Christopher Murphy

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, at a time of international turmoil and crisis like this, all of us, I think, are sometimes prone to hyperbole. I count myself as part of that club. I endeavor to do better. It doesn't serve this body well to warn of bad decisions that could lead to war if we are only doing it to serve political ends or to bloody up a political opponent. Crying wolf also anesthetizes the public and risks dulling the country's senses at a moment when the peril is real. Anytime we are considering asking the men and women of our Armed Forces and their families to make further sacrifices for their country, we have to treat those moments with the gravity they deserve. Let me state at the outset of my remarks that there are important reasons why I believe that both Iran and the United States do not want to enter into a conventional conflict that would likely involve the United States taking steps to remove the Supreme Leader from power and which would likely involve an invasion that would make Iraq in 2003 look like child's play. The United States, of course, remembers the Iraq war--at least, I think we do. Our military leaders know that a short-term fight in Iran would be much bloodier and would be much more costly than the initial invasion of Iraq. Iran, for instance, has twice the population of Iraq. A long-term counterinsurgency in Iran would be endless, potentially costing hundreds of thousands of lives. The Iranian leadership also knows that the United States might never defensively defeat a drawn-out insurgency on Iranian turf, but Iran's leaders also know they likely wouldn't be around to see that eventual conclusion because the United States would, at the very least, likely be successful in ending the existing regime. So neither side is likely war-gaming for victory. Even those of us who are deeply critical of President Trump's Iran policy should acknowledge this, but as a student of history, I know that the annals of war are replete with cataclysmic conflicts that began not by choice but by accident, negligence, and incompetence. So today, when I warn of the United States being on a potential path to war with Iran, that is my concern, that the utter lack of strategy, the complete absence of nuance, the abandoned communication and coordination with our allies, and the alarming deficiency of experienced counsel will end up getting thousands of Americans needlessly killed. This is not the first warning of this kind I have presented. A year and a half ago, the President ignored the advice of his first Secretary of State and his first Secretary of Defense, and he unilaterally pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear agreement, despite the fact that every expert agreed that Iran was in compliance. Then, to make things worse, President Trump enacted a series of devastating unilateral sanctions on Iran. No other nations joined with us. In fact, most of our allies actively and aggressively worked against us, trying to undermine and work around those sanctions in order to save the nuclear agreement. That fact, in and of itself, is simply extraordinary and a sign of how weak President Trump has made America abroad. The sanctions still took a dramatic toll on Iran's economy, and like everybody predicted, the Iranian Government didn't sit still. They began to push back, attacking Saudi oil pipelines, capturing European oil tankers, and ratcheting up threats against U.S. forces in Iraq. During this time, the President changed his story every week. Some days he said he would sit down and negotiate with the Iranians without preconditions. Other days his top people said they wouldn't sit down unless Iran met an absurdly long list of preconditions. Other days, President Trump said he wanted to blast Iran off the map. It was a comedy of diplomatic errors, compounded nearly weekly with conflicting message after conflicting message that made it difficult for Iran to approach negotiations with us, even if they wanted to. By this winter, the situation was spiraling out of control. Iranian- backed militias launched a rocket attack that killed a U.S. private contractor in Iraq. The United States responded by killing at least 24 Iraqi militia members. Then Iraqi militia, supported by Iran, stormed our Embassy, culminating, for now, in the drone strike that killed General Qasem Soleimani last week in Iraq. There is no reason things had to get to this point. When President Trump came into office, Iran had stopped their quest for nuclear weapons capabilities, and Iran was complying with an intrusive inspections regime that made sure they didn't cheat. Iranian-backed militias had stopped firing rockets at U.S. personnel in Iraq. In fact, they were actually working on a U.S.-led project in Iraq--the eradication of ISIS. President Obama had united the entire world against Iran. Even Russia and China were working side by side with the United States to constrict Iran's nuclear weapons program. And with the nuclear agreement secured, this global coalition was teed up and ready to be mobilized by President Trump to pressure Iran to make the next set of concessions on their ballistic missile program and their support for terrorist proxies across the region. But Trump's bizarre and nonsensical Iran policy threw all that leverage away willingly, voluntarily. Despite the economic sanctions, Iran today is more powerful, is more menacing than ever before. Just weeks ago, Iran had been wracked by anti-government protests, but President Trump's recent actions have united the country against America and against our allies in one fell swoop. One only needs to look at yesterday, when millions of Iranians took to the streets for Soleimani's funeral--a mass outpouring of support that the Iranian regime could never have hoped to inspire on its own. Compared to 3 years ago at the end of the Obama administration, today Iran is closer to restoring its proxy state in Syria, Iran is more influential in Yemen, Iran is more threatening to U.S. troops in Iraq and across the Middle East, and Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon. The simple truth is that Iran is stronger and we are less safe today than when President Trump was inaugurated, but it gets, implausibly, even worse. Because the strike on Soleimani is so destabilizing and so unstrategically provocative, the U.S. position in Iraq--where we are still battling ISIS--is unraveling. All U.S. civilians have been ordered to evacuate. All U.S. counter-ISIS operations have been suspended. NATO has stopped its ongoing efforts to fight ISIS. The Iraqi Parliament has begun the process of kicking out all U.S. forces from the country--exactly what Qasem Soleimani had worked for years to achieve. All of that, on the back of Iran's newfound strength in the region, is the reason there is so much head-shaking happening right now about why President Trump has so willfully bungled Iran policy, emboldening Iranian hard-liners and putting our Nation's safety at risk. With that for context, we come back to the crisis moment of today and the real possibility that more of President Trump's stumbling will lead us into a world-changing conflict with Iran. We, the Senators, have seen no evidence that the assassination of Soleimani was necessary to prevent an imminent attack on the United States. I remain open to seeing that intelligence, but 5 days later, Congress has not received a briefing from the administration. We are apparently going to get that tomorrow. But both President Obama and President Bush had the ability to kill Soleimani. They didn't because their experts believed that executing the second most powerful political figure in Iran--no matter how evil he was, no matter how many American deaths he was responsible for--would end up getting more, not fewer, Americans killed. We don't know in what form the reprisal from Iran will come or when, but it will come. And, listen, we shouldn't be afraid of reprisals in the wake of truly necessary military actions by the United States to protect our interests abroad. But when that attack arrives, President Trump has telegraphed that he is preparing to respond by committing war crimes against the Iranian people. He says he will bomb cultural sites, filled with civilian visitors, in retaliation. I can't believe this needs to be said on the floor of the U.S. Senate, but that is something terrorists do, not the United States. Although this administration keeps saying they don't want war, there is no logic to their circular theory of Iran policy. Trump believes that to change Iran's behavior, we need to escalate our own actions. Then when our escalation begets more escalation from Tehran, Trump and his Iran hawks come to the conclusion that this must be due to the fact that our escalation wasn't serious enough. The theory becomes unprovable because the Iran hawks just contend, failure after failure, that we just need one more escalation and one more escalation and one more escalation. This is the exact behavior that could land us in a kinetic conflict with Iran that costs American lives. As I said at the outset, this is likely not going to be a full-on conventional war--at least I hope it is not. It may be that Iran sends missiles into Israel or ramps up the temperature in Yemen. They may try to assassinate American military or political leaders or use cyber warfare to go after critical infrastructure. And maybe we don't invade Iran. Maybe we just blister their countryside with bombs or try to disable their military from above. Of course, no matter the scope of the conflict, no matter how long this escalatory cycle lasts, the one thing we know is this: None of this has anything to do with making us safer. This cycle started with Trump's rejection of a diplomatic agreement with Iran that he didn't like just because it had Barack Obama's name on it. A political grudge set off a series of events that now has us lodged in a crisis of harrowing scope, a crisis that this President--so unstable, so reckless, so capricious--likely cannot handle. Unfortunately, his rejection of diplomacy and lack of concern for our allies has left America more isolated than at any other perilous time in our history. At a moment when we cannot afford to be out on a limb, out on our own, we are. Politics is part of what got us here, but maybe politics is part of how we get out of this mess. Congress can cut off funding for President Trump's war of choice with Iran. We can make clear, Republicans and Democrats, that the President cannot take military action without congressional consent. And of course the American people can have their say too. They can rise up, as they did in many cities this past weekend, and cry out in protest over President Trump's decision to put politics over our Nation's security. That public pressure may push allies of the President's here in the Senate to stand with Democrats in opposition to this reckless risk to our Nation's security. It is not too late to put a stop to this madness. Iran is an adversary. I don't want anything I have said today to paper over all of that nation's misdeeds in the region. It is in our national interest to conduct a foreign policy that weakens Iran's ability to threaten us, our allies, and our interests. But for the last 3 years, President Trump has done exactly the opposite. Iran's nuclear program is back on. Iran has restarted attacks against the United States. Iran is more influential in the region. Everything the President has done has worked to degrade our Nation's safety and has worked to make Iran stronger. The order to strike Soleimani has already been given, but what happens next is not predetermined. My fear--my belief--is that last week's killing of Qasem Soleimani will end up fitting into this pattern. But we have serious choices to make in this body, and we can choose to get off this path of escalation and make decisions that correct this President's recklessness and keep America safe. I hope we step up to that challenge. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that floor privileges be granted for the first 6 months of this calendar year for a list of interns in my office. The interns on that list are: Aileen Murphy, Rilind Abazi, Parker Baird, Julia Cortina, Shanelle Jones, Chris O'Brien, and Megan Brown.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am on the floor briefly today to remind my colleagues to remind their constituents that December 15 is the open enrollment deadline for healthcare at healthcare.gov. This is incredibly important because if you are uninsured or you are currently on an Affordable Care Act plan, if you don't renew or sign up by the 15th, you will be frozen out of the marketplace unless you have what is called a qualifying event. As we head back for the weekend, I want to ensure we do everything we can to make sure there are aren't more people who go into the New Year without insurance than absolutely necessary. This is especially important because we have seen a big decline in the number of people who have insurance in this country since President Trump took office. Obviously, we made enormous progress after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. We were able to get the percentage of Americans without insurance down to around 5 percent. That is really extraordinary. Yet we have seen that progress reverse. We have seen more and more people go without insurance since this administration started to wage what is a pretty consistent, remarkable war on the Affordable Care Act. As we speak today, the Trump administration is in court trying to get the court system--the Federal court system--to strike down the entirety of the Affordable Care Act. If they are successful in that endeavor, then next year's deadline will not matter because the Affordable Care Act will be gone; 20 million people will lose their health insurance; insurers will once again be able to charge you more because you have a preexisting condition or your kid has cancer or you are a woman. As we fight that court case, we need to remember that the Affordable Care Act is still out there and is still very affordable for millions and millions of Americans. Seventy percent of enrollees who go on to healthcare.gov find they qualify for financial help, meaning the sticker price is not actually what you pay. The tax credits in ObamaCare will help you get that premium lower. In fact, on average, folks are getting pretty sizable premiums--in the neighborhood of $500. That could make healthcare incredibly affordable, even if the sticker price looks out of your range. A woman in Hartford, named Deborah, visited a local enrollment fair after receiving a letter saying her premiums actually might be going up. She said this: That scared me a little bit so I wanted to come in and have someone explain it to me whether it was going to go up, decrease, you know, what were my options. What ended up happening is that actually my premium went down for the same plan but I also learned that just because they renew you that I had the opportunity to go in and say no, I don't want that plan, I want to choose this plan. I am ecstatic with my new plan. . . . I got educated on the insurance process and I like that. You can still get that help. You can still get somebody on the phone to walk you through your choices. I really encourage people to do that by this Sunday. For folks who do find an affordable plan, I hope you will also step up and try to help us maintain the protections and the coverages we have. We have been fighting a battle with the Trump administration. It doesn't like the Affordable Care Act simply because the President's name is on it, despite the fact that Americans don't want the Affordable Care Act repealed. But the administration has been doing everything within its power to try to make it harder for people to sign up. The administration has rolled back the advertising for the Affordable Care Act. This is what qualifies for advertising today--charts on the floor of the U.S. Senate. The administration has rolled back the money for the navigators--the people who help you pick which plan is right for you. The administration, for a period of time, threatened to stop paying insurance companies, which chilled the interest of insurers to actually offer plans on these exchanges. As I mentioned, the administration is going to court to try to unroll and unwind the entirety of the act through a court case. Lastly, though, what you will find, if you go and enroll in some States, are plans that look like an Affordable Care Act plan on these websites but actually aren't. They are what we call junk plans, short- term plans--plans that don't really cover anything. They might not cover maternity care or addiction care or mental health or prescription drugs. Some of these junk plans don't cover you if you get admitted into the hospital on a Friday or Saturday. Be careful of those plans because the sticker price is going to look really low, but that is for a reason. It is because they don't cover anything. The President has allowed for those junk plans to be shown right next to the Affordable Care Act plan. Make sure you are signing up for a regulated, Affordable Care Act plan. That is a plan that is bronze or silver or gold, not one of these junk short-term plans that is not going to be right for the vast majority of Americans. It is not too late. Sunday is the deadline. If you are in Connecticut, make sure to go to Access Health CT or your State exchange, if your State runs an exchange. If not, you can get healthcare through www.healthcare.gov. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I join my colleague from Connecticut, Senator Blumenthal, and others in urging my colleagues to oppose the nomination of Lawrence VanDyke. I may risk repeating some of the ground that has been covered by Senator Blumenthal, but I think it is important enough that we reiterate over and over the dangerous nature of this particular nomination. I have come down to speak on the floor in opposition to maybe only a handful of the President's judicial nominees. In fact, if you look up the voting record, I probably am amongst a very small handful of Democrats who have routinely voted for the President's nominees--not just judicial nominees but also his appointments to positions in his administration. Often in committee, I am the only Democrat supporting some of the President's nominees and appointments, and that is because I have come to the conclusion that this body should give deference to the administration and to the President when it comes particularly to filling the positions of those who work for him in political appointments but to a degree as well in the judiciary. So I put my votes where my test is, and probably with only two or three exceptions in the Democratic caucus, I have voted for more of the President's nominees than the rest of my colleagues on this side of the aisle. My test is pretty simple. One, I want individuals who are qualified. Obviously qualifications are sometimes in the eye of the beholder, but I want folks who know something about the job they are about to undertake or have some set of skills that will be relevant. Second, I want to make sure the candidates we are reviewing for judgeships or administration posts are not out of the mainstream--I mean the conservative mainstream. I don't want folks who have radical points of view. Mr. VanDyke doesn't pass that test as far as I am concerned, and that is why I chose to come down to the floor and express my opposition to his nomination. In particular, I do not believe Mr. VanDyke is within the mainstream when it comes to his positions on the issue of gun violence. Obviously this is a personal issue not just to me but to everybody in this Chamber, and we have a lot of disagreement--maybe a narrowing set of disagreements on the policy surrounding what we should do to better protect this country against the growing scourge of gun violence. But Mr. VanDyke has held a position that would take away from this body the ability to keep our friends and our neighbors and our constituents safe. Mr. VanDyke's record as a candidate for the supreme court and as solicitor general was to endorse views outside of the mainstream that would take away from us the ability to pass laws to keep people safe. Let me tell you what I am talking about. First and foremost, he was a vocal proponent of something called the Firearms Freedom Act. As solicitor general of Montana, he argued that the Federal Government should not have the power to regulate gun ownership in his State of Montana. This is a political cause that is picking up steam in some conservative circles around the country, but it is still a radical notion, the idea that the Congress can pass a law restricting who can own a gun or what kinds of guns can be owned and that a State can just claim those laws are not valid in that State. That is what Montana was attempting to do, and that is what Mr. VanDyke was pushing--the idea that that State was just going to conveniently avoid enforcing Federal firearms acts and laws. That position is unconstitutional, and Federal courts have held that it is unconstitutional, but that didn't stop Mr. VanDyke from pushing what is essentially a political cause--the idea that one of the ways to stymie Federal action on guns is to just convince States to pass laws saying they won't enforce Federal laws. That is a very slippery slope to go down--certainly on the issue of enforcement of firearms laws, but it is a slippery slope to go down with respect to any Federal laws that States may want to ignore or invalidate. Second, Mr. VanDyke has taken a position opposing the constitutionality of restrictions on the sales of certain types of weapons. We have big disagreements here as to which kinds of weapons should be sold commercially and which kinds of weapons should be reserved for law enforcement and the military. I believe that semiautomatic, assault- style weapons like the AR-15 are best left in the hands of those they were designed for--soldiers and law enforcement. Many of my Republican colleagues don't agree. But that should be a debate we have here, and I simply do not believe our Founding Fathers would accept the premise that the Constitution restricts our ability to decide what kinds of weapons should be in civilian hands and what kinds of weapons should be in the hands of the military. There was all sorts of gun regulation happening at the time of the passage of the U.S. Constitution. They were not unfamiliar with the idea that government was going to have a hand to play in regulating firearms, and I reject the idea that the Constitution bars us from having those debates. Mr. VanDyke has spent a lot of time arguing that the Constitution prohibits Congress from acting to keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of civilians. It is one thing to have a policy objection; it is another thing to put somebody into the Federal court system who doesn't think we should have ownership as a political body of a question that is inherently political, not constitutional. I come to the floor to point out just a handful of ways in which Mr. VanDyke's record, I believe, is outside of the conservative mainstream when it comes to guns. I think he holds positions that would make even NRA-endorsed Republicans in this body a little uncomfortable, especially this idea that States can nullify Federal firearms laws. Although I think there are many reasons to draw issue with this particular nominee, I put this set of issues at the top of the list. Again, this is coming from someone who has spent a lot of time supporting the President's nominees with whom I have big policy disagreements. I think this is beyond a question of policy disagreements. This is someone who is going to bring some pretty radical ideas on what the Constitution allows States to do and what the Constitution allows this body to do when it comes to keeping our constituents safe. I would urge us to oppose Lawrence VanDyke's nomination. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following five interns in my office be granted floor privileges for the remainder of the year: Madison Malin, Chris Brown, Britt Jacovich, Devon Bradley, and Alanna Van Nostrand.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, as Senator Murray noted, 100 people die from gunshot wounds every single day. We can't go 24 hours without news of another mass shooting somewhere in America. My kids and millions of others hide in corners of their classrooms or in their bathrooms preparing for a mass shooting at their school, and this body does nothing about it. The good news is, we have a piece of legislation that enjoys 95 percent support in the American public and will undoubtedly make an enormous impact on gun violence rates in this country. I will give more extensive remarks after I make this unanimous consent request, but my request will be that the Senate immediately take up H.R. 8, the universal background checks bill which was passed in a bipartisan way in the House of Representatives and which has received no action, no debate here in the U.S. Senate since that time. As in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 29, H.R. 8; further, 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. Mr. President, I appreciate the good-faith objection from my friend from Mississippi, but the good news that I can convey to her is that my Republican Senate friends who want to have some impact into the consideration of the future of American gun laws have ample opportunity to do that because they are in the majority. Senate Republicans control the Judiciary Committee. Senator McConnell can decide to bring any measure to the floor. If the concern is that there hasn't been enough Republican input into the question of whether criminals or terrorists or people who are seriously mentally ill get guns, then, convene a discussion on this, bring a debate to the floor, have a process in the Judiciary Committee. Don't just stay silent. It doesn't pass the straight-face test to come down here and say: Well, we can't take up H.R. 8, despite the fact it has 90 percent public approval because we haven't had input on it. You are in the majority. You have the ability to pass legislation that you support and that Democrats can support as well. The idea that we are just going to sit here and twiddle our thumbs week after week as 100 people are killed by guns through suicides and homicides and accidental shootings is an abdication of our basic responsibility as U.S. Senators. There is nothing that matters more to our constituents than their physical safety. There are kids who are walking to school in cities in every single State in this Nation who fear for their lives, whose brain chemistry is changed by the trauma they go through because of that fear for their safety, and they can't learn, they can't cope, and they can't build strong relationships. My kids go through active shooter drills at school because they, in fact, expect that someday someone will walk through their doors and start firing a military-style assault weapon in one of their classrooms. I get it that there is a difference of opinion on exactly how we should expand background checks. I understand that maybe my Republican colleagues don't want to support H.R. 8. But you are in the majority. You have the ability to lead a conversation that can find that common ground on expanding background checks. I am not going to accept this argument that we can't bring H.R. 8 to the floor because we have some concerns about it. I can't get a piece of legislation to the floor any other way than to offer this motion. The American public is not going to accept silence from this body week after week, month after month, in the face of this epidemic carnage that is happening across this country. Parents know their kids aren't safe, and they expect us to act. The President's Attorney General said the other day that we made some progress on the issue of background checks over the summer, but now we have the impeachment proceedings, and so that stops all of this discussion. That is not true. The impeachment proceedings right now are in the House of Representatives. The discussion on the future of a background checks bill was in the Senate. It was happening between myself and Senator Manchin and Senator Toomey. We are still at the table, ready to negotiate a compromise version of the Background Check Expansion Act. We, frankly, have lots of time on our hands in the Senate because we are not doing anything other than approving an appointee here, a judge there. We have plenty of time. We have plenty of bandwidth in the Senate to negotiate with the White House over a universal background checks bill. You can't say that we can't take up H.R. 8 because we haven't had input. Republicans are in charge. You have the ability to have as much input as you want. The White House can't say the impeachment is stopping a debate on background checks from happening. I am ready to talk. Senator Toomey is ready to talk. Senator Manchin is ready to talk. We have evidence from this summer about how important universal background checks are. On the last day of August, a gunman fled from police in Odessa, TX. He hijacked a U.S. Postal Service van. He killed its driver and then randomly fired on people as he drove through the streets. During his shooting spree, the gunman killed seven people and wounded over 20 others--a reign of terror throughout the streets of this Texas town. The current background checks law worked as it was intended to work. The shooter tried to buy a gun in January 2014, but he was denied. Why? Because he had been found to be so seriously mentally ill when he was committed to an inpatient institution that his name was placed on the list of individuals who were prohibited from buying weapons. The problem is, Texas doesn't have universal background checks, meaning that it was as easy as pie for the shooter, after he got denied a gun purchase at a brick-and-mortar store, to just go find a private seller who would sell him a military-style weapon without a background check. In this case, it resulted in 20 people getting hurt and seven people being wounded--this easy way to find loopholes through the Nation's background check system. But that happens every single day. Every single day, somebody buys a gun at a gun show or online or through a private sale because that is the way they can get a gun without having to go through a background check. I am deeply troubled. I am profoundly aggrieved by my body's reluctance to even take up a conversation about the future of gun policy in this country. I wish there wasn't an objection. I wish we had an opportunity to be able to discuss the future of background checks and the future of our gun laws on the Senate floor. Our constituents expect us to have that debate. This will not be the last time we come down to the floor to try to force a debate, to force a conversation in this body so that we can find bipartisan consensus on an issue that enjoys 95 percent public support, 80 percent support from gun owners, and 70 percent support from NRA members. There is almost nothing else that is less controversial in America today than the issue of universal background checks, and we will continue to press that case on behalf of the American people. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am here to speak about the topic of healthcare, but while my friend from Alaska is on the floor, I hope we can bridge the policy disagreements we have right now over the Defense appropriations bill, the appropriations process and the authorization bill. I have been in Congress long enough to have heard this argument be trotted out over and over again that if you vote against a defense bill, then you aren't supporting the troops, even if you have a legitimate policy disagreement you are trying to work out. I have heard that enough to know that it just doesn't match up with reality. I was told that because I opposed the Iraq war, I didn't support the troops. People in the 1970s were told that if they didn't support the Vietnam war, they were opposing the troops. The fact is, we have a legitimate policy disagreement that we are trying to figure out. Democrats don't think we should be taking money from defense construction projects that are housing and protecting our troops to be used to build a border wall with Mexico that doesn't do anything, in our opinion, to protect the United States compared to the benefit of the spending on military construction projects. We think that, ultimately, we are serving our troops by making sure those military construction projects get funded instead of this wall that doesn't make sense if not for the President's campaign speeches. So we have some policy disagreements over the budget. I would hope that my colleagues wouldn't try to use this tired argument that if anyone here ever votes against a defense budget, then they somehow are opposing the troops. That is just irresponsible and disingenuous rhetoric.

Mr. MURPHY

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

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I want to tell you a quick story about a woman from Atlanta. Her name is Dawn Jones. Dawn bought what is commonly referred to in the insurance industry as a short-term health insurance plan. She brought it from the Golden Rule Insurance Company, which is a unit of UnitedHealth, and she needed it because she needed some coverage in between jobs. She was then diagnosed with breast cancer, and she went through a heartbreaking experience, trying to get her insurance company to cover her for her $400,000 medical bill. In the end, she could not get her short-term health insurance plan to cover her breast cancer treatments, and here is the reason why. The insurer didn't need to cover preexisting conditions. Short-term plans do not need to cover things we traditionally think of as healthcare insurance today. The protections of the Affordable Care Act require that insurance cover you regardless of whether you are diagnosed with a serious disease, but short-term plans don't need to cover you for those things. This short-term plan didn't cover her breast cancer, despite the fact that she wasn't diagnosed with breast cancer until after she signed up for the plan. So you may ask: Why is that a preexisting condition if she wasn't diagnosed with breast cancer until she was on this short- term plan? Well, the insurer in this case made a very innovative argument. It said that she actually had the cancer before she signed up for insurance. So even though she didn't know she had cancer and even though she hadn't been diagnosed with cancer, because she technically had cancer before she got the insurance plan, she had a preexisting condition, and, thus, they would not cover her. This is a pretty typical story about what happens on these short-term insurance plans in this country. They are more commonly referred to these days as junk insurance plans because, for millions of Americans who sign up for short-term insurance, they find out that it really doesn't cover much of anything. One Golden Rule plan excludes pregnancy and provides a lifetime maximum benefit of $250,000. That is, by the way, an incredibly low amount of lifetime coverage--$250,000. One hospital stay for a serious illness can be over $250,000. And the icing on the cake--this particular junk plan from Golden Rule doesn't cover a hospital room or nursing services for patients admitted on a Friday or Saturday. So good luck if you get sick on a Friday or Saturday because you are not going to get coverage on those 2 days of the week. These are junk plans because they don't cover what you need, and you, by and large, don't find out about that until you actually need the insurance. How about a gentleman from San Antonio who actually had his short- term plan for about 6 years? He had been paying it and paying it for 6 years. Because they are technically short-term plans, he was renewing them over and over and over again, and when he was diagnosed with kidney disease, they wouldn't cover him because they went back to his medical records and found out that he had some blood work done earlier that had shown the initial signs of kidney disease, but he wasn't diagnosed until later on. What they said--just as they did for the woman in Atlanta--was this: Because you had signs of kidney disease when you were insured with us a year ago, we are not going to cover you now because, technically, you are on a new plan. He had been getting a plan every 6 months every year. He didn't have any gaps in insurance, but because he technically was signing up for short-term plan after short-term plan, he didn't get covered for his kidney disease. Over and over, we hear these stories about individuals who go on these junk plans and then find out that they can't get insured for anything--can't get insured for hospital stays on Fridays and Saturdays, can't get insured for mental health treatment, no prescription drug benefits, no coverage for maternity, and all sorts of backbending activity to try to stop people from getting coverage for illnesses. Yet these plans are becoming more and more prolific. Why is that? The reason is that the Trump administration is using an innovative method to try to get more Americans to sign up for these junk plans, and that is what I wanted to come to the floor and talk about today. These junk plans are a nightmare for people who get on them and then find themselves on the outside of coverage. When you sign up for health insurance, you basically think it is going to cover a set of things like hospital stays on weekends and coverage for your cancer diagnosis, but these junk plans don't cover those things. The administration has decided to use a section of the Affordable Care Act that was designed to strengthen our healthcare system and, instead, use it to weaken the healthcare insurance system by providing for more and more of these junk plans. Here is a little bit of legislative history. There is a section of the ACA that was set up so that you could apply to the State for a waiver to improve coverage. The waiver says that you can do some innovative things in the ACA so long as you prove that whatever you are going to do is going to provide health coverage that is just as comprehensive as what is required under the ACA, that you are not going to cost consumers any more than what they are paying under the ACA, that the number of people who are insured under the ACA in your State isn't going to down--it is going to stay stable or go up--and you are not going to increase the Federal deficit. Well, President Trump, in October of 2018, issued new guidance that essentially guts all of those protections for these waivers. President Trump basically says that these short-term insurance plans can be approved, even if they cost people more, even if they don't cover things like preexisting conditions, and even if they result in fewer people getting insurance. This October 2018 guidance allowed for these junk plans to be sold in more States to more consumers. Even worse, the 2018 guidance said that these junk plans could be sold side by side with the Affordable Care Act plans right on the same web page, disguising the fact that some plans would actually cover you for your preexisting conditions and others wouldn't. So, today, we have more and more of these junk plans available to individuals and more people who are vulnerable to all of the old abuses that used to happen left and right in the healthcare insurance system, largely to people who have pretty serious illnesses. Now, 130 million Americans have a preexisting condition. In my State, over a half million people have some sort of preexisting condition. If they sign up for one of these junk plans--either because they were marketed the plan under the belief that it would cover them or by mistake because they didn't notice the difference between the ACA- regulated plans and the junk plans on the website that they went to-- they are at risk of not getting covered for their preexisting condition. It gets even worse than that because what economists tell us is that these junk plans, which cover very little, are admittedly going to be attractive to some people who are presently pretty healthy. Young people and people who don't have any preexisting conditions may sign up for those junk plans because it doesn't really matter to them at the time that they don't get coverage for much at all; the junk plans are going to have prices that are lower, in most instances, than the plans that cover basic healthcare services. In the short term, that might be OK for the people who are relatively healthy until, of course, they get sick and find out that their junk plan doesn't cover anything. But for the people who have preexisting conditions, who can't sign up for the junk plans, and who need to be on the plans that are regulated by the Affordable Care Act, their premiums are going to skyrocket. This is health insurance 101. As more healthy people go to the junk plans, leaving behind on the Affordable Care Act plans folks who have these preexisting conditions, their prices will go up. The Trump administration's junk plan rule is, frankly, bad news for a lot of people who are on junk plans if and when they actually need healthcare insurance, but it is also really terrible news for the 130 million Americans who have preexisting conditions, who are likely going to see their insurance rates skyrocket. Next week we are going to have a vote on the floor of the U.S. Senate, a vote on a resolution of disapproval for the administration's junk plan guidance. I have listened for a long time to Members of the Senate on both sides of the aisle talk about how the one thing we agree on is that we need to protect people with preexisting conditions, and though many of our Republican colleagues might not support the Affordable Care Act, they do agree that we should support people with preexisting conditions, which I generally read to mean that we should make sure we don't pass legislation and we don't let the administration do anything that will make it even harder than it already is to live with a cancer diagnosis or a diagnosis of serious heart disease. Yet it is completely clear that the Trump administration's guidance is going to make life a lot worse for people with preexisting conditions, for those who go on the junk plans, and for those who stay behind. Here is a quote from an article in The Atlantic magazine, which did a summary of these junk plans and what they are like and, frankly, how important they are to insurance companies. The article says that these short-term junk plans ``make up a high-profit portion'' of the insurance industry's business. They are largely designed to rake in premiums, even as they offer little in return. And even when they do pay for things, they often provide confusing or conflicting protocols for making claims. Collectively, short-term plans can leave thousands of people functionally uninsured or underinsured without addressing or lowering real systemwide costs. That is the story of junk plans. They are a pretty good deal for the insurance industry, which is why they have been pushing the Trump administration to allow more of these junk plans to be sold. They are a good deal for the insurance companies because ultimately they don't require the insurance companies to pay out a lot in benefits, but they ultimately make a ton for the insurance companies in the premiums they collect. It is time for everybody in this body who has stood up and said that they support individuals with preexisting conditions to vote that way. Next week, we will have an opportunity to stop in its tracks the Trump administration's rule allowing for more of these junk plans to be sold to consumers. Because we know the House of Representatives will join us, we now have the chance to actually do something about it and stop this erosion of healthcare for people with preexisting conditions before it is too late. I get that the country and this Congress are rightly consumed with the ongoing scandal surrounding the impeachment inquiry and the recent heartbreaking, unconscionable events in Syria, but that doesn't mean folks in our States are as concerned with those headline-grabbing issues as we are. They still have to make their budgets balance every single month, and they are deeply worried--at least those families I talked to in Connecticut who are still struggling with serious illnesses--about our ability to make sure the protections for preexisting conditions, which were a lifeline for millions of Americans when we passed the Affordable Care Act, are not undermined by this President. We have a chance to step up and do something about it next week. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, the most sacred, the most important, and the most profound responsibility that a President of the United States has is to keep Americans safe. Everything else that we care about--the citizens of this great Nation, the best Nation in the planet--matters very little if our physical safety and the physical safety of our families and our loved ones aren't assured. That is job No. 1 for the President of the United States. I believe the President has likely committed offenses that are worthy of impeachment, and I think it is likely that information is going to emerge from the House's inquiry that would present Republicans with clear evidence that the President's abuse of office has been serious. Obviously, we need to wait for the articles of impeachment to arrive in the Senate--if they do arrive--before any of us decide our vote on removal, but the publicly stipulated facts already surrounding the President's shadow foreign policy designed not to advance the national interests but his personal political interests are damning. So far, my Republican friends have rallied to the President's side, despite public opinion moving pretty quickly against the President and in favor of an inquiry in the House. So today I want to use my time on the floor to ask just a simple question of my Republican colleagues. I want to ask what the costs are to the physical safety of the Nation of continuing to protect the President from the consequences of his misdeeds because as we gather in the Senate for our fall session, we are watching American national security policy go completely and fully off the rails. Our global reputation and our credibility have been shattered to pieces, and no one knows whether they can be reassembled. Our Nation's defenses have never been weaker. Our enemies are gathering strength by the day. Fear of American power is waning. Our global system of alliances is falling apart. Our friends are turning away from America because we are a demonstrably unreliable partner, and those friends may never come back. Right now, before our eyes, American power is in a free fall, and our Nation's safety is at risk. American citizens are looking to this place for leadership, but when they lift up the hood looking for steely-eyed patriots, all they are finding are blind partisans. What is the cost, I ask my colleagues, of letting America continue to slide into global irrelevancy? How many American lives are going to be ultimately lost because we sat on the sidelines and we let American influence fade as our President becomes a toxic commodity, the butt of jokes, and an international pariah? What must it take for this body to put aside party and come together to salvage our shrinking American security? I want to take a few moments--a few more than I normally take when I come down to the floor--to take my colleagues on a tour of the world right now just so everybody understands how dangerous the situation has gotten, to understand just how broad the scope of our foreign policy dysfunction is right now, because just maybe--maybe--if you see the crisis all in one map, all in one summary, my colleagues might wake up to the magnitude of this emergency. It is hard to start anywhere but in the Ukraine. The power of the American executive branch has no equal. No individual in the world has more power than Donald Trump has today. That power comes with responsibility and guardrails. The one firm promise that a President must make to those he governs is to use the powers of the Oval Office for the national interest and not for his personal or financial interest. But it is now clear beyond a reasonable doubt after all this testimony--much of it from Republicans before the House--that President Trump has turned our support for Ukraine into a personal poker chip to be cashed in in order to get Ukraine to help him destroy his political rivals. This just isn't allowed in a democracy. The damage done by Trump's corruption of the Ukraine relationship is far beyond this broken covenant with the American people. He pulled essential assistance to Ukraine just when their new President needed U.S. support the most. Trump has weakened Ukraine dramatically by pulling them into this mess, and Russia is the beneficiary. Make no mistake--Putin has won for the time being, and those fighting for democracy have lost for the time being, sold out by their fair-weather American friends who are more interested in destroying the President's political opponents than supporting Ukraine. Now, other nations on Russia's and China's periphery, wondering whether to simply acquiesce to the bullying dominance of their neighbors or put up a fight for independence, now are less likely to do the latter, knowing that the United States is there only to help if their nation fulfills our President's personal requests. The world's eyes this week are down here in Syria, where the President has engaged in one of the worst, most abominable acts of double-cross in the history of the American Presidency. We convinced the Kurdish military to fight ISIS forces for us. We convinced them to take down their defense against a potential Turkish invasion because we promised to protect them. And then, out of nowhere, a week and a half ago, Trump stabbed the Kurds in the back. He announced the pullback of our forces and invited by press release the Turkish army to march into Syria and destroy our ally, the Kurds, whom today he has denigrated by telling the world that they are not actually as good fighters as everybody says they are. The damage to our Nation's security done by this one single act is almost too comprehensive to list in one speech. ISIS detainees have escaped their jail cells and are now likely reconstituting and possibly readying new attacks against the United States. They can plot without fear of interruption because the Kurds have ended their fight against ISIS to try to survive this Turkish offensive. Now, in addition to ISIS, Russia, the Syrian regime, and the Iranians all grew stronger in Syria overnight as we stood down, and they will quickly reap the benefits of Trump's abandonment of the Kurds. It is a nightmare in Syria today, and it is going to get much worse before it gets better. Let's move down to China, where President-for-life Xi Jinping has been steadily consolidating power, building a model of totalitarian control that denies basic human rights to its population of 1.4 billion. The United States has watched from the sidelines as China not only conducts cultural genocide against its Muslim population in its own country but also grows its global clout and exports its model and technology of repression around the world. China's military continues to gain in strength and push their unlawful territorial claims further in the Western Pacific. We do virtually nothing. China's Belt and Road Initiative is forging linkages across the globe, building foundations for long-term technological, economic, and strategic dominance. The United States stands on the sidelines under the Trump administration. The sum total of our bilateral interactions thus far with China has been a bungled, disastrous, job-killing trade war. It is a trade war that really only made sense in Trump's campaign speeches but never had a chance to succeed without the help of other potential partners that the President never tried to enlist. Every single day, Trump is losing the trade war badly. Our trade deficit with China isn't going down; it is going up. The tariffs on Chinese imports could cost middle-class American consumers $1,000 a year, and our economy has slowed down and is on its way to potentially losing 300,000 jobs because of the trade war. It is an unmitigated economic disaster for our Nation, and this nightmare, like all the others, seems to be getting worse. All the while, China forges ahead to corner the market on next-generation technologies like 5G, drones, and artificial intelligence, leaving America and American companies potentially shut out of these markets. Nowhere has China's heavyhanded repression been more apparent than right here in Hong Kong. Yet again, we have been totally absent. In Hong Kong, brave, pro-democracy protesters should be seen as America's best friends--Chinese people who are risking everything to fight for basic freedoms in an increasingly totalitarian state. There is no better way to undermine China's unfair trade model than to promote the rights of its consumers and its citizens. But Trump promised the Chinese regime that he would offer no support to the Hong Kong protesters--an unconscionable promise that he has kept--while China runs circles around him on trade talks. Staying in Asia, let's run right up the road to the most immediate and terrifying existential threat: a nuclear-armed homicidal dictator with the capacity and willingness to nuke us and our allies in the region--North Korea. A lot of ink has been spilled on the pomp and circumstance of Trump's summits and the ongoing love affair that he claims with Kim Jong Un, but what has actually been the result of nearly 3 years of Trump's North Korean diplomacy besides stroking his ego? The answer is nothing. Kim continues to fire missiles into the Sea of Japan. He continues to quietly build his nuclear stockpile. Even the freeze on nuclear long-range missile tests is temporary, and the North Koreans are warning they might resume that at the end of the year. Meanwhile, we abandoned the South Koreans, we canceled our joint military exercises, and we nearly withdrew our troops entirely. Kim got international recognition and essentially a free pass to keep building his arsenal and making it more deadly while we weakened all of our regional alliances. America and the world are dramatically less safe right now. All over the world, in fact, dictators and would-be dictators are racking up stunning records of human rights abuses right now because they know that under President Trump, America will really raise no issue and no protests. Go down here to the Philippines, for instance, where there have been 20,000 people who have vanished in the extrajudicial massacres by President Duterte. No protests from the United States, and 20,000 have vanished. Thousands of political dissidents are being locked up in places like Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia--these are supposed U.S. allies--and have no one to speak for them because America now doesn't do anything about civil rights or human rights. We have vanished from the human rights playing field. In Saudi Arabia, in fact, their leadership felt so emboldened by Trump's embrace of brutal strongmen that they kidnapped an American resident who was critical of the Saudi regime. They chopped him to pieces, and then they got rid of the body parts. The dots are piling up in the Middle East. The response from the United States to Jamal Khashoggi's murder was a visit to Riyadh by the American Secretary of State for a smiling photo op to make sure that every foreign leader in every corner of the world recognized that human rights abuses would be forgiven pretty immediately by this new American regime. Elsewhere in the Middle East--I don't know that I can just keep on piling up more and more dots, but elsewhere in the Middle East, things are falling apart fast due mostly to the Trump administration's incompetence. It started with this nonsensical fracture of relations between Saudi Arabia and another key U.S. Gulf ally, Qatar. It was the kind of disruption that, frankly, would normally be papered over and fixed by a competent U.S. administration probably in days, but 3 years later, the two countries--Saudi Arabia and Qatar--still aren't talking, largely because we did nothing to fix it. Making matters worse, Saudi Arabia and their one remaining friend in the region, UAE, aren't getting along now either. Under Trump, the war in Yemen began to rage out of control. Tens of thousands of innocent Yemenis, many of them little children, died needlessly as Trump piled more weapons and more bombs into the war and did really nothing to try to find a peace agreement between the parties who for a year had been begging the United States to step in and play a traditional role as mediator. The conflict has raged on for so long due to Trump's unwillingness to use America's diplomatic muscle that events on the ground have become so chaotic that the Saudis and the Emiratis have now parted ways. Now, with the Qataris, the Saudis, and the Emiratis all on different wavelengths, the potential for proxy wars between these wealthy nations could get much worse all over the Middle East. In Iran, right next door, the campaign of blind escalation and provocation has been disastrous. Every one of the President's national security advisors told him to stay in the Iran nuclear agreement and focus his energies on addressing Iran's other malevolent behavior in the region, like their ballistic missile program or their support for terrorist organizations. Trump ignored all his advisors, like he has ignored all the rest of the counsel he has received on major foreign policy matters, and he canceled the agreement and implemented a series of unilateral sanctions against Iran. He coordinated with absolutely no one. Now, Iran, feeling cornered but also not feeling particularly vulnerable, given the fact that America couldn't recruit any of our friends to our new anti-Iran campaign, hit back against oil tankers, American drones, and Saudi pipelines. We now seem perpetually on the precipice of war with Iran. Meanwhile, they have restarted parts of their shuttered nuclear program. We haven't convinced a single nation to help us build new sanctions, and there is absolutely no chance that Trump is going to secure a better deal than the JCPOA before he leaves office in just over a year. Iran is a bigger menace than before he took office. They just scored another major victory with Trump's abandonment of the Kurds, and an anti-Iran coalition that the United States methodically built under Barack Obama has vanished, perhaps never again to be resurrected. In this very red region of the world right now, the only leader who has been happy with Trump's dangerous, bizarre, nonstrategy on Iran has been Benjamin Netanyahu, but he may not be in power much longer, and his alliance with Trump has left his successor a frightening legacy. Under Trump's watch, the two-state solution in Israel--a longtime bipartisan lynchpin of American policy in the Middle East--has effectively fallen apart. Trump has allowed Israel to take steps that make a future Palestinian state almost impossible. For 3 years, he has put his son-in-law--whose only experience was using his father's money to buy real estate--in charge of brokering peace between Israel and the Palestinians. It was a joke. Everybody knew it, but since Trump was President, everybody had to play along. Now there is no peace plan. There was never going to be a peace plan, and the chances for one are almost nonexistent after 3 years of the Trump administration. Down in Libya, Trump admittedly inherited a pretty miserable situation, but somehow, like everything else, he managed to make it worse. The country has been fractured for years, as rival militias with a host of foreign patrons have been fighting a civil war that has created a vacuum that has been filled in by extremists and a migrant crisis that continues to expand. But instead of doing the hard work of diplomacy to try to get the warring parties back to the table, instead, Trump threw his support--his personal support--behind General Haftar, upending years of American diplomacy and endorsing Haftar's plan to try to take Tripoli by force. As a result, the fighting there continues, peace talks are failing, and the humanitarian crisis grows by the day. One of the consequences of this Trump death spiral in Libya and the Middle East is that the economic and political refugees continue to flow into Europe, which simply isn't politically ready to accept this rate of inflow, and by slashing the number of refugees allowed in the United States from over 100,000 to 18,000, we have communicated to the Europeans that we have no interest in helping. Just like everything else, Trump has made the assimilation of the Muslim immigrants into Europe even harder by serving as a model for racist, xenophobic demagogues, and rightwing nationalist political parties who want to bring Trump's form of political nativism into Europe. Nationalist political parties are on the rise all across the West, and Trump is absolutely central to their development. He gravitates not toward Angela Merkel, whose courageous leadership has held the EU together through all these crises, but he hews to Viktor Orban, who has stoked the embers of nationalism to take Hungary down a dark path. Trump and his nationalist compatriots weaponize these fears of immigration and cultural change to justify really bad policies--from labeling journalists as enemies of the state to putting kids in cages. And when rightwing groups try to copy Trump's success and deploy his playbook in countries all throughout Europe, he doesn't stand up and object, as the leader of the free world should; he offers a wink and a nod or sometimes a warm embrace. Trump doesn't stop there in his deliberate attempts to undermine European democracy. He has carried out a systematic, purposeful campaign to weaken the European Union and NATO. By now, we have all grown used to Trump's attacks on globalism, but it is still pretty extraordinary that we have a President who just doesn't attack the specific institutions he loathes, such as the U.N., the EU, or NATO; he levies regular broadsides against the entire concept of global cooperation. He sees multilateralism as a weakness, and his cheerleading of Britain out the door of the EU and his constant attacks on NATO, even to the point of wondering out loud if the United States would defend allies if attacked risks taking down the entire post-World War II order. That would be a disaster for us and a gift to countries like China, Russia, India, and nonstate actors such as al-Qaida and ISIS. When it comes to our relations with Europe, Trump reserves his greatest multilateral animus for global attempts to address climate change. The Paris Agreement wasn't even a binding commitment on the United States, but Trump felt so strongly that climate change was a Chinese-perpetrated hoax--unwind that riddle for me--that he pulled us out of the agreement in a big, grand, festive ceremony at the White House. Global climate catastrophe is coming if we don't do anything. In fact, it is already here. The story of Syria's descent into madness can partially be told through the tale of successive global warming- connected droughts that forced farmers into overcrowded cities that weren't ready for those population surges. Trump's hostility to climate action is one of his most unforgiveable global legacies, and the next President may not have enough time or political capital to make up the ground we have lost on climate change, especially with European partners. Speaking of failure to capitalize on opportunities, let's spin the globe back to our own hemisphere, where, according to the script, things couldn't be going much worse. Here in the Americas everything that Trump has touched thus far has fallen apart, and the United States is weaker regionally than ever before. Trump's nativism is his political calling card, but his own policies seem to encourage more migration to the United States, not less of it. President Trump's decision to cut off foreign assistance to Central American countries because they weren't doing enough to stop migration is lunacy. President Obama's program of investing in Central American security so that less of their citizens felt the need to flee to America was beginning to work, and Trump gave it all away simply to provide fuel to his domestic political agenda. Further south, U.S.-Venezuela policy is one of the few times Trump's Presidency stood up to a dictator. Unfortunately, because Trump doesn't know how to do foreign policy, he botched that intervention too. It has been really embarrassing to watch this administration repeatedly and wrongly claim that the Maduro regime is on the verge of collapse. They did it in January, when Juan Guaido swore himself in as interim President. They did it again in February, when they said deploying American aid along the border would trigger the regime's fall, and they did it again in April in a lead-up to a military uprising that went nowhere. The White House has engaged in tough talk only to see Maduro's hold on power endure. Trump played all his cards on this crisis right in the first few days, like a nervous teenager. Now we are left sanctioning the Venezuelan people and recognizing a leader of the country who isn't really the leader of that country and probably isn't going to be the leader of that country. It is yet another failure that makes us look weak and foolish. We make a play and can't back it up. It is hard to be scared of the United States when everything we try to do goes wrong. Let's move back over to the African Continent for a moment. Now, as a candidate, Trump repeatedly stoked fears of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, tweeting that the United States ``must immediately stop all flights from EBOLA infected countries or the plague will start to spread inside our borders!'' Of course, this didn't make any sense, and it doesn't make any sense now. We have known for ages that travel bans aren't actually the best way to deal with an outbreak of disease, but since he has become President, the Trump administration has asked Congress to rescind $252 million that had been put aside to deal with the virus. He ousted the NSC's top biodefense expert and repeatedly sought to slash funding for global health programs. Sadly, Trump's default response to epidemics and barriers of exclusion, defunding preventive measures, and opting to feed panic rather than deploy an orderly response that is driven by science and led by scientists only hurts our ability to control outbreaks that are present today and in the future. Finally, Denmark. Trump managed to even screw up our relationship with Denmark, which many of us would have thought was impossible. Out of an episode of ``The Simpsons,'' Trump canceled a diplomatic meeting with Denmark's leader because they wouldn't agree to sell us Greenland. It sounds funny, but it is an example of the relatively small things compared to the big world screw-ups that happen every day that only get a few days of media attention. Denmark is one of our strongest NATO allies. At the height of the war in Afghanistan, they had one of the highest numbers of troops per capita fighting alongside us. They hold the key to blocking a Russian gas pipeline that could avoid Ukraine, damaging their economy, and come into Europe, but now we have managed to even make Denmark an adversary. I know it sounds implausible, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. It is a policy massacre everywhere. The world is on fire, and in most places Trump is one of the arsonists. Meanwhile, who is benefiting? Across the board, America's enemies and our competitors are rubbing their hands with delight as we score own goal after own goal. Putin, Xi, Erdogan, Kim, the hard-liners in Iran, could not have scripted a better opportunity to gain power for themselves at our expense. I say that Trump's foreign policy is a global joke, but calling what he does policy is probably unfair. He doesn't really care to take the time to learn about the world. He doesn't read his briefings. He makes it up day by day, with his personal political priorities, his jealousies, and his headline addiction guiding his decisions rather than anything connected to our actual national security interests. Our foreign policy is in complete, utter, total meltdown, and it is time for all of us to face facts. You can't impeach a President because you disagree with their policies, but this is beyond a policy disagreement. This is a President who has compromised our Nation's integrity and our credibility, who has put in jeopardy the safety of our citizens, especially as ISIS breaks out of detainment and looks to regroup to threaten America again in Syria. These kinds of things--the perversion of the powers of the Presidency--are not allowed in a democracy. Our refusal to accept this kind of behavior is what separates us from all the tin-pot dictatorships around the world. I hope, eventually, my Republican colleagues see this, but I also want my Republican colleagues who spend their time thinking of themselves as bulwarks of national security to see the damage, much of it irreparable, that Trump is doing to our position in the world. Why continue to offer him this unconditional protection from an impeachment inquiry if the cost of his staying in office is the shattering of our reputation around the world? Why continue to defend him if his actions everywhere are causing the world to fall apart--and it is falling apart in every part of the globe. Everything this administration has touched has gotten worse. The scariest part is that this President and this administration still have 14 more months to do even more damage. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I just listened to the majority leader come to the floor and tell Members of the Senate that they should close their eyes and box their ears to the current scandal that is engulfing the White House and the Trump administration. I heard the majority leader accuse Democrats of ``politicizing'' President Trump's demand that the Government of Ukraine interfere in the 2020 election. That is a laughable charge, and it is not going to silence us on this matter of grave importance. First of all, I have no idea what it means to politicize something these days. News flash: We are politicians. We practice politics. That is our job. I get told very often that I am politicizing gun violence when I suggest that maybe we should pass laws in order to change the daily trajectory of violence in this country. Yet the very reason we are here is to protect the safety of our constituents and to protect the sanctity of our democracy. What we are standing up for right now is the rule of law, and I hope, over the course of this week, my Republican colleagues will join us in that basic responsibility that Members of the Senate and House of Representatives have. We see the rule of law slipping away from us right now. We see our Nation being turned into a banana republic where the President can do anything he wants and turn the organs of state into his permanent political machine--his means of crushing his opponents. Today we see that many of my Republican colleagues are not just letting it happen but facilitating it. There has to be a line that the President cannot cross. There has to be a moment when we all stand up and say: This has gone too far. The President has admitted this weekend to asking a foreign leader to open an investigation into one of his political opponents as a means of advancing himself politically. That is not allowed in a democracy. That fundamentally corrupts the foreign policy of our Nation. It makes us all less safe when foreign governments now wonder whether they are going to be enlisted into the political operation of the President of the United States. This has always been a no-go area for Democratic and Republican administrations because we understand the vast power the Presidency has. If the President chooses to use that power and the leverage he has over people in this country and in other countries to do his political bidding, then there is nothing to protect any of us from the executive branch. The idea that the President can openly admit that he is asking a foreign government to get involved in his political reelection campaign--and believe that he will get away with it--suggests a belief in the impunity surrounding his office. We should all be concerned about that. At the very least, if my Republican colleagues don't share my grave alarm at the disclosures of the last 48 hours, then we should at least agree that the whistleblower complaint needs to come before the Congress unredacted. There is no fuzzy penumbra around this law. It is clear as day. If a whistleblower makes a complaint that is deemed urgent in nature, it must be presented to the Congress. The President cannot hold it back; the executive branch cannot make it a secret. What makes it worse is that the President seems to be playing a game with this whistleblower complaint. He seems to be teasing out little bits of information that are contained in it here and there in order to play to his political advantage. It is even worse than holding back the complaint from us. He is now using pieces of it to try to gain advantage over his political opponents. At the very least, over the next 24 hours, we need to come to a conclusion that the law needs to be followed. If the President can withhold from us whistleblower complaints that are not flattering to him--that potentially implicate him--then what is the point of having a whistleblower law? What is the point of having a process to protect people who are uncovering corruption in the administration if the administration can keep those complaints secret? Let's just be honest. If this President gets away with it, the next Democratic President can get away with it, and the next Republican President can get away with it. We will have lost all of our power to see into the wrongdoing of an administration. There will be a day when Republicans want to see into potential wrongdoing of an administration of the opposite party, but that will be all gone if we don't, at the very least, come to the conclusion that we need to see it as the law states. That is just the beginning because I think--as the President has advertised--that complaint is going to show he did, indeed, try to pressure a foreign government to conduct investigations into one of his political opponents. I think this is a really serious moment for the country. I think it is a really serious moment for the prerogatives of the article I branch. I understand that my Republican colleagues may not be ready to talk about consequences for the administration for their wrongdoing, but, at the very least, we need to come together and make sure we have all of the information necessary. By the way, it doesn't end with the whistleblower complaint because the whistleblower complaint is likely going to raise even more questions that we are going to have to answer. We have a duty to then go out and find additional information. For many, the President's admission of guilt may be enough to make a determination about what the next steps are. But for those who aren't persuaded that there have to be consequences for the President's admission of corruption, then we should use the organs at our disposal to try to figure out the rest of the details surrounding this incident or series of incidents. What kinds of contacts have the President's representatives been having with the Ukrainian Government? Has the State Department been involved in trying to do the President's political bidding in and around Ukraine? How many people in the administration knew about this? Who tried to stop it? Who has been involved in keeping the whistleblower complaint from us? There are so many questions that need to be answered here, and it should be our responsibility to get to the bottom of all of them. I think this is a really serious moment for this country. I think the minute the President is able to turn the foreign policy of this Nation into a vehicle for his own political advancement is the day that democracy, as we know it, slips away from us. If we aren't ready to have a bipartisan conversation about consequences and remedies this week, then let's at least have some bipartisan consensus in the way that this place used to have all the time, making sure that we have all of the information necessary to move forward. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MURPHY

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

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, let me thank, once again, my colleagues for being on the floor with us this evening, for the compelling testimony of Senator Schatz, Senator Casey, Senator Brown, Senator Van Hollen, and so many others who have joined us this evening. We have a few more who will come down later in the evening. I want to take a moment to put a face on this issue. There are 100 Americans who are killed every day by guns. The majority of these are suicides, but many are homicides, and many are accidental shootings and domestic homicides. Shootings in this country happen at a rate 10 times that of any other high-income nation. This is a uniquely American epidemic. Senator Schatz very aptly pointed out that it can't be because of mental health because we have no more mental illness in this country than any other nation does. It can't be because of lack of law enforcement resources; we spend just as much money, if not more, on law enforcement than any other country in the world. It is not because we put less money into treatment for mental illness; we put more money, on a per capita basis, than other nations do. To explain our abnormally high rate of gun violence--10 times that of other high-income nations--you have to tell a story of the proliferation of dangerous weapons, of the ability of almost anyone, regardless of their criminal history or their history of mental illness, to get their hands on a weapon. Nowhere else in the high- income world is it so easy to get your hands on a weapon and often a weapon of mass destruction. Leo Spencer was born an only child. He grew up in Bridgeport, CT, but he was far from an only child in his mind. His cousins were like his siblings. He spent summer after summer after summer with them in Boston, in Connecticut, in Cape Verde, and in St. Thomas. He was known as ``Lil Bill.'' His friends described him affectionately as an amazing person, a phenomenal soul, the greatest friend they ever had, and the best family member they knew. A family member said Leo was ``a simple man who loved to keep to himself, but deep down inside he was a free spirit that wanted nothing more than to make people laugh. Always joking around, he kept us on our toes, and his smile lit up the room.'' Another friend said: Never one to follow trends, Leo was intent on making his own path through hard work and unparalleled ambition. He was a creative soul with a deep love for expressing himself through music and loved fiercely without bounds. Leo placed a priority on making sure his family and friends were happy. He made each person feel like they were the most important person in the world. He loved his parents. He did everything he could for them. He wanted to take care of his mom the way she took care of him. On September 8 of 2019, just a few days ago, Leo was shot in the head and the neck while sitting in the passenger seat of a friend's car. His friend hit the accelerator and drove him as fast as he could to Bridgeport Hospital, but he was pronounced dead shortly thereafter. Leo Spencer is 1 of the 100 Americans who die every day from gun violence. It is so much bigger than Leo. I mentioned Leo's cousins, his family members, and his friends. Their lives will never be the same either, forever altered. Studies show that when 1 person dies from a gunshot wound, there are 20 other people who experience life-altering trauma. It becomes a cycle that becomes hard to get out of. I will talk a little bit later about Sandy Hook, CT, but Sandy Hook will never ever be the same--never--after what that community has been through. Leo, whether he knew it or not, may already have been affected by gun violence because when you grow up in places like Bridgeport, where kids literally fear for their lives when they are walking to and from school, the trauma associated with the fear of losing your life from gun violence ruins your brain. We call this a public health epidemic, not to be cute with our words but because that is exactly what it is. When you don't know whether you are going to make it through the rest of the week as a child--and studies show that, criminally, a high number of young people of color in this country living in urban environments that are violent don't believe they are going to live past 25 years old--when that is your belief, something happens to your brain. Most of us in this Chamber have probably confronted only once or twice in our lives a fight-or-flight moment. That is a moment in your life where you face a risk that is so great, a danger that is so acute, that you have to make a decision in a split second: Do you fight or do you run? Our bodies are designed to rush into our brains a hormone called cortisol that helps us make that quick decision. Many of us may never have actually faced that moment, and, frankly, I don't hope that anyone ever has. But when you grow up in a place like the east end of Bridgeport, you face that decision: Fight or flee on a weekly basis. What doctors will tell you is that the brains of these kids who grow up in these neighborhoods are literally bathed in cortisol. Cortisol, when it comes in and out in an instant once or twice in your life, can be helpful. But when it is flowing through your circuitry on a regular basis, it literally corrupts your brain. It corrupts your brain. So it is no coincidence that all of the ``underperforming'' schools in this country are in the violent neighborhoods because these kids show up with brains that cannot learn, brains that cannot cope and cannot create lasting relationships, brains that have been atrophied by the daily fear for their lives and their daily experience. This Congress has done nothing--nothing--to address their reality. We are here on the floor today to tell you about people like Leo so that maybe our colleagues who aren't responding to the numbers may respond to the stories of those lives that have been lost. Let me tell you another one. Over the winter, we shut down the government for an unacceptable period of time. We were all figuring out what to do with our days when we weren't legislating. I decided one day to take a trip to Baltimore. Baltimore, in some years, has been the most violent city in the country with the most kids who are going through this life-altering cycle of trauma. But I had heard about a program in an elementary school that was teaching kids how to be entrepreneurs and was giving them a vision for their lives after growing up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Baltimore. They are trying to give them a pathway or a ray of sunshine in their lives. I went up to talk to the person who ran that program. Her name is Joni Holifield. She and I sat down in a classroom on the second floor of Matthew Henson Elementary School, and she started to explain to me her path out of the corporate world into programming for kids at schools like Matthew Henson and what she thought that program could bring to those kids. In the middle of this conversation, the intercom starts blaring a recorded message: code green, code green, code green. I didn't know what a code green was. Joni didn't know what a code green was. Shortly thereafter, a teacher opened the door to our classroom and yelled: Shut the blinds. Turn off the lights. We did as instructed, and we sat there a little nervous, not knowing what a code green was. Shortly thereafter, someone from the main office, knowing that there was a U.S. Senator in a second floor classroom, called up. Joni answered the phone and was told that a code green means there has been a shooting in the proximity of the school and that the school is on lockdown. The day that I was there at this elementary school in Baltimore, there was a shooting within a block or two of the school. Here is what I found out. That morning there had been a delay in school starting. It had snowed that morning, so I walked in with all the rest of the kids at around 9:30, 10 o'clock. About the same time that I was showing up at the school that morning, a young man by the name of Corey Dodd brought his two little twin girls to school. He was doing the drop-off for his wife, who was home tending to their relatively newborn child. Corey decided to bring the kids to school that morning himself. He drove home a couple of blocks away after dropping the twins off, probably right about the time that I was walking upstairs to the second floor. When he got out of his car, he was shot to death. One of his other little daughters always sits at the door waiting for her dad to come home, and she was there waiting for Corey. Her mom had to tell her that her dad was never coming home. He had been shot outside of their house that morning. As that code green was happening inside that elementary school--and the kids were probably having a little bit of fun, wondering when the lights were going to come back on--there were two little girls who were never going to see their father again and who were going to be told in a matter of hours that this shooting had taken the life of their dad. And every single kid in that school was going to be wondering: Is it going to be my dad next? Is it going to be my mom next? That cycle of trauma and that cortisol that bathes kids' brains were going to be reality once again for all of these kids in this neighborhood. That is just one day that I happened to be in Baltimore. Imagine that it isn't just coincidence. Imagine that is the reality day after day after day for kids all across this country. Why are we doing nothing? Why are we sitting on our hands? Why are my Republican colleagues waiting for the President to give them direction? It would be one thing if we didn't know what to do--if we were overflowing with compassion for those two little twin girls in Baltimore, MD, and for the family of Leo Spencer in Bridgeport and we just couldn't figure out what would make the situation better. That is not the case. We know what will make the situation better. There is no mystery about it. In my State of Connecticut, we passed a law requiring all handgun buyers to pass a background check as part of the permit process. Studies show that there was a 40 percent reduction in the gun homicide rate after Connecticut passed that law. You might say: OK, well, that is just one State. And 40 percent--that is pretty serious. That is a pretty big return on one change in the law. Give me another State, you say. OK, let's take a look at Missouri, which did the opposite. A few years ago, it repealed its purchase permit law that requires you to get a background check with every sale of a weapon in Missouri. Guess what happened. A year later, gun homicides went up by 23 percent, controlling for every other factor that could have explained it. In fact, during that period of time, gun homicide rates were going down in all the States around Missouri, and they went up in Missouri. Then they found out that, in fact, in other States, what did go up in those other States was the number of weapons used in crimes that came from Missouri because all of a sudden you didn't need a background check in Missouri. So if you wanted to traffic guns from another State, Missouri was the place to get them. Across the board, when you look at all of the States' experiences, you don't get 40 percent and 23 percent everywhere, but, on average, States that have background checks have 15 percent lower homicide rates than States that don't have them. If we did this on a national basis, even States that have universal background checks would benefit. Why? Because the guns that are being used in Connecticut aren't coming from Connecticut. They are coming from States with--you guessed it--no universal background checks. The guns being used in Chicago don't come from Chicago. The guns being used for crimes in New York City don't come from New York City. One percent of guns used in crimes in New York City come from New Jersey. Do you know why? New Jersey has universal background checks. Those guns are coming up from South Carolina and Georgia and places where you can go to a gun show and get a whole truckload of guns without having to ever go through a background check. Background checks work. They are the most impactful public policy measure. Since the background check law was passed in the midnineties, over 3.5 million sales have been blocked to violent criminals and other prohibited individuals, and that is just the tip of the iceberg because those are the people who actually have the gall to set foot in a gun store, knowing that they have an offense in their history that would prohibit them from buying a gun--maybe not, knowing that. But these are the people who went into the gun store and tried to buy a gun and got denied. There are millions and millions more people who wanted guns but couldn't get them and didn't go into the gun store in the first place. The problem is, today, getting that denial from the gun store is not really a barrier to buying a gun because 20, 30 percent of gun sales now happen without a background check. They happen in a private sale between one person and another. They happen at gun shows, which are forums that don't require, under Federal law, background checks. A man in Odessa, TX, failed a background check because he had been diagnosed by a clinician as seriously mentally ill. That didn't stop him from getting a gun. He just found a private seller; he found another way. The private seller gave him a gun and didn't require him to go through a background check. He took that gun, and he used it to kill 7 people and injure 20 more. I don't think you have to pass a law to fit the last mass shooting. I think that is a ridiculous trap that people try to put us in. This isn't the only mass shooting in which universal background checks could have changed the outcome. One of the first mass shootings that sits in my consciousness is that in Columbine as another example of a shooter who got a gun outside the background check system who couldn't have gotten one through it. So whether you want anecdotal evidence or statistical data, I have it all. Background checks work. Here is what is so maddening. People love background checks. Apple pie, baseball, and grandma--none of them are as popular as background checks are. Ninety percent of Americans like background checks. Show me any other public policy today in the United States of America that gets 90 percent support in this country; 80 percent of gun owners and 70 percent of NRA members, everybody wants background checks--universal background checks. They don't want Manchin-Toomey, which just expands background checks to commercial sales. They want H.R. 8. They want H.R. 8, which has passed the House of Representatives and has been sitting on the floor of the U.S. Senate for 202 days. That is what Americans want. Ninety percent of Americans support H.R. 8. Don't tell me that this issue is controversial. It is just controversial in this bubble. It is not controversial out in the American public, and it is not a blue State or a red State issue. Background checks are just as popular in Georgia as they are in Connecticut. As Senator Schatz said, we don't have to wait for the President to tell us what to do. Senator McConnell has a different copy of the Constitution than I have. My copy of the Constitution says that none of us are required to get permission slips from the President before we act or before we do something that we think is good for the country. It is wild to me how the Republican leadership is so eager to advertise that the Senate will do nothing unless President Trump gives it permission. He is not the most popular guy. I don't know why my friends on the Republican side would just openly admit that they don't act unless the President tells them it is OK. That is not how it has to be. We can make the decision ourselves, and on this one, every single person here should do it because it is the right thing, and it is also going to win you a lot of support back home. I have a few more colleagues who want to say a few words, and then I may wrap up at the end. I want to finish, in my last 5 minutes or so, by reading something to you. I apologize to my friend Neil Heslin because I made a commitment to read this every Father's Day after the shooting in Sandy Hook. I forgot to do it this year. This is a makeup effort. I don't want to talk too much about what happened at Sandy Hook this evening. I have spent plenty of time talking to my colleagues about it. Unfortunately, there is a macabre club of Senators and Congressmen who have now had to walk with their communities through these horrific mass shootings. Maybe there is not another one like Sandy Hook where 26 7-year-olds lost their lives in a matter of 5 minutes, but they are all terrible. They are all awful. One of the things that happens in the wake of these mass atrocities is that you get to know the victims' families. You get to know the parents, the brothers, and the sisters. They become friends of yours. I feel like I have a personal obligation to the families of Sandy Hook separate and aside from the global obligation I believe I have to human beings in this country to do something about the issue of gun violence. Amongst the parents, one of those whom I have become closest to is a gentleman by the name of Neil Heslin. Jesse Lewis was one of the children who lost their lives that day. Neil has had an up-and-down life--an up-and-down life. He would admit that to you. It hasn't been an easy life for Neil. Jesse was Neil's best friend, not just his son. I tell his story every Father's Day because it is a reminder to all of us who are fathers how none of us are protected from this. Neil thought he was. Neil never ever thought this would happen to him, but it did. It is a reminder that but for the good grace of God, any of us could be a victim, any of us could know a victim. So why sit on our hands and do nothing when we could do something? Let me finish by reading an excerpt from Neil Heslin's testimony that he gave to the U.S. Senate in February 2013, 2 months after his son was shot, and I will wrap up after I finish this page and a half of his testimony. My name is Neil Heslin. Jesse Lewis was my son. He was a boy that loved life and lived it to the fullest. He was my best friend. On December 14, he lost his life at Sandy Hook Elementary because of a gun that nobody needs and nobody should have a right to have. I'm here to tell his story. I know what I am doing here today won't bring my son back, but I hope that maybe if you listen to what I say today and you do something about it--maybe nobody else will have to experience what I have experienced. On December 14, Jesse got up and got ready for school. He was always excited to go to school. I remember on that day that we stopped at the Misty Vale Deli. It's funny the things you remember. I remember Jesse got the sausage, egg and cheese he always gets, with some hot chocolate. And I remember the hug he gave me when I dropped him off. He just held me, and he rubbed my back. I can still feel that hug. And Jesse said ``It's going to be alright. Everything's going to be okay, Dad.'' Looking back, it makes me wonder. What did he know? Did he have some idea about what was about to happen? But at the time I didn't think much of it. I just thought he was being sweet. He was always being sweet like that. He was the kind of kid who used to leave me voice messages where he'd sing me happy birthday even when it wasn't my birthday. I'd ask him about it, and he'd say ``I just wanted to make you feel happy.'' Half the time I felt like he was the parent and I was his son. He had so much wisdom. He would know things, and I would have no idea how he knew. But whatever he said, it was always right. And he would remember things we'd done and places we'd been that I had completely forgotten about. I used to think of him as my tiny adult. He had this inner calm and maturity that just made me feel so much better when I was around him. Other people felt it, too. Teachers would tell me about his laugh, how he made things at school more fun just by being there. If somebody was ever unhappy, Jesse would find a way to make him feel better. If he heard a baby crying he wouldn't stop until he got the kid to smile. Jesse had this idea that you never leave people hurt. If you can help somebody, you do it. If you can make somebody feel better, you do it. If you can leave somebody a little better off, you do it. They tell me that's how he died. I guess we still don't know exactly what happened at that school. Maybe we'll never know. But what people tell me is that Jesse did something different. When he heard the shooting, he didn't run and hide. He started yelling. People disagree on the last thing he said. One person who was there says he yelled ``run.'' Another person said he told everybody to ``run now.'' Ten kids from my son's class made it to safety. I hope to God something Jesse did helped them survive that day. What I know is that Jesse wasn't shot in the back. He took two bullets. The first one grazed the side of his head, but that didn't stop him from yelling. The other hit him in the forehead. Both bullets were fired from the front. That means the last thing my son did was look Adam Lanza straight in the face and scream to his classmates to run. The last thing he saw was that coward's eyes. Jesse grew up with guns, just like I did. I started shooting skeet when I was eight years old. My dad was vice president for years at a local gun club. . . . Jesse actually had an interest in guns. He had a bb gun. . . . I taught him gun safety. He knew it. He could recite it to you. He got it. And I think he would have got what we are talking about today. He liked looking at pictures of army guns, but he knew those [guns] weren't for him. Those were for killing people. Before he died, Jesse and I used to talk about maybe coming to Washington someday. He wanted to go up the Washington monument. When we talked about it last year, Jesse asked if we could come and meet the President. [I'm a] little cynical about politicians. But Jesse believed in you. He learned about you in school and he believed in you. I want to believe in you, too. I know you can't give me Jesse back. Believe me, if I thought you could, I would be asking you for that. But I want to believe that you will think about what I told you here today. I want to believe that you will think about it and then you will do something about it, whatever you can do to make sure that no other father has to see what I've seen. You can start by passing [legislation to take] these senseless weapons out of the hands of people like Adam Lanza. Do something, he said. Do something. Seven years later, we haven't done anything. So we are down here on the floor tonight begging our colleagues to put a bill on the floor. Amend it, debate it, do whatever you want, but let's not stay silent any longer. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I thank my colleagues for their indulgence this evening and those of you who help us keep this floor open. I will make some longer remarks later this evening, but while we have a short break on the floor and await Senator Brown, I want to say a word of appreciation to all of my colleagues who have decided to join us this evening on the floor. This is my first appearance here to talk about the imperative of changing the Nation's gun laws, recognizing that this number--100 Americans killed by guns every single day--is not inevitable. Almost every single one of these murders and suicides and accidental shootings is preventable if we make different choices here on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Our purpose tonight is to try to bring some consistency of effort to a case that we have been making for a very long time. So I will be back here later this evening to walk through the case, as far as I see it, for universal background checks in particular but also for a host of other measures that are broadly popular amongst the American public. One point I will make right now is that this issue is really unique in American politics today. It is not a controversial issue out in America. It is only controversial here inside the political process. In fact, there are very few matters in public life today that are, frankly, more controversial than this issue. When you go out and ask people if they support universal background checks, which is the measure that passed the House of Representatives by a 9-to-1 margin, they support universal background checks. There is almost nothing else in American politics today--I would endeavor to say there is nothing else in American politics today that is as popular as this measure; yet it has this reputation of being a third rail of political discourse here in Washington. I would simply encourage my colleagues to get out there and have conversations with their constituents, to have conversations with members of their own parties, to have conversations with gun owners. You will find that there is a consistency of opinion at least on a large number of pieces of legislation that are before this body. At the top of that list are universal background checks. I have this conversation over and over and over again--and then I will leave the floor to Senator Brown and return later--with the President's supporters, with supporters of the Second Amendment, and with members of the NRA in my State. Of course, I have acquired a reputation of being a forceful and vocal advocate for stronger gun laws in this Nation, and the NRA often targets me in its advertisements and its emails. I will often be confronted by my constituents who will see me at a public event. They will come on a beeline over to me and start confronting me about my agenda to confiscate their weapons or to take away their guns. Of course, I try to disabuse them of that notion, and as soon as I can, I take the conversation to background checks. I say: Listen, let me ask you a question. Do you think that everybody who is buying a gun in this country should have to go through a background check? Almost invariably, the individual, who just moments ago was so confrontational with me about the issue of guns--his defenses drop, and he says: Well, yes. Of course, I support that. Of course, everybody should get a background check before buying a gun. I said: You got one, right? He said: I got one. It was 3- or 4-minutes long. That is not what I am talking about. I object to all of the other things, but, of course, I want background checks. Gun owners support background checks by an 80- to 90-percent margin. NRA members support it. Polls suggest that 75 to 80 percent of NRA members support background checks. This is just one of the least controversial issues that exists out there in the American public today. We are going to have a conversation today about the efficacy of these measures, but we should remember that there are many times when we get deluded into believing something is much more of a vexing political conversation than it truly is, and background checks are on that agenda. At this point, I yield the floor, and I will come back down later for longer remarks. I am glad to be joined this evening by Senator Brown from Ohio.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am going to be joined on the floor over the course of about an hour or so by Members of the Senate who are desperate for our colleagues to wake up and recognize that the time for action to quell the epidemic of gun violence in this country is now. It was also last week. It was also a month ago and a year ago and 6 years ago. It was also nearly 7 years ago, after the shooting in my State of Connecticut that felled 20 little 6- and 7-year-olds attending first grade at Sandy Hook Elementary School. We tend to pay attention to the mass shootings--the ones in Odessa, El Paso, Dayton, and Newtown--but every single day in this country, 93 people die from gunshot wounds. Most of those are suicides, but many of them are homicides, and others are accidental shootings. When you total it up, we are losing about 33,000 people every year from gun violence and gunshot wounds. Those numbers may not be that meaningful to you because it is a big country, but how does that compare to the rest of the world or at least the rest of the high-income world? Well, that is about 10 times higher than other countries of similar income and of similar situation as the United States. Something different is happening here. It is not that we have more mental illness. It is not that we have less mental health treatment. It is not that we have less resources going into law enforcement. The difference is that we have guns spread out all over this Nation, many of them illegal and many of them of a caliber and capacity that were designed for the military in which this slaughter becomes predictable. We have a chance to do something about it right now in the U.S. Congress. We have a chance to try to find some way to come together over some commonsense measures. I just got off the phone--a 40-minute conversation with the President of the United States. I was glad that he was willing to take that amount of time with me, Senator Manchin, and Senator Toomey to talk about whether we can figure out a way to get Republicans and Democrats on board with a proposal to expand background checks to more gun sales in this Nation. In particular, we were talking about expanding background checks to commercial gun sales. That is certainly not as far as I would like to go, but I understand that part of my job here is to argue for my beliefs and my convictions but then try to find a compromise. There is no single legislative initiative that will solve all of these issues, but what we know is, if you want to take the biggest bite out of gun crime as quickly as possible, increasing the number of background checks done in this country is the way to go. All we are trying to do here is make sure that when you buy a gun, you prove that you aren't someone with a serious criminal history or that you aren't someone who has a serious history of mental illness. In 2017, about 170,000 people in this country went into a store, tried to buy a gun, and were denied that sale because they had an offense on their record or a period of time in an inpatient psychiatric unit, which prohibited them from buying a gun. Of those 170,000 sales that were denied, 39 percent of them were convicted felons who had tried to come in and buy a gun, many of them knowing they were likely prohibited from buying those guns. The problem is, that isn't a barrier to buying a weapon--being denied a sale at a gun store. Why do we know that? It is because just a few weeks ago in Texas, a gunman who went in and shot up 7 people who died and 23 who were injured failed a background check because he had been diagnosed by a clinician as mentally ill and had triggered one of those prohibiting clauses, but then he went and bought the gun from a private seller, knowing that he wouldn't have to go through a background check if he bought the weapon from a place in Texas that didn't have a background check attached to it. He then took that weapon and turned it on civilians. This happens over and over again every single day. Estimates are that at least 20 percent of all gun sales in this country happen without a background check. These aren't gifts of guns to a relative or a loaner to somebody who is going to go and use it for hunting on a Saturday or Sunday; this is about legitimate commercial transactions, 20 percent of which, when they involve guns, happen without a background check. We also have plenty of data from States that have decided to expand background checks to make them universal. States requiring universal background checks for all gun sales have homicide rates that are 15 percent lower than States that don't have those laws. In Connecticut, we have research showing that when we extended background checks to all gun sales through a local permitting process, we had a 40-percent reduction in gun homicide rates. Compare that with the State of Missouri, which repealed its permitting law, which was their way of making sure that everybody who buys a gun has to get a background check. They saw a 23-percent increase in firearm homicides immediately after they started allowing people to buy guns without a background check. There is your data. It is pretty incontrovertible. You can get pretty immediate and serious returns--safety returns--if you expand background checks to all gun purchases. But the benefit to a U.S. Senator who has to go back for reelection every 6 years is that not only are background checks as a legislative initiative impactful, they are also very politically popular. In fact, very few things are more popular than expanding background checks to more gun sales. Ninety percent of Americans want universal background checks. Apple pie is not that popular. Baseball is not that popular. Background checks are. You are not going to get in trouble with your constituents if you vote to expand background checks to all commercial sales or all private sales in this country. You are going to get rewarded politically if you do that. I don't argue that that is the reason you vote for background checks, but I think you should accept the plaudits that will come to you from your constituents if you support this measure. I don't think the President has made up his mind yet. After spending about 40 minutes on the phone with him this afternoon, I don't know that the President is convinced yet that he should support universal background checks. I was with the President right after the Parkland shooting, and he said he would support universal background checks, and then he didn't support them after speaking to representatives of the gun lobby. I am sure the gun lobby will come in and talk to the President this afternoon or tomorrow and try to explain to him why he should once again endorse the status quo. The status quo is not acceptable to Americans in this country. People are sick and tired of feeling unsafe when they walk into a Walmart. Parents are heartbroken when their children come home and tell them about the latest active-shooter drill they participated in. I know that from direct experience, having listened to my then-kindergartner tell me about being stuffed into a tiny bathroom with 25 of his other colleagues and told by his teacher to remain as quiet as possible because they were practicing what would happen if a stranger came into their school. Some of the kids knew what it was really about and some of them didn't, but my 7-year-old--6 years old at the time--knew enough to say to me: ``Daddy, I didn't like it.'' No child should have to fear for their safety when they walk to school. I am not saying that universal background checks can solve all of our gun violence issues in this country. I will say that beyond the lives that it will save, it will also send a message to our children and to families in this country that we are not encased in concrete, that we are trying our best to reach out across the aisle and come to some conclusion to at least save some lives. I will tell you that peace of mind, that moral signal of compassion and concern that we will send, will have a value, as well, next to and beside the actual lives we will save. Leilah Hernandez was 15 years old. She was a high school student when she was shot by the gunman in Odessa, TX. Her grandmother Nora explained how Leilah would spend a lot of her time with family and would drop by after school to visit her grandmother. She described Leilah as a happy girl who adored her parents. She was described at her funeral as ``a naturally shy girl who became a quiet leader on the basketball court.'' Lois Oglesby was 27 when she was killed in the Dayton shooting. Her friend Derasha Merrett said: ``She was a wonderful mother, a wonderful person.'' According to the children's father, Oglesby face-timed him after she was shot, saying ``Babe, I just got shot in my head. I need to get to my kids.'' She died that day in Dayton. Jordan and Andre Anchondo were 25 and 23 years old when they were amongst the 22 who were killed in El Paso. The couple had dropped their 5-year-old daughter at cheer practice, and then they went to Walmart to pick up some back-to-school supplies. Their 2-month-old son Paul was with them. He survived the shooting, probably because it looks like Jordan died shielding her baby, while Andre jumped in front of the two of them. The baby was found under Jordan's body and miraculously suffered only two broken fingers. On August 31 in Buffalo, NY, Norzell Aldridge saw an altercation happening from a distance. He went over to the altercation to try to defuse the situation. He was a youth league football coach. As he tried to deal with this altercation, he was shot and killed. One of his friends said: ``The guy died a hero trying to save somebody else's life.'' One of the folks who work in football with him said: ``His legacy will always be never give up, give it your all, and now his legacy is through his son.'' You haven't heard of Norzell because he didn't die in a mass shooting. He is just one of the routine gun murders that happen every single day in this country. It matters just as much as those that occurred in El Paso and Dayton and Odessa, and we can do something about those right now. I am begging the President to come to the table and agree to a commonsense background checks expansion bill that will save lives. I am begging my colleagues here to do the same--figure out a way to get to yes. There is no political liability in it for you. There are thousands and thousands of lives to be saved. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I am on the floor today to talk about a crisis overseas. Before I do, I just want to take one moment. The Senator from Georgia talked about the increases in defense spending that we have done on a bipartisan basis and suggested that it was the prior administration that had gutted defense spending. That is not true. I think we should clear the record about that. In fact, in the first 3 years of the Obama administration, defense spending was on the rise. It was the election of a Republican Congress that led to what we call sequestration--the downward descent of discretionary spending of both defense and nondefense dollars. To the extent that my colleagues are worried about what happened to defense spending in the last 10 years, there is only one explanation for that; that is, the election of Republicans to the House of Representatives in 2010 and their demand that in order to vote for an increase in the debt ceiling, discretionary spending had to be slashed. In the first several years of the Obama administration, defense spending was on the rise. Yemen Madam President, I am on the floor to once again talk about a dire humanitarian nightmare happening on the other side of the world in a country called Yemen, the U.S. complicity in that horror, and the national security disaster that comes with staying involved in this war. I could have brought a bunch of much more disturbing charts to the floor to talk about the world's worst humanitarian disaster--a country in and on the brink of famine and with a cholera epidemic that the world has never ever seen before in recorded history. Instead, I chose to bring you a picture of a child with his back turned to you in order to spare you the worst of this nightmare. Before we break, I am here to make an urgent plea to my colleagues because, as bad as the situation is today, it is about to get much worse over the course of the summer and this fall. There are millions of Yemenis who are going to die if we don't make some decisions and pressure our allies to make some decisions in the coming days. The reason for this is simple. At the beginning of this year, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which are the primary military partners with the United States in Yemen, made a pledge they have made in the past, which is that while they would be dropping bombs and fighting battles on the ground in Yemen, they would be putting up money to make sure that people would be fed and that children would be immunized. They made that pledge at the beginning of this year. We are now halfway through the year, and the UAE and the Saudis have reneged on that pledge. Saudi Arabia pledged $750 million to the United Nations. It still owes, today, $630 million. The UAE pledged $750 million. It still owes, today, $500 million. They have always been tough negotiators and have been difficult to get the money from, but this year is different. This year, 6 months in, the Saudis and the Emirates are essentially saying: We are not giving the U.N. its money. If you meet with them, they will tell you that they are spending that money in other ways, that they are working with other partners inside Yemen to do the same kind of work. Don't let them put that argument over on you. There is no one in Yemen who can do the nutrition work, the healthcare work, or the anti-cholera work that the U.N. can and does. There are no other partners who have the capacity to keep people alive like the U.N. You can't just create and stand up that capacity outside of the United Nations. If Saudi Arabia and the UAE were not planning on giving the U.N. the money, then they shouldn't have promised it at the beginning of the year. The U.N. went out and built infrastructure. It hired partners based on those pledges. If the Emirates and the Saudis were not planning on giving the money, then they shouldn't have promised it at the beginning of this year. Let me tell you what is happening right now inside Yemen. Work has been suspended on 30 new feeding centers in the most famine- stricken parts of Yemen. Vaccinations have been suspended for 13 million people, which increases the risk for things like measles and malaria. The procurement of new medical supplies and equipment has been suspended. UNICEF has stopped its clean water and sanitation services for 8.4 million people, including 3 million kids, which means more cholera, and cholera is already on the rise. There have been more cholera cases reported in the first half of this year than had been reported in all of 2018. There have been half a million new cases of cholera just in the first 6 months of this year. A U.N.-supported treatment plant that purifies water for agriculture has started to shut down as well, meaning an additional 4 million people could be eating vegetables that are irrigated with dirty water. Starting very soon, the World Food Programme will not be able to buy vouchers for 3 million people. Sixty more feeding centers will close in the coming weeks. The World Food Programme has stopped providing nutrient bars to 2.6 million malnourished women and children, which will tip them now into the category of ``severely malnourished,'' just like this child is. The U.N. is going to have to stop providing fuel for hospital generators. There are 35,000 cancer patients who will stop receiving treatment. I could go on and on and on. Why are we standing here? Why aren't we all pressing our friends--the Saudis, our allies, the Emirates--to come up with this money? While we all enjoy our August recess, there are going to be millions of children in Yemen who will look like this who don't look like this today. There will be hundreds of thousands who will either die or reach the brink of death all because of a war that the United States has perpetuated and because of funding commitments that can't keep all of these people alive, that can't save all of these children's lives but that could save tens of thousands of lives if our friends, our allies, would simply do the right thing. I am furious about this, my colleagues, because I don't know what the Trump administration is getting for this bear hug it has put around Saudi Arabia. After the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, we transferred to it more nuclear technology and sold it more weapons. Maybe the hope was, in exchange for that, Saudi Arabia would do something about the humanitarian nightmare, but it is making it worse. Saudi Arabia is getting everything from us, and it is not even feeding the people on the ground in Yemen who are dying as we speak. At a 2015 campaign rally in Alabama, the President said: I get along great with the Saudis. They buy apartments from me. They spend, like, $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much. From 2016 to 2017, a lobbying firm connected to the Saudi Government paid $270,000 to the Trump International Hotel in DC. In 2018, a 5-day visit from Saudi officials to the Trump International Hotel in New York City helped to boost the hotel's quarterly revenue by 13 percent. Boy, I hope this isn't the reason the administration isn't pressing the Saudis harder to come up with their funding commitment, but the President has been pretty clear that the Saudis send him and his family a lot of money. He has been open about that. I hope this is not the reason for our not forcing our partners to step up. This is life-or- death time right now. If the administration is not going to do it, then we will have to do it. Members of Congress will have to do it. I hope, before my colleagues go home and enjoy some rest and relaxation over the month of August, they will get on the phone with their friends in the Saudi Government, that they will get on the phone with the Emirates Government, and that they will get on the phone with the Trump administration and tell them that it is time to pony up the money they have pledged. The United States is the No. 1 donor, but we could do more. The Saudis and the Emirates have come through on a quarter of the money they have promised, and the consequences of that continuing are absolutely nightmarish. So, before we go home for our break, let's do something to make sure that a handful more of these kids are alive when we come back. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I congratulate all of those responsible for the passage of this long-overdue legislation. I thank my colleagues on both sides of the aisle who made this happen but first and foremost all of the advocates all over the country but primarily in and around the Northeast. There were hundreds upon hundreds of individuals who rushed to that scene from my State of Connecticut, many of them dealing with potentially terminal diseases as a result of that action. I am glad we have stepped up in a bipartisan way and once again done the right thing. I am on the floor to continue the conversation about healthcare. I wish I had as good news as comes with the passage of this legislation, which is going to extend the guarantee of healthcare to all sorts of heroes in and around New York. At the very same time, we are dealing with a potential calamity for millions of other Americans who also have serious conditions, who are dealing with diagnoses like cancer. Today, if you have a preexisting condition, you know you are going to be able to get insured for that preexisting condition. If you are the parent of a child who has a serious illness, you don't have to worry about being denied care for your son or daughter because of that diagnosis. That is because we have the Affordable Care Act. The Affordable Care Act has been on the books now for going on a decade. It says: No matter how sick you are, no insurance company can deny you care. That has made a world of difference for millions upon millions of Americans who have preexisting conditions. The potential calamity comes in a court case filed by Republican Attorneys General, supported by the President and by Republicans in this Congress, that would try to use the court system to do what the Congress would not--overturn the entirety of the Affordable Care Act. Congress wouldn't do that. We debated it. We voted down measures to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Why? Because Americans all across this country rose up and said: We want you to fix what continues to be broken with the healthcare system, not tear down my coverage, not remove me from the rolls of those who are insured. All across the country, over 20 million people have insurance just because of the Affordable Care Act--either because of tax credits we give people to afford private insurance or the 12 million people who got Medicaid because of the Affordable Care Act, never mind all the folks who buy private insurance on their own, who can finally afford it because we don't discriminate against you if you are poor. People didn't want that taken away from them, so they rose up all across the country, and Congress listened. By the skin of our teeth, we voted down legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Because opponents of the Affordable Care Act--in particular, this President and Republicans who don't like it--couldn't get the job done in the people's branch, they are now going to the courts to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Right now weaving its way through the court system is a case called Texas v. United States. I won't go into the complicated legal argument. The goal of it, if it is successful, is to wipe out the entirety of the Affordable Care Act overnight. It has been successful at the district court level. It was just argued before the appellate court level, and by the account of witnesses who were there, the arguments didn't go too well for those of us who think the Affordable Care Act should stick around. There is just a simple question right now for my colleagues: Do you support Texas v. United States? Do you support the lawsuit that would wipe out the entirety of the Affordable Care Act overnight and replace it with nothing? I put Republicans on here because I actually know what the answer is from the Democratic side of the aisle. Every single Democrat in the Senate opposes this lawsuit. It is not because every single Democrat thinks you shouldn't change anything about the healthcare system; it is because we don't think it is a very good idea to kick 20 million people off of insurance, jack up rates for people with preexisting conditions, and have nothing to replace it--nothing. That is what will happen if Texas v. United States is successful. Petitioners are asking for the whole act to be thrown out and nothing to replace it. That would be a humanitarian catastrophe in this country, if 20 million people all of a sudden woke up and found they didn't have insurance coverage any longer; if insurers were once again able to charge that family of a child with a cancer diagnosis two times, three times, four times as much. The question for Republicans is, Do you support this lawsuit? I think we need to get some answers. I think we need to get some answers. Some of my colleagues are on record saying they hope it fails. More are on record saying they hope it succeeds. But I don't think this body can just box its eyes and ears to the reality of what would happen if this lawsuit succeeds. We are not riding to the rescue this Congress. Let me just be honest with you. Given how fractious the debate is here about everything but in particular about healthcare, there is no way that the Congress and this dysfunctional White House can reassemble all of the protections in the Affordable Care Act if the courts wipe them out. That is just not realistic. We don't debate anything on this floor any longer. We don't have the muscle to pass minor pieces of legislation like this body used to do 20 years ago, never mind a reordering and reconstruction of one- sixth of the American economy, which is what the healthcare system represents. Republicans need to start making a decision. Do you support this lawsuit or do you not? If you do support it, you can't just say ``Well, you know, if everybody loses insurance and rates go through the roof for people with preexisting conditions, we will figure it out'' without having a specific plan for how you are going to do that. It is not good enough to just say ``I hope that lawsuit succeeds. I hope everybody loses their insurance. And then, the day after, we will come back and we will see if we can try to find people healthcare.'' That is irresponsible. That is not satisfactory. It isn't enough for people out there who are living life in fear that their insurance is about to vanish. The problem is, the last time Republicans started thinking about what they would want to replace the Affordable Care Act with, it was a joke. It was a joke. The Better Care Reconciliation Act, which was Senate Republicans' replacement for the Affordable Care Act--CBO found that it would increase the number of people without insurance by 22 million. It found that by 2026, an estimated 49 million people would be without insurance, almost doubling the number who lack insurance today. That is not better care; that is much, much worse care. So forgive me if I don't have confidence that my Republican friends who run the Senate today are going to have a plan to deal with a successful Texas v. United States court case that keeps insurance for people in my State, the 111,000 people in Connecticut who get insurance through the private market with ACA subsidies and the 268,000 people in Connecticut who are covered in my State under the Medicaid expansion. It is time for everybody in this body, whether Republican or Democrat, to step up and say: A, do I support the lawsuit to get rid of all of the protections in the Affordable Care Act, with nothing to replace it, and B, do I have a plan for what to do if the lawsuit that I support is successful? Chris, from Westbrook, CT, is asking that question of everybody in this Chamber. Here is what he said: I am a 30 year old patient living with muscular dystrophy type 2B. Preexisting conditions can happen to anyone. . . . Disease does not discriminate. . . . No amount of pre- planning or prudence can stop you from preventing a genetic disease, for example. . . . You can be healthy one day, and have a health crisis the next. Everyone knows someone with a preexisting condition. It is a lifesaver--having insurance when you have a preexisting condition means being able to afford lifesaving medicines and treatments. Chris is watching carefully to see what the answer to this question is. Jeff in Enfield, CT, told me that in 2012, at the age of 7, his daughter was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. He said: By the time we noticed the symptoms and took her to the doctor, she most likely had only a couple weeks left to live. She is healthy today thanks to a daily regimen of insulin. But insulin in the U.S. costs five to ten times what it costs everywhere else. . . . Without insurance, the expense of keeping our daughter alive would ruin us. The prospect of my daughter being un-insurable is terrifying. . . . Without the ACA's insurance protections, the problem would be epidemic. The problem of people not being able to afford insulin all across this country. Jeff continued: How can anyone be expected to live under that kind of strain, especially a young person just starting out in life? I am asking this question of my colleagues on behalf of my constituents, but millions of Americans who are sick or have a child who is sick are sick and tired of Congress playing politics with healthcare. You may not love everything that is in the Affordable Care Act. I get it. Republicans didn't vote for it. They didn't support it. They have been consistent in trying to get rid of it ever since it was put into law. I understand that. But I have taken my Republican friends at their word over the last 10 years when they have said: We want to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better. Asking the courts to overturn the entirety of the act with no plan to replace it is an abdication of the promise that has been made. I don't begrudge people trying to repeal a law they don't like if they think they can do something better, but Congress didn't repeal the Affordable Care Act because people didn't want us to do it. This is an irresponsible and thoughtless mechanism to try to score a political victory, but it ends up playing with lots of people's lives. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to ask my colleagues a simple question. There is a lawsuit that is proceeding through the court system right now that has succeeded the district court level, that has had a hearing at the appellate court level, and may be speeding toward the Supreme Court. It is a lawsuit that was brought by 20 Republican attorneys general. It is a lawsuit that is being supported by the Trump administration. It is a lawsuit that many of my colleagues have gone on record saying they support. It is a lawsuit to undo the entirety of the Affordable Care Act, to throw out insurance for 20 million Americans and to end protections for people with preexisting conditions. It is an attempt to do through the court system what this Congress refused to do, which is to obliterate the Affordable Care Act and all the insurance it provides for people without any plan for what comes next. I have served in both the House and the Senate, and I listened for a long time to my Republican colleagues say that while they don't like the Affordable Care Act, they certainly understand that there has to be something else, and that something else should be just as good as the Affordable Care Act. In fact, the President himself said that whatever plan he supported in substitute of the Affordable Care Act would have better insurance, cheaper insurance, and would insure more people. Republicans never came up with that plan. In fact, the replacement they jammed through the House of Representatives in 2017 was much worse than the Affordable Care Act. The Congressional Budget Office said that 24 million people would lose insurance because of that piece of legislation and rates would potentially skyrocket for people with preexisting conditions. There has never been a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. The only plan from the beginning has been to repeal it. Now that Congress has said it won't repeal the Affordable Care Act--why? because Americans do not want the Affordable Care Act repealed with nothing to replace it--now that Congress won't do it because the American people don't support the repeal of the protections for sick people in the Affordable Care Act, Republicans are trying to get the courts to do it. We are perhaps 60 days away from the Sixth Circuit invalidating the entirety of the Affordable Care Act. Likely, if that is the case, the judgment will ultimately be rendered by the Supreme Court. But that could come as soon as the beginning of next year. We could still be months away from a humanitarian catastrophe in this country in which the entirety of the Affordable Care Act is invalidated and what to do about it is put back before Congress. It would stand to reason that if your plan is to try to get the entire Affordable Care Act thrown out in Congress, you would maybe start thinking about what would replace it. As far as I can tell, Republicans have no plan for what happens if the Affordable Care Act is overturned. As far as I can tell, my Republican colleagues have spent no time thinking about what would happen if they actually end up catching the car they have been chasing. What happens if the lawsuit succeeds? What happens if the Affordable Care Act is struck down? What comes next? We can't accept--and I don't think my Republican colleagues would want to accept--millions of people losing coverage overnight or insurance companies being able to discriminate against you because your child has a history of cancer or an insurance company being able to go back to capping the amount of insurance you get on an annual or lifetime basis. It is mere fantasy to think that we can reproduce the protections in the Affordable Care Act if we are not talking about it ahead of time. I am coming back on the floor today, as I have several times in the last few months, to ask my Republican colleagues to either withdraw your support for this lawsuit, stop the administration from being able to pursue it in court, or start a serious discussion about how you are going to protect care for everyone who has it today--not a handful of people who have it today but all the people who have it today--while this lawsuit is moving through the system. My Republican colleagues have been queried as to whether they support this lawsuit. The answers are all over the map, which tells you once again that nobody on the Republican side has really thought this one through. One Republican Senator says: I actually don't think the courts are eventually ever going to strike it down. Another says: I am ready for the lawsuit to succeed. I would love to go back in and actually deal with healthcare again. Another one says: Do I hope the lawsuit succeeds? I do. Another says: I can't say I hope it succeeds. I think the strategy from here on that I have adopted in my own mind is repair. Another says: My hope and belief is we won't strike the law down. The answers are all over the map. That is fine. The Republicans can have a varied set of opinions on whether the lawsuit should succeed, but none of those individuals who are quoted giving various opinions as to whether they would like the lawsuit to succeed have a concrete plan for what comes next. Let's just be honest. It is mere fantasy to think that a divided Congress is going to be able to, in an emergency, come up with a plan to keep 20 million people insured and keep preexisting conditions protections for the 133 million Americans who depend on them. We can't pass a budget through Congress. We have trouble passing a Higher Education Act reauthorization or the Violence Against Women Act. How on Earth are we going to pass a reordering of the American healthcare system when it is blown to bits by a Supreme Court decision that no one is ready for? That is why I am down on the floor today. I am going to keep on bringing this up because I just can't accept this world in which we live today in which half of this Chamber is just sort of boxing their ears and closing their eyes to this legal strategy. If it succeeds, as many Republicans hope it does, all we are going to be talking about here is healthcare. Overnight, we will be consumed by this topic, and we will not be able to come up with a solution that involves the same amount of protections that exist today. Why repeal it? Why not continue to work on making the system better without holding hostage all of the Americans who rely on it today? That is a much better path of action. Keep the Affordable Care Act in place. Work together on ways that we can fix the existing healthcare system. Don't create a chaotic situation with the wholesale repeal of the entire act, putting lives in jeopardy. There is no plan on behalf of the Republicans as to what to do if the ACA is overturned. I feel that we need to remind the country of that over and over again. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

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

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I am going to be joined on the floor over the next 45 minutes or so by a number of my colleagues to talk about an exceptional court case that is being heard today in New Orleans, LA. This is a court case the Trump administration, along with a number of Republican attorneys general, has brought to obliterate the Affordable Care Act, all of it, overnight. The case, if successful, would result in a humanitarian catastrophe in this country. Why do I say that? Because the plaintiffs in the case, backed by the Trump administration, are arguing that the court should throw out the entire Affordable Care Act, with nothing to replace it, despite the fact that for almost a decade now, I have listened to this President and my Republican colleagues in the Congress object to the Affordable Care Act on the premise that they will have something better to replace it with--in President Trump's words, a replacement that will insure more people, at lower cost, with all the protections the Affordable Care Act has. That plan has not materialized yet because it doesn't exist. It has never existed. It will never exist. The choice today is between the Affordable Care Act, which insures over 20 million Americans, which guarantees that people with preexisting conditions cannot be discriminated against, and nothing--no protections, no expansion of Medicaid, no subsidies--for individuals to buy private insurance. Right now, with the support of Republicans in Congress, the Trump administration today is making the argument that the entire Affordable Care Act should be struck down, with nothing--nothing at all--to replace it. This is my friend John from Middletown, CT. I had breakfast with John last week. That is a picture of John in his younger years. John was 12 years old when he started to have flulike symptoms but was diagnosed-- coincidentally, on the day of the tragedy in Sandy Hook, CT--with a rare form of soft-tissue cancer in the back of his throat. The treatment process for John was, in his words, horrendous, bringing him to as little as 70 pounds for a period of time, rendering him unable to speak, eat, or drink. He was out of school and in and out of the hospital for almost 2 years. Six years later, he can only open his jaw a small fraction of the normal range of motion; he can only chew foods out of one side of his mouth; and he has very limited healing ability for any jaw injury. These issues will never go away for John. He has become an advocate for the Affordable Care Act because he knows--he knows that if the Trump administration's lawsuit is successful, his life as he knows it is over because, once again, insurance companies would deny him treatment. No insurance company would provide John Carlson with insurance, knowing his history of cancer, if they were allowed to make decisions for themselves on who gets coverage and who doesn't. The only reason John gets coverage is that we have said, through the Affordable Care Act, we are not going to hold you responsible for your childhood cancer. We are going to make sure you get insurance no matter what. These are the stakes right now. These are the stakes for millions of Americans like John whose lives will be upended if this heartless, thoughtless, cruel lawsuit proceeds. We should be talking about how to make the healthcare system better. We should be talking about ways to lower costs. We shouldn't be talking about going backward with no safety net. What if this lawsuit is successful? I haven't heard a single Republican in the Senate talk about what they would do. I haven't heard the President talk about what his plan is if his lawsuit is successful. What happens to John? What are you going to do to make sure he still gets the treatment he needs? The answer is, you don't know. The answer is, you are jumping without a net, and you are playing with the lives of millions of Americans. John is a remarkable young man also because his eyes were opened when he was in the hospital. I want to read you his words. He said this to me a couple of weeks ago, and I asked him to write it down because it is really remarkable the capacity of young people to see beyond their own suffering. He said: I wanted to take this opportunity today to tell one more story about an experience I had in the hospital during my cancer treatment. This is a story about a young boy who received cancer treatment the same time as me. During my daily physical therapy walks around the childhood cancer floor, I started to notice a pattern. There was always one room--directly across from the nurses station--with the same patient inside. A small boy, no older than three years old. I can remember asking my parents and nurses, ``Why are that baby's parents not with him?'' I felt so angry that such a tiny child was left alone and forgotten in a hospital room while going through cancer treatment. I remember seeing the tiny chemotherapy port embedded in his head through the glass door. ``Why would they abandon him like that?'' I asked the nurse walking with me that day. She explained to me that he had not been abandoned at all, he was not forgotten nor neglected. She explained that he was left alone due to pure necessity and desperation. This is John talking. He said: I learned that both of his parents were working day and night to be able to afford his cancer treatment. Nobody deserves to go through this alone, especially not a three- year-old infant. I shared my story so that his story will not continue to take place in America. I shared my story so that patients fighting for their life will no longer be taken advantage of by the hospitals and insurance companies. What a miracle that this young man, going through his own cancer treatments, would think of a 3-year-old child who has no parents there with him because his parents are working multiple jobs in order to afford the cancer treatments for their son. Before the Affordable Care Act went into effect, 750,000 people in this country went into bankruptcy because of medical costs. That does not happen any longer. It doesn't mean our healthcare system is perfect. It doesn't mean it doesn't need more improvement, but why would we want to go back to the day in which a family lost everything simply because their 3-year-old son got cancer? Why would we take this chance with these people's lives? I, once again, come to the floor to beg my colleagues to stand with us, to stand with us and oppose this lawsuit--this careless, thoughtless lawsuit. At the very least, if you support it, then come to the floor with a real plan for how you are going to take care of John and the millions of Americans who rely on the Affordable Care Act for coverage. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, on July 9, the Trump administration will be in court defending the Texas v. United States lawsuit. Let me rephrase that. They will not be defending the lawsuit. They will be arguing on the side of the plaintiff in that lawsuit. This is a virtually unprecedented move. Administrations traditionally defend the statutes of the United States, no matter what they feel about the politics of the underlying statute. But the Trump administration has made the decision to join with 22 Republican attorneys general to argue that the entirety of the Affordable Care Act should be dismantled, with nothing to replace it. There are those of us who believe that it would not be wise policy to kick 20 million people off of insurance and get rid of all of the insurance protections in the Affordable Care Act, with no idea as to what comes next. We have begged our Republican colleagues to join us in telling the Trump administration--demanding that the Trump administration argue against the attorneys general in this case. I have listened to my Republican friends, and I have listened to the President himself over and over again say that they don't like the Affordable Care Act. They want to replace it with something else, something that insures more people, and something that continues to protect people with preexisting conditions. If that is your position, it stands to reason that you would oppose a lawsuit that seeks to invalidate the entirety of the Affordable Care Act with nothing to replace it. The bewitching hour is upon us. The oral arguments are the week after next. This lawsuit was successful at the district court level, so there is no reason not to believe there is a substantial possibility that it could be successful at the appellate court level as well. I wanted to come to the floor, as we head into this week while we will be back in our districts, just to make sure that everybody understands what the stakes are on July 9 when the Trump administration will argue in court to get rid of insurance for 20 to 30 million Americans and what the stakes are for this Senate--in particular, Senate Republicans refusing to stand up to the President in his perpetuation of this lawsuit. If the Affordable Care Act is struck down, there are 130 million Americans with preexisting conditions who could see insurance rates increase by up to 50 to 60 percent. Others will have their insurance withdrawn when they go through open enrollment next because no insurer will cover someone with serious, very expensive preexisting conditions. That was the way things worked before the Affordable Care Act was passed. Gone is Medicaid expansion, which today covers 17 million people across the country--and I have been happy to see more and more States with Republican Governors or Republican State legislators adopt the Medicaid expansions and become a source of bipartisan agreement that more people should have access to Medicaid--but those 17 million people will lose their coverage. There are 12 million seniors who will immediately pay more for prescription drugs because the Affordable Care Act gets rid of, over time, essentially the entirety of the Medicare part D doughnut hole. There are 2.3 million adult children who are on their parents' insurance until they become 26, who would potentially lose access to that insurance. The Affordable Care Act requires insurance companies to cover those kids. Many insurers, without that requirement, would no longer cover those children. Then many of the other protections in the marketplace, like bans on lifetime caps or annual caps, can be lost. Insurers would once again be back in the practice of saying to a very sick child, a patient with cancer: You only get x amount of insurance coverage from us, and once you go beyond that number, then it is on your dime. Again, remember, before the Affordable Care Act was passed, there were 1.5 million families every single year in this country who declared bankruptcy. Today, there are half as many families who declare bankruptcy in this country. It is not coincidence that studies have shown us that of those 1.5 million, half of them were declaring bankruptcy because of medical costs. When you don't go bankrupt any longer because of medical costs because you have access to affordable insurance and your insurance company can't kick you off because you get sick, you don't face the kind of destitution that families faced before. So I think it does make sense to run through the lineup of who has weighed in in favor of this court case to invalidate the entirety of the Affordable Care Act and knock 20 to 30 million people off of insurance to jack up rates for millions more and who has weighed in against it. Well, the President wants this lawsuit to succeed. Attorneys general want this lawsuit to succeed. And by the silence of my Republican colleagues, you would infer that many Republicans may want this lawsuit to succeed. But here is who hates this lawsuit. I am not going to run through the whole list here, but this is essentially anybody who knows anything about healthcare. This is essentially every organization that represents people who have serious diseases, every association that represents doctors, and every association that represents hospitals. You don't really find all of those groups aligned on much at all because when you are moving around pieces in the healthcare system, often you will do something that benefits patients that insurers will not like or you benefit something at hospitals that single-practice offices will not like. This is pretty much everybody who says: If you kick 20 million people off insurance like that and you have no plan to replace it, that is a humanitarian catastrophe. Here is what the AARP says in their filing opposing this lawsuit: If this Court finds that the ACA is invalid, millions of older adults will lose the healthcare coverage and consumer protections they have relied on for years. They will also throw the Medicare and Medicaid programs into fiscal and administrative chaos, which will disrupt the nation's healthcare system and economy. It will plunge the more than 100 million people with preexisting conditions into an abyss of uncertainty about whether they can obtain coverage. That is the AARP. Here is what the American Medical Association says: ``The decision below, if affirmed, would have devastating effects on the quality, cost, and availability of such care.'' Families USA says: ``Among those whose coverage rates increased due to Medicaid expansion are young adults, people with HIV, veterans, rural residents, and racial and ethnic minorities.'' For many of our most vulnerable citizens who are covered by Medicaid, eliminating the expansion would leave them without healthcare. I mentioned the insurance companies are against this lawsuit. They say this: ``Invalidation of the ACA--irrespective of the continued operation of the so-called individual mandate--would wreak havoc on the healthcare system.'' Finally, Americans with disabilities say: The result is a cruel irony: the population that needs healthcare the most has the hardest time obtaining it. For the last nine years, the ACA has helped change that. Stripping away its protections now will reverse the positive gains that people with disabilities have realized and will return this community to the same grim reality as before the ACA, if not place people with disabilities in an even worse position. So let's not forget where we were before the Affordable Care Act was passed. I am not saying that it is perfect. I am not saying that we shouldn't work together to try to improve it. We just finished a debate in the Health Committee in which we passed a whole bunch of reforms to our healthcare system that Republicans and Democrats agree on. But the American Cancer Society, in their filing, reminds the court: ``A 2009 Harvard Medical School study found approximately 45,000 deaths annually could be attributed to lack of health insurance among working- age Americans.'' The Heart Association said this: ``Even during a heart attack, uninsured patients were more likely to delay seeking medical care because of the financial implications.'' I could go on and on, reading from these filings or reading from the testimony that all of these groups have submitted. Again, that is not to say that these groups don't want changes in our healthcare system. Nobody on this list, as far as I know, is arguing for the status quo, just as no one in this body is arguing for the status quo. But to rip away Medicaid expansion, to rip out from the roots of the healthcare system the exchanges and the tax credits, to get rid of all of the insurance protections, to reverse the gains we have made on lowering prescription drug costs for seniors--to do all of that with nothing to replace it is to invite misery, destitution, and chaos. Let's just be honest. We are not ready to ride to the rescue. I offered an amendment in the Health Committee today just asking for the Department of Health and Human Services to provide us with a report about what the landscape would look like in the healthcare system if Texas v. United States were successful. I didn't get a single Republican vote for that one. All I was asking was that we just get a report on how bad it is going to be so that we can start doing a little bit of advance planning, and not a single Republican was willing to vote for that in committee today. So we are deliberately boxing our eyes and ears about what the effects on our constituents could be if this lawsuit is successful. We are not in a position to ride to the rescue. There is no chance that this Congress is going to pass a new healthcare reform proposal that will restore healthcare to everybody who lost it. That is not happening, and I know that is not a surprise to anyone here. You also shouldn't delude yourself into thinking this lawsuit will not be successful. There are lots of very smart legal scholars who suggest that this argument that the plaintiffs are making, which the Trump administration has endorsed, is nonsense. I tend to agree with them. The argument is that because you got rid of one section of the Affordable Care Act, then the court needs to invalidate the rest. Well, Congress made its intent pretty clear. Republicans decided to get rid of the individual mandate for the penalty that is assessed if you don't have insurance and deliberately did not choose to get rid of the rest of it. I think that is not a smart decision, but the intent of Congress is pretty clear. It is my belief that this argument doesn't hold water, and that is the belief of many smart legal scholars, but the district court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. So you already have a Federal judge who invalidated the entire Affordable Care Act. Since then, the Trump administration has upped the ante. The district court finding in favor of the plaintiffs, which invalidates the entire Affordable Care Act, didn't convince the President to say: Let's pull back the reins a little bit here. Let's maybe change our position. This feels too real. Let's hedge our bets. No; after the district court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, the administration changed their position to go all in on the plaintiffs' side. Their initial lawsuit only backed up some of the plaintiffs' claims. So the district court ruled that the Affordable Care Act has to disappear overnight. The Trump administration has changed their position to weigh in and to support the entirety of the lawsuit, and we are not having a serious conversation about what happens if the fate that all of these groups are deeply fearful of comes to pass. Finally, this is not about numbers. This isn't about statistics. This is about real people. Michael from New Fairfield, CT, says: This is . . . personal to me, the ACA literally saved my life in 2016. I have pre-existing, recurrent skull base disease for most of my adult life. I underwent an 11-hour skull base neurosurgery to remove a benign tumor that involved my brain arteries, nasal passages, jaw and a total reconstruction of my middle and outer ear canals. My surgeon said I was a month away from a much more debilitating surgical outcome. As it is, my recovery and rehabilitation period has been a full two years with resulting partial physical impairment. My spouse and I both run our own businesses and the ACA is still our family's only option for healthcare. Without the operations and the ACA coverage, the disease would have continued to progress--I would have eventually died and my family would have had to sell the house and/or go bankrupt to manage the medical expenses. David from Southport said: In July of 2011 I was diagnosed with Colon Cancer. At the time, I was covered under an individual policy with Blue Cross Blue Shield. It was a very comprehensive policy and, after my deductible was satisfied, it covered all my doctor and hospital expenses, surgeries, chemotherapy, medications, etc. However, a couple of years later I was advised that due to my preexisting condition I would not be able to renew my policy. . . . At that time I enrolled in [the Affordable Care Act] Access Health CT and without this policy . . . [through Access Health CT] I would not be able to be insured and would face prohibitive costs for even basic care. David's story can be told thousands of times over: a diagnosis followed by denial of coverage from an insurance company because of a preexisting condition. There is no free market response when it comes to very sick people who want insurance. The free market tells the insurance company: Do not insure somebody who is going to cost you a lot of money. The free market would tell the insurance company to keep that person on the outside of insurance. So there has to be a public sector response. We provided that response with the Affordable Care Act and now, in a matter of weeks or months, it could all be gone. So I come down to the floor this afternoon to once again engage my colleagues and ask them to work together. Let's try to find a common ground here, at least behind the premise that you shouldn't rip out the foundation of the modern healthcare system without a plan for what comes next. I assume we will continue to offer unanimous consent requests to try to withhold funding for the Trump administration's perpetuation of this lawsuit. I would hope we can get Republican support for that motion, not because Republicans support the Affordable Care Act--I get it; I am not going to get Republicans to support the Affordable Care Act--but because my Republican friends need to make good on what they have said for years; that they want the Affordable Care Act to go, but they really want something else to replace it that will insure the same number of people and protect folks who are sick. That cannot happen if this lawsuit succeeds. As we head back to our districts for this recess period, I wanted to make sure everybody knows how many groups that know something or anything about healthcare are standing against Texas v. The United States. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, there is a reason Article I of the Constitution is about the structures around the legislative branch and Article II of the Constitution imagines structures around the executive branch. It was the legislative branch that was most important to the Founders. It was rooted in the desires and dreams and priorities of the people. The way in which we structure ourselves and how we have become chosen to these bodies has changed over the years, but we are Article I for a reason. The division of labor between the Article I branch and the Article II branch was not limited only to domestic policy. The Founding Fathers spent a lot of time talking about making sure that the Article I branch had a significant say, a dispositive say over foreign matters as well. That is why we have the power to declare war, not the executive. That is why we have the power of the purse when it comes to funding overseas activities, and it is the reason Congress gave itself the power to have oversight over the arms that we sell to the rest of the world. It is because these arms and the relationships that surround the sale of these arms are amongst the most important foreign policy decisions that we make. We don't have to look far to understand how arms sales can go wrong very quickly. It was the arms that we sold either overtly or covertly to the rebel forces in Afghanistan that ended up becoming the arms used by some of the most vicious terrorist groups that eventually attacked the United States. It was arms that we sold to Syrian rebels that ended up in the hands of the extremist Sunni Muslim groups there that we were, in fact, fighting. So we have good reason for historically coming together, Republicans and Democrats, to ask these questions about arms sales. I agree with Senator Cardin in that, if we let this emergency declaration go without protest, without a vote, I don't know whether we are ever going to get the power to oversee arms sales back as body, and it will be just another mechanism by which we fritter away our coequal responsibility to determine the course of America's role in the world to a growing imperial Presidency, especially when it comes to matters of foreign affairs. I want to be clear with my colleagues and the Presiding Officer that I didn't just adopt this view when I became a member of the minority party. I didn't just decide that this was important when Donald Trump became President. In fact, I brought a resolution of disapproval of this very similar arms sale under President Obama. I note there were 24 Members of this body--20 or so of them Democrats--who voted to maintain our prerogative to vote against that arms sale. There were 20 members of the Democratic Party who were willing to vote, in a sense, to cancel out a sale that had been proposed by a Democratic President. So, on this side of the aisle, we have been willing to hold to this principle whether the President is of our party or is of a different party. It is because we think this is a nonpartisan principle. I agree with Senator Menendez and Senator Cardin in that, if we don't take a positive vote here, we are potentially giving away this priority forever. This emergency that exists in the Middle East is not a new emergency. You could argue that if the emergency is related to Iranian behavior, it is one that has been created, in part, by this President's policies. It, frankly, invites any President, Democrat or Republican, to be able to just point to one of the various crises in the Middle East, of which there is always one, as the reason by which Congress just can't be bothered to weigh in on this particular arms sale. Second and lastly, I want to quickly go over a case that I have made several times on the floor of the Senate. That is the case that, I think, is shared by most smart watchers of the Middle East, which is that there really is not a national security disaster for the United States that equals that of Yemen today. First of all, it is a humanitarian nightmare, and it is not one of these humanitarian nightmares that was caused by a drought or a famine and over which the United States is just looking and watching. It is a humanitarian disaster that we are, in part, causing. We are selling the bombs that are being dropped in a country where 100,000 children under the age of 5 have died of starvation and disease, where tens of thousands have been killed by conflict and the bombs that are dropping. They are dropping on school buses, on Doctors Without Borders' facilities, on churches, and weddings. These are not all by mistake. Many of them are purposeful. We have never seen a cholera outbreak like the one that we have today--never in our lifetimes. Just this week, the head of the U.N. relief mission there rushed here to Congress to give us devastating news. I don't know whether all of my colleagues were able to meet with her or get a briefing from her, but the head of the relief work in Yemen told us that there are a quarter million Yemenis who are so sick and so malnourished that they are beyond saving. A quarter million Yemenis are going to die this summer and this fall. The Saudis and the Emiratis have stopped funding the relief work, and they have stopped funding the World Health Organization and the World Food Programme. They are all closing up shop. The conflict is bigger and in more places than ever before. The bombing has not stopped, and the money from the contestants is no longer flowing. This fall, we will see a catastrophic loss of life in Yemen that the world has not seen in a very, very long time. Second, this is all coming back to haunt the United States, these bombs that are being dropped. This famine that exists is not seen as a Saudi-caused famine; it is seen as a U.S.-Saudi-caused famine. So these young Yemenis--and they are mostly young--are being radicalized against the United States, and there are willing places and willing contestants for their allegiance who are gobbling them up. Al-Qaida and ISIS have never been stronger in Yemen. I will admit we have made some military progress against them in the last couple of years, but from the beginning of the conflict to today, they are much stronger than ever before, and they have more potential recruits than ever before because of our actions there. Third, there is no change in battle lines. Sit down with the maps of what the Houthis control and what the coalition controls. They are, essentially, the same today as they were a year ago or 2 years ago. Senator Cardin is right in that there is no military solution here. The more bombs the coalition drops, the more mercenary armies they bring in from Sudan and other places, and the more the battle lines just harden. Fourth, Iran gets stronger and stronger by the day. When this all started, the Houthis were not a proxy force of the Iranians. They relied on them. Yet, as the war goes on and our country stands unwilling to negotiate a peace and we remain only willing to fund the war, Iran gets deeper and deeper into the Houthis. When the political settlement is finally achieved, Iran will have much more of a footprint in Yemen than had we ended the war last year or the year before. Lastly, just to underscore this point that others have made in the context of these gross, grave Saudi human rights abuses, whether it be the Americans who are there whom they are locking up today and torturing or whether it be the dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi as reported on most recently by the United Nations, America just looks so fundamentally weak in the world. It looks so fundamentally weak in the world when the Saudis stick a finger in our eye by grabbing a U.S. resident and dismembering him in their consulate and then lie to us about it until the evidence is so incontrovertible that they have to tell the truth. The result of that is we draw them closer in. Our Secretary of State goes to Saudi Arabia; it is not the Saudis who are coming to us. We offer them more nuclear secrets, and we give them more weapons. Then, inside this deal, not only do we give them weapons, but we actually grant them coproduction of some of the most sensitive technology that we own, which is of our smart bombs. That is the kind of deal that you do if the other party has leverage on you. We give coproduction to countries when we feel like we are the weaker party. We are giving the coproduction of smart bombs--we are going to vote on this tomorrow. We are giving the coproduction of smart bombs to a country that just chopped up an American resident into little pieces and lied to us about it. What a world we are living in. It is important for this body to stand up for itself sometimes. It is not to stand up for your party, not to stand up for your particular principles or to stand up for yourself. I think I can make the case to vote for these resolutions based just on our institutional prerogative. The war itself is a national security nightmare for us. I said this when President Obama was perpetuating it, and I say it here today. So, for me, this has nothing to do with who is in the White House. I believed this from the start, and many of us have believed it from the beginning. Even if you don't believe in standing up for our prerogative as an institution, standing up for American national security compels you to vote against these sales tomorrow. I thank Senator Menendez for being such a strong, resolute voice not just for the principle of standing up for human rights but for the principle of standing up for this body. I am glad to stand by his side and by so many others who are sponsors of this, and I am glad that he has brought us to the floor this evening. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am on the floor to join my colleagues Senator Blumenthal and those who will speak afterward. It has been 113 days since the House of Representatives passed H.R. 8, the bipartisan background checks bill. We have a proposal before the Senate as well, and we are here to make a simple request: Bring this bill up for a debate. Let us do our work as the U.S. Senate on an issue that dominates headlines, dominates kitchen table conversation, and steals from this country 36,000 lives a year, 3,000 a month, and 100 a day. Those are the number of people who are killed by gunshot wounds. Each one of their stories is different. These are mostly suicides; many of them are homicides; accidental shootings; some are mass shootings that make the headlines, but no one can escape this horror today. In my son's school, he has to go through an active-shooter drill every year. Think about the trauma we put kids through preparing for a stranger to walk into their classroom with a weapon. Just this past weekend, 32 people were shot and 6 were killed in 1 city alone, the city of Philadelphia, including 24-year-old Isiaka Meite, who died this weekend. He was at a cookout to celebrate a graduation and to also celebrate Father's Day, and he along with four teenagers were shot while out celebrating. That is the reality of what happened in just one single city. So I get it that the bill that passed the House of Representatives may not be the bill that could get 60 votes in the Senate, but what is so offensive to many of us who have lived with this epidemic--it is personal to everyone here--because I don't think there is an individual in the Senate who hasn't had a one-on-one experience with a victim of gun violence or the mother or father of someone who was killed. What is so offensive is that we are not even trying. We are not even attempting to find common ground. The Senate used to do this. The Senate used to take big important issues, put them on the floor, and spend at least a week's time trying to figure out whether you could get 50 or 60 votes. We are not doing that on anything in the U.S. Senate today. This place has become a complete, total legislative graveyard. There is really nothing more important to families out there than their ability to protect their loved ones from harm. The fact that we are not trying to find consensus on the issue of gun violence, that there is no interest to put H.R. 8 before this body so we can attempt to debate it, amend it, and come to some consensus in the Senate is unconscionable to many of us. I want to narrow my remarks on how exceptional this issue is from a public opinion standpoint. I have been on the floor so many times before talking about the evidence that points us to why background checks are the most impactful intervention we can make. In Missouri, where they got rid of their universal background checks requirement, and guns started to flow into the community through gun shows and internet sales without a background check, homicide rates went up by 40 percent and reports of Missouri-bought illegal guns found in other neighboring States skyrocketed. It is the exact opposite effect in Connecticut. Years ago, Connecticut put in place a universal background check requirement tied to a local permit. Research showed that reduced our gun homicide rate by around 40 percent. So the evidence is there. Let's just talk about public opinion on this matter because there is really nothing like background checks today in the public consciousness. Today polls will show that 97 percent of Americans believe that everybody should go through a background check before they purchase a weapon. There is nothing else in America today that gets 97 percent support. I mean, there is nothing else that gets 97 percent support. These are actual numbers. Apple pie is supported by 81 percent of Americans. Kittens only get 76 percent support from the American public today, and baseball, the American pastime, has the support of only two-thirds of Americans. Yet 97 percent of Americans believe someone should fill out a form proving they are not a criminal or seriously mentally ill before buying a gun. Universal background checks, while here in Congress seemingly a very controversial, politically charged issue, is more popular than apple pie, kittens, or baseball. These are actual numbers. I don't mean to make light of this. I just need to drive home the point that no matter if you represent a Republican-leaning State or a Democratic-leaning State, a State that voted for Donald Trump or a State that voted for Hillary Clinton, your constituents want you to vote for universal background checks. Let me just give the full panoply of public opinion on this. The number of people who support background checks is 97 percent today. That includes 90 percent of gun owners. I can back that up with plenty of anecdotal experience from my State. When I talk to gun owners, many who assume I have a hidden agenda and who believe I want to confiscate their guns--when I sit and talk to them about background checks, they say: Of course. It took me 5 minutes. I don't want people who are criminals to get their hands on guns. Everybody should go through a background check. Ninety percent of gun owners think this is a good idea. This is not new data. Back in 2012, prior to the shooting in Sandy Hook, 74 percent of NRA members who were polled said they supported requiring criminal background checks. A year later, in April 2013, a Washington Post poll showed that 91 percent of Americans supported background checks. In July of 2014, a Quinnipiac poll found that 92 percent of Americans supported background checks, including, in that poll, 86 percent of Republicans and 92 percent of Independents, 90 percent of men and 94 percent of women and 92 percent of gun-owning households. You don't get below 90 in any constituency. In September 2015, another poll showed 93 percent of Americans support it and 90 percent of Republicans. A CBS poll from 2016 shows that 89 percent of Americans supported it, including 92 percent of Republicans. In March of 2017, a Pew Research Center poll found that 77 percent of gun owners and 87 percent of non-gun owners supported background checks. Then the February Quinnipiac 2018 poll found 97 percent of Americans support background checks. These are stunning numbers. They are stunning numbers. Again, they don't require everybody in this Chamber to support the bill that passed the House of Representatives, but it has been 113 days since H.R. 8 passed, which is broadly supported by 90 percent of Americans, and we still have not had that bill or any version of this measure brought up before this body for debate or an attempt to find consensus. This is the running theme. We are talking a lot about the Senate becoming a graveyard for legislation because, in my lifetime, I have read stories about the Senate working through big issues, having serious debates--sometimes not coming to a completed product, sometimes ending up stymied but more than not figuring out a way where 50 or 60 votes could be achieved. The House is passing legislation--healthcare legislation, anti- violence legislation, clean elections legislation--and all of it is coming here to die, not because we can't find consensus but because we don't even try to find consensus. In those 113 days, approximately, 11,000 people have been killed by guns. That is a number that finds no equal in any other high-income nation. I can talk to you about the variety of reasons for it. Some of them can be solved by us; some of them can't. America is a unique nation with a unique history. We are, indeed, a melting pot of races, ethnicities, and backgrounds. By virtue of that, we were likely going to be a more violent nation from the start. I admit that, but we have poured kerosene on this fire by having the loosest gun laws, a set of laws that are not supported by 90 percent of Americans who are asking us to do something different. So we are on the floor today asking, begging, pleading with Senator McConnell and Republican leadership to at least bring H.R. 8, the Bipartisan Background Checks Act, or some version of it before the Senate so we can have a debate on the most important, most vital issue to Americans today--their physical safety. I yield the floor.