Christopher Murphy

Mr. MURPHY

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I rarely come to the floor to directly respond to speeches given by my colleagues. I normally like to use the Chamber to make my own arguments on their merits rather than to make arguments against specific colleagues. But yesterday I listened to a speech by Senator Cruz of Texas, and it was one of the most dangerous speeches that I have ever heard given on the Senate floor, and it deserves a response. Now, I understand that Republicans don't want to talk about the economy. They don't want to talk about the fact that we have had more jobs added to the economy in the first 5 months of President Biden's term than any other first-term President. I know they don't want to talk about the rapid expansion of the economy that is happening. I understand Republicans don't want to talk about what we are debating on the Senate floor right now, which is the biggest bipartisan investment in infrastructure in the history of the country. And I also understand that the Senator from Texas doesn't like the new guidance announced this week by the CDC. And he is not alone. From what I can tell, a lot of Republicans here are upset, as are a lot of nonpolitical Americans. Nobody likes to wear a mask. Nobody likes that the new recommendation is that some Americans need to wear them. Again, I don't like wearing a mask. I hate it. My kids hate the masks more. But here is what the CDC said. The CDC's scientists have been carefully following this dramatic increase in cases that we have seen all across the country as the Delta variant spreads, even through vaccinated people. First, we can't ignore this, the fact that there has been this huge increase in cases. The national 7-day average is triple what it was from a month ago. We are averaging 40,000 new cases a day. This is a big problem, and it is overwhelming parts of our healthcare system. Now, I wish this weren't the case, but it requires us to think about adjusting policy. Second, the CDC is looking at this new evidence that indicates that even fully vaccinated individuals who become infected with the Delta variant can carry the virus and transmit it to others, even if they don't get sick. Now, this latest development is important because it allows the Delta variant, the more contagious variant, to spread faster. Early information from the CDC shows that the Delta variant is as contagious as the chickenpox, more contagious than earlier strains of COVID. And, remember, not every American today is vaccinated. For instance, my youngest son is 9 years old. He can't get vaccinated. If the evidence suggests that I can transmit the virus to him, even if my vaccine prevents me from getting really sick, then that matters. Finally, with so many Americans still unvaccinated, the virus still has plenty of bodies in which to mutate. Right now, the good news is that we have got three authorized COVID-19 vaccines that are pretty effective against severe illness. But the worry is that eventually the vaccine is going to mutate into a version of itself that is resistant to the current vaccines. And with so many Americans choosing to stay unvaccinated and evidence suggesting that vaccinated people who are infected with the Delta variant can transmit it to people who are unvaccinated, the CDC has concluded that, right now, we need to take additional steps to cut down on the pathways that the virus has to spread and keep mutating before it is too late, and we have a virus that our vaccines don't work against at all. Now, what does the new guidance say? It recommends that fully vaccinated people wear a mask in public indoor settings, in places in the country where there are a lot of cases. And since most young kids aren't vaccinated, the CDC is also recommending that, when school opens, teachers and kids should wear masks. That is the argument that the CDC is making. That is the evidence upon which they have issued their new guidance. And it is perfectly legitimate to contest the CDC's decision or the reasons that they gave for making the decision. It is OK for anybody in this body to disagree with the conclusions that they reach. But that is not what Senator Cruz did yesterday. He didn't come to the floor and argue against the merits of the CDC's argument. No. In fact, not once during the speech--and I watched the whole speech--did he ever reference the actual reasons for the CDC's new guidance, not once. In fact, he claimed that the CDC offered no explanation. At one point, after mischaracterizing the CDC's announcement, he asked rhetorically why the CDC changed the guidance. ``Who knows?'' he said. Anyone who listened to that speech or, frankly, many other speeches that are being given by Republicans all across Capitol Hill this week would logically come to the conclusion that the CDC had offered not a single explanation for the new guidance. Then, after creating the impression that the CDC didn't have any reasons for the new recommendation, the Senator from Texas announced that he had discovered the reason. He said that the real reason the CDC changed their guidance was because the CDC is ``an arm of the Democratic National Committee'' and that Democrats in Congress are ``faithful little foot soldiers'' of the CDC He offered no explanation as to why it would benefit Democrats politically or the DNC or the CDC to recommend mask wearing. He just simply claimed that the CDC was a political puppet of the DNC and the guidance was politically motivated. The closest he came to a more detailed explanation of this claim was when he talked about the school guidance. There the Senator from Texas claimed, without any evidence, that the only reason the CDC made this decision was because it was demanded by ``union bosses'' and that the ``CDC said `Ma'am, yes, ma'am, we will issue the order demanded by the union bosses.' '' That is all made up. And the Senator from Texas isn't the only Republican saying things like this. There are dozens of national Republicans making these same wild, unfounded allegations. The political agenda at the CDC that Republicans allege is a fiction. It is constructed out of thin air. And it is, frankly, an insult to the thousands of dedicated, nonpolitical public health professionals at the CDC who just go to work every day trying to keep Americans safe. These aren't politicians. These are epidemiologists and scientists and doctors who have worked their entire lives trying to keep this country safe. I am not saying they get it right every time. I have criticized many of the decisions made by the CDC during the pandemic. It is OK to criticize their decisions, but to claim that they are all corrupt, they are these politically controlled ``hacks,'' that is an outrage. And rhetoric like that is going to get people killed because we are still in the middle of the epidemic, and what anti-CDC Republicans are doing through these attacks on our public health agencies is to intentionally undermine people's faith in the Nation's preeminent public health institutions right at the moment where we need people to believe in them. I am not saying they should be immune from criticism, but criticism should be based on the science. Contest the new evidence the CDC says that requires people to wear masks again, but saying that the scientists are deliberately ignoring the science to effectuate some top-secret political agenda--give me a break. And, by the way, what political interest is served by recommending that people wear masks indoors again? People hate masks. There is only political downside to suggesting that people start wearing them again. It just belies plain old common sense to say that politics is behind the new guidance. If the CDC was worried about politics, they certainly wouldn't be recommending anybody wear masks again. And, by the way, that is all the CDC is doing: They are giving guidance. Over and over, Republicans refer to this new guidance as an ``order'' or, as the Senator from Texas said repeatedly, an ``edict.'' They know that is not true. They know that is not true. But Republicans want to scare you into believing that the Federal Government has more power than it does. The CDC doesn't require people to do anything; they issue recommendations. But that doesn't suit this narrative about socialist, statist Democrats secretly pulling the strings of their marionettes at the CDC. It is ridiculous. It is ridiculous. Don't come to the Senate floor and make things up. Don't destroy people's reputations and careers with wild, unsubstantiated allegations about political motivations. The CDC doesn't get it right 100 percent of the time, but they don't have some secret political agenda. But the more people believe that they do, the less likely it is that people will follow their recommendations the 90, 95 percent of the time that they do get it right, and that will guarantee that this virus never disappears. I understand there is an element of the Republican Party that just wants to destroy all government institutions and is seeking to discredit any effort by any public agency to do good in this country. In normal times, I would argue that that is dangerous, but in the middle of a pandemic it is deadly. And Republicans of conscience should come to this floor and start telling the truth. I yield the floor

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, rightfully, this body is consumed with pending votes on infrastructure, but I want to draw my colleagues' attention to another matter of both importance and urgency. One of Vladimir Putin's favorite tactics during the Chechen rebellion was to kidnap the innocent relatives of rebel leaders and hold them captive until the leaders surrendered. Sometimes, if the rebel leader never gave himself up, the family members would just disappear forever. Thousands of these cases were documented over the course of the war, all in gross, blatant violation of human rights laws. It is one of the many reasons that Russia is an adversary, not an ally of the United States. We don't do business with nations that prey upon the innocent. We don't align ourselves with nations that use kidnapping or torture as a tool to stay in power. A few months ago, Moustafa Soltan and Khairi Soltan were startled by a hard knock on their door in the wee hours of a February Sunday morning. It was the Egyptian authorities, there to detain them again simply because their cousin happened to be a man named Mohamed Soltan, an American citizen and vocal Egyptian human rights advocate. Rightly, Moustafa and Khairi were not surprised because for the past year, the Soltan family has been the subject of consistent, coordinated harassment and detention by the agents of Egyptian dictator Abdelfattah Elsisi. Now, Sisi would probably argue that he uses the tactic of harassing and detaining family members of his political opponents in a more judicious manner than does Vladimir Putin, but he can't deny that he does it. He further cannot deny the systematic method by which he has used the judicial system in Egypt to eliminate his political opposition. Now, a reliable estimate is hard to come by because the political arrests have come at a dizzying pace since 2013, but it is believed that there are 60,000 people in jail today in Egypt because they are political opponents of the Sisi government. Now, Putin jails his political adversaries, too, but his number of around 400 doesn't come close to Sisi's. But that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Egyptian regime's treatment of political opponents. Only China and Iran execute more people every year than Egypt, and many of these executions are for political crimes. Journalists are currently under constant threat in Egypt. The country rates 166 out of 180 by the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders compared against other nations. In the 2018 Presidential election, Sisi had his main opponent arrested and had his campaign manager beaten up, causing all the other credible candidates to drop out of the race. Shockingly, Sisi won with 97 percent of the vote. That same year, Putin was less greedy. He gave himself only 70 percent in his Presidential election. So why, you might ask, is Egypt our partner and Russia our adversary if their behavior is so malignantly similar? Why does Russia get sanctioned and Egypt get showered with $1.3 billion in military aid each year? Now, yes, there are important lines of cooperation between Egypt and the United States, and this explains some of that difference. Egypt's 1979 peace treaty with Israel remains one of the most significant diplomatic achievements for the promotion of Arab-Israeli peace. For the last 40 years, Egypt has been a peace broker between the Israelis and the Palestinians. We rely on them historically. Egypt contributed forces to the first gulf war in 1990. The United States and Egypt often cooperate on counterterrorism work. Our ships often get preference in going through the Suez Canal, although we pay for that privilege. All that is important, but none of it is enough to justify the damage done to U.S. power and prestige when the whole world watches America deliver this giant blank check each year to Egypt while Sisi engages in this repeated, brazen violation of human rights. How do you tell Russia and China to stop their campaigns of political repression when we so openly endorse the grandiose scale of Sisi's? No, Egypt has come to believe that it can act any way that it wants, that it can carry out a massive campaign of political repression and that the Congress and the American President, whether he be a Republican or a Democrat, will just keep the money coming. And it is a stunning amount of money. The $1.3 billion security assistance package that Egypt gets every year from U.S. taxpayers is bested by only one other country in the world, and that is Israel. Most outrageous of all in light of this policy, Egypt arrests and imprisons American citizens with near impunity. Mohamed Soltan is not the only Egyptian American to be arrested and tortured as a political prisoner. Mustafa Kassem from Long Island, NY, was arrested in 2013 while visiting family, just visiting family in Cairo. He died in an Egyptian prison in January of last year. There have been dozens of other American citizens. It is unacceptable that we would be providing over $1 billion in assistance to Egypt while they are holding a single American in prison for political crimes. When countries accept our money and continue to thumb their noses at our values, it makes America look like a patsy. It makes us weaker as a nation. So many of us cheered when President Biden took office declaring that there would now be ``a foreign policy that unites our democratic values with our diplomatic leadership, and one that is centered on the defense of democracy and the protection of human rights.'' President Biden's team has been outspoken on human rights in our foreign policy by calling out abusive dictatorships who imprison their critics and muzzle free speech, reuniting our democratic allies in Europe against Russian election interference and Chinese misinformation, and sanctioning corrupt oligarchs all over the world. That is great news. The Biden administration has chosen to make democracy and human rights a priority because they see this coming fight between Chinese- and Russian-modeled autocracy and American-led democracy. And over the last 4 years, Donald Trump's affection for dictatorship, it gave our adversaries in the autocratic world a headstart. President Biden knows the future of the world depends on our willingness as a nation to take a strong, immediate stand right now for democracy everywhere. And so let's be clear. An administration that wants to lead on democracy and human rights cannot send another $1.3 billion to Egypt with no strings attached. To do so would be to endorse Sisi's crackdown and send a bright, blinking message to the world that America talks a big game on democracy but isn't willing to do much about it. Luckily, Joe Biden doesn't have to take the heat when it comes to a change in Egypt policy. He can simply blame Congress and tell Sisi that he is just upholding the law. Why? For more than a decade, Congress has been conditioning some of the aid we give to Egypt on its human rights record, hoping that if we tied a portion of the $1.3 billion to things like holding free and fair elections, or releasing political prisoners, allowing the media space to operate, that the Egyptian Government would make progress. But nearly every single year, the State Department waives those conditions and just gives Egypt the money, even when the conditions aren't close to being met. Only once--and I will give them credit for this--in 2017, Secretary Tillerson cut $95 million and temporarily held up another $195 million of Egypt's aid money, but even that $195 million was released before all the conditions were met. Never has the State Department just said the obvious: The conditions weren't met. We are not going to waive them. You are not getting the money. And we are talking about a portion of the money, this year, $300 million of the $1.3 billion. It is painfully clear that the lesson Egypt has learned over the years is a simple one: America is not serious about human rights, and so we don't need to invest in improvements; we are going to get the money anyway. This year, Congress has said that the Secretary of State should withhold $300 million of military aid to Egypt if Sisi doesn't substantially reverse his campaign of political repression and intimidation. What we know, unequivocally, is that no meaningful progress has been made. The latest arrests of Mohamed Soltan's family were done in February of this year. That was kind of like a thumb in the eye of the new administration and the new Congress. Like clockwork every year, right before the annual waiver is given by the State Department, Egypt normally does release a few of the most egregiously detained prisoners or announces some minor change in policy, but it is always window dressing. The trend from year to year is always the same: more human rights violations, more intimidation, less free speech, less democracy. This year, the United States must withhold the $300 million, in accordance with the law passed by this Congress. It will send a message to Egypt that we are serious about reform and, maybe more importantly, it will send a message to the world that we are willing to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. Now, this town freaks out whenever the security assistance gravy train goes off the rails, even for a moment. Keeping the pipeline of American arms flowing to brutal regimes, it makes a lot of people rich in Washington. And those people are whispering in the ears of Congress and the administration right now, making the claim, as they do every single year, that the sky is going to fall if Egypt doesn't get its $1.3 billion--all of it, all of the $1.3 billion--as they have every year since 1987. They will say that all the lines of cooperation that I mentioned earlier will disappear. But in reality, the return on investment for our military aid to Egypt, it has been diminishing for a long time now. And there is no reason that the things that we get from Egypt--Suez access, overflight rights, continued upholding of the peace treaty with Israel--will be overturned should they get only $1 billion rather than $1.3 billion this year. Why is that? Well, because in 1987, those benefits Egypt provides were arguably concessions to our requests. But, today, Egypt does those things not because we pay them to do it, but because they have their own reasons to do them. For years, the United States looked the other way while another regional power, Saudi Arabia, carried out its own dizzying campaign of repression against its own people. We did virtually nothing. We said virtually nothing. Instead, we rewarded Saudi Arabia with record amounts of armed sales. And then one day, they kidnapped a U.S. resident and they chopped him to pieces. And America was made a fool in the eyes of the world, and, in some ways, we have had a hard time recovering from that day. Mohamed Soltan, just like Jamal Khashoggi, believes that there is no other nation in the world that cares more about standing up for democracy and civil rights than America. Egypt doesn't care. They harass and imprison his relatives at will--the relatives of a high- profile American citizen--because they can. Let's not make the same mistake with Egypt that we made with Saudi Arabia. Egypt notices when we talk tough and do nothing, so does the rest of the world. And so withholding $300 million of their $1.3 billion until Egypt makes real concessions on reform, it won't fundamentally harm U.S. interests in the Middle East. It will only make us more safe. It is the best opportunity for the Biden administration to show that we mean it when we say that the stakes in the fight between autocracy and democracy are sky high and that we are willing to do more than just talk about our values. America has the capacity to live them as well. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, my colleagues, it is not a coincidence that in 2020, gun sales in this country spiked by 40 percent. It is an extraordinary increase in gun sales. And homicides in this country increased by 30 percent. Violent crime is increasing in the country. You can't miss that if you turn on the news at night. And there can be no doubt that our Nation's gun laws--the loosest and most loophole-ridden in the Nation--are a primary contributor to this spike in gun crime. I want to spend just a few minutes this afternoon making sure that all of my colleagues understand that if we want to do something about violent crime in this country, then you cannot continue to close your eyes to the fact that we are allowing criminals all across this country to traffic dangerous weapons that are being used in gun homicides. First, let's burst the bubble of the gun lobby. Their primary argument is that more guns keep people safer. Well, that is not true. It has never ever been true. Study after study tells you what your common sense should already tell you. In fact, one study makes it very plain. On a nearly one-for-one basis, the more guns you have in your community, the more crime you are going to have. One study said this. What they found was that for communities that saw a 1-percent increase in gun ownership--guess what they also saw. A corresponding 1-percent increase in gun homicides. Thus, it should surprise no one that as the number of guns increase in this country, the number of gun crimes increase in this country. Now, there are a lot of reasons for that. But, again, you don't have to surge deep into the data to understand why. Let me give you just one example. A family I am pretty close to in Hartford, CT, a young man named Shane Oliver was shot years ago right down the street from where I live in the capital city. And he was in an argument with some young men about things they said about his girlfriend, who happened to be with him. It just so happened that there was an illegal gun sitting in the front seat of one of these cars. An argument over a girl that in any other high-income nation in the world would have, at worst, resulted in some punches being thrown. In this neighborhood in Hartford, CT, it resulted in a gun homicide. Shane Oliver doesn't live on this Earth any longer. He was taken from his parents, Pastor Sam Saylor and his wife Janet, when he was 20 years old because there was an illegal gun that just happened to be sitting in the front seat of a car. In almost any other country in the world, there is not a gun sitting in the front seat of another 20-year-old's car in the middle of Hartford, CT. Access to guns means more gun crime. But here is the other problem. We know there has been a 40-percent increase in gun sales. But those aren't just the sales that are reported to the criminal background check system. What we know is that somewhere around 20, 30 percent of all gun sales in this country don't happen with a background check attached to it. Those are gun sales that very often are going straight to criminals and straight to gun traffickers. So if there has been a 40-percent increase in background check transfers, there has likely also been a 40-percent increase in the number of guns that have been transferred to criminals and transferred to gun traffickers, the people who are selling them to the folks who are going to use them in gun violence. Here is a study out of New York. The New York AG's office recently reviewed aggregate gun trace information for about 5 years, and what they found was that 74 percent of the recovered guns in New York-- normally recovered because they were used in a crime--came with a known source State that wasn't New York. That is interesting, right? Three-quarters of the guns that are being used in crimes in New York aren't being bought in New York. There is a reason for that. You have to go through a background check in New York if you want to buy a gun. And if you are a criminal, you can't get a gun in New York at a gun store because they have background checks and because they don't have internet sales or gun show sales without background checks either. What the AG's office also found was that half of the guns that came from outside of New York came from six States--all six States with really weak gun laws--meaning there is this very intentional iron pipeline of guns in this country coming from States with no universal background checks, places where gun traffickers can go and buy guns at gun shows or online, and then bring them to States like New York or Connecticut or New Jersey and sell them on the black market. And what we also know is that there is a really short period of time between when these guns are being purchased and when they are being used in crimes, which shows an intentionality, which shows a very clear commercial market around the purchase of guns in places without background checks, the sale of those guns to potentially violent individuals, and the commission of crimes. Of the 1 million crime guns that were traced in this country between 2015 and 2019, more than one-third were used in a crime within just 3 years of their initial retail sale. This short time-to-crime timeline is a strong indication that these guns were purchased with the intent to divert them for criminal use. So every year that goes by that we choose, as a Congress, to not close these loopholes, to not simply say that if you are going to buy a gun on a commercial market in the United States, you just have to prove you are not a gun trafficker, is another year that we essentially endorse and facilitate the murder of thousands and thousands of Americans. And there is a clear connection between this increase in gun sales and this increase in criminal activity. Why? Because along with those legal gun sales come all sorts of gun sales that do an end around on the background check system. Now, thank goodness President Biden is doing something about this because there is a new loophole that criminals are taking advantage of, the ghost gun loophole. In California, today, 30 percent of the confiscated guns are unserialized. Think of that. Thirty percent of the guns being confiscated in California today by the ATF have no serial number on them. That is largely because of this new phenomena of ghost guns that are assembled from a kit, not guns that are purchased at a store In Connecticut, a convicted felon who couldn't have bought a gun at a gun store in Connecticut because he is a convicted felon used a ghost gun to shoot his girlfriend's 15-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son before turning the gun on himself. People who know they can't buy guns in gun stores or online in a place like Connecticut that has universal background checks are now assembling ghost guns and committing crimes. The Biden administration is taking action, but so should we. I come to the floor to share this with my colleagues because our constituents are concerned about the rising rate of gun homicides in this Nation. They expect us to do something about it. And I am not saying that there is only one solution. I am not saying that changing our gun laws is the only step that we should take to try to do something about the rising rates of gun homicides in this country. There is a longer story as to why people have become so desperate as to resort to gun violence in order to mediate disputes or to project power. But the prevalence of so many more guns in our country today than just a year ago, the prevalence of so many more illegal guns due to intentional choices made by this body is a big part of the story. And I hope that we will be able to bring before this body bipartisan legislation that will close those background check loopholes very soon to give this body a chance to do something about the rising rates of gun violence in this country.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, for the information of Senators, there will be two rollcall votes starting at 11 a.m. and one vote at 1:45 p.m.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 10 a.m., Thursday, June 24; that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and morning business be closed; that upon the conclusion of morning business, the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. 1251, the Growing Climate Solutions Act, under the previous order; further, that all time on the bill expire at 11 a.m.; that there be 2 minutes of debate equally divided prior to each vote, with all provisions of the order remaining in effect; that upon disposition of S. 1251, the Senate proceed to executive session to resume consideration of the Jackson- Akiwumi nomination, with all postcloture time expiring at 1:45 p.m.; finally, that if the nomination is confirmed, the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. If there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask that it stand adjourned under the previous order, following the remarks of Senator Marshall and Senator Brown.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, my State proudly calls itself the Land of Steady Habits. Some people in Connecticut think it is kind of a funny thing to be proud of--being resistant to change--but honestly, in the Northeast, in the crucible of America, we know there is real value to consistency and tradition. A nation as unique as ours--multicultural, democratic, ever expanding in scope and ambition--we probably can't hold together unless there is some agreement between all of our different peoples about the expectations that we have for each other in the conduct of our national business. Without tradition, our Nation's defining dynamism, it might break us. Yes, it is wildly old-fashioned to hold town meetings, where every citizen has to show up on one particular day, to make decisions about how you spend money or what rates you pay in taxes, but that way of governing, created in New England some four centuries ago, is still the method of decisionmaking in many of our towns. It may not be the most efficient means of government, but tradition matters. It helps to hold us together as a country. I know and appreciate the value of consistency. I don't deny it. So earlier this week, I read with interest an opinion piece, penned by one of my friends in the Senate Democratic caucus, making the argument that amongst the most important reasons to preserve the 60-vote threshold in the Senate is to advance the value of consistency and tradition in American politics. I was glad to read it. I am proud of my colleague because for too long, the punditry and the activists have had near exclusive domain over the debate about the wisdom of changing the rules of this body. So it has been strange, given how much this place means to the 100 of us who serve here, that we have mostly left the dialogue over its future to those who don't work inside this Chamber every day. Yes, right now, there is a disagreement amongst Senate Democrats and between the majority of Senate Democrats and the majority of Senate Republicans about how the Senate should operate, but there is no merit in hiding this dispute. There is no valor in letting others define the terms that lay out the conflicting arguments, which I readily submit are compelling on both sides. So let's have the debate. Let's have it right here. No more shadowboxing. The stakes, I would argue, are too important. Let me start here. The argument to keep the 60-vote threshold, to guarantee policy consistency or to uphold Senate tradition, is downright dangerous because this argument essentially prioritizes consistency over democracy. At the very moment when Americans have less faith than ever before that this place has the capacity to implement the will of the people, the 60-vote threshold is a slap in the face of majoritarianism, which is the bedrock principal of American democracy, the idea that the majority of people get to decide the direction of this country--not elites, not oligarchs, like in other nations; people, regular people. To say that Americans can have an election, choose leaders of a particular view, and then watch while the rules of democracy deliberately stop the voters' will from being enacted is to thumb our noses at the American electorate--at the very moment when they are actively considering whether American democracy has anything left to offer them. My colleague argues quite powerfully that the requirement to achieve 60 votes to pass legislation in the Senate guards against rapid policy change, giving several examples, including education and environment policy and voting rules as areas where danger might lie if one majority imposed the policy in one Congress that would be undone by the next. I want to walk us through this argument. My first approach might be to postpone the harder question of whether or not to value consistency over democracy and to simply accept for a moment the prioritization of consistency and tradition. I do so knowing that our Founding Fathers also prioritized consistency. In Federalist 9 and 10, Hamilton and Madison discuss what they call the problem of factions. Madison says that a faction is ``a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, adverse to the rights of other citizens.'' Now, notice here that Madison doesn't really care whether the faction represents a minority or majority of citizens; he simply defines it by its cause's malevolence. This was and still is tricky business--rich White men defining for everybody else what cause is righteous and which cause is wicked. But our Founding Fathers built a system of government to make rapid policy change--even change supported by the majority of voters--very, very hard to implement. Now, how do they do this? I want to lay this out because if you do care about preventing rapid policy shifts, it is important to understand why the 60-vote threshold isn't necessary, is overkill given all the other barriers our system has to prevent rapid policy shifts. First, our Founding Fathers established a bicameral legislature as opposed to a unicameral parliamentary system. That meant that no change could be implemented until two different legislative bodies agreed to the exact same text. Second, they layered on top of that bicameral legislative structure a unitary President with the power to veto that legislation. Third, they put in place an unelected body, the Supreme Court, that could invalidate any statutory changes that conflicted with the Constitution. Fourth, they put the House and the Senate and the Presidency all on overlapping, conflicting election schedules, guaranteeing that it would be 100 percent possible for the voters to sweep out all elected officials and replace them with a new slate all at one moment. Fifth, the Founders built a few supermajority requirements but only for selective occasions: treaties, impeachments, constitutional amendments--the stuff that could last forever. The Founding Fathers did want extra consensus around that. All of that design has lasted. It is still with us today. There are other parts of the original design intended to protect the value of consistency to protect against the danger of faction that have not lasted. The Founders also believed that only White men should vote and that citizens shouldn't be trusted to directly select the Members of this body. That is all history because for all of the anti-faction design that we have kept, we changed just as much, and all of that change has moved in only one direction--toward more majoritarian democracy. Why? Well, because as our grand experiment--the American experiment-- matured, we saw proof of concept. The people could be trusted to govern themselves. They could choose leaders who were more able, more honest, more effective than any King or Queen, any Sultan or Emperor. So we extended the franchise universally. We directly elected the Senate. As America expanded, the new States out West gobbled up even more democracy. The West decided to not just elect legislators but judges, prosecutors, dog catchers and commissioners. Majoritarian rule became addictive, and our country grew and it demanded more and more of it. That brings us to the 60-vote threshold. The 60-vote threshold in a country built on the strength of direct democracy stands out like a sore, rotting thumb--this anti-majoritarian drain clog designed intentionally to stop the majority of Americans from getting what they want from government. Proponents of existing Senate rules say that in the name of bipartisanship or tradition or consistency of policy, we should purposefully frustrate the changing will of the electorate. But why? Why not trust voters? For instance, voters elected a President and a Congress in 2008 that promised to enact a system of universal healthcare. It just so happened that at that moment, for the first time in 40 years, there were 60 votes for the party of that view in the Senate, so a universal healthcare law was passed. But why should it not be up to the voters and not politicians to review the efficacy of a major policy change like that and, if they so choose, elect leaders to rescind or revise it? I don't want the ACA repealed, but I am deeply uncomfortable that a 60-vote threshold robs from voters that decision. This preference for policy consistency, intentionally blind to the merits of policy over direct democracy, is particularly insidious at this moment in American history, first because the 60-vote threshold is being used in a very, very different way today than it has anytime prior in our Nation's history. Up until the 1970s, cloture votes were almost nonexistent in the Senate. Legislative filibusters were used in those days mostly by racist southern White Senators to stop civil rights bills. Beginning in the seventies, that tactic became more widely employed but was still used sparingly. Consider this. In 1994, our colleague Senator Feinstein forced a vote on one of the most controversial of all proposals that come before this body--a ban on assault weapons. It received fewer votes than the Manchin-Toomey background check bill did 30 years later. Senator Feinstein's proposal got 52 votes; Manchin-Toomey got 54 votes. But the assault weapons ban became law while the background checks bill did not. Why? Because in 1994, many important votes, even the assault weapons ban, were allowed to proceed on a majority-vote basis. Not so by 2013. I could make the argument that it was Republicans who started this rapid escalation of the use of the 60-vote threshold, but who really cares? It doesn't matter because today both parties use it almost without exception in a way that looks radically different from the way the tactic was utilized half a century ago. I would argue that if you want to do an overview of the history of the 60-vote threshold, it doesn't tell a story of the value the Senate places on consistency. No, it is the opposite. Watching the way the tactic has been used so differently over time, it demonstrates the value the Senate places on change in practice and tradition. Reforming this rule would, frankly, just pay heed to this reality. The second danger of valuing consistency over democracy at this moment lies in the signal that it sends to an American public that is in, frankly, no mood for the choices of the elites to be continually substituted for their own collective judgment. Right now, Americans are in kind of a revolutionary mood, and for good reason. More Americans today than at any time in recent history see themselves on the precipice of financial and sometimes spiritual ruin. They are done with economic and political elites jealously protecting the status quo. And the election of Donald Trump, although revealed by time to be a false prophet, was an unmistakable foot stomp by an electorate tired of being taken for granted. So why on Earth would our message, amidst this growing populist tempest, be to tell voters that rules in the Senate are required to protect them from their own bad judgment, to take from them, purposely, the ability to change policies whenever and however they wish? I submit to you that today, right now, this replacement of popular will by anti-majoritarian rule-rigging could destroy us. Today more than ever, voters want to know that their vote counts every election. And continuing to give minorities here in the Senate power to stop change is dangerously disconsonant with the current political mood of this country. Take power away from the American people at your peril. Finally, on this question of the value we should place on consistency, I want to raise the problem of the city firehouse. Firehouses are places that value consistency and tradition. Firefighters spend a lot of time in close quarters together. When that alarm rings, they are required to work together in precise and disciplined unison to get out the door in seconds in order to save lives and property. Practices change in a firehouse but carefully and through consensus decision making. Keeping everybody together matters when the stakes are so high. But what would happen if inside that firehouse, a sizable group of firefighters decided one day that the mission of the department should no longer be to put out fires but maybe, instead, just to let them burn a little? Wouldn't then the value of consensus decision making become a little less important? If you were a homeowner, wouldn't you want to make sure that the firefighters who still wanted to fight fires were setting the rules and not the guys who are OK with the houses in the neighborhood burning down? I know this is a crude analogy, but to value consistency or tradition above everything else, I think you have to be pretty certain that everybody in your club, everybody on your team is guided by the same foundational goal. In the case of the U.S. Senate, our goal, our endgame has always been simple: the preservation of American democracy, the belief that every American should have a say in who governs, and the persons whom they choose and no one else should be seated in power We have had fights--often vicious in nature--over the course of our Nation's history over how fast we should expand the vote, how quickly we should reform our Constitution to allow for more direct democracy. But never before has one party actively advocated for the lessening of democracy. Never before has one party openly advocated for candidates who receive the smaller share of the vote to be made President of the United States. In the last year, a democratic Rubicon has been crossed by one party, and we can't ignore this devastating blow to our Nation. You cannot value consistency in practice when a large faction of your group's members don't believe in the underlying mission of your organization any longer. The firehouse can't just keep doing the same things it always does year after year for the sake of consistency or tradition or consensus when two or three of the members who hop on the firetruck when that alarm sounds aren't intending to actually put out the fire when they arrive at the building. Giving Republicans a veto power over legislation when they no longer believe in the same way the Democrats do or Republicans used to in the sacredness of the vote is to risk the voluntary destruction of our democracy. Consistency as a value has merit. It does. But in this business, consistency is often put on an unhealthy pedestal. What is the value of being consistent when all of the circumstances around you are changing? Where is the strength in sticking to your position when everything around you is in metamorphosis? When democracy itself is being attacked in a brutal, coordinated, unprecedented volley of blows, what is the good of holding to a position just for the sake of being consistent if the primary consequence is to simply green light the assault to continue? Consistency and tradition and bipartisanship--they matter but not at the expense of democracy, not in a moment when millions of voters are questioning the wisdom of American democracy because no matter whom they elect, nothing seems to change, and not when one party has increasingly abandoned the joint project to which all Members of this body swore an oath as a condition of our membership. I yield the floor. Mr. President, I know Senator Marshall is ready to speak, and I apologize for delaying him with my rather long remarks.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to legislative session and be in a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I wanted to come to the floor very briefly today to thank Chairman Menendez and Ranking Member Risch for the great work they did on the Foreign Relations Committee to add to the pending legislation a title developed in the Foreign Relations Committee that makes sure that we are building the kinds of capacities inside the State Department and USAID that are able to make sure America can compete with China and a host of other developing, advancing nations all around the world. The fact is, we are often fighting our competitors with one hand tied behind our back. For instance, the size of the Chinese international development bank dwarfs the capacities of the similar institution that is used by the United States of America, the DFC. We have added new capacities to the DFC in this legislation that will allow the United States of America to be able to make sure that we can do development deals around the world and compete with other nations that are fast investing significant amounts of money and trying to use that money as leverage to gain political interest and political influence. Included in that title, midwifed through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is a provision that builds upon the expectation that Congress should have that the administration share with us agreements that they have entered into on behalf of the United States. If we want to play our constitutional role to be a coequal branch with the executive on the setting of American foreign policy, then, of course, this body needs to have access--immediate access--to any agreements, whether they be binding or nonbinding, that the Federal Government, through the executive branch, has entered into on behalf of the American people. I am very pleased that the legislation includes a requirement that, in an expeditious manner, the executive branch, whether there is a Republican President or a Democratic President, share with Congress any agreements that they have entered into on behalf of our constituents. That section of the bill goes a little bit further than that, though. It also says that the administration shall notify Congress anytime that the administration is beginning a negotiation over a prospective agreement with a foreign nation. Again, that, on its face, makes a lot of sense, the idea that the administration should be communicating with Congress when they have begun a significant negotiation with a foreign country that may ultimately obligate the United States or this Congress with respect to an international agreement. I raised, during the consideration of this bill in the Foreign Relations Committee and I have continued to raise both publicly and privately, concerns I have that I think are shared by current and former diplomats that there is a potential that by going too far in our request that the administration inform us of negotiations, we could provide a chill on both our government's willingness to enter into what are sometimes very sensitive, early negotiations with foreign governments but also a chill on foreign nations' interest in entering into negotiations with the United States of America if they were to understand that anytime they began a conversation with the United States about a very sensitive matter, there would be a notification to Congress that could easily become public. In fact, there are good reasons sometimes where the executive branch, early on in a negotiation, before they know whether it is even going to become an agreement a year, 2 years down the line, would want the space to conduct that negotiation without the public eye coming down on those proceedings. So I think there is a way to get this right. I think that we want to make sure that any agreements are sent to Congress. I can even understand how, in some circumstances, when you are talking about big negotiations of national significance, we would want to know at some point when those negotiations have begun. But I think you have to understand that there are two equities at play here. One is transparency, the right of Congress to get information from the executive branch, but the other equity is that we don't want to do anything here that would disincentivize diplomacy, that would create a massive bureaucracy inside the State Department that would serve as a barrier to negotiations with countries that may avoid a war or may end up in a more efficient expenditure of U.S. taxpayer dollars. So I want to raise this concern about this language that is included in the substitute amendment. I know that there is a long way before this bill is law. Obviously, the House will take up their own version, and there will be some reconciliation between the House and the Senate. And I am glad to have Senator Menendez's commitment to continue to have this discussion to make sure that we balance these equities--the equity of Congress's right to know with the equity to invest and incentivize in American diplomacy. I yield the floor.

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. Madam President, I further ask unanimous consent that the mandatory quorum call with respect to the cloture motion for the motion to proceed to Calendar No. 58, S. 1260, be waived.

Mr. MURPHY. Finally, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to finish my remarks prior to the upcoming vote.

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I come to the floor this afternoon to talk about two issues of vital importance to the United States and the world. First, I want to say a few words about the current violence paralyzing Israel and the Palestinian territories, but then I want to spend the bulk of my remarks on the future of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. First, here in America, our hearts are breaking for Israelis and Palestinians. The images are just bone-chilling--rockets and interceptors streaking across the night sky, parents huddled with their children as air raid sirens ring out, tragic images of innocent Israeli and Palestinian civilians, including children, injured or killed in the blasts. For many Americans who are turning on the news this week, it might appear that the events of the last few days erupted almost overnight. While tensions are now reaching a fevered and deadly pitch, this cataclysm has been long in the making and no party, including the United States of America, has completely clean hands. Zero-sum politics have driven both the decision making of the Netanyahu government and Palestinian leadership, to the extent that there is such a thing as Palestinian leadership. Those decisions have led us to this crisis. Over and over, Prime Minister Netanyahu has pushed Israeli settlements further into territory historically considered reserved for a future Palestinian State. The Israeli Government, increasingly reliant on rightwing, zero-sum political constituencies for its survival, also stepped up campaigns to remove Palestinians from areas in East Jerusalem as a means to undermine the Palestinian claim to that section of the ancient city as the capital of a future state. The spark that lit the match of the existing conflagration was the Israeli effort to remove Palestinian families from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah and replace them with Israeli settlers. In February, the Israeli court ordered Palestinian families in that neighborhood to vacate their homes by May 2 or they would be forcibly removed. Protests began, spread to other cities in Israel with large Arab populations, while the Palestinian families awaited a final ruling from the Israeli Supreme Court. As these protests spread and grew in size, Israeli police adopted some tactics that we have seen on display here in the United States--an overly securitized approach that only escalated rather than defused the tension. Those crackdowns led to more protests and more clashes and a cycle that continued and continued. Then Israeli security forces stormed Islam's third holiest site in Jerusalem during Ramadan prayers. Now, the Israelis contend that they were responding to a rock thrown from Palestinians inside. The Palestinians argue it was the other way around. But whatever happened, at the end of that night, more than 330 Palestinians and 22 Israelis had been injured. The story of the Palestinians' conduct over the last decade is just as important in understanding the roots of the existing crisis. Fatah, the main political party representing Palestinians, has failed the people it represents. Ripe with internal conflict and corruption, Fatah lost its mandate to govern Gaza in 2006, when Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist organization, beat Fatah in parliamentary elections there that year. Hamas refuses to recognize the right of Israel to exist and advocates for the armed rebellion of Palestinians against Israel. Fatah, under pressure from Hamas to take more extreme positions, spent most of the last decade refusing any and all chance to negotiate with the Israelis, preferring to sit on the sidelines and nurture grievances. They were unable to deliver any real economic benefit to the people under their charge in the West Bank, and the resulting desperation of Palestinians fed this grievance culture even more. In response to those events I mentioned at Al Aqsa, Hamas and its allies in Gaza started firing rockets into southern and central Israel. Since that day, thousands of rockets have landed inside Israel. These rocket attacks were then responded to by an Israeli Government that has begun its own assault inside Gaza, and as we sit here today, hundreds of Palestinians inside Gaza, including children, have been killed. Although there have not been as many casualties in Israel because of the defense-security relationship with the United States, Israelis have been killed as well. The Israelis were wrong to pursue settlements and evictions as a deliberate means to undermine a future Palestinian state. These policies might have helped hold together Netanyahu's political coalition, but they helped to feed a sense of hopelessness amongst Palestinians and their future. The Palestinian leadership was wrong to perpetuate an anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic narrative as a foundation of their hold on power. They were wrong to choose grievance over diplomacy. But the United States, over the last 4 years, played a role too. President Trump rejected America's historic role as a broker for peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. He chose a side unconditionally, and his alliance with Netanyahu and his rejection of a Palestinian state drove the two parties further apart and turned the temperature up. Trump pursued a path to intentionally create division rather than healing. Those 4 years of America's absence from its traditional post of mediator is also a big reason we are here today. There is going to be time to talk about the big picture--to talk about what went wrong and how American policy needs to change toward Israel and the West Bank and Gaza--but right now, our focus needs to be laser-like on deescalation, on a cease-fire. Hamas must stop its rocket attacks. They are war crimes. They are indiscriminate. They do nothing to help the Palestinians in East Jerusalem or anywhere else. Israel needs to stand down its military campaign as well. They have to take off the table a ground invasion of Gaza. Israel possesses a disproportionate military power. That is why, during the 2014 invasion of Gaza, 2,000 Palestinians died compared with fewer than 100 Israelis. But when children die in Gaza, it does nothing to secure Israel. In fact, it does the opposite. It just provides further fuel to this furnace of grievances. So I am glad that the administration is sending Deputy Assistant Secretary Amr to the region, that he is there. It is critical that we also get a formal U.S. Ambassador to Israel in place as quickly as possible. But the United States needs to be pressing for a cease-fire. The United States can't afford to simply allow for this escalation to continue. That is not in Israel's best interest, and that is not in America's best interest. My hope is, in the conversations that are happening today between the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government, that they are talking about the terms to bring this violence to an end. Now, as to the second topic, I recently spent 5 days in the Middle East last week. I came back just before this recent spate of violence began in Gaza and Israel. During the 5 days I was in the Middle East, I crossed paths with a bunch of Biden officials who were making stops throughout the region, and I can report that, in setting aside the conflict in Israel--something that is pretty hard to do right now-- there is some real positive news to bring back from the Gulf. The 4-year-long rift between Qatar and its Gulf neighbors is healing. There is now a new diplomatic energy behind cease-fire talks in Yemen, and the Saudis and the Iranians are in direct talks for the first time in years. All of this--I was repeatedly told by leaders in the Middle East--is happening because President Biden has made clear that deescalation is going to be rewarded and supported by the United States--a stark departure from the Trump administration. Now, this is good news, but the bad news quickly follows, and it is this: If the United States does not reenter the Iran nuclear agreement, all of this nascent progress is going to be at risk. Joe Biden ran on a promise to reenter the Iran nuclear agreement. He made this commitment because he knew that this agreement was critical to American security. With Iran's nuclear program curtailed and inspectors allowed to comb every inch of the country to look for signs of a secret enrichment program, the world could breathe a sigh of relief in knowing that, for all of Iran's other malevolent behaviors and policies, at least we knew that they were not developing a nuclear weapon. The achievement of the deal also brought together a set of really unlikely bedfellows--the United States and Europe but also Russia and China. On Iran policy, with this coalition of regular adversaries, it was intact at the end of the Obama administration. It was ready to be picked up by President Trump to confront Iran's ballistic missile program or their support for regional proxy forces like Hezbollah, but Trump went in a different direction. Instead of building on the Iran deal, he decided to put to test the theory of its opponents. That theory is this: that if the United States imposed unilateral, crippling sanctions on Iran, leaders in Tehran would limp to the negotiating table, cowed and willing to put all of the issues-- nuclear enrichment, missiles, human rights, proxy support--up for discussion. That is what Obama's critics said he should have done, and those critics cheered when Trump took their advice. What happened, of course, was a policy cataclysm. Trump imposed the sanctions, and our partners, instead of following America's lead, effectively took the Iranian side, even helping Iran work around our sanctions. Making matters worse, when Trump sent word to the Iranians of our 12 demands, they refused to talk. Instead, they did the opposite. They ratcheted up their bad behavior. They sent more support to the Houthis in Yemen. They restarted dormant parts of their nuclear program, reducing their breakout time to a weapon from just over a year to just under 3 months, and they resumed attacks on American forces in the region, both directly and through proxies. Here is a pretty simple way to take a look at the success of the maximum pressure campaign. One element of the Iran nuclear deal was a commitment by Iran to reduce their enriched uranium stockpile. You can see, in the years leading up to the deal, there is a dramatic escalation in the amount of enriched uranium the Iranians are holding. Then immediately upon the deal's being reached, it plummets. Yet here is the bad news: As soon as the maximum pressure campaign is unveiled by President Trump, those numbers start to creep back up again. One chart explains to you the effect of Trump's maximum pressure campaign. It was a spectacular failure and definitive proof that the alternative approach, cheered by the Iran deal's opponents--keep the sanctions in place until Iran totally capitulates--was a fantasy. Instead, the situation has empowered the more hardline wing of an already hardline regime who is prepared to perpetually operate a resistance economy and blame the United States for the nation's suffering. Yet now those same critics of the nuclear agreement are back, and incredibly, despit the writing inked on the wall during the past 4 years, their argument hasn't changed a bit. Just keep doing what Trump did, and this time it will work, they say. They suggest that getting back into the nuclear deal, as Biden pledged during the campaign, isn't enough. They want a new deal that includes a resolution to all of Iran's bad acts, but unless we are prepared to invade Iran and demand unconditional surrender--news flash: We are not--then that comprehensive, soup-to-nuts deal is a neoconservative fantasy. It doesn't exist in real life. In real life, the achievable result is a restart of the nuclear agreement. The good news is that this result in 2021 might have an even greater peace dividend than when it was executed the first time in 2015. This brings me back to my trip to the region. I heard this story, while I was there, of how quickly talks on healing the Gulf Cooperation Council rift matured as soon as Biden won the election. Countries that were at one another's throats throughout the Trump administration were suddenly coming to terms with one another. While conflict and bullying and score-settling--Trump's calling cards--were rewarded during his term, countries quickly realized that diplomacy and deescalation would most quickly win favor with President Biden. In Oman, I heard how the Saudis were suddenly much more willing to make additional concessions in Yemen and how the Houthis were now more likely to trust the United States as an interlocutor. In Jordan, the King talked to us about how an Iraqi Government was now more welcoming than ever of help from places other than Iran, and he spoke of Jordan's new overtures to a Baghdad Government in its looking for a more diverse set of allies. And everyone in the region, at every stop, buzzed about these talks, these dialogues, between the Saudis and the Iranians. Reports suggest that these two countries wanted to talk during the Trump administration but were discouraged from doing so. This momentum toward peace is encouraging, but it is so fragile, and one major setback, one major, unexpected diplomatic hiccup, could turn all of this progress around. I worry that this hiccup could be the failure of America and Iran to get back into the nuclear agreement. If the talks fail and the Biden administration is forced to implement Trump's Iran policy for the next 4 years, complete with these unilateral crippling sanctions, it is easy to see how all of this progress in the Gulf could disintegrate. The so-called Iranian moderates would head back to Tehran with no deal and be defeated in the upcoming national elections. A harder line government, much less prone to diplomacy, would choose to scuttle peace talks in Yemen, end the outreach to the Saudis, and work like mad to make sure that their proxies in Iraq take power in the upcoming parliamentary elections. This could convince the Saudis to double down militarily in Yemen and open up new fissures in the Gulf. Listen, maybe I am wrong. Maybe this is an overly apocalyptic vision of what would occur if the nuclear negotiations go south, but I fear that it is more accurate than fantastical that the stakes might be that high, which brings me, finally, to our negotiations in Vienna. If the consequences of success are so promising and if the ramifications of failure are so dire, then what has to happen to guarantee a good outcome? And I will end here. First, the structure of the talks is deeply problematic, and that is the Iranians' fault. They are insisting on this shuttle diplomacy when we should be talking directly to them. Second, countries in Iran's neighborhood that were hostile or neutral to the talks in 2015 suddenly have their eyes wide open to the benefits of getting back into the deal, so we should make sure that our partners in the Middle East who have the ear of the Iranian Government or the Supreme Leader are applying the appropriate pressure and letting Iran know that their relationships in the region are at risk if Iran fails to get back into the deal. On our side of the ledger, we need to be willing to be creative. Now, of course, any restart of the nuclear agreement is going to require the United States to drop the sanctions Trump applied to Iran's economy-- that had the same impact as the Obama-era nuclear sanctions. Yet here is the point I want to make: What about the other sanctions that Trump layered on top of the economic sanctions? For example, it should be expected that the Iranians would want us to lift Trump's designation of its primary military force, the IRGC, as a terrorist organization. This wasn't strictly a nuclear sanction, but it was certainly a key part of Trump's maximum pressure campaign, and it was specifically designed to try to bring Iran back to the negotiating table on a nuclear program. In evaluating the wisdom of peeling back these noneconomic sanctions, it is important to remember that they were all completely feckless. These sanctions had no impact. In fact, their only impact was to worsen Iran's behavior, so lifting them would have no practical negative impact. Just as importantly, lifting this particular designation, the one example I am posing to you today, is a rather technical exercise under the U.S. statute, and it actually doesn't prevent us from sanctioning the truly bad actors in the Iranian military. For example, our sanctions on some of their most brutal interrogators--the IRGC's interrogators--would all stay in place even if we lifted that blanket IRGC designation. This is just one example of a Trump-era sanction whose erasure would have little to no practical impact. There are many more, but I use this example to show how weighing the equities, the benefits, of getting into the deal are going to be far greater than the imaginary benefits of keeping many of Trump's noneconomic sanctions. Now, let me be clear. If the sanctions like this are removed, opponents of the deal are going to cry bloody murder in that they are going to accuse Biden of giving more than Obama gave, but this is the exact trap that Trump was trying to set for his successor. He applied sanctions on Iran in connection with the pullout of the nuclear deal, but he called them nonnuclear sanctions, hoping the next President would be caught in this sticky web. President Biden shouldn't be bound by Trump's tortured sanctions logic. But, just as importantly, let me assure you that no matter the particulars or the details of the agreement to restart the nuclear deal, the deal critics are going to oppose it, no matter what. They opposed it in 2015. They are going to oppose it again. What we should really be worried about is Trump's Iran policy becoming, by accident, permanent, and this is what is likely to occur if the Vienna talks fail. Iran will continue to speed up its nuclear research program, the maximum pressure will continue, and a chill will be delivered to the deescalation momentum in the region. But on the other hand, reentering the deal, while effectively already priced into a Biden electoral victory, will be seen as a diplomatic victory, at a perfect time to score a win for diplomacy, and the Middle East countries who have found new affection for a U.S.-Iran agreement will exhale. Now, I am not naive. I understand the Middle East has still dozens of intractable crises, and the events of the last few days in Israel and Gaza are a reminder of the grave challenges that are still there. But the overall mood of deescalation in and around the Gulf is real, and it is much better than the old incentive structure for escalation. So I see these roots of positive change slowly, quietly growing, and, right now, the best way for the United States to nurture those grass shoots is to restart the Iran nuclear agreement. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President and my colleagues, there is a saying about Afghanistan: that we have turned the corner toward victory so many times that we are spinning in circles. During the beginning of my time in Congress, I went to Afghanistan to visit our troops and military leadership about every 2 years. Each time I went, I was met by a new, capable, impressive general who had just started his yearlong tour, who told me that the last general did it wrong and that, this time, everything was going to be different. I remember coming back from my third trip to Afghanistan--I think it was in 2011--convinced that it was time to leave. The primary mission had been accomplished. Within a few years of our invasion, al-Qaida in Afghanistan had been reduced to a shell of its former self, and we had really shifted to a new mission: nation-building. At the outset, there was reason for us to stay and engage in that mission and to work with the new Afghan Government to help get it on its own feet, but, by 2011, that mission had, for all intents and purposes, become a permanent one. Now, after 20 years of war and handwringing about when the right time is to leave, we have to acknowledge some basic truths: Our military presence in Afghanistan is not creating the conditions necessary to eradicate the Taliban or the conditions necessary to create a fully functional Afghan military or government. In fact, the facts on the ground would tell you the opposite is true: The longer we stay, the more powerful the Taliban becomes and the less willing the Afghan Government appears to be to make the hard choices to stand on its own. We can pretend that another year is going to change this, but it won't. ``Just a little bit more time'' has become the rinse-and-repeat phrase of the Afghanistan hawks, but to stay any longer is really-- let's be honest--a decision to stay forever, and that is something the American people do not support. I want to tell you one story from my trip to Afghanistan in 2011 that helped to confirm my belief that something was very wrong about our policy there. I went with a bipartisan delegation. I was in the House at the time. We visited a far-off Province in western Afghanistan--a small town called Parmakan--and we were there to visit a group of Army commandos who toured us around this village. They were protecting the farmers in this village from Taliban attack. They attested to us that the attacks had largely stopped, and in the place of those attacks had matured a commerce between the Taliban forces that surrounded the village and the farmers of the village. As we walked around this village, we made our way through fields of these beautiful, beautiful, colorful flowers. I turned to my colleague next to me, and I asked him if he had a sense as to what this crop was. He said: I think I do, but let's confirm. So we asked one of the village elders what they were harvesting in these fields. Poppy, he told us. Our U.S. military forces were protecting the poppy trade in this western Province of Afghanistan--in fact, protecting the ability of the Taliban to come in and purchase that poppy in order to fuel the insurgency that we were fighting. Our troops were literally being utilized to protect the revenue source of our enemy. And so no wonder our policy in Afghanistan appears circular. In many ways, it is and it has been for a very long time. But even for those who disagree with me and contest that our presence there has actually helped facilitate the survival of the Taliban, what evidence is there that staying for another few years is going to make the key difference? The American war in Afghanistan is nearly 20 years old. It is the longest war in U.S. history, outlasting the Civil War, the Spanish- American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean war combined. The United States and other international donors have invested an extraordinary amount of money and effort and blood to help stand up a functioning Afghan Government and civil society. And yet that government has failed to get widespread support from the Afghan people. There are many reasons for this, but there is one big one: corruption. And the billions upon billions of dollars that are pumped into the Afghan economy by U.S. taxpayers often never find their way to actually helping the people of that country. Too much of our aid has been syphoned off by local leaders and unintentionally we have helped establish a system of corruption that has become so pervasive and so predatory that people have, frankly, become less resistant to Taliban inroads. Without a functioning police force, local Governors establish their own militias, and the mafia-style system that has developed has led to this vast drug trafficking network, fueled by corruption and that poppy production I talked about. This has distorted Afghanistan's economy, and it has, frankly, neutralized a lot of our economic aid. And yet the United States often, over the course of the last 20 years, has tolerated these warlords, these drug traffickers, and these corrupt defense contractors inside Afghanistan because we consider the enemy of our enemy to be our friend. Our entire mission there has often been built on a self- defeating strategy. In fact, what began as a vital mission to eliminate the threat of those who attacked us on September 11 has now, in some ways, become a symbol of nearly everything that is wrong with American foreign policy. Our armed presence in Afghanistan epitomizes this hubristic myth around the power of U.S. troops abroad; that they can completely dismantle terrorist networks by force, install and cultivate a stable democratic government, and eliminate rampant corruption and illegal drug cultivation. Two decades and nearly $2 trillion dollars of spending later, we have seen the limitations of those fantastical assumptions. Our generals have offered PowerPoint presentation after PowerPoint presentation on how this time it is going to be different, but it never is because the failure really isn't in the execution. The failure has been in the design. A few thousand troops--and that is what we have there today--cannot deliver security and political stability to a complex, multicultural, multilingual nation, long resistant to centralized rule, on the other side of the world. We were right to pursue the al-Qaida terrorists who attacked us on September 11, but that mission is completed, and it is time to face facts about the limitations of American military power in Afghanistan and bring our troops home. Now, let's be clear, al-Qaida still wants to harm the United States, but the threat that they pose today is nowhere near what it was 20 years ago when they attacked our Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, bombed the USS Cole, and killed thousands of Americans on September 11. Intelligence estimates tell us that in Afghanistan, there may be only 200, 300, maybe 400 al-Qaida members total. The organization is no longer capable of planning large-scale attacks against the United States. That is what our intelligence estimates tell us. And, frankly, there are far more al-Qaida members today in other countries, like Yemen, for instance. Does that mean that we should also plant huge numbers of U.S. troops in every place where there are security vacuums to eliminate the terrorist threat from those countries? Of course not. After two decades of the War on Terror, we have made a ton of mistakes, but we have also gotten a lot better in terms of our intelligence capabilities and our ability to strike against a terrorist threat absent a huge in-country presence. Why not apply that lesson learned to Afghanistan? To their credit, the Trump administration was right to finally call it like it is and state that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan couldn't and shouldn't continue forever. But as usual, the Trump team didn't put in the work to ensure that we could do this responsibly by their deadline of May 1. So a 4-month extension, announced by President Biden, will give us the space needed, not to magically accomplish what we haven't been able to do in 20 years but to realistically chart out the operational plans for pulling out the 2,500 troops whom we still have there. Now, finally, I want to be honest. When we withdraw, there is a real possibility the situation in Afghanistan is going to get worse. It is likely that fighting between the Afghan Government and the Taliban escalates. At that point, either the Afghan Government will have to lead the fight without the crutch of American support or the government could collapse. But this is the key point: That has been the dynamic for the last 15 years, and it is going to continue to be the dynamic for the next 15 years. It wouldn't be any different if we had stayed for another 5 years, another 20 years, or another year. There is simply no evidence to suggest that things are going to change. After 20 years and billions of dollars of investment in the Afghan Government, the onus has to be on them to get their act together and to earn the support of the people. And one last point, being in Afghanistan is a choice, a choice to not focus on other theaters that present more serious threats to international norms, global stability, and American security. It bogs America down having 2,500 troops there and thousands more contractors and billions of dollars. It bogs us down in a theater that, frankly, just matters less to us today than it did years ago. Just within the last few days, China has leveled new threats to the territorial integrity of its neighbors; Russia is amassing thousands of troops on the border of Ukraine; and there are new worries about a potential attack on NATO member states. And remember, counterterrorism officials and our daily newsfeed remind us that the most serious threat to America today is actually not from foreign terrorist organizations but from domestic groups. We spend more money than any other nation in the world on security, but even given the gargantuan size of our global military footprint, we cannot and should not be everywhere. We need to make choices every now and again, and right now it is fantasy, not reality, that undergirds an argument to stay in Afghanistan for another 10 years or 5 years or even another year. A big part of being President is making tough choices, and today President Biden has made the right one to end this war I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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. 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. I further ask that the Durbin amendment at the desk be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read three times and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 1651, which was received from the House and is at the desk.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. For the information of Senators, we expect to have four rollcall votes beginning at 10:45 a.m. tomorrow. Additional rollcall votes are expected during Thursday's session.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that following morning business tomorrow, Thursday, March 25, all postcloture time on the motion to proceed to Calendar No. 11, H.R. 1799, the PPP Extension Act, be considered expired and the motion to proceed be agreed to; that the only amendments in order be the following: Kennedy, No. 1401; Rubio, No. 1405; further, that it be in order for Senator Paul or his designee to raise a Budget Act point of order; finally, that at 11 a.m. tomorrow, the Senate vote in relation to the amendments in the order listed and on the motion to waive, if made; that if the motion to waive is agreed to, the bill be considered read a third time and the Senate vote on passage of the bill as amended, if amended, with 60 affirmative votes required for passage, all with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, Marcia Reitman Currie from New York; Mitchell Wright, Jr., from Missouri; Nicholas Tarpley from Pennsylvania; Reuben Lewis III from California; Rhyce Wingate-Bey, Maryland; Robert Crochiere, Massachusetts; Samuel Lamont Smith- Williams, Tennessee; Spencer Wilcox, Oregon; Anthony Castillo, New York--we didn't come close to finishing this list tonight. We didn't make a dent in the list of those names of the people who have died from gun violence in 2021 alone, a year in which almost 10,000 people have died in less than 3 months in suicides and homicides and accidental shootings. It is a choice. None of this is inevitable. Almost all of it is preventable. It only happens here in the United States of America because other countries make different choices. Congress goes the next 2 weeks on a district work period. We wanted to come to the floor tonight to make clear that we are not going to forget those who have died through the inaction of this body, their national leaders; that we are going to renew our commitment to be better and to change and to begin that process in the wake of the shootings in Boulder and Atlanta by making sure that everybody hears the names of those who have died. I yield to Senator Blumenthal to wrap up for the evening.

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

Mr. MURPHY

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