Christopher Murphy

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I wish to pay tribute to Ann Taylor, who is retiring from Connecticut Children's Medical Center after 19 years of service to the children of Connecticut. Dating back to my time as the chairman of the State legislature's Public Health Committee, Ann has been a great friend and counsel to me. I have relied on her policy expertise and acumen, and I have drawn inspiration from her relentless focus on improving the lives of Connecticut's kids. Throughout her career, Ann has both led and managed various departments across Connecticut Children's Medical Center, including legal, risk management, compliance, strategic planning, government relations, marketing and communications, and the foundation. Ann has been the voice of Connecticut's kids here in Washington. She successfully advocated for funding that supports Connecticut Children's vital role as an academic medical center, healthcare reform efforts that protect children with preexisting medical conditions, and protections for the Medicaid Program that maintain a critical safety net for more than one-third of Connecticut's children. At the State level, her drive to improve health outcomes for children led her to establish Connecticut Children's Medical-Legal Partnership Project, which is devoted to providing traditional legal representation for children within a comprehensive approach to the child's healthcare needs. The project also worked to secure funding that improved access to care for children and adolescents in behavioral health crisis through the establishment of the CARES unit on the Institute of Living campus. On a more personal level, I have seen firsthand the dedication Ann has for every single child who intersects with Connecticut Children's. She doesn't just advocate for broad-based policies; she works for every single patient. I recall working with her for days on one single case--a little girl who because of her complicated immigration status was having difficulty getting insurance coverage for her expensive, rare medical condition. Ann worked with me to make sure that little girl got what she needed, so that her life could be extended for a few more years. I am sure Ann went that extra mile for countless other children, and that will likely be the legacy she leaves. The impact of Ann's work will be felt by children and families for years to come, and we are grateful for her service. I hope Connecticut realizes how lucky it was to have her fighting for children's healthcare for the last two decades.

Mr. MURPHY

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

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to express my opposition to the amendment before the Senate right now with respect to the disposition of American forces in Syria. First, for my colleagues, let me stipulate that President Trump's Syria policy has been an absolute mess. It has been a train wreck. It has been a dumpster fire on a daily basis. That is something Republicans and Democrats can agree on, and I assume that is the reason we are having this debate right now. There is bipartisan consternation over a policy in Syria that seems to change daily. It often changes based upon who the last person was to walk into the Oval Office or catch the President's ear. The current policy seems to be that the President is intent on pulling out the 2,000 or so troops that are there at the request of the leader of Turkey. He would love to see the United States pull out so that he could move his troops in and overrun the Kurdish forces, which have been our partners for several years in trying to root out ISIS and extremist groups from Syria. Let me also stipulate that I was one who did not support sending American troops into Syria in the first place. I have never believed that there is a military solution, led by the United States, to the host of problems that ravage that country. But once you have made that commitment, if you are going to undo it, you have to do it in some orderly fashion. To simply decide on a moment's notice, without any discussion with our allies or partners, that we are moving troops out is the wrong way to undo a commitment that I would argue was wrong in the first place. You have to have a plan in place for the security of those you are leaving behind--both the Kurdish forces that you have pushed to bring the fight to ISIS, as well as all of the civilians who could be caught in the crossfire between an advancing Turkish force and a defensively oriented Kurdish force. This is not why I am on the floor today--to try to, once again, rehash all of the ways that Trump's policy in Syria has gone wrong. I want to talk about why this amendment is not the right way for us to proceed as a means of correcting Trump's backward policies and how it could, frankly, get us more deeply mired into a series of conflicts in the Middle East, which are not supported--nor will they be supported-- by the American people. First, we should be debating an authorization of military force for American forces in Syria, not an amendment that restricts an illegal use of military force. The President does not have congressional authorization to use U.S. troops to fight ISIS in Syria or anywhere else. He claims he does because he has taken the 2001 AUMF and suggested that because some elements of al-Qaida eventually became elements of ISIS, that authorization continues. There is no one who voted then for that authorization some 17 years ago who thought that it would now be used as a means to fight a very different terrorist organization. We should be having a debate about renewing America's authorization of military force so that it is updated for the enemies we are actually fighting, instead of conceding that the President has what is now, potentially, unlimited ability to fight anyone, anywhere around the world, who has any kind of affiliation to a terrorist group named 17 years ago. We are not doing that. Instead, through this amendment, in some way, shape, or form, we are ratifying the President's extra- constitutional use of military force overseas, green-lighting the continued end-around on congressional authorization that this President and many other Presidents would like to continue. Let me also concede that this perversion of the 2001 AUMF was not invented by President Trump. It was invented by President Obama. I opposed it then, as I oppose it now. Second, the language of this bill suggests that our mission inside Syria is not just to fight ISIS. The language of this bill suggests that our troops are in Syria to fight Iran as well. Over and over again, this amendment is peppered with references to the rationale for our existence in Syria being not just to fight ISIS but also to counter Iranian influence. In fact, the amendment lists a series of conditions that we believe need to be filled before troops are to be withdrawn. Among those conditions is a strategy to ``stop Iran from dominating the region.'' That is an interesting debate for us to have: What should be the role of the United States to stop Iran from dominating the region? I agree with my Republican colleagues that it is not in the security interests of the United States, nor our allies, for Iran to continue to gain a bigger foothold in the region, but there is absolutely no congressional authorization for U.S. forces to be in Syria to counter Iran or to fight Iran or to try to be a bulwark against Iranian aggression. No matter what kind of hoops you jump through to try to contort the 2001 AUMF to counter ISIS, you cannot get it to cover Iran. This resolution--I don't know that it suggests, but it essentially admits--it asserts--that our troops are inside Syria today not just to fight ISIS but to stop Iran from gaining a bigger foothold there and, in fact, makes a condition of our troops' withdrawal be a strategy to continue to press back against the Iranians. There is no AUMF for that. Let me tell you my real worry. Putting a bipartisan stamp of approval today on an amendment that suggests our troops are inside Syria, in part, to counter Iran will ultimately empower those in the administration who are rooting for actual war with Iran. If Democrats and Republicans say here, today, that our mission inside Syria is ultimately to fight Iran, then doesn't that potentially put some imprimatur of congressional support for a bigger conflagration with Iran that some in the administration may be trying to achieve? Third, this amendment leaves the impression that there is an American-led military solution to all of the vexing problems inside Syria. There is none. There is none. If we really want to have a debate about the future of American policy in Syria, then we need to come to the conclusion that, ultimately, if we want to be a real player in the long-term disposition of Syria for the betterment of the Syrian people, then American diplomats, American refugee programs, and American economic development aid are going to be much more dispositive than 2,000 American troops. Let me give you an example. In Northern Syria, where the Kurds exist and where American troops are for the time being, we have a problem. As I outlined before, the problem is a relatively simple one. We have pushed the Kurds to become more and more influential in the military and governance matters of that region. That was important for us because the Kurds were the most likely fighting force to be able to oust ISIS, but we knew ahead of time that this was going to create a problem with the Kurds, who see the YPG--the Kurdish military--as a terrorist group. We don't agree with them, but we knew ahead of time that the Turks would not stand for the long-term empowerment of the YPG in those portions of Syria. We have now reached the point at which the rubber hits the road--at which Erdogan has said: We are not going to stand for that. We are going to bring our troops in, creating a potential flashpoint there. There is a solution here, and Erdogan outlined it in an op-ed he wrote for a major American newspaper. He said: Well, listen, we understand the Kurds are going to have to be influential, but it has to be Kurds we support, not Kurds we believe to be affiliated with terrorist groups. That is a really tricky needle to thread, and I am not sure that it ever can be threaded. But the way you do that is, frankly, not with tanks or with American marines but with diplomats and with experienced foreign policy hands--people who know how to work out a complicated political arrangement in which the Kurds continue to be able to run that region but the Turks decide to hold back and not press forward militarily. That is a diplomatic and political quandary that cannot be solved by the American military. This amendment seems to suggest that we can solve all of our problems--or many of our problems--if we just keep 2,000 troops there. Fourth, the back end of this amendment lays out a series of criteria that have to be fulfilled before the troops can be removed. I mentioned one of them--that there has to be a strategy to combat Iranian influence. The final of these criteria is that ISIS has to have been substantially defeated in the region and a certification has to be made to that effect. Well, let me ask my colleagues this--it is a legitimate question, not a rhetorical one. I don't know the answer, and maybe someone can provide it to me. When was the last time this Congress tied the Executive hands in that way? When was the last time this Congress actually laid out the conditions by which the Executive cannot withdraw troops from a region? That seems to be a very curious exercise of our foreign policy oversight responsibility. I am someone who has suggested for a long time that we have largely abdicated that responsibility. I would love for us to be debating foreign policy and exercising our oversight more often, but the idea that we would, as a legislative body, tell the President that he cannot withdraw troops from a place unless x, y, and z criteria are met seems to be dangerous and restrictive because there are all sorts of conditions that you can imagine that aren't listed in this amendment by which a President may feel it is in our best interest to bring troops home. The Constitution doesn't vest in this Congress the power to undeclare war. It vests in us the power to declare war. To me, I worry that by restricting the aperture by which the President can make an argument to bring troops home, we ultimately will end up having them be in harm's way for longer than is necessary. Maybe this isn't unprecedented. Maybe there are other times where we have done this, but it does seem to be fairly unprecedented for the legislature to tie the Executive's hands and tell him or her that he has to keep troops in a place for a certain period of time. I wanted to come down to the floor and express my reservations about this amendment. Again, I wish we were having a debate on an AUMF. I wish this weren't the way in which we were exercising our constitutional prerogative on foreign policy. I am deeply worried-- deeply worried--about language in this amendment that empowers those in the administration who are jonesing for a fight with Iran. I do not believe that however capable and brave our troops are in Syria, they ultimately are the answer. If we want to have a debate on Syria policy, let's talk about all the other ways that we need to engage in Syria in order to bring stability to that place. I do worry about how we tie this President's hands or any President's hands when they want to bring our troops home and get them out of harm's way. Trump has completely botched policy in Syria, but that shouldn't go-- even Trump's most ferocious opponents--from endorsing endless wars. That shouldn't require Democrats to be against everything that he is for. He is pulling our troops out in a way that I oppose, but I worry about the long-term implications of this Congress asking for a fight in Syria that is unauthorized and then tying the President's hands when it comes to getting troops out of harm's way in places in far-off lands. I oppose the amendment and encourage my colleagues to do the same. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I want to share with the body today my very short New Year's wish list. It is very short because Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are all the same. We need to open the government. We need to reopen the one-quarter of the Federal Government that is shut down today. We need to start acting like adults. We need to start doing the job that we were sent here to do because our Nation's security is at stake, kids' health is at stake, and families' economic security is at stake. Hundreds of thousands of Federal workers all across the country are furloughed as we speak, including over a thousand in Connecticut. But that is not the extent of the damage. When you start having folks at airport security not be able to show up for their jobs because they have to work somewhere else in order to put food on the table, when you start creating questions about whether food stamps are going to go out or Section 8 vouchers are going to get paid, when you can't have the Department of Agriculture functioning to help our farmers, you are starting to affect a whole lot of people. You are starting to drag down the entire economy. My hope--my wish--is that we will reopen the Federal Government. The fact of the matter is that this happens every now and again. Occasionally, somebody makes a demand, something that they can't get through the normal political process, and they say if they don't get that demand, they are going to shut down the government. Every time I have been through one of these, it is the party making the demand that eventually relents because we tend to all agree that is not the proper way in order to try to get what you want in the U.S. Government. Senator Cruz and others shut down the government for 2 weeks because they wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Eventually, they relented. This time, President Trump couldn't get Congress to approve $5 billion for his wall in the budget so he decided to shut down the government. This is not how we should conduct a debate about legitimate public policy issues. The future of the American healthcare system was a legitimate public policy issue, as is the security of our borders, but we shouldn't be having the discussion amidst a government shutdown--trying to use our Nation's security and all of these Federal workers and the work they do as hostages to try to achieve a political result. Of course, we were all on the same page just a few weeks ago. This body voted unanimously to open the Federal Government, and now Senator McConnell says that piece of legislation that all of us voted for in December can't pass. What changed? What changed in each one of your States that causes so many Members of this body to now say that they cannot vote for a continuing resolution that you all voted for back in December? We know what has changed. The only thing that has changed is that the President has decided that he will not sign it. That is not how the Constitution works. The Constitution doesn't make the Senate subservient to the President. The Constitution certainly doesn't make the President's party subservient to him. No one here has to follow the orders of President Trump, especially when he is doing something that is bad for the Nation. We could bring up that same bill that reopens the government at least temporarily. We could all vote the same way that we did back in December. We could send that bill to the House of Representatives and admit that the President shouldn't dictate our votes. Just because his position changed doesn't mean Senate Republicans' position should have changed. Let's reopen the government so that, then, we can have a discussion about the question of immigration law and border security, because I am more than willing to have it. OK, I didn't exactly tell the truth. I do have two other wishes beyond reopening the government, but they are connected to my primary wish. My second wish is that the President would stop making up things as he proceeds through this debate. The worst of his lies was the idea that there were 4,000 known or suspected terrorists who came across our southern border. That was a number proffered by the Press Secretary at the White House. It has been repeated in various ways, shapes, and forms by the President's allies. Of course, we now know there have not been 4,000 suspected terrorists that have come across the southern border. There have been six since the beginning of this year. That is six people on a terrorist watch list who were not U.S. citizens. Do you know how many people who fit that description came across the northern border in the first 6 months of this year? Forty-one. If you really care about the security of this country--if your primary reason for getting up every morning is to make sure terrorists don't get into this country, then we should be putting up a wall with Canada, not a wall with Mexico. The second fiction is that all of these drugs coming into the United States are crossing the U.S.-Mexican border at places where there isn't a wall. That is not true either. The vast majority of illegal products that come into this country come through ports of entry. We should all talk about why that is and what we can do to beef up protections, but putting up a wall along the treacherous portions of the Rio Grande are not going to stop smugglers who right now can find lots of other ways to get their goods into the United States. I want to make sure that when we have this debate, we are having a fact-based debate. My second wish in this new year is that the President and his allies would just start telling the truth, and the truth is that there is not a new security crisis at the southern border. Illegal crossings have been coming down since 2000. The people who are on the terrorist watch list who occasionally do try to come into this country are predominantly trying to get in through Canada, not through Mexico. I want to talk about facts. Here is my last wish. Again, Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 are to reopen the government. If I had No. 6 and 7, it would be that the President start talking about the real facts, and the other would be this: Let's not get into this very dangerous conversation about trying to do an end- around on the political process with a national emergency. I guess I am talking to my Republican colleagues here. I get it that I often have some of the sharpest words for this President, but I hope that we can come together on the idea that declaring a national emergency because you can't get what you want through the political process is a really bad precedent to set. It is true that there are a whole bunch of national emergencies that have been declared, but none of the circumstances of those national emergencies and none of the powers that were utilized in those national emergencies compare to what the President is reportedly considering. If the President is really talking about declaring a national emergency on our border, despite the fact that there is no set of facts that suggests that what is happening on our border is fundamentally different today than what was happening a year ago or 10 years ago, and if the President is really contemplating, by Executive order, reprogramming billions of dollars this Congress set aside for military construction projects to a border wall, that is a Pandora's box that, once opened, cannot be shut again. This is a genie escaping out of a bottle that will not be put back. I said in jest last night that if President Trump can use a national emergency declaration to build a border wall, what would stop a Democratic President from declaring a healthcare emergency and passing and declaring a national emergency to create a single-payer healthcare system in this country? I wouldn't advise a Democratic President to do that, but I am not sure what the precedent would be if President Trump, having not been able to get Congress and the American public to get behind a border wall with Mexico that nobody really wants, declares a national emergency and builds it anyway. What would then stop any future President from doing the same thing on a host of other policy areas? Really, what would stop a President from declaring a healthcare national emergency because he or she can't get their legislation passed through the Senate and reordering our insurance markets and our Medicare and Medicaid programs to cure that national emergency, simply shifting money around from place to place? I don't think this is an avenue that the Federal Government should go down because there will be a Democratic President someday, and if you can just declare a national emergency and move billions of dollars around because you can't get your way in Congress, that is a horse that, once out of the barn, is not coming back. That is my wish list: Open the government, open the government, open the government, open the government; pass the bills that we passed back in December. Don't let the President dictate your votes. Let your constituents dictate your votes. I hope the President and the White House start telling the truth about what is really happening with border security, and I hope this nonsense about declaring a national emergency goes away. I hope it goes away in part because Republicans in this body recognize the really dangerous precedent that sets for this country, and they recommend publicly and privately to the President that he shutter that idea. We could reopen the government today. If Senator McConnell came down here and decided to put a continuing resolution before this body and said that it is the right thing to do for the country, it would pass with flying colors. If Senator McConnell exercised that kind of leadership that he has shown in previous shutdowns, it would pass with flying colors. We all know it would. I am sure there would be a handful of Republicans who just got elected with President Trump's support who might not support it, but it would pass just like it passed 3 weeks ago, and it would likely pass the House of Representatives by a veto- proof margin, as well, once the signal was given by Senate Republicans that the adults need to step up and reopen the government. So this whole crisis can be over tonight. It can be over tonight if there is some leadership shown by Senate Republicans. Why spend all of this time trying to control this body? Why spend millions of dollars trying to run for office to become the majority party in the U.S. Senate if you are not willing to step up in a moment of crisis and lead the country through it? It is still possible, and I hope, as my new year's wish, that it gets done sooner rather than later. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to speak briefly about the President's announcement today that he is going to be withdrawing 2,000 American troops from Syria. Let me be clear. I thought this was a bad idea from the start, primarily because our troop presence in Syria is not authorized by Congress. We have had that debate in many forums here, but I believe this Congress has never authorized the U.S. military to engage in hostilities against ISIS. I think it is an extrapolation of the 2001 AUMF. It simply belies common sense. So we should never endorse military activity overseas, no matter what we think about the merits, if it is not authorized by this body. But we have also seen over and over again that our relatively meager military presence in the Middle East has never been enough to change the political realities on the ground. The training mission was a disaster. The weapons we gave to the rebels ended up in the hands of the people we were fighting. Ultimately, we never had enough firepower there to be able to meaningfully change the balance of power. But I will concede that the way the President went about making this decision makes our country an even bigger laughing stock than it already is in the region, and, frankly, that is pretty hard, because everybody is asking questions right now about why we pretended we were going to protect our Kurdish partners in the region if, on the eve of the Turkish offensive against the Kurds, we decide to pull out. It makes absolutely no sense to pretend for literally months and months that we are going to be the bulwark to protect the Kurds against the Turks and then right on the precipice of the Turkish offensive, we leave. Why would anybody believe us in the future if we give them our word? Again, I am speaking as someone who didn't support the intervention in the first place, but once you have made that commitment, why not follow through? Second, why pull the rug out from under our diplomats in the region? It is very clear that neither Jim Jeffrey nor Brett McGurk knew anything about this. In fact, they were just making plans and suggestions weeks ago to increase our military involvement in the region, and now they are having to explain why 2,000 troops are leaving. If you are going to make a decision like this, make sure the people who are working for you know about it. Third, why announce this pullout without answering any questions about it or without announcing an alternative strategy? Total darkness from the President and his national security team. An announcement--a statement made on Twitter and no rollout of a plan for how the United States is going to continue to try to keep the peace. So I agree with many of the criticisms that my Republican friends who have come down to the floor have complained about. This was done in a ham-handed manner that makes us weaker in the world. But forgive me if I have a few questions about why my Republican friends chose to speak up only now with questions about the President's Syria policy. Where was this outrage when the President of the United States froze millions of dollars in humanitarian funding that could have saved lives on the ground in Syria? If they care so deeply about the future of Syria, why weren't the Republicans lighting up social media and down on this floor complaining about the fact that the President refused to forward badly needed humanitarian dollars to the region. Where was the outrage when the President effectively pulled the United States out of the peace process? Remember, the United States, under the Obama administration--whatever you think about Obama's strategy--was in the peace process, was a partner to try to figure out a way forward for Syria. Donald Trump, as has been his strategy internationally, pulled us out of that diplomatic conversation, left the diplomatic playing field to the Iranians, to the Russians, and to the Turks. Where was the outrage when the United States walked away from the negotiating table? How about the shutdown of the refugee program? Once again, if your focus is on the cataclysm of humanitarian disaster on the ground in Syria, why weren't there all sorts of Members of the Republican Party coming down to the floor and complaining when the President decided to not allow any more Syrian refugees--those fleeing terror and torture-- to come to the United States? What about outrage over the fact that the President proposed cutting the State Department by 40 percent--the State Department that is going to be in the driver's seat when we eventually get to the point of putting Syria back together politically? Why is there outrage only today? Well, here is the answer, I think, and it worries me. I think there is outrage today because many Members of the Republican Party still cling to this outdated, empirically disproved, fantastic notion that the American military can solve complicated, convoluted political problems in the Middle East. We have amazing men and women in the Armed Forces, but there are limits to what they can do. And history--especially the history of the last 15 years--tells us that big U.S. military presence in the Middle East often creates as many problems as it solves. The Republicans who are complaining about this make it sound as if we had a couple divisions in Syria. We didn't. We had 2,000 troops. We had 2,000 troops compared to the hundreds of thousands of troops fighting on behalf of the Syrian regime, the Iranian militias, the Kurdish forces, the rebel forces, the remnants of ISIS's forces. Two thousand troops isn't enough to bluff. It isn't enough to gain a negotiating foothold. It is, frankly, just enough to keep faking it in Syria--doing just enough militarily to say that we are doing something to be able to sleep at night while never actually doing anything sufficient to change the balance of power. That has been the story of both President Obama's and President Trump's policy in Syria. We do just enough to convince the rebels that they should keep going but never enough to actually tackle Bashar al-Assad. All we have done is keep the civil war running and running and running. I have really terrible news for you all. Assad is going to win this war. He was always going to win this war because the folks who were on his side had much bigger equities--Russia and Iran--than the folks who were on the side of the rebels. Now, that really stinks, that Bashar al-Assad is going to win, but you have to make policy based on the real world, not on some world that you imagine. These neoconservatives are still--even after 4,000 Americans were killed in Iraq and 30,000 were wounded, they are still clinging to this notion that a couple thousand U.S. troops are going to be able to solve the problems in Syria. Listen. I get it. Restraint in the face of evil is really hard stuff. But hubris in the face of evil is worse. So what should we be doing? I won't spend too much time on this, but we should get out of the civil war. We should admit that we have just prolonged it instead of trying to end it. We should keep working with our partners and keep using airpower to keep ISIS on the run. We should rescue Syrians with a generous refugee program, both helping our partners in the Middle East rescue Syrians and bringing them to the United States when they pass our vetting program. We should stop angering our allies all over the world, but particularly in that region, and get back into the diplomatic game. Finally, we should stop believing that our only leverage in negotiations in Syria or anywhere else in the world is military force. Put up a promise of massive investment in Syria after a peace deal is signed--likely, frankly, costing a fraction of what we spent in Iraq-- and you will discover that you quickly get a seat at that table again. But it is time that we give up on this notion that these brave, capable American soldiers can fix these complicated, tribal, political, economic, and religious problems in the Middle East. They are brave, and they are capable, but there are things they can do, and there are things they can't do. Every time we put our troops in situations where they are doomed to fail, when we are not prepared to give them the resources to succeed, as was always the case in Syria--spare me this notion that 2,000 American troops were going to be able to fix Syria-- every time we put them in situations where they can't win, we undermine American influence, and we undermine the power of our military. I don't agree with how the President did this. Once you have made that commitment, boy, it doesn't make a lot of sense to pull the rug out from under our partners right as the tough stuff starts to come. I don't agree that he didn't do it in consultation with anybody in this place or anybody on his national security team. I think that his announcement today is ham-handed and embarrassing, but his instincts aren't entirely wrong on the question of what American troops can and can't do in the Middle East. I can't believe I am saying this. I think the President may have learned more than many of my friends in the Senate have. I yield back.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment. I understand it will be on a voice vote. This exemption, just like the amendment that will follow, is so broad as to render the underlying resolution impotent. Let's be clear. The existing conflict the United States is supporting is the primary cause of the humanitarian catastrophe that exists today. Eighty-five thousand kids under the age of 5 have died of starvation and disease. This is the world's worst cholera epidemic in the history of the globe. If we were to adopt this amendment, it could potentially allow for continued unlimited assistance for the Saudi coalition to continue to exacerbate that nightmare. I urge my colleagues, on a voice vote, to oppose this amendment.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, once again, I urge rejection of this amendment. If passed, it would, again, render the underlying resolution a moot point. I would make two additional arguments against it: First, the entire rationale that the Saudis used for the military campaign in Yemen is to prevent Houthi attacks against Saudi Arabia. So if this was an exemption, then the United States could fully participate. Second, existing law already allows the U.S. Commander in Chief to protect U.S. troops against an attack or an imminent attack, and nothing in the resolution would take away the Commander in Chief's power to protect U.S. troops either here in the United States or abroad. For those reasons, I would strongly oppose--that we object to this amendment which, if passed, would essentially gut the underlying resolution.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to join many of my colleagues in support of passage of the underlying resolution. I was pleased to be one of the original cosponsors, along with the Presiding Officer and Senator Sanders, amongst many others. This is clearly not the first time I have been to the floor to talk about the crisis inside Yemen and the broader crisis with respect to our relationship with Saudi Arabia that has grown worse and worse, especially in the last several months. I want to thank Senator Menendez and Senator Corker for taking this incredibly seriously, especially since the death of Jamal Khashoggi, who was a resident of the United States here, ostensibly under our protection. I am hopeful that we will get another big bipartisan vote when this comes up for final passage. I want to reiterate some of the reasons I think this is incredibly important. First, let me state what I hope is obvious even for those of us who have been critics of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is a very important ally of the United States. It is an important partner for stability in the region. We continue to engage in an important counterterrorism, intelligence-sharing relationship with Saudi Arabia. They have helped us track down some very bad people. We have helped them track down some very bad people. Sunni extremists-- separate and aside from the argument as to where that movement gets some of its seed funding--are out to get the Saudi regime, just as they are out to get the United States. Second, it is important to note something that we take for granted in the region--this now long-term detente that has existed between the Gulf States and Israel, which did not used to be something you could rely on. In fact, one of the most serious foreign policy debates this Senate ever had was on the sale of AWACS to Saudi Arabia back in the 1980s. The objection then was that by empowering Saudi Arabia, you were hurting Israel and Israeli security. No one would make that argument today because Saudi Arabia has been a good partner in trying to figure out a way to calm the tensions in the region and, of course, provide some balance in the region, with the Iranian regime on the other side continuing to this day to use inflammatory and dangerous rhetoric about the future of Israel. So this is an important partnership, and I have no interest in blowing it up. I have no interest in walking away from it. But you are not obligated to follow your friend into every misadventure they propose. When your buddy jumps into a pool of man-eating sharks, you don't have to jump with him. There is a point at which you say enough is enough. I came to this floor 3 years ago and suggested that time had already come. Muhammad bin Salman, who is the Crown Prince, who is the effective leader of the country, has steered the foreign policy of Saudi Arabia off the rails. Folks seem to have noticed when he started rounding up his political opponents and killing one of them in a consulate in Turkey, but this has been ongoing. Look back to the kidnapping of the Lebanese Prime Minister, the blockade of Qatar without any heads-up to the United States, the wholesale imprisonment of hundreds of his family members until there was a payoff, the size of which was big enough to let some of them out. This is a foreign policy that is no longer in the best interests of the United States and cannot be papered over by a handful of domestic policy reforms that are, in fact, intended to try to distract us from the aggressive nature of the Saudis' foreign policy in the region. Of course, the worst example of their regional behavior going off the rails is Yemen. And I don't want to restate the case here; I think Senator Sanders did a great job of it. I have stood here before with posters of malnourished children with distended bellies. Some 85,000 of them have died from malnutrition or disease. The world's worst ever outbreak of cholera is happening right now as we speak. Ten thousand Yemenis have died from warfare, from bombings, or from siege campaigns. About two-thirds to three-quarters of those were as a result of the Saudi side of the civil war, but let's make clear that there are some really bad actors on the Houthi side as well. Part of the reason the humanitarian aid can't get to where it is needs to get to is because the Houthis are stopping it from getting into the areas they control today. So the Saudis bear the majority of the responsibility for the humanitarian nightmare, but there is enough to be spread around. I am appreciative that many of my colleagues are willing to stand up for this resolution today to end the war in Yemen. I wish that it weren't because of the death of one journalist, because there have been tens of thousands who have died inside Yemen, and their lives are just as important and just as worthwhile as Jamal Khashoggi's life was, as tragic as that was. But there is a connection between the two, which is why I have actually argued that this resolution is in some way, shape, or form a response to the death of Jamal Khashoggi, for those who are primarily concerned with that atrocity. Here is how I link the two: What the Saudis did for 2 weeks was lie to us, right? In the most bald-faced way possible. They told us that Jamal Khashoggi had left the consulate, that he had gotten out of there alive, that they didn't know what happened, when of course they knew the entire time that they had killed him, that they had murdered him, that they had dismembered his body. We now know that the Crown Prince had multiple contacts all throughout the day with the team of operatives who did it. Yet they thought we were so dumb or so weak--or some combination of the two-- that they could just lie to us about it. That was an eye-opener for a lot of people here who were long-term supporters of the Saudi relationship because they knew that we had trouble. They knew that sometimes our interests didn't align, but they thought that the most important thing allies did with each other was tell the truth, especially when the truth was so easy to discover outside of your bilateral relationship. Then, all of a sudden, the Saudis lied to us for 2 weeks--for 2 weeks--and then finally came around to telling the truth because everybody knew that they weren't. That made a lot of people here think, well, wait a second--maybe the Saudis haven't been telling us the truth about what they have been doing inside Yemen. A lot of my friends have been supporting the bombing campaign in Yemen. Why? Because the Saudis said: We are hitting these civilians by accident. Those water treatment plants that have been blowing up--we didn't mean to hit them. That cholera treatment facility inside the humanitarian compound--that was just a bomb that went into the wrong place, or, we thought there were some bad guys in it. It didn't turn out that there were. It turns out the Saudis weren't telling us the truth about what they were doing in Yemen. They were hitting civilian targets on purpose. They did have an intentional campaign of trying to create misery. I am not saying that every single one of those schoolbuses or those hospitals or those churches or weddings was an attempt to kill civilians and civilians only, but we have been in that targeting center long enough to know--to know--that they have known for a long time what they have been doing: hitting a lot of people who have nothing to do with the attacks against Saudi Arabia. Maybe if the Saudis were willing to lie to us about what happened to Jamal Khashoggi, they haven't been straight with us as to what is happening inside Yemen, because if the United States is being used to intentionally hit civilians, then we are complicit in war crimes. And I hate to tell my colleagues that is essentially what the United Nations found in their most recent report on the Saudi bombing campaign. They were careful about their words, but they came to the conclusion that it was likely that the Saudi conduct inside Yemen would amount to war crimes under international law. If it is likely that our ally is perpetuating war crimes in Yemen, then we cannot be a part of that. The United States cannot be part of a bombing campaign that may be--probably is--intentionally making life miserable for the people inside of that country. So I would argue that this resolution is an appropriate response if you are only concerned about Jamal Khashoggi because it is a way to make clear that if you lie to the United States, there are consequences. It is also a way to say to the Crown Prince: We are not going to be partners with you in your most important foreign policy endeavor--the war inside Yemen--if you are not being straight with us about this or other matters. If you care just about what happened to that journalist, this is still an important vote for you to cast. And I get it that some people have issues with the mechanism by which we get here, the War Powers Resolution. I understand that it is new, that it hasn't been tested before. But I believe this is the right moment to have this debate and to have this vote. I am hoping that we are going to come to a conclusion here as quickly as we can in which we maintain bipartisan consensus. I just joined several of my colleagues upstairs to express our desire--this isn't the beginning and the end of our debate about what to do with Saudi Arabia moving forward. I support Senator Menendez and Senator Young's legislation to take some additional steps to halt arms sales. I support imposing sanctions on the individuals who are responsible for this crime. But I would also hope that all of us take a little bit of time over the holidays to really think about how we reset this relationship in the region and how we send a signal to the world that there is no relationship in which we are the junior partner--certainly not with Saudi Arabia. If Saudi Arabia can push us around like they have over the course of the last several years and in particular the last several months, that sends a signal to lots of other countries that they can do the same thing--that they can murder U.S. residents and suffer almost no consequences; that they can bomb civilians with our munitions and suffer no consequences. This is not just a message about the Saudi relationship; this is a message about how the United States is going to interact with lots of other junior partners around the world as well. Saudi Arabia needs us a lot more than we need them, and we need to remind folks of that over and over again. Spare me this nonsense that they are going to go start buying Russian jets or Chinese military hardware. If you think those countries can protect you better than the United States, take a chance. You think the Saudis are really going to stop selling oil to the United States? You think they are going to walk away from their primary bread winner just because we say that we don't want to be engaged in this particular military campaign? I am willing to take that chance. We are the major partner in this relationship, and it is time that we start acting like it. If this administration isn't going to act like it, then this Congress has to act like it. As Senator Graham said, sometimes Congress has to go its own way. Sometimes Congress has to reorient American foreign policy when an administration will not. With respect to this bilateral relationship, with respect to this egregious, unconscionable military operation inside Yemen, it is time for Congress to step up and right something that today is very, very wrong. I appreciate all of the great work that Senator Sanders and Senator Lee have done as partners in this, and I thank the chairman and ranking member for helping guide us through this debate as painlessly as possible. I look forward to coming to the floor again before final passage and look forward to another big bipartisan vote at the end of this. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I want to speak very briefly on behalf of the resolution being offered today by Senator Sanders, Senator Lee, me, and several others. I encourage my colleagues to support it. I want to use my brief time to respond to some of the arguments that the administration has made over the course of the last few days as to why we should not stand together as a body and say that without a congressional declaration of war, the United States cannot and should not be involved in a disastrous civil war in Yemen. This is as important a vote as we will take in the Senate. Lives are at stake; lives are in the balance. I don't need to repeat everything Senator Sanders and others have said about the humanitarian catastrophe that exists inside that country. Yet this is different than other famines. This is different than other cholera outbreaks. This is different than other humanitarian nightmares in which tens of thousands of children lose their lives because we are not just a spectator in Yemen; we are participant. The bombing campaign that is causing the worst humanitarian nightmare in the world today is caused by a military campaign of which the United States is a major player and participant. So we have something to say today about whether this civil war ends. We have something to say about whether this Congress is going to allow the administration to continue to perpetuate a war that has had no debate in the U.S. Congress. Let me take the four arguments the administration uses to try to argue against our resolution and talk to you a little bit about them. The first argument that has been made--it is probably the most clear in Secretary Pompeo's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning--is that the real issue is not Saudi Arabia, it is Iran, and if we do not continue to support the Saudis' bombing campaign inside Yemen, the result will be that Iran will win in the region. First, that exhibits a third-grade understanding of the Middle East. The Middle East is not a zero-sum game between the Saudis and the Iranians. Every time you do something that is potentially disadvantageous to the Saudis doesn't mean it results in an equal-sized benefit for the Iranians. In fact, it may be that both countries are doing things that are deleterious to American national security. It may be that we want to pick and choose when we engage with the Saudis and when we don't engage with the Saudis. Just because we choose not to engage in one particular aspect of Saudi foreign policy does not mean that it equals a gift to the Iranians. Yet that is what Secretary Pompeo would have you believe; that if we don't blindly support the Saudis' civil war inside Yemen, then that will be a win for the Iranians. The reality is, while this civil war has been occurring, al-Qaida and ISIS have gotten stronger and more numerous. In fact, the greatest threat to the American homeland today comes from the wing of al-Qaida that is inside Yemen. This civil war that we have been helping to perpetuate is actually making our most sacred enemy even stronger inside that country. Second, there has to be a line that is crossed in which our ally has gone too far, that we are not willing to follow. Clearly, that has happened in Saudi Arabia as they intentionally bomb schools and hospitals and schoolbuses. Just because we stand up and say: We are not willing to support you, Saudi Arabia, in your targeted bombing of civilians, that does not equally gift to Iran. We are still able to decide when we engage or not engage even with our allies. Third, a lot of folks seem to believe there is some command-and- control relationship between the Iranians and the Houthis. They are, certainly, tied together. There are, certainly, weapons capabilities that have been gifted, granted, to the Houthis by the Iranians, but the Houthis are not Hezbollah. This is not a group of fighters that Iran controls. In fact, as the civil war goes on and on and gets deeper and deeper, the Houthis and the Iranians get closer and closer together. So as we continue to just feed enough support to the Saudis to keep the civil war going, we are actually perpetuating the very end we seek to avoid, which is the merger of the Iranian regime and the Houthi rebels. They are becoming closer and closer the longer and longer the United States becomes engaged in this conflict. The Middle East is not a zero-sum game. You do not have to unconditionally back the Saudis in everything they ask of us simply because you don't like the Iranians. That is not how the Middle East works. You can pick and choose the places in which you back up your ally--at no cost to your campaign--so as to try to delegitimize and reduce the influence of Iran. Second, the claim is that this resolution, if it were to be agreed to, would hurt the negotiations that are scheduled for next month. False. It is exactly the opposite for two reasons. One, the Saudis need to understand that our support is not unconditional, that they actually have to bend at the negotiating table. Right now, they don't believe they have to do that. In fact, over the course of this civil war, they have been, more often than not, the reluctant party in these negotiations because they believe that if negotiations fall apart and they return to a state of military hostilities, the United States will give them whatever they need. It is really important right now for the Saudis to understand, as they head into these negotiations, that if these negotiations don't succeed, there will be consequences. Second, the idea that the Houthis are ready to give up the fight, that they are tired, is also false. There is no evidence of that. The Houthis don't believe the negotiation is real, so they are prepared to just fight it out. If the Houthis believe the United States is an honest broker here, that there is some point at which we are unwilling to follow the Saudis into battle as they continue to deliberately attack civilians inside Yemen, then the Houthis will be actually more willing to sit and talk at the negotiating table. Showing that there is some conditionality to our support for the Saudis, that there is some line on war crimes that they cross that is too far, is actually helpful in getting both of these parties closer together at the negotiating table. Third, the claims that if this resolution were to be agreed to, it would hurt our work against al-Qaida and ISIS are absolutely false. Inside this resolution is an exclusion. What we say is, if there is an existing authorization for war inside Yemen, this resolution does not erase it. There is an existing authorization for any campaign anywhere in the world that the United States launches against al-Qaida. The administration and the prior administration, the Obama administration, have expanded the 9/11 AUMF to cover ISIS as well, so nothing in this resolution hurts our ability to go after al-Qaida and ISIS inside Yemen. All of those operations can continue, even if this is to be agreed to and becomes law. Second, al-Qaida has been growing in strength. ISIS had no foothold in Yemen before this civil war. It is stronger today than it was 3 years ago because, once again, like we did in Iraq for 10 years and like we are doing in Syria, we are giving just enough help to the Saudis to keep the civil war going without actually ever being willing to give enough force so as to be dispositive on the ground. All we are doing is lengthening the civil war. Nature abhors a vacuum, and in the vacuum that is created by that civil war, especially in the vast, ungovernable portions of Yemen, al-Qaida takes advantage, and ISIS continues to grow. Every day we continue to just keep this thing going, our sworn Sunni extremist enemies are getting stronger. Lastly, the argument is made that if the United States is not involved with the Saudis, the humanitarian nightmare would be worse. How could it be worse? How is that a justification? There are 85,000 children under the age of 5 who have died of starvation and disease. There are 22 million people in the country, and three-quarters of the population cannot live without humanitarian assistance. The world's worst cholera epidemic in the history of the world is happening right now inside that country. Why? Because the Saudis have been deliberately hitting the water treatment facilities. I am not making this up. They have been targeting the water treatment facilities so you can't get clean water, so people get cholera. Today, humanitarian supplies have been reduced by 50 percent to the Port of Hodeidah because, as we speak, the Saudis, with U.S. support, are bombing all around Hodeidah, and humanitarian agencies have cut off many of the supplies they would traditionally send into that capital. The humanitarian nightmare is getting worse right now, as we speak today, because this civil war continues to go on and on. It can't get much worse than it is today, and there is no evidence that the U.S.' participation in this campaign has made it better. In fact, since we have been sitting inside these targeting centers, with U.S. personnel helping the Saudis pick targets, more civilians have been killed, not fewer. We actually pulled out of the targeting centers at the end of the Obama administration. The Obama administration made a determination in 2016 that we were potentially committing war crimes by being with the Saudis as they were choosing to hit the water treatment facilities, so they pulled our people out. There is no evidence that during the time we were not in the targeting centers, the Saudis were hitting more civilian targets. In fact, the evidence tells us that the deeper we get involved in the targeting decisions, the more they hit civilian targets. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for that. So long as they have the United States inside the tent, they have moral cover for hitting civilian targets. They can use us to say: Well, the United States was there. It was inside the room when these decisions were made, so it can't be that we are doing the kind of damage you say we are. The evidence doesn't suggest the contrary. The evidence says, the contrary is true--of a 160-percent increase in civilians being killed just this year versus last year. So the Middle East isn't a zero-sum game. The adoption of this resolution does not empower Iran. We are not obligated to follow the Saudis into every mistake they make. Second, this resolution will not hurt negotiations. It will absolutely help negotiations by showing that the United States is going to be an honest broker. The Houthis are bad players. They have killed a lot of people. They have done a lot of damage inside that country. This is not just a question of what the Saudis have done. Seventy percent of the civilians have been killed by Saudi bombs, but the Houthis need to be held to account for what they have done as well. We need to be a broker of peace. This resolution will help us be a broker of peace. Third, al-Qaida and ISIS can still be confronted, even if this resolution is agreed to, and the quicker this civil war ends, the less power they have. Fourth, theoretically, maybe things could be worse. Maybe we could have 185,000 children under the age of 5 die from starvation and disease, but this is not a justification to just stay the course. We need to shake up the stalemate that exists today. We need to send a signal that the United States is not OK with the way the Saudis have perpetuated this war--frankly, the way they have lied to us over the course of the last several months about other things they are doing to quell dissent in and around the Kingdom. We need to send a message, but we also need to get the United States out of a conflict right now that is of no benefit to American national security and that has become a nightmare for people who are stuck in Yemen today. I urge the adoption of the resolution. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, these are the big leagues for a Senator. Depending on how long you serve here, you get only a handful of opportunities to vote on the confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice. We may know how this is going to go tomorrow, but many of us who have very serious concerns about the precedent that this confirmation creates for this country that we love are going to be here on the floor tonight--through the night--trying to implore our colleagues to think differently about this or at least think about how we can do this differently the next time around and how we can come to some common understanding as to what the rules of the game should be and what the standards should be when we are interviewing candidates for one of the most important jobs in the world, the U.S. Supreme Court. I have a few things to say here tonight, as the hour gets late. I wanted to start by talking a little bit about what the standard is. What is the standard that we should apply when we are considering a submission from the executive branch to sit on the Supreme Court? It seems to me as if this whole exercise has been conducted in a manner to suggest that, A, there is no one else eligible for the Supreme Court, other than Brett Kavanaugh, as if we live in an Adam and Eve world in which we have few, if any, alternative choices and, B, that this body owes some significant and potentially binding obligation to the President when he makes his choice. I just want to go back over the standard for a moment because it is not uncommon for the Senate to reject Supreme Court nominees who have been sent to this body. In fact, if you walk out the door on the other side of this Chamber and you hang a left, you will quickly come to the Senate Reception Room. In that room, there is a relatively freshly painted picture of Oliver Ellsworth and Roger Sherman. This is one of the newer portraits here in the Capitol, and it depicts two Connecticut delegates to the Constitutional Convention scheming over what would become called the Connecticut Compromise. This is the breakthrough at the Constitutional Convention that establishes the Senate with two Members per State and the House of Representatives elected by proportion of population per State. Oliver Ellsworth is a significant figure in the history of my State and in the history of this country but not only because of his contribution to the adoption of the U.S. Constitution; he also plays a significant role in the beginning of the American judicial system. He is the father of the American judiciary in that he authored, as a Senator, the first Judiciary Act, which established the Federal court system. Then he plays another important role in the early history of the courts because when it was time for George Washington to nominate a second Supreme Court Chief Justice, the name he sent to the Senate was rejected. He sent his friend John Rutledge, but because his friend John Rutledge had played a fairly controversial role in the adoption of the Jay Treaty, the Senate voted Rutledge down. Washington, not wanting to be embarrassed again, knowing that he needed the consent of the Senate to get someone into that role, picked one of the Senate's own. He picked Oliver Ellsworth, who was the foremost expert on the judiciary in the Senate. Oliver Ellsworth became the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. His bust sits inside the Old Supreme Court Chamber here in the Senate today. I tell that story only because it is a reminder that at the very earliest stages of the American Republic, the Senate decided to exercise its independent discretion when it came to choices for the Supreme Court by the President of the United States. George Washington figured out very quickly that the Senate does not owe the executive automatic deference when it comes to the choices that are placed before the Senate. It is advice and consent. In fact, that practice of refusing to give complete and total deference to the executive has continued up until this day. From World War II until this moment, I think the number is seven selections by the President that ultimately did not get confirmed. Sometimes the Senate gives a hint ahead of time that a nomination isn't going to go so well, and the President withdraws that nominee. Not in every case is there actually a vote before the Senate. Oftentimes, the signal is clear enough from the Senate that consent is not going to be given, and the administration withdraws that nominee. Let's be clear that there is no binding obligation on behalf of the Senate to say yes to a nominee whom we believe to be flawed or wrong for the moment--no obligation on behalf of Members of the President's party and no obligation on behalf of Members of the opposition party. Second, I have heard my Republican colleagues, ad nauseam, treat this selection as if we are a court of law with a defendant sitting in front of us whose freedom is going to be taken away if he doesn't get a positive vote for confirmation. Why do I say that? Because over and over again, I have heard this idea that Brett Kavanaugh is innocent until proven guilty, that there is a presumption of innocence with respect to the claims that surround him. Those are not traditionally terms that have been used with respect to the choices we make about nominees to the judicial branch or to the executive branch. Those are terms that are used in courts of law. The presumption of innocence is given to a defendant. The high burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is placed on the prosecutor because the stakes in a criminal trial are fundamentally different from the stakes in an appointment to the Supreme Court or to become the head of a department. In a court of law, in a criminal court of law, the bar, the standard is set high because the consequence to that defendant is his liberty being taken away from him or her. That is not the case for Brett Kavanaugh or any other name that gets sent to this body for confirmation. If Brett Kavanaugh were not to receive a confirmation vote to the Supreme Court, he would go right back to the appellate court with a nice job and a nice salary, as would many other nominees who don't get a confirmation vote from this body. Their liberty isn't taken away. They go back to some pretty good jobs. That is why it is nonsensical to suggest that the standard we apply here to a nominee is similar to that of a criminal court. We don't have to prove that reservations about a nominee can ultimately be held to the same standard as in a criminal court. Why? Because the consequences are lower but also because there are other people who can serve that role. You err on the side of caution often when it comes to nominations because the consequences for the country of simply moving on to the next nominee for a Cabinet post or a judicial job are, frankly, fairly low. The standard is not a criminal standard. We have often talked about the fact that this is much more like a job interview. I think that is right. I don't think it is a perfect analogy. This is a pretty special and important job. There are some procedures around this job interview that we don't hold ourselves to when we are interviewing somebody for a position in our office. Let's all be honest with each other. If somebody showed up in our office looking for a position and their file looked like the file of Brett Kavanaugh, none of us would hire that individual--not a single one of us. Tell me that a Senator would hire an individual who came to their office, who might have looked qualified, who might have a sterling resume, but whose file included several credible allegations of serious misbehavior. You probably wouldn't even go through the trouble of conducting an exhaustive inquiry into whether those allegations were true or not, as I think we had an obligation to do with respect to this case. I would argue, we had an obligation to do that investigation here because this is different from a job interview for a legislative assistant or a person who answers our phones. Let's be honest that if those allegations were before us as employers, we wouldn't hire that individual. And we certainly wouldn't hire an individual who conducted themselves in the job interview in the same way that Brett Kavanaugh conducted himself when he came before the Judiciary Committee last week. It is much more like a job interview than it is a criminal trial. It doesn't neatly fit into either category, but we wouldn't hire that individual in our office because we know that there are plenty of other qualified applicants for the jobs we are looking for. Why take a chance on someone who might be fundamentally wrong for the position we are interviewing for? I think it is important at the outset to get the standard right. The terminology that gets thrown around here as if this is a criminal trial just misunderstands the nature of the job that we have before us. I want to turn to the arguments that I would use if I thought I had the chance to change the mind of some of my Republican colleagues this evening. That is probably impossible at this late stage, but we are here, so I might as well give it a try. I agree with everything Senator Cantwell said about the jurisprudence of Judge Kavanaugh on the appellate court. I think he is a dangerous nominee because he does fall fairly far out of the judicial mainstream. I heard Senator Collins on the floor earlier today talking about how she hoped that he would be a bridge between the two sides of the Court, how she thought that he might ultimately be someone who would lead to fewer 5-to-4 decisions being rendered on the Court. She used as evidence of that hope a statistic that is curious. She talked about the fact that he voted with Merrick Garland 93 percent of the time on the court. Brett Kavanaugh voted with Merrick Garland 93 percent of the time on the court because the appellate court in DC--as is the case with most appellate courts in the country--renders most of their decisions in unanimous form. All of the judges are agreeing with each other on the vast majority of cases. That statistic does not tell you whether Brett Kavanaugh is a bridge builder or whether he is an outlier. Fortunately, there is another, more relevant statistic; that is, the percentage of times a judge dissents, who stands away from his colleagues, who has formed a consensus and rendered an opinion of his or her own. No one on the DC Circuit dissented during Judge Kavanaugh's time on that court more often than Judge Kavanaugh. Some of those dissents were pretty creative dissents. Some of the things we are most worried about with respect to the friendliness of Judge Kavanaugh to corporate power, his distaste for regulation, comes from those dissents in which Democrats and Republicans--or, put better, judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans--on the DC Circuit found a way to agree, but Judge Kavanaugh stood over here with some novel theories of the case as to why regulatory bodies couldn't get into the business of big corporations. The history in appellate court is not of being a bridge builder; it is of standing outside of that mainstream, challenging the consensus. That is who Judge Kavanaugh is going to be on the Supreme Court. I will give you an example, something that is close to my heart. I had a lot of arguments in Connecticut about the future of gun policy in this country, just like we have a lot of arguments here. By and large, people in my State--even the folks who don't agree with all the things I would do if I were in charge of America's gun laws--generally think it should be up to us to decide. They might not think the Second Amendment allows us to pass a bill banning all guns in the country, but they think the question of who can own guns and what kind of guns can be sold is a question better left to legislature. Brett Kavanaugh has a novel theory about the limits of the legislature's ability to regulate gun ownership. It is a theory that even for him is pretty far outside of the mainstream. He actually laid it out for the Judiciary Committee in a series of questions and answers with the ranking member. He said: Listen, I think if a gun is in the commercial space, the Constitution grants it permanent protection. His argument is that once a gun is sold privately, you can never ever ban it. That is ridiculous. That is not how any courts have read the law prior to this time. This Congress has regularly made the decision that some weapons are not proper for commercial sale and have pulled them out of the commercial market. In the 1930s, Congress decided that automatic weapons that were out in the streets--the so-called Tommy guns--should come out of the commercial market. In the 1990s, we made the decision that assault weapons--the semiautomatic tactical weapons--should be restricted. Kavanaugh says: No, once a gun is sold privately, you can't ever take it back, no matter how dangerous. No matter how dangerous it becomes, no matter the mistake that Congress thinks it might have made in legalizing that weapon, once it is out there, you cannot take it back--so says the Second Amendment. It is a radical idea, as is his theory of the case on abortion rights. We can talk about the case that came before his court in which he denied the ability of a young immigrant woman to seek an abortion despite the fact that she fit all the other legal requirements for that procedure, or we could just look to the fact that in his testimony, he parroted the political jargon of the anti-choice movement. He used phrases that courts don't use when talking about the issue of abortion or reproductive healthcare. He used the phrase ``abortion on demand,'' which is a ridiculously politically loaded term. I have no idea what that means, but it is a term that is regularly used by the anti-choice political movement. You can't get an abortion from a vending machine, but that is what the phrase ``abortion on demand'' seems to suggest exists in the world, and Judge Kavanaugh used it. He also called birth control an abortion-inducing drug, which it is not. Simple science can serve to explain that birth control certainly can prevent a pregnancy, but it does not cause an abortion. But Judge Kavanaugh used that term in his confirmation hearing because it is part of the political opposition. It is part of the basket of propaganda that gets used to try to pull down protection for reproductive choice around the country. I share many of the reservations that my colleagues have expressed when it comes to Judge Kavanaugh's record on the Second Amendment, Judge Kavanaugh's testimony before the Judiciary Committee in his first hearing on the issue of reproductive choice, as well as the reservations many of my colleagues have about what he will do to the Affordable Care Act. I will concede that his writings on the Affordable Care Act are limited. He has expressed some hostility to the Affordable Care Act. He said in one of his decisions that if the Congress could go so far as to require people to buy healthcare, there was no limit to the potential reach of Congress's power. On this one, I take the President at his word. The President said he would never make the mistake George Bush did in appointing someone to the Supreme Court who would uphold the Affordable Care Act, as John Roberts did. He promised he wouldn't make that mistake again. On this one, given the over-the-top, incessant, persistent hostility the President has expressed for the Affordable Care Act, I trust he has made good on his promise and that he has sent someone to us who is going to work with him to try to unwind the Affordable Care Act. I was an early opponent of Judge Kavanaugh's. I didn't wait very long to express my opposition because I see he is so far out of line with Connecticut values that he is not going to be a judge in the model of those true centrist judges who maybe I didn't agree with on issue after issue but I thought gave each question before them a fair look. I also don't think that is my best case with my Republican friends because you feel differently about the Affordable Care Act and about the Second Amendment and about the issue of choice than I do. It is probably not the best tactic at 1 o'clock in the morning to try to convince you to vote against Brett Kavanaugh based upon his conservative, I would argue rightwing record as an appellate judge. So let me try some different arguments out on you. Some of these will have to do with process. Process is important. Process is important because it is kind of all we have. When it comes down to it, democracy holds together because of a set of rules we all agree to follow. It is called the rule of law, broadly. In this place, it is a set of precedents and traditions that have held up pretty well over 240 years. As those precedents and traditions start to fall, so do the edges of democracy itself. I know to some it feels like insider politics--beltway jargon--to be talking about the process we have gone through here, but there are some important precedent-shattering decisions that have been made by the majority with respect to the Kavanaugh nomination. The first is the documents surrounding Brett Kavanaugh's candidacy. As many of my colleagues have said, we have seen somewhere around 6 percent to 7 percent of all the documents relative to Brett Kavanaugh's time as a judge and as a staff person in the executive branch. We have seen a small slice of those documents. I think the 7-percent number applies to the documents relative to his time in the White House. I listened to Senator Lee earlier tonight talk about the fact that it wasn't his fault that we didn't see the documents because those are in the possession of the administration, and the Bush administration and representatives of the Bush White House are making the decisions about what documents Congress can see and can't see independently of Brett Kavanaugh. That is not true. The individual who is overseeing the decision about which documents Congress can see and can't see is a close confidant, ally, and colleague of Brett Kavanaugh's. In fact, 2 weeks ago when the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh was thrown into doubt and the White House convened a war room--a war room of Judge Kavanaugh's most loyal, trusted advisers--the individual who was vetting the documents for the Bush White House was in the war room. This was not an independent exercise of discretion on behalf of the Bush White House; this was one of Judge Kavanaugh's primary backers making decisions on which documents we could see and which ones we couldn't. This was a political job. We are left to wonder why we get so few. What is in those other documents that were so explosive that you had to put a political ally of Brett Kavanaugh's in charge of the disclosure of those documents and give us so few? Here is why the process matters. Once you have made the decision that you are going to create a structure by which you withhold evidence that would be relevant to the decision the Senate makes because--well, just because--it becomes the new rule. I am not here to say what goes around comes around; I am telling you that once you make the decision that ``You don't need to see evidence on a particular nominee because we are not going to give it to you because we think it might be damaging,'' that becomes the new rule. Then, all of a sudden, there will become a day when my friends on the other side of the aisle want evidence they are not getting either. The withholding of documents really matters. If we can't make sound decisions, then this whole institution becomes weaker. Second, I want to move to last Thursday's hearing. I think there is also some precedent-shattering decisions we are making in the wake of what was a stunning performance by a nominee before the Judiciary Committee. Let me talk about the lies. I believe Dr. Ford. I think she was credible, thoughtful. Everything she said in that hearing seemed to be an effort to try to get to the truth. I, frankly, don't know whether Judge Kavanaugh wasn't telling the truth or legitimately doesn't remember what happened because he was so intoxicated. I can set aside the question of whether Judge Kavanaugh was telling the truth about that particular assault and still have serious concerns about all of the other smaller lies he told during the testimony. I understand some of the stuff that came up was embarrassing to him, some of these terms and phrases. Yet he was asked the questions, and no matter how embarrassing it was to talk about what boofing is or what a devil's triangle is, he was obligated to tell the truth, and he didn't. We have plenty of corroborating evidence to suggest that he and his friends knew exactly what those terms mean, knew exactly what they were referring to with respect to the young women with whom they were part of an alumni club. I know it sounds trivial to be talking on the Senate floor about words and phrases that high school kids were using. The fact that they were using those terms, said certain things when they were kids, doesn't bother me at all. What bothers me is that a nominee for the Supreme Court has such a casual association with the truth that he couldn't admit to us what were some embarrassing admissions and lied instead. The precedent of letting a nominee get away with that--even if you don't believe he told a big lie, even if you only believe the mistruths were on the smaller things--is another precedent-shattering decision, because all of a sudden, we send the message to people who want to apply for the most important jobs in the world that telling the truth is not that important. I get it. The cat is out of the bag. The horse has left the barn. I get it that the top of the Pandora's Box is open. We have a President of the United States who doesn't tell the truth every single day. We have a President of the United States who goes on Twitter and makes up stuff about U.S. Senators. Our bigger problem is not the small mistruths--the potentially small mistruths of Brett Kavanaugh's; our bigger problem is that we have a President who literally can't get through a day without making up something. That sends a worse message to our kids than the mistruths of Brett Kavanaugh, but, nonetheless, the Supreme Court is the Supreme Court. It is a lifetime appointment. At least if an Executive gets into office and starts making stuff up, we can get rid of him or her after 4 years--not the Supreme Court. You send somebody up to the Supreme Court who fibs, and that individual is there forever. Thus, maybe our standards should be a little bit higher. Third, I want to talk about Judge Kavanaugh's disposition in that hearing and some of the things he said about how the allegations came forward. I talked about this on the Senate floor, I think, now 2 days ago. So I will not repeat it all. But his belief that Dr. Ford's allegations or Ms. Ramirez's allegations came forward as part of some vast conspiracy led by progressive groups and Democratic Senators on behalf of Hillary and Bill Clinton is delusional. I understand that politics in this town are rough. We have all been subject to character attacks we think are unfair, but that doesn't mean there are these vast cabals of people on the left and the right wing who are out there spinning tales on a daily basis about each other. What we know is that Dr. Ford brought this forward to her Member of Congress before Brett Kavanaugh was even the nominee. What we know is that it got leaked to the press, likely by somebody who didn't have an interest in Brett Kavanaugh as a nominee, but not by a Democratic Senator. What we know is that the allegations that followed came out as a consequence of that first allegation. There is zero evidence that there is some grand conspiracy of Democrats in league with the Clintons to try to bury Brett Kavanaugh. Further evidence of that is that if that were our MO, why did we wait a year and a half to employ it on Brett Kavanaugh? If Democrats' method of operation was to gin up a whole bunch of false allegations about individuals and make accusations about sexual assault that weren't true just to muddy them up and smear them, why didn't it occur to Neil Gorsuch who, frankly, engendered much more hostility among many of our friends and backers, because that was the seat that we believe was stolen from Merrick Garland. Why didn't we gin up those kinds of allegations about the President's early nominees to the Cabinet who, frankly, spun up a lot more grassroots anger than Brett Kavanaugh did in the summer of 2018? The answer is because this wasn't a conspiracy. This wasn't a whole bunch of Democratic Senators sitting around. These allegations came out organically, and whether or not you believe they are true, to go before the Judiciary Committee as a judge and make the allegation that there is a conspiracy including Democratic Senators against you, when you have no evidence for it, tells us all we need to know about your fitness to serve on the Bench. If you are making things up in order to fit the narrative that you think will be most helpful to make your case before the Senate, why would we think that you wouldn't do the same thing on the Court, which leads me to the most troubling passage of his testimony, and I heard Senator Lee launch a defense of it. I have heard others launch a defense of it, but I watched it again before I came down to the Senate floor just to make sure that I had it right. At the end of his diatribe against Democrats, at the end of this description of a Clinton-connected conspiracy that he believes is launched against him, he uses this phrase--and I am paraphrasing the beginning of this. He says: As we all know in the political world of the early 2000s, ``what comes around, goes around.'' Now, I listened to it again today just to make sure that that wasn't a lead-in to some other thought, and it wasn't. He starts a new thought after that. He starts talking about how he is a generally optimistic guy. The passage about the conspiracy theory and about how badly he has been treated by the Democrats ends with a punctuation point right before which is the admonition ``what comes around, goes around.'' There is little way to read that other than as a threat to those who are going to oppose him in the Senate and to those political interest groups outside the Senate who are working to oppose him. I don't think I am making too much of this, and I know that last night in the Wall Street Journal Brett Kavanaugh wrote a somewhat apologetic op- ed in which he said that he might have gotten a little bit too heated at times in the hearing. He didn't specifically refer to which statements he would take back, but that line--``what comes around, goes around''--and those allegations about this dangerous Democratic-led conspiracy theory weren't statements that he just came up with in the heat of the moment. Those were statements in his prepared text. Those were statements that he wrote down on paper, thought about overnight, thought about again as he listened to Dr. Ford's testimony, and then read before the Judiciary Committee: ``What comes around, goes around.'' How does any petitioner who is aligned with any of the groups that Judge Kavanaugh might think was involved in the political opposition to his candidacy have faith that they will get a fair audience before the Supreme Court when Judge Kavanaugh is on it? Do you really think, given how angry he was, given what he believes was organized against him, that he is going to fairly give causes aligned with Democrats a fair shot before the Court? Do you really think he now can say that he will be a neutral-colored umpire as a Supreme Court Justice? Here is why this is a precedent-breaking decision that we are making. In the past, we have actually put political people on the Supreme Court. We have. Centuries ago we selected people for the Supreme Court who had actually served in political positions. That was at a time when our politics was, maybe, a little bit less heated, where there was more opportunity for common ground. But in recent times, that has not been the way in which we have selected people for the Supreme Court. We traditionally select jurists. There has been in the American public this belief that even in a super politically charged time, there are at least nine people who are above all of that, who are above the regular partisan barbs and allegations that we tend too often to throw at each other. Those nine people are on the Supreme Court, and that is really important, because once the American public starts to think that the Supreme Court is just another political arm, that is the day when the rule of law really starts to fall apart. That is why nominees to the Court are so careful not to unveil any political bias, even if they may have one, because they don't want to shatter that image that the American public still has, by and large, that at least those nine people are immune from the political biases that we hold here in the Senate. Well, that belief has been forever compromised because Judge Kavanaugh has told you his political bias. He has told you what he thinks of Democrats, and now he is headed for the Supreme Court. Senator Lee spent some time earlier this evening talking about Federalist No. 78. Senator Lee is not the only one who has read Federalist Papers. Federalist No. 78 is an important one. It is where Hamilton lays out the importance of seeing the judiciary different than the legislative body, and Senator Lee got it right. He talks about the judiciary exercising judgments, whereas the legislature exercises will. That is a good way to think about the difference between the two. Yet inside Federalist No. 78 is another idea that is really, really important. What he says inside that document is this. Hamilton says: I agree, that ``there is no liberty, if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers.'' And it proves, in the last place, that as liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would have everything to fear from its union with either of the other departments. . . . Hamilton is saying in that edition of the Federalist Papers that the judiciary is the weakest of the three branches because it doesn't have the power of the sword as the executive does, nor the power of the purse as the legislative branch does. Though he admits that the judiciary can overrule an act of Congress and that gives it power, he suggests that so long as the executive is independent and is not a tool or a part of the legislative branch or the executive branch, we have nothing to fear. Now, he doesn't lay it out in as explicit terms as I might today, but what he is essentially saying is that the judiciary has to be apolitical. As long as it is apolitical, you have nothing to worry about because it doesn't have some of the inherent powers of the branches in article I and article II. We have broken through that wall in the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. By making these blatantly partisan allegations, by associating himself in his confirmation hearing so clearly with one side of the partisan fight inside the U.S. Congress, he has now brought at least his seat on the Supreme Court that much closer to one of the two departments that Hamilton feared would ultimately become joined. Alexander Hamilton spent a lot of time thinking about the importance and writing about the importance of an independent judiciary. Brett Kavanaugh, by jumping into the political fray, by translating his biases, has started to break down that wall. Now, I don't want to be apocalyptic about this. Maybe what I am suggesting is that it just is going to make it a lot easier to put more people on the Supreme Court who are more and more political, ultimately continuing to tear down that wall. Lastly, I want to talk for a moment about the investigation that took place regarding some of these allegations. One of the precedent-shattering decisions that was made was the decision on behalf of the majority to do no work to try to figure out whether those who were making these allegations were telling the truth, beyond a hastily scheduled hearing in which only two witnesses were called, as compared to the Anita Hill hearings, where there were over 20 witnesses called. It was a sham of a process. That is not too strong a word. There was not an attempt to get to the truth. There was an attempt to provide cover, to make it look as if the Senate was having a fair hearing. There was also no intention to do what had been done back during the Clarence Thomas nomination--to have the FBI go out and gather some facts for themselves. It was only because of a last-minute demand by a handful of Republican Senators that the FBI went out and conducted an investigation but was given only 1 week to do that investigation. There is reporting in the New York Times today that suggests that the White House intentionally limited the scope of that investigation, but, frankly, I didn't need the New York Times to tell me that that is how this went down. I read the report, and it was very clear in that report that the FBI could do some things and couldn't do other things. This is not me telling you this. I am referring to independent reporting that only eight people were actually interviewed, and there were clearly some subjects that were off limits in those interviews and some things that would have been very important for Congress to know that we cannot know because those interviews only went so far. Now the Times is reporting that that was intentional. In fact, the Times reports that the President's Chief Counsel told the President that if there was a full investigation of all of the claims and all potential claims around Judge Kavanaugh, it would be very bad for his nomination. So I think the FBI do good work, but not when they are given unfair parameters around their investigation. That, in and of itself, is another precedent-shattering decision, constraining the FBI when they are trying to go out and gather facts for us. Yet another precedent-shattering decision was the way in which we were allowed to see the report. It was one of the most humiliating things I have ever gone through as a U.S. Senator--to sit in a secure room with 10 of my other colleagues, with 60 minutes to review a document, look at it, digest it, and ask questions about it. The scene was chaotic. We are sitting there with a bunch of our colleagues, trying to share different pieces of the report: I will read that page. You read that page. Wait. Did I read page 6? Wait. Do you have page 7? Oh, boy, we have to get out of here because we only have 60 minutes. It was not becoming of the U.S. Senate, and it didn't have to go down like that. It would have been easy for the Senate majority leader to work out an arrangement with the White House to have more than one copy of the FBI report. And, of course, the Senate leadership could have given us more than a half day to review that report. Neither of those things happened, and they have consequences because the next time there is a complication, there is incentive to do the same thing again--to rush a nominee through the process. I have with me a statement from a gentleman by the name of Keith Koegler. This is a statement that comes to the Senate from Christine Blasey Ford's lawyers. It is a statement of an individual whom the FBI did not interview. This is a friend of Dr. Ford's who had conversations with Dr. Ford prior to Judge Kavanaugh's nomination regarding the allegations of assault that Dr. Ford told the committee. One of the things he says here is that he has a copy of an email thread ``between Christine and me'' in which he made it clear that Brett Kavanaugh was the judge who assaulted her as a teenager. He says: ``We exchanged those emails . . . two days after Justice Kennedy's retirement announcement, before there was a shortlist for his replacement.'' He is submitting this to us so that we can put it in the Record, given the fact that it was not included in the FBI's investigation, because they never came and interviewed Mr. Koegler. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that this document be printed in the Record.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, this is just one piece of evidence that none of us saw prior to this moment that would have provided important back up to Dr. Ford's testimony. I don't know why this person wasn't interviewed who can testify that Dr. Ford told him of this abuse before Judge Kavanaugh was placed on any shortlist. I don't know if the FBI made their own decision not to talk to this individual, whether they were time-limited so that they were unable to get to him or whether the White House told them whom they could interview and whom they couldn't, but this would have been really important information for us to have beforehand. I will end where I ended the other day. All of these decisions that have been made, I think, have long-term consequences for this body. I am not saying that we can't recover from this. We are all adults. I do believe that everybody here in the Senate believes in this place and wants it to be better. I don't run into many people on either side of the aisle who are having a lot of fun these days, given the fact that we can't get along on almost anything except for the budget, which is not insignificant. So I have to trust, as a relatively new entrant to this place, that we can do better, that we can try to learn from what has happened here. The damage has been done at this point to survivors of sexual assault who are going to be thinking twice about coming forward because they are not going to be believed. The damage has been done to the precedent surrounding nominations to the judiciary. The damage has been done to the idea of objective truth and the belief that folks who are applying for important jobs should tell the truth. But I have faith that we can learn from what happened here and try to be better the next time. Ultimately, what I think about a lot and what I have thought about a lot these last few weeks is this: Why Brett Kavanaugh? I come back to where I began. At the outset, I said that our standard should be educated by the fact that there is not one person in the world, in the United States, who is qualified for this job. There are lots of them. So if you have serious doubts or reservations about an individual, you can move on to the next person. That is what George Washington did when John Rutledge was rejected by the Senate. He had somebody else who was great in reserve--a great early American, Oliver Ellsworth. There are, no doubt, other conservative jurists who would probably fulfill most of the jurisprudential aims of the Republican majority just as well as Brett Kavanaugh. It can't be because Brett Kavanaugh is the essential man. So given all of these doubts, given all of these allegations, given his precedent-breaking performance before the Judiciary Committee, why stick with Brett Kavanaugh? This is what I come back to when I try to answer that question for myself. I know that it is hard being a Republican today. Your party doesn't look like it did 10 years ago because you have a President who really doesn't have an ideological core. He doesn't have a set of beliefs. He is a cult of personality. He makes it up as he goes along. So it is difficult being a Republican in Congress today because the party is just fundamentally different than it was 5 years ago, and there is very little that binds together a President without an ideological core and Republicans in the Senate who do have a set of beliefs that they are fairly regularly consistent about. I know that is uncomfortable. So I fear that the reason the Senate Republican majority is sticking with Brett Kavanaugh is because the one thing on which can agree with this President is your antipathy for the Democratic minority. There is this theme--this phrase on social media--that gets used by the right, called ``owning the libs.'' It is the idea that you win if you dominate your opponents. Winning isn't about passing a bill. Winning isn't about doing something good for the country. Winning is about owning your political opposition. I worry that is what this is about--that we are sticking with Brett Kavanaugh even with all of these problems and questions that surround him because the worry is that to give up on him and move on to somebody else would be a show of weakness and would be interpreted as a victory for Democrats. The one thing that binds together congressional Republicans and this President is an unwillingness to give Democrats any perception of victory. Now, it wouldn't really be a victory for Democrats because we know there would be another conservative Justice--maybe, one even more conservative than Brett Kavanaugh--who would be coming down the pike. But maybe in the short term, it would be scored that way, and thus, it becomes unacceptable. It is sort of the definition of power politics--dominance no matter the cost, no matter the policy implications, no matter the precedent. I might be wrong about this. It may be that my colleagues just feel like Brett Kavanaugh is telling the truth on everything, down to the definition of some of those terms, or maybe they see a talent in him that is unique that the rest of us don't see. But I worry that what matters in this place these days is just winning, and I worry about that for Democrats too. I worry that ultimately what drives us when we get up in the morning in Washington, DC, these days is just beating the other side--that it is just a game, that it is just an athletic contest, and that we have become what the news media and the cable shows want us to be, a sporting event. I think that of late my Republican colleagues have been more guilty of this than Democratic colleagues. I have that bias, I admit it. I am allowed to have it as a partisan, but I believe it exists on both sides of this body. This, I would argue, is just the worst episode of that desire for political dominance and something that we should all, in the wake of this nomination, step back from and think long and hard about. 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. President, this is the first time I have come to the floor to speak on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh since the events of the last several weeks. I want to say this at the outset in the most dispassionate way I can: I have come to the conclusion Brett Kavanaugh is perhaps the most dangerous nominee for the Supreme Court in my lifetime, and I am going to vote no tomorrow when the cloture vote comes before this Senate. Let me be clear. I had decided to vote no before his confirmation hearing, before the allegations of sexual assault were levied against him, before his second confirmation hearing, before the FBI refreshed its background check investigation. That doesn't mean I wasn't willing to do my due diligence; it is simply that his judicial record, which I became familiar with as he was becoming known as one of the finalists for this selection, was enough for me to decide he wouldn't rule fairly on the questions before the Court that affect the millions of people I represent in Connecticut. Every year, I take a walk across my State. It takes about 5 days. It is about 120 miles, give or take. It is a chance for me to conduct a weeklong running focus group where I get to talk to hundreds of voters who aren't plugged into politics on a daily basis. The people I meet at gas stations and auto body shops and folks who are out walking their dog in the morning are part of the 98 percent of Americans who don't watch Sean Hannity or Anderson Cooper or Rachel Maddow. Yet they have strong opinions about what is happening in this country just like everybody else, and I am glad they share them with me. For the last 2 years, since President Trump took office, the No. 1 topic people talk to me about during the walk is healthcare. People in Connecticut are scared about what they see as a coordinated effort that is underway in Washington to take away their insurance coverage and the protections for people in my State who have preexisting conditions. Folks in Connecticut don't think the Affordable Care Act is perfect. They want us to work on making it better, but they don't want us to end it without a plan for what is going to come next. They were glad when the repeal plan was defeated last year. Now they are worried that President Trump is trying to use the courts to get done what he couldn't get done in the people's branch of government, the legislative branch. Brett Kavanaugh was vetted by two conservative political groups whose chief legislative priority is repealing the Affordable Care Act come hell or high water. The head of one of those groups said on television it really didn't matter to him which of the names on the list Trump picked because they all shared their group's priorities. Trump himself told the American public he would never pick a judge like John Roberts, who voted to uphold the major parts of the Affordable Care Act. Kavanaugh, in his judicial writing, has been hostile to the Affordable Care Act. Frankly, I will take the President's word for it. He picked Brett Kavanaugh to help him unwind judicially a law he couldn't unwind legislatively, and that will have huge consequences on folks in my State who need insurance coverage for things like cancer, addiction, or mental illness. While Kavanaugh hasn't said a lot specifically on the ACA, his views on choice are pretty well known. As a lawyer in the Bush White House, Kavanaugh went out of his way to note that Roe v. Wade isn't settled law, that it would take just five Supreme Court Justices to get rid of it. As a circuit court judge, he denied access to an abortion for a young immigrant girl, even though she met the legal criteria to receive the procedure. He uses rhetoric and terminology that is right out of the anti-choice dictionary when talking about reproductive healthcare. He talks about abortion on demand. He called birth control an abortion- inducing drug. Kavanaugh, no doubt about it, is going to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Any Senators who have convinced themselves otherwise are living in a fantasy world. The people I represent in Connecticut don't want the Supreme Court of the United States telling them what they can and cannot do with their bodies. The judicial doctrine of privacy comes from a Connecticut case, Griswold v. Connecticut, brought by a pioneering civil rights lawyer in New Haven. In my State, we prefer judges to stay out of our private business. Finally, when I am walking across the State of Connecticut, I am talking an awful lot about the issue of gun violence. It is not just the murder of 20 little first graders in Sandy Hook that still hangs heavy over Connecticut; it is the murders in Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, and the suicides all over our State continue unabated. Listen, it is not as though everybody I meet when I am walking across the State agrees with me on what we should do. When I walk east to west, I spend half of my time in Eastern Connecticut--a part of the State where people still love their guns, and I get into lots of spirited arguments about assault weapons and gun permits. What there is relative agreement on is that it is our choice on how we should regulate guns. Here is where Judge Kavanaugh's views get outside of the mainstream. His testimony before the Judiciary Committee suggests that he is a Second Amendment radical, believing almost all restrictions on gun ownership are likely unconstitutional. Here is a for instance: He stated in his testimony, as long as a weapon is in regular commercial use, it can never ever be banned. That is a recipe for disaster because all you need then is a very short period of legalization of automatic weapons, followed by a few years of robust commercial sales, and then that gun has permanent constitutional protection forever. That is absurd, but that is Brett Kavanaugh's view on the Second Amendment. What I am saying is this. I didn't need the tragic drama of the last few weeks to know how I felt about Brett Kavanaugh serving on the Supreme Court. I was an early ``no'' vote, and I don't apologize for coming to that conclusion months ago. Yet that doesn't mean I am not entitled to have a strong opinion on what has played out before the eyes of America during the month of September, and it doesn't mean I don't have the right to make the argument here that for those in the Senate who weren't as sure as I was, what happened in the last 30 days should be dispositive on the future of this nomination. I said at the outset, I thought Brett Kavanaugh is the most dangerous nominee to the Court in my lifetime. That opinion is one I arrived at only after hearing his testimony before the committee last week. I think it is really important for Senators to understand the Pandora's box they are opening by voting yes, endorsing his performance, his demeanor, and what I argue is maybe most important: his bias. Let me say first, I don't believe any Democrat should defend the way in which Christine Blasey Ford's allegations were brought to light. I don't know who leaked the contents of that letter. I think it is fair to guess it was somebody who didn't want Brett Kavanaugh confirmed. Dr. Ford should have controlled her story or at least the ranking member of the committee to whom she entrusted it should have controlled that story. The timing of its release just sucked. Something that explosive, that serious, shouldn't be shoved into debate at the very last minute. Here is the thing. The way in which the substance is revealed does not change the substance. Yet it may give you reason to be angry about the way in which it was made known. It may make you suspicious of the motivations of the person who did it, but the method doesn't alter the substance. The substance is Dr. Ford's very credible account of a sexual assault carried out against her by somebody who wants to be on the Supreme Court. Let me be clear. There is no reason not to believe Dr. Ford. Plenty of Republicans admitted to this after she came before the committee. She disclosed the incident well before Kavanaugh was nominated. She was composed, credible, and thoughtful in her testimony. Why on Earth would she put herself and her family through this horror if not because she is telling the truth? Though I believed Dr. Ford, you frankly don't even have to be sure she is telling the truth to decide the risk of nominating someone with these kinds of serious charges swirling around them is an unnecessary burden for this body or the judicial system to bear. If there is a chance he did these things, just move on to the next eligible conservative candidate. These charges bother me greatly. What truly shook me about Kavanaugh's testimony and the speeches many of my Republican colleagues have delivered on this floor since is the idea proffered by Judge Kavanaugh that these charges are simply a result of a Clinton-connected liberal conspiracy theory. Let me read for you what he actually said last Thursday. When I did at least okay enough at the hearing that it looked like I might actually get confirmed, a new tactic was needed. Some of you were lying in wait and had it ready. He then went on to allege: The whole 2-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that had been stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons. Come on. Listen, I am telling you that I don't like how this information was released to the press. I am not trying to be a blind partisan here, but to believe and then to publicly claim that this is some larger organized effort by Democrats who purposefully held back this allegation until the last minute is to reveal to America your true political bias. There was no conspiracy. There was no orchestrated smear campaign. Listen, if that was our MO, why didn't we use it on Neil Gorsuch, when there was even more anger on our side because that was the seat that should have been Merrick Garland's. Why didn't we use fake allegations of sexual misconduct against the President's Cabinet nominees, who engendered much more grassroots anger in early 2017 than Brett Kavanaugh did in the summer and fall of 2018? It just doesn't make sense because it is made up. There are zero facts behind it, and for a nominee to the Supreme Court to believe such a far-fetched story and then to angrily warn Democrats that ``what goes around comes around,'' is one of the most astonishing unveilings of political bias that I have ever witnessed from a nominee asking for the support of the Senate. That has serious long-term consequences for us as a republic, because it used to matter that in the midst of all of our political heated debates here, there were at least nine people in America whom Americans could credibly believe didn't care about our usually petty political partisan fights. There were nine people that Americans could believe were above it all. Now we are on the verge of perhaps sending someone to the Supreme Court who called Democrats ``embarrassments'' and who warned his political opponents menacingly that we will reap what we sow. I don't really know what that means, but I am sure that I know that I don't want a nominee to the Supreme Court saying anything like that. Now, the fight over the Kennedy seat was going to be controversial and contentious. There is no way around that, but it didn't need to go down like this. It didn't need to divide this country. It didn't need to marginalize victims and to politicize the Supreme Court, like this nomination has. Add to the conspiratorial beliefs the hatred that was oozing from him toward Democrats that day and the likelihood that this nominee was also lying over and over about, at the very least, relatively small things for which he had really little reason not to tell the truth. I am sorry. I know this sounds trivial, talking about things like a devil's triangle or boofing, but is it really not too much to ask, to expect that a nominee for the most important court in the world tell you the truth even about the small embarrassing stuff? Even if you don't believe Dr. Ford, I just don't know why you would want to put somebody on the Supreme Court who has a habit of fibbing. This is the Supreme Court. So I guess, for me, it comes down to this question, which I think is a really, really important one: Why did Republicans stick with Brett Kavanaugh, given all of this, when Republicans could have just sent him back to the President and brought before this body another really conservative judge who would have regularly sided with the right side of the Court? This process isn't a trial. It is a job interview. Not a single one of us would hire someone into our office if credible allegations like this were attached to that person or if they conducted themselves in an in-person interview the way that Brett Kavanaugh did on Thursday. Seriously, think of that. Not a single Senator would willingly hire a person with these questions surrounding him or her, but we are here with a vote pending in a matter of hours. Now, I just came from that secure briefing room where I was force-fed a half-baked FBI investigation that I was told I had to read and digest in no more than an hour. It was humiliating. I felt like I was 9 years old. But that humiliation was sort of the capstone for me on explaining why we are still moving forward on Brett Kavanaugh. At least it helped me to fill out the details of my theory of the case, and I will end here. Listen, I get it that it is really hard to be a Republican today, and I mean that sincerely. The things that the Republican Party used to stand for have been obliterated by this President. The Grand Old Party has become the party of Trump. There is only a thread of unifying ideology left between this administration and congressional Republicans. Republicans are much more so organized now around a kind of cult of personality. I know that many of my Republican colleagues are really uncomfortable about this. Without this unifying set of ideas that can bind together the President and congressional Republicans, I fear that you are using this nomination to cling to the one thing left that you can agree on, and that is the methodical complete domination of your political opponents. On social media they call it ``owning the libs,'' because why else would you stick with this nominee other than just because you want to shove down the throats of Democrats this deeply flawed nominee? Why else would you try to railroad through his nomination without a background check, and then, when you are forced to do one, humiliate us all by giving us 60 minutes to review what turned out to be a product that raises more questions than it answered? I wish the answer was that you all think that Brett Kavanaugh is worth it. He is just that important a jurist, that serious a thinker to do whatever it takes to get him on the Court, but I don't think that is what Republicans believe. So we are left searching for the real reason why we are having a vote tomorrow. I don't hate my Republican colleagues. I don't have any interest in dominating them or getting my way just to get my way, and I wish I could explain this process, especially over the last few weeks, through any other prism than the desire by Republican leadership to simply bury Democrats into the ground. I hate the way this has played out. I hate the lateness of the revelation. I hate the rush job of an investigation. I hate the inability to recognize that none of us, Democrats or Republicans, are obligated to stand by a nominee that has real questions about his history and his impartiality just because the President likes him. This is not right. None of this is right, and the elevation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, filled with hatred toward Democrats and our allies, surrounded by legitimate questions about his fitness for office, is totally unnecessary, even to try to accomplish the political aims of my Republican friends in the majority. In the end, most importantly, the way in which this has been done is deeply, deeply hurtful to the unity of our great Nation. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

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

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, Candice Bowers overcame a lot of challenges in her life. She raised two children as a single mother. She worked as a waitress at Mimi's Cafe. She had a wide circle of friends. She adopted a little girl named Ariel, who was a relative's baby who couldn't be cared for. Ariel was 2 years old, and her children were 16 and 20, a year ago yesterday, when Candice Bowers was one of the over 50 victims of the biggest mass shooting in American history--in Las Vegas. In speaking about Candice, her aunt said that everybody loved her and that she always had a smile on her face. She would help anybody. She had a big heart. She was just a sweetheart. Robert Layaco, a 78-year- old veteran who served in the Korean war, who was her grandfather, said that everybody else might forget about this in 6 months but that they will never forget about her--he won't, her daughter won't, her little daughter won't, and her son will not forget about her--in thinking ahead to all the Thanksgivings and Christmases at which there will be an empty seat at their dinner table. He said thoughts and prayers are just not going to do it. Angela Gomez was 20 years old when she was gunned down at the concert a year ago yesterday. She had graduated from Riverside Polytechnic High School in 2015 and was attending classes at a community college. Her former cheer coach said that Angie was a fun-loving, sweet, young lady with a great sense of humor and that she challenged herself all the time. Angie enrolled in advanced placement classes, and she loved the stage. She was involved in cheer, she was involved in choir, and she was involved in the Riverside Children's Theatre. She had an amazing life ahead of her--filled with joy, filled with enthusiasm for performance. Charleston Hartfield was 34 years old when he was killed in the shooting in Las Vegas. He was a Las Vegas police officer. He was off duty when he decided to attend the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival, and that is when this shooting took place. One of his friends said: I don't know a better man than Charles. They say it's always the good ones we lose early. There's no truer statement than that with Charles. Charles enlisted in the Army in 2000, and he was a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division. He deployed to Iraq in 2003, and he served in a task force that was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation for extraordinary heroism. He survived his deployment to Iraq--one of the most dangerous theaters of combat in modern history. Yet he couldn't survive going to a concert to hear a singer he liked in his hometown of Las Vegas. Gun Violence Mr. President, I come to the floor every week or so--a little bit less frequently now than I did a few years ago--to talk about who these people were. I think the statistics have kind of come to wash over people. There is no other country in the world--at least in the advanced world, in the industrialized world--that has numbers like these: 33,000 a year dying from guns, 2,800 a month, 93 a day. These are epidemic level numbers, and there are lots of different stories inside these numbers. The majority of these are suicides. We have an epidemic level of suicides alone in this country that is going nowhere but up. A lot of these are homicides. A lot of these are accidental shootings. They are domestic violence crimes. Suffice it to say, it only happens in the United States, and it is getting worse, not better. Certainly, I can show you a 200-year trajectory of how violence in the United States is getting better, but in the last several years, since these mass shootings have become so regularized, all of it is getting worse. There seems to be a lot of consensus about at least one very narrow-cast idea to try to reduce the likelihood that 58 people could die all at one time, as happened in Las Vegas. As we came out of that shooting a year ago, it seemed that we all, at the very least, agreed that these things called bump stocks--these things that are manufactured to turn a semiautomatic weapon essentially into an automatic weapon with which you can fire multiple rounds with one pull of the trigger--shouldn't be legal, that they shouldn't be allowed to be sold. We had all made a decision a long time ago that notwithstanding our differences as to whether these semiautomatic, tactical weapons should be sold in the commercial space, we at least knew that automatic weapons should not be available to consumers. Now this modification was being allowed to turn semiautomatic weapons into automatic weapons. We are now a year since the Las Vegas mass shooting, and you can still get one of these. You can still turn a semiautomatic weapon into an automatic weapon with ease. In fact, bump stock manufacturers don't need a Federal firearms license to sell them--you don't even need a license to sell these things--because the Federal Government classifies them as accessories, not as firearms. To me, it is just unbelievable that our ability to work on the issue of gun violence has broken down so badly that even on an issue about which we profess agreement a year after 58 people were killed--and by the way, 800 people injured--we still haven't done anything in this Congress about the narrow issue of bump stocks, which turn a semiautomatic weapon essentially into an automatic weapon. In February of this year, President Trump directed the Department of Justice to propose a rule that would do this. Just last week, the Department of Justice announced that it was submitting its rule to the Office of Management and Budget--one of the final steps in the rulemaking process. Yet, as we all know, that rulemaking process takes a long time. You are talking about a rule that will not be effective until at least 2019. Even when that rule is put into place, it will be easily contested in the courts because we all know that it is doubtful as to whether the administration has the ability to ban bump stocks given the nature of the underlying law. It would be so much easier for us to just pass a law that says bump stocks are illegal, thus taking the question away from the courts as to whether the administration has the power to do it. We could also do it much more quickly because this rule is still going to take months and months and months before it is fully put into effect, putting more and more people in this country at risk. I wear my frustration on my sleeve when it comes to the issue of gun violence because I just don't understand why there is only one issue like this about which the American public has made up its mind. The polling tells us that universal background checks enjoy 97-percent support in this country. By a 2-to-1 margin, people want these assault weapons off the street. The ban of bump stocks enjoys ratings similar to that of universal background checks. Yet we still can't get it done, and there are consequences. If you look back over the history of this country, we have always been a more violent nation than our parent nations in Europe from which a lot of the original settlers came. Yet we are more violent now by a factor of 5 or 6 or in some cases by a factor of 20 because the vast majority of our violence in this country today is done by guns. The data tells you that in places in the United States that have invested in the kinds of reforms that we would like to take nationally, like universal background checks or the bans on certain dangerous capacity weapons, the violence rates are much lower and gun deaths are much lower. So it is not a guessing game as to what works here if you actually want to reduce the number of people who are killed by guns. Ultimately, we know what works. One of my chief frustrations continues to be the fact that we pay attention to the issue of gun violence only when 50 people are killed or when it is the 1-year mark of 50 people being killed. This is a daily number. Every day, 93 people are being killed by guns, and they do not make it on the evening talk shows. They don't make headlines, but the pain for those 93 families today who will lose a loved one from a suicide or a homicide or an accidental shooting is no different from the pain that comes from losing a brother or a sister or a son or a daughter in Parkland or Las Vegas or in Newtown. Betty Sandoval had a toxic relationship with a man who had been threatening her for some time. There were text messages found on her phone, threatening her life if she ever left her boyfriend. One day, she was followed home by this young man, who shot and killed her out of anger that their relationship was going the wrong way. Betty was 16 years old and was shot in a fit of passion by a young man who had easy access to a weapon with which to try to exercise his demons over the relationship. This is the story of America. We don't have more mental illness than any other country in the world. We don't have more broken relationships than other country in the world. We just have more guns. So when a young man is really upset about how things are going with his 16-year- old girlfriend, he can easily find a weapon. That is the story of suicides as well. There are tons of data that show that if you don't have easy access to a gun in those moments when you are contemplating taking your own life, you have a chance to survive that moment, to get help, to have a conversation with your mother or your father or a friend, and that gets you to a different place. It is the proximity of that weapon that makes a difference, as it did for Betty Sandoval, who died just about 3 weeks ago in Houston, TX. Dezmen Jones was 15 years old and Jameel Robert Murray was 28 years old when they were both shot to death in York, PA. Of Jameel Murray, one of his mother's friends said that he was always smiling. She said: ``He was just larger than life.'' Classmates of Dezmen Jones said that he was ``a really cool person'' who ``had lots of friends.'' Dezmen was 15 years old, and he rode his bike all around town, from friend to friend, back and forth to William Penn Senior High School. He was 15 years old when he was gunned down. Jameel's mother's friend set up a fundraiser on Facebook because Jameel's family didn't have enough money to bury him. They didn't have enough money to do a funeral, so they asked for donations online so that they could give Jameel, who was 28 years old, a proper burial. That shooting happened a week ago, on September 26. Close to home, in Waterbury, CT, on September 2, Matthew Diaz was shot in the back early Sunday morning in the Berkley Heights housing complex. This is about 3 miles from our house in Connecticut. He was the father of two. He had an 11-year-old son and a 2-year-old daughter. Imagine having to tell an 11-year-old kid: Your dad is gone, and he is never coming back. Matthew's mother said: He loved his children to the fullest. He would do anything for his children. He would do anything for me. He was my friend, my protector, my comedian. Diaz was unconscious when the police found him. They tried to perform CPR, but he was pronounced dead about an hour after arriving at the hospital. Every single one of these stories is exceptional because when an 11- year-old loses a dad or when you lose your mom or when a newly adopted 2-year-old no longer has her adoptive mother, everything changes. Everything is cataclysmically different for those families. There are 93 of those stories every single day, and it doesn't have to be that way. It is not inevitable. It is within our control. I think these numbers just tend to stun people after a while. I think these numbers don't mean anything to folks. So I am going to continue to come to the floor and tell the stories of these victims, to give voices to these victims, especially today as we mark 1 year since the worst mass shooting in the history of the country. We recognize 1 full year since we pledged to do something about it, since we talked about the narrow area of agreement around bump stocks, 1 full year of total inaction on the one thing we thought--we thought--we could do together to make the country a safer place. Thank you. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, let me express my thanks in return to Chairman Daines for being such a fantastic guide and a fantastic partner on this subcommittee budget. I am excited to bring this to my colleagues this morning. I will note that he took over midstream from Senator Lankford, who began this process. I will also note that we didn't really get moving so quickly to a conference committee until Senator Daines took over. I give him great credit for adding so much and being such a great partner in all of this. I really don't need to go through all of the important initiatives Senator Daines already did; maybe I will spend a minute doing so. I would note that we made progress on some issues that had been stalled in the Legislative Appropriations Subcommittee for a long time--such as intern pay or the requirement to file campaign finance reports online-- I think because we were able to do this budget on its own, with a real process, with a real committee debate, and with a real conference committee. When these budgets get tied up in giant omnibus negotiations, it tends to be that only the top four or five issues in the omnibus get the attention from the folks in the room. These budgets are very important, but maybe because they are a little bit smaller than the budget for HHS or the Department of Defense, they go untended to. As we return to regular order, not only do I think that is a breath of fresh air for democracy, it is not good news for anybody when the decisions over a budget get decided behind closed doors amongst a very small set of people appointed by the Democratic leader and the Republican leader. It is also good government because when we do these budgets one by one, we get to flesh out some very important and sometimes controversial issues that we might not get to address when they are all lumped together in a massive package. I hope this is now the way we do things. I congratulate Senator McConnell and Senator Shelby for setting the tone. I know there are a couple of conference committees tomorrow on some other packages. I hope they go as well as ours did. In this budget, we did some very good things. We have a long list of deferred maintenance here on this campus. We have 16.5 million square feet of buildings. We have millions of visitors who come to experience the U.S. Capitol. We provide $734 million for the Architect of the Capitol to make those targeted investments. Accountability and transparency were things Senator Daines focused on as chairman. We will have 50 additional auditors and investigators at the Government Accountability Office. That is the office which makes sure that we are doing our job, that we are spending taxpayer dollars wisely. When they issue reports, the taxpayers save money, and now they have the ability to do more of that great work. It also provides full funding for the Capitol Police. I want to specifically thank Senator Daines for working with us to include in this budget an initiative that we started here in the Senate to improve protections and coordination for Members' security off campus, to recognize the new and emerging threats that exist in and around Washington, DC. Finally--I have said it before, but I will say it again--there is a breakthrough, a small amount of money to help compensate interns. Lives change when they get to experience something like working for their Member of Congress, for their Senator. It opens their eyes to a set of experiences that would not be available to them otherwise. Under prior practice where very few Senate offices paid for those internship experiences, you had to be a child of means in order to get here. Now, hopefully, with this small amount of money we are giving to our interns, we will have a much greater pool of applicants and a much greater pool of young men and women who will be able to be here and work in our offices. I think that is good for this place, and I think it is good for the kids who are going to get to experience government. Faith in government and belief in civic participation couldn't be lower today. Giving more kids from diverse backgrounds access to the Federal Government is a very positive development. Again, it has been a joy to work with Senator Daines. It is great to be on a conference committee. I had heard rumors about conferences committees, and we got to sit on one and hammer out a budget with our House colleagues. I hope it sails through as we move to final debate and passage. Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I am about to speak on an amendment to the underlying appropriations bill. My amendment is No. 4004. Before I do, I ask unanimous consent that the following Senators be added as cosponsors to amendment No. 4004. They are Senators Baldwin, Menendez, Van Hollen, Blumenthal, Reed, Feinstein, Markey, and Carper.

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, maybe one of the most memorable moments from Secretary DeVos's confirmation hearing was her response to a question I posed to her. I thought I was giving her a softball. I thought I was giving her a very easy question at the end of my 5 minutes when I posed a simple question to her as to whether she thought it was a good thing to have guns in schools. I thought she would give me an answer about how, of course--in listening to teachers and parents, as she claims to have done during her career in education--having more guns in schools was not the right thing in order to protect our kids. Instead, she said yes. In fact, she thought that question should be largely up to the States because of potential ``grizzlies''--the idea that there are some schools that may need guns inside to protect against wild animals. I assume she would probably answer that question differently today, as it has become a butt of jokes. Yet, as it turns out, what we may be learning today is that the Secretary was, indeed, serious. Reports this morning suggest that Secretary DeVos is planning to do the bidding of the firearms industry and put our kids at risk by allowing Federal funds to be used to arm teachers, which is in direct contravention of Federal law. I have offered an amendment that will reiterate what has been the policy of this Congress--not of Congress in general but of this Congress--which is that Federal funds should not be used to arm teachers. Let me speak about why we have taken that position as a Congress, why Republicans and Democrats have voted for legislation that prohibits Federal dollars from being used to arm teachers. First, we listen to teachers when we set educational policy, and teachers have told us they do not want to be responsible for carrying firearms. Two different polls that have been taken of teachers suggest that three out of four definitively state they think their kids will be less safe, not more safe, if these teachers are armed. They tell us that because they know how difficult a teacher's job is. I have a first grader and a fourth grader in the public schools, and I am in awe of how many things we ask our teachers to do. We ask our teachers to teach earlier than ever before; we ask them to be social workers; we ask them to engage in conflict resolution; we ask them to be nurses; we ask them to teach a range of children; we ask them to interact with the community and show our kids a broader view of the world; and we, as parents, want them on call to answer our questions all of the time. Our teachers are probably the greatest multitaskers in this country, and they don't want an additional job description of having to be trained to carry a firearm at all times in order to guarantee that firearms stay out of the reach of little children. Earlier this year, we saw a series of events which showed us what happens when you do put guns inside classrooms. In one incident, a teacher accidentally discharged his gun at a high school in California. Ironically, it was during a class that was devoted to teaching public safety. Three kids were injured when that gun accidentally went off. In another incident this year, a school resource officer accidentally discharged his weapon while he was inside a school in Alexandria, which is just down the street from the U.S. Capitol. In Maplewood, MN, earlier this year, a third grader managed to pull the trigger on a gun in an officer's holster and fire a bullet into the floor. On that same day in Florida, a parent discovered one school resource officer's gun in a faculty bathroom. It is important to note, those last three incidences were with respect to school resource officers whose entire jobs are to engage in public safety and who, in these cases, I would assume, had serious training on how to handle weapons. So, if these mistakes are being made with school resource officers, imagine what will happen when first grade teachers and art teachers, whose jobs are not primarily to learn how to handle and store and protect firearms, are equipped with these weapons. The evidence also tells us that putting more guns into facilities-- putting more guns into the hands of civilians--does not solve the problem we identify. A comprehensive study on the effects of right-to-carry laws across the country has found that violent crimes had actually increased each additional year after right-to-carry laws had been passed. In fact, they had increased by 13 to 15 percent in the 10-year timeframe after the right-to-carry laws had been put into effect. Another study of 111 of the most recent gun massacres has shown that not a single one of them had been interrupted by an armed civilian. The FBI has done its own analysis in which it has shown that unarmed citizens--civilians--are more than 20 times more likely to end an active shooting than are armed citizens, excluding police officers or security officers. The data tells us this is not the way to protect our kids. Teachers are telling us this is not the way to protect our kids. Most importantly, Congress has told the Secretary this is not the way to protect our kids. Earlier this year, as part of the Omnibus appropriations bill, we passed the STOP School Violence Act. This is a new source of funding that allows for schools to engage in trying to keep their kids safe. It is a very important piece of legislation that is supported by Republicans and Democrats. Admittedly, this is not the source of funds Secretary DeVos is supposedly going to offer guidance on, but it is important to note that when we set up a new fund that is specifically dedicated to make schools safer, we wrote into the legislation this phrase within this new appropriated account: ``No funds To provide firearms or training-- No amounts provided as a grant under this part may be used for the provision to any person of a firearm or training in the use of a firearm.'' That is Republicans and Democrats doing that together. More importantly, the statute she claims to be relying on, or reportedly is going to offer guidance on, is title IV, which is kind of a grab bag of Federal dollars to be used for a variety of school initiatives. In that statute today, title IV offers this to the Secretary. It reads: ``[W]ith respect to violence, the promotion of school safety, such that students and school personnel are free from violent and disruptive acts . . . through the creation and maintenance of a school environment that is free of weapons.'' The title IV language allows for money to be used to try to quell violence, but there is a specific phrase that seems to give clear guidance to the Secretary because you can use the grant for a school environment that is free of weapons. Yet, reportedly, the Secretary is about to issue guidance that says that money can be used to load schools up with weapons, which is in direct contravention of the statute itself and is certainly in contravention of the spirit of Federal education law, given the act we passed earlier this year that prohibits school safety dollars from being used to arm teachers. I understand the hour is late on the appropriations bill and that it is very unlikely that my amendment is going to get a vote. My amendment would make clear that title IV dollars cannot be used to arm teachers. Yet I hope, as this bill ultimately heads to conference, we will revisit the clear congressional intent we have expressed this year of keeping Federal funds away from arming teachers. I hope the Secretary, as she considers whether to issue this guidance to States, will look again at the statute and come to the conclusion that she does not have the authority to allow States to use Federal money in order to arm teachers. As it turns out, it was not a joke. It was not just a phrase she uttered in a congressional hearing that drew a lot of attention on the internet. Secretary DeVos is reportedly considering allowing Federal funds to be used to arm teachers. That is not what parents want. That is not what students want. That is not what teachers want. That is also not what the evidence tells us will make our schools safer. I hope she listens, and I hope, ultimately, this Congress acts. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, Senator Boozman is here and is scheduled to speak before me. So I yield the floor to him and will speak after he is done.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, included in the underlying appropriations bill are funds to continue the U.S. support for the Saudi-led bombing campaign inside Yemen. I will speak about an amendment I have that would stop the U.S. support for this campaign pending a determination by the administration that we are in compliance with U.S., international, and humanitarian law regarding the targeting of civilians. At this point, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and call up amendment No. 3793.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, of course, I am disappointed by the chairman's objection, but I take his commitment to work on this issue to heart, and I look forward to doing that. I would like to speak for a moment about the amendment and the reason I was very hopeful, and remain hopeful, that we may get the chance to vote on this before the consideration of this bill is passed because in this legislation is substantial funding in order to perpetuate a bombing campaign inside Yemen that is making this country less safe. I argue that since this bill was debated in the Appropriations Committee, some horrifying, new information has come to light that should cause us to reconsider whether this is something that is so urgent, we need to deal with it now, this week, that it can't wait. Unfortunately, these pictures are a dime a dozen. You could find any number of them every single day coming out of this theater. This picture, in particular, is of a community center that was bombed by the Saudi and UAE-led coalition that the United States finances and supports. Inside this community center, a funeral was occurring when it was ostensibly targeted and bombed by the United States, the Saudis, and the UAE. This is a horrifying scene, in and of itself, but to know a funeral was occurring there makes it even worse. What we now know is, the targeting of civilians inside Yemen is getting worse, not better. The new information I spoke of is something that I think is on the minds of many of my colleagues. That new information is that last week, the Saudi-U.S. coalition hit a schoolbus in northern Yemen intentionally. The Saudi's initial reaction was that it was a legitimate military target. There is no way a schoolbus is a legitimate military target. That schoolbus was carrying dozens of children, dozens of children who are now dead because of a 500-pound bomb made in the United States and sold to the coalition. Over the course of this year, the targeting inside Yemen has gotten more and more catastrophic. On June 11, a Doctors Without Borders cholera treatment facility, located in the center of a humanitarian compound, with no military value, was hit. There is no way this is a mistake. Everyone knew about this humanitarian compound with a cholera treatment facility inside of it, and the Saudi coalition bombed it anyway. There is no way that is a mistake. There is no way that is a military target. That is an intentional bombing of a cholera treatment facility. Two weeks later, on July 24, a UNICEF water treatment facility was hit. I will talk a little bit about the cholera epidemic in Yemen in a moment, but the reason there is a cholera epidemic, the biggest in recorded history, is because of these water treatment facilities that are being taken down by the Saudi-led coalition--another one hit on the 24th. On July 28, a water main supply for Yemen's most important port city was hit, and then on August 9, as I mentioned, there was the schoolbus full of children--kids 6 years old to 11 years old. Forty-four children died, and many more were left without arms, legs, or had other injuries. There was a video and photos of the wreckage. The coalition initially denied there were any children on the bus, and they still claim it was a legitimate military target. The United States is a key player in this bombing campaign. The United States has personnel who sit in the targeting center when decisions are made as to what sites on the ground will be bombed. The United States pays to put planes in the air to refuel the fighter jets flown by the Saudis and the Emirates, and the United States sells the coalition the bombs that are used. In fact, in this Congress, we have authorized, have taken votes on several sales of precision-guided missiles. We sell them PGMs because we believe they will make fewer mistakes. That probably is right. They are probably making fewer mistakes with the PGMs. The problem is, their targets are schoolbuses, funerals, water treatment facilities, and water mains. They can more effectively hit their civilian targets with the bombs we are selling. My amendment, which was objected to, would simply say we should not continue to fund this bombing campaign until we have a certification from the administration that the campaign comports with international and U.S. humanitarian laws, humanitarian laws that the United States has signed on to. These laws effectively say, bombing campaigns such as this need to be proportional to the threat, but, most importantly, they need to refrain from targeting civilian populations. At some point, we need to believe our eyes rather than the reports we get from the administration that the targeting is getting better and that without the United States in these targeting centers, without the PGMs, and without the refueling missions, the targeting would be worse; that the civilian casualties would be worse. It is hard to imagine it being any worse than it is today. It is hard to imagine anything worse than schoolbuses and water treatment facilities and cholera treatment centers being targeted by this coalition. At some point, we have to believe what we are seeing rather than what we are being told by the administration. There has been a 37-percent increase in civilian casualties from airstrikes in 2018 compared to 2017. Seventy percent of the civilian deaths inside Yemen are caused by these coalition airstrikes. I can spend time talking to you about the atrocities the Houthis, who are on the other side of this civil war, have committed, but the fact is, the majority of the civilian casualties are caused by the side we are supporting--that we are supporting. Lastly, let me make the case to you that even if you don't buy the unconscionable nature of targeting civilians with U.S. support, this bombing campaign is making the United States less safe every single day. What we know is, AQAP is the most lethal arm of al-Qaida. It has the greatest capacity to hit the American homeland. It has gotten nothing but stronger inside of Yemen since this civil war started. There are new reports that our coalition partners, the Saudis and UAE, have been cutting secret deals with these terrorist organizations. They are not killing or defeating them, but they are just cutting deals with them to push them out of the way. There are new reports that the UAE is aligning itself with radical Salafi militias inside Yemen. They are maybe not groups that are technically labeled ``ISIS'' or ``AQAP,'' but they are groups that essentially trade fighters back and forth with these groups that are aligned with the UAE, aligned with the Saudi coalition on the ground. The very people who want to kill us are getting stronger every single day inside Yemen--every single day that this war goes on. We have been told by the Saudis and the UAE that if we just keep on backing their play here, eventually, there will be a political settlement. We are getting further and further away from a political settlement every single day. They are going after Hodeidah now, the humanitarian port. Let me tell you, the Houthis are going to fight to the end to protect Hodeidah, never mind if there is an eventual assault on Sanaa. So the campaign is not expediting a political end; it is simply prolonging the misery and giving more opportunity for our mortal enemies there, those terrorist groups, to get stronger and stronger. Lastly, the rationale we are given is that we have an interest here because the Iranians are backing the Houthis. There is no doubt--no doubt--that the Iranians are backing the Houthis. There is no doubt we have an interest in trying to push back against growing Iranian influence in the region, but every single day we participate in this campaign, the Iranians go in harder, the Iranians go in stronger. The military campaign, which postpones the political settlement, is just making the Iranian presence in Yemen worse. They now have more advanced weapons than ever before inside Yemen, including short-range ballistic missiles, because they are readying to defend Hodeidah, and they are readying to defend Sanaa. Just remember that when things like this happen, it is not that the Yemenis who survive blame the Saudis or the Emirates; they blame the United States. The world blames the United States. We are radicalizing a generation of Yemeni children against us, and that will have implications for U.S. national security for years to come. Twenty-two million people inside Yemen today require humanitarian assistance. Seventy-five percent of the country cannot live without humanitarian assistance. Eight million people are on the brink of starvation, meaning they get one meal a day--one meal a day--and 1 million have been affected by cholera. By the way, according to the WHO, we are on the brink of the third cholera outbreak in that country in the last year and a half because we continue to bomb water treatment facilities. The bombing, the humanitarian catastrophe, it just shouldn't be on our conscience as a nation to be part of this, but it is making our country less safe every single day. Every single day that we continue this unchecked, unconditional support for this Saudi-led bombing campaign, we are making Iran stronger in the region, we are postponing a political settlement, and we are radicalizing Yemenis against us, driving them to AQAP, driving them into ISIS. I am going to continue to try to convince my colleagues to allow us to take a vote on this amendment. Again, I just reiterate what this amendment says. It actually doesn't cut off support for this campaign. If I were King, I would cut off American support for this bombing campaign--I would--but I understand that is not where all of my colleagues are, so I am offering an amendment to simply say we should require the administration to certify that civilians aren't intentionally getting targeted, in contravention of U.S. law, before we continue to support this funding. I truly think that if we took a vote on this, we would get the majority of the body to support the idea that a certification that civilians are not being targeted is a worthwhile precondition to continuing funding for this brutal military campaign. I will continue to press this. I appreciate the support I have gotten from many Republicans. A growing number of Republicans are supporting the idea that as the facts change, we need to change our approach. Before I wrap up, I will finally note that we had come together on an amendment to the authorization bill that we thought moved the ball forward. In the authorization bill, we actually did require that the administration make some of these basic certifications before continuing to fund the refueling missions. In the President's signing statement, he effectively told us he would ignore that section of the authorization bill because he did not think it was in the authorizing power of the U.S. Congress to put those conditions on the refueling missions. I disagree. I think that is clearly within our authorizing power, but there is no way the President or the administration can object to conditions on appropriations because appropriations are unequivocally in the power of the U.S. Congress. Given the fact that we all came together on these conditions under the leadership of Senator Reed, Senator Corker, and Senator Shaheen, amongst others, this is simply reiterating what we did in the authorizing bill--in the appropriating bill--to make sure we are doing our due diligence as the U.S. Congress to make sure this kind of horror isn't undertaken unnecessarily with U.S. funds. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, we are on the verge of the 1-year mark since the U.S. Senate attempted to take away healthcare from 30 million Americans and was told no by the American public. For virtually the entire time, since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, Republicans in the House and in the Senate engaged in an exercise that was futile while President Obama was in office but then was made possible by the election of Donald Trump--that was the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which extended care to 20 million Americans who weren't guaranteed that health insurance would actually cover the things they needed and protected people who were sick or people with preexisting conditions from discrimination. When Republicans finally took over, they realized they had spent a whole lot of time criticizing the Affordable Care Act but not a lot of time figuring out what would come next, and most of 2017 was spent in an embarrassing series of proposals that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would uninsure somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 million people. Finally, when a vote was called on the floor of the Senate, just enough Republican Senators chose to side with the American people, who want to maintain the protections of the Affordable Care Act and work to perfect it, that the bill failed by one vote. That 1-year mark will occur this weekend on Saturday. So a few of us wanted to come to the floor today to talk about what has happened since that fateful vote a year ago that was, frankly, celebrated all across this country, as folks who were deeply fearful that their healthcare was going to be ripped away from them by the Congress realized they might be able to rely on it for at least another year. Let me set the stage, first by reminding people of the promises that were made. This is President Trump shortly after his election and just before his swearing in. He said: We're going to have insurance for everybody. People covered under the law can expect to have great healthcare . . . much less expensive and much better. That is a clear promise that the President made: Everybody is going to have insurance. It is going to be less expensive, and it is going to be better--more insurance, less expensive, better quality. The vote that took place a year ago this Saturday would have done exactly the opposite. It would have kicked 30 million people off of insurance. It would have driven up costs for millions of Americans-- especially those people with preexisting conditions. Coverage would have been much worse, not much better, in part because people with preexisting conditions wouldn't be able to access care. So this promise never came true because of the vote that we took a year ago this Saturday. But, occasionally, the President does say something that is true. This is a picture of the celebration that the House of Representatives had at the White House the day they voted on the proposal that would rip away healthcare from 30 million Americans, before the vote that took place here in the Senate. There are a lot of smiling faces of Members of Congress who were so excited that people who had cancer or people who had diabetes would be unable to get healthcare insurance. This quote is not actually from this press conference. It is from a rally that the President held just a few weeks ago. He was talking about the fact that John McCain and some others voted against that proposal on the Senate floor, which caused it to fail. He said--these are the President's words: ``It's all right, because we have essentially gutted it''--the Affordable Care Act--``anyway.'' ``It's all right, because we have essentially gutted it anyway.'' So that summarizes what has happened since the failed vote on the floor of the Senate a year ago. President Trump and his Republican friends in Congress, all smiling behind him, have gutted the Affordable Care Act, not because they want better healthcare for people but because they are just angry that they couldn't get the votes to do it here in Congress. So they are doing it by other means. So a few of us are going to be on the floor to talk about what has happened in the last year. I actually think that most of my colleagues do want better healthcare for their constituents, but I don't understand how any of what has happened, either through legislative act or through administrative action, gets us there--gets us to that promise that President Trump made in January of 2017. Here is what is going on. First, the President signed an Executive order saying that all of his agencies should start to take their own actions to unwind the protections of the Affordable Care Act. Then he stopped the marketing for the Affordable Care Act so that less people would know about the options that were available to them. Then the President came to Congress and worked with Republicans to take away one of the most important pillars of the Affordable Care Act--the requirement that healthy people buy insurance. That action alone will result in 13 million people losing insurance and rates going up for 10 million Americans. Most recently the President authorized the sale of junk insurance plans all across this country--plans that don't have to cover mental health or prescription drugs or maternity care. He then cut funding even deeper for the personnel that help you find what insurance is right for you, and he instructed the people that remain to push Americans onto the junk plans. Then the President sent his lawyers to court to argue that Congress actually can't protect people with preexisting conditions because it is unconstitutional, which would wipe out all of the protections that people enjoy today. So it is really no mystery as to why, as the 2019 premium increases are coming out, they are catastrophic. They are catastrophic. Fourteen States have insurance companies that have requested premium increases of 10 to 20 percent. Connecticut is one of those. Five States have insurance companies that requested premium increases of 30 percent or more. Think about that for a second: 30 percent or more. Who can afford a 30-percent or a 40-percent increase in premiums? One insurance company requested a 94-percent increase in rates. In 21 of the States that have rates filed already, the insurers said the reason they are doing this--the reason they are passing along enormous premium increases--is because of the sabotage campaign that is being run by the President and by this Congress, all or most of it occurring since the failure of the repeal vote a year ago. It is all right, says the President. We didn't need to repeal the Affordable Care Act. That vote that we are marking the 1-year anniversary of doesn't really matter because we have essentially gutted it--the Affordable Care Act, the American healthcare system--anyway. So, finally, before I turn this over to the ranking member on the HELP Committee, I just want to talk about the next phase of the sabotage campaign. If Republicans in Congress can't get the American people to support a legislative act to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the next hope is for the courts to do it. That is why the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh is so critical to this continued campaign of trying to undermine the Affordable Care Act, because you probably can't get the majority of Members of Congress to wipe away protections for people with preexisting conditions, but maybe you can get the Supreme Court to do it. There is a case that I just referenced that the Trump administration is supporting, moving its way through the courts, that would invalidate--constitutionally invalidate--Congress's protections for people with preexisting conditions. These are people with cancer, diabetes, heart disease, mental illness, cerebral palsy, Crohn's Disease, ALS, addiction, Lupus, epilepsy, Parkinson's, and the list goes on. President Trump made clear during the campaign that he wasn't going to pick a judge in the mold of John Roberts, who would uphold the Affordable Care Act. He was going to pick judges that would rule with him to strike down the Affordable Care Act. That is also probably why he outsourced the decision on whom to pick for this vacant slot to political groups like the Heritage Foundation. So the expectation is that Brett Kavanaugh will deliver one of those five needed votes to strike down the laws on the books, which Congress can't find the votes to override, protecting people with preexisting conditions. The Supreme Court could take away your healthcare if you have a history of any of these diseases, and, if that happens, the results are lethal. If you have metastatic cancer and you don't have the protection in the law that says insurance companies can't charge you more because you are sick, a recent study shows that you will be charged a rate of $142,000 higher than what you pay today. If you are an individual with diabetes, your increase could be 137 percent on top of what you are paying now. So these are the stakes. These are the stakes as we prepare to vote on Judge Kavanaugh's nomination, and it is all in service of this very intentional, very deliberate, very planful campaign of sabotage. A year ago this Saturday the American people got their way, and this body decided not to repeal the Affordable Care Act because people like the fact that 20 million people have insurance. People like the fact that people with preexisting conditions are protected. That night, the American people got their way, but since then, the President and this Congress have been working to undermine it, and the next step in that plan is the elevation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. It is important for us to come to the floor and explain what the stakes are. I yield is floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, in my lifetime, no American President has ever had a more disastrous overseas trip than the one that was just concluded by President Trump--5 days of disaster after disaster, insult after insult, capitulation after capitulation. Today, Donald Trump has America weaker in the world than at any time in recent memory. Let's start with what just happened today that has the whole world reeling. To the shock and horror of the American public, President Trump stood on stage with Vladimir Putin and told the world that he believes Putin when Putin insists that Russia did not try to interfere in the American elections in Trump's favor in 2016. Despite what President Trump wants us to believe these days, there are still some truths left in the world. Not everything is political spin. Not everything in the world today is up for debate. Russia did attack our elections in 2016. They plan on attacking our elections in 2018. In 2016, they did so with the explicit purpose of trying to elect Donald Trump. All 100 Senators agree on this. Every U.S. intelligence agency agrees on this. Every U.S. law enforcement agency in the country agrees on this. Everyone working for Donald Trump in his national security cabinet agrees on this. Now, we actually have the specific names of the specific Russian individuals who carried out these attacks. They have been indicted by Donald Trump's Department of Justice. There is simply no question, no debate over whether the Russian Government engaged in a massive, willful, illegal campaign to push the 2016 election to Donald Trump. It is a fact. President Trump, no doubt, doesn't like this fact. First, because there is an investigation that is pending right now over the outstanding question of whether he knew it was happening and whether he and his campaign team coordinated with the Russians to make that happen. There is increasing evidence that this might be the case, but we will have to wait for the Mueller report to know. Second, without the Russians' help, it is possible that Donald Trump might not be President. We don't know this, but the slim margins where the President prevailed in certain States leave room to surmise that without Russia's help, Donald Trump might not have been elected President. Regardless of whether Trump coordinated with the Russians and regardless of whether their support tipped the balance, it frankly doesn't explain what just happened in Helsinki. When asked if Trump agrees with his staff, every Member of the Senate, and every law enforcement and intelligence agency in his government or Russia, he chose Russia. Let me say that again. When asked whether the President of the United States believed his own government or Russia, our President said he believed Russia. He took sides against American national security interests, and we are left with a question of why. We raise that question because, frankly, the expectations for this summit, this meeting between the American President and the Russian leader, were very low. All President Trump had to do at that press conference today was to offer some mild pushback--an acknowledgment of Russia's interference in the election--and to stand up and, in mild terms, offer America's support for the sovereignty of Ukraine. He didn't do any of that. So we are left with this question of why. Now I don't know what Mueller knows. I don't know what Vladimir Putin knows. But Americans should be freaked out today that there is some explanation that we don't know for why our President is so friendly to Russian national security interests and so hostile to our own. Of course, today, my colleagues, was just the icing on the cake. We already have forgotten what happened on the first 4 days of this trip. Shortly before the meeting with Putin, Trump announced to the world that after several days of meetings and consultations with our European partners, he could definitively say that Europe was an enemy of the United States. He called the European Union a foe. That conclusion was bracketed by his comments upon his arrival in Europe, when he announced that his meeting with Putin was going to be a whole lot easier than his meetings were going to be with Europe. Let's be clear. First, Europe is our most important friend and ally, and it has been that way for a very long time, and nothing has changed. In the last 70 years, when we have needed help in the world, the first place we turn to is Europe. It shares our democratic values. They are our most important trading partner. The post-World War II order that has ushered in an order of relative global stability never before seen in the world is reliant on the continued alliance of the United States and Europe. We have always had our grievances. We may want them to spend a little bit more money on defense. They may want us to shoulder a little bit more of the burden with respect to the world's refugee crisis and not leave it all up to them. But the alliance is just as important as it ever has been, and Europe is just as important a partner as it ever has been. Here is the other thing to make clear. Donald Trump's intent is to smash the European Union and to break the United States and Europe apart from each other. His advisers and Cabinet members may go on TV or show up to hearings on Capitol Hill, and they may say all the right things about the strength of the transatlantic alliance and America's rock-solid commitment to NATO. I have heard them say it. I saw John Bolton say it on TV this weekend. I watched Secretary Pompeo come to the Foreign Relations Committee and testify to such before Congress. But the people who work for President Trump don't set U.S. policy. The President does, and the President has made it clear over and over that NATO is temporarily functionally irrelevant. That sounds like a radical thing to say, but let's just admit that it is true for the time being. Trump has made it crystal clear that if Russia ever perpetuated a Ukraine-style attack on a NATO country, one that was in plain sight for everybody to see but that was officially denied by the Kremlin--does that sound familiar? That is what happened in Ukraine--a clear Russian invasion but officially denied by the Kremlin. Does this sound familiar? The 2016 attacks on American elections are there for everyone to see, and they are denied by the Kremlin. Trump has made it clear that if Russia ever perpetuated an attack like that against a NATO country, Trump would believe Russia and not his own eyes, not his own government. He has telegraphed to Russia that if you simply deny the invasion or the attack, we will believe you, not our own government, not our own intelligence and security agencies. That is what he told us. That is what would likely happen if Europe was attacked. The Europeans know this. Why we are so much weaker today is because that message to the Europeans comes with a price. If the Europeans don't feel that we are going to get their back, having watched the President mock and insult them over the course of the last 4 days, it is now in doubt as to whether they would come to our defense if we asked, as we did after the attacks on September 11. None of our European partners will say that. They are going to try to save face. They are going to try to be the bigger party to this contest and say that the strength of the alliance is as strong as it ever has been. But it is not, and there are consequences--potentially serious ones for the United States. For as bad a shape as the President left NATO, the EU is in no better condition today. It is in tatters in large part because of a President who continues to cheerlead those who want to break apart the EU. There are people who understand the genius of the European Union who are working hard to keep it together, and I am going to cheerlead them, but President Trump spent his time in Britain telling anybody who would listen, including the press, that unless Britain carried out a clean break from the EU, there would be consequences from the United States. That is madness. Our policy should be the opposite--that if Britain and the EU want to reconcile, America will be there to assist. Let's bring it back to Vladimir Putin again because his top priority--his No. 1 goal--is the dissolution of the European Union, which is his main political and economic rival on the Eurasian continent. The breakup of NATO is right up there as well. His chief ally in the deconstruction of the EU and NATO today is the President of the United States. America is so much weaker today than we were just 5 days ago, and that is saying a lot. Our Nation and the world has never seen a more cataclysmic foreign trip than the one that we just witnessed. This country can survive a lot. We are resilient. But President Trump is making this country a laughing stock. We used to be a pillar of strength, an example to be looked up to. Now we are the butt of jokes. We are seen as weak--a total pushover. All you need to do if you are a despot or an autocrat or an enemy of America is to get in the room with the U.S. President, and he will give you everything you want, with no price to pay. That is America in the world today, and I couldn't be sadder about it. I yield back.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, 2 weeks ago, Secretary Pompeo appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee, and I got the chance to ask him a simple question. I asked him whether it was still the position of the United States that Russia should not be allowed to join the G7 without adhering to the outlines of the Minsk agreement. That is the agreement that seeks to try to resolve the crisis that has been created in Europe and in Ukraine by the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine. I give Secretary Pompeo credit because his answer was brutally honest. He said that he certainly could foresee a series of trade-offs with the Russians by which they would be allowed to join the G7--rejoin the G7-- without withdrawing their forces from eastern Ukraine or Crimea. That is a stunning reversal of prior U.S. policy--the idea that we would trade away Ukraine for some set of concessions from Russia on another area of national security, maybe in the Middle East--but it is not surprising. It is not surprising because, as Donald Trump has made clear over and over again, his primary objective is to become friends with Vladimir Putin. His primary objective is to try to square himself and the Kremlin without regard to the consequences for U.S. national security. So I am very pleased to join Senator Menendez and Senator Schumer and Senator Reed on the floor today to express our hope and desire that President Trump finds some way to stop undermining the NATO alliance as he heads for this important summit and understands that Russia presents a real and present danger to the world order, to American security, and to the future of global security if we continue to communicate to them that they pay no consequences for their erasure of borders in and around their periphery and for their continued attempts to manipulate elections outside of their borders. I hope there are others in the room with President Trump and Vladimir Putin when they meet because it is hard for us to understand what leverage Putin has over Trump such that he would continue to give away so much to Russia without getting very much in return; why he would continue to do Russia's bidding in trying to tear apart NATO, in trying to tear apart the EU, without getting anything in return. I don't know what leverage Putin has over Trump, but I would feel much more comfortable if there were some other people in that room who could be witness to those discussions to make sure the discussion with Putin doesn't go the same way the discussion with President Kim did in North Korea. I also am here on the floor to remind my colleagues about the importance of this underlying relationship with Europe. I am sure my colleagues have already said it, but let's just remember that article 5 has only been exercised one time, and that was in the defense of the United States. That was when the United States was attacked, and we asked our NATO allies to join with us to try to rid Afghanistan of a government that had given shelter to those who had attacked us. Don't forget that NATO exists for our benefit as well as for Europe's benefit. Also don't forget that for 4 consecutive years, European governments have been increasing their defense spending. For 4 consecutive years, countries have been scaling up their contributions to their defense budgets. But I also don't want my colleagues to think that the measure of transatlantic security is simply the amount of money we are putting into a defense budget. I am not saying that isn't important, but this administration from the beginning has had backwards the way in which you protect America from the threats that we face all around the world. Peace does come through military strength, but increasingly, the threats we face--increasingly, the threats Russia presents to the United States and to our allies--are nonkinetic threats, are not military threats, and they require other means of counteraction. So as we are trying to measure whether Europe is a full and meaningful participant in a security arrangement with the United States, I don't mind measuring defense contributions, which are increasing year by year, but let's also remember that it is Europe that is handling the flood of refugees leaving the security vacuum in the Middle East. The United States is doing nothing--nothing of consequence, of importance--to handle that refugee flow. It is Europe that is dealing with that refugee flow. It is Europe that often deals with the most mature terrorist organizations setting up cells inside of Europe. It has, in fact, been Europe that has borne the brunt of terrorist attacks since 9/11 due to those mature organizations being able to exist inside Europe. It is the counterterrorism capacity and the law enforcement capacity that Europe offers to confront those threats that also matters to our security. It is Europe that has had to stand up capacities to counter Russian propaganda that floods in particular Eastern Europe and the Balkans but also Central and Western Europe as well. We don't measure those counterpropaganda resources in the defense budget, but they are serious and they are increasing. It is Europe that has spent billions of dollars trying to diversify their energy supplies so as to cut off Russia's most important revenue source--the export of oil and gas. The United States provides advice to Europe on how to do that, but it is Europe that is spending hard dollars--reverse flowing, diversifying domestic energy, bringing in gas from other countries besides Russia, which has made the biggest difference. I want my friends here to understand the holistic nature of the security partnership that we enjoy with Europe and with our NATO allies. Yes, defense spending matters, but it is representative of this administration's unwillingness to understand the panoply of ways in which we need to defend our country, besides just a robust defense budget, which causes them to misunderstand the nature of this relationship. It is Europe's focus on refugee resettlement. It is Europe's focus on counterpropaganda capacities. It is Europe's focus on fighting Russian propaganda and their focus on diversifying their energy supplies that add, frankly, just as much to our joint security as their defense spending does. Now, I don't expect that Donald Trump, given how little study he affords to the national security of the United States, is going to get up to school on all of these different capacities that Europe lends to the alliance, but it is important for us on a bipartisan basis to recognize that this is a strong alliance and that as much as we both push and pull each other, it remains strong. And don't think that the grievances only lie on our side of the aisle. Our European partners for years told us that we were making our collective security weaker by continuing an invasion and occupation of Iraq that was creating more terrorists than it was killing. So we have grievances with our partners in Europe, but they have had historic grievances with us, and it is important for us to recognize that historical fact as well. I am here to express my desire that this President acknowledge the importance of this alliance. I am here expressing the hope that the summit won't be the unmitigated disaster that most people think it will be given the spirit in which the President leaves for it--castigating our NATO allies on his way out the door. And I don't want us to come to the conclusion that without NATO, without the European Union, without the post-World War II structures that we created in the midst of the rubble of that global conflict, that global security can be preserved. We have taken for granted that countries don't march on each other, by and large, any longer. While we still have instability, we don't have nations invading other nations in the way that we did 100 years ago. That is because of NATO. That is because of the set of global security structures that the United States and Europe have helped stand up together. And if they fall apart--as it seems that this President roots for on a regular basis--then our assumption of how conflict will play out or not play out over the course of the next 10 to 20 years falls apart as well. I am glad to join my colleagues today in support of the NATO alliance and in hope that the President understands the importance of it as he heads off to this critical summit. I yield the floor.