Christopher Murphy

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, Republicans are going to be on the floor today, taking a sudden 100-percent sincere interest in immigration reform. They are going to propose that the Senate take up a handful of bills to address what they call a crisis created by President Biden on our southern border. Forgive me for being blunt, but give me a break. Republicans suddenly care about the border because they don't want to talk about the real crisis that President Donald Trump created and that President Biden is fixing: the COVID crisis and our Nation's economic crisis. Republicans don't want to fix our broken immigration laws. They want to distract Americans from the real story right now, which is the implementation of the very popular American Rescue Plan. There are $1,400 checks that are arriving in people's bank accounts right now. School budgets finally have enough resources to catch up on all of the lost learning for our kids; childhood poverty is about to be cut in half; more production of vaccines. That is the real story. You know how I know the Republicans are less than sincere in this interest in immigration policy? First, because they controlled the Senate for 6 years and not once during the roughly 2,100 days that they were in charge did they try to honestly bring a comprehensive immigration reform proposal to the floor. I checked. Two of the bills they are going to ask unanimous consent for today were brought up for show votes in the middle of the 2016 Presidential election as a means of helping Donald Trump's candidacy, but in neither instance was there actually any attempt to try to find common ground to actually pass something. Go back even further. In 2013, when Democrats were in the Senate, that is when we actually did pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill. But it was Republicans who opposed it--not all, but all of the opposition came from Republicans--and it was the House Republican majority that refused to even consider the bill. That is where it died. So spare me this sudden concern for immigration policy. But since Republicans are now newly concerned about what is happening on the border, it probably makes sense for us to level set the facts. The facts. So here are four of them. The first is a pretty simple one. Republicans will tell you that Joe Biden created this crisis, that his policies are the reason why we have seen an increase in migration to the border. But here is the chart, and I want you to zero in on the end of it. As you can see, apprehensions at the border, which are a pretty decent indication of the number of people who are crossing without documentation, started going up in the middle of 2020 precipitously. All that is occurring now is a continuation of these increases. Apprehensions and crossings at the border didn't start increasing on Inauguration Day; they started increasing back in the middle and end of 2020. So you can't say that this was a creation of Joe Biden's policies if what we are witnessing now is a continuation of a trend that began at the end of last year. In fact, as you can see here, the 10-year high for apprehensions at the border happened right in the middle of the Trump administration--a time during which the President was crowing that his policies at the border were the toughest ever. Here is the second fact. The border is not open, as Republicans falsely claim. Here is what is happening right now on our southern border. Since the pandemic began, the administration invoked something called title 42 that allows, temporarily, during a public health emergency, the Border Patrol to turn everyone back around and send them back into Mexico regardless of whether they have an asylum claim that is legitimate or not. Under law, that is a temporary authority that is only allowed to be used during a public health emergency, and President Trump was using that authority. The problem was that for these kids who were showing up at the border, who had legitimate asylum claims, right, whose lives were in danger in the places they were coming from, when we turned them around and sent them back to the Mexican border, we were essentially leaving them to die. Their parents weren't there. The smugglers who brought them to the United States had already left. This was a disastrous, inhumane, unconscionable policy, to turn these kids back around to the border and leave them to the smugglers, to the sex traffickers with no one to help. So the only change President Biden made was to say that these unaccompanied minors need to be protected; we need to process their asylum claims. But President Biden is still turning around, under title 42 authority, every single adult, every group of adults, and every family who comes to the border, under title 42 authority. The border is not open. All that has changed is that the prior law that was applied before the pandemic began is being applied selectively to unaccompanied minors. Let's be clear. The authority to expel everybody being applied now to everybody except for unaccompanied minors, that is a temporary authority--an authority that Donald Trump didn't even invoke until the pandemic began. Third, it is not even clear that what is happening now is anything other than a natural increase in migration during the winter, combined with the buildup of demand from title 42 enforcement in 2020. The Washington Post data analysts took a look at the recent data on border crossings year to year and month to month, and here is what they said: We looked at data from [the] U.S. Customs and Border Protection to see whether there's a ``crisis''--or even a ``surge,'' as many news outlets have characterized it. We analyzed monthly CBP data from 2012 to now and [we] found no crisis or surge that can be attributed to Biden administration policies. Rather, the current increase in apprehensions fits a predictable pattern of seasonal changes in undocumented immigration combined with a backlog of demand because of 2020's coronavirus border closure. What they are essentially saying is that because of conditions on the ground in Central America and Mexico, you saw an increase in crossings and apprehensions in 2018 and 2019 that vanished only in 2020 because of title 42 authority that is now starting back up again. Again, the data backs this up. This year, from January to February, there was a 28-percent increase in crossings. January to February 2019, there was a 31-percent increase. Go back to 2018; February to March, a 25-percent increase. For the last 3 years, outside of the pandemic environment, during the winter, you will see a routine 25- to 30- percent increase in presentations at the border. This is when people normally cross, during the relatively colder weather months of the winter. Second, these numbers are really deceiving because these aren't unique individuals; this is just total number of apprehensions. So what is happening under title 42 is that adults are being immediately removed right back to Mexico, but then they are immediately attempting to recross. So many of these numbers look high because you have individuals who never got the chance to make an asylum claim who are crossing multiple times at the border. The fourth fact is that there is little evidence that American policy at the border has much to do with migration rates. The evidence, the facts show that it is conditions on the ground in the origin nations that are what determine whether people pack up their homes and leave for America Again, this chart is a good indication of that fact, because Donald Trump would tell you that his policies were tougher than anybody's, but the 10-year high in crossings, apprehensions happened in the middle of Donald Trump's inhumane border policies. Why? Because during this time, conditions are abysmal. Violence is spiking in many places from which these migrants are coming. Just as a matter of sort of further explanation, if we brought this chart back into the Bush administration, you would find that crossings were much higher, at a much higher rate during the Bush administration than at any time during the Obama administration. People come to the United States because they are fleeing violence, they are fleeing economic desperation, not because of some message they get from the U.S. Government. One study I was looking at the other day, a comprehensive study of rationales for crossings data on the times that people cross, says this: [T]ougher border controls have had remarkably little influence on the propensity to migrate illegally. These are the facts. These are the facts. Republicans need to stop looking at immigration as a political opportunity. We need to start dealing with the truth. The number of immigrants showing up at the border today is large, but the winter increase isn't bigger than either of the last two winters prior to the pandemic with respect to percentage increase. It didn't start when Joe Biden became President or because of Joe Biden's policies. The increase started last year, when Donald Trump was President. To the extent that Republicans oppose President Biden's lifting of the title 42 removal proceedings for kids, what is your alternative? Do you support just dumping these kids, these 10- and 11-year-olds, on the other side of the border, scared and alone, and just leaving them to die or to be forced into the arms of drug cartels or traffickers in Northern Mexico? That is un-American, and I am glad my President chose to end that inhumane, temporary policy. But even if President Biden continued title 42 authority for kids for a few more months, expedited removal can't last forever. The law doesn't allow it. So once again, pretty soon, every migrant is going to be able to have the chance to apply for asylum, as they should. And herein lies an opportunity. Let's work together to fix what is a legitimately broken system. I will give an example. People should be able to apply for asylum in the United States. We built this Nation by allowing people to come here from very dangerous places. But the asylum process takes too long-- years between when you present yourself at the border and when you get a final decision on whether you can stay in the United States. Let's fix that. It is within our ability as Members of Congress to fix that. The administration can't do it. They need resources. They need new law and new authorities. Republicans and Democrats could choose to--instead of playing politics, instead of offering up motions today that are sure to lose, we could sit down and try to do something about it. But for 6 years, Republicans had the opportunity to bring together a conversation around comprehensive immigration reform, and they didn't. Hopefully, we will have the opportunity to do that now. Lastly, behind every single one of these individuals coming to the border is a story, is a real human being. Ask yourself, if your child were being recruited into vicious drug gangs with a high likelihood of serious harm or death, would you not take steps to keep your child safe? Would you not bring them to a place like America that was safer for that child? I visited, on Friday, the southwest border. I was in El Paso with a group of bipartisan colleagues and Secretary Mayorkas, who is doing a good job, who is managing this emergency with skill. I met a little girl, about 13 years old, who was in one of these processing facilities waiting to be moved into the asylum process. She was truly scared. She was truly scared. She knew she was going to have a chance to reunite with her family in the United States, but these detention centers--they are better than they were in 2019, but they are no place for kids. That little girl was coming from Guatemala, a place where there are certain neighborhoods that are more violent than any war zone in the Middle East, a place where murder rates eclipse anything we can even imagine in the United States. So that little girl, she needs America to survive, but I would argue that America needs her more because without her and the thousands of other children arriving at our border, hungry for a better life, we are going to risk abandoning the entire original idea of this great, one- of-a-kind Nation, a Nation that opens its arms to those who are fleeing violence and desperation. It is not just our tradition; it is our definition as a country--more reason for those of us in the U.S. Senate to resist the temptation to play politics with these kids' lives and with the very complicated, nuanced, important issue of immigration and instead find ways to be truthful about what is happening at the border as a means to come together and do something about it. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I thank my friend Senator Bennet for those remarks, for honoring the memories of those we have lost and commanding us to action. I remember getting a phone call from Michael Bennet that Friday morning as Senator Blumenthal and I were sitting at a firehouse in Sandy Hook, CT, learning what had happened just around the corner at a schoolhouse. I remember getting advice from Michael Bennet about what you do as an elected official in the midst of this tragedy because he had already been through it once before. Colorado had already been through it more than once before. I think about this macabre club that an increasing number of Members of the Senate and House belong to in which we have this memory bank of what to do when a mass shooting happens in your district or your State--a set of capacities that no Member of the House or Senate, no Governor ever had to think about or ever consider possessing decades ago. Now, we call each other when these things happen to impart advice as to how to be helpful to communities that are grieving. I am thankful to have friends like Senator Bennet, who can be with others at moments like this, but I hate the fact that he knows all too well what communities go through when something happens like happened earlier this week in Boulder. We thought about what to do to try to move this country and our colleagues to action after another spate of mass shootings. This is a really old chart that I brought down to the floor for years. These numbers are out of date, unfortunately, because, well, in 2019, we were losing 100 people a day from gun violence. That is not the number from 2020 or 2021. We have seen a dramatic increase in gun violence. While in 2020 we didn't see the mass shootings that we have been accustomed to in years prior, we are now seeing them once again pop up on our TV screens in 2021. But the lack of mass shootings masked the reality, which was a dramatic increase in the number of people who were felled by guns over the course of last year. We thought about what we could do to try to make more real for our colleagues the scope of this epidemic, and we thought of maybe something simple, you know, to make people understand that these aren't really numbers. The numbers are just a way to explain in aggregate who these people are, because each one of them is an individual. Each one of them led a life. Each one of them had people who loved them. Each one of them loved people. So many of them, you can just see by these snapshots, were young. They had full lives ahead of them, businesses to start, and families to begin. None of that happened for them because they were shot, often at the beginning or the peak of their early life. So tonight I am hopeful that I will be joined by a number of my colleagues to do something simple, just to read into the Record, the permanent Congressional Record, the names of those who have died just in 2021. Every single day, there are over 100 people dying right now. I don't think America has ever seen this rate of gun violence, with the exception of wartime, in our history. While we won't have time to tell you the story of all these people, as Michael did about those whom we lost in Boulder, at least we can make sure that forever their name and a link to their story is in the Congressional Record. Senator Bennet already talked about Lynn Murray and Suzanne Fountain, Teri Leiker, Kevin Mahoney, Tralona Bartkowiak, Rikki Olds, Neven Stanisic, Denny Stong, Jody Waters, and Eric Talley. Those are the victims from Colorado. I am sorry if I didn't get the pronunciations perfectly. But we also lost, over the course of the first 3 months of this year Patrice Lynette Jones in Indiana; Kelvin Darnell from Illinois; Kevon Dickerson from Kentucky; Leah Brooke Hines from Ohio; Linda McMurry in Tennessee; Michael Uttley in Missouri; Jarrea Gardner in Pennsylvania; Robert Randall Turner III from Maryland; Maddox Jones in Georgia; Joseph Jackson in Florida. On Monday, the same day as the shooting, in Boulder, Alessia Mesquita, 28 years old, was shot and killed in New Haven, CT, with her 1-year-old daughter sitting in the back seat of her car. She and her boyfriend were arguing in the car when he shot her to death. According to her mother, Alessia had been trying to leave her boyfriend. Alessia is described as a devoted mother who loved her children with all of her heart. Many of her friends really relied on her for advice and guidance. They said she would give the shirt off her back to help a friend. Her mom said: My heart has been shattered, and I don't think I'm ever going to be right again. She was the second of eight children. She had two children of her own, and her mother will now raise her two grandchildren. Nobody heard about Alessia Mesquita being shot with her daughter in the back seat in New Haven, CT, on Monday. Her life isn't less valuable than any of those who were killed in mass shootings. But this country's attention to the pandemic of gun violence, the epidemic of gun violence, seems to surface only when there is a mass shooting. Benjamin Bagley was shot last week in Bridgeport, CT. He was 22 years old. He was remembered by friends and family as somebody who always kept a smile on the faces of people who loved him. He was a doting father. He was a loving son and brother and always made people smile. His friends wrote: He was taken from us far before his light was fully able to shine its brightest. He was one of six siblings, two brothers and four sisters. He had two children and one on the way. He was born and raised in Bridgeport. He was involved in his church. His mom Michelle Brown said: I had to kiss my son lying in a hospital bed dead. I don't wish this on nobody, not even my worst enemy. This wasn't the first time Benjamin had been shot. He had been previously wounded in a shooting in 2016, but he had recovered. Kevin Jang was 26 years old. About a month and a half ago, in early February, he was killed by gun violence. He had moved to New Haven just 2 years ago to pursue a master's degree at the Yale School of the Environment. He was a west coast native. He had gotten engaged 1 week before his death. He had earned a degree. He was an Army veteran. He was a present Army National Guard member. He was shot outside his fiance's apartment. His fiance said: Kevin was . . . a gift from God. He was a true and righteous man after God's own heart. Life is so precious and short. My only hope is that he is with his Heavenly Father now in perfect peace. ``An extraordinary young man,'' said Yale University's president. I mean, I have a stack of names, 20, 25 per page. We don't have enough time tonight to read into the Record the number of victims of gun violence in 2021 alone--alone. There is Adam Todd Saeed from South Carolina; Andrew Wesley from Ohio; Antonio Rowban Thompson from South Carolina; Artrell Conner, Louisiana; Beau Michael Wasmer, West Virginia; Brittany Wagoner-Moore in Ohio; Byron ``B'' Donnell Ross in Texas; Carolyn Ann Stephenson, North Carolina; Christian Parra, New Jersey; Christopher Bess, Illinois; David Caballero, California; David Prince, Illinois; Dean Wagstaff, Washington; Devin Dawkins, Missouri; Dolores Reyes, California; Eric Thompson, Tennessee; Glorida Dean Eddington Lewis, Ohio; Harold Edward Dennison, West Virginia; Javontae Hendricks, Illinois; Jeffrey Gillespie, Mississippi; Justin Bartley Williams, Texas; Keldrick Love, Louisiana; Kiron Golden, Alabama; Lesean Long, Illinois; Malcolm Fitts, Illinois; Marcel Tramon Pimpton, Texas; Mario Vines, Oklahoma; Melissa Marie Nease, Florida; Nestor Gregorio, Texas; Pedro Arturo Delgado Tagle, Texas; Rene Hernandez, Texas; Robert ``Trey'' Scott III, Indiana; Ryan Abraham Whiteis-Saks, Minnesota; Satnam Singh, Utah; Shamso Gedi-Abdi, Minnesota; Teresa Ratliff, Ohio; Thomas ``TJ'' Carr, Ohio; Timothy Alfred Nelson, Texas; Timothy Dugar Ohio; Tony Nichols, Missouri; Tre'Veon D. Buckner; Victor Zuniga; Xavier Crosby; Adam David-Lawrence Arrambide; Bobby King; Brandon Chunko; Carol Tinsley; Cecilia Apolo; Christian Joseph Jones; Christopher Benton McLeod; Cory McHaffie; Curtis Lee Upshaw; DeAndre Carter; Dominicko Howell; Donnell Hoskin; Grayson Babbs; Jamie Bull. It is two pages. I have 20 more here. My colleagues will hopefully join me on the floor tonight to read some of these names into the Record. This is as astonishing as it is heartbreaking. This country allows for this to happen, allows these individuals to effectively be nameless and to be anonymous. Tonight we are reading into the Record only the names of individuals who died in this year, and the year isn't even 90 days old. How is it that we pay attention during the mass shootings but just sleep through the days in which all of these people are stolen from us through an epidemic that is preventable? This doesn't happen anywhere else in the high-income world. No other nation permits this level of gun violence. Don't tell me it is the price of admission to America. Don't tell me it is not preventable. Don't tell me it is inevitable. It only happens here. It only happens here, and it is really hard to comprehend the impact this has on people. I was in an elementary school in Baltimore, MD, about 2 years ago. I had gone there to see an afterschool program that I had heard was very successful. The school had started about an hour late that day because of a weather delay, and so when I was inside the school, at about 10 o'clock, kids were still just arriving. I went upstairs to join the young lady who ran this program, and we were about a half an hour into our conversation when buzzers started going off, and the lights flickered, and the intercom system lit up with somebody from the central office repeating over and over again: Code green, code green, code green. I didn't know what a code green was. The person I was meeting with, who was just running this afterschool program, didn't know what code green was. Luckily, the front office called up and told us that ``code green'' means there has been an active shooting somewhere in and around the school and that everybody needs to turn the lights off, lock the doors, and shut the blinds. So that is what we did. It was 10:30 in the morning. After about 20 minutes, code green ended, lights turned back on, and we continued our discussion. I was shaken. This is a school I had never set foot in. I had only been there about 20 minutes, and there was an active shooting within a handful of blocks. So I wanted to know what happened. I stayed in touch with personnel at the school. I read the Baltimore papers over the course of the next few days to find out what had happened, and here is what I found out. A young man by the name of Corey Dodd, who lived just down the street from the school, had told his wife--I believe her name is Marissa, if I remember correctly--that he would drop their twins off at Matthew Henson Elementary School that morning. They had two other kids. She was busy with them. He said: I will drop the kids off this morning. So he drove the kids to Matthew Henson Elementary School, the twin girls, and brought them into the building. I could have been in that lobby with him that morning as I was coming in and he was leaving. He got into his car. He drove a few blocks home, and in between his car and the door, he was shot dead--10 o'clock in the morning. His little girl, the youngest, always waited for him at the door when he was arriving. Well, he never showed up to that door because he died that day. And his two little twin girls in that school at the same time that I was there, who might have been giggling as they took a break from instruction and the lights went off, and they got to chat with their friends, didn't know that they were never going to see their father again. Think about it, how the lives of those children change when their dad vanishes from the Earth just like that. Think about how the lives of all the children in that school change when they have to contemplate the fact that their dads might not be home when they arrive next week or the week after, if it could happen to Mr. Dodd. Think about how the entire neighborhood goes through trauma after trauma when that happens so routinely in a place like Baltimore. You can't understand the scope of this epidemic by just reading off these names. Adam Todd Saeed died. Jason Wilson died. Jath Burns died. Johnjairo Brito died. Johnnie Clark died. Jonathan Joseph died. Jose Medero died. Joseph Carney died. Justin Locklear died. Justin Marshall died of gun violence. So did Kristen Slack and Latarous Harris and Lieutenant Justin Bedwell. They all died of gunshot wounds just in 2021, but they simply represent the surface. You scratch just a bit, and you will find their kids and their moms and their dads and their neighbors who are going through trauma right now because of their deaths. Research tells us that often there are 20 people who experience definable trauma when someone close to them dies. And so even the names that we read into the record tonight don't accurately represent the scope of this trauma. Those kids' lives will never ever be the same in Sandtown, the neighborhood of Baltimore in which this elementary school sits, neither will be the lives of those kids who go to that school. And maybe what was so inexplicable to me was that I had to work really hard to find out anything about that young man. It was barely a story the next day that he had died bringing his daughters to school and then returning home. Had there been six more people shot, maybe it would have made the papers. Maybe America would have paid attention. But think of it this way: What if that same story played out not in Baltimore, MD, with an African-American father and African-American girls, what if that story played out in Westport, CT, with a White father and two twin, blond-haired, White girls? Do we care less because Corey was African American? You better believe it. You better believe that headline news would have been running stories about an affluent, White, suburban father dropping his kids off at an affluent, White, suburban school and being shot before he entered his suburban home. We don't care about individual loss of life like we care about the victims of mass shootings. That is a tragedy. We also don't care about the loss of Black life. We don't care about the people of color who die in the same way that we care when White people die in this country. That is just the truth. So, tonight, my colleagues and I are going to come to the floor--and I hope some will join me. I thank Senator Blumenthal for being here to start us off--to read into the Record the names of individuals who have been lost to gun violence in 2021 as a way to make sure we recognize who they were and the lives that they led, but also as a last-gasp effort to try to convince our colleagues to do something. Tonight isn't really going to be the night to go deep into policy. Senator Bennet talked about what we know we need to do. We can have that debate at another time. Tonight is a night to just recognize the scope of this epidemic, how many people are being lost, how many lives are being impacted in mass shootings and in individual acts of violence, in homicides and suicides and domestic violence incidences. And maybe, maybe by pounding into people's brains the human toll of this tragedy in mass shootings and in other forms, we can inch this body a little bit closer to doing the right thing. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I thank my friend Senator Cortez Masto for that powerful testimony, for sharing some of these stories talking about the impact on families in Las Vegas and throughout her State, and to talk about what this means from a parent's perspective, to think that her own family had to wonder whether their loved one was going to come back from that shooting that dominated the news, to think about how many lives were changed. Senator Blumenthal made a really important observation earlier and that was that the numbers we are using here, 39,000 people dying a year, and the names that we are reading into the Record, these are the names of the individuals who have died, but what we know is there are hundreds of thousands of others who have survived gunshot wounds. The trauma is different, but it is still serious and acute. When a loved one is shot, obviously, that comes with a moral disruption to the family that is hard to calculate. Often that injury has lifelong consequences. The individual is bound to a wheelchair, losing the use of legs and arms. These are serious consequences that affect the rest of your life. While today we are reading into the Record the names of those who have died, this stack represents, I think, just a fraction of those who have died in 2021. It could be four times as high if we had talked about those who have been injured in episodes of gun violence. Other colleagues are going to join us here tonight on the floor. While they do, let me just read into the Record a handful of additional names: Carlesa Taylor; Cleveland Sanders; Cortney Smith, Missouri; Corporal Martinus Mitchum from Louisiana; Daniel Bonham from Georgia; Darrell Merriwether from Iowa; Devon Lon Remmel from Minnesota; Diontaye Petty from Kentucky; Gregory Marchand from Missouri; Gwendolyn McMillan from Georgia; Irvinn Villalba from New Mexico; Jakob Lee Haines from Pennsylvania; Jonatan Jose Martinez, Pennsylvania; Julian Castro, Illinois; Julie Lee Karvelis, Mississippi; Keith Hawkins, Arkansas; Lee Patrick David, West Virginia; Manyari Smith, Illinois; Mario Turner, Illinois; Marquise Jones, Louisiana; Nazeer Defares, California; Nicolette Sheridan Law, Pennsylvania; Officer Dominic Jared Winum, Virginia; Peter Vanvallis, Montana; Qualil Terrion Young, Texas; Raymond William Nieman, Kansas; Reginald Copning, Louisiana; Reginald James, California; Robert Bigger, Illinois. I am sure some cynical viewer tonight may listen to a name they recognize on this list and say: Oh, well, wait a second. I know that guy. He had a criminal record. That individual was involved with some bad people. There is never a justification for a gun homicide. No matter whether the individuals on these lists were perfect angels or individuals who had made mistakes, none of them deserved to die in an episode of vigilante or random justice. So to answer a hypothetical question, I haven't vetted the names that I am reading because not a single person on this list deserved to go in the way that they did. I remember talking to a woman who has become a friend in Hartford, CT. She lost her son just about a month before Sandy Hook. She remembers when Sandy Hook happened that she latched onto the number of children who were killed. Twenty kids were killed that day in Sandy Hook. I asked Senator Bennet were there survivors from the shooting in the supermarket in Boulder, and he said he had to check, and I will check as well, but he wasn't sure that there were individuals who were seriously injured. If that is the case, there are parallels to Sandy Hook. The weapons that are being used in these crimes are so lethal, so powerful that, increasingly, it is hard to survive wounds when a bullet enters your body at the speed that bullets are traveling when they come from an AR-15 or AR-15-style weapon as was used in Sandy Hook. In Sandy Hook, 20 kids were shot. All 20 of them died. The number 20 wa meaningful to my friend because her son was 20 years old when he was killed on October 20 of 2012, the year of Sandy Hook. He was killed by a 20-year-old, and he was the 20th victim of gun violence that year in Hartford, CT. She told this story about what her life was like after her son was killed, after Shane was killed. She said that first she just didn't want to leave the house ever. She didn't want to see anybody. She would always walk down the street to the corner bodega to pick up groceries. I think it was only a block or so away. She came to driving there so there was no chance that she would have to meet people she knew along the way. Her life became fundamentally different. Her life ended, as she described it, in so many ways when her only son disappeared from the Earth. She talked about this strange habit that came to dominate some of her evenings. She would get up in the middle of the night and she would get in her car and she would drive to the site where Shane was shot. Shane was shot about two blocks from my house where I live in Hartford, CT. I drive by the site of Shane's shooting almost every day when I am going back to our home. She would drive to that site. She would stop her car, and she would turn on her high beams as if she were waiting for Shane to show up, as if she were waiting for him to come back. She knew he never was, but this became a habit. It just speaks to this immense, incalculable trauma that families go through when they lose a loved one, a trauma that you can't truly understand. In Sandy Hook, one mother adopted another curious but understandable habit in the years after Sandy Hook. She would, during an afternoon on a Saturday or a Sunday, convince herself that her son who had been killed in Sandy Hook was at a friend's house. She would sort of create this fantasy, this fiction in her mind. She would find it a little bit easier to go about cleaning up the house or doing laundry or playing with her other children if, in her mind, she could pretend just for a half hour or an hour that her son was safe at a friend's house. She was successful in contorting her mind to give her that space for that short period of time. It is what she needed to do. It is something that you never ever want to have to contemplate, creating these fictions in your minds to allow you to survive just for an hour at a time, shining bright lights on an empty space near downtown Hartford, thinking maybe that your son will show up. These are contortions of action and thinking that nobody should have to deal with. Roshawn Tate from California; Shana Lynn Williams from North Carolina; Stanley Taylor from Missouri; Ty'Reece Thomas from Mississippi; Tyrone Brown from Ohio; Tyrone Gregory from Ohio; Anthony Collins from Georgia; Anthony Milian from Indiana; Antoine Jamil Johnson from Missouri; Brad Rumfield from Texas; Brittany Dawn Scruggs from Texas; Bryan Fundora, Kentucky; Carlesa Taylor, Michigan; Curtis Smith, Oregon; Dae'Vion Pullum, Indiana; Detraio Deshawn Whorton, Alabama; Enelrae Collier Rubenstahl, North Carolina; James Delgiorno, Florida; Jessica Morehouse, Missouri; Jordan Reen, New York; Joseph Marwan Brown, Michigan; Jovanne Hollman, California; Kevin Neal, Georgia; Kimberly Marcum, Ohio; Lentavius Cortez Hall, Louisiana; Leonne Kellam, Delaware; Lovelle Laramore, New Jersey; Luis Rafael Lopez, Arizona; Michael Vines, Michigan. I apologize if I am mispronouncing some of these names. I am seeing many of them for the first time. But it is important for us to read these names into the Record so that at least they live in that space because the numbers aren't moving our colleagues to action. So far this year, just 2021, there have been 9,649 gun-related deaths. These include homicides and murders, accidental shootings, and suicides. Some people take issue with the fact that when we talk about the gun violence epidemic, that we are including suicides in these numbers. There have been thousands of suicides in the United States this year, but it is important that we talk about these deaths together. Again, this evening is not going to be a time to go deep into the question of policy change, but when you do start to explore interventions and causes, you will find that many of the same causes for homicides cause suicides as well. For instance, there is a very clear correlation between poverty and gun homicide. There is a very clear correlation between poverty and your risk of suicide. There is a clear correlation between the ease of access to a firearm and homicide as there is to suicide. In States that have universal background checks, there are generally lower rates of homicide and there are generally lower rates of suicide as well. We talk about suicides together. People are paying attention today to this epidemic because of what has happened in Atlanta and what has happened in Colorado. I understand why we pay more attention to mass shootings. There is something unique and frightening about large-scale, indiscriminate slaughter. But mass shootings are just not those incidences where 10 people die; there are mass shootings where 3 or 4 people are shot. That is still a significant crime. So far, this year, there have been 104 of those. There have been 104 mass shootings this year. You didn't know that, right? You thought there was just Atlanta and Boulder. No, not true. There have been 104 mass shootings. I believe most times mass shootings are defined as when four or more people are shot at the same time, not necessarily killed but shot. There have been 104 mass shootings this year and 191 deaths and injuries of children aged 11 and younger. Think about that. In this year alone, almost 200 kids, aged 11 and younger, have been killed and 128 deaths and injuries of teenagers, aged 12 to 17. In May 2020--think about this--there were 61 mass shootings. Now, in May 2020, we were emotionally focused on the pandemic, and we were focused on trying to get people well. The country was not talking about gun violence in the way it normally would if there were 61 mass shooting in 1 month. That is the highest monthly total ever tallied by the Gun Violence Archive, which is a nonprofit research group where a lot of our data and names come from. They began tracking data in 2013. Since they have been tracking the data, May 2020 was the highest number of mass shootings, but you didn't hear about it because most of those mass shootings were of 4 or 5 or 6 people, not of 20 or 30 or 40, and, honestly, many of those mass shootings were likely people of color, which don't get as much attention either. Mushab Mohamud Ali, Minnesota; Rasaan Mack, Illinois; RoCoby Rodgers, Missouri; Roxann Martinez, Colorado; Samuel Lee Pollard, Mississippi; Steve Alphonso, North Carolina; Terrance Armour, Michigan; Timothy Swope, Illinois; Windy Lee Higgins, Florida; Xzavior Frost, Oklahoma; Anne-Marie Winters Wilson, Georgia; Audrey Isham, Indiana; Cameron Watkins, Virginia. I am not even close to the 9,649 gun-related deaths in 2021 alone. I am glad to be joined on the floor by my colleague Senator Klobuchar, to whom I will yield in a moment. I want to thank her for being a real steadfast partner in these efforts and, in particular, on focusing, as she has, on the crime of domestic violence. Senator Klobuchar, earlier this evening, I was describing a murder in New Haven, CT, that happened on the same day as Colorado's, in which a young woman was sitting in a car with her boyfriend and with her 1- year-old in the backseat. They were in an argument, and she was trying to leave him, and she shot him while in the car with the child in the backseat. I was talking about how little attention that got in Connecticut, never mind in the country, in how we pay attention to these mass shootings--and for good reason--and how every one of these individuals has a story attached to them. She was someone her friends relied on for counsel and for moral support, and it is how that death initiates so many other traumas. I was honored to be able to read her name into the Record tonight. She is one of many who will now find their names in the Congressional Record so that, at the very least, the Record of our proceedings will remember her life and think about what could have been had we not been so cavalier with her life and her safety through our inaction. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I now ask for a second reading, and in order to place the bill on the calendar under the provisions of rule XIV, I object to my own request.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I understand that there is a bill at the desk, and I ask for its first reading.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I was presiding on Tuesday. Sometimes my staff will give me a folder of things to review while I am presiding, and often they will be upset when I come back having not reviewed what they have given me. The reason for that is simple: When there are Members speaking before the body, I am, frankly, very interested to listen and to hear what our colleagues have to say. We don't do enough of that in this place. We are so busy during the day, we don't spend a lot of time on the Senate floor. We might have the floor on on our TV in our office, but we are not always paying attention to what our colleagues have to say. One of the benefits of being able to preside is that you do get to listen to the arguments that are being made right here on the floor. In the hour or so that I was presiding on Tuesday, I got to hear about four or five of my Republican colleagues come down in sequence to make their case as to why they would be voting against the American Rescue Plan, and so I got to hear a number of themes being developed. I don't think coincidentally a number of arguments were made repeatedly by many of our friends on the Republican side of the aisle, and so I decided it might be worthwhile to just spend a few minutes talking about the claims that are made about this bill by Republicans, the reasons why they are voting against it, and to talk about how some of these arguments may be a little bit more disingenuous than we might like. The first thing that I heard was that this bill was just too expensive. It is $1.9 trillion. That is a lot of money, no doubt, but this country has never ever faced a healthcare crisis or an economic crisis like we do today. This is an unprecedented moment in our Nation's history, and it requires us to step up and do something that isn't just going to sound like it will work and help people but actually will. What is, I guess, to me ironic about this claim that it is too expensive, that it is going to cost our kids and grandkids too much money, is that Republicans passed a tax bill that was almost to the dollar the exact same amount as this relief bill is. They passed a $1.9 trillion tax bill where the majority of the benefits went to the richest Americans who needed no more help. There was no crisis in 2017 amongst American millionaires and billionaires. Yet Republicans were very willing to draw down $1.9 trillion in debt-financed tax cuts; $1.3 trillion in corporate tax cuts; $83 billion to let heirs of huge mega- estates be able to inherit more money without taxation; $435 billion tax cut for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. So it is a little hard to listen to my Republican colleagues claim that this bill is too expensive when they were willing to spend the exact same amount of money in 2017 on tax cuts for their wealthy corporate and millionaire friends. It is also hard to listen to this argument because just a year ago, Republicans were willing to spend $1.9 trillion to address this crisis. It isn't as if Republicans haven't understood, when they were in control of the White House and the Congress, that we needed to step up and meet this moment. Republicans have said: Well, this is different because we are turning the corner. Well, as Senator Durbin laid out very well, we may be able to see the corner, but we are not there yet. March 24 was the day that we passed the CARES Act--almost the same amount of money as we are considering today. On that day, 737 people died of COVID-19. Yesterday, 2,369 people died of COVID-19. So in many ways, the crisis today is exponentially worse than it was a year ago when Republicans, to a person, were willing to spend $2 trillion on the crisis. Now, all of a sudden, when Democrats are in charge of the White House, when a Democratic majority leader sits here in the U.S. Senate, $1.9 trillion is too much money to spend on a crisis that is taking on a daily basis three to four times as many lives as it did when we spent this money a year ago. By the way, the economic crisis is still acute. There may be technically more people at work today than there were in April or May of last year, but surveys suggest today 80 percent of Americans don't have enough money to pay their bills. Why? Because a lot of people are back to work, but they are working fewer hours, right? They have less reliable work. So there is still a crisis that exists amongst 80 percent of Americans today. This is no less than the crisis that existed in 2017. Here is the second critique that is made over and over about this bill: It is a partisan bill, Republicans say. Well, that is a complaint of Republicans' own making because it is only a partisan bill in the U.S. Senate. Three out of four voters support the American Rescue Plan. This is a recent Morning Consult poll. It has been referred to before on the floor. Seventy percent of all voters support the American Rescue Plan. Not surprisingly, there is some difference between Democrats and Republicans but, frankly, not much. Ninety percent of Democrats support the American Rescue Plan, and 60 percent of Republicans support the American Rescue Plan. Why? Because everybody is hurting in this country. Everybody is hurting. Republicans and Democrats need an extension of unemployment benefits. Republicans and Democrats both want cash payments. Republicans and Democrats know that their kids can't get what they need in schools without additional support. This is a unifying proposal in the American public. President Biden made a commitment to govern in a way that unified the country. He has done that. He has proposed a bill that has the broad support of Republicans and Democrats. I don't know that it is his fault that it can't draw Republican support in Congress despite the fact that it draws Republican support from the public. Finally, this was maybe the most interesting theme of the complaints: It is not COVID relief. I have heard different statistics thrown out by my Republican friends. Some of them suggest that only 5 percent of this bill is COVID relief. I am not sure exactly how they come to that calculation, but what I understand them to say is that anything that isn't directly related to putting shots in people's arms or treating people with present cases of COVID is not COVID relief. Well, let's just take a look at what was broadly part of the CARES Act that was supported by every single Republican and what is broadly part of the American Rescue Plan, because my Republican colleagues thought that everything in the CARES Act was COVID relief, whether it was designed to immediately attack the healthcare crisis or whether it was designed to address the economic crisis. There were stimulus checks in the CARES Act--not as big as the ones in the American Rescue Plan, but they were COVID relief when we passed the CARES Act. Now, according to Republicans, they are not COVID relief. There was an unemployment extension and a plus-up in the maximum benefit under the CARES Act. That was COVID relief back in March of last year, but now, according to Republicans, it is not COVID relief. There was money for vaccines and for testing in the CARES Act. In the American Rescue Plan, there is money for vaccines and testing. Small business relief was, of course, conceived in the CARES Act, the PPP program. That is a big part of the American Rescue Plan, but now it is not COVID relief, according to my Republican colleagues, whereas it was last year. There was State and local funding in the CARES Act. There is State and local funding in the American Rescue Plan. There was rent and mortgage relief in the CARES Act. There is rent and mortgage relief in the American Rescue Plan. All of a sudden, since Democrats took control of the White House and took control of the Senate, all of these things, which were categorized as COVID relief by Republicans in March, are no longer COVID. You are just supposed to think of these as extras, as Democratic priorities. Ninety percent--ninety-five percent of what is in the package we are voting on today is simply an extension of the same set of funding streams that we authorized in a bipartisan way a year ago. And so this idea that this is some Democratic wish list, when we are essentially just extending or increasing the same funding streams that were in the CARES Act, is nonsense. It is nonsense. Of course, this is all COVID relief. Of course, it is COVID relief when you are increasing nutritional benefits to people who can't afford to feed their kids because they have lost their job or they have lost hours because the economy melted down due to a pandemic. That is not, all of a sudden, not COVID relief today. This one is maybe the most bizarre of Republican claims. This bill is expensive, but it is not too expensive. This moment is unique, and we are mandated by our oath of office to meet this moment. Republicans didn't have a problem spending $1.9 trillion to give tax breaks to their wealthy friends. I don't know why they, all of a sudden, have a problem putting money in the pockets of hard-working Americans who are suffering through the worst healthcare crisis this country has seen in a century. Republicans say this is a partisan bill. Out there in America, guess what--it is not. It is not. Republicans and Democrats support this because it is full of commonsense ideas that make a lot of sense to people, no matter what their political ideology is outside of Washington. Republicans say this bill isn't COVID relief but a Democratic progressive wish list. No, it is simply an extension of the things that were bipartisan priorities last year. We thought they were good ideas then. We think they are good ideas now, especially given the fact that four times as many people are dying today as were dying in March of 2020, when we passed the first bipartisan CARES Act, and as the economy today is in just as dire straits as it was. I hope we are turning the corner. I hope we get vaccines into the arms of individuals such that we are soon back to the numbers of deaths per day that we saw in March of last year. I hope that we are on a road again to full employment. But I am confident that none of that can happen unless we make this investment in COVID relief and in economic relief. It is an obligation as stewards of the economy and the welfare of the American people for us to step up to the plate and get this done this week. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I come to the floor to echo Chairwoman Murray's comments, to suggest and commend to my colleagues the nomination of Miguel Cardona to be the next Secretary of Education. There is no one better suited for this job in this moment than Miguel Cardona, and I couldn't be more excited on behalf of my constituents, on behalf of the people of Meriden, CT, to be here on the floor to tell you just a little bit about why Miguel Cardona makes so much sense for this moment. As Senator Murray laid it out for us, this is obviously a moment of crisis in American education. Kids have been distance learning or in and out of classroom settings for the last year. We have had so many children fall behind, especially those with learning needs. We have a lot of kids in crisis. For a lot of kids, home is not a safe place. There is trauma today amongst America's children, and our education system is going to have to bear a lot of the brunt of making sure that these kids are taken care of. We have a crisis in higher education without students in the classroom, without sources of revenue flowing into institutions of higher learning. We need to make sure that we don't lose classroom slots in colleges and universities, which, of course, is the only thing that allows us to be able to see a bright economic future for our country--expanding access to higher education. Miguel is made for this moment because he knows how important college is. He was the first member of his family to complete college. He knows how important community is. He came right back to his community of Meriden after completing college and went to work serving his community by taking a job teaching fourth grade in Meriden. He proved early on that he would go above and beyond the call when it came to the needs of his students. He was a teacher at Israel Putnam Elementary School, room 160. If his kids didn't have what they needed, Miguel would reach into his pockets to make sure they had it. One year, he spent $450 of his own money--money that he probably didn't have as a first- or second-year teacher--to make sure every kid in his classroom had a notebook, a writer's handbook, and a box of crayons. One student told the story of a classmate who moved back to Puerto Rico and of Miguel's organizing a packet of letters from all of his classmates to be sent to him so that he could still have a connection back to Meriden. He was such an amazing teacher that he was promoted just after a few years in the classroom. He was actually Connecticut's youngest principal when, at age 28, he took over Hanover. Soon thereafter, he was promoted to help run the city's school district, and he was promoted again to be the commissioner of education in Connecticut. It has been his work over the last year that, I think, caught the attention of educational policy leaders and advocates all across the country because Connecticut was one of the first States to reopen its schools. We did it through a consensus-building exercise that Commissioner Cardona led. He brought together students and parents, administrators, teachers, and teachers unions to come up with a plan to safely reopen our schools. Connecticut reopened our schools faster than many people thought we could, ahead of the curve nationally. He was able to do that because consensus building is a skill that Miguel Cardona has been working on for a very long time. In 2013, one of his jobs, while he was helping to lead the Meriden school system, was to implement a new teacher evaluation system. You know this can always be very, very controversial, a new system evaluating teachers' performances, but he brought everybody to the table and developed a model that became used statewide. His model and his consensus approach became the standard in our State. He is the Secretary of Education we need right now--somebody who has experience in our classrooms, somebody who knows the value of college, especially to first-generation college families, and somebody who knows how to bring people together. This is an incredibly important moment for America's educational system. We need to maintain and expand our commitment to equity in our K-12 system to make sure that every single kid--no matter the level of income, no matter the ethnic background, no matter the race, no matter if one is disabled or not--gets a quality education. This is a moment to invest in accountability in higher education and make sure that we are not wasting taxpayer dollars funding programs and degrees that don't work, that may make money for for-profit investors but that don't end up in skill sets that are going to power our economy. Miguel Cardona is the right person to meet this moment. He is whip-smart. He is a consensus builder. He is a passionate advocate for kids and for teachers and for parents. He is the perfect person for this job and for this moment. Lastly, let me just share with you how I got to know Miguel Cardona, which, maybe, will serve as a final advertisement for his unique qualifications. This was my old congressional district, and Meriden was part and is still part of the Fifth Congressional District. One of the biggest weekends in Meriden has become the Puerto Rican Heritage Festival, but that festival had sort of hit hard times. It was a decade ago when, maybe, only a couple hundred people came to it until the Cardona family took it over. Miguel Cardona and his family took over the Puerto Rican Heritage Festival in Meriden, CT. Today, 6,000 or 7,000 people come to this festival. You can find Miguel Cardona, on that weekend, every hour of each day of the festival, driving around on his golf cart, organizing bus transportation, working on the entertainment acts, and making sure that Meriden is able, on that weekend, to be able to celebrate its Puerto Rican heritage but then to offer something really constructive, really fun, and really empowering for the community. Even as commissioner of education, it wasn't beyond him or above him to invest in his community in that way. It is, I hope, an indication of who he is and whom he will remain if the Senate chooses to confirm him into this role, as I hope we will do with a big bipartisan vote today. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY. I ask unanimous consent to complete my remarks before the vote.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am here today to speak in favor of the underlying resolution and urge my colleagues to support it. I will be very brief. I would like to tackle three topics, amongst many, in this package. I would like to talk a bit about the crisis that stands ahead of us with respect to summer learning and summer programming for kids all across this country. I would like to talk a little bit about the importance of expediting the pace of vaccinations and then, lastly, about the global fight that lies ahead of us to make sure that we are building a pandemic response infrastructure around the world that makes sure this never, ever happens again. Before delving into those three topics, let me just say that we have an opportunity to pass programming to meet this moment that is wildly popular. There was a poll out yesterday that suggests that many of the most important programming in this package enjoy 70 percent support amongst the public. The relief checks, which will total $2,000--$600 from last year, $1,400 in this package--have 74 percent support among the American public. Only 13 percent of Americans oppose those checks. Increased Federal funding for vaccinations--69 percent favor that increased funding; 17 percent oppose it. Those are difficult numbers to get on any major area of policy in the United States today. To have 74 percent in favor of anything is pretty impressive. But it speaks to the moment. It speaks to the expectations that Americans have. But it also speaks to the fact that there is unity in the American public about what we need to do. President Biden rightly talked about unifying the country around an agenda to build back this country better, and these polling numbers show that he has done that because you don't get to 74 percent support for an initiative without a whole bunch of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans supporting that measure. So we hope--we want to get to a place where we have bipartisan support in the Senate, but we know we have bipartisan support for this agenda out in the American public. These polling numbers and polling numbers to come will prove that. The reason is that the crises we are trying to address don't really care what your politics are. Let me talk about these three distinct areas. First, I want to talk about what is happening in our schools. Others have done that in a far more articulate way, so I want to drill down specifically on what is going to happen this summer. Schools are in crisis right now. I know that because I have two kids in public school--in a big, urban public school. They haven't been back in the classroom at all. They have continued to learn from home the entire time. But they have all the support that they need around them-- two loving parents who are willing and able to help in any way that we can. Not every child has that. So schools have been scrambling just to make sure that they are doing instruction right, that they are opening schools safely, that they are building support systems around students. But come this summer, you are going to have all sorts of kids who aren't going to have programming ready for them, aren't going to have a safe place to go, and are going to have tremendous amounts of learning loss. You are also going to have kids who are in need of a really healthy, safe place to be this summer. Some kids will need deep academic experience, but others kids are just going to need some emotional growth, are going to need something fun to do so that they have the ability to restart and be ready to reenter what will, hopefully, be a much more normal-looking classroom. In this bill is over $100 billion for schools, to support the safe reopening of schools. And what we do in this plan that the President is proposing to us is to allow for some of that money to be used for summer programming. I am going to make a pitch to have a set-aside, a portion of money dedicated to summer programming. But what we all agree on--those of us who support this package--is that the challenge ahead of us is not just how we keep schools open and open those that have had their doors closed, but what we do to support kids for 12 months of the year, not just 9 months of the year. This is going to be a tough summer for a lot of kids, and we have to have a specific focus--as this plan does--on meaningful summer programming for kids--programming that is emotionally healthy, that addresses some of this learning loss. In a typical year, middle-class kids--kids with families that have some means--are five times as likely as those living in poverty to attend a summer camp, twice as likely to visit a museum or go to a performance. We can't allow for that disparity to be present this summer, not this summer. We have to have funding in this bill. We have to pass funding through Congress to make sure that every kid in thi country, especially kids coming from limited-means backgrounds, can get into quality summer programming. This summer we have to make that promise to them. Second, let me talk about vaccines. I know my colleague from Connecticut is going to talk about this as well. We did well this past week. There were 1.36 million doses administered. I say ``well'' because that is 20 percent more than we did the following week, but it is not good enough. In this plan from President Biden is $10 billion to operationalize the Defense Production Act. Senator Baldwin and I have been working on this issue for the better part of a year. If you want to produce more vaccine, if you want to produce more testing equipment, more PPE, then you have to organize America's industrial base better than what was happening under the Trump administration. You have to go out and find every potential manufacturing partner who can help Pfizer and Moderna and Johnson & Johnson and any vaccine maker that comes after them be able to make more and make it faster. We are standing up capacity in Connecticut. We are doing well--No. 3 nationally in terms of the percentage of shots that we get into people's arms--but we can do a lot more. We just need that production to be ramped up. In this bill is specific money to operationalize the Defense Production Act so that we can make more vaccines. That is one of the most important parts of this bill. Finally, I wanted to talk about the global challenge that we have ahead of us. This virus didn't start in the United States. But, man, it moved quick--from a wet market in China to the west coast of the United States to today, with 400,000 lives having been lost. And the question is: Why? Why was this virus able to move so quickly? Why weren't we able to contain it? Why didn't we learn more about it earlier? Why wasn't the world ready for this moment? Now, China has a lot to answer for. But, frankly, the whole world has to understand that we didn't allocate resources properly. The United States didn't allocate resources properly. We spent, last year, $740 billion on hardware for the Department of Defense and $12 billion on global public health. Nobody today, living in the United States, would tell you that that was the correct allocation. So inside President Biden's package is funding to start to rebuild the global pandemic prevention infrastructure. I won't go into the details of how we do that today, but there are estimates suggesting that we are going to need over $20 billion globally in order to stand up greater capacities. That means more resources at a reformed WHO. That means more U.S. diplomats who are working in the public health space. That means doing partnerships with developing nations in which we put some money on the table in exchange for public health reform so that they can strengthen their own systems of pandemic detection and prevention. But even if you drive this thing down in the United States, so long as there are outbreaks that exist on the other side of the world, we are still at risk. And there may come along a virus down the road that is even more contagious, that spreads even faster than this one, so shame on us if we don't, at the same time, lock down this virus domestically and set up a system of defense internationally to make sure that we are ready for the next one. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. And President Biden's focus on rebuilding our alliances comes at the right time because we are not going to be able to do this by ourselves. We have to meet the moment. We can't go small right now. The problems are too big. Senator Blumenthal and I have spent lots of time at food banks in Connecticut. We have never, ever seen the desperate need that exists today in our State. Shame on us if we don't use the power that has been granted us to both take on this virus and deliver economic prosperity to people who have had it robbed from them through no fault of their own. I urge my colleagues' support for the budget resolution. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, rightfully, when we talk about the issue of gun violence in this country, we think about it through the prism of those lives that have been lost because the numbers are just stunning. They are hard to get your head wrapped around. Here are the rough numbers in front of me. On an average year, we have 39,000 people who lose their lives through a gunshot wound. That is a suicide, a homicide, an accidental shooting, domestic violence crimes. If you break it down, that is around 100 people a day, and there is no other high-income nation in the world that comes anywhere close. We talk about the issue of gun violence through the prism of people whose lives have been lost because it is so morally disrupting, cataclysmic, when you have a loved one--normally, a young loved one, a brother or sister, a child--who is there one instant and then gone the next because of a random shooting. I always get drawn back to the people whom I have been lucky enough to have had access to and friendships with in Connecticut. One of them is Janet Rice. Janet lost her son Shane, who was 20 at the time, to a gunshot wound back in 2012. It was actually only a month and a half before the Sandy Hook shooting. Shane was just selling a car to some acquaintances, and the conversation went off the rails. There was some pushing and shoving. There was a gun fired, and Shane was dead. It is really hard for Janet to describe how her life changed. She talks a lot about in those early months and years really not being able to even leave the house. She would drive a couple of blocks to the corner grocery store because she just didn't want to walk down the street and encounter friends and have to talk about what happened. She had this habit of waking up in th middle of the night and driving her car down to where Shane was shot, which is only about two blocks from where I live in Hartford. She would arrive there in the middle of the night, she would pull up in the parking lot, and she would turn on her high beams, half expecting that Shane was going to show up. Her life is fundamentally different today than it was when Shane was in her life. And I have no idea what it is like to lose a child. I have no idea what it is like to lose a loved one to gun violence. But we talk about it in these terms because it is absolutely catastrophic when you lose somebody that way. This week, though, is Gun Violence Survivors Week. This week we focus on those who survived gunshot wounds, and I think I hate to tell you this, but the numbers are much worse. More people survive gunshot wounds than are killed by gunshot wounds, and that wound can change your life as well. It can inflict you with physical pain that you can never get over, render you unable to walk, and in our colleague Gabby Giffords' case, almost unable to speak. But it can also inflict you with an ongoing, cascading trauma from which you may never recover. James Harris was shot in Hartford in 2018. He was shot while he and another friend were just hanging out in the hallway of the friend's apartment building, when a man showed up and shot James and his friend. The man was charged with a whole bunch of things, including possession of an illegal firearm. But they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. His friend lost his life. James survived and, to this day, he experiences post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic pain, and mental health challenges that I don't think anybody in this Chamber can get their head wrapped around. Tyrek Marquez was shot in the head a decade earlier, in Hartford, when Tyrek was 7 years old, following a West Indian Day parade in Hartford in the summer of 2008. Guess what. The three shooters who were arrested were all found to have illegal firearms. One of the guns they found in the perpetuation of that crime had been used in 14 other crimes. It is a decade later, and Tyrek remains partially paralyzed on the left side of his body. But he is part of the anti-gun violence movement. He survived, and he wants to make sure that this never happens to anybody ever again. ``You've got to overcome obstacles and that's what I have been'' able to do, he says. There are 100 people a day who die from guns, but there are just as many who survive gunshot wounds, and they are now demanding that something change. Right now, as we debate a COVID relief package, our focus, rightfully, is squarely on trying to reverse the disturbing trend of this virus expanding all across this country and righting the economic ship of this country. But not coincidental to the pandemic and the economic meltdown, we saw a dramatic increase in homicides. Some cities reported 40, 50 percent increases in homicides in 2020 versus 2019. You saw record numbers of gun sales. Those two things are not coincidental. And those are just the reportable gun sales. Likely, we saw a dramatic spike in illegal gun transfers as well. More weapons equals more gun crimes in this country. And so knowing that 20, 30 percent of guns get transferred outside of the legal system, knowing that, as in the case of Tyrek and James, it was illegal guns that ended up being used to shoot them, as it was for Shane Oliver in Hartford--that mother I talked about, Janet Rice; Shane was killed with an illegal gun--to honor Gun Violence Survivors Week, we have to make a plan this year. We have to make a plan to work on an issue that can bring us all together. I hope that Republicans join us in voting for COVID relief funding. The things in President Biden's package are supported by 70 percent of the American public. That is impressive. It is really hard to get the American public to agree on anything at a 70-percent rate. They have actually done polling on things like kittens and baseball and grandmas, and it is hard to get 70 percent support for that stuff. So on Joe Biden's agenda, boy, it must be pretty popular to get 70 percent of the American public supporting it. Universal background checks, requiring that everybody have to prove you are not a criminal or seriously mentally ill before you buy a gun-- that has 90 to 95 percent support. Think about that. That means that the vast majority of gun owners, of NRA members, of Republicans, Democrats, Independents, all support universal background checks. It is something that this body can come together on. And just like in Tyrek and James's case, every single day we are presented with evidence of what happens when we let these illegal guns flow on to our streets. In Pennsylvania, a man purchased two handguns advertised in a classified ad. He used those guns to kill a person and wound seven others inside a psychiatric institute. He had failed a background check at a gun store just a few months prior. In Illinois, a man killed a Chicago police commander with a gun he purchased online. He was prohibited from buying a gun because he had a restraining order. Wisconsin, a man killed his wife and two other women and wounded four others with a gun that he purchased outside the background system. Why? Because he was prohibited from purchasing a gun because of a domestic violence restraining order. In Texas, a man killed 7 people and injured 22 others after being fired from his job. He had failed a background check but was able to find an unlicensed seller. I can go on. Over and over and over again, the victims of gun violence are very often put at risk and put in harm's way because there are so many guns being sold illegally or so many guns being sold legally to people who shouldn't have them, like people with serious, violent criminal records and people who have been arrested for things like domestic violence. So, right now, our priority has to be COVID relief, but as we take part this week in Gun Violence Survivors Week, we have to recognize that the status quo is not acceptable and that there is something fundamentally wrong with democracy if a public policy measure can enjoy 90 percent support amongst the American public, and it can't get passed through the representative bodies that are assembled in the Nation's Capitol. Thirty-nine thousand people die every year. More are injured and survive. And we owe them, in 2021, to pass legislation that finally starts putting these trajectories downward. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MURPHY

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

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, this is a screen shot from a video taken during a school field trip on August 9, 2018. These are Yemeni schoolchildren going to school in a northern governorate inside the country, and they are on their way either to or back from a picnic that they were having with their classmates. As you can see, they are schoolchildren of elementary age--around 8, 9, 10 years old. They don't look any different than what school children here in the United States would look like on their way to a fun-filled school field trip. There is a little boy catching a little nap somehow amidst all of the den of the rest of his classmates so excited. They are excited because there isn't and there wasn't a lot of fun to be had for schoolchildren in Yemen today or in 2018. A civil war still plagues that country and plagues Yemeni children who are too often facing starvation and disease, but on this day, there was fun to be had. This is that schoolbus hours later. Forty children died when a U.S.- made bomb dropped from the sky and hit this schoolbus. Not every child on that bus died, miraculously, but 40 children on the bus and around the bus did. It was a war crime. The Saudis, in the aftermath of the incident, defended it saying that it was a legal action. They were targeting enemy leaders who were responsible for recruiting and training young children. They hit a schoolbus in the middle of the day, right next to a crowded marketplace. It wasn't on a lonely road. It was in a crowded area. It is why not only people on the bus died, but children and families surrounding the bus died as well. This was a military strike done, in part, as part of a coalition campaign of which the United States is a member. It is not just that we sold the bomb that hit this bus. We participated and still do participate in this military campaign in a myriad of ways For years, we flew planes in the sky that put fuel into the Saudi and Emirati jets that dropped these bombs. We embedded U.S. personnel in the operations center that planned these bombing campaigns, and maybe, most importantly of all, we lent moral authority to the Saudi-led campaign inside Yemen. But over the course of our time as a coalition partner with Saudi Arabia, the war in Yemen has been a national security apocalypse for the United States. Our bombs and our planes have been used to kill thousands of civilians; 17,000 civilians have died inside Yemen since the beginning of this war. The war has caused the world's worst humanitarian catastrophe on the ground inside Yemen. Over 100,000 children have died of starvation and disease. Yemen, since 2015, has been the site of the world's worst cholera outbreak anywhere in the world during all of our lifetimes-- likely caused by the targeting of water treatment facilities by the coalition, of which the United States is a member. And inside this country, Yemenis rightfully blame the United States for this cataclysm. They know that it is our equipment, they know that it is our bombs, and they know that it is that moral authority that the United States gives to this war through our decision to continue to take part in it, human rights crime after human rights crime. It has radicalized a generation of Yemenis against the United States. It has made us part and parcel of repeated human rights violations, and it has created a chaotic environment on the ground in Yemen that has allowed for AQAP, the wing of al-Qaida with the clearest designs to hit the United States, again, room to govern and room to grow. AQAP and ISIS are able to operate and control territory inside Yemen because of the chaos created by this civil war. Iran has grown stronger. At the beginning, Iran and the Houthis, who are on the other side of this civil war, had a slightly tenuous connection, but as the war has dragged on, the Houthis have had to become more and more reliant on Iranian assistance and Iranian expertise. Iran has grown stronger and stronger inside Yemen and inside the region as this war persists. In every way, it has been a nightmare, from a security perspective, for the United States. But with the election and inauguration of President Biden, our participation in this national security cataclysm is coming to an end. I come to the floor today to thank the Biden administration and to thank the incoming Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, for their recognition that it is no longer in our security interest to be a part of this. The Biden administration has made several very important decisions that they have announced at the outset of their term in office: one, the plan to withdraw from the military coalition; second, a decision to suspend arm sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who are the primary participants in this coalition. UAE has dramatically scaled back their involvement--to their credit. The Saudis continue to fight this war on the ground and in the air. And lastly--and, perhaps, most immediately importantly--the Trump administration announced that they were reserving an eleventh-hour decision by the Trump administration naming the Houthis a terrorist group. Now, the Houthis are incredibly bad actors. The Houthis are also guilty of war crimes in and around this conflict. They recruit child soldiers. They deliberately hold up aid and don't allow it to get to the citizens in areas under which they control. The Houthis have a lot to answer for as well. But by naming them a terrorist group, what the Trump administration effectively did was to stop the international aid community from being able to deliver any aid into Yemen because the Houthis control some of the most important ports, and 80 percent of the aid is commercial food. That would have all stopped if you couldn't run aid through ports controlled by an organization named at the eleventh hour by the Trump administration as a terrorist organization. The Biden administration has made a decision to suspend that designation to make sure that we are not going to end up with millions of people starving inside Yemen because the United States makes the decision to eliminate the ability of humanitarian groups to get food on the ground in Yemen. They are all incredibly important decisions that the administration has made--decisions supported by a majority of this body. We have voted here in the Senate, on a bipartisan basis, to end the U.S. participation in the war in Yemen. We didn't have a veto-proof majority. So we couldn't overcome the President's veto. But there is a bipartisan coalition that believes the United States shouldn't have anything to do with this, and President Biden is now effectuating that bipartisan consensus in policy. Lastly, let me say this. Saudi Arabia is an important security partner for the United States. The UAE is an important security partner for the United States. We have an important counterterrorism relationship. The Saudis and the Emirates have been part of this groundbreaking detente with Israel, resulting in several recognition agreements. That is great for U.S. security interests in the region. But it is time for us to reset those relationships to make clear that if our Gulf partners are going to participate in actions inside the region that are terrible for our security interests, then we can't join them in those actions--a reset that includes an expectation that the Saudis and the Emirates address what is a very disturbing downward trend in the ability of individuals inside those countries to have political space with which to contest grievances with the regimes. It is time for us to make sure that our relationships with our Gulf allies are always consistent with U.S. national security endeavors, and the Biden administration is off to a very good start in resetting those relationships by pulling ourselves out of a war inside Yemen that has killed 17,000 civilians, caused 100,000 kids to die of starvation and disease, and ends up with our bombs doing this to a school bus full of 8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I have a request for one committee to meet during today's session of the Senate. It has the approval of the Majority and Minority leaders. Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committee is authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate: Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs The Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, January 28, 2021, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing on the nomination of the Honorable Marcia L. Fudge, of Ohio, to be Secretary, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, America has 600 billionaires. Now, $1 billion doesn't sound like a lot of money these days. President Trump just signed a bill, begrudgingly, that has $900 billion in it. But trust me--$1 billion is still a whole lot of money. It is actually so much money that it is really hard to find words to describe what it looks like, but let me try. If you are, for instance, one of the half a million Americans who make the minimum wage in this Nation and are lucky enough to work 40 hours a week, guess how many years you would have to work in order to get $1 billion. Five hundred years? A thousand years? Ten thousand years? No, you are not even close. If you make minimum wage in America today, you would need to work for 75,000 years in order to make $1 billion--75,000 years. Neanderthals were roaming the Earth 75,000 years ago. Those guys, if they had made minimum wage, would have had to have worked up until present day, every single day--that is, of course, if they hadn't spent a dime of the money they had made in order to accrue $1 billion. One billion dollars is a bananas amount of money, and there are 600 people in America today who make at least that amount of money or have that amount of money to their names. That is crazy. With $1 billion, you are leading a life that, frankly, none of us can really imagine, right? You have private planes. You have yachts. You have household staffs in the dozens. You have enough money to make sure that your children and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren and your great-great-grandchildren never have to work a day in their lives. Generations of your offspring can just live lives of indolent luxury, without a care, if they so choose. Do you know where I was 2 days before Thanksgiving this year? I was at Hamden Middle School, in my State, to help hand out free food for the unemployed, the poor, and the disabled ahead of a long holiday weekend. Those long weekends can be really hard, especially the ones that fall at the end of the month when the SNAP benefits have long run out. I got there as darkness fell but right at the beginning of the event. I noticed that down the hill from the roundabout at the school at which they were handing out the food, there was usually an empty parking lot. That night, at that moment, at the beginning of the event, that parking lot was lit up by hundreds of sets of headlights of hundreds of cars that were just sitting there, idle, in that parking lot. I asked the organizer of the event what was going on in that parking lot. Was there some other event happening that evening? Why all the cars? He told me: The cars started pulling into that lot hours ago. They got wind we were handing out food, and they got here early to make sure they didn't get left out. We have enough food for 300 people, and there were 300 cars in that lot before I even got here. That is what has happened during this pandemic. Millions of families all across this Nation, through no fault of their own, have lost their jobs or have had their hours dramatically cut back. They have no savings because work doesn't pay in this country anymore. They spend everything they earn each month. So when the economy collapsed, virtually overnight in the spring, they got desperate--really fast. I want you to think about what it is really like on an hour-to-hour basis when you don't have enough money for food for your family. The decisions you have to make every single day are practically animalistic. Do you make your kids go hungry during the day, when they need the most energy, or do you skimp on dinner and force your kids to go to bed with hunger pangs? There are hundreds of thousands of mothers and fathers who, right now, as I am speaking, are making that decision today. That is the reality of this pandemic. But here is another reality: Those 600 billionaires in this country? As it turns out, as a group, they lost nothing--nothing--during this pandemic. No, exactly the opposite. They got richer. The wealthiest 600 Americans collectively added $1 trillion to their bank accounts. Let me say it again. The richest 600 Americans gained $1 trillion over the course of 2020. Let's be clear. That is not money that grew in their money tree orchards. Yes, we are printing some more money these days, but wealth isn't far away from a zero-sum game still. So when we allow for 600 people in the country to control 50 percent of the Nation's wealth, that is coming out of your pocket. Six hundred people in a country of 328 million isn't a lot of people. But do you know what is a smaller number than 600? Fifty-two. There are 52 Republicans in this Chamber--52 people who are going to have a decision to make about what to do in a country where millions are literally starving as we speak, while 600 billionaires count the $1 trillion in additional wealth that they have accumulated during this period of national calamity. The question before these 52 Senate Republicans is simple. It is simple: Should we give $2,000 to low- and middle-income Americans right now to help them survive this crisis? That is the decision Senate Republicans have to make right now. Time is running out. Six hundred billionaires got $1 trillion richer this year, and the question before Senate Republicans is this: Are you willing to spend an amount equal to just half of that windfall to America's billionaires in order to help 160 million Americans? Right now, the 52 Senate Republicans serving in this Chamber are the only thing standing in the way of $2,000 being sent to 160 million of our neediest citizens. The House passed the bill authorizing the checks in a big, bipartisan vote. It is hard to get two-thirds of the House of Representatives to agree on what time it is, but two-thirds of the House of Representatives voted for the $2,000 checks. President Trump supports the $2,000 checks, so he will sign the bill if the Senate sends it to him. We can vote on the House bill today in a matter of hours if Senate Republicans agree. So why isn't this happening? Why didn't Senator McConnell announce the schedule for the vote on the $2,000 checks bill? Why didn't he agree to Senator Schumer's request to bring it up for an immediate vote? Now, a lot of Republicans are saying they object to the payments because they cost too much and they are going to add too much to the deficit. Well, frankly, spare me the fake righteous indignation about the deficit all of a sudden. Three years ago, these same deficit hawk Republicans passed a tax cut bill that, before the pandemic hit, had already added over $200 billion to the annual deficit, and that was a tax cut where 80 percent of the benefits went to the richest 1 percent of Americans. Warren Buffet wrote in his note to investors last year that the deficit-financed tax cuts earned his empire $29 billion overnight. That windfall, Buffet noted, ``did not come from anything we accomplished at Berkshire.'' So it is funny: Deficits just didn't matter to the 52 when it was tax cuts to the 600 richest people in America. But even if this Congress weren't ending in 5 days and we had time to figure out how to pay for it, do you know how we can't pay for it? Cutting foreign aid. President Trump has been talking a lot about foreign aid in the last week. Now, the money we spend on foreign aid, all supported by Democrats and Republicans over the years, all of it smart investments in our Nation's security--that actually wasn't in the COVID relief package. It was in the annual budget, as it always is. It just so happens that this year the COVID relief package and the annual budget were passed together. But just for argument's sake, let's say Trump got his way and every single dollar of foreign aid was cut out of the budget. Would that pay for the $2,000 checks? Not even close. President Trump apparently has an oversized impression of how much money we spend on foreign aid, because our annual foreign aid spending doesn't even equal 10 percent of the cost of a one-time $2,000 payment to low- and middle-income citizens. There is also some speculation that Senator McConnell is going to join together the $2,000 payments with other, much more controversial measures, much more complicated measures, like the reform of our internet liability laws. That is an invitation for this entire effort to fall apart. The House has finished voting. They have passed the $2,000 payment bill and sent it to us. They are not interested in taking up anything else. If we start adding poison pills to the $2,000 payment bill, that is just another way of telling the American people that this body doesn't support $2,000 payments. Listen, being a billionaire must be crazy. I make a lot of money as a Senator, but even I would have to work 7,500 years before my earnings equaled $1 billion. You know what was happening $7,500 years ago? The Stone Age. There isn't a good reason to oppose giving Americans who aren't billionaires a measly $2,000 check to help them put food on the table for their kids in the middle of this once-in-a-lifetime crisis. There isn't a good reason to choose to make moms and dads all across this country decide which two meals they will feed their kids each day because three meals are not an option. Two thousand dollars doesn't put dinner on the table every night, but, man, going to bed hungry when you are 11--it sucks. And even dealing with it every other night instead of every single night, no kid is going to turn that down. There are 52 of you, and in the next 24 to 48 hours, you get to decide: Do you protect the billionaires or do you choose to feed that 11-year-old kid? The only thing that stands between the American people and a $2,000 emergency survival check is 52 Senate Republicans. Got it? Understand? There is a bill pending right now before the Senate that gives $2,000 to ordinary Americans. Yes, it costs a lot of money, and maybe down the line we will have to ask the billionaires to pay for it, but the bill is here right now. The legislative session expires in 5 days. President Trump says he will sign it, and all that matters right now is what these 52 people decide. The House passed the bill with lots of Democratic and Republican support. The President supports the idea. The only thing that can stop $2,000 payments to struggling Americans right now is 52 Senate Republicans. Some things in Washington aren't that simple--but this is. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, 8 years ago this morning, I was in Bridgeport, CT. I had done an event early that morning with the mayor, and I was due to meet my wife and my two children--then 4 years old and 1--on a train platform in Bridgeport to head down to New York City, to spend the rest of that Friday afternoon with my young kids, their first chance to see the Christmas decorations of the city. I received a phone call while on the train platform telling me that something had happened in Sandy Hook, CT. Sandy Hook is a section of Newtown, CT. I debated whether or not to still go down to New York, but as the news started to become more clear, I got in the car and headed up to the firehouse just down a short road from Sandy Hook Elementary School, where an emergency response effort was gathering. It was there that 20 parents found out what had happened inside that school, as the rest of the world was finding out that same gruesome news. That was 8 years ago today--mark today--that tragic anniversary of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Since that day, I have gotten to know those families--the mothers and the fathers of the children who were killed, the daughters, the siblings of educators who were killed. There were six educators inside Sandy Hook Elementary School who lost their lives that day--heroes all. There were 20 children. I have also gotten to know the community of Sandy Hook even better than I ever had during my 6 years representing them in the House of Representatives. Sandy Hook was and is a miraculous place. As much as the world saw evil that day, perpetuated by a young man named Adam Lanza, what happened in the hours and days, weeks and months following, in and around Sandy Hook, told us what really sits inside of us, and that is an indescribable goodness, an ability to meet evil with all sorts of generosity that poured on to Sandy Hook from all over the world in big ways and small ways. Teddy bears were sent in to Sandy Hook by the thousands in the days and weeks afterward. A fund was set up for the families of the victims. Millions of dollars went into that fund to help pay for the college educations of the brothers and sisters who were left behind. The community wrapped its arms around those families, around the first responders. And while Sandy Hook will never ever be the same ever again, I was able to see firsthand what truly lies inside all of us. Over the last 8 years, we have tried to make good by the memory of those kids. There is no way to fill that hole, but I have watched as communities have been changed through the generosity that has come out of that tragedy. Almost every family established a unique not-for- profit that is doing all sorts of incredible work, all sort of based in many ways off of the loves of those children. There are charities that are building playgrounds for kids who love to climb and swing. There are charities that are providing access to animals for young kids in need, in memory of the kids who died that day who loved animals. There are charities that are building social- emotional help, trying to make sure that you never ever get in a situation ever again where a young man like Adam Lanza feels so separated from society, his community, his peers, and reality that someone thinks to do what he did. Just on the charitable side of the equation, there is so much over the last 8 years that has happened that has changed people's lives, that has saved lives, because of what those families and what the community of Newtown has done. There has been policy change as well. We passed the Mental Health Reform Act in the U.S. Senate and in the House, and it was signed into law, one of the last things that President Obama did before he left office. Of course, we have had an ongoing conversation about the way in which we change our gun laws. Many of us in Connecticut have strong feelings that if Adam Lanza wasn't able to get his hands as easily on a semi- automatic military-style weapon, he may not have ever made the journey to that school that morning. So we continue in our work to try to reset the gun laws of this Nation to try to make sure that no tragedy like that ever happens again simply because of ease of access to a weapon of that power. About a month after that shooting in Sandy Hook Elementary School, I had the chance to visit a community center in the North End of Hartford. I had just been sworn in as a Senator. The tragedy in Sandy Hook happened after my election to Senate but before I had been sworn in. After I was sworn in to the Senate, I went to a community center in the North End of Hartford where I met with the families of the victims of gun violence from that neighborhood. By the time Sandy Hook had happened in 2012, 20 young men and women had lost their lives to gunfire in Hartford. As for the families that we met that day, their hearts grieved deeper than anyone else for the families in Sandy Hook because they knew what that pain is like. They had lost sons and daughters themselves. But they were also furious that the whole country was waking up to the epidemic of gun violence in this country after Newtown when it had been happening in Hartford and Bridgeport and New Haven and New Orleans and Chicago and Los Angeles and Baltimore for decades without much action and without much attention from the mainstream news media or from those in power. Many of us had to reconcile the ways in which we had spent our public career in the weeks and months after Sandy Hook. I am embarrassed by the fact that I didn't do more when I was in the House of Representatives, that I didn't do more when I was in the State legislature, to try to address the epidemic of gun violence in this country, wherever it happens. There were many people in this Chamber who stood up in the wake of Sandy Hook and decided that they were going to lead--people like Pat Toomey and Joe Manchin--in ways that they hadn't led before. I think we have all had to reassess our priorities. We have all had to think about whether we measured up to this moment that we live in today, where 100 people died from gun violence and a lot of kids who go to school around this country just expect that, at some point in their young lives, they will be met with a mass shooting. So we come here 8 years later, and we try to measure what has happened. Have we made enough change? And we try to recommit ourselves to these ideas moving forward. I am proud of many of the things we have done. I am proud of all the charitable efforts, and I am proud of the Mental Health Reform Act, and I am proud we have put more money into school safety. I am proud that a lot of private-sector entities have stood up to stop weapons from being carried into public spaces. But I am also furious. I am also furious that there are easy, popular things that we could be doing to stop the likelihood of another Sandy Hook, to reduce the level of gun violence that happens in our city, and we choose not to take those steps. Now, universal background checks wouldn't have saved the lives of those kids in Sandy Hook, but those parents came here and lobbied for that legislation in 2013 because they know that, if that legislation was in place, there would be a whole lot of other kids alive throughout this country because the flow of illegal guns would be stunted into our cities and many of our neighborhoods. Those families in Sandy Hook don't necessarily care how it gets done. They just want to make sure that there are less parents that ever have to go through what they have gone through. And despite the fact that 95 percent of Americans support something like universal background checks, we still haven't done it here--an example of where democracy just doesn't seem to be working. So we still have lots to do. I am sure I will get the opportunity over the course of 2021 to talk a lot about the path forward on changing our gun laws. But the final thing that I want to say today, before I yield the floor to Senator Blumenthal, is that for those Americans who haven't had to come face-to-face with a tragedy like that, maybe for those who haven't been around that kind of pain and sorrow, maybe it is a little bit hard to understand perspective. One of the things we have tried to do in the last 8 years is, on this day--the 1-year, the 2-year, the 3- year, the 4-year, and now the 8-year mark--to just ask people on this day to go out and do something nice for a friend, for a relative, for a stranger. Just act in a kind, generous way, and maybe, over the course of the next year, make it a habit to do a little bit more than you would have done otherwise to help people in and around you in the ways that people helped the community of Sandy Hook--the parents, the relatives--in small and big ways in the wake of the tragedy 8 years ago. When you are around that kind of loss and pain, when you think about what it is like to lose a child, I think it helps to give some perspective as to what is really important in this world. We have a habit in this business to treat each other unkindly, and I am guilty of that, just like everyone else in this body is. Especially these days, we tend to fall into this trap too easily in which we assume bad motives of folks who just think differently than us. There are some folks out there today who won't go to businesses that are owned by Republicans or won't associate themselves with folks who might have more progressive views than they have. Politics matter. Don't get me wrong. But there are things that matter more than politics. And when we think about what those families are going through today as they are forced to relive the events of that day at Sandy Hook Elementary School, we should be reminded of how lucky we are to still be on this Earth; for those who haven't endured that kind of loss, how lucky we are to still have our children by our side. And we should remember that kindness, treating people respectfully, understanding what is important in the long run--family, friendships, relationships--that is one of the lessons, I hope, of Sandy Hook. So this is never a fun day to come down to the floor and mark the anniversary of Sandy Hook, but I want to finish by just saying thank you to the parents and the families for letting Senator Blumenthal and I into their lives. I have these friendships, these bonds with those families today that I never expected but now may be more meaningful to me than any other relationships that I have. And I do have strong words often for my colleagues about our unwillingness to make change in this body, but it is because, when my public service is done, the measure of whether I succeeded or failed, to me, in many ways is in the hands of those families. Whether they think that I have made a difference to honor the memory of their children is probably what will matter to me more than anything else when I hang up my public service spikes a few years from now--5 years from now, 10 years from now. I thank them for enduring this pain, for reaching out to those of us in positions of leadership to help guide us, and for finding all sorts of ways to lift up the light and the memory of their children, of their parents, of those that fell 8 years ago today in Sandy Hook. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, colleagues, we are in the middle of a whole bunch of really important debates right now about the National Defense Authorization Act, trying to avoid a shutdown by the end of the day, and, of course, trying to find a path forward to authorize funding to continue to combat this pandemic. But it is worth noting today that an effort to overturn the 2020 election continues and, in many ways, is picking up steam, and we need to talk about the consequences for the Nation. Democracies are really fragile things. Ours only continues because we make choices so that it can remain. Our government really isn't a piece of paper upon which the Constitution is written. Our government--where voters, citizens, not kings or monarchs or oligarchs, decide who governs--is made possible by a series of decisions that we make every single day to put the rule of law ahead of our own political power or the position of our political party. That is the history of America-- our decision that democracy comes first, not the perpetuation of our own political power. Right now, the most serious attempt to overthrow our democracy in the history of this country is underway. Those who are pushing to make Donald Trump President for a second term, no matter the outcome of the election, are engaged in a treachery against their Nation. You cannot, at the same time, love America and hate democracy. But as we speak, a whole lot of flag-waving Republicans are nakedly trying to invalidate millions of legal votes because that is the only way they can make Donald Trump President again. It is the only way they can make Donald Trump President again because he didn't win. Our democracy, the citizens of this country, chose Joe Biden to be President of the United States. He won the popular vote in a landslide, and he won the electoral college by a substantial margin. But now, Republicans have decided--not all Republicans--but far too many have decided that if democracy can't keep Trump in power, then democracy ceases to have any real purpose because, to Republicans who are supporting these continued efforts to invalidate the election, their loyalty is to Donald Trump, not to the Nation or our system of government. Their No. 1 goal is to keep Trump in power, and if that means throwing out the election and turning America into something other than a democracy in which the voters get to choose their leaders, then so be it. Here is the latest. This lawsuit is supported by 106 House Republicans. That is more than half of the Republicans who serve in the House of Representatives. It is supported, apparently, by many Senate Republicans as well. This lawsuit is an attempt to overthrow democracy. Now, you can laugh at it; you can scoff at it; you can suggest that it has no chance to prevail if it reaches the nine Supreme Court Justices. But let's be clear about what it argues, and let's be clear about the consequences for so many elected officials at the highest level of American Government supporting this lawsuit. What it argues is that the votes in four States--Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan--should be thrown out because Trump didn't win. It asks for the State legislatures, controlled by Republicans, to appoint electors instead. Now, there are a bunch of vague, unsourced claims about voter fraud in this lawsuit, but there is not a shred of evidence for these claims. All of the individual lawsuits trying to allege voter fraud, trying to create contests about how laws were modified regarding voting in these States, have all lost. Importantly, the lawsuit doesn't ask for another canvass or another count; it just asks for the votes in these States to be disregarded and for Republican politicians in these States to make the choice instead. Already in Pennsylvania, the State legislature's Republican leadership has expressed support for appointing electors who would choose Donald Trump. Let me say that again. This lawsuit says that in Pennsylvania, the State legislature should choose the electors, not the people. And in Pennsylvania, the leadership of the Republican Party in the legislature has expressed support for appointing electors who will choose Donald Trump instead of Joe Biden despite the fact that Joe Biden won the State of Pennsylvania by 80,000 votes--80,000 votes. This isn't 500 votes, like Florida in 2000--80,000 votes. The request of this lawsuit is clear: Throw out the votes in these four States that Joe Biden won and just give the election to Donald Trump instead. Some of my Republican Senate colleagues sent out pretty mealy-mouthed statements supporting the general right to count every legal vote and to contest illegal votes, but that is not what this lawsuit is about. It just asks for the whole vote to be thrown out. It asks for every vote in these States to be disregarded. Other Republicans who haven't signed on to this suit suggest that it won't succeed in the Supreme Court; it is a sideshow, so why really care? Well, we have to care. The majority of Republican Members of Congress believe that Donald Trump should be named President again despite the fact that he lost and lost by a lot. It wasn't close in the popular vote or in the electoral college. We should care because this attempt to overthrow democracy won't be successful this time--Joe Biden is going to be President--but it plainly shows us the direction that the Republican Party is heading, and they control governments in a lot of really important States and jurisdictions. The majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives apparently believe that if a Democrat wins an election, it is illegitimate by definition. There is no evidence of fraud or stolen votes or vote-rigging in the 2020 election. You can be mad about the fact that States allow for mail-in voting; but Republican and Democratic States allow for it. You can be angry that the majority of those votes this year were cast in favor of Joe Biden in many of these States, but in previous years, the majority of mail-in votes had been favoring Republicans. But no matter the lack of evidence about voter fraud, Republicans, including the President, have just come to the conclusion that Democrats must have cheated because Democrats are evil, and lots of people show up to Donald Trump rallies. You know, there is just no way that all of these people could have voted for Joe Biden because FOX News and Newsmax and RT--they tell us that Trump is just so popular. This mindset won't win out this time. Joe Biden is going to be President. But what about next time? What if the next Presidential election is closer? What if 2024 comes down to just one State? It is a lot easier to steal one State. What if these radical anti-Democrats get control of more secretary of state offices or election boards and there is a close race for Governor in 2022 or the U.S. Senate, and these same people who support the Texas lawsuit decide again that there is no way a Democrat could have won our State, and so by definition it has to be fraudulent, despite the lack of evidence, so let's just throw out the result and choose a Republican? I know this kind of sounds farfetched, but this is exactly what this lawsuit is asking for. It is asking for the vote to be thrown out in four States and Donald Trump to be named President regardless of the fact that he lost, with no evidence of any voter fraud or illegal behavior. There is a majority of the U.S. House of Representatives Republican caucus who supports this, so it stands to reason that this won't all of a sudden stop being their position 2 years from now and 4 years from now. If that happens and the voters' will is thrown out--not just in a Presidential election but in a Governor's race or a U.S. Senate race or a congressional race--then our country will no longer be a democracy. If that happens, the American experiment will be done. It will be over. That is why this moment is so frightening, no matter the fact that it is not going to be successful in an attempt to keep Donald Trump barricaded in the White House. That is why more Republicans than just a handful in this country need to be standing up to this lawsuit and this claim that the vote should be thrown out, because you have a majority of Republicans in this country who believe that Joe Biden won the election fraudulently when there is no evidence that that happened. That belief, as it festers and it grows--this idea that if Democrats win, it has to be because of fraud--it does eventually lead to the voters' will being overturned, and that will be the end of American democracy. Don't just assume that this system is going to be around for another 240 years. It is a miracle that we have held this together thus far. It is just a series of choices that we make. The Constitution itself is not strong enough, is not durable enough without all of us making a decision that even if we lose an election, even if that means that temporarily our political power is lessened, that we accept the result because what matters most in this country is what the voters choose, not how it affects us. It is not enough to just punt here and say ``Ah, the President has a right to go to court; let's just see what happens'' because when the overthrow of democracy is beginning and you are sitting on the sidelines, you are a collaborator. And there are way too many high- profile Republicans who march around the world giving speeches about the importance of protecting democracy who are awfully silent when the attempted overthrow is happening in their own country. Nobody can stay silent right now. There are a lot of other important things happening in the Senate today. I am engaged in those as well. It is true, this effort to overthrow the 2020 election is not going to bear fruit, and so it is tempting to just work on the other things and to ignore this lawsuit and these attempts because this time, it won't be successful. But all of this effort, supported by so many mainstream Republicans, is setting a precedent and is creating conditions that could easily overthrow the next election. If the Republican Party just allows for this assault on the 2020 election to continue, no matter whether it ultimately is successful, then by 2022 or 2024, I am telling you, it might be too late to save our democracy. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, this is a substantial proposal, one that merits full consideration on the floor of the Senate with the opportunity to debate and amend to understand how many government agencies would be affected, to understand whether it merits a sunset date, to understand what the effects would be, not just on the regime of Venezuela but the people of Venezuela, and for that reason I will object.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am on the floor today to speak to resolutions upon which we will begin voting today regarding arms sales proposed by the administration to the United Arab Emirates. I am on the floor today to ask my colleagues to support these resolutions of disapproval upon two grounds: one, the protection of congressional prerogative and, two, a question of U.S. national security. First, let me cover the question of congressional prerogative. We have traditionally debated arms sales here on occasion, and the reason why we don't have constant debates in this body on arms sales, the reason why we don't have resolutions on every sale that is noticed by the administration, is because we have built into our practice an ability for the Senate to consult with the administration beforehand on a bipartisan basis. Over the years, since the passage of the law allowing for Congress to have a role in the sale of arms to foreign nations, administration after administration, Republican and Democrat, has observed a period of consultation with Congress in which the administration comes to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, comes to the House Foreign Relations Committee, presents the reasons for the sale, and then addresses concerns raised, often in a bipartisan manner, by Republicans and Democrats. Again, this has happened in both Democratic and Republican administrations, with Democratic and Republican Congresses, and often that consultative process results in issues that Congress has being resolved so that you never have to have a vote on the Senate floor. Something different happened with this sale. The administration was so desperate to rush through the sale before the end of their administration that they blew through the consultation process. It just didn't happen. There was no ability for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to weigh in on this particular sale. It was rushed to notice, and our only option was to bring it before the full Senate. Now, under any circumstances, I would argue that the Senate should stand up for our right to have a role. The reason that we built in this consultative process was because the Senate was actually unhappy with the amount of input it had decades ago and was threatening to dramatically expand its oversight role on arms sales. Instead, a deal was worked out in which the administration said they would come for this consultation. Now it appears that those consultations are no longer the practice. That reduces our role as a foreign-policy-making body. And remember, we have abdicated all sorts of responsibilities over the years when it comes to what should be a coequal responsibility to set the broad direction of U.S. foreign policy with the executive branch. This would be yet another chip away at Congress's participation in the setting of U.S. national security policy. I am not sure we will ever get it back. But on this sale, in particular, the consultative process was really important because this sale is as big and as hairy and as complicated as you get. We are, for the first time, selling F-35s and MQ-9 Reaper drones into the heart of the Middle East. We have never done it before. There are only 14 countries that currently operate the F-35, and almost all of them are NATO allies. Turkey was on the list for a period of time, but because they ended up making a choice to go with the Russian missile defense system, they were taken out of the program. So the partners that remain are the ones that you would suspect--Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Australia, Denmark, Canada. There are even fewer countries that we have sold Reaper drones to-- Australia, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, UK, and India. This is the first time that we would sell these incredibly lethal, incredibly complicated technologies into the heart of the Middle East-- a region that, arguably, is not in need of more weapons. What we risk doing here is fueling an arms race. Today we may be selling the F-35s and the MQ-9s to the UAE, but the Saudis are going to want it, the Qataris have already requested it, and it just fuels Iran's interest in continuing to build up its own military program. But, more specifically to this sale, we have to ask ourselves whether the UAE is ready for this technology or whether their behavior over the past several years makes them an unworthy partner for this set of highly complicated U.S. defense technology. I will stipulate, as I think every Member of this body will, that the UAE is often a very important ally of the United States. There is an important cooperative relationship that exists between the United States and the UAE. We share counterterrorism information together. We were both involved in the fight against ISIS. We work together to counter Iranian influence in the region. And, of course, the UAE's recognition of Israel is good for the United States as well. But for as many places as we cooperate with UAE, there are many points of division, and those points of division often involve the use of U.S. military technology against the interests of the United States. The UAE has been, for years, involved in a civil war in Yemen that is terrible for U.S. national security interests. They may not be as involved as they were a couple of years ago, but they are still a barrier to peace. They still refuse to make humanitarian contributions to help the situation on the ground. So far in 2020, there are zero dollars from the UAE put into the U.N. appeal to try to fight off starvation and cholera inside Yemen. At one point, they took U.S. equipment and they handed it to extremist militias inside Yemen. That is open-source reporting. The UAE copped to it when the reporters asked them whether they had done it. They gave our equipment to Salafist militias inside a theater of war. There are other reports that they were dropping American-made TOW missiles out of the sky into areas of that country that were controlled by al-Qaida-aligned elements. And they are, right now, as we speak, in violation of the Libya arms embargo. The U.N. Panel of Experts came to the conclusion that the majority of arms transfers into Libya to the Haftar armed forces were either from Jordan or the United Arab Emirates. The panel found that the UAE was in repeated noncompliance with the arms embargo. And guess what is on the list of the weapons that the UAE was transferring into Libya in violation of a U.S.-supported arms embargo-- armed drones. We are talking about selling the UAE the most lethal, most advanced armed drone technology in the world today, and as we speak, the UAE is in violation of the arms embargo to Libya, fueling that civil war, specifically sending drones into that theater. So I am not here to say that we shouldn't be in the security business with the UAE. There are a lot of important common projects. But the question is, with a country that is part of the problem more often than part of the solution in Yemen, a country that is in existing violation of an arms embargo in Libya, a country that has just within the last several years transferred our weapons to al-Qaida-aligned militias, without resolving those issues, is this the moment to be selling, for the first time ever, F-35s, armed drones into the heart of the Middle East? One last caution. The countries that I mentioned on this list are by and large in business with the United States and not with China and Russia. The UAE has pretty deep and complicated defense relationships with China, Russia, and Chinese and Russian companies. Query whether we can be absolutely certain that the technology on board those fighter jets, those drones, is going to stay in the right hands. There arguably is no other country on the list for the F-35s that does as much business with China and Russia as the UAE does. In fact, as I mentioned, we pulled the F-35 program from Turkey because they are involved with Russia on a very complicated and important ground defense system, and we are just learning about the nature of the partnerships that the UAE has with the Chinese and the Russians. It stands to reason that this would be one of the issues that a consultative process with Congress would resolve. It also stands to reason that we could probably come to a conclusion during that consultative process. If the UAE really wants those weapons, wants to be the first country in the heart of the Middle East to get the F-35 or the Reaper drones, then I assume they would want to be able to assure Congress and the administration that there is no chance of technology transfer into the wrong hands. That is what the congressional consultative process would have gotten us, but it didn't happen in this case, and so we are stuck with this vote--a means for Congress to stand up for its right to participate in this question of arms sales. Believe me, my Republican colleagues are going to want that right when a Democratic administration comes into office. You are not going to want to send a signal today to the Biden administration that they don't have to consult with you as the majority party, potentially, in 2021. But if you vote against these resolutions, then you are essentially saying the Biden administration doesn't need to consult with Congress on it. They probably will because they want to do the right thing, but anybody who votes against these resolutions is essentially endorsing an end-around of Congress by any administration, Republican or Democratic. It is also important to say that on policy grounds, it is not time to do these sales. There are too many outstanding questions about who the UAE transfers weapons to, what they are doing in Libya, why they haven't been part of the solution in Yemen, and what their relationship is with some of our most important adversaries around the globe. Until we satisfy the answers to those questions, we should not move forward with this sale. Finally, there is no threat to the accords between UAE and Israel unwinding if we simply press pause on this sale until those questions are answered. I do want to be in business with the UAE. I think they are an important defense partner. But I think there is far too much at stake with the sale of these weapons right now to rush it through, and I don't think there is any downside risk if we were to say ``not now'' until we get all of our t's crossed and all of our i's dotted. Let's stand up for Congress's prerogative on the sale of arms to foreign countries. Let's slow down this process that has been rushed, potentially to the great detriment of U.S. national security. Let's support these resolutions of disapproval this afternoon.

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

Mr. MURPHY

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

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, a Republican candidate in California by the name of Errol Webber lost his race for Congress by 72 points, and yet he is not conceding that he has lost. He says: I'm going to the Los Angeles County Registrar's Office to audit the vote counting procedures. I will NOT concede. Every LEGAL vote needs to be counted! Just up the road in Maryland, a Republican candidate by the name of Kim Klacik lost by 40 points, and she is refusing to concede. She retweeted a post from President Trump in which she claimed that the election was stolen, and she wrote: I beat my opponent on day of & in-person early voting, along with absentee. However, 97k mail in ballots were found in his favor? My colleagues, there is an epidemic of delusion that is spreading out from the White House and infecting the entire Republican Party in the wake of this election, and it presents a real threat to this country. President Trump didn't win the election. Every single one of my colleagues knows this. And he didn't just lose. He lost by a pretty substantial margin. He lost by 4.3 percent of the popular vote, likely around 70 electoral votes when all the counting is done. And while the results haven't been certified yet, this isn't the election in 2000. There aren't any hanging chads. We are not arguing about 500 votes here or there. In Michigan, the margin today is 148,000. In Nevada, the margin is 36,000. In Pennsylvania, it is 47,000. In Wisconsin, it is 20,000. In Georgia, it is 12,000. In Arizona, it is 14,000. Thousands and thousands of votes are these margins. Hillary Clinton, in 2016, lost by less than the President did in Pennsylvania and Michigan and by about the same amount in Wisconsin, and she conceded the day after the election. Now, this is important, and I think we need to talk about it here because it has real consequences for democracy and for national security. Why hasn't the President conceded? Now, it is not because there was voter fraud or because the election was stolen from him. We are a week out, and the President is still desperately searching for evidence of fraud. He won't find it because it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist in Pennsylvania or Michigan or Wisconsin or Georgia. The President has empowered the Department of Justice to now go out and launch investigations of voter fraud despite a longstanding precedent for the DOJ to stay out of elections if their actions could be determinative. But the President is so desperate now to fill in his mythology, his narrative, with facts that he doesn't have, that he is sending the DOJ on this massive national fishing expedition. He hasn't conceded--not because there is fraud. There hasn't been. He is not conceding because he believes that there is a chance he could remain as President without having won the election, so long as congressional Republicans are willing to stick with him step by step by step, and, so far, there is no evidence that congressional Republicans are ever going to step away from President Trump's delusional assault on democracy. Senator McConnell said this week that the President is ``within his rights'' to fight the election. That is of course true. The President can keep filing frivolous legal challenges if he wants. We are not going to stop him from doing that. But just because he has the right to mount these legal challenges, that doesn't mean that Republicans here have to support him in those efforts if they contravene the interests of democracy and the interests of a smooth transition of power. Today, Republicans support the President's refusal to concede. They support his lawsuits. They call on election officials--most recently, in Georgia--who refuse to bend their knee to Trump to resign, and they endorsed the President's decision to refuse to begin the transition. This may sort of seem like a sideshow now to the inevitability of a transfer of power, but what is next? What if President Trump asks Republicans here to contest the selection of electors? What if he gets the message from Republicans in Congress that if you are willing to support all the steps he has taken since Tuesday, that you will continue to support his efforts to try to remain in office despite losing both the popular vote and the electoral college? That is within his rights, to ask you to support a contest of electors. But will you do it? What so far have we seen to suggest that there is an end to your decision to put your allegiance to this President above an allegiance to the country? The Secretary of State was asked today if he thought there would be a smooth transition of power from President Trump to the winner of the election, Vice President and President-Elect Biden. And Secretary Pompeo said: ``There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.'' Listen, these guys aren't playing. This isn't just for show. They are going to keep pushing the bounds of democracy until somebody stops them. It is logical to ask: If Republicans have been willing to support every conspiracy that the President has engaged in over the last week, then why wouldn't they support the next set of attacks on democracy that this President engages in? How far are Republicans willing to go in their attacks against the decision of voters? Now, for the President, there is really no downside to what he is doing right now. Either he steals the election or he grows his political power, because we have learned in the last 24 hours that the President is raising money today online from his supporters, not for a fund that is designed to strictly finance a recount effort but for a new political action committee that he has established that will fund his political efforts over the next 4 years. The button you click may give you the idea that you are supporting the President's recount but, in fact, you are helping him to amass resources that will allow him to be a major political presence for the next 4 years. So either the President is successful in continuing this assault on the transition of power or he is able to amass resources that help him into the future. There is no downside for the President. There is a big downside for the rest of us. There is a big downside for this country. In the short run, the country's national security is threatened by a messy transition. This has been covered, I think, well today, but, traditionally, the President-elect would be able to start getting briefings on national security threats, would start to get access to classified information, and would begin to be able to do background checks on individuals that he would like to be part of his national security cabinet. Traditionally, those are among the first confirmations that move through this body, the President's national security team. All of that is being delayed by a President who refuses to begin a transition and a Republican Senate that refuses to put pressure on the President to change his mind. But, also, and in some ways more insidious, is the attack on the rule of law and the idea of peaceful transition of power itself. The narrative that President Trump is spreading and that congressional Republicans are facilitating right now that the election was stolen or rigged, it isn't being written on a white board that is going to be neatly and tidily erased as soon as 2021 shows up. No, the work that is being done right now by the Republican Party to undermine faith in our elections will have a very long, very long tale. And when the American people or a large percentage of them lose faith in elections, when they are told by leaders they trust that elections that were actually held legitimately are illegitimate, then, those individuals, of course, will naturally lose faith in public institutions themselves. If all the people who got elected were illegitimately chosen, then, so must be the actions they take once they are in office. Now, maybe that is consistent with the general Republican project over the last several decades. I have watched as Republicans have engaged in a withering assault on the public sector. The whole idea from Republicans has been that government is illegitimate by its very nature and can't do anything to help you or to solve your problems. But that idea, if it is, in fact, the goal of my Republican colleagues to delegitimize public institutions by delegitimizing elections, is really dangerous for two reasons. One, don't assume that democracy can survive this. If the 45 percent of the country that supports Donald Trump doesn't really believe that elections are legitimate, I am not sure that democracy hangs around for another 100 years. But, second, we are living in a moment where it is really important for people to have faith in public institutions. There is no way for us to turn the corner on this pandemic unless people believe what leaders are telling them about how to conduct themselves or about how we are going to administer a vaccine or about why the business around the corner from you is limiting the number of people who can enter it. In the middle of a pandemic that has killed going on 250,000 Americans, losing faith in public institutions is deadly. The President is delusional. There was no voter fraud. He lost. The American people, by a large margin, chose Joe Biden as President of the United States, and this delusion is not a quaint sideshow. It is an assault on our democracy that will have consequences for the future viability of democracy but also for the viability of public institutions to meet crises like the one that we stand in the middle of today. The President's behavior and the behavior of Republicans in Congress who support him is dangerously unpatriotic. When we arrive in the Senate we swear an oath to our country, not to our party, and right now our President and congressional Republicans are not living up to that oath. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, first, let me thank the Presiding Officer, the staff on the floor, and the staff in both caucus rooms, for putting up with a very, very late night to take the floor just past 3:30 in the morning. I thank my friend Senator Schatz for picking up about an hour and a half, from 2 until 3:30, and I know that Senator Kaine will be joining the floor shortly. This is an exceptional night because we are living in exceptional times. We are likely to see tomorrow a record number of COVID cases diagnosed in this country. I know that it now feels like the new normal 7, 8 months into this pandemic, but this is unthinkable that our country has been ravaged by a virus that less than a year ago no one had ever heard of. Sometime in November or December of last year, COVID-19 started popping onto the international public health radar screen in China, and a few months later, it was here in the United States. Most countries were able to come up with a plan to control, contain, or essentially eliminate the threat of COVID-19 in a matter of months. The United States was not, because of an abysmal failure by this administration. We are now living with a third wave of COVID. As we speak on the floor tonight, we are looking down the barrel of 300,000 Americans dead by the end of this year. No one is safe. There are millions of kids who can't go back to school, businesses that have gone under, and 10 percent of our workforce that is out of work. This is an exceptional night because we are living in an exceptional moment, and I will talk over the course of my remarks about the President's failure to meet the moment and to be able to rescue this country from this pandemic--in fact, his daily actions now to actively spread the disease. There is no one who is doing more to spread COVID- 19 across the country today than the President of the United States, who is holding daily superspreader events, who is shaming individuals who wear masks, and who is deliberately trying to reduce the number of tests that are done in this country. I also want to acknowledge that the vote that we have pending, ready for action tomorrow, is directly connected to the question as to whether this country is going to be able to turn the corner on COVID, because the first case Amy Coney Barrett will likely hear after she is confirmed by this body, as it looks like will happen tomorrow, will be a case on the Affordable Care Act--a case that asks the Supreme Court to invalidate the entirety of the ACA. It draws issue with one specific provision in the ACA, but the remedy it seeks--the remedy the President of the United States is asking for-- is the complete invalidation of the Affordable Care Act. That is 23 million people losing healthcare. That is 130 million people all across this country who have preexisting conditions potentially losing protections that, under the ACA, prohibit insurance companies from charging them more. I have heard my Republican colleagues come down to this floor and go on television and give press conferences in which they suggest that those of us who say the Affordable Care Act is about to be struck down due to the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett are engaging in hyperbole, that we are exaggerating. Well, I have been in the Congress for the last 10 years, the House and the Senate. My eyes haven't been closed. I have watched an unrelenting campaign from the Republicans to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act. When I was in the House of Representatives, the call from the Republicans was to repeal and replace. The Presiding Officer will remember this because I think we served together during that period of time. The idea was, of course, that the Republicans didn't like the Affordable Care Act, but they acknowledged that they couldn't get rid of it with nothing else to replace it. Now, that in and of itself was an acknowledgment of the merits of the Affordable Care Act. The Republicans may not have liked the details, but given the fact that they were not supporting repealing it but supporting repealing it and replacing it with something else, they knew the American public would not allow for the Affordable Care Act to disappear and have nothing else to stand in its place. We waited month after month and year after year for a replacement plan to be offered by the Republicans. We waited month after month and year after year. That replacement plan never arrived. The closest we came to seeing a replacement plan was in the summer of 2017. As we were debating its repeal here in the Senate shortly after the election of Donald Trump, Speaker Ryan, then still in charge of the House of Representatives, presented a replacement. The problem is the replacement was worse than simple repeal. The Affordable Care Act covers around 23 million individuals, and the Congressional Budget Office said that Speaker Ryan's replacement plan would have resulted in 24 million people losing healthcare, going backward from the status quo ante. Seventy different times Republicans, either in the House or the Senate, tried to repeal all or part of the Affordable Care Act. You may say: Well, that sounds unfair. It is not fair to create an equivalency between efforts to repeal all of the Affordable Care Act and efforts to repeal just some of the Affordable Care Act. OK, on 31 different occasions, Republicans tried to repeal the entirety of the Affordable Care Act--31 times, which is a lot--with no replacement that would have covered everyone that receives coverage under the Affordable Care Act, with no meaningful effort to protect those who have preexisting conditions. My eyes were open to that. My constituents were watching all of that. We saw how Republicans, 31 times, tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. I have listened to Republicans out on the campaign trail. I have watched what Republicans have said to the press and to their constituents. We are not blind. We know that Republicans, for 10 years, have been trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act. We know that for 10 years Republicans have not had a replacement that would insure anywhere close to the number of people insured by the Affordable Care Act or provide protections to people with preexisting conditions. So don't tell us that we are overhyping this desire by Republicans to take steps in this body that would lead to the repeal of the Affordable Care Act because that is the lion's share of what Republicans have been doing for the last 10 years. In the summer of 2017, Republicans mounted their last stand to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. They had control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. This was the moment to do it. In fact, most of us expected that it was a foregone conclusion, having told the American public in the runup to 2016 that, If you elect us, we will repeal the Affordable Care Act, and having won the House and the Senate and the Presidency, despite, by the way, getting less votes than Democratic candidates for the Senate and the House and their President having gotten less votes than the Democratic candidate for President, by virtue of the way in which we select representatives through gerrymandered districts, through the way in which States with smaller populations have greater representation in the Senate and through the mechanism of the electoral college. Despite getting less votes than Democrats all across the country in 2016, Republicans did take control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. And those are the rules. Those are the rules. Republicans played by the rules in running for office in 2016. I am not begrudging the fact that they did in fact win control of all three lawmaking chambers of U.S. democracy-- the Presidency, the House, and the Senate. It was to be expected that Republicans would repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017. But, curiously, they could not, and the reason they could not is pretty simple. Democracy took hold. The people of this country didn't allow this Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They rose up in record numbers. Thousands of people turned out to townhalls all across the country. The phone lines here were lit up. There were protests that spring and summer outside this building on a near daily basis. It was 100 percent clear that if Republicans voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replaced it with nothing or made our healthcare system worse, as Speaker Ryan's plan would have done, there was going to be hell to pay from the American electorate. Now, it turned out that there was, anyway, because Americans watched the attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and were just slightly less infuriated than they would have been if repeal had actually gone forward. But repeal failed. On this floor, late one night in the summer of 2017, the bill went down, and Republicans at that point had figured it out. Having tried 31 times--70 times, whatever your number is--to repeal all or part of the Affordable Care Act, Republicans figured out that they weren't going to be able to get it done through Congress, that the American people weren't going to let them. So they decided to try another way. Later that year, the Republican tax bill passed the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives and was signed into law by the President of the United States, and inside that tax bill was a curious provision, a provision that eliminated the tax penalty for individuals who don't have insurance. That was a really important part of the Affordable Care Act, not a super popular part of the Affordable Care Act. Nobody likes putting a financial penalty on individuals who don't have insurance, but it was really critical to protecting people with preexisting conditions. I won't go into the details of it, but I actually sat in the Presiding Officer's chair during Senator Cruz's filibuster overnight, on a late night like this one. I was probably presiding as a freshman Member of the Senate at about this hour, and in that filibuster--I wouldn't recommend going back and looking at it on tape, but you could--you would listen to Senator Cruz explain that, in fact, the individual mandate and the tax penalty are critical to protecting people with preexisting conditions. Because if you don't require people to get insurance but you also require insurance companies to rate folks who are really sick the same as they rate healthy patients, the whole insurance system falls apart. Because if you aren't required to get insurance but you are not penalized if you wait to get insurance until you are really sick, then that is exactly what you will do. You won't get insurance until you are really sick. You won't have to pay any more once you have that expensive cancer diagnosis, for instance. Then, without any healthy people buying into the system and with only sick people part of our insurance pools, the insurance system collapses. So Republicans went into this 2017 tax bill, and they removed the provision that would provide a financial penalty. But it really wasn't actually that curious. It wasn't that difficult to figure out why they were doing that. Republicans were doing that because, a few years before, the Supreme Court had ruled that the Affordable Care Act was constitutional because of the existence of that tax penalty. It was an interesting decision, one that I disagree with, but Justice Roberts ruled for five of nine members that the Affordable Care Act could stand as constitutional because of the existence of that tax provision. So you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why Republicans had inserted this provision into the tax bill--because they believed that they had a new route, a new pathway, to invalidate the entirety of the Affordable Care Act. Now, having failed to be able to get the elected branch of government to undo the Affordable Care Act, they could essentially plant a constitutional landmine in the Affordable Care Act and attempt to get it invalidated through the courts. Now, again, let me tell you, I don't agree with the Supreme Court decision--I think it was in 2012--that suggested the Affordable Care Act would be invalid if you removed this tax penalty. But that decision stands, the NFIB decision, and Republicans figured out that they could sabotage the Affordable Care Act and run a case through the court system that would end up getting done what they had been trying to do for 10 years--take insurance from 23 million people and the preexisting conditions protection. And that is exactly what they did. That is exactly what Republicans did. Twenty Republican attorneys general, joined by a whole host of conservative political organizations, launched a court case claiming that because of the change made in the 2017 tax bill, the Affordable Care Act was now, all of a sudden, unconstitutional. It had to be struck down. The case went before the district court, and a Republican-appointed judge ruled in favor of the Republican attorneys general. The case then went to the circuit court, and in a 2-to-1 decision, with a Trump- appointed, Senate-confirmed judge making the difference, they ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, and now that case sits before the Supreme Court, and it is to be heard by the Supreme Court in 2 weeks--in 2 weeks. So now you might be starting to figure out why we are here. Why are we rushing through Amy Coney Barrett's nomination in record time? You never had a Supreme Court Justice confirmed this close to the election. In my political lifetime, I have never seen a Supreme Court Justice rushed through in this amount of time. We have been here all weekend. It is 3:30 in the morning. We took a vote on Saturday. It is now becoming apparent why we are rushing this through. It is probably partially because Republicans are worried they are going to lose their Senate majority in this election and the President is going to lose, and it will be much harder to push through a nominee in a lameduck session. It is probably because there are potentially cases to come before the Supreme Court regarding this election, and this President wants to make sure he has as many of his nominees stocked on the bench as possible if there are any questions that arise before the Court regarding the validity of the election. But I think mostly the reason that we are here, rushing through Amy Coney Barrett's nomination, in the dead of night, in record time, 1 week before an election, is because the Affordable Care Act case is up before the Supreme Court in 2 weeks, and it is likely--in fact, almost certain--that without Amy Coney Barrett on the Court, that case brought by Donald Trump and Republicans across the country will not succeed, and that only by rushing through Amy Coney Barrett's nomination 2 weeks before this case is to be heard by the Supreme Court can Republicans finally get done what they have been trying to do for 10 years--repeal the Affordable Care Act and end insurance for 23 million Americans and strip away protections for everybody who has a preexisting condition. Now, I know my Republican friends get really angry when they hear us suggest that their goal is to end insurance for 23 million Americans or to strip protections away from people with preexisting conditions, and they will stand up here and say: No, of course, that is not what we want to do. We are going to protect people with preexisting conditions. We will find a way to insure all those people. And I truly do believe that my Republican colleagues do, in a perfect world, want people with preexisting conditions to be covered. The problem is they have worked themselves into a trap that they can't get out of and that they know they can't get out of. They say they want to cover people with preexisting conditions, but they have never been able to put on the table a plan that would do that. They have made this promise that they will repeal the Affordable Care Act, and they have put themselves on this path that they can't get off of to repeal the Affordable Care Act through legislation or through the court system, such that, even though they say they want to protect people with preexisting conditions, they are acting in a way that does the opposite. So you have to forgive us when we say that you want to strip protections for people with preexisting conditions. Because despite the fact that you say you don't want to do it, everything you are doing ends up in that result. So at some point, we have to watch what you do, not what you say. Your President had the chance to go to court. Well, first of all, your President didn't have to go to court at all on behalf of the plaintiffs. In fact, 99 percent of the time, a President will defend the statute that is being attacked, even if that President doesn't agree with the statute. That is generally seen as the responsibility of the executive branch, to defend the statutes of the United States, whether or not you agree with them. That doesn't happen in every case, but that is generally how it works. In this case, not surprisingly, the President went to court and said: I am going to join with the plaintiffs. I am going to ask for the court to invalidate the Affordable Care Act. But President Trump could have asked for only part of the act to be invalidated. He could have asked for the part of the act that protects people with preexisting conditions to remain, but he didn't, and, frankly, Republicans in this Chamber didn't pressure him to do so. Republicans here could have begged the President, privately or publicly, to go to the court and ask for the portions of the act that protect people with preexisting conditions to remain, but the President didn't do that. He sent his lawyers to court. His lawyers will be in Court in 2 weeks arguing that the entire Affordable Care Act be struck down--the whole thing. So let me say it again. Don't blame us for watching what you do, rather than what you say. Republicans say they want to protect people with preexisting conditions, but then everything they do and everything this President does seeks to destroy those protections. That is why we are here. We are here because Republicans have gotten themselves on this train that they cannot stop--this effort that has been underway for a decade to strip away the Affordable Care Act protections. Two weeks from now, the Republicans will get a little bit closer to what they have been asking for, for 10 years, when this case comes before the Supreme Court and Amy Coney Barrett sits on it as the deciding fifth vote to invalidate the Affordable Care Act. And why this matters more now and why I led my remarks referencing the COVID epidemic is because it is unthinkable in ordinary times for 23 million people to lose health insurance or for folks that have a history of heart disease to all of a sudden not be able to buy insurance. In my State, that is about 260,000 people who get their insurance through the Affordable Care Act who would lose it. We are a small State, about 3.5 million. A quarter million people losing healthcare insurance in our State--that is a humanitarian catastrophe at any time, but in the middle of a pandemic, that is a nightmarish, cataclysmic dystopian future to wish for. In the middle of a pandemic, to take health insurance away from 23 million people, to go back to the days in which insurance companies could discriminate against you because you had a preexisting condition? COVID is going to be a preexisting condition. Let me just level with you. There are 8 million people in this country who know that they have had COVID. But, eventually, if people start taking antibody tests, there will be five times that many who have a medical history that includes COVID. All those people will have a preexisting condition, and insurance companies, if the Affordable Care Act disappears, can either decide to not insure those individuals or can jack up their rates. That is on top of the 130 million people who have other preexisting conditions. So think about both of those things happening. Think about, in the middle of a pandemic, when there are over 1,000 people dying every day in this country, where we are seeing reports of hospitals literally being filled to total capacity in parts of our country, for over 20 million Americans to all of a sudden not have the ability to pay for healthcare. We are in the middle of a pandemic, but we are also in the middle of a giant depression; right? I mean, 10 percent of America is out of work. Guess how those individuals get health insurance when they are out of work--through the Affordable Care Act. People that lose their job, many of them get insurance through the Affordable Care Act. They qualify for the Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act, or they end up buying insurance through these exchanges. I have story after story from my constituents in Connecticut of people who lost their jobs in the middle of a pandemic and were able to get health insurance because of the Affordable Care Act. It is not just that you have all these sick people who are going to lose insurance when the Affordable Care Act is repealed but also all these folks who are out of work and have no other way to get insurance at an affordable rate other than the Affordable Care Act. Stripping it away in the middle of a pandemic is just inhumane. On top of that are all of the people who will have COVID as a preexisting condition. Wayne lives in Rocky Hill, CT. Rocky Hill is a small town south of Hartford. I wish his story were exceptional, but you have all heard these stories, my Republican and Democratic friends: Thank you for your continued support of the Affordable Care Act. Our family has extensive medical needs, and we rely on the preexisting conditions and no lifetime cap coverage provisions that the ACA provides. Both of our sons have serious health issues. Harrison is developmentally impaired. Has a rare genetic disorder, cerebral palsy, hearing loss, and a rare form of intractable Epilepsy, characterized by multiple, uncontrolled daily seizures. Imagine having a son like that. Jacob, who just turned 15, has Hemophilia A with an Inhibitor. If you are unfamiliar with this disease, it means his body not only lacks the protein needed to clot his blood in case of an injury, but it also rejects the typical medicine used to treat his bleeding disorder. This means his only alternative for treating his often spontaneous internal bleeds is a very expensive synthetic clotting factor, which costs around $9,000 a dose. When he has been injured in the past, he has to receive doses every 2 hours for the course of several days. This happened on over six occasions since he was first diagnosed in 2011. Think about how lucky you are if you have healthy kids. I am lucky. I have two young boys who are healthy. Harrison has cerebral palsy, hearing loss, epilepsy, daily seizures. Jacob has hemophilia--medicine that costs $9,000 a dose. Wayne writes: We have had to maintain double insurance coverage through both my wife's and my employers as well as Medicaid in Harrison's case. We would have easily been dropped by any number of insurance companies for exceeding both boys lifetime expense caps-- Well over 1 million each-- and might not have been able to obtain insurance in the first place due to their preexisting conditions. If these provisions were not made law by the ACA, there would be no way we would have obtained or ever afforded health insurance. We would not have been able to keep our home and would likely have had to file for bankruptcy by now. Both boys together have been hospitalized on over 36 separate occasions, with Harrison having spent almost his entire first 6 months of life in the NICU . . . at a cost of over $1,000 a day. Remember, the ACA says insurance companies can't deny you coverage because you have a preexisting condition. They can't deny your family coverage because your child has a preexisting condition, but the Affordable Care Act also says insurance companies can't cap your insurance. They can't say: Hey, if you have an expensive disease, we are going to insure you for up to this amount of money, and then we are going to stop paying for healthcare. They can't do that on an annual basis either. The Affordable Care Act says they can't, as an insurance company, give a dollar amount of coverage over the course of the year and then cut you off, because that is not really insurance, right? The whole idea of insurance is that you pay in whether you are healthy or you are unhealthy, but you are banking money and you are using other people's banked money in case you get really sick, in case your family member gets really sick. If your insurance plan doesn't cover you in the case that you have kids like Harrison and Jacob, then it is not really insurance in the traditional form of insurance. That is why the Affordable Care Act said: No, listen, health insurance is going to have to cover you if you are really sick or your children are really sick, and they can't pull that coverage after a certain dollar amount on an annual basis or a lifetime basis. That is why Wayne talks about the importance of the Affordable Care Act for his family. He says: We would have had to sell our home. We likely would be bankrupt if not for the Affordable Care Act. He says: If these key provisions are removed-- Which seems entirely likely-- millions of individuals and families with loved ones having serious illnesses will be adversely affected. That is a kind way of explaining what would happen to Wayne's family. They would be adversely affected. Wayne would lose everything if insurance companies were able to go back to discriminating against people with preexisting conditions and placing back on insurance plans these annual caps and these lifetime caps. Again, the President of the United States had the choice to go to court and ask for the entire act to be invalidated or for specific provisions to be invalidated. He asked for the entire act to be invalidated, which means these provisions which protect Wayne and his family will be gone if Amy Coney Barrett and four other Justices decide to rule for President Trump on his request to invalidate the entire Affordable Care Act. Don't tell us that we are overhyping this threat, that we are making up this idea that Republicans want the Affordable Care Act to disappear. It is much of what Republicans have been doing for the last 10 years. There has been no viable replacement plan that protects Wayne in the way that he needs and Wayne's children in the way that he needs While no one can be guaranteed as to what the Supreme Court is going to do, Donald Trump himself told you that he is only going to put people on the Supreme Court who will invalidate the Affordable Care Act. He criticized John Roberts over and over again as a Republican appointee for upholding the Affordable Care Act. He signaled to you that he was not going to appoint someone to the Supreme Court like John Roberts--someone who would find a way to uphold the Affordable Care Act. He told you that was John Roberts' primary sin and that he wouldn't make that mistake again. He, in fact, told you once again just a few days ago that he hoped the Supreme Court would strike down the Affordable Care Act. If that is his hope, then I don't know that we can rely on the idea that he would have then coincidentally been picking Justices to serve on the Supreme Court who would follow through on that request. Julie is from Sandy Hook. Julie says: On March 25, 1994, I received a lifesaving kidney transplant at Hartford Hospital. At the time I was working at a job that was not fulfilling, and I was trying to complete my Master's degree in Education to get my job in teaching. I finished my degree, got married, had two children, and got a dog. Later, I finally landed a full time teaching position at Newtown, CT. I know if the law were overturned today, I would not have been able to transfer to my husband's health insurance plan and ultimately would not have been able to achieve my dream of becoming a teacher. Now, that is a different story than Wayne's, right? It is not equally important, but it is important. What Julie is telling you is that she had a dream to become a teacher, and she needed to take the time out of the workforce in order to pursue that dream, and she needed health insurance during that time. What the Affordable Care Act has allowed for--and this was back in 1990s that Julie is telling the story. Why she is telling it is because the Affordable Care Act gives you the opportunity to maintain health insurance while you are out of work or while you are transitioning from one job to another. It provides a nimbleness, a flexibility in the workforce that didn't exist without the Affordable Care Act protections. Julie goes on to write: In August of this year, I was diagnosed with B-cell Non- Hodgkin's Lymphoma. I am currently receiving chemotherapy treatments. . . . I am scared to death [she writes] to imagine what would happen if I am not able to return to work and I lose my benefits. While my husband does have the opportunity to get health insurance benefits through his employer, if the ACA were overturned I might not be eligible for benefits because of my multiple pre-existing conditions. This could mean financial ruin for my family since I need continued follow up care even after I finish my chemotherapy treatments. Julie is now in this sort of classic situation in which she has a preexisting condition. She is currently receiving treatment, and she is living in fear about what will happen to her and her family if all of a sudden the days of discrimination against people with preexisting conditions come back. She is also telling the story about what happened to her earlier in life when she went out and got herself reeducated to become a teacher but had fear about what was going to happen to her insurance benefits because of that. That fear doesn't exist for Americans any longer because they have access to these private healthcare exchanges when they lose their coverage, perhaps even voluntarily because they want to go get another job. Now she is in this classic situation in which she has a serious, serious illness. She talks about the fear that she has about what will happen if the Affordable Care Act is struck down. I think that is important to recognize, as well, because there is a generation of young adults who, frankly, don't even remember the days in which you could be discriminated against by insurance companies because of a preexisting condition, who don't know what it is like to obsess and obsess and obsess over that question. There are folks who are 30 years old today who during their entire adult lives lived under the ACA, who are having kids now--kids who may have complicated medical conditions--and don't have to worry about that child living a life in which they are constantly chasing insurance. It just doesn't happen any longer. Now that prospect has returned because of this case before the Supreme Court. Now those parents are starting to worry. What will happen if Amy Coney Barrett provides the fifth vote to invalidate the Affordable Care Act as President Trump is asking the Supreme Court to do? What will happen? Well, what likely will happen is those protections for people with preexisting conditions will be struck down, and once again, parents of children with complicated illnesses will spend their lives worrying about how this illness will define their child's future. Now, if you have a serious illness, it is going to define your future no matter what, but on top of the daily search for treatment and the daily search for wellness, there is the worry of whether you are going to be able to pay for that. It is a nightmare that we don't have to choose to endure as a nation because right now we have a law that protects against it. I always remember this very simple story from a few years after the Affordable Care Act was passed. I was at a community pool in Cheshire, CT, with my son, who was then 4 or 5 years old. This young guy--maybe a few years younger than I--sheepishly approached me in the pool as I was playing with my son. He said: Thank you. I asked: For what? He said: I want to say thank you for the Affordable Care Act. I am here with my son. My son has a rare heart condition. I used to stay up nights worrying about what his life was going to be like. I still have lots of worries, but now I have one less because of the Affordable Care Act. Now I know we are not going to go bankrupt paying for him. Now, more than anything else, I know his future is not going to be dependent on whether or not he can find a job that provides him healthcare benefits. He can pursue his dream without the constant worry of how he is going to pay for health insurance. That sounds like a simple thing, but it is not. For any parent here, the idea that your child can be whomever they want to be or at least their life won't be dictated by whether they can afford healthcare for their expensive disease that they have through no fault of their own, through no choice of their own--that is a big deal as a parent. The Affordable Care Act relieves much of that worry. That is why people are so concerned about what Amy Coney Barrett's nomination to the Court will result in. Malaine from Branford says: In 2015, my husband co-founded a Biotechnology company, which is located at the UCONN Incubator in Farmington. That is exciting. That was an incubator that I helped conceive as a State legislator and then as a Congressman. She writes: He did this because the ACA made it possible for our family and the company employees to have healthcare. The company now has 10 employees, all high-paying, Connecticut based jobs. This entrepreneurship would absolutely, positively not have been possible without the ACA. In 2018, the company transitioned to employer healthcare. Now through the Trump administration's incompetence in the handling of the coronavirus pandemic, sales of the company's product-- They sell to other companies that are still closed because of coronavirus-- have plummeted and so our company, like so many, is struggling. If we lose our livelihood, we also lose the company health insurance, which means we co-founders . . . would need to depend on the ACA's health insurance, if it still exists. Once again, this is another story about how the ACA allows for financial innovation, allows for economic innovation. This is a company that was started in Connecticut, a biotechnology company. Because the ACA allowed in the early days for those entrepreneurs to insure themselves, their families, and their early employees through the Affordable Care Act before they had enough money in the company, they were able to provide employer-based insurance. All of that goes away. That cushion for entrepreneurs will disappear if this act is invalidated. These stories go on and on and on, individuals who will have their lives ruined and changed if the Affordable Care Act disappears. Again, we might be months away from that occurring--months away from that occurring--in the middle of a pandemic, people losing their insurance right at the moment when they need it the most because of the costs of confronting COVID, because of the fact that they lost their insurance because of the recession or are at risk of losing insurance, like Malaine's family is. What a nightmare. That is not my only worry, though, when I think about Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation. Frankly, I nor my constituents have had enough time to really understand the consequences of Amy Coney Barrett's nomination because of how rushed this process has been. In the middle of a pandemic, when it is abnormally difficult to be able to communicate with your constituents, we rushed this nomination through, which has made it almost impossible for people to figure out who she is, what she believes, and communicate that in time to their Members of Congress. I have a feeling there is a reason for that as well. The rush job is because Republicans need to get her on the Court in time for the ACA case, because Republicans want to get her on the Court in time to hear election disputes, because Republicans want to get her on the Court before a lameduck session makes it harder if the election goes against Republicans. But I have a feeling it is because they also don't want people to figure out what she stands for. One of the other areas of law in which Amy Coney Barrett is likely pretty radical--certainly is radical--is on the question of America's gun laws. Obviously I care about this deeply. I have borne witness to one of the country's worst gun homicides in Newtown, CT. Right now, on the streets of Hartford, CT, as in many other cities, gun violence is spiking. It is not shocking. Gun violence tends to attract poverty when people are desperate economically. Whether we like it or not, they often resort to violence, and we are in a moment of economic desperation. You should see the food lines at food pantries and food banks in Connecticut. It is not coincidental to that economic desperation that we are seeing an increase in gun violence. Yet gun violence is made a lot easier in the Nation because of the ease of access to weapons. Our Nation is just flooded with weapons and many of them illegal weapons, many of them in the hands of felons-- dangerous people who shouldn't have them. We are attempting to pass a universal background checks bill here in Congress that would make it harder for felons--dangerous individuals-- and people with serious mental illness to get their hands on guns. It is probably the most popular policy intervention in the country. I don't know that there is any other major piece of legislation that we have proposed that is more popular than universal background checks. It gets about 90 to 95 percent of support in most polls. The majority of non-gun owners, gun owners, NRA members, non-NRA members--everybody-- wants universal background checks. It makes a difference. The States that have universal background checks have lower rates of gun homicides, suicides, and domestic violence crimes on average. It is maddening to me that we haven't been able to pass universal background checks here, but that is a political problem. That is a problem of political power. The gun lobby has had much more political power. Despite the fact that 90 percent of Americans want universal background checks, it is just a question of one side having more political power than the other. That is changing. Witness the House of Representatives' passage of universal background checks last year. I think that we will be able to pass that in the Senate if the elections go a certain way. Yet Amy Coney Barrett has a different idea as to what the barrier should be to universal background checks. Amy Coney Barrett believes there is a constitutional prohibition against preventing all felons from owning guns. Amy Coney Barrett wants to take away the choice from Congress of who can own a gun and who can't own a gun. Now, that is not hyperbole. She will tell you that this is her belief. She wrote it down in an opinion. She didn't serve on the appellate court for very long, but while she was there, a case on a State gun law came before her, and she wrote a dissenting opinion which is a major outlier in Second Amendment jurisprudence, and it contains in it some pretty dangerous ideas that, frankly, people haven't had the time to consider because of how rushed this nomination has been. In this case, the Kanter case, Amy Coney Barrett says that this felon--I think, in this case, it was a nonviolent felon--should be able to own a weapon. This is notwithstanding the State law that says all felons can't own weapons. Amy Coney Barrett comes to the personal opinion, in this case, that this individual is not dangerous. What she says is that it is not for the legislature to decide who is dangerous and who isn't. It is for the courts to decide who is dangerous and who isn't, and if the legislature can't prove to me, Amy Coney Barrett, that this person is dangerous, then I will declare that the Constitution doesn't allow for that person to own a weapon. The court now becomes the trier of fact. This isn't unfamiliar because this has been a sort of interesting strain of jurisprudence among this new Federalist Society-vetted, conservative judicial crowd. That is sort of the issue in Shelby County as well. This voting rights case comes before the Court, and the Supreme Court essentially says: We are going to be the trier of fact with respect to whether there is discrimination in this country. We are going to determine whether discrimination against people of color exists such that they need these voting protections. That traditionally would be a function of the legislature to decide whether discrimination exists so that it is necessary to require these protections, but in Shelby County, the Supreme Court says: No, we will make the decision as to whether discrimination is a problem, and if it is not, we will constitutionally invalidate these provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Well, in Kanter, what Coney Barrett says is that courts now will decide who is dangerous and who isn't because I believe the Second Amendment to only allow for guns to be prohibited to individuals who are dangerous. The second thing she says in that case is equally as dangerous. She says she also would require a State or the Federal Government to prove that the law is efficacious in promoting public safety. Now, that might not sound to you unreasonable, but that is not what the Second Amendment says. The Second Amendment doesn't say anything in there about gun laws only being constitutional if they can be proven to be efficacious, and there is always going to be a study funded by the NRA that will tell you that, if you take guns away from people, you make a community more dangerous. The NRA is really good at telling you that the only way to solve crime is with more guns. So, conveniently, under Amy Coney Barrett's conception of the Second Amendment, so long as she or others on the Court can find a plausible argument that a gun law is not effective in promoting public safety, it can thus be ruled unconstitutional. There are a hundred other courts out there with Republican judges who have not found the Second Amendment to say what Amy Coney Barrett says the Second Amendment says, and for courts to, all of a sudden, micromanage decisions about who is dangerous and who is not dangerous and what laws are effective and what laws are not effective sounds to me like the kind of judicial activism that many of my conservative friends have been warning against. I think the natural consequence of that would be to invalidate a whole host of background checks laws, perhaps to make it impossible--indeed, likely, to make it impossible for us to be able to expand background checks in a universal fashion as 90 percent of Americans want us to do. So, while we are certainly spending most of our time talking about the threat to Americans' healthcare--because we are in the middle of a healthcare epidemic and because the consequences are so serious--it is important to note that it is not only on the question of healthcare that Amy Coney Barrett is going to, potentially, fundamentally change this country. Whether it be her likely vote to overturn Roe v. Wade or the same-sex marriage decision or her radical, out-of-the-box conception of American gun laws and the constitutionality of them, her views are not in the American mainstream. Of course, that makes sense because, increasingly, the Republicans aren't using the legislature to try to mold this country into their world view, into their political view, because their conception of how this country should be is deeply unpopular. It is unpopular to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It is unpopular to make it harder for the legislature to put into place universal background checks. It is unpopular to allow States to criminalize abortion. It is unpopular to allow for more dark money to be spent in elections. It is unpopular to provide less regulation on the pollution--oil and gas--industry. So, increasingly, the Republicans don't really try to push that agenda through Congress because they have this other way now--because the Supreme Court will get all of that done. The Supreme Court will eviscerate the civil jury to make it easier for corporations to prevail in their cases against consumers. The Supreme Court will declare that a woman's right to a safe and legal abortion is not protected by the Constitution. The Supreme Court will invalidate the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court will stop legislatures from passing universal background checks. As the Republicans' political agenda has become less aligned with that of the broad American public's, it makes sense that the Senate has stopped legislating. It makes sense that the Senate has just become this confirmation simple machine. I have been here for the last 2 years. We haven't debated any legislation of substance here. All we have done is just confirm judges. I checked, and we have done 20 pieces of legislation. That is half as many as a normal Senate would do. Most of the bills we have passed have been--or not most of them, but, as I checked, one-third of the bills that we have passed have been of post office renamings or commemorative coins, and we have passed half as many bills overall as we would in a normal legislative session. Legislation is just kind of grinding to a halt here. Yes, some of that is because the House is of a different party, and it is difficult to pass a law when you have different parties in charge of the House and the Senate, but there aren't a lot of conference committees happening, and there aren't a lot of attempts to reconcile our differences. In part, this is because the Senate is just confirming judges--a record numbers of judges because, in part, there were record numbers of vacancies because Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans refused to confirm almost anybody over the last 2 years of Obama's term in office. They essentially nullified that portion of his Presidency--his right under the Constitution to nominate and have considered judges to the Federal bench. So, when Trump won and the Republicans maintained control of the Senate, all of a sudden, they had more vacancies than ever before. They have spent the last 2 years populating the bench, filling those vacancies. That is their right to do so, I guess, but it is also part of the strategy to push a conservative political agenda through the courts rather than through the legislature. Because that agenda is so unpopular, if it were pushed through the legislature, it would jeopardize the Republicans' chances of reelection. This has been an unusually activist Court, but it is likely to get more so with Amy Coney Barrett on the Court. I want to do two more things before I yield the floor, and I know Senator Kaine will be here shortly. I want to spend a few more minutes on why this pandemic is so intimately intertwined into this conversation about this nomination and then finally say a word on process. There are 220,000 Americans who have died, and millions of others have had their lives changed forever by this pandemic. The number of people who have been laid off is just sort of unfathomable to think about. The President tried a feckless travel ban in February and March. It didn't work. It was not going to work. He, effectively, gave up after that. He just put the States in charge and then refused to resource the States in a way that would allow them to adequately and effectively confront the virus. One example is the President's refusal to stand up a national supply chain so that we have been in constant crisis--first, with respect to masks and face shields and hand sanitizer and then, throughout the crisis, with respect to tests and testing equipment and cartridges. I was visiting testing sites in Connecticut just last week. I mean, we are in--what?--month 8 of the pandemic, and still these testing sites in Connecticut have no idea, from day to day, how many tests they are going to have. I was visiting a hospital that is right in the middle of a historic hot zone in Connecticut. I did a roundtable, and there were a bunch of people there. On my way out, one of the participants in the roundtable kind of followed me out. It happens often, as my colleagues know, and she wanted to have a private word with me. She was the purchasing agent for that hospital who wanted to tell me before I left exactly how nightmarish her life was for not knowing, from day to day, how many tests they were going to be able to do and how she had to scramble every single day to figure out how to get the components for the tests and how there was no way to plan, how there was no way to say, ``OK, this week, I am going to go to this site and this site to do tests,'' because I don't know where I am getting them from. That is just one of the ways in which this President has just fundamentally let us down, but now it is something different. Now, the President isn't trying to stop the virus. He is actively trying to spread the virus. The President is holding these political rallies at which nobody is wearing masks and where people are standing shoulder to shoulder. He knows what he is doing. He knows that the effect of those rallies is going to be to spread the virus. He is shaming people who wear masks and is chiding the Vice President for always wearing one. He is now actively engaged in an effort to test people less because he thinks that makes the country look bad. He is at war with his own scientists and regularly undermines his own officials at the CDC and the NIH. There is nobody who is doing more today to help this virus spread than Donald Trump. Then, on top of that, to rush through a nominee who may end up invalidating the Affordable Care Act and leaving people with no insurance in the middle of a pandemic that you are responsible for as President, that is cruelty built on top of cruelty. Some of my other colleagues have done this as well, and I want to do it just so that some of these people's names end up as part of history, as part of some record other than of lonely obituaries. I am just going to read into the Record the names of a handful of the people who have died due to COVID-19 during this epidemic. I know it sounds like a futile exercise, given the fact that I will read 20 names and that 220,000 have died, but I don't really know what else to do at this point to try to convince this President to stop spreading the virus--to act in a responsible way, like an adult--other than to at least put some names to the numbers: Avigdor and Rachel Farin, Adam Russo, Maurice Berger, Robert Herman, Mary Margaret Smith, Ingrid Kisliuk, Johnny G. Gonzales, Anne Martinez, Amelia Michels, Giomar Fuentes, Carmen Carlo. By the way, those last four were related--a mother, an aunt, another aunt, and a grandmother in law. Dr. John Marvin Brown, Sr.; Sylvia Livings; Howard Kramer; Robert Patrick Perry, Jr.; Hing S. Yee; Frank Small III; Steven D. Silverman, MD; Alexander Malcolm MacMillan, Jr.; Dean Pryor Perkins; Mary Castro; Alfonso Ye, Jr.; Michelle Lee Carter; Jerome Mark Spector; John Robert Hicken; Frederick Harris; Bill Huening; Jim Sheehan; Barry Downes; Mark Blum; Florence Warshawsky Harris; Kenneth Glover; Terrence Neil Thompson, Jr.; Gordon Pickering; Robert M. Flanders; Carlos Llamas; Juan Gilbert ``Tito'' Dominguez; Sarah Ann Staffa Scholin; Anne Morreale; Roberta M. Pepitone; Barbara Ross; Jacqueline Hoover; Kerman Hain; Mario Mendoza; John Pizzetti; and William Charles Edward Prince. These are just two pages of names of individuals who have died due to the coronavirus. The numbers are, obviously, absolutely overwhelming, and it is, of course, not just those who have died. It is those who have lost their jobs. It is all those people who have had the illness. Eight million people have been diagnosed with COVID. Who knows what the overall number is--individuals who had it who didn't know it, thought it was something else, or people who were asymptomatic. But is that number 100 million? Is that number 50 million? It is big, and all those individuals now have a preexisting condition. All those individuals now could be discriminated against by an insurance company if the Affordable Care Act was to be invalidated, and that is the ask of the Supreme Court--a Supreme Court on which Amy Coney Barrett will be sitting if this nomination is pushed through. That is why these two questions--of the Supreme Court nomination which is before us today and the question of how we adequately confront the coronavirus pandemic--are connected and why we talk about them together. Finally, let me say a word about process. This is not the most compelling argument to the American people. I don't think they really care too much about the processes by which we choose to conduct business here in the Senate, but we do. We should. We chose to serve in this body. I have thought a lot over the course of the last few weeks about the idea of restraint--the idea of restraint, the idea of temperance. It has been a sort of seminal idea that humans have been considering for millennia--the idea of deciding not to do something that you have the ability to do, the decision to restrain one's self, to not use the minimum powers available to you because of the downstream consequences of your decision to operate at maximum power, your decision to use all of the facilities available to you. It is an idea that humans have considered, as I said, for thousands of years. It is generally applied to this body. It is generally a very important facet of democracy because the Constitution says very little about how the Senate will conduct business. It doesn't micromanage our proceedings. Certainly, if you read our constitutional history, there was a belief that the Senate was supposed to be different than the House of Representatives. Obviously, we are chosen very differently. At the outset, we were given different term lengths. The idea was that the Senate was supposed to be able to look out for the long-term health of the country in a way that was different from the House of Representatives, given their requirement to answer to the people every 2 years. So, over time, there was this understanding that the Senate would have, at its foundation, some concept of fairness, some ability for the minority to participate. So, over time, there have been different rules about how many votes are required for cloture or different practices of how cloture was used, how often it was used. But always there was an idea that this place would be a shared experience; minority and majority would work together. Senator McConnell has his version of history. I think Democrats have a different version of it. But I don't think anybody can disagree that the changes to the way in which the Senate operates have come faster and more furious during the years in which Mitch McConnell has been majority leader than at any time before. I mean, just while I have been here, we have seen the eradication of the filibuster for Supreme Court Justices. We have seen the time that we have to debate Justices dramatically shrunken. I think it is now down to 2 hours. We have seen the elimination of the blue slip--the ability for Senators from a particular State to have a say in the judges that are selected to serve in their State's appellate courts. But we also saw this exceptional thing happen in 2016, in which Mitch McConnell, as majority leader, decided that he would not even consider Barack Obama's choice for a vacancy in the Supreme Court, despite the fact that the vacancy came about 11 months before the next President was to be sworn in. In retrospect, Democrats didn't make a big enough deal out of it, I think, because we thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win, and, thus, ultimately, while it would be a dangerous precedent to live with, it might not have a practical effect on the country. We just couldn't imagine in the winter and spring of 2016 that Donald Trump was going to be the President of the United States. In retrospect we should have made a bigger deal out of what was happening in 2016, because this idea that Republicans weren't going to even consider--even do a courtesy meeting, have a hearing on--Merrick Garland was and still is truly exceptional, and it fits into this pattern we have seen under Senator McConnell during the past few years, this pattern of forsaking restraint and using every conceivable power. Or let me back that up: using more powers available to the majority than ever before in order to effectuate a political agenda. What Republicans did in 2016 was unprecedented--to just say: Forget it, President Obama. We are not considering your choice for the Supreme Court because you are a Democrat and we are Republicans. Now, at the time, as we remember, Republicans said that it wasn't political. It was because there was an important rule they were enforcing--this rule that you couldn't consider a Presidential nominee to the Supreme Court in the last year of his or her term. Now, I didn't hear my colleagues say at the time that the rule was only applied when the President and the Senate were of different parties. In fact, I heard many of my Republican colleagues, including the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, say that the rule was simply that, in the last year of a President's term, you don't consider a Supreme Court Justice. Famously, Senator Graham said: Write down my words. Hold them against me. And, at the time, we all knew that Republicans probably weren't telling the truth. We knew that it was probably just because it was President Obama and they did not want Justice Scalia, a conservative Justice, to be replaced by someone who was more liberal in their views. We suspected that this idea that they were enforcing a rule was just a ruse to paper over what was simply a political decision not to give President Obama a seat on the Supreme Court. Well, now we know it was a ruse because, all of a sudden, when presented with the exact same circumstance--well, in fact, a different circumstance in that this vacancy occurred weeks before the election rather than 9 months before the election--Republicans have now changed their tune because it is just about politics. Right? It is just about politics. It is just about getting your guys on the Supreme Court and stopping the other guy's folks from getting on the Supreme Court. And what Mitch McConnell has said is that we are going to use any power at our disposal in order to effectuate our agenda, especially when it concerns the Supreme Court. Restraint, which is a predicate for the effective operation of democracy, is disappearing. And, again, I know that it sounds ridiculous to make this suggestion, but there is really no logical end to how you can maximize your powers as a majority body in the U.S. Senate. There is no constitutional prohibition on the Senate majority saying that Members of the majority are going to get twice as much staff as Members of the minority. There is nothing stopping the majority from eliminating our speaking rights in committees, on the floor of the Senate. There are a lot of things that the majority can do to make it increasingly impossible for the minority to have any role here--to be able to protest, to be able to carry out our agenda. And I know that there is a lot of speculation--much of it driven by the Republican majority--about what Democrats will do if Democrats are given control of the Senate. Will Democrats go to new extraordinary lengths to maximize their power, given the extraordinary lengths Republicans have gone to maximize their power? That is not a conversation that is sort of ripe enough yet, but what do Republicans expect? I mean, what you did in 2016 is really wild. You basically invalidated the last year of a President's term, at least with respect to that core function of appointing Justices. And what is wild was that you didn't have to go to the lengths that you did. Republicans could have voted Merrick Garland down and, at least, have recognized the legitimacy of the nomination--voted Merrick Garland down and perhaps forcing a conversation about another nominee that might be more amenable to the Republican majority. That wouldn't be the first time that that has occurred. One of the statues here in the U.S. Congress is of Oliver Ellsworth from Connecticut, who was elevated to the Supreme Court because George Washington believed his first pick couldn't be confirmed by the Senate. So, instead, he chose one of Connecticut's two U.S. Senators, who was beloved in this body when it operated not far away. And Oliver Ellsworth went to the Court because of a quiet negotiation with the Senate. Republicans, under Mitch McConnell, didn't even engage in a process with Merrick Garland. They just declared that the President's choice was illegitimate. And I can't argue that they didn't--well, I can argue they didn't have the power, but certainly there was a colorable argument that Republicans in the Senate could just refuse to consider Merrick Garland's nomination. But now having practiced that exercise of maximum power, using the majority to delegitimize a President in that way, you put Democrats, if they win control of the Senate, in a really unenviable position. Do we just unilaterally stand down and not choose to use the same tools that Republicans did in the majority? Would we expect, if we did that, that if Republicans regain the majority, they would follow our lead? Or would that be wildly naive? No, in fact, I think there are now new rules in the Senate, and I think Republicans have set them. I get it that you can claim Harry Reid's rule change as the original sin that legitimizes everything that you have done since then, but the changes Republicans have made have come at a dizzying pace--far more changes made, far more precedents shattered than anything that happened when Democrats were in control. And, of course, as to Senator Reid, many of us would argue that the reason that that change was made was because Senator McConnell doubled the number of cloture motions that were required in order to move legislation to a final vote. The change in the use of the filibuster by Republicans during their time in the minority was what forced that change. But setting that aside, there is no question that changes have come much faster and much more furious, and it just doesn't bode well for the future of our democracy when everyone uses the maximum power available to them, with no concern for the minority party, in order to get what they want. And it is not just the Republican majority that has done this. So has the executive branch. I listened to the Presiding Officer give his maiden speech on this floor about the overuse of Executive power, and there were legitimate complaints about ways in which the Obama administration had used maximum Executive power when the legislature would not act. But, again, it doesn't compare with the ways in which this President has used maximum Executive power in the absence of authorization from Congress. Both in the executive branch and in the legislative branch, under Republicans, restraint as a practice inside democracy is disappearing. Maximum power becomes the ethos, and that is a danger to democracy--maybe not today, but soon enough. I don't know how this body gets back into a conversation about comity. I don't know how we get back into a conversation about how we govern together. I have, frankly, voted for more of this President's nominees to the executive branch, to political offices, and to the bench than almost all of my colleagues, maybe, on this side of the aisle, maybe with the exception of a few, because I generally have believed that if the nominee is in the conservative mainstream and if the nominee is generally qualified, they should get their post, especially for executive appointments, for nominations to Secretary positions and Undersecretary positions. I do that, in part, because I think that it is important to not use maximum power and maximum leverage, for me not to vote against every single nominee that the President puts forward just because I disagree with that nominee. That conversation about how we restore some comity and some restraint is an important one, but it is likely to be impossible in the next Congress because of how fundamentally broken this body will be after what happened to Merrick Garland and then, on top of it, what is happening right now. We are 8 days before an election. We are 8 days before an election. We are jamming through Amy Coney Barrett's nomination in record time, not because it is good for the country, just because you can--just because Republicans can--and, likely, because it is really important to effectuate your deeply unpopular agenda through the Supreme Court. We don't legislate here anymore because Republicans have found out a way to get their agenda done through the court system. Amy Coney Barrett will likely be the fifth vote to invalidate the Affordable Care Act, a political project for the Republicans for the last decade, unfulfilled through the legislative branch, now achievable in the next several months through the judicial branch, but only if Amy Coney Barrett's nomination is rammed through right now. The rewriting of the Second Amendment is not available to Republicans any longer in the legislative branch. The NRA's priority list couldn't even get a vote in the Senate with Republican control--now available through the judicial branch if Amy Coney Barrett is nominated. The consequences for the country are serious if the source of power in this town, the source of policymaking and rule setting, moves from this body across the street to the Supreme Court. And not equally as dangerous to the Nation, but still perilous, is what will happen to this body, if all that matters political power, when restraint vanishes and whoever is in the majority uses every lever available to them to try to get what they want, to try to stop the other side from getting what they want. It is 1 week before an election. We are here all night, ramming through a Supreme Court nominee in record time simply because you can. That is not a good enough reason. I yield the floor.