message to the world, here we stand sworn, still, to fulfill their promise. As far as we have come during that time period, we still have so far to go. Today, our government--founded to protect Americans' rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--threatens unborn Americans on all three counts. The Supreme Court imposes and Congress subsidizes the most radical abortion policy in the Western world. Since 1973, more than 60 million little lives, innocent lives, have been lost. The children lost to abortion cannot be seen, they cannot be heard, but the loss of every single one of them is felt. Mothers have been robbed of their children. There are gaping holes left throughout our Nation, in our families and in our communities--gaping holes that only those unique, unrepeatable souls could have and would have otherwise filled. For more than four decades, we have failed American women and their unborn children. Today, we have a chance to do better, to aspire for more, not to settle for mediocrity or tyranny but to celebrate and embrace life and liberty. We have a chance to stand up for the very weakest and most vulnerable among us, the ones still being knit together in their mothers' wombs, the ones we know respond to human touch by the age of 8 weeks, who feel pain by the age of 20 weeks, and who recognize the sound of their mother's voice before they are even born. Science and medicine are only confirming what we know deep down--that unborn human beings are, in fact, just like us. Every day, more scientific evidence confirms our moral intuition that a person is a person no matter how small that person happens to be. The so-called Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act that was before us earlier this week would have banned abortions for babies more than 20 weeks of age, upholding in law what science already confirms; that is, that these babies feel every bit of their life as it is being ended. This should not have been a controversial bill. Still less controversial should have been the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act takes no position on abortion, and it takes no position even on the rights of the unborn. It simply says that in this country, the United States of America, when a child is born, even if by accident, even in the most dangerous place in the world for an infant--that is, a Planned Parenthood clinic--he or she becomes a citizen of the United States under our Constitution, entitled to the full and equal protection of our laws. It says that when a child intended to be aborted is, in fact, instead born alive, he or she cannot simply be ``disposed of'' in the back room of a clinic or a hospital, as if it were nothing more than medical waste. This bill merely outlaws the murder of the innocent in the first moments of life; that is, the first moments of life outside the womb. It is a tragedy, a blight, and a poor commentary of frightening reflection not only upon this country but on this very legislative body that these measures failed this week. A minority of this body chose to reject both the scientific facts of human biology and the essential moral principle of human dignity. When someone talks about not accepting science, I hope they will remember what happened this week. I hope they will remember that against all medical and scientific evidence, to say nothing of what people know morally, intuitively, and within their own hearts, this body failed to protect the most vulnerable among us. Unfortunately, this is not the first time in our Nation's history that we have sometimes looked at the people according to a really evil logic of utility and power, and it is not the first time that we have tried to dehumanize human beings. It is not the first time we have tried to pick and choose who is wanted and who is valuable in society, penuriously doling out rights to exist and to be free on the basis of that arbitrary and unjustifiable determination. Nonetheless, thankfully, if there is one thing that we know about our country, it is that the American people have a way of bending the arc of history toward life or, as Winston Churchill is credited for saying, the American people will always do the right thing after they have exhausted every other alternative. We have a long, proud history as Americans of standing up for the weak, for the innocent, and especially for the vulnerable. We have made mistakes--grave, grave mistakes--but the right thing to do is always the right thing to do, and we come around in the end. It is one of the things that differentiates us from other societies. We aspire toward that which is good. Today there is reason to hope. Abortions in my home State of Utah have been steadily declining over the past four decades, with fewer than 3,000 happening in 2017. Six States are now down to just one abortion clinic: Kentucky, West Virginia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Mississippi, and Missouri. This past year, Alabama passed a law banning elective abortions in most circumstances, and just last month hundreds of thousands of Americans marched joyfully once again through Washington, as they have year after year after year, for those who cannot, for those who are rendered absent by this barbaric practice. The tide is turning, and today we have another chance to right these same wrongs. Through my bill, the Abortion Is Not Healthcare Act, we have the chance to stop the tax deductibility of abortions which are currently categorized as medical care by the IRS. The purpose of healthcare is to heal, is to cure. It is not to kill. Let us be serious. Whatever else abortion may be, of course, elective abortion is not healthcare. That is why physicians literally take an oath to do no harm. The government should not offer tax benefits for a procedure that kills hundreds of thousands of unborn children each year, nor should taxpayers have to subsidize it. This bill would end this preferential tax treatment and clarify that this gruesome practice is not healthcare. We also have the chance to permanently stop the use of our foreign aid money from funding or promoting abortions overseas. The Protecting Life in Foreign Assistance Act will save countless lives across the globe and affirms the truth that the lives of all unborn children, regardless of where they might happen to be from, have dignity and worth. Today we can stand to allow all human beings--no matter what their age, their appearance, or their abilities--a fair chance in the race of life. We have only to remain loyal to that bedrock principle that we claim to defend in the Declaration of Independence: the inalienable, fundamental right to life, the equal dignity, the immeasurable worth of all human life. I ask unanimous consent that the Finance Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. 3173 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration. I further ask that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I appreciate the opportunity to address these important issues today. I thank my friend and colleague from Oregon for outlining his reasons for objecting to this legislation. I feel the need to respond to a few things that he said because they call for an immediate response. First, he noted that there were two votes cast earlier this week that he described as part of an ongoing pattern, an ongoing campaign among Senate Republicans that, according to my colleague, are anti-woman. This is offensive on a variety levels--first when you consider that the abortion is no respecter of persons. It is not just male babies aborted; it is also female babies. There are parts of the world where abortion of female babies occurs in much higher numbers--in many cases because they are female babies. Abortion is itself--elective abortion is an act of violence against a human form, against a human life, albeit a life in utero. I remember a few months ago we were holding a hearing, of all things, addressing issues relating to wild horses and burros in the Western United States. Certain wild horse populations have grown out of control. They have devastated rangelands. They have depleted resources available to them, and many of them are starving, malnourished, and suffering. There have been programs that have sought not only to help them in one way or another but also to sterilize them. I never thought I would be part of a significant hearing addressing the nonsexy topic of equine contraception, but in this instance we had one. One of our witnesses, who was from an organization devoted to preventing cruelty to animals, explained that one of the most effective techniques of horse birth control involves the sterilization procedure. I asked why that was not the preferred method. She said because, in many instances, it can result in the loss of the unborn horse. I asked her why that mattered. She said: Well, because it is a life, notwithstanding the fact that it hasn't been born. It is cruel to the unborn baby horse. It is cruel to the foal. If it is cruel to the foal, why isn't it cruel to the baby, whether it is a male baby or a female baby? This is not anti-woman. There was also the suggestion that the campaign somehow involves a Republican in every exam room, and that, according to those who advocate pro-life positions, it would relegate healthcare to the healthy and wealthy. Well, this gets back to the very point I was making. An exam room--actual healthcare--involves protecting and preserving human life. Elective abortion, by contrast, has one object; that is, the termination of a human life--an unborn, in utero human life but a human life just the same. You can say whatever you want about it but to call it healthcare, to me, is counterintuitive--not just to me but to many, many Americans who find the practice abhorrent and are shocked by the thought that the U.S. Government would be subsidizing it, whether through its tax policy or through more direct forms or, as we see today, both. As to the suggestion that politicians ought to stay out of this issue, well, let me ask you this: What about the idea that politicians and, therefore, lawmakers ought to stay out of other issues involving violence to a human being? There was a day and age in this country where people would say that lawmakers ought to stay out of other issues involving violence, of domestic violence: That is a family matter, after all. Politicians ought to stay out. The law should have nothing to do with that. Well, it involves violence to another human being. To say simply that politicians and, therefore, lawmakers and, therefore, the law ought to stay out of a topic means to suggest that it is somehow beyond the reach of the law. If we have reached, if we ever do reach the point where we can't say no human being can kill another human being, we have really, really big problems. We are not talking here about an exam room. We are not talking about procedures designed to promote, to heal, and to prolong life. We are talking about a procedure to end life. This is, itself, not a bill that talks about the appropriateness or lack thereof of elective abortion. This simply says that, given how many Americans feel about this, as many of us in this very room feel about abortion, we shouldn't be subsidizing it, and we shouldn't be pretending it is something it is not. Finally, let me remind this body and anyone who may be watching from outside this body that, of the legislation we voted on this week, one of those pieces of legislation didn't even involve abortion at all. It didn't regulate any facet of abortion. It dealt only indirectly with the topic of abortion, but it had nothing to do with the performance or availability of an abortion itself. It simply said that, when a baby is born, following or in the middle of a failed attempt at an abortion, if that baby is born alive, notwithstanding the attempt by the abortionist to kill the baby, that baby shouldn't simply be neglected. In any other circumstance, a human being, particularly a vulnerable, brandnew newborn baby--an infant--to neglect the baby and allow that baby to die of exposure, to not administer lifesaving care or nutrition or sustenance to that baby, to neglect the baby and allow that baby to die of exposure would be a crime. In some circumstances, it may well be murder. In others, it would be a serious criminal form of deliberate child neglect. So, to suggest that a baby is somehow different as a result of a subjective intent of the abortionist to kill the baby and that we shouldn't make sure that baby is properly cared for following its birth is barbaric. Look, I get it. Not everybody shares my viewpoint with regard to when human life begins. I get it. Not everybody shares my view with regard to abortion policy. Now, I will defend to my dying day my views on these issues, and I will not shrink from them, but regardless of whether you agree with me on that, I seriously question how anyone would credibly maintain that a human being born alive following a failed abortion attempt shouldn't be given the same protection under the law as any other human being. In other words, the humanness of a baby shouldn't depend on that baby's ``wantedness.'' The fact that anyone wanted to kill that baby before the baby was born doesn't give anyone the right to kill the baby with impunity. That is what they voted down this week. Let's not pretend that this is about exam rooms. Let's not pretend that this is about actual healthcare. Let's not pretend that this is somehow an anti-woman strategy. By the way, many women I know--most, I would say--actually find quite offensive the suggestion that to be in favor of protecting babies is somehow anti-woman. This is offensive. It is sad to me, more than anything. This was a lost opportunity that we had this week to protect the dignity of human life, not just unborn human life but human beings who have been born. One day we will look back and see this week through sad eyes in much the same way we now look back on other episodes in American history where we have failed to accord the full dignity to a human life that each human life truly deserves. I yield the floor.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Madam President, I move to table the Sullivan amendment, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. LEE. Madam President.

Mr. LEE. Madam President, I have great respect for my distinguished colleague from Alaska, and I appreciate his service to our country and his thoughts today. I stand in opposition to his amendment because, if there is one thing we don't need right now, it is anything else that would give more authority to the military-industrial complex to start and finish wars without authorization from Congress. Anytime we introduce additional ambiguity into a field that is already ripe with ambiguity, given the inherent tension between ambiguities surrounding the inherent article II Commander in Chief power and the article I power that Congress has to declare war, we run into problems. This would open up that ambiguity. The legislation we are addressing here, this resolution, is bipartisan. It has as its object to clarify that, for future, offensive action, we need congressional authorization. We have been lied to by the Pentagon for years regarding a war that has gone on for two decades. That is long enough. We don't want to create additional ambiguities. We don't want any more wars without the people's elected representatives being able to debate it.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I rise today to support my colleague, Senator Kaine, in support of this resolution before us, a resolution that would prohibit the United States from conducting offensive military strikes against Iran unless or until some time as Congress may authorize it. This is how security policy in our constitutional Republic is supposed to work. It is how decisions like these are supposed to be made. Congress authorizes the use of military force and the President-- as Commander in Chief--directs the military as it undertakes the effort to complete its missions. This arrangement gives the American people the best of both worlds--a deliberative, representative legislature to declare war and a single, decisive Commander in Chief to lead the troops. Unfortunately, Congress has not upheld its end of this responsibility. Our system of checks and balances--while very beneficial to the American people and while giving us the greatest opportunity to protect our freedom, our liberty, and our system of government--imposes a degree of rigor and accountability on Congress, which its Members, unfortunately, sometimes are inclined to shirk whenever possible. This trend has sadly gained momentum for decades, and it has done so under Presidents, House of Representatives, and Senates of every conceivable partisan combination. Now, nearly two decades into multiple wars without clear missions or paths to victory, it is time for Congress to reassert, on behalf of our constituents, our vital constitutional role in American warmaking. Before addressing the merits of this particular resolution, let me first dispel two very mistaken assumptions being made about it. First, it is not about defying President Trump. Quite to the contrary, this resolution supports President Trump and his particularly deferential approach--one that defers to the American people, one that accepts, at the outset, the fact that we can't fight wars all around the globe in perpetuity, and we certainly can't and shouldn't do that without the consent of the American people and that of their elected representatives in Congress. Indeed, on this issue, President Trump is the most restrained and the most Constitution-minded Commander in Chief we have had in decades. I believe he is the most restrained and Constitution-minded Commander in Chief we have had in my entire lifetime. He is exactly the kind of partner Congress needs in order to get the Constitution's warmaking process back on the rails--back on the same rails that were designed in 1787. Second, this resolution is not about condemning the strike against General Soleimani last month. After all, the strike against Soleimani worked. He was an enemy of the United States, with the blood of hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis, Syrians, and even other Iranians on his hands. Everything we know about him and his work of terror confirms that he was planning to kill again and to do so soon. Rather, what this resolution is about is Congress reclaiming its rightful powers to restore accountability and consensus to this most grave of all public policy decisions that we, as Members of Congress, are asked to make. I understand why Members of Congress are OK with pretending to be pundits on matters of national security, cheering the troops when things go well and attacking the President when they don't, but we are not just political pundits on cable news shows. We have a job to do based on an oath that we took right here in this Chamber to uphold and ``protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.'' In order to enable the President of the United States to do his job correctly, we have to be willing to do ours. You see, this is part of the evil design of the military industrial complex to convince Members of Congress, first and foremost, that they don't have to and shouldn't want to put their name on the line when it comes to war power. This unfairly puts the blame and the accountability all on the President of the United States. That is wrong. Just as importantly, it disconnects the American people from their elected representatives here in the Senate and in the House of Representatives from a process that really could put not just American treasure but also American blood--the blood of their own sons and daughters--on the line. That is not right. The Founders could not have been any clearer about this. That is especially true when it comes to the greatest Founder of them all. Remember when the Miami and Wabash Indians attacked Americans north of the Ohio River between 1791 and 1794, President George Washington carefully confined his military operations to exclusively defensive measures. ``The Constitution,'' Washington wrote, ``vests the power of declaring War with Congress, therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject, and authorized such a measure.'' Our first President, George Washington, was a humble man, and he was a modest man. One of my favorite paintings in this entire building can be found in the Capitol Rotunda, where you see George Washington handing his commission back to the Continental Congress. This at the moment when he had ascended the apex of power; this at the moment when he was the most respected, well-known person, certainly, in the Western Hemisphere, possibly in the entire world; this at a moment when, in any other land and any other point in world history, George Washington was in a position to become a Monarch, a King, he chose not to be. He said right then and right there: not on this soil; not on my watch. I am handing my commission back to the Republican institution that employed me to begin with. So, yes, he was a humble man, and he was a modest man, but this wasn't just an act of humility or modesty; it was duty. He understood that he had taken an oath to uphold, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. As President, he would not deviate from it because he had taken an oath that he wouldn't. Under the Constitution--whose drafting President Washington oversaw before he was President of the United States, while he was President of the Constitutional Convention and to which he swore an oath of office later--the power to direct war would reside in him as President of the United States as Commander in Chief, but the power to declare war resided exclusively with Congress. This was, of course, very different than the form of government that we had left just a few years prior to that. Under our previous system of government, the one based in London, the Parliament had no role in declaring war. Declaring war was up to the Executive, the Monarch, the King. The King could--and in many instances would and did--take the country to war. It was the job of the legislative branch of government, of the Parliament, to figure out what to do about it, how to fund it, and where to go from there, but it was up to the King and the King alone to take us to war. This, Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist 69, was exactly the kind of system we didn't want. It would be up to Congress in the first instance to declare war. Congress and Congress alone would have this power. Why? Well, because it is the branch of government most accountable to the people with the most regular intervals. When the American people are called upon to put their own blood and treasure-- their own sons and daughters on the line in the name of safety, security, freedom--nothing else can suffice but a vote in Congress. George Washington understood that. Donald Trump understands that today, and to his great credit, President Trump has followed this standard. He has countered recent Iranian aggression through economic sanctions. They are working, and it appears that Iran is standing down. Tehran has already had to cut back support for international terrorist organizations and its nuclear program, and its oil exports are plummeting. Iran's economy has been crippled, contracting by almost 10 percent. The Iranian people know it is the fault of their own government, their own government officials. Tens of thousands of Iranian protesters have taken to the streets to protest their own government, even knowing that such action may lead them to injury or imprisonment or even death. Even the New York Times has admitted that the Iranian regime is losing the will to confront the United States. There may be a pathway to peace and prosperity for the Iranian people through sanctions relief and trade if the Iranian Government is willing to cease its support for radical Islamic militant organizations and abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons and ICBMs. Until then, the United States, under President Trump's leadership, will maintain maximum pressure through sanctions and defend the United States from any further attacks. I stand firmly behind President Trump in this course of action, and like President Trump, I believe that we ought to avoid war if we can. After nearly two decades of military entanglement in Iraq and Afghanistan--much of which was fostered by Department of Defense bureaucrats deceiving Congress and misleading the American people, as we have recently tragically learned--the last thing we need is another aimless, protracted conflict in the Middle East. The other last thing we need is to have such a conflict occur without Congress even authorizing it. In any event, war with Iran is currently neither warranted nor consistent with our strategic interests. To be very clear, under this resolution, the President would retain all of his authority as Commander in Chief to take defensive measures against active threats to U.S. persons, assets, and the homeland, including our Armed Forces abroad and our diplomats in U.S. Embassies, even without a declaration of war or authorization for the use of military force. Such power inheres and resides in article II. He already has that power. Nothing in this resolution can or would or even attempts to undermine or erode that power. However, even when defensive measures are conducted, the administration should share the justifying evidence with Congress. This, you see, is how this inherent tension between, on the one hand, the congressional war declaration of power in article I and, on the other hand, the article II power that the President has as Commander in Chief. This is how they are held in balance. It is for that information-sharing process to be ongoing. As a separate branch of government--the branch with the constitutional prerogative over the power to declare war--we are not required to simply accept an administration's talking points as a matter of faith, especially after almost two decades of deception in Afghanistan. Intelligence-sharing ensures that Congress can appropriately determine whether it should or should not provide the administration with further authority to conduct offensive military force. The intelligence so far shared with Congress on recent actions taken against Iran has fallen short, but my main concern with the briefing that I called the ``worst'' that I had ever witnessed on military matters in my more than 9 years in the Senate was that we were given no indication, whatsoever, that any ongoing offensive action against Iran would occur with consultation and authorization from Congress. This was inexcusable. This was, moreover, not the President's approach. It was not something that would have occurred in the President's presence. It certainly is not something that would have been communicated by the President, himself, because this is not how Donald Trump operates. That briefing was not the President's fault. That briefing was the fault of individuals who decided to go off on a detour of their own, forgetting whom they represent. Worst of all, in that briefing, it was suggested that engaging in public debate, discussion, and deliberation about further military action in Iran--in other words, precisely what we are doing right here and right now--would somehow empower our enemies and undermine the morale of our men and women overseas. This is as false as it is insulting to the American people and demeaning to the constitutional framework to which each of us has sworn an oath. It is contrary to our very form of government. Constitutionally separated powers, exercised with accountability to the people via checks and balances, are precisely what makes the United States strong. Bowing to the politicians' impulse to avoid responsibility and subvert our constitutional duty--that is what empowers our enemies and undermines the morale of our Nation. Whether the United States sends our young men and women into harm's way, yet again, is on us--not to cheer or jeer but, rather, to decide and stand accountable for. So, of course, that decision ought to be made at the end of a very public debate that requires not only our attention but our contributions and, ultimately, our assent. Our names have to be on the line if we are going to offer up our fellow beings to stand in harm's way. For too long, Congress has deliberately and in a very cowardly manner shrunk from its constitutional responsibility for its own narrow, selfish, shallow, political interests. Yet, by taking itself out of the process of debating and declaring war, Congress has taken the American people out of the process, and that is simply unacceptable. It is time to turn the page. Osama bin Laden is dead, and so are the 9/11 terrorists. General Soleimani is dead, and Iran is weakened and isolated. Saddam Hussein is dead and has been out of power for a generation, and Iraq is a sovereign nation that can and should dictate its own course. We now face new challenges. Our priorities have rightfully changed, and they must. While this resolution speaks only to offensive action against Iran, I believe it is time to repeal the 2002 AUMF and bring our troops in Iraq home. It is also time to repeal the 2001 AUMF and bring our troops in Afghanistan home. That is a question that we can and should address in this body. In the meantime, we as a body and as a nation should at least agree that there is no justification for further military action in Iran in the absence of a new authorization for use of military force or a declaration of war by Congress. This resolution is consistent with the President's desire to keep us out of excessive, unnecessary, and especially undeclared, unconstitutional wars. It is consistent with the vision of our Founding Fathers, who sought to make it harder to enter into war by the requiring of express consent from a bicameral legislature, and it is consistent with the conviction that the American people, whose sons and daughters lay down their lives to defend us, should get a say in this matter. President Trump wants to make America great again. I stand with him. The military-industrial complex wants to make America Great Britain again, and I stand strongly against the military-industrial complex. Making America Great Britain again would include such things as giving the executive the power and keeping the legislative branch out of the power of declaring war. That is wrong. That is not what our Constitution allows. It is not even what President Trump wants. We need to support this resolution. Commemorating Utah Women's Suffrage Mr. President, on February 14, 1870, a remarkable thing happened in Utah--something that changed the course of history not just in our State but in our entire Nation. Seraph Young, a 23-year-old schoolteacher, became the first American woman to cast a vote in a political election under an equal suffrage law. It was a moment that both followed and preceded a long line of remarkable contributions from Utah women--women who have pioneered and led in our State and in our Nation. Take Mary Fielding Smith, the wife of Hyrum Smith, who was one of the early leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After Hyrum was murdered, the resilient widow followed in Brigham Young's footsteps. She took her children and led a group of pioneers across 1,300 miles of wilderness into the West. Through a combination of faith and grit, she braved treacherous weather, a massive buffalo stampede, and a myriad of hazards and successfully led the entourage to a settlement where they could build a new life and live in freedom. Other Utah women continued to blaze trails, and Martha Hughes Cannon stands out among them. At a time when women rarely went to college, Martha aspired to be a medical doctor. She earned a degree in both medicine and pharmaceuticals. A skilled public speaker, she also earned degrees in oratory and public speaking, which gave her four degrees by the time she was 25 years old. In the late 19th century, she quickly became a leader in Utah's burgeoning women's suffrage movement, and she put her speaking skills to good use. At a large suffrage meeting in 1889, held at Temple Square, she argued: No privileged class either of sex, wealth, or descent should be allowed to rise or exist. All persons should have the [same] legal right to be the equal of every other. In the first year that women could vote and run in a Utah election, Martha ran as a Democrat for one of the five State Senate seats. She even ran against her own husband. She became the first woman to be elected as a State senator either in Utah or in any other jurisdiction in the United States, and she went on to sponsor many successful and influential legislative proposals. All the while she was in public office, she continued to run her private medical practice and raise her three children. It is, indeed, fitting that we will soon be installing a statue of this extraordinary woman here in the U.S. Capitol Building. Fast-forward to today, when Utah women are continuing to carry the banner of public leadership and service. We have Ruth Watkins as president of the University of Utah; Astrid Tuminez as president of Utah Valley University; Noelle E. Cockett as president of Utah State University; Deneece Huftalin as president of Salt Lake Community College; and Beth Dobkin as president of Westminster College. We have Gail Miller, philanthropist and entrepreneur, who took over the ownership of the Utah Jazz after Larry, her late husband, died. She took over his other companies as well. She has led the team and companies with exceptional grace, dedication, and success and has helped their philanthropic arm champion education, homelessness, and family causes. We also have Carine Clark, president and CEO of Banyan, who is forging paths in Silicon Slopes and Utah's tech community. In all different capacities and in all different fields, Utah women are continuing to make invaluable contributions in our State and in our Nation. These women have offered and continue to offer much needed gifts to their families, communities, schools, churches, businesses, and governments. When Martha Hughes Cannon spoke before a U.S. Senate committee about the success of women's suffrage in Utah, she said: ``The story of the struggle for Woman's suffrage in Utah is the story of all efforts for the advancement and betterment of humanity.'' As we approach the 150th anniversary of Seraph Young's groundbreaking vote and as we enter the centennial year of the 19th Amendment, it is only fitting that we honor the legacy of these remarkable women and all they have given to my State and to our country. I yield the floor.

Mr. LEE

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

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I have long maintained that most, if not all, of the most serious and vexing problems within our Federal Government can be traced to a deviation from the twin core structural protections of the Constitution. There are two of these protections--one that operates along a vertical axis; the other, a horizontal. The vertical protection we call federalism, which states a very simple fact: that in the American system of government, most power is to be reserved to the States respectively, or the people, where it is exercised at the State and local level. It is only those powers enumerated in the Constitution, either in article I, section 8 or elsewhere, that are made Federal, those things that the Founding Fathers appropriately deemed unavoidably, necessarily national or that we have otherwise rendered national through a subsequent constitutional amendment. As was the case when James Madison wrote Federalist No. 45, the powers reserved to the States are numerous and indefinite, while those that are given to the Congress to be exercised federally are few and defined--few and defined powers, the Federal Government; numerous and indefinite reserved for the States. The horizontal protection operates within the Federal Government itself, and it acknowledges that we have three coequal, independent branches within the Federal Government: one that makes the laws, one that executes the laws, and one that interprets the laws when people can't come to an agreement and have an active, live dispute as to the meaning of a particular law in a particular case or controversy. Sadly, we have drifted steadily, aggressively from both of these principles over the last 80 years. For roughly the first 150 years of the founding of our Republic and of the operation of our constitutional structure, we adhered pretty closely to them, but over the last 80 years or so, we have drifted steadily. This has been a bipartisan problem. It was one that was created under the broad leadership of Republicans and Democrats alike and, in fact, in Senates and Houses of Representatives and White Houses of every conceivable partisan combination. We have essentially taken power away from the American people in two steps--first, by moving power from the State and local level and taking it to Washington, in violation of the vertical protection we call federalism; and then a second time, moving it away from the people's elected lawmakers in Washington to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats placed within the executive branch of government but who are neither elected by the people nor accountable to anyone who is electable. Thus, they constitute essentially a fourth branch of government within our system, one that is not sanctioned or contemplated by the Constitution and doesn't really fit all that well within its framework. This has made the Federal Government bigger and more powerful. It has occurred in a way that has made people less powerful. It has made government in general and in particular, this government, the Federal Government, less responsive to the needs of the people. It has been fundamentally contrary to the way our system of government operates. What, one might ask, does any of this have to do with impeachment? Well, in my opinion, everything--or at least a lot. This distance that we have created in these two steps--moving power from the people to Washington and within Washington, handing it to unelected lawmakers or unelected bureaucrats--has created an amount of anxiety among the American people. Not all of them necessarily recognize it in the same way that I do or describe it with the same words, but they know something is not right. They know it when their Federal Government requires them to work many months out of every year just to pay their Federal taxes, only to be told later that it is not enough and hasn't been enough for a long time since we have accumulated $22 to $23 trillion in debt, and when they come to understand that the Federal Government also imposes some $2 trillion in regulatory compliance costs on the American people. This harms the poor and middle class. It makes everything we buy more expensive. It results in diminished wages, unemployment, and underemployment. On some level, the American people feel this. They experience this. They understand it. It creates anxiety. It was that very anxiety that caused people to want to elect a different kind of leader in 2016, and they did. It was this set of circumstances that caused them to elect Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States, and I am glad they did because he promised to change the way we do things here, and he has done that. But as someone who has focused intently on the need to reconnect the American people with their system of government, Donald Trump presents something of a serious threat to those who have occupied these positions of power, these individuals who, while hard-working, well- intentioned, well-educated, and highly specialized, occupy these positions of power within what we loosely refer to as the executive branch but is in reality an unelected, unaccountable fourth branch of government. He has bucked them on many, many levels and has infuriated them as he has done so, even as he is implementing the American people's wishes to close that gap between the people and the government that is supposed to serve them. He has bucked them on so many levels, declining to defer to the opinions of self-proclaimed government experts who claim that they know better than any of us on a number of levels. He pushed back on them, for example, when it comes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act--or FISA, as it is sometimes described-- when he insisted that FISA had been abused in efforts to undermine his candidacy and infringe on the rights of the American people. When he took that position, Washington bureaucrats predictably mocked him, but he turned out to be right. He called out the folly of engaging in endless nation-building exercises as part of a two-decade-long war effort that has cost this country dearly in terms of American blood and treasure. Washington bureaucrats mocked him again, but he turned out to be right. He raised questions with how U.S. foreign aid is used and sometimes misused throughout the world, sometimes to the detriment of the American people and the very interests that such aid was created to alleviate. Washington bureaucrats mocked him, but he turned out to be right. President Trump asked Ukraine to investigate a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. He momentarily paused U.S. aid to Ukraine while seeking a commitment from the then newly elected Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, regarding that effort. He wanted to make sure that he could trust this recently elected President Zelensky before sending him the aid. Within a few weeks, his concerns were satisfied, and he released the aid. Pausing briefly before doing so isn't criminal. It certainly isn't impeachable. It is not even wrong. Quite to the contrary, this is exactly the sort of thing the American people elected President Trump to do. He would and has decided to bring a different paradigm to Washington, one that analyzes things from how the American citizenry views the American Government. This has in some respects, therefore, been a trial of the Washington, DC, establishment itself but not necessarily in the way the House managers apparently intended. While the House managers repeatedly invoked constitutional principles, including separation of powers, their arguments have tended to prove the point opposite of the one they intended. Yes, we badly need to restore and protect both federalism and separation of power, and it is my view that the deviation from one contributes to the deviation from the other. But here, in order to do that, we have to respect the three branches of government for what they are, who leads them, how they operate, and who is accountable to whom. For them to view President Trump as somehow subservient to the career civil servant bureaucratic class that has tended to manage agencies within the Federal Government, including the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, the Office of Management and Budget, individuals in the White House, and individuals within the State Department, among others, is not only mischaracterizing this problem, it helps identify the precise source of this problem. Many of these people, including some of the witnesses we have heard from in this trial, have mistakenly taken the conclusion that because President Trump took a conclusion different from that offered by the so-called interagency process, that that amounted to a constitutionally impeachable act. It did not. It did nothing of the sort. Quite to the contrary, when you actually look at the Constitution itself, it makes clear that the President has the power to do what he did here. The very first section of article II of the Constitution-- this is the part of the Constitution that outlines the President's authority--makes clear that ``[t]he executive Power [of the United States Government] shall be vested in the President of the United States.'' It is important to remember that there are exactly two Federal officials who were elected within the executive branch of government. One is the Vice President, and the other is the President. The Vice President's duties, I would add, are relatively limited. Constitutionally speaking, the Vice President is the President of the Senate and thus performs a quasi-legislative role, but the Vice President's executive branch duties are entirely bound up with those of the President's. They consist of aiding and assisting the President as the President may deem necessary and standing ready to step into the position of the Presidency should it become necessary as a result of disability, incapacitation, or death. Barring that, the entire executive branch authority is bound up within the Presidency itself. The President is the executive branch of government, just as the Justices who sit across the street themselves amount to the capstone of the judicial branch, just as 100 Senators and 435 Representatives are the legislative branch. The President is the executive branch. As such, it is his prerogative, within the confines of what the law allows and authorizes and otherwise provides, to decide how to execute that. It is not only not incompatible with that system of government, it is entirely consistent with it--indeed, authorized by it. A President should be able to say: Look, we have a newly elected President in Ukraine. We have longstanding allegations of corruption within Ukraine. Those allegations have been well-founded in Ukraine. No one disputes that corruption is rampant in Ukraine. A newly elected President comes in. This President or any President in the future decides: Hey, we are giving a lot of aid to this country--$391 million for the year in question. I want to make sure that I understand how that President operates. I want to establish a relationship of trust before taking a step further with that President. So I am going to take my time a little bit. I am going to wait maybe a few weeks in order to make sure we are on a sure footing there. He did that. There is nothing wrong with that. What is the response from the House managers? Well, it gets back to that interagency process, as if people whom the American people don't know or have reason to know because those people don't stand accountable to the people--they are not elected by the people; they are not really accountable to anyone who is in turn elected by the people-- the fact that those people involved in the interagency process might disagree with a foreign policy decision made by the President of the United States and the fact that this President of the United States might take a different approach than his predecessor or predecessors does not make this President's decisions criminal. It certainly doesn't make them impeachable. It doesn't even make them wrong. In the eyes of many and I believe most Americans--they want a President to be careful about how the United States spends money. They want the United States to stop and reconsider from time to time the fact that we spend a lot of money throughout the world on countries that are not the United States. We want a President of the United States to be able to exercise a little bit of discretion in pushing pause before that President knows whether he can trust a newly elected government in the country in question. So to suggest here that our commitment to the Constitution; to suggest here, as the House managers have, that our respect for the separation of powers within the constitutional framework somehow demands that we remove the duly elected President of the United States is simply wrong. It is elevating to a status completely foreign to our constitutional structure an entity that the Constitution does not name. It elevates a policy dispute to a question of high crimes and misdemeanors. Those two are not the same thing. At the end of the day, this government does, in fact, stand accountable to the people. This government is of, by, and for the people. We cannot remove the 45th President of the United States for doing something that the law and the Constitution allow him to do without doing undue violence to that system of government to which every single one of us has sworn an oath. We have sworn to uphold and protect and defend that system of government. That means standing up for the American people and those they have elected to do a job recognized by the Constitution. I will be voting to defend this President's actions. I will be voting against undoing the vote taken by the American people some 3\1/2\ years ago. I will be voting for the principle of freedom and for the very principles that our Constitution was designed to protect. I urge all of my colleagues to reject these deeply factually and legally flawed Articles of Impeachment and to vote not guilty. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. Chief Justice, I send a question to the desk on behalf of myself and Senators Hawley, Ernst, and Braun.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. Chief Justice, I send a question to the desk on behalf of myself and Senators Cruz and Hawley.

Mr. LEE. Mr. Chief Justice, I send a question to the desk.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Madam President, where I come from in Utah, $700 million is a lot of money. Seven hundred million dollars is something we ought to worry about where we are going to get it. It is not unreasonable for us to request that the House of Representatives agree to the language we unanimously, on a bipartisan basis, passed out of the Senate Commerce Committee. In my mind, it is unfortunate that we are allowing the House of Representatives' unreasonable, unwarranted demand--a demand the chairman of the Commerce Committee himself acknowledges is one they shouldn't object to--to rule the day and prevent this legislation from becoming law.

Mr. LEE. Madam President.

Mr. LEE. Madam President, notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Commerce Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. 1625 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration. I ask unanimous consent that the amendments ordered reported by the Commerce Committee be agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. LEE. Madam President, reserving the right to object, this is clearly an effort to push through last-minute changes on a single bill. In my view, these changes are reckless, unnecessary, and unwise, and in any event they were made without debate by Members of this body and specifically contrary to the manner in which this very same legislation was reported out of the Senate Commerce Committee. I am glad to see the passage of a couple of pieces of legislation just now, including the TRACED Act, which will help us fight damaging robocalls. This is good legislation. I am also supportive of S. 1822, the Broadband DATA Act, which will require much needed updates to our broadband maps. These are good pieces of legislation. I am glad they are passed. I am also very supportive of the legislation that is the subject of the immediate unanimous consent request; that is, the Commerce Committee's reported version of S. 1625, the United States 5G Leadership Act. This is an important bill. It would help us identify Huawei equipment posing an espionage risk in the United States. It will ban the use of Universal Service Fund dollars to purchase the equipment and help reimburse small companies for the costs associated with ripping and replacing vulnerable equipment. This is an important bill, and it received careful consideration during the Senate Commerce Committee's markup on July 24, 2019. The version of this bill that passed the committee was supported unanimously by Democrats and Republicans on both sides of the aisle. That version required $700 million to be set aside in a fund to help reimburse companies for Huawei equipment replacements. The bill specified that the source of this funding was to come from the proceeds of spectrum auctions. This was a smart and good and carefully tailored pay-for that did not add to our out-of-control Federal spending. As currently written, the bill contains a reference to a reimbursement fund and assumes there will be reimbursements, but the bill does not specify how much funding is allocated, nor does it specify the source of these funds. I can only assume this means the House and Senate Appropriations Committees will default to authorizing new funds rather than using the smart pay-for that the Senate Commerce Committee unanimously and wisely agreed to in July. For these reasons, I object.

Mr. LEE. Madam President.

Mr. LEE. Madam President.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, it is December, so America's attention turns once again to the great debate of our times: What is the best Christmas movie? Is it ``White Christmas,'' maybe ``Elf,'' ``A Christmas Story,'' ``Home Alone,'' or ``Die Hard''? That is a good one. A lot of people are partial to ``It's a Wonderful Life'' or ``Braveheart.'' Now, ``Braveheart,'' of course, has nothing to do with Christmas, but it is about freedom. Nothing says freedom quite like Christmas. We have to debate, you see, the best Christmas movie out there for the simple reason that we also have to watch every year the worst Christmas movie. The worst Christmas movie is the one that runs every single year from this Chamber right here in this city on C-SPAN just a week before our Lord's birthday. It is called omnibus. Critics and fans have loved to hate it for years. As is always the case in these money- grabbing sequels, the actors and the writers and the directors are just mailing it in. They know they can do this every year, and it works for them, so they mail it in. The only plot twist this time is that instead of a continuing resolution or a single omnibus, leaders and appropriators have cleverly put the negotiated spending agreement into two bills so that we can all pretend it is better than just one. Even though they were negotiated at the same time, released to the public at the same time, and will be voted on within only minutes of each other, we have had different formulations of this over the years. Sometimes it is a continuing resolution. Sometimes it is an omnibus. Sometimes it is a couple of minibuses capped off with another continuing resolution. Sometimes we call it a CRomnibus. This time I think we can call it a double-decker minibus, but whatever you want to call it, it is the same movie. It is a rerun, and it is not very good. In fact, it is really, really bad. The secretive, undemocratric, irresponsive, and ultimately irresponsible process that produced this bill is nothing short of a sham, but then, again, so is the substance of the bill. It has been like this for years now. Instead of actively setting and passing budgets within which we intend to stay, as we expect from any other organization, we make it up as we go along in as abusive and dysfunctional a fashion as the American people will possibly let us get away with because that seems to be our aim--do whatever they let us get away with. In fact, the last time Congress passed all of its respective appropriations bills in each of the dozen or so categories in which we spend money--and we pass each of those bills unbundled and on time--was back in 1997. For this fiscal year, we have already passed two continuing resolutions. An omnibus bill in and of itself doesn't have to be a bad thing. In fact, one could make it a relatively good thing. You see, in theory, an omnibus could be a decent legislative vehicle if--and only if, that is--Members of the House and the Senate were given time to read it, to debate it, and to offer, consider, and vote upon amendments to offer improvements to that legislation. So I really don't care whether it is a dozen individual spending bills or a small handful of minibuses or whether it is a single bill; what I want is consideration on the floor of the Senate in front of the American people so they can be aware of what is happening, so we can exercise the election certificates we fought so hard for. Each one of us is made more relevant when we get that opportunity and less relevant when we are denied. Unfortunately, it is just never the case anymore that we have those kinds of opportunities to debate, discuss, and consider amendments, and to receive the underlying legislation in enough time for any of us to make a difference. These bills are written entirely behind closed doors by a small handful of leaders from two parties--thousands of pages of spending trillions of dollars and released to public scrutiny for the first time within only hours of what would otherwise become a government shutdown. You see, this is a feature, not a bug. For those in charge of this process, this is a good thing because this is what allows them to write it on their own. The law firm, as I sometimes describe it--the law firm of McConnell, Schumer, Pelosi, McCarthy, and a small handful of staffers and a few other Members around them write this bill, and then it is presented to us as a single, binary, take-it-or-leave-it package. You fund this and everything in it or you fund nothing. You vote for this package or you are blamed for a government shutdown. It is not right. This, we somehow manage to call rather euphemistically, is bipartisanship. Like too much of what Washington calls bipartisanship these days, these spending bills are a fiscal dumpster fire. You see, they are masquerading under the banner of bipartisan compromise, when, in fact, they are collusion--collusion just by a small handful of Members of Congress who don't have to have their provisions debated and discussed and subject to amendment. On the merits, and not just on the procedure, this bill is a dumpster fire. Discretionary spending will be set at record-high levels in nearly every category of government spending. This omnibus--or double-decker minibus, as I sometimes call it--will add $2.1 trillion to the national debt over the next 20 years. By that time, we will be spending more on interest on the debt than we do on national defense. This is embarrassing. It is embarrassing to the American people, and it ought to be especially embarrassing to those of us elected to represent our respective States in the U.S. Senate. What has historically called itself the world's greatest deliberative body has become something substantially less glorious than that. When we had a trillion-dollar deficit after the 2008 financial crisis, everyone admitted it. Everyone admitted it was a problem; that it was reckless and out of control. President Obama admitted it. Now we are borrowing just as much, and we are doing so at the top of the business cycle. With wages up and unemployment at record lows, it is an awful, corrupt cycle on repeat. Congress breaks its own spending rules, creates new ones to spend more, and then breaks the new ones and tries to hide the evidence, racking up ever more national debt all the while. What is worse, we are literally putting the brunt of the cost of all of this on future generations, on those who are not yet here and not able to vote for or against the politicians who are doing this to them. Gorging ourselves on debt to the tune of another trillion dollars a year means we are saddling our children and our children's children with the cost of this bill, and we are setting ourselves up for a disaster come the next inevitable recession. John F. Kennedy famously said ``to govern is to choose,'' but Congress's defining dysfunction is that it doesn't choose. It chooses not to choose rather deliberately. We don't budget. We don't reform. We don't prioritize. We just spend, and we hope we are retired or--let's face it--dead when the bill for our negligence and recklessness finally comes due. Not only does this package feature reckless spending, but it includes many bills it should not, with Congress funding broken, inefficient, and, in many cases, downright harmful programs. For instance, this bill reauthorizes the National Flood Insurance Program--a program that might sound nice, but it subsidizes beachfront properties right in the middle of dangerous flood plains, which is already in more than $20 billion of debt to American taxpayers, for a full year, without a single reform. By the way, after every single time it has been reauthorized, for years running, I and others have been promised that the next time around, we will have an opportunity to offer amendments, and we will have an opportunity to reform the Flood Insurance Program. It can be reformed, and it must be reformed. We have been promised reforms for years, but this bill just reauthorizes it for a full year, without a single reform--not one. This bill also maintains the broken status quo for overseas contingency operations. For those Americans who aren't familiar with this term--or OCO, as it is sometimes described--this is the Pentagon's increasingly unaccountable and widely abused slush fund, insulated from scrutiny by unchecked budget caps. The deal appropriates another $71.5 billion for OCO, a $4 billion increase just from last year alone. This, only days after America learned that civilian and military leaders have been lying to the American people for years across multiple Presidential administrations about our failures in Afghanistan. Instead of reform or oversight, these bills would put another $4.1 billion into the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund and limit our ability to negotiate peace and bring the war in Afghanistan finally to an end. In an era of rampant fake news, even the media is outperforming Congress on this issue. These bills include $495 million for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a 13-percent increase from the last fiscal year, and the highest appropriation it has had in 17 years--all for a program that has been of particular detriment to my State of Utah. The LWCF has been used as a tool for the Federal Government to gradually acquire more and more land, even as it is failing to care for the lands that it already owns, with a current maintenance backlog of $19.4 billion. Worse, in addition to funding broken programs, it funds blatant, abusive cronyism. The bill reauthorizes the Export-Import Bank-- Washington's favorite among favored banks--which doles out taxpayer- backed loans to help American exporters, and it does so for a full 7 years, without even so much of a word of debate. This, notwithstanding the fact that the Export-Import Bank has been the subject of very intense debate in this body for many years, and with good reason. Why? Well, among other things, the biggest recipient of Export-Import Bank funds is Pemex--Mexico's infamous, corrupt, state-owned oil company. It is so corrupt, in fact, that its own employees collaborate with Mexico's drug cartels to facilitate the theft of their best oil and their refined petroleum products. In fact, that theft has become so rampant in Mexico that there is a term coined to refer to that kind of theft. Those who engage in it are called ``huachicoleros''--``huachicoleros.'' We are funding, and we are insulating from the ramifications of that theft, Pemex, a corrupt institution. It doesn't operate well, in part, because it is the victim of theft and in part because it is being backed up by the U.S. Government. Ranked right after Pemex is the People's Republic of China, whose state-owned enterprises are granted generous taxpayer-backed financing for purchases they could fund through their own Communist government. Say what you want about China, about U.S.-China relations on trade, about military issues related to China, whatever national security issues we might be concerned about with China, but I don't know many people--in fact, I don't know anyone outside of this town--who think the U.S. Government should be propping up China, should be giving up money for the Export-Import Bank, or otherwise, to China. That is not our job. That is not the role of the U.S. taxpayer, who works hard every day to earn money which then might be sent to a Communist government in China. The reauthorization even includes provisions instructing the Export- Import Bank to pretend it is helping Americans to compete against China at the same time it is sending that very government billions of dollars. Then there is the extension of the Brand USA Act--a 7-year reauthorization of a government-chartered nonprofit Brand USA--to use tens of millions of Federal dollars to advertise for tourism. To top things off, a last-minute tax extender's deal was added to the package late Monday night, diverting billions of dollars on central economic planning and picking winners and losers in the marketplace. Over the next 10 years, this package provides about $2.7 billion in tax benefits through programs that use the Tax Code to incentivize businesses to invest in government-selected neighborhoods, seeking to control the flow of investment instead of relying on the free market to make those decisions, and it includes naked handouts to cronyist special interests. For example, it spends over $2.1 billion for subsidies in the energy sector--not energy generally but to specific winners within the energy industry that this small handful of purported leaders in Congress have decided would benefit from the hard-working taxpayer dollars that would be doled out. The bill, among other things, engages in awarding $113 million for coal production on Indian land, $331 million for facilities to refuel alternative fuel vehicles, and $1.5 billion for biodiesel and renewable diesel tax credits, for instance. As if the Federal Government weren't already mired sufficiently in this area, this bill devotes even more. Beyond these, it hands out $187 million in writeoffs for owners of motor sport entertainment complexes, $18 million in tax breaks for the production of movies and TV shows, and $3 million in tax credits for the purchasers of two-wheeled, plug-in electric vehicles, just to name a few examples. Not only that, but it features new levels of absurdity too. This deal actually includes a special interest bailout to make up for the failures of a faulty pension plan, while, at the same time, authorizing another pension plan to follow in its same footsteps. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for an additional 3 minutes.

Mr. LEE. Congress authorized a group of coal miners' multiemployer pension plans under problematic rules, allowing them to underfund the plans by over 70 percent, but all the while, those pensions still promised their workers full benefits, setting up unreasonable expectations for their return on investment. Inevitably, they have not made up the shortfall, and now the taxpayers are being asked to bail them out. In the very same bill in which we are bailing out the coal miners' pensions, we are authorizing a select group of community newspapers-- not all newspapers and not all media enterprises; just a select group of handpicked community newspapers--to follow the same practice, allowing them, once again, to underfund their workers' pensions while again promising them a full return on benefits. With this bill, we are rubberstamping the expectation that employers are free to raid their workers' promised retirement benefits for their own short-term gain and setting the precedent that the government will reward this bad practice by bailing them out when that inevitably becomes a problem. This bill, however, does include some good measures that I support, like repealing the medical device tax, fixing a tax provision that would unfairly subject churches to more taxes, and making retirement account reforms that allow Americans to access these funds in times of a particular need. Sadly, I, like many of our colleagues, will be forced to vote against these measures because they have been lumped into this massive, stinking package where the only choice we have is a binary one. We have no option to vote for the things we like. This is wrong. There is no finite cap on our ability to debate these things other than the artificial ones we have created rather deliberately within this body, and that is wrong. The thing about these omnibuses is they put us in a take-it-or-leave- it position. We were given no choice but to support or oppose the whole thing, good and bad measures alike. Unfortunately, just like every other episode in this squalid saga--I call this one omnibus 2--this one, too, will come to a predictable, sad, sorry ending. Congress will pass the mess, indulging in a process, substance, and long-term result that are all an affront to the viewers, because at the end of the day, the audience members are real live victims. We can do better. We can, we must, and we will. I yield the floor.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, it has been an honor and privilege to work with my friend and distinguished colleague, the senior Senator from Illinois, on this important project. I have been working on bringing about an end to the arbitrary per country caps put in place on employment-based green cards for nearly the entire 9-year period I have been in the U.S. Senate. At no point has it been an easy process. These are significant and weighty issues, and they require attention. Senator Durbin and I have spent the last couple of months negotiating in good faith with a lot of energy and a lot of time and attention given to the project not only by the two Members involved, Senator Durbin and myself, but also by our very dedicated and devoted staffs who have really put a lot of shoe leather, sweat, blood, and tears into this effort. I am grateful to Senator Durbin for being willing to work with me on this. I have enjoyed working with him over the years on a number of projects, including the passage just about a year ago--almost exactly a year ago--of the FIRST STEP Act. This was the result of a project that Senator Durbin and I had been working on for 8 continuous years up until that point, culminating in a lot of proposals, including things like the Smarter Sentencing Act, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, and, ultimately, the FIRST STEP Act. Like I said, that was passed almost exactly a year ago. At no point in that process was there an easy path forward, an easy path toward victory. Yet he and I remained united in our desire to see something get passed. Senator Durbin and I, along with our staffs, have put a lot of energy and attention into this effort as well to try to bring about a resolution of the problem created by the arbitrary per country caps placed on employment-based immigrant visas. I am very pleased with the outcome of those negotiations. I am very confident that this is something we can get passed into law. He and I are going to continue to work together. I am going to make sure we have the buy-in we need. I want to make sure the cosponsors of the legislation are comfortable with what we have negotiated and that they understand it. To that end, I thank the Senator from Illinois and his staff and also my own staff for working on this. I have every hope, expectation, and confidence that this is going to result in something that can pass-- something I believe that can--and will soon pass with the unanimous support of the Members of this body. Thank you. I yield the floor.