Christopher Murphy

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, there are a lot of inscriptions--famous words, inspirational sayings--that are detailed into and painted onto the walls of the Capitol. One of my favorites, which I think also happens to be one of the shortest, adorns a wall, I believe, on the way into the House Chamber. The saying is attributed to Alexander Hamilton, and it reads, simply: Here, Sir, People Govern. Here, Sir, People Govern. It is purposeful that that quote finds its way onto the walls of the Capitol Building because this is the branch of government that is given primacy by our Founders. It is no coincidence that we are the article I branch. Governing--the process of setting the rules by which the country lives--is supposed to happen here, in the article I branch, the elected wing of American democracy. But as all of my colleagues know, there has been very little governing here happening of late. This Congress--this Senate--has been effectively dead. Here in the Senate, half the normal bills have been passed during this Congress, compared to normal years, and nearly one- third of that legislation that we have finished has just been renaming postal buildings or authorizing commemorative coins. In fact, over the last 2 years, the Senate has spent floor time on a grand total of 20-- 20--pieces of legislation that weren't routine or emergency spending measures. That is less than one bill a month. We are getting paid $170,000 a year to work on one substantive piece of legislation every 30 days. Now, perhaps you could intellectually reconcile this legislative desert if there were no problems to solve in America, if not a single major change in law was necessary. That, of course, is not the case. A pandemic disease has killed over 200,000 Americans. An opioid crisis that rages largely unchecked took another 70,000 lives last year, just in drug overdoses alone. One out of 10 Americans are out of work today. Wildfires and hurricanes and droughts, caused by a man-made warming of the planet, ravage our landscape. No, there are really big problems that need to be solved--deadly problems, existential problems. I keep searching for the reason that no legislation is happening here, especially since the Senate does actually seem to be doing something. I mean, I am here voting most weekdays. So we must not be totally out of business. No, in fact, the Senate has been doing something, and that something is confirming judges to a record number of vacancies in the Federal court system. Those record vacancies were created by Senator McConnell, who refused--refused--to confirm any judicial nominees, including to the Supreme Court, during President Obama's final 2 years in office. And the primary reason that Senator McConnell has stopped passing legislation and has turned this institution into a judge-confirming simple machine is because the modern Republican Party currently owns a policy agenda that is about as popular as a pair of wet socks. More people without health insurance and higher rates? Nobody wants that. Easier access for dark money to influence Congress? Not very popular. Less regulation of financial companies and polluters? No, few people out there are clamoring for that. The criminalization of abortion? Not a big groundswell in America. The elimination of the firearms background check system? Yes, pretty much everybody hates that idea too. You see, no parts of that agenda can actually pass Congress. Certainly not now, with Democrats in charge of the House. But they couldn't even get it done when they had control of the Senate, the House, and the White House. They spent months trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, for instance, but because Republicans figured out that they would all lose their seats if they repealed the law, they gave up and walked away. Frankly, they gave up on it all, not just because they feared the electoral backlash--no, also because they found another way to get their agenda done. You see, Republicans found another place for that Alexander Hamilton quote. It turns out that they can't--or they don't want to--govern here. But they found a way to get another branch of government, insulated almost completely from popular opinion, to implement their world view. They want that inscription--Here, Sir, People Govern--to move to a building a block away, on the other side of First Street--the U.S. Supreme Court. With the elevation of Amy Coney Barrett to that Court, Republicans will have completed their methodical, careful surgical procedure--the transplant of American rule setting from the abdominal cavity of this building to that of the building across the street. I want to explain what I mean by this, but, first, let's just lay down an obvious predicate about the process that brought us to this moment. It is important. Senate Republicans were not telling the truth, as it turned out, when they said in 2016 that they believed the Senate shouldn't confirm a Supreme Court Justice in the final year of a President's term. Shocker--they didn't actually mean what they said. They said it, in 2016, to try to put some lazy, razor-thin veneer of intellectual legitimacy on their refusal to let President Obama fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court, as was his duty and right under the Constitution. But we know now that their obstruction of Merrick Garland was, of course, just a simple, naked, anti-democratic, anti- constitutional power grab. They should have just admitted it then because at least it would have avoided the mind-blowing hypocrisy of this sudden, stunning reversal of position. Now, suddenly, all of a sudden it is OK to confirm a Justice in the last year of a President's term--in the last few months of an election, while people are actually voting, as it turns out. Of course, it is, because all that matters here now is power. We get that. We will remember. The rules have changed. The Republicans changed them. You went back on your word. And it makes this whole process lack legitimacy. It is important to stipulate that, but it is an insufficient explanation, admittedly, of my opposition to Amy Coney Barrett, because the consequences of this nomination go far beyond the downward spiral upon which Republicans have placed this institution. No, the real travesty here is that transplant of lawmaking from here to the Supreme Court and what it is going to mean for regular people out there when 5 of 300 million Americans--5 people who are unelected and totally unaccountable to popular opinion--start changing the rules under which we all live because the rule changes they support and their political movements support are so wildly unpopular that they couldn't be passed in Congress. So they had to be enacted over in the Supreme Court. Seventy times since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, Republicans have tried to gut all or part of the law. Thirty-one times the Republicans tried to repeal it in its entirety. They shut down the entire Federal Government for 2 weeks, trying to strong-arm Democrats to acquiesce to their demands to end health insurance for 20 million Americans. But all 31 times, they failed--most spectacularly, of course, in the summer of 2017. So, having failed here at this political imperative, Republicans turned to the courts. Senator Cornyn kind of explained what they did for you in his remarks just before mine. He said, Republicans put into the 2017 tax bill a relatively small change to the Affordable Care Act that opened it up to judicial assault. Then, not coincidentally, Republican attorneys general, joined by President Trump, sued to invalidate the entire law because of that one small change. Senator Cornyn talked about severability. That is not what the plaintiffs in the case, including President Trump, are asking for. They are asking for that change in law to bring down the entirety of the ACA, and President Trump confirmed that, once again, today in an interview on ``60 Minutes.'' A Republican-appointed judge ruled for Trump at the district court, and then a Trump-appointed, McConnell-confirmed judge provided the decisive vote at the appeals court in favor of striking down the law. Now that entire law is up for legal challenge at the Supreme Court, and--surprise--the hearing to invalidate the entirety of the Affordable Care Act is in 3 weeks. You wonder why we are rushing through this nomination in record time. Amy Coney Barrett, who has already stated on the record that she thinks the law, even before the changes in the tax bill were made, is unconstitutional, has been selected specifically in order to be the fifth vote to invalidate the Affordable Care Act. That is not conspiratorial thinking. That is the President's word. He has said he is not going to put people on the Supreme Court unless they do the opposite of what John Roberts did. The same goes for Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. They have all been picked for the Court because of their willingness to bend the law and the Constitution, through this riotously flexible doctrine called originalism, to comply with Republican requests of the Court. This new crowd of jurists that are trained, midwifed, and championed by Republican political associations like the Federalist Society are brought up through the farm system and up to the majors to do one thing, to win games for the franchise--the pro-corporate, anti-worker, modern Republican Party. Really, Coney Barrett's confirmation is just the final act of this plan to make the Supreme Court do what the Republican Congress couldn't--in this case, end the Affordable Care Act and the insurance it provides for 23 million Americans and the protections that it gives to 130 million Americans with preexisting conditions. I love this argument that Republicans use that all of a sudden we shouldn't worry about what is about to happen on the Supreme Court, that it is all a construction of our imagination that there is some effort under way to invalidate the Affordable Care Act. I didn't just wake up yesterday. I have been in Congress since the passage of the Affordable Care Act. I have watched the methodical, daily, unending campaign of Republicans to strike down the entirety of the Affordable Care Act. I watched them make the change to the tax law when they couldn't repeal it through Congress. I then watched mainstream Republican attorneys general all together, en masse, bring a case to invalidate the entire law. I watched the Trump administration break with precedent and join that suit, arguing against his own government's position. Now I have watched this Senate elevate three people to the Supreme Court who have been brought up through that same political movement and will vote to end those protections in the Affordable Care Act. My eyes have been opened these last 10 years. I know what is going on, and so do the American people. Joe is a constituent of mine from East Haven. He says: After working for decades, I was one of millions laid-off due to the covid-19 economic disaster. Not only was my livelihood destroyed, but my health insurance disappeared along with it. I am not old enough for Medicare nor young enough to feel secure without health insurance. Private insurance and COBRA are simply too expensive for the average middle class individual who now has no income. The ACA is my only option for healthcare coverage. Margaret from Enfield, CT, says: My husband had a near fatal heart attack 2 years ago. He has recovered but requires on-going monitoring. He now has a ``preexisting condition.'' He was laid off from his job . . . six weeks ago [a job he had for 28 years]. We have no income, and [we have] to pay . . . to have his health care continued. Without the ACA, we would not only have no income, but also no health insurance. We would be destitute trying to pay his health care bills. Imagine 23 million people losing health insurance in the middle of a pandemic. But that is why we are rushing through Amy Coney Barrett's nomination--because there is this chance, finally, to grab the brass ring, to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. If you don't get Amy Coney Barrett on the Court by the time that hearing happens in 3 weeks, it makes that effort a lot harder. Healthcare isn't the only area of our daily lives that will be changed if Amy Coney Barrett turns the Supreme Court into a new legislative body. Let me take you down another rabbit hole: the use of the Supreme Court to rewrite the Nation's firearm laws. The National Rifle Association's vice grip over Congress is nearly over. Evidence of that comes from the 2017-2018 legislative session, when the NRA controlled both Houses of Congress, had their man sitting in the Oval Office, and they had priorities, but they couldn't get any of them called up for a vote. Then, in 2018, 30-plus NRA A-rated House Members were removed from office by their voters and replaced by supporters of measures like universal background checks and bans on AR- 15s. NRA-sponsored measures can't even get a vote in a Republican Congress anymore because they are so unpopular. But just like ACA repeal, the window, though it is closed here to weaken our Nation's gun laws, remains open on the Supreme Court. Once again, it is time to abandon legislative action and for Republicans to turn to the Court. Amy Coney Barrett represents the vanguard of the new, radical, out- of-the-box pro-gun industry thinking on the definition of the Second Amendment. It is the kind of radical, new thinking that is necessary if one wants the courts, rather than the legislature, to invalidate background checks laws, something an elected body could never, ever, ever do, what with 90 percent of the Americans supporting universal background checks. Amy Coney Barrett's opinion in Kanter v. Barr is a sight to behold, really. In it, she argues it is unconstitutional for a legislature to prohibit felons from owning a gun. She says the Second Amendment guarantees certain felons the right to own firearms, even though 90 percent of Americans think otherwise. What she writes to back up her view is even more radical, even more dangerous. She says that courts, not the legislature, should be the finder of fact on whether a person is too dangerous to own a gun. And she says that the courts can overturn any gun restriction if they find evidence that refutes the efficacy of the law. Basically, she is saying the courts are now going to micromanage our gun laws. She believes the Second Amendment puts the courts, not the legislature, in charge of choosing who can own a weapon and who can't. That is, of course, a curiously convenient view for a Republican Party that would love to weaken our gun laws but can't do it through Congress. Now--surprise again--the Supreme Court rides to the rescue. This, of course, would be devastating for the safety of Americans if criminals could once again buy guns. Last week, I was spending time with Janet Rice, whose son Shane was killed just a few blocks from my house in Hartford. An argument over a girl turned deadly when one angry young man went to the front seat of his car and grabbed an illegal weapon, likely bought through a loophole in the background checks system, and used it to shoot Shane in the back. Weaker background checks systems mean more illegal weapons, more suicides, more domestic violence murders, but they probably mean higher profits for the NRA's members. Let's move on to one last priority of Republicans that is stuck, that can't move, in the legislative branch: more power and influence for dark money political groups. No Member of the Senate who wants to run for reelection in this body would ever introduce a piece of legislation allowing anonymous billionaire donors to gain more influence over the political process. That would be career suicide. No one in America supports that. But these dark money groups are a boon for Republicans because most of the billion-dollar interests that want to influence elections--like the oil and gas industry, for instance--support Republican candidates. Once again, the Supreme Court becomes that back door to get rules put in place that advance a Republican political interest that could never get enacted by Congress. Amy Coney Barrett will join five other Justices who will all likely rule that most regulations of campaign finance laws, like our Federal and State laws restricting the size of donations to campaigns, are constitutionally invalid. The Court has already ruled that the Constitution protects a corporation's right to spend limitless amounts of political money. That is just the beginning. Billionaires want all of our campaign finance laws eviscerated, and that new radical, out-of-the-box thinking on the First Amendment suggests that day is coming if Amy Coney Barrett does what is expected of her and joins other ultraconservatives on the Court to strike down our remaining campaign finance laws. Here, Sir, People Govern. That is what the inscription says on the walls of the U.S. Capitol. It used to be true. Now the inscription should probably read ``Here, Sir, People Confirm'' because now, with an activist, rule-setting, norm-busting Supreme Court, there is really no need for Republicans to pass laws anymore. The Coney Barrett Court will do all the lawmaking Republican interests require. And, frankly, if Democrats win this November, that same Coney Barrett Court will just invalidate any attempts that Congress tries to make to expand the Affordable Care Act or pass universal background checks or protect voters' access to the polls. I get it. I know it feels weird to hear somebody like me describing Amy Coney Barrett as extreme because she doesn't look extreme; she doesn't talk in extreme tones. But, really, look at what she stands for: the elimination of the Affordable Care Act, the right of felons to own guns, the interpretation of a Constitution to allow for the flood of billionaire money into politics. Those are extreme views. Do you know why I know that? Because none of that--the repeal of the ACA, the invalidation of our background checks system, the erosion of campaign finance laws--none of that could pass Congress even when the most partisan Republicans were in charge of all of the relevant lawmaking institutions here. That agenda was so unpopular, so marginal, that even a Republican Congress and a Republican President wouldn't touch it in the end. But over there at the Supreme Court, that is now the place where people will govern after Amy Coney Barrett is rammed through in the quickest confirmation process in modern history, an abomination of a process that makes a mockery of the Senate and the Constitution. Over there, that will become the new power in American democracy, and we are all worse off for it. I will oppose Amy Coney Barrett's nomination. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, Wendy is a constituent of mine from Stanford, CT, and she tells a story that is going to sound incredibly familiar to folks who have been part of this healthcare debate over the last 10 years in this Chamber. She said: When my daughter was 15, she was diagnosed with a type of bone cancer and underwent a year of treatment. We were hopeful that she was cured, but exactly 1 year ago--it was 2 months after she graduated from college and was about to move across the country to begin her career when she underwent a routine checkup and found out that the cancer had returned. The past year has included more chemo, surgery, and immunotherapy. My daughter is now 23 years old, and she is the definition of a preexisting condition. She is still on our health plan, but we are already looking at the time in about 2 years when that will no longer be possible. Although she is at least feeling well enough to begin the job search again, there is no security for any of us without the existence of the Affordable Care Act as an option should she not have employer-based healthcare. She is a young woman who has already gone through so much in these short years. There are enough unknowns. Please continue-- This is her writing to me-- to protect the Affordable Care Act so she knows she has healthcare. President Trump last night contested the idea that 100 million Americans have preexisting conditions. Well, maybe he is right because most data suggests that the number is 130 million Americans who have some form of preexisting condition that, if insurance companies were allowed to, would either result in rate hikes for them because of their diagnosis, or insurance would be made unavailable to them entirely. Now, it has almost been 10 years since we lived in a world where insurance companies could deny you healthcare because of a preexisting condition or could raise your rate simply because you are a woman. So for many Americans, it is even hard to remember those days in which you could be discriminated against just because of a childhood cancer. But those days are about to come back. We are literally months away, if President Trump is successful in ramming through this Supreme Court nominee, from insurance companies once again being able to deny coverage to anybody they want based upon their gender, based upon their medical history, based upon their prior diagnosis. This isn't hyperbole because I have been in the Congress long enough to know two things. One, Republicans will stop at nothing in order to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and we will talk this afternoon about what that means beyond the 130 million Americans who will have their rates increased. But I know something else as well, which is that there is no replacement. There is nothing coming from the Republican majority in the Senate or from this administration to replace the Affordable Care Act. Do you know why I know that? Because I have been waiting for the replacement for a decade, and it has never shown up because it never will. Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act here the first year of the President's term. A lot of people said it was a foregone conclusion--of course, after having pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act for 5 years, Republicans now, with control of the Senate and the House and the White House, will of course make good on their promise. Of course, we know how that turned out. They couldn't because the American people rose up. Phone lines lit up, townhall meetings exploded, and Republicans in the end could not find the votes, even with majorities in both Houses and control of the White House, to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Well, then, Republicans said, let's find another way. If we can't use the most democratic process--legislation--in order to repeal the Affordable Care Act, then let's go to the courts. So Republican attorneys general filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the entirety of the Affordable Care Act on a legal premise that most mainstream scholars thought had no shot, but they weren't counting on this President being able to pack the Court with enough extreme, rightwing jurists to accept the flawed argument. So the President started by putting Neil Gorsuch on the Court. He continued with Brett Kavanaugh. Now, one vote away from being able to overturn the Affordable Care Act, he now has a chance, with the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, to finally get what he couldn't get done in the elected branch of American government--the full repeal and elimination of the Affordable Care Act with nothing to replace it. It is not hyperbole because there is literally that case that I described getting ready for argument before the Supreme Court a week after election day. So guess why it is so important that we confirm a Justice before election day--because they need the votes to invalidate the Affordable Care Act shortly after the election occurs, and it becomes a little bit harder if that Justice is not there to hear the arguments in mid-November. Take Republicans at their word: They want the Affordable Care Act gone. Take Republicans at their word: They don't have a replacement. It will be a humanitarian catastrophe in this country, in the middle of a pandemic--a pandemic that is killing 1,000 people a day; 44,000 new infections that we know of on a daily basis--if 23 million Americans lose access to insurance. Remember, this lawsuit doesn't ask for the Affordable Care Act to be eliminated in pieces or over time; the remedy it seeks is the Affordable Care Act gone, all of it, overnight. There are 23 million Americans who rely on that and 260,000 in my State--the equivalent of 62 different towns in my State alone losing their health insurance. Don't think that States are going to be able to pick up the pieces here. A lot of these folks are on Medicaid. Theoretically, States could decide to pick up the bill themselves, but they can't because the President has forced States to foot the lion's share of the bill for fighting COVID because of the failure to stand up a national response. So States have no money lying around in order to make up for all the people who are going to lose Medicaid access. There are 23 million people who can lose their insurance, potentially by the end of the year or early next year, if this Justice gets confirmed to the Court. But then, all those people with preexisting conditions--and, remember, we now have a new preexisting condition. That is COVID. What we are learning about COVID-19 is very, very worrying. Researchers have observed changes to the heart, the vascular system, the lungs, the brain, the kidneys in those who have gotten sick, and even in many people who are asymptomatic. In fact, there is a study out there right now that Dr. Fauci noted before the HELP Committee recently that shows 70 to 80 percent of people who have had COVID have some lasting damage to their heart. COVID is a preexisting condition. Now, you may think, I haven't had COVID, so I am not at risk of that preexisting condition causing my rates to go up if Amy Coney Barrett gets confirmed to the Court. Well, you don't know if you have had COVID or not, and let me tell you that insurance companies are not going to play dumb. If they are allowed to discriminate against you because you have COVID, then they are going to require you to prove that you haven't had it before you get a policy. Millions and millions of Americans are going to have their rates increased or be denied healthcare at all because they had COVID, whether they were asymptomatic or symptomatic. That, in and of itself, is a healthcare crisis in this country. So the stakes of this debate over the nomination of this new Supreme Court Justice couldn't be higher. Senator Klobuchar talked about the fact that this Supreme Court may decide the outcome of this election, and that is a subject that we should explore at a different time. But 1 week after the election, the Court will hear a case asking for the invalidation of the entire Affordable Care Act. Republicans in the Senate and the White House have no plan to replace it, and if that case is successful, 23 million people are at risk of losing their health insurance: 11 million who are on the exchanges; 12 million who are covered by Medicaid; 133 million Americans, roughly half of America's population under the age of 65, could have their rates increase because of preexisting conditions; 2 million young people under the age of 26 could be kicked off their parents' health insurance; and 9 million people who receive Federal subsidies, tax credits, to buy private insurance would lose that coverage. In the midst of a global pandemic, a COVID diagnosis would possibly render you ineligible for insurance. That is a nightmare--a nightmare on top of the pandemic nightmare that we are living through currently. So we are on the floor today to make sure that our Senate Republican colleagues don't distract the American public, don't try to create controversies around this nomination that don't exist, and don't try to put words in Democrats' mouths. Listen to what we are saying. What we are saying is that this nomination is about the future of the American healthcare system, and every single Senator who votes to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, I believe, is voting to take insurance away from over 20 million Americans, voting to render COVID a preexisting condition that requires you to pay more for healthcare for the rest of your life, and going back to the days in which any preexisting condition could cause you to lose your health insurance and then lose everything that you have saved up over decades and decades. Betty Burger is one of those people, and I will finish with her story. Betty Burger had good insurance through her husband her entire life. He changed jobs, and he had about a week's period of time in which he didn't have a job in between those two jobs and did not have healthcare. During that week, one of their kids was diagnosed with cancer, and it became a preexisting condition, such that the husband's employer's healthcare plan wouldn't cover it, and the Burgers lost everything--everything. They went bankrupt. They went through their savings. They went through the college fund. They lost their house. They lost everything. It has been a decade since any American has had to face that kind of financial ruin because of a diagnosis for them or their child. It is hard for us to remember those days, but they are coming back. They are coming back--I tell you this now--if this Supreme Court Justice is rammed through over the course of the next month. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, the Russian Federation has a Constitution, and if you read Russia's Constitution, you would know that Russia is a democracy. Why? Because their Constitution guarantees the existence of a vibrant, multiparty political system. The Russian Constitution prohibits the use of extrajudicial force or torture by the government. Their constitution says: ``Censorship of the media is prohibited.'' Russia is a democracy if you read their Constitution, but Russia isn't a democracy, of course. It is a dictatorship. One man rules. No one has the right to dissent. There is no freedom of the press. All of that is under the penalty of death. Now, why is this? Well, it is because democracies aren't made by their founding document. The document is just a piece of paper-- parchment, in our case--with words written on it, and these words are just that: They are words. Democracy doesn't work unless its leaders choose to follow the rules that those words prescribe, but also to operate in the spirit of the values that undergird those words. Vladimir Putin will proudly tell you that, technically, Russia adheres to its Constitution. Now, that is not true, obviously, but what Putin has done over the years is just slowly erode a democratic system by using every single inch of discretion allowed to him by that Constitution to make democracy functionally impossible. He will say that censorship doesn't exist because there isn't an explicit censorship law, but we all know that he has used every informal mechanism available to him to make sure that there is no room--no room--for the independence of the press. Something stunning happened here 4 years ago. A Supreme Court vacancy arose through the death of Justice Scalia. The Constitution says that a new Supreme Court Justice can't be seated unless he or she gets an affirmative vote from the Senate, and every single nominee--at least those who weren't withdrawn by the President--essentially got a vote from the Senate before 2016 because, you see, the Founding Fathers didn't actually require the Senate to vote. They didn't because they assumed that leaders of good faith would, of course, fulfill that responsibility to hold a vote. They never considered that the Senate might stretch its discretion under the Constitution so broadly to refuse to consider a nominee simply because they didn't like the President who made the nomination. The Founders didn't actually micromanage democracy. They set these broad rules, and they trusted that we would all act in good faith toward each other and with a patriotism toward our Nation in filling in the details. But that is not how 2016 went down. Senate Republicans said they were setting a new precedent: When a nomination is made in the last year of a President's term, the Senate shouldn't act on it. The Senate, in that case, Republicans said, should wait for the outcome of the election and let the President who wins make the selection. Now, what Senator McConnell and Senator Graham have said is pretty definitive. It is well covered. But there were lots of Senate Republicans who are still here who were equally definitive about the rules they were establishing. For instance, the senior Senator from Florida said: I don't think we should be moving forward on a nominee in the last year of [a President's term]. I would say that even if it was a Republican president. That was the rule that Republicans repeated over and over and over and over and over and over. They are not telling the truth if they try to spin it differently, and we all know this. So you may ask: Why does it matter that they weren't telling the truth? Why does it matter that Republicans didn't honor their word? Why does it matter that they are willing to bend the rules, no matter the promises they have made in the past, whenever it suits them in order to gain political advantage? Well, it is back to the bet that the Founding Fathers made. They just didn't anticipate a moment like today, when truth doesn't matter, when lying is normal, when honor is dead. They left us a bunch of wiggle room in the Constitution, knowing that we had to treat each other well, with respect, with a concern for precedent, in order to have a functional democracy. Senator Alexander, whom I greatly admire, said in his statement the other day that nobody should be surprised that Republicans are going to confirm a Supreme Court nominee before the election, notwithstanding the fact that the election has already started and that it also wipes out the precedent that they just claimed was so sacred 4 years ago. That statement is really revealing. Whether he meant it or not, what he is saying is that nobody should be surprised by now that Republicans are just willing to do whatever it takes--even making up complete fabrications, like a new rule against confirming Justices in an election year--in order to accumulate more power. That is a really dangerous place for this body to head, because the Constitution does provide all sorts of room to push that document to its limits, to dispense with all fairness and honor and fair play, and to just seek power, no matter the costs. I know this sounds silly, but it is not. There is nothing in the Constitution that prohibits the majority party in this body from, for instance, denying all staff to minority Members. There is nothing stopping the majority party from banning all minority party Members from speaking on the floor. And once you don't care about fairness, once you can just change precedent on a dime just to accumulate power, then, there is really no end. I get it that a comparison to Russia seems a little tortured and a little strained, but, honestly, this is how democracies fall apart-- when power becomes more important than the rule of law, our sense of fairness, or even loyalty to country; when your word means nothing; when no one can count on anyone to stay true to what they say; when there is nihilism, trump's patriotism. There are new rules in the Senate now. We get that. There are new rules. Republicans might pretend like they existed before today, but they didn't. This breaks the glass like nothing else did before it. Finally, let me ask this: To what end? Why is it so important that Republicans so nakedly grab for power and reset the very rules of how the Senate operates--rules that were so important 4 years ago? It is not coincidental that the case that the Supreme Court is due to hear days after the election is a case that has to do with something the Republicans have been trying so desperately and unsuccessfully to do for 10 years--repeal the Affordable Care Act and end healthcare for 20 million Americans and protections against rate gouging for 130 million with preexisting conditions It is worth repeating this. I know my colleagues have said it before, and they will say it after, but if Republicans are successful in appointing an anti-ACA Justice to the Supreme Court--and President Trump has made it clear that he is not putting anyone up for the Supreme Court who isn't willing to strike down the Affordable Care Act--then we will have a humanitarian catastrophe on our hands in this country because days after the election, a case is to be heard that will be heard by that new Justice that asks to invalidate the entirety of the Affordable Care Act--not in pieces, not over time, but immediately, the whole thing. That is 25 million people losing access to healthcare--Medicaid and the State and Federal exchanges--in the middle of a pandemic. Think about that. Think about 25 million--the equivalency of something like 10 to 15 different States--all losing healthcare right off the bat, when COVID is raging in this country. As Senator Baldwin said, COVID is a preexisting condition. We are just learning what it does to your body, but it may ravage it. And, ultimately, everyone in this country who knows they have COVID or finds out about it through antibody tests down the line will have their rates jacked up if the Affordable Care Act goes away. Spare me the talk of a replacement coming. I have been in this body long enough to know that there is no replacement coming. Republicans have been talking about it for 10 years. The Affordable Care Act will be invalidated by this Court with this new nominee. Nothing will replace it. Millions of people will lose their healthcare. The reason this nomination is being pushed through is, yes, because Republicans care about power more than anything else but also to make sure that the Court around the corner from here does what the American people wouldn't let Congress do. Remember, Congress could not repeal the Affordable Care Act because the people wouldn't let Congress do it. But nobody is going to be fooled about this end-around. By the time this nominee comes before this body, nobody is going to be mistaken about the consequences for Americans' healthcare. I know that a lot of people think Democrats are foolishly naive. How could we be surprised by this treachery, this about-face of precedent on election-year confirmations, when Republicans have been changing the rules of the Senate at light speed for 5 years? First it was unprecedented denial of a vote for a Supreme Court nominee in 2016. It never happened before in American history. Then it was the abolition of the 60-vote requirement for Supreme Court nominees. Then it was the restriction of debate on judges and political appointees so that nobody could actually see how wildly unqualified the people Donald Trump was appointing to office were. Then it was the end of blue slips so that even more radical nominees could be put on the bench. It has been just one power grab after another. So, yes, we probably have seen this coming, and we probably should have known that a party so committed to ending health insurance for 20 million Americans would do anything to make that happen. But I was naive. I still had hope. I still believed that honor was alive in this place. I still thought that when people said things, they meant it, and they would stick to it. I still thought that we could save the Senate. I believe in my heart that Republicans are going to rue the day that they made nakedly clear that a Senator's word means nothing, where this place is simply a vehicle to compile as much power as quickly as possible, no matter the cost. American democracy is not just the Constitution. It is us. It is the decisions we make every single day. It is the way we treat each other. It is the decision as to whether we care about our word mattering. This month, as it stands tonight, democracy's flicker just got a whole lot duller. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, when people talk about this body being fundamentally broken under Republican leadership, this is exhibit A. This is exhibit A. This body has had 2 months to consider legislation that would stand up a national effort to squash this pandemic once and for all and to make sure that people don't die, don't go hungry, don't get pushed out into the street at a moment when unemployment is higher than at any time in this country's history since the Great Depression. We didn't consider any legislation for all of the last work period. We went on recess for 2 weeks. Now we are 3 days before unemployment benefits expire--the additional unemployment benefits--and we are now getting the introduction of what appears to be a dozen different pieces of legislation from Senate Republicans tonight. We still don't have the details, but it looks as though there is not one bill being introduced but that there are about 13 bills being introduced. We don't have enough time before the expiration of unemployment benefits to negotiate 1 bill--1 bill--never mind 7 or 10. We wasted months of time when Democrats and Republicans should have been talking together. Instead, Senate Republicans were talking amongst themselves and have now waited until the zero hour to come out with a piece of legislation which calls for a $400-per-week cut in unemployment benefits for people who are out of work. That is the economic stimulus plan: a $400-per-week cut for families in this country who have been relying on unemployment benefits because the economy is not coming back. But I come to this floor tonight to tell you why the economy is not coming back. It is not because we haven't appropriated enough money. It is because we are losing the fight against the virus. In 15 days, this country has gone from 3 million cases to 4 million cases, and there is not enough funding in these proposals that were just outlined in order to help States beat the virus. We are, once again, experiencing a PPE shortage in this Nation. Doctors at Memorial City Medical Center in Houston are using single-use N95 respirator masks for 15 days before throwing them out. Schools are, right now, planning to spend $25 billion in order to buy masks and cleaning supplies that are escalating in cost. There is nowhere close to enough money in this legislation to help schools get ready. There is nothing in this bill that requires the operationalization of the Defense Production Act to make sure that we are producing enough PPE in this country. There are still States in this Nation that are refusing to open up the health insurance systems so more people can get access to health insurance. There is nothing in these proposals to require open enrollment periods in States, to make sure that everyone who is contracting this virus has the chance to get health insurance. The reality is that the States are the ones on the frontlines, standing up these responses. My State has done pretty well, but we are going bankrupt in the process. From what I can tell, listening to these speeches tonight, there is nothing significant in this package of bills to help States like mine stand up responses. So I grieve for families who are going to listen to the news tonight and hear that Senate Republicans' stimulus plan is to cut their unemployment benefits by $400 per week. I also grieve for this Nation, knowing that nothing in these proposals is significant enough to allow States and hospitals and healthcare systems to turn around this damaging trajectory on the virus, to produce enough PPE necessary to do the job, and to fix the dangerously broken testing system in this country. I plead for my Republican colleagues to finally come to the table with Democrats in the House and the Senate so we can craft something together that does the job for families and does the job to fix this very, very broken healthcare system amidst an advancing pandemic.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Thank you for the question. This is what led me to join with many of my other colleagues, as I mentioned, including Senator Schumer, to introduce the legislation in the wake of the protests in our Nation's Capital. Accountability is also a cornerstone of the rule of law. The only way that we can aggrieve abuses of power is to know who committed those abuses of power. Listen, these troops or these riot officers were ordered to be in that space. Let's be honest that the vast majority of these patriotic law enforcement officers are trying to do the right thing. But we know, because we have seen the video, that there have been repeated-- repeated--abuses on the streets of Portland, on the streets of New York City, and on the streets of the Nation's Capital. When those occur, frankly, it should be in the interest of law enforcement leadership themselves to be able to hold those individuals accountable so that we can make sure that the blame is not ascribed to every single individual who is uniformed and on these streets, but that we hold the specific individuals, or the individuals who ordered them to take those actions, accountable. So as a broad question, Americans should want to know what agency these individuals are representing, and they should at least have a badge number attached to them so that we can make sure that individual actions have a line of accountability. But I would argue that the agency themselves should want that if they are really in the business of making sure that any abuses of power by their officers or by their soldiers or by their police are held to account as well.

Mr. MURPHY. I would.

Mr. MURPHY. I would yield for a question, then.

Mr. MURPHY. Senator Merkley and I serve on the Foreign Relations Committee together, and what we have watched together, over the course of our time on that committee, is a reversal of what was called by some scholars ``the end of history.'' There was this idea that democracy was going to be triumphant in the world; that in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall, democracy--participatory, open democracies--and capitalist economies had, effectively, won the fight and that it was just a matter of time before the rest the world was living in a system like ours that respects the rule of law and allows for those who want to protest their government to do so under the protection of law. And much of our outreach to the Communist Party in China during the 1980s and 1990s came under the presumption that even China would eventually fall under the crushing weight of an advancing democracy. We now know that to not be true because we are at a moment in time in which we hear on the Foreign Relations Committee uninterrupted testimony of countries that we would have, even just a decade ago, accepted and named as a democracy, starting to slide away from the rule of law, away from the protection of speech into something else. Now, you don't go from a democracy into an autocracy overnight. So many of the countries we are concerned about are in that transition. We hope that an active United States, playing a role for democracy promotion in the world, can help pull them back. But it is a reminder-- it is a reminder--that democracy in many ways is a very unnatural mechanism to control or run your life or society I always remind my constituents back home that there aren't many other things in life that are really important that you run by democratic vote. You don't run your business by democratic vote. Your kid's sports team doesn't run by democratic vote. I love my 8-year-old and 11-year-old, but they don't get an equal vote in the decisions in my household. Democracy is fairly unnatural. We don't really choose it as a mechanism to run other institutions in this country, but we reserve it for government. We reserve it for government, but it only remains, it only survives, it only perseveres if we tend to it, and we have not been tending to it over the last 3 years. I rise to support Senator Merkley and his effort because I have watched what these other governments do at the outset--these would be autocrats--what they do to try to gently begin to quell people's interest in free speech. The tactics that are being used in Portland, the tactics that were used just down the street, in the Nation's Capital, the tactics that are being contemplated for other cities throughout this country are reminiscent of tactics that have been proven successful in other countries to try to push people back inside their homes and to try to disincentivize their interests in speaking up against power, because, I am going to tell you, as word spreads that if you run out to the streets to protest your government, you may be requisitioned and shoved into an unmarked vehicle, if you are a single mom, who can't disappear for an hour, never mind a day, you aren't going to be that interested in going out and speaking freely. All of a sudden, if the government is starting to come down like a ton of bricks with Federal troops, with sweeps of peaceful protesters off the streets and into confinement, it does start to chill people's interest in standing up. And that is why governments across the world have tried to pioneer these practices. They say they are still democracies. They say they still observe the rule of law, but, then, when people try to go out and protest, they throw the military at them. They start to snatch people off the streets, and, all of a sudden, people start to think to themselves that they are better off just staying in their homes. They are better off not protesting their government because the consequences now feel too significant. I know, Senator Merkley, that a lot of folks claim that we are engaged in a hyperbole when we talk about the risks to democracy presented by this administration, but through our collective seats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, we see what is happening around the world. We see the ways in which, drip by drip, an open participatory democracy can all of a sudden start to foreclose the rights of people to be able to petition their government. We should just remember that over the course of history, it is .001 percent of citizens who have lived in a democracy. This is not actually how the world has chosen to organize itself. We now have these templates. We now have these models provided to us by people like the leader in Turkey or the new President in the Philippines by which we should be cautioned in the ways in which we start to constrain speech, the ways in which we start to punish speech, the ways in which we start to make people believe that there is so much risk in speaking out against their government that they are better off just accepting whatever comes their way. So I come to the floor today as someone who introduced legislation requiring the identification of military forces when they are doing crowd control. The minute that I saw those unmarked officers on the streets of the Nation's Capital, I knew how dangerous it was. I know enough about the history of our own country to know that vigilante justice, masked from identification, is reminiscent of some of the worst moments in American history. I know that we should be students of our own history to understand the danger to democracy presented by unidentified, unaccountable agents of justice, but I also know, as a student of the world today, that there are plenty of examples overseas that should caution us as well. Maybe there isn't a question in there, Senator Merkley, but I am just so appreciative of your efforts, so appreciative that you have allowed me and the legislation that I have offered with Senator Schumer to require identification of Federal security forces to be added to the bill that you are offering. I will be with you every step of the way, if we are not successful in getting it included in the legislation pending today, to make sure it finds a way into law. I think your legislation is a cornerstone of our strategy to protect democracy for the next 240 years.

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I appreciate the Senator breaking for a moment to allow me to just a say few words. I might pose a question to him, if he chooses to answer with the remaining part of his time. I want to make sure that my remarks are counted toward my time, not Senator Merkley's time.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am glad to have the opportunity to talk for a bit on the floor of the U.S. Senate on U.S. policy toward China because there has been no better friend for Chinese interests likely in our lifetime than President Donald J. Trump. Articles suggest that when you survey Chinese Communist Party leaders, they are, to a person, rooting for the reelection of this President. I don't need to go through the litany of ways in which China has become more influential and more powerful all around the world because of this administration's policies, but at the top of that list is the abdication of the United States' traditional leadership role on human rights, which has allowed the Communist Party to march on the Uighurs and others. It is a failed trade policy that has allowed China to extend its influence into places like Africa and throughout the Silk Road. It is America's break with Europe that has shattered our ability to negotiate together the future rules of the economic order. But what China is really ecstatic about is this President's performance since March in the wake of a virus that now shows the United States as having 25 percent of the world's COVID cases while having only 4 percent of the world's population. My friend Senator Blackburn recited the early moments of this virus outbreak in China, and she is right that China was nontransparent and unhelpful in those early days. But do you know who the greatest cheerleader for China was in the first 2 to 3 months of COVID-19's outbreak there? President Donald Trump. On 45 occasions he went on social media or gave statements to the press in which he lauded China's response. He talked about how transparent they were and how they were doing a great job. The world community couldn't put pressure on China to open up with respect to what they knew about the virus in large part because the leader of the Nation's most powerful country was doing the bidding of the Chinese Government. The second thing that this President has done that makes China very, very pleased is to essentially make the argument for the Chinese that the autocratic model that they are perfecting is the best method by which to organize society around the world, because they say: Listen, we got this virus under control in a matter of months, and the world's greatest democracy is still dealing with an epidemic that looks to be raging newly out of control. So as we engage in this broad fight between models of governance, our inability--this administration's inability--to get this virus under control is maybe the greatest gift that this President has given to China. Here is what makes it so unconscionable: We know that democracy is inefficient. We know that capital markets can sometimes be inefficient when pressed up against the wall by emergencies. So we built into the statutes of the United States emergency powers to give to this President--to any President--so that when they are faced with an emergency, they can cure some of the inefficiencies of democracy. We are on the floor today--Senators Baldwin, Stabenow, Brown, and I-- to talk about one particular power this President has. It is an act called the Defense Production Act, and it allows the President during moments of emergency to commandeer parts of the manufacturing supply chain in this country to make sure we are making everything we need in order to repel a foreign invader. Sometimes that may be an army, but in this case it is a pathogen. What we have known from the very beginning is that there was no way for this country to have enough personal protective equipment--masks, face shields, gowns, and gloves--and there was no way for this country to be able to have enough tests to know who has it so that we can track it and get rid of it without the Federal Government stepping up and utilizing the Defense Production Act. Twenty percent of nursing homes today have less than a week's supply of PPE. Doctors at one hospital in Houston, where the outbreak is raging out of control, are being told to wear their N95 masks for 15 days in a row when it is recommended for a single use. The national strategic stockpile once had 82 million gloves. Today they have less than 1 million. Guess what. It is going to get worse. More people need to be tested. Schools are about to reopen. The superintendent of the 100,000-student Jefferson County school district in Louisville, KY, says that he needs $10 million to order face masks alone. It is going to cost schools across this country $25 billion to purchase medical supplies, and these medical supplies are going up in price because the supply is so low. We have a solution: the Defense Production Act. We also don't have enough tests. It now takes 7 to 10 to 14 days to get a test back. In Connecticut, it used to take just 1 day. You can't beat this virus if you don't get results for 7 to 10 days. That person who gets tested goes out and spreads it during that time. James Davis from Quest Diagnostics said: We would double our capacity tomorrow . . . but it's not the labs that are the bottleneck. [It] is our ability to get physical machines and . . . our ability to feed those machines with chemical reagents. That is equipment that could be produced in the United States if the President took control of the manufacturing supply chain--not forever, but to the extent of this crisis. So the Medical Supply Transparency and Delivery Act, which Senator Baldwin and my colleagues will talk more about, essentially picks up the ball the President has dropped and commands the President to operationalize the Defense Production Act and put somebody in charge of its effectuation to make sure we are producing in this country all of the medical equipment--the masks, the gloves, the testing reagents, the cartridges--that it is possible to produce in this Nation The level of gleeful, willing, knowing, purposeful incompetence from this administration is absolutely stunning, and no one should normalize an administration that has the power to save lives and refuses to operationalize it. Why won't this administration take control of the supply chain? Why are they willing to let people die? States can't run the supply chain by themselves. It is a national and international supply chain. Hospitals can't create their own supply chain. They need to be focused on saving lives, not being miniprocurement organizations. We know that democracies and capitalist economies are by nature and design often inefficient when faced with these urgent crises. That is why we give Presidents these enormous but temporary powers to smooth out the inefficiencies of a multibranch, multijurisdictional democracy. When it comes to calling in the Federal troops to beat the hell out of protesters, this President seems perfectly willing to exercise his powers as Commander in Chief, but when it comes to making sure that my kids' teachers or my local doctor has a mask this fall, this President is all of a sudden impotent. It falls to us, Members of the U.S. Congress, to stand up and pass legislation, the Medical Supply Transparency and Delivery Act, to make sure--to make sure--that we are using the extent of the statutes provided to this government and this President to make sure that people are safe and make sure people are tested in the middle of an ongoing epidemic. I am glad to be joined on the floor today by a number of my colleagues to talk about the need to pass this legislation. We are going to offer a unanimous consent request. Senator Baldwin will do that. I have been very pleased to be a partner with her in developing this legislation to require the operationalization of the DPA, but before she speaks, let me turn it over to my colleague and our caucus's leader on issues of healthcare, Senator Stabenow.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, let me tell you how the bailout has worked. When COVID hit this country and people were dying from a disease that we didn't have a vaccine for, as emergency rooms all over the country were being overwhelmed, the Federal Government and the Trump administration did nothing. They did nothing. They didn't stand up a national testing program. They didn't stand up a national trace and quarantine system. They didn't let the CDC do their job and issue national guidelines around how to close businesses and schools. They didn't lead proposing legislation before Congress to tackle the costs of this response. President Trump put in place a feckless travel restriction that still allowed tens of thousands of people to get here from the countries that were infected, and then the Federal Government gave up. It did nothing. It left the entirety of the response to the States Here is how the bailout works. The States have bailed out the Federal Government by stepping up to the plate and being primary responders to this epidemic. Hospitals and local public health systems have bailed out the Federal Government, which did nothing to stop this virus. That is how the bailout has worked. All States are asking for is to help pay for the expense of confronting this virus. If a bailout equals saving lives, then I am for a bailout. Without help from the Federal Government, people are going to die. States that have to balance their Federal budgets are not going to be able to erect the kind of anti-pandemic infrastructure that will save lives. My colleague from Florida has left, but let's also just be honest about the accounting here. He had a chart up about Florida bailing out New York. If you want to do a deal in which Connecticut and New York and New Jersey get to keep all of the revenue that we send to the Federal Government, that we get a guarantee for every dollar we send to Washington, we get a dollar back, we are all in. I don't think my friend from Florida would take that deal because every single year, on average, a Connecticut citizen gives $4,000 more to the Federal Government than that Connecticut citizen gets back. The average New York citizen gives on average $1,700 more to the Federal Government than they get back. That is because we are wealthier States. You know what, while we fight to try to get as much of that revenue back to our State as possible, we understand that because citizens in our States have done a little bit better, we should help pay for the healthcare of people in Florida; we should help pay for the education of poor kids in Florida. We grouse about the amount of taxes we pay, but we understand the deal in which, because we have done a little bit better, we are going to help States that need a little bit more help. But on an average year, the average Florida recipient gets $2,700 more in Federal assistance than they give. That sounds like a bailout--on an annual basis, repeating year after year. What we are asking here is for some help to save lives. We are not asking to give out surplus checks to our constituents; we are asking for help to keep people alive all throughout this country. States and municipalities are the ones that are conducting the response because the Trump administration has refused to do it, and it is an expensive response. If you want to keep people alive, then you have to help us pay for that expense. You have to help us pay for that expense. Our revenues are cratering as the economy has been shut down. Our expenses are spiraling as we have been left holding the bag. When that happens, you can only do two things if you are a State that has to balance your budget, as Connecticut is, every year. We can either raise taxes--think about that: raising taxes in the middle of an economy in meltdown--or we can lay people off. Already across this country, 1.5 million State and local workers have been laid off, and there are more to come. Many of them will be in the public health field--the very people who we need to be able to identify where the virus exists, trace the contacts, and quarantine people to keep others safe. Those are the people who are going to be laid off. It becomes this downward spiral in which, as the Federal Government refuses to help States pay for the virus response and the States can no longer effectively stand up a response effort, the virus wins. That is one of the reasons you are seeing the virus spread in places like Florida or Texas--because we don't have the infrastructure in place. The Trump administration refused to build it, and now we are refusing to help States build it. It has been 45 days since the House passed their legislation helping States to keep people alive. I was on this floor as my Republican colleagues were literally jumping from their seats when Senate Democrats were insisting that we take an extra day or two to pass the CARES Act, to get it right--jumping out of their seats with a sense of urgency. The virus is back on the march again. The economy is in worse shape today than it was in March. It has been 45 days since the House sent us legislation to keep people alive, and we have done nothing. My colleagues, I want to leave you with just one picture--really two pictures side by side for my State. Just ask yourself after thinking about this, visualizing this, if this is really the world you want to choose to live in through your inaction. We have our share of billionaires in Connecticut. They are important to us. They pay a decent amount of taxes. They contribute philanthropically. But they have done very well over the course of the pandemic. A survey just came out that showed that over half of those who count themselves as billionaires in Connecticut had dramatically increased their net worth since this pandemic began. In fact, of all the billionaires in Connecticut, they had increased their total wealth by about $2 billion--$2 billion. That is driven in part by a stock market that has priced in all of the Trump administration's support for corporations. It is because of a stock market that has also priced in the mass extinction of lots of small businesses that will accrue to the benefit of those corporations. I want you to think about the richest Americans over the course of the last several months having seen their nest egg grow--grow. They can afford more. They can pass down more wealth to their children, even with 20 percent of Americans unemployed. Put that next to this visual. Jen Sherman lives in my State and has a 14-year-old named Gavin. He is a special education student with a host of learning challenges. He hasn't been in school since March. He needs school because at school are his professionals--his counselors, his therapists. School is where his routine is. Jen says: My kid is falling apart in front of my eyes. It is making me physically ill watching him be out of school for going on for 4 months. He is just deteriorating on me. His mental health is concerning. It is the unknown. He has so many questions we can't answer. Jen is getting ready to send Gavin, who is already broken down, back to school. As she is readying to send him back to school, school districts across the State of Connecticut are talking about laying off the very professionals who will help Gavin get back to that routine. Surveys suggest that if we don't pass another emergency response package for States, 10 percent of teachers could be laid off. You know who is going to come first. It is going to be those paraprofessionals. It will be those counselors who build support services around the most vulnerable kids. As corporations and billionaires have done better and better, kids like Gavin--low-income families across this country, the masses of the unemployed--are suffering and will not be able to get back to normal unless we beat this virus. We can't beat it if we don't help States and municipalities with the work that needs to be done. It has been some 45 days since we watched the House pass legislation that could save lives and allow us to stand up a true national effort to beat this virus once and for all. I would plead to my colleagues to not go home for a 2-week vacation without passing legislation to help us stand up a State and local response to COVID-19. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I concur in the remarks of my friend from Michigan. A lot of our constituents have long thought that there has just been an enormous gulf between the conversations that we have in the U.S. Senate and the conversations that are going on at people's kitchen tables, that are going on between friends and neighbors at the supermarket. They think that what we worry about here is guided by lobbyists and K Street and political action committees and that it really doesn't have much to do with what they care about. I don't know that their perception of that gulf has been any bigger than it is right now because the message that Senator McConnell and the Senate Republicans are sending is that there is no urgency, that there is no need for the Senate to act, that we have done everything that needs to be done for the time being when it comes to the depression levels of unemployment in this country, the lines that go on for blocks for families who can't afford food to pick up groceries and the schools that are scrambling to figure out how the heck they are going to reopen with the revenues for their municipalities and counties and States that are cratering through the floor. So it just tears people's hair out right now to know that there is a piece of legislation that has been passed in the House of Representatives that will help millions of families who are in meltdown crisis right now as they have lost their jobs, as they, maybe, have sick loved ones, and as they don't know when life will get back to normal, but the Senate is doing nothing. I understand my Senate Republican friends wouldn't have written the bill that passed in the House. It is understandable in that there is a different party in control of the Senate than is in control of the House of Representatives. Of course, there is going to be a difference in priorities. Yet the decision to not even take up the House bill--to not try to amend it, to not try to draft a version of our own to fill these enormous gaps that families are feeling right now--is maddening to the people whom I represent back home who feel that sense of urgency that is not shared by the folks who haven't lost their salaries or their healthcare benefits in the U.S. Senate. Earlier today, we tried to take a small step forward to better protect our constituents and try to bring this pandemic to an end. Senator Durbin offered a pretty simple resolution that would have just expressed the sense of the Senate that we should join with nations around the world to try to develop a vaccine for COVID. I don't agree with the President. I don't think that it is all hopeless until we find a vaccine. I think that we can take steps in our communities through State leaders to try to reopen our economy even before we have a vaccine. Obviously, that is the goal for which we all strive, and we are much better off if we work with other countries to develop that vaccine. As we speak, there are very promising discoveries that are being made in other countries. Many of the countries are allies of the United States. There is, in fact, an international effort underway to help pay for that vaccine development. Probably the most prominent of those efforts is something called CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. Curiously, though, all of our friends--all of our allies-- and some of our adversaries are members of that coalition, but the United States is not. So, if this coalition were to develop a vaccine and if it were to get there before the United States, then we wouldn't have a seat at the table to be able to decide where that vaccine goes. It is a question as to whether we would be able to get it to the United States if we are not sitting at that table. Why not hedge our bets? I hope the dollars that we have proposed here in the U.S. Senate lead to the discovery of a vaccine's happening here, but if it doesn't, why would we not also want to be part of a coalition like CEPI so that, if it were to discover the vaccine first, we would get the benefit of it or, at the very least, we would get a say in where it would go. That is all the resolution said. Yet we couldn't get it passed. This resolution was especially important because there is something extraordinary happening right now. It is not as if the Trump administration has decided that it is not going to go forward with membership in CEPI because it is going to lead a different international coalition. No. In fact, the Trump administration is taking a giant step back from the world and from international organizations just at the moment when it is the most necessary for us to be cooperating with the rest of the world in finding a vaccine or in stamping out this virus. Remember, how we stopped Ebola from becoming a crisis in the United States is by being present in Africa to make sure that it didn't reach our shores. The Obama administration understood that travel bans and walls couldn't stop a virus from entering one's country, so you have to stamp it out everywhere in order to be protected here. So, just at the moment we need to be more engaged with the world, the Trump administration is withdrawing us from it. Witness the President's unprecedented attacks on the WHO. Now, there is a stipulation. The WHO is not unlike any other major, multinational, international organization. It has flaws, and it has inefficiencies, but there is no way you can stand up an international coalition to manage the coronavirus or prevent the next pandemic without the World Health Organization. Color me skeptical that the President is sincerely interested in reforming the WHO. It seems as if it has been a fairly recent interest of the White House. One of the ways I can tell that is that we have a seat on the governing board of the WHO. If we have legitimate grievances over how the WHO is run--and I am amongst those who has a laundry list of reforms I would like to see at the WHO--then the proper way to express those grievances would be through our seat on the board of the WHO. But do you know what? It has been vacant for 3 years. The Trump administration hasn't put anybody on the board. It nominated somebody, but then Senator McConnell didn't bring him up for a vote. Then his name had to be withdrawn, and it took another 10 months for the Senate to finally put somebody on it in the middle of this crisis. So we have been absent from the WHO for 3 years. Now the Trump administration is leveling some pretty serious criticisms at that organization. Many of them are crystallized in a letter that the President released to the world last night. What is extraordinary about this letter is that it is almost as if the President took a letter that detailed his administration's failings with respect to how it addressed the early moments of coronavirus and just substituted in the WHO for the Trump administration, because in this letter to the WHO, it reads: ``The World Health Organization has repeatedly made claims about the coronavirus that were either grossly inaccurate or misleading.'' Here is President Trump on January 22: Question: Are there worries about a pandemic at this point? No, not at all. . . . We have it totally under control. It's one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It's going to be just fine. If you want to talk about the leading world figure making misstatements about the seriousness of the coronavirus, it is President Donald Trump, especially in January and February, when we could have been getting a head start. Further in this letter, it reads: ``[T]he World Health Organization has been curiously insistent on praising China for its alleged `transparency.' '' Here is President Donald J. Trump on January 24. This isn't in answer to a question. This is just an unsolicited remark about China on his Twitter account. He writes: China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi! There was no more enthusiastic cheerleader for China and its response to the coronavirus in January, February, and March than our own President. If President Trump wants to level criticisms at the WHO for being too soft on China, he has to look himself in the mirror and understand that it frankly would have been hard for the WHO to stand up and contradict its most important donor and patron, the United States of America. On February 7, the President was given this question: Are you concerned that China is covering up the full extent of coronavirus? President Trump's answer: No. China is working very hard. . . . They're working really hard, and I think they are doing a very professional job. On February 18: Mr. President, are you still satisfied with how President Xi is handling the coronavirus? Answer: I think President Xi is working very hard. Question: Some people don't seem to trust the data coming from China. Are you worried about that? Trump: Look, I know this: President Xi loves the people of China. He loves his country, and he's doing a very good job. February 26, the question is: How can you legitimately trust President Xi and the Chinese? Well, I can tell you this: I speak to him; I had a talk with him recently. And he is working so hard on this problem. . . . And they're tough and very smart. There is no one who was defending China more vociferously in January and February than President Trump. It came on the heels of his decision to pull two-thirds of the CDC scientists out of that country, to shutter a program that was tracking viruses around the world, including China, and now the President has compounded that error by pulling the United States out of the WHO, an imperfect but absolutely necessary body that can be the only natural source of convening for a fight to stop coronavirus over the course of this summer and this fall and to prevent the next pandemic. This is a moment when we should be putting a foot forward into the world and leading--and leading. There is no wall; there is no travel restriction that can stop this virus. Why do we know that? Because the President crowed about his travel restriction on China, and we found out that 400,000 people got here from countries subject to the ban before and after it was put into effect. He sends out pictures on a regular basis of a wall going up with Mexico. That didn't stop this virus from getting here. We need to be present on the world stage right now. Finally, if the President's complaint is that China and the WHO are too close, then by withdrawing from the WHO, we are effectively exacerbating the problem that the President identifies as one that needs to be solved. Why? Because yesterday President Xi accepted an invitation to speak before the WHO--an invitation that President Trump turned down--and he pledged to lead the world's response to the humanitarian suffering caused by coronavirus. Now, color me skeptical about China's intentions, but the fact is, they were on that world stage putting $2 billion into that effort yesterday, and we were nowhere to be found. The greatest beneficiary that comes from the United States' stepping back at this moment and walking away from the WHO is the Chinese Government. I believe that our security will be defined by our ability to contest efforts by China to grow its power around the world. We are gifting them--gifting them--an advancement of their power and influence through our refusal to take part in WHO, our refusal to lead the effort to reform it, and our refusal as called upon in this resolution that was objected to earlier today offered by Senator Durbin to be part of the global effort to try to find a vaccine. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I yield to the Senator from Oklahoma for a unanimous consent request.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I think all of us are in awe on a daily basis of those who we have a responsibility to serve. The people of Colorado, the people of Texas, and the people of Connecticut are doing just absolutely extraordinary things, and I hope that over the next several weeks we get to hear more of those stories. At the end of last week, I got a chance, with my Governor, to go down to a healthcare facility in Bridgeport, CT. It is a healthcare facility that has been designated to serve only COVID-19-positive patients. The nurses and staff came outside into the parking lot area to have a socially distanced, masked conversation with us. While they have struggles, and while they need help, they have a sense of mission about them that is impressive. They are working double shifts. They barely get to see their kids. They know that their lives are in danger every time they go into a facility where there are only patients who have tested positive for COVID, and yet they know they are doing something with their life today that they will be able to tell their kids and grandkids about. They are making a difference. I think about those individuals who aren't a first responder, who aren't a healthcare worker but have found a way to do heroic things just in their neighborhoods. Luciana Vera was already making a difference. She was a bilingual teacher in the Stamford, CT, public school system, but she heard about a crisis that one of her students was having. One of her student's mother had contracted the virus, had gone into a coma, but was pregnant and delivered a child while she was in a medically induced coma. Her husband also had the virus, as did one of her children. So do you know what Luciana did? Do you know what this teacher did? She took the baby into her home. While she taught her students online during the day, she warmed up bottles and fed that baby at night. Jerry Sicardi is 100 years old. He lives in Stratford, CT. Even at 100 years old, he decided to get together with his daughter Judy and start making masks. We all have these stories from our States, just folks who started sewing masks and giving them out to people who needed them. Jerry gave them out to his neighbors. He sent some to the Bridgeport Correctional Center. He gave them to former students. Then, when folks learned that Jerry was pretty good at making masks, they would call, and he would make them on order. These are the stories that could, frankly, fill up the whole day from each one of our States. While my constituents in Connecticut, who are as generous as that, would have undertaken those actions regardless of the effectiveness of the response from their government, their actions are all the more important, given the failures of their Federal Government to do the right thing by them. I want to spend a few minutes today talking about the Trump administration's response to the crisis that we are facing. If we are going to be here in Washington, I think it is important for us to talk about what is missing. There has been a lot of ink spent already criticizing the Trump administration's response to the crisis--that the strategy was wrong, the focus was in the wrong place, or that the level of activity wasn't high enough. But I really think that this is the wrong paradigm. It is the wrong lens through which to have this discussion because the problem really isn't that President Trump's response to coronavirus has been ineffective. It is that he hasn't responded at all. For all intents and purposes, there has been no response to coronavirus from this administration. There have been press conferences. There is a social media presence, but they aren't running a national response. From the beginning, the response has been left to States, to cities, to counties, to hospitals, to school districts, to nursing homes, to shelters, to food banks, to charitable organizations--really, to every public-facing entity that isn't the administration. We shouldn't lose sight of how remarkable that is--that in the face of the most serious national crisis since 2001, perhaps since Vietnam or World War II, the administration has effectively chosen to stand down and let others lead. I know that sounds like hyperbole because there is a task force, right? There are press conferences on TV every day. But hear me out. At the beginning, the President didn't do nothing. He fanned the flames. He called coronavirus in the early days a ``hoax'' perpetuated by his political opponents. He telegraphed to the country that this wasn't something we needed to be prepared for because it was just going to go away, despite all the experts telling him differently. On 12 different occasions, he praised the Chinese response and said that President Xi was doing an excellent job responding to the crisis. He praised, specifically, their transparency. At a moment when the international community was trying to get into China to find out what they knew so that we could start developing vaccines and treatments, the chief apologist in those early days for the Chinese response was our own President. Arguably, the most significant action that the Trump administration undertook--really, the only action that the President mentions to this day, when pressed for tangible things that he has done--was the set of travel restrictions. But public health experts told the President that the restrictions wouldn't work, especially since they were filled with loopholes. We now know that 400,000 people ended up getting into the United States from the countries that were subject to the restrictions list. The travel ban was feckless. It was a failure. And after that, the administration effectively gave up. They gave up. What could they have done? As the travel ban started to prove ineffective at stopping the virus and cases started to mount, what could they have done? Well, they could have decided to lead a national effort to make sure we have the supplies necessary to fight the virus. Members of Congress told the administration early on that we needed to appropriate dollars to make sure that we had things like masks and gowns and ventilators. They could have created a national effort to ramp up domestic production of personal protective equipment. They didn't do that. The administration could have come up with a national testing plan. They could have done an early assessment of how many tests were going to be needed and taken control of the supply chain necessary to make those diagnostic machines and the cartridges that go inside them. They didn't do that. They could have begun the work of building a national public health workforce. Every expert told the administration that it wasn't just the machines and the equipment, that we were going to need public health workers to do the testing, to then trace the spread of the disease, and to help support quarantines. They could have started to put together a plan to build that workforce at a national level or at least a plan to help States build that workforce. But they didn't do that. They could have, early on, worked with States to create uniformed standards for school and business closings. This didn't have to be left to States and municipalities and individual superintendents. The administration could have chosen to lead on the question of how and when we chose to close our economy and our school systems down, but they didn't do that. They could have joined with other countries to jointly produce a vaccine. In fact, there was an entity set up at the beginning of the Trump administration specifically for that purpose, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. They could have made an investment in that international organization after having refused to join early on during the President's term, but they didn't do that. They could have increased aid for developing nations or refugee camps. They could have gone on the international offensive, like President Obama did during the Ebola epidemic, and made sure that we were helping every country beat the virus because, as we know, due to the failure of the travel restrictions, if you don't stop it everywhere, you really are not stopping it anywhere, but they didn't do that. They could have made sure that everybody in this country had insurance. The Trump administration could have stopped pushing junk plans. They could have, at least temporarily, put on hold the lawsuit to try to end the Affordable Care Act and the 20 million who are insured through it, but they didn't do that. They could have worked to create a national commitment to make sure that every student has the ability to distance learn and has internet access, or they could have proposed a plan to ramp up special education funding to make sure they are protecting kids with disabilities during this crisis. They didn't do that. Finally, they could have proposed any of the various programs that Congress developed and passed: the PPP program, the State stabilization fund, the hospital relief fund, the national testing program fund. None of these were initiatives from President Trump. Early on, as negotiations were beginning on these relief packages, the President's only idea was a payroll tax cut. Frankly, it is still the President's only idea. The President didn't need to leave all of the legislative leadership to Congress. He and his team could have laid out detailed new programs to combat the virus or to save the economy and pressed Congress to pass them, but they didn't even do that. I am not saying there aren't meetings. I am not saying there aren't press conferences. But my State, one of the hardest hit in the Nation, has had to effectively fend for itself. When I talk to State leaders, or hospital executives, or food pantry directors, none of them talk to me about all of the help they are getting from the Trump administration. They talk about the programs that Congress has passed, but they don't talk about any meaningful, impactful responses to this crisis run by the Trump administration. Do you know why? Because they don't exist, and even when the Trump administration tries to do something meaningful, they screw it up. Take, for instance, the much-heralded plan to reopen America. Now, that was a good idea, a serious set of guidelines for States to use to judge when the right time is to reopen. I may have quibbles with certain elements of that plan, but I thought they were generally on the right track, giving States some specific guidelines so that we can have some consistency across the country as to when States decide to reopen schools and businesses. The administration stuck with that plan for about a week, and now President Trump is calling on States to reopen, regardless of whether any of the benchmarks have been met in his own plan. Now he is talking about healthcare workers and cafeteria workers as warriors, apparently preparing them for a summer during which his experts tell him there will be 3,000 coronavirus deaths a day because of these early reopenings. If that is true, the President's so-called coronavirus warriors would be dying at a daily total 10 times that of the warriors who fought in World War II. Not all of this was avoidable. China, where the virus started, bears serious responsibility for the global spread, but the epidemic did not have to become the crisis of the magnitude we have witnessed today. A normal President would have been able to take steps early on and throughout that could have controlled the spread. Our President effectively chose to stand aside and leave 50 States and thousands of cities and hospitals to manage the response instead. They were left largely helpless, without significant Federal support, competing against each other for scarce resources, and now our country is in desperate straits. So, once again, it is up to Congress to lead I agree with my friend from Colorado that there has been remarkable bipartisan support in this body in order to fill the vacuum that has been created by the refusal of our President to lead, and so we will have to do it again. Let me leave my colleagues with a few suggestions as to the path that we should take going forward to build upon those suggestions proffered by my colleague from Colorado. First and foremost, we have to admit what is true. The States and the cities are in charge of the response. The Trump administration is not. I have heard my colleagues talk about aid to States or municipalities that are fighting the virus as a bailout. That is nonsense. It is more accurate to talk about what the States and cities are doing as a bailout of the Federal Government. When the Trump administration refused to run a national response, it was the States, like mine, and cities, like those in my State, that stepped up to lead the response. All we are asking is that we share in the cost of the States' and cities' efforts to save lives. Second, our schools are going to be overwhelmed with need when they reopen. I am one of the few parents of school-aged children, children who go to public school. My kids are lucky enough that they don't have special learning needs, and they have two parents who are able to telework from home and support their distance learning. But there are millions of kids who have learning disabilities, who have needs totally unmet during this time who are going to show back up at school way behind and in crisis. We need to appropriate money right now, especially for special education, so that school districts across the country can start to do planning now, this spring and this summer, so that there are supports around those kids when they show back up. Every kid is going to have to catch up. But especially for kids with serious learning disabilities, they are going to need extra help. And States that are going to have expended all of the money available to them to fight the virus and that have cratering revenues because of the shutdown of the economy are not going to be able to fund those special education needs themselves. It is going to have to be us. It is going to have to be us. So why wait until the fall? Let's make a downpayment on that assistance for kids with disabilities and do it now. Food banks in Connecticut are running dry. They are running dry. We need more support in the next bill for nutrition assistance. We have to start thinking creatively about how to make sure that everybody has access to food. Right now, if you are on a SNAP benefit, you have to go to a grocery store. Well, those aren't safe places for everybody on SNAP benefits. Some of the corner bodegas have closed down. So the only place that might be open is a long way away. So restaurants can be a lifeline right now. Traditionally, we don't allow you to use your SNAP benefits in restaurants, but I think we should temporarily allow for that in the next package we pass. And guess what. That would be a win for people who are on assistance who need more food options. It would also be a win for restaurants that are looking for customers. Fourth, we have to build that public health workforce. Again, States will not be able to afford it themselves. Every medical expert tells us that it is not just testing. It is tracing the contacts that that individual had. It is quarantining those they had contact with. And that can't be done just with an act. There have to be workers who help do that tracing, who help support the quarantine. We have to build that workforce. Again, there is just no conceivable way that States can pay that by themselves. Then, lastly, we need to get back into the game internationally. It was a fallacy from the beginning to think that we can just shut our borders and protect ourselves. That is not how viruses work. In an interconnected economy today, there is no practical way to completely shut down your borders from individuals or products that move across international boundaries. We have offers right now to engage with our partners internationally on ways that could end up helping to save lives in the United States. I mentioned the Trump administration's refusal to join CEPI, which is the international body working on a vaccine. Why? Why is Europe and Canada and Australia and Japan and Saudi Arabia and India all working jointly on a vaccine, and we are on the outside? It doesn't mean that we would have to stop doing our own congressionally funded work to develop a vaccine, but why not also join the international effort so that we are not on the outside if they develop that vaccine? An easy thing we can do in this next bill is make sure we are both working on a vaccine domestically but also working internationally. When this crisis is over and life has returned to relative normal, there will be a grave, serious accounting of how badly the Trump administration failed this Nation that it was sworn to protect. I am grateful for my colleagues stepping up time and again in a bipartisan way to try to fill the gap created by the failure to lead by the executive branch. Hopefully, when we do that accounting, it will allow us to learn lessons. For now, this Congress has to soldier on and do our best to muster a Federal response that, if not for our actions, would be practically nonexistent. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, you can't keep on saying it is a bipartisan bill when it clearly is not. If it were a bipartisan bill, you wouldn't have this level of angst from the Democrats who were shut out of the process. Let's be clear about what we are talking about here. We don't think your bill works. We don't think the bill that has been drafted by the majority party is going to fix the problem. This is a policy disagreement, and I have an obligation as a representative of my State to stand up and say when I don't think a $2 trillion bill is going to fix the problem. It may make a lot of people rich, but it doesn't have the resources in it today to take care of the most vulnerable in this country, and it is not going to do the primary job at hand, which is to stop the virus. Remember, there is no amount of economic stimulus we can pass--$1 trillion, $2 trillion, $3 trillion--that will solve this problem if we don't get serious about the public health crisis that exists today. When you shortchange States, when you don't provide enough money to help my State and my municipalities manage testing, move congregate populations apart from each other, and try to manage the crisis, then you aren't serious about stopping the virus. Yes, one of the outstanding issues in this bill is that we think we need more funding for the States and municipalities that are on the frontlines of fighting the virus. Yes, we don't think this bill will work--will work--at job No. 1, which is stopping the public health crisis, unless we provide ample funding. And, yes, we are worried about the lack of conditionality on funding to big businesses, to Wall Street. Yes, we are worried about the fact that this is going to make rich people much richer and, at the same time, not actually stop the public health crisis. These are policy differences. Instead of coming down here and having showboat after showboat, we should be sitting together trying to resolve differences that, frankly, I don't think are so large that they can't be solved within the next several hours. I just hope we understand that we are down here very frustrated because we worry that we are about to vote on a bill that is not going to solve the problem. That is a policy disagreement but a policy disagreement that can be resolved.

Mr. MURPHY. Objection.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, let me just make clear what happened over the course of the last couple of days, because I heard many of my colleagues come down to the floor today and claim that this is a bipartisan bill that is on the floor of the U.S. Senate today, which would strike a lot of Americans as curious because the votes are not bipartisan, so how could that be? How could it be a bipartisan process, as has been claimed by my Republican colleagues, yet there is not bipartisan agreement? Well, let's start from the beginning. Instead of deciding to write this legislation from the beginning, with Republicans and Democrats in the room, the leader decided to write the bill initially, bringing together a consensus of Republican Senators and then bringing Democrats to the table. And there was a period of time--for about 24 hours--in which Democrats were in the room, and we were making progress, and that was a great 24 hours. And then, on Saturday night, all of a sudden, Democrats were let out of the room. And on Sunday morning, lobbyists on K Street sent a draft of legislation to chiefs of staff here that Democrats had no part in writing. So you can't call it a bipartisan piece of legislation if Democrats weren't involved in the beginning, and then they were let out of the room at the end. We appreciate having some input in the middle, but we clearly ended up with a product that doesn't have bipartisan buy-in, and much of that is because of the process that led us here. The decision could have been made to include both parties at the table from the very beginning because, guess what. We do have differences of opinion. We do have different ways of looking at this crisis. And our objections, our policy objections--I mean, spare me the righteous indignation about Democrats trying to settle outside political scores in the context of this legislation. Let me tell you what I care about. What I care about is making sure that if we are going to spend $2 trillion, we spend it wisely. And if you spend $2 trillion, and you don't stop the virus, then you haven't done anything meaningful in the long run because this is, first, a public health crisis that is causing an economic crisis. So, yes, one of the things that is an open issue in negotiations right now is whether we are putting in enough money for healthcare providers, nursing homes, hospitals, States, and municipalities to give them the resources to stop this virus in its tracks. We don't believe that this bill, today, has enough resources in it for States, municipalities, hospitals, nursing homes, and healthcare providers to stop the virus. We don't think that this Congress is serious enough about the crisis in the medical supply chain today, in which our States and our hospitals and our healthcare providers are engaged in a ``Lord of the Flies'' environment, where they are trying to bid against each other for scarce medical supplies. We think this bill shortchanges the people who are actually going to stop this virus in its tracks. So, yes, we don't think it is wise to rush to spend $2 trillion if the bill doesn't stop the public health epidemic. That is a policy disagreement we have. It is a policy disagreement we have. And had Democrats been in the room with Republicans at the beginning, middle, and end, we wouldn't be here today. As many Republicans who want can come down to the floor and say that it is one party who is responsible for this impasse, but had Democrats not been ushered out of the negotiations on Saturday night, had Democrats been there from the beginning, we likely wouldn't be here. Second, yes, we do have policy disagreements over how we spend the enormous amount of money that is going to end up in the hands of corporations. And for those of us who were here in 2008, for those of us who voted for that bailout bill, we have regrets and reservations about how that went down because much of that money ended up in the pockets of CEOs and shareholders. Now, I get it. We want to get the money out fast, and you are not going to be able to account for every single dollar, but what we are talking about here, which is applying very minimal conditions for job retention to literally hundreds of billions of dollars of my taxpayer money, is not wise policy. If we don't have assurances that the billions of dollars that we are going to hand to big companies is used to preserve jobs, then I am going to tell you that my constituents don't want to spend that money unless they know that it is going to hold on to jobs, and we have policy disagreements about that right now. I take my Republican friends at their word that they believe that the restrictions in the bill are good enough. We don't think they are. We don't think they are. And so we think we should work together throughout the day to get this right, to make sure that every dollar is there that is necessary to stop this virus, to stop looking at it as an economic crisis first and a public health crisis second, and that we should make sure that there are real requirements on this $2 trillion to make sure that it doesn't end up in the hands of people who don't need it; that it ends up protecting jobs--not just in the hope of protecting jobs but the actual result is protecting jobs. These are policy disagreements we have, but they are disagreements that we are still fighting over today because of the process--because of the process. So you are angry, and we are angry. We are angry for being shut out at the beginning, and we are angry for being shut out at the end. Our Republican colleagues knew they couldn't pass anything without 60 votes. They knew, as they were developing this legislation, that they needed to get bipartisan buy-in. And yet there was a limited opportunity for us to have input here, and now we are engaged in a series of votes that are forgone conclusions until we get on the same page. And we can because, from what I understand--and I admit, I am not one of the negotiators in the room, but from what I understand, these are not unbridgeable differences. These are not unbridgeable differences. We can figure out a way to put tighter controls on the funding that is going to companies and corporations. Let's just make sure that if we are going to spend $2 trillion, we spend it right and make sure we aren't shortchanging our States and our hospitals. There are provisions in the first draft of this bill that would limit which kind of providers get Medicaid dollars and which will not. Our belief is that that language actually leaves a whole bunch of healthcare providers out in the cold. Now, some have said that was intentional. That was because Republicans didn't want Medicaid dollars to go to abortion providers. That sounds like politics to me, but that is just something I read in the paper. I don't know that that is true. What I do know is that, whether or not that decision was about politics--the politics of reproductive healthcare--it still is just not good policy to leave a whole bunch of healthcare providers outside when it comes to the additional Medicaid money that is absolutely necessary to make sure we have what it takes to stand up defenses against this virus. That is a policy difference. I could sit here making accusations that Republicans are bringing outside political issues into this process, like Senator Barrasso made accusations about Democrats, but aside from that question, it just still is not good policy to limit the number of healthcare providers who can get this additional Medicaid money when everybody is in this together, when we know that every single healthcare institution, by the end of this week, is going to be dealing with patients who have positive tests for COVID-19. These are policy differences but policy differences that didn't have to be outstanding today had the process, run by the majority party, been different and been more inclusive. I agree that back home my constituents do not care about who takes credit for this and who drafts it. They want a bill done. They want assurances that money is on the way. I think we have agreement on big pieces of this. I may not love the small business provision of this bill. I put a different concept on the table that I think is better than the one my Democratic and Republican colleagues have come up with. But do you know what? On that front, I will not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I think we have made tremendous progress on employment compensation insurance. There are big titles of this bill that I think are in good places. We should be working out the details of those outstanding issues right now rather than spending all of our time on the floor casting broadsides against each other. I understand my Republican colleagues are complimenting themselves on how many of them are down here on the floor blaming Democrats. You are right. There are not as many Democrats here levying the same charges against Republicans, but it would be better if we were all spending time trying to work out these final differences because we can get there. We can get there. I think we can get there by the end of the day if Republicans are committed to making sure that we attack the virus first, that we don't shortchange the public health response, and that we make sure our taxpayers don't end up subsidizing the profits and pocketbooks of people who don't need any more help from this government. Thank you.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, let me associate myself with the remarks of the Senator from Delaware and others who spoke before him. We are here. We are all in town. We came back for an expected vote tonight that did not occur. There is no excuse for us not to be voting at this moment on an assistance package that is going to be dispositive on some of the toughest decisions that many American families will make over the course of this year or next. Let me drill down on what those decisions are. Right now, there are parents in my State of Connecticut who have to go to work tomorrow but have a child who is home from school, and they have to make a decision as to whether they are going to forgo tomorrow's paycheck and stay home from work, possibly face termination or discipline, or leave their child at home alone or in an unsafe environment. There are thousands and thousands of families in my State who cannot afford to miss a paycheck--a paycheck--that is the difference between being able to put food on the table or not, whether or not their kids have diapers, whether the lights stay on. That is the decision many families are making tomorrow in Connecticut. Here is another decision that many individuals are making in my State: Tonight there are a lot of moms and dads who have a cough, who are starting to feel a little fever coming on, but they have work tomorrow, and they have a paycheck they need for their family, and they don't have paid sick leave as part of their compensation package. That is not part of their contractual deal with their employer. So they are making that decision. Do I forgo a paycheck? Do I risk getting fired or disciplined, or do I go to work even though I am not feeling well, even though I have symptoms that I know are problematic? They are facing those decisions tonight because we weren't here this weekend, because a bill passed the House that had in it an answer for many of those families--not all of those families--had guaranteed paid sick leave for thousands and thousands of workers all across this country who were waiting for that assurance that if they stayed home with their child who is home from school or they decided to stay home with the beginnings of symptoms that look like COVID-19, they would be protected financially. That bill was ready for action here in the Senate, and had we passed it on Saturday or Sunday, there would have been thousands of parents, thousands of workers, who would have stayed home today. But they didn't. They didn't. I know this to be true. I know this to be true--that there were many, many workers who went to work today even though they might not have been feeling well, didn't stay home with their kids because they didn't feel they could go without that paycheck. So this is about real-life, minute-by-minute decisions that are being made by families in this country. I know sometimes it doesn't feel that important if we wait a day. I know sometimes it feels like a bummer if we have to miss out on a weekend. But not this weekend. Not today. These decisions that families are making are fundamentally different if we do it a day ahead of time. The epidemic has less of a chance at winning if we pass this legislation tonight rather than tomorrow or Wednesday or Thursday. And I worry about that because I have listened to some of my Republican colleagues suggest over the last 24 hours that we are not going to pass this bill, that we are going to change the bill, that we are going to amend it and we are going to send it back to the House. This bill is ready. It has bipartisan support. The President announced on Friday night that he was for it. No reason to wait in order to give our constituents some assurances, in order to make sure they are making the right decisions for their family and for their health and for all of our health rather than decisions necessary in order to guarantee that next paycheck comes, which is essential-- essential--for their family's financial health. Lastly, I just don't want to let the President of the United States off the hook here. I watched yet another one of these press conferences yesterday in which he once again sort of glossed over the gravity of the moment, in which he hinted that young people didn't have as much to worry about as older people, in which he once again savaged the press, attacking them right at the moment when Americans are relying on the media to give them information that is going to keep them safe. I talked to several of my hospital leaders today, and they talked about the fact that not only do they need personal protective equipment--they are running out--not only do they need more ventilators, but some of my hospitals don't even have the swabs necessary to do the tests. That is not an issue today because they can't get the tests processed, but once we get the testing capacity ramped up, they are not sure they will have the swabs necessary to do the tests. It is just inexcusable that we got caught this unready. It is inexcusable that many of us were sitting in a meeting with the President's representatives in early February, begging for a supplemental bill to be sent to the Senate and House then so that we would be ready when the disease ramped up and were told by the administration that they didn't need it, that they had enough resources. It is unacceptable that to this day, this President doesn't understand the urgency of this crisis. This is a crisis of a pandemic sweeping the country, but it is also a crisis of leadership. It is also a crisis of leadership. And at the very least, we need to keep the heat on this President to be accurate in his portrayal of the scope and the danger of this national public health emergency, and on a daily basis, he is failing even to just be honest with the American people. I really hope that we get this done tomorrow. It doesn't look like we are coming in tonight. For my constituents in Connecticut, they can't wait another 24 hours, they can't wait another 48 hours to know whether they are going to have at least some modicum of protection if they choose to do the right thing by their family, do the right thing by their health. We need to provide them that assurance, and we need to do it immediately.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I rise in support of S.J.Res. 56, a resolution of congressional disapproval for the Department of Education's, Borrower Defense Institutional Accountability rule. It is inconceivable to me that the Federal Department of Education would choose to protect the profits of predatory corporations instead of the students they ripped off, but sadly, that is exactly what Secretary DeVos's borrower defense regulation does. It is now up to Congress to step in and reverse the harm that her Department is seeking to do. Four years ago, the Obama administration took action when it became clear that a number of for profit colleges were defrauding students, leaving them on the hook for massive loans without an education or a job. The borrower defense rule established under President Obama made sure that students who had been hurt by these schools could access debt relief and get a chance at restarting their education. Unfortunately, Secretary DeVos chose to gut that regulation, making it nearly impossible for defrauded students to get any kind of debt relief from the loans they took out to attend colleges that were later found to be bad actors. To make matters worse, Secretary DeVos also rescinded existing protections and ended forgiveness pathways that were included in the 2016 borrower defense rule. Secretary DeVos took what was a fair and transparent process and rigged the deck against students. Because of the new barriers to debt relief established by Secretary DeVos's new borrower defense rule, only an estimated 3 percent of loans associated with school misconduct will be discharged. The DeVos rule eliminates the ability for borrowers to file for relief in groups and requires individuals to meet an unreasonably high standard of evidence that the school intended to mislead them. In addition, the rule only gives borrowers 3 years from the time they leave school to file a claim. In a large number of previous cases, it has taken many years to gather evidence of and establish fraud. Finally, the DeVos rule prohibits borrowers from appealing the decision on their claim, even if new evidence of a school's misconduct comes to light. This new rule might be good for corporate profits, but it will have a cruel impact on many vulnerable people who can afford it the least. I hear often from Connecticut residents who have been crippled by massive debt accrued while attending what turned out to be a valueless institution and who desperately need access to debt relief through a borrowers defense claim. I have heard from a number of students in Connecticut who joined a lawsuit in the bankruptcy case of ITT Technical Institute after its closure left 40,000 students in limbo. Students described falsified job placement rates, lack of career connection with industries associated with their degree programs, unqualified teachers, and inaccurate information about their loan terms. Meanwhile, the Department holds those with claims in financial limbo as they wait years for a decision. Natarsha Morales, who attended Briarwood College in Southington, CT, filed a claim on $39,000 in outstanding Federal student loans. Natarsha filed this claim nearly 4 years ago and has yet to receive a decision. During this time, Briarwood College, which later became Lincoln College, closed permanently after a history of defrauding students like her. As the Department neither grants nor denies her request, the interest on her loans continues to grow. As a result, Natarsha has struggled to plan for her financial future. She has been unable to buy a home and unable to enroll in another educational program. These students were just trying to do the right thing; they made sacrifices to try to get an education, better themselves, and get on a path to a better-paying career. Tragically, we now know that the degrees these students obtained--or sought to obtain--were worthless, and they were taken advantage of by predatory institutions that cared only about taking as much money as possible. The least we can do for these students is to give them a chance at loan forgiveness. I urge my colleagues to vote in favor of S.J.Res. 56 and repeal the DeVos Borrower Defense Institutional Accountability rule that turns its back on borrowers and reduces the culpability of risky institutions.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am coming to the floor today as we have just passed the 1-year mark since H.R. 8, the Bipartisan Background Checks Act, passed the House of Representatives. This is a piece of legislation supported by 90 percent of the American public. It is hard for anything to enjoy 90 percent support in this country these days. The data shows us that this is a piece of legislation that, if enacted, would save lives. We have begged and pleaded for this piece of legislation to come before the Senate. I understand that there may not be 60 votes in the Senate to pass the exact piece of legislation supported by the House, but we could engage in a process of amendment, a process of compromise, and that could end up saving lives and getting a piece of legislation passed that is supported, as I mentioned, by 9 out of 10 Americans. I have some remarks after what I expect will be an objection to my motion from the majority party. I will ask unanimous consent of my colleagues that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 29, H.R. 8, the Bipartisan Background Checks Act; I further ask that the bill be considered read a third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. MURPHY. I am sorry to hear the objection. It is obviously not surprising. We have been waiting for a year for this body to act on the issue of gun violence. And though there are a range of measures that may actually be controversial, this is not one of them. This is not one of them. It is really hard to find folks in America who object to the idea that somebody should have to prove that they are not a criminal, that they don't have a history of serious mental illness, before they purchase a firearm. The fact is, the longer we wait, the more people die. There is no piece of legislation that is going to eliminate every single gun death in this country. In my State of Connecticut, when we passed the universal background checks law, we saw an immediate 40-percent reduction in gun homicides. In Missouri, when they repealed their universal background checks law, they saw an immediate 25-percent increase. That is the short-term immediate rate of return--both on the upside and the downside--you get when you take steps to ensure that criminals don't get guns or you take steps to make it easy for criminals to get guns. Senator Blumenthal is on the floor with me as well, and he will make remarks. I have been unable to persuade my colleagues, based on the data, that we should pass background checks--the data being the broad public support for the measure, the data being about the impact on people's lives that this piece of legislation would have. I want to make the case that, just from the simple standpoint of humanity, we should care about listening to the American public and passing legislation that will reduce these numbers. This is heartbreaking. Some 39,000 people a year are dying from gunshot wounds, with 3,011 on average a month and 100 a day. The majority of these are suicides, but the data tells us that by making it harder for people to buy guns who shouldn't have them because of a serious history of mental illness or because of their criminal background, you will have less suicides. Many of these are homicides, and many of these are accidental shootings. All of them are preventable by better policy. Remember, this happens in the United States and nowhere else in the advanced-income world. It is not because we have more mental illness in the United States. There is no evidence of that. It is not because our kids play more video games in the United States. There is no evidence of that. It is not because we spend less money on law enforcement. There is no evidence of that. It is because this country is awash in illegal and dangerous guns. It is because we have made a choice to make it a lot easier for some to find a way to a lethal firearm to commit an act of violence. Every single one of the 100 persons who die every day is attached to families and friends and neighbors. The data suggests that for everybody who is killed in a gun homicide, there are 20 other people who experience some kind of life-altering, diagnosable trauma because of it. I want to tell you a few of these stories today--stories of people who over the last year have been among this statistic--40,000 people who died from gunshot wounds. In March 2019, 1 month after H.R. 8 got to the Senate, Shelby Verderosa was home with her 6-month-old daughter when she was shot and killed in Phoenix, AZ. As a new mom, Shelby ``was doing everything she possibly could to make sure her daughter had the best life,'' said her cousin. One month after H.R. 8 passed the Senate, she was shot and killed when she was home with her 6-month-old daughter. Lamar Sharp was at a picnic in Kansas City in April--2 months after H.R. 8 got here to the Senate--when he heard gunshots. Instead of running away from the gunshots toward safety, he ran to save his friend's 2-year-old grandson, and he was shot three times. He died 5 days before his 32nd birthday, 2 months after H.R. 8 got to the Senate floor. In May, 3 months after the background checks bill got to the Senate, three LGBTQ+ young people were shot in Detroit. Alunte Davis, Timothy Blancher, and Paris Cameron were known for being funny. They were known for being wildly charismatic. Police believe their sexual orientation and gender identity were factors in their murders. A month later, 4 months after H.R. 8 got here to the Senate, Durelle Moxley was killed on Father's Day when a shooting broke out in his neighborhood. Durelle and his wife had three young children. His friends said: He was really proud to be a father. He was pumped and he was really celebrating Father's Day. In July, 5 months after H.R. 8 got to the Senate, 5 months after sitting on Mitch McConnell's desk, awaiting action, Julianna Carr was killed by her brother in a murder-suicide at a housewarming party in Katy, TX. She left behind a husband and two children whom she called her ``greatest loves.'' Jurnee Thompson was 8 years old when she was shot in August, 6 months after the Senate got H.R. 8--6 months of doing nothing on a bill with 90 percent public support. Jurnee was the 14th child to be shot and killed in St. Louis alone last summer. Her dad says losing her was ``one of the biggest fears of my life and now I'm living it as a reality.'' In September, 7 months after H.R. 8 showed up in the Senate and the Senate did nothing with it, Usher Hanns was 17 years old when he was shot and killed. He was a senior at Weaver High School in Connecticut. He was a member of Hartford's Proud Drill, Drum, and Dance Corp. His mom said he was ``a good son. He always made me smile. He's a joyful kid.'' Deirdre Zaccardi was murdered by her husband Joseph in Abington, PA, in October, 8 months after H.R. 8 got to the Senate. He also shot their three children, Alexis, Nathaniel, and Kathryn, before turning the gun on himself. The Abington police chief said their deaths were ``a horrific event no one should ever see.'' Nine months after H.R. 8 got here in November, Gracie Ann Muehlberger was shot by a classmate with a semiautomatic, untraceable ``ghost gun'' in Santa Clarita, CA. Hundreds attended Gracie's memorial service. Her friends described her as an ``independent spirit.'' In December, 10 months after the House passed H.R. 8--10 months of doing nothing with it here in the Senate--Sergeant Chris Brewster was responding to a domestic violence call in Houston. When he got there, he was shot by a suspect fleeing the scene. He was a devoted husband who loved making people laugh. Friends described him as ``wonderfully weird.'' In January, 11 months after H.R. 8 got to the Senate, Gregory Rieves was killed. He had retired after 22 years as a State trooper, a career that he called his dream job. He was killed in Illinois. His friends described him as ``the most gentle, kind-hearted person you could ever know.'' In February of this year, two sisters, Abbaney and Deja Matts, were shot by Abbaney's ex-boyfriend in a dormitory in Commerce, TX. ``I just want people to know they were fun,'' said their mom. Just last week in Milwaukee, almost exactly a year since H.R. 8 came to the Senate, five people were shot on the campus of Molson Coors. People who went to work on a normal Wednesday and whose families will never get to hug them or tell them goodbye or hear their voices again were shot and killed in a workplace shooting. Senator Blumenthal and I are not going to give up. We are not going to give up because of what we have been through in Connecticut, having experienced and lived through the aftermath of the horrific shooting in Sandy Hook, but also because of what we see happening every single day in places we represent--murders that happen in Hartford and Bridgeport and New Haven, murders that happen in rural areas of our State, as well--accidental shootings, homicides, suicides. Nowhere else, other than in the United States, does this epidemic of carnage happen at this rate. It happens because we have made a choice. We have made a choice to let the gun industry run Washington, DC, to give them veto power over gun policy that has helped their bottom line, that has made gun company executives rich. But it has resulted in 40,000 people a year dying--100 a day. I will continue to come to the floor and tell the stories of those who have been lost. I am deeply sorry that when we try to bring up unanimous consent requests to the Senate to have a debate or a vote on H.R. 8, we keep hearing objections. We don't run the Senate. Democrats are not in charge. We don't get to set the agenda. Mitch McConnell, Senator McConnell, does; Republicans who are part of leadership do. All you have to do is bring this bill to the floor. Let's have a debate on an expanded background checks proposal. I get that the version of the bill that passed the House might not have 60 votes here, but why don't we try to find common ground? Why don't we sit down and do what the Senate used to do and find compromise that makes the country a better place? The fact that we aren't even trying to find bipartisan agreement on a background checks proposal is absolutely heartbreaking, not just to me or to Senator Blumenthal; it is heartbreaking to the survivors and the family members of the folks who aren't with us any longer. It is an insult to them that we are not even lifting a finger to try to make this country a safer place. 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. Mr. President, it has been more than a month since President Trump brought the United States to the brink of war with Iran by ordering the killing of Iran's top general, Qasem Soleimani. Now, no one here mourns Soleimani's death. He was a ruthless killer. He has American blood all over his hands. But decisions over whether to attack sovereign nations or whether to send American troops to war are not decisions for the executive branch to make. These are decisions that the Constitution vests only in the U.S. Congress. That is why we need to pass, on a bipartisan basis, the War Powers Resolution that is currently pending before this body. I want to come to the floor today to raise three issues for my colleagues--and I will try to do it briefly--surrounding the President's decision to use force against Iran and what the implications are for us, both as a body and as a nation. First, when we are talking about the topic, I just think it is always important to level set. I think it is important for us to realize how much President Trump has thrown away. This is a President who is running a master class right now on creating crises that didn't exist before he started flailing away in the china shop, and then this President claims we all have to get together behind his efforts to clean up the mess that he and his administration largely created. Let's just remember where we were with Iran when President Trump came into office. When President Trump arrived in the Oval Office, Iran had stopped their quest for nuclear weapons capabilities. They were compliant with an intrusive inspections regime to make sure they didn't cheat on that agreement. Iranian-backed militias had stopped firing rockets at U.S. personnel in Iraq. In fact, those militias were actively working on a U.S.-led project--the eradication of ISIS. President Obama had unified the entire world against Iran. Even Russia and China were working side by side with the United States to constrict Iran's nuclear program. And with the nuclear agreement secured, this global coalition had essentially been teed up for President Trump, to be used to make new progress to pressure Iran on a next set of concessions, on their ballistic missile program and their support for terrorist proxies across the region. But President Trump threw this all away. And now, despite the sanctions that he has imposed on them unilaterally, Iran is more powerful than ever. We went from a construct in which we had the United States, Europe, China, and Russia aligned against Iran to a moment today where, on many issues, it is Iran, the European Union, China, and Russia aligned against the United States. How much ground have we lost? This town tends to view power only through a military prism. So we have kind of lost sight of Iran's provocative actions because, since the strike in Iraq against our troops, we haven't had front-page headlines about what Iran is doing. Let's talk about that strike for a moment, because we need to make it clear that, contrary to the administration's assertions, the Soleimani strike did not deter Iran at all. They levied a barrage of rockets at our forces in Iraq that were designed to kill. Some suggested that night, or the next day, that maybe their attack was calibrated to sustain minimal damage. Now we know that is not the case. In fact, it was calibrated to try to wipe out over 100 American soldiers. They missed. But, of course, now we are finding out that they actually didn't miss. At first, the administration reported no injuries. Then, it was a few. Then, it was dozens. Now the injury report is over 100. Thank God that nobody was killed. But let's be clear. Iran fired rockets that injured over 100 American soldiers, and we didn't respond at all. I am glad we chose a path of military deescalation, but nobody in this administration and none of their allies in Congress can pretend that we ``restored deterrence.'' Second, it is important to note that Iran is retaliating. They are retaliating all over the region. In Iraq they are stronger than ever before. They have a new Prime Minister-designate who is incredibly close to Iran. They managed to get a vote in Parliament--nonbinding, admittedly--to kick all American soldiers out of that country. We are still in the middle of a negotiation to try to keep some American military presence there to fight ISIS, but Iran has used this opportunity to get more and more embedded in the Iraqi infrastructure. And the protests--the anti-Iran protests that were happening in Iraq-- are no longer making headlines because many of those elements are now lined up against the United States instead of against Iran. Remember, Soleimani was working every single day to try to get American troops out of Iraq, and it may be that he gets closer in death to his goal than he did while he was alive. In Yemen, Iran is fighting back. It is hard to see into the relationship between the Houthis and the Iranians, but the Houthis are acting out in provocative ways that are fundamentally different today than they were prior to the death of Soleimani. They are restricting humanitarian aid. They are launching attacks against civilian sites. We don't know that the Houthis are undertaking these actions because of orders from Iran, but it is likely that it is not coincidental that the Houthis' increase in activity in Yemen, further destabilizing a country that is really important to the United States, is happening at the very moment that Iran is looking for ways to get back at the United States for the Soleimani strike. Remember, ISIS and al-Qaida are inside Yemen. The wing of al-Qaida that has the clearest designs against the United States takes advantage of the chaos inside Yemen to recruit, to grow, and to expand their territory. So as the Houthis are further destabilizing Yemen, the enemies of the United States are potentially getting stronger. Iran is, once again, back on the march inside Yemen. Then, in Lebanon we had this moment in which there were protests on the streets that were demanding a Lebanese Government free of corruption and free of Iranian influence. We were this close to getting a technocratic government in Lebanon that might--that might--finally break the grip of Iran on elements of Lebanese politics. Instead of taking advantage of that moment, the United States decided that it was going to cut off aid to the army that was protecting the protesters. The combination of that mistake and then the assassination of General Soleimani allowed Iran to upend the momentum that was running against Tehran inside Lebanon. Now guess what we have in Lebanon. We have a Hezbollah government in Lebanon. Instead of getting a citizen-focused technocratic government, we have an Iranian-aligned Hezbollah government in Lebanon. Iran is fighting back. They are escalating. They may not be shooting missiles at American military bases, but they are gaining ground. They are taking provocative actions throughout the region. It is really important for us to understand that. It is really important for us to understand how we are losing ground in places like Iraq and Yemen and Lebanon and how much stronger Iran is getting as a direct consequence of the action that was taken without congressional authorization. My third and last point is this. Even if we pass this War Powers Resolution, this President is still going to maintain that he has a Mack truck-sized loophole through which he can run military action overseas without coming to Congress. As for the President's article II authority, he has it. I am not denying that the President doesn't have constitutional authority to protect America prior to a congressional authorization, but the President's article II authority has morphed over time into a monster, and Congress needs to do more than just pass War Powers Resolutions to contain this Godzilla. For years, Presidents of both parties have stretched executive war- making power too far. I have been on this floor criticizing a Democratic President--President Obama--who I argued should have come to Congress for authorization for airstrikes against Libya and should have come to Congress to ask for authorization before launching an offensive against ISIS, or waging drone wars in Yemen and Pakistan. But President Trump has taken this abuse to new levels, and the threat of falling into a new war with Iran, based on whispers of intelligence and without any authorization from Congress, is a real possibility that we have to take seriously in this body. In fact, I listened to an administration official this week make the case that the President was actually authorized to kill Soleimani because the IRGC, the military group that he led, was listed by the administration as a terrorist organization. I know that many of my colleagues have heard the administration make elements of this argument as well. That is a ridiculous argument that fails on its face. Remember, the administration, not Congress, designates who is on the terrorist list, so you cannot argue that the executive-level designation of a terrorist group is a declaration of war. It is not even a debatable proposition, but the administration is apparently making it. So what I am saying is that we need to be looking toward the reform of the war powers process more broadly. The overreach of multiple administrations proves the need for an enforcement mechanism for Congress and, more specifically, definitions around the circumstances in which a President can use force before coming to Congress--a new War Powers Act. It should sunset the existing authorizations of military force and force us to come back to the table and write new authorizations for the military engagements that we still need to be in overseas, and it should create templates for new authorizations of military force that include reasonable sunset provisions on those new AUMFs and protections to make sure that those authorizations don't get stretched to cover groups and geographic areas that were never contemplated by the legislators who drafted the initial authorizations. For many folks, it feels all too familiar to be down here today having this argument over the President's military escalation with Iran. We are talking about manipulated intelligence, a drumbeat of war. We are listening to the administration and its advocates bully Congress and the American people into avoiding this debate--the suggestion that, by questioning U.S. military objectives overseas, we are somehow hurting the troops. It all brings back these flashbacks of the disastrous path to war in Iraq. This vote is essential, in my mind, so that we warn ourselves against going back down that wretched path again. So, yes, let's pass this resolution, but we can't stop there. Congress needs to do our job to reform the war powers system so that this President and future Presidents of both parties respect both Congress's role and the deepest responsibility that we all have to the American people when we make a decision to go to war. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, it is important to remind ourselves, at moments like this, how unnatural and uncommon democracy really is. Just think of all of the important forums in your life. Think about your workplace, your family, your favorite sports team. None of them makes decisions by democratic vote. The CEO decides how much money you are going to make. It is not by the vote of your fellow employees. You love your kids, but they don't get an equal say in household matters as mom and dad do. The plays the Chiefs called on their game-winning drives were not decided by a team vote. No, most everything in our lives that matters, other than the government under which we live, is not run by democratic vote, and, of course, a tiny percentage of humans--well under 1 percent--have lived in a democratic society over the last thousand years of human history. Democracy is unnatural. It is rare. It is delicate. It is fragile, and untended to, neglected, or taken for granted, it will disappear like ashes that scatter into the cold night. This body--the U.S. Senate--was conceived by our Founders to be the ultimate guardians of this brittle experiment in governance. We, the 100 of us, were given the responsibility to keep it safe from those who may deign to harm it, and when the Senate lives up to this charge, it is an awesome, inspirational sight to behold. I was born 3 weeks after Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of a taping system in the White House that likely held evidence of President Nixon's crimes, and I was born 1 week after the Senate Watergate Committee, in a bipartisan vote, ordered Nixon to turn over several key tapes. Now, my parents were Republicans. My mom is still a Republican. Over the years, they have voted for a lot of Democrats and Republicans. They raised me, in the shadow of Watergate, to understand that what mattered in politics wasn't really someone's party. It was whether you were honest and decent and if you were pursuing office for the right reasons. In the year I was born, this Senate watched a President betray the Nation, and this Senate--both Democrats and Republicans--stood together to protect the country from this betrayal. This is exactly what our Founders envisioned when they gave the Congress the massive responsibility of the impeachment power. They said to use it sparingly, to use it not to settle political scores but to use it when a President has strayed from the bonds of decency and propriety. The Founders wanted Congress to save the country from bad men who would try to use the awesome power of the executive branch to enrich themselves or to win office illicitly, and I grew up under the belief that, when those bad men presented themselves, this place had the ability to put aside party and work to protect our fragile democracy from attack. This attack on our Republic that we are debating today, if left unchecked, is potentially lethal. The one sacred covenant that an American President makes with the governed is to use the massive power of the executive branch for the good of the country, not for personal financial or political benefit. The difference between a democracy and a tin-pot dictatorship is that, here, we don't allow Presidents to use the official levers of power to destroy political opponents. Yet that is exactly what President Trump did, and we all know it. Even the Republicans who are going to vote to acquit him today admit that. If you think that our endorsement through acquittal will not have an impact, then, just look at Rudy Giuliani's trip to Ukraine in December, which was in the middle of the impeachment process. He went back, looking for more dirt, and the President was ringing him up to get the details before Giuliani's plane even hit the gate. The corruption hasn't stopped. It is ongoing. If this is the new normal--the new means by which a President can consolidate power and try to destroy political opponents--then we are no longer living in America. What happened here over the last 2 weeks is as much a corruption as Trump's scheme was. This trial was simply an extension of Trump's crimes--no documents, no witnesses. It was the first-ever impeachment trial in the Senate without either. John Bolton, in his practically begging to come here and tell his firsthand account of the President's corruption, was denied--just to make sure that voters couldn't hear his story in time for them to be able to pressure their Senators prior to an impeachment vote. This was a show trial--a gift-wrapped present for a grateful party leader. We became complicit in the very attacks on democracy that this body is supposed to guard against. We have failed to protect the Republic. What is so interesting to me is that it is not like the Republicans didn't see this moment coming. In fact, many of my colleagues across the aisle literally predicted it. Prior to the President's election, here is what the Republican Senators said about Donald Trump. One said: He is shallow. He is ill-prepared to be Commander in Chief. I think he is crazy. I think he is unfit for office. Another said: The man is a pathological liar. He doesn't know the difference between truth and lies. Yet another Republican Senator said: What we are dealing with is a con artist. He is a con artist. Now, you can shrug this off as election-year rhetoric, but no Democrat has ever said these kinds of things about a candidate from our party, and prior to Trump, no Republican had said such things about candidates from their party either. The truth is the Republicans, before Trump became the head of their party, knew exactly how dangerous he was and how dangerous he would be if he won. They knew he was the archetype of that bad man the Founders intended the Senate to protect democracy from. That responsibility seems to no longer retain a position of primacy in this body today. The rule of law doesn't seem to come first today. Our commitment to upholding decency and truth and honor is not the priority today. In the modern Senate today, all that seems to matter is party. What is different about this impeachment is not that the Democrats have chosen to make it partisan. It is that the Republicans have chosen to excuse their party's President's conduct in a way that they would not have done and did not do 45 years ago. That is what makes this moment exceptional. Now, Congressman Schiff, in his closing argument, rightly challenged the Democrats to think about what we would do if a President of our party ever committed the same kind of offense that Donald Trump has. I think it was a very wise query and one that we as Democrats should not be so quick on the trigger to answer self-righteously. Would we have the courage to stand up to our base, to our political supporters, and vote to remove a Democratic President who had chosen to trade away the safety of the Nation for political help? It would not be easy. No, the easy thing to do would be to just do what is happening today--to box our ears, close our eyes, and just hope the corruption goes away. So I have thought a lot about this question over these past 2 days, and I have come to the conclusion that, at least for me, I would hold the Democrats to the same standard. I would vote to remove. But I admit to some level of doubt, and I think that I need to be honest about that because the pressures today to put party first are real on both sides of the aisle, and they are much more acute today than they were during Watergate. It is with that reality as context that I prepare to vote today. I believe that the President's crimes are worthy of removal. I will vote to convict on both Articles of Impeachment. But I know that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Ours is an institution built to put country above party, and today we are doing, often, the opposite. I believe within the cult of personality that has become the Trump Presidency, the disease is more acute and more perilous to the Nation's health on the Republican side of the ledger, but I admit this affliction has spread to all corners of this Chamber. If we are to survive as a democracy--a fragile, delicate, constantly in need of tending democracy--then this Senate needs to figure out a way after today to reorder our incentive system and recalibrate our faiths so that the health of one party never ever again comes before the health of our Nation. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

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