Christopher Murphy

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, colleagues, I think there is a tendency in this place, but probably in the country, writ large, to compartmentalize each news cycle, to get outraged by every new contest to free speech or to the rule of law or to the power of Congress, but to really never see the full picture. Yesterday's assault on a particular democratic norm is forgotten, and we just wake up the next day to some new outrage. And I know that when people like me start talking about creeping authoritarianism in America, a lot of my Republican colleagues tune out. They think it is hyperbole or just politics. But I think it is time for all of us--Republicans and Democrats--to really step back and come to terms with the full picture of what is happening right now in America. I know that there are many Republicans in this Chamber who are not ready to give up on democracy, but there are a group of radicals surrounding the President who have convinced him to operationalize a plan that is designed to try to crush political opposition and dissent in this country. When democracies die, sometimes it is in a coup; sometimes it is through violence; sometimes it is the occupation of the Parliament building; sometimes it is the cancellation of elections. But normally, that is not how democracies wither and vanish. In countries that have lost healthy democracy, normally what happens is that, over time, the regime--the party in power--just contracts the space for dissent, for speech, for political opposition such that, while elections still happen, the opposition party can never win. The rules get rigged, essentially, so that the party in power never ever loses. That is the plan. That is what President Trump and the radicals around him are trying to do to America. I know that many of my colleagues aren't on board for this plan, but I worry that many of my colleagues refuse to see it in its totality because they deal with one outrage at a time. They justify one assault at a time without seeing the full scope of it. We aren't on the verge of an authoritarian takeover; we are in the middle of it. Now, it is not a fait accompli. It is not certain to be successful. But if we aren't clear-eyed about what is happening, then we have no chance to arrest it. If my Republican colleagues don't force themselves to pull back and see the totality of what is happening to the political opposition--it is hard to see because it is not happening to you. It is happening to your colleagues. You are not in jeopardy of being arrested; my colleagues are. Your allies are not being taken down off the air; ours are. If we don't all pull back and see this for what it is, we will wake up, and there will be a day where our democracy is gone. And so I want to talk to my colleagues today about the totality of this plan, and it really happens in five steps. The first step is to convert the justice system into a political witch hunt operation. Every totalitarian relies on the justice system to punish dissent, but also to immunize illegality for loyalists. That is the deal you get in a totalitarian state: If you speak out against the government, well, then the legal system comes crashing down on you. But if you are loyal to the government, then you can get away with crimes. We are seeing this at scale right now. The indictment of James Comey for no crime--not a single prosecutor in that office in Virginia would sign the indictment--not a single one--until President Trump sent his personal lawyer to take over that office because only she would sign the indictment. We see this in the arrests that are being readied for at least one Democratic Senator, for the Soros family, for the attorney general of New York--for behavior that is not criminal; for behavior that apparently, reportedly, has been engaged in by plenty of other people. But you also see it in the way that it ultimately plays out in a very quiet way. The goal here is not to arrest everybody that opposes Donald Trump. The idea here is to just put enough fear into the ranks of those who might speak truth to power that they stay quiet, and it is undoubtedly happening. There are undoubtedly people in this country who see what is being threatened to Senator Schiff, what has happened to James Comey, and they have just decided to remain quiet. This is a tried and true tactic of a totalitarian state, is that they threaten people with arrests if they speak up, and lots of people just decide not to speak up in the first place. But what also happens is that if you are loyal to the regime, you get away with crimes. See what happened to the mayor of New York Eric Adams. He allegedly had committed a crime. He had committed significant corruption but was exonerated by President Trump only after the mayor pledged his political loyalty to the President. In fact, one of the President's representatives and the mayor went on television to essentially publicly do the handshake--loyalty from the mayor to the President and exoneration of corruption from the government to the mayor. This is how totalitarian regimes control speech: They punish, through the legal system, dissent. They immunize corruption amongst those who are loyal. The second part of the plan is to eliminate free press and replace it with state-run media. Now, I don't know that I would go so far to say we have state-run media in the United States yet, but there is an attempt underway to try to use the vast regulatory powers of the administration to censor media. And, again, the administration isn't hiding it. They are going on TV and celebrating the fact that, in the latest instance, they threatened to pull the licenses of TV stations that didn't take off the air one of the President's loudest critics. But we also see it through the consolidation of media into the hands of allies of the President. One family that has just taken control of a major media group that owns, amongst other properties, CBS is looking to also take control of CNN and may have an ownership stake and a control stake in TikTok. That family has shown a willingness to censor content, pulling Stephen Colbert off the air and to put in place, essentially, Trump- approved censors for their future news content. So you get to state-run media not necessarily through the state owning and operating media, but by the state using its regulatory powers--its control of licenses and mergers--to make clear to the billionaire class that they can own media, that they can make a lot of money off of media, but only if it propagates Trump's narrative and suppresses criticism. It is happening right now. We are watching it happen. The third step in the plan is to militarize law enforcement. The deployment of the military to Chicago and to Portland, to Los Angeles, is illegal. It is illegal. But it is designed to try to, once again, quell dissent and protest. This isn't about public safety. This is about political intimidation. And you are just naive if you think that folks aren't going to be a little bit less interested in showing up at a protest if they are worried about getting roughed up by law enforcement. You are naive to think that there isn't an impact on speech when the military is patrolling your streets. The signal that is being sent is that, if you speak up in opposition to this President, you are going to be greeted by troop deployments and tear gas and military helicopters. The fourth step in this plan is seizing control of government spending and taxation, and here is where I fail to understand why there isn't bipartisan agreement, why we don't join hands. Our Founding Fathers saw what the British King did: using taxation and spending in order to compel loyalty to Crown, in order to punish the colonists when they rose up in defense of their rights. And so when they wrote the Constitution, they deliberately put the spending and taxation powers not in the hands of the Executive but in the hands of Congress, where every faction is represented; thus, this body is in a position to broadly protect the rights of all people. Trump is seizing spending power from us, canceling grants unilaterally--most recently brazenly deciding to refuse to spend money only in the States represented by Democrats. The day after the shutdown began, they announced that they were, first, suspending billions of dollars' worth of projects in just one city, New York City--not coincidentally represented by the Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate. And then, hours after, they released a list of canceled energy projects. They listed the States that they were being canceled in. Every single one of those States was represented by two Democratic Senators. Everybody knew what was happening. It was an effort to use the spending power, seized by the Executive, to punish--to punish-- representatives of the people who oppose the President politically. And then the fifth part of the plan is to rig the rules when the rules don't work for you. This is happening in the way that President Trump is going State by State and demanding that congressional lines be redrawn in the middle of a 10-year cycle in which, traditionally, we leave lines as they are. Why? He has, again, been totally honest and transparent about it. He just wants more Republicans elected. Even if the majority of people in a particular State favor Democrats, he wants the lines drawn in a way that would elect more Republicans to Congress. Now, in this case, it has, of course, forced Democratic States to do the same, but it was Donald Trump who started this cycle of changing the rules in order to make sure that his party stays in power and that he stays in power no matter how unpopular he gets. You see the same thing happening with respect to the control of information. Totalitarian states can't accept truth. They can't accept truth, so they try to destroy truth. Well, that is what Donald Trump is doing by banning reporters from the White House who don't toe the Trump or MAGA line. That is what they are doing in saying to reporters at the Department of Defense that you can't report on military operations unless you are given preapproval. That is what happened to the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. When the labor statistics showed that the economy wasn't good, that guy got fired and was replaced by somebody who would issue fake numbers that made the economy look better. You convert the justice system so that it pursues your political enemies and exonerates your political loyalists for crimes. You eliminate the free press, and you replace it with state-run or state- influenced media. You militarize law enforcement. You seize control of government spending and taxation. You rig the rules of democracy in your favor. You can't see the indictment of Comey, the cancelation of Kimmel, and the troops in Chicago as different events. They are all part of the same story. They are all part of a plan--a well-thought-out plan--to try to destroy American democracy and create a new set of rules that will allow Trump and his allies to rule forever. I know this sounds extreme. It is. But, if you connect the dots, if you allow yourself to see the whole story--the totality--of this story, you will see the grave danger that we are in. I know that it is often easiest for all of us, but probably especially for supporters of the President who still support democracy, to just assume the best, instead of assuming the worst, or to just kind of close the door and batten down the hatches until the storm leaves town. But think about how we will feel if this 250-year democratic experiment disappears on our watch and we didn't do all we could as a body and as a citizenry simply because we didn't want to face the hard reality. The authoritarian takeover isn't coming; it is here. We are in the middle of it, but it is not too late for everybody to see it and for us to stop it. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, the House of Representatives is not coming back into session, reportedly, until next week. The government is shutting down tomorrow night, and the Republican House of Representatives isn't here, and they aren't coming back until the government has been shut down--reportedly for days. That tells you all you need to know about who is responsible for a potential shutdown of the government. Republicans care so little about funding the government that they aren't even showing up. President Trump doesn't care either. He boycotted even meeting with Democrats until 24 hours before the shutdown was to begin. He was watching golf or posting on social media--basically anything except trying to negotiate, to do the job of government. I wish Republicans were trying to keep the government open instead of trying to shut it down, but what I really want is for Republicans to open their eyes and see what is happening at an increasing pace to our democracy. What I want and what I think is necessary at this moment is for any budget that we write to put the health of our democracy first. In fact, as I have watched the events of the past few weeks play out, with political enemies being systematically hunted by this administration, I think that we all have a moral obligation to only support a budget that at the very least puts the brakes on the President's lawlessness. Right now, our democracy is in grave peril, and there is no better example of this than the events that played out last week over the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey. The President has made it clear that he wants to put his political enemies in jail as retribution for the charges brought against him. He does not care about whether there are grounds for these charges; he just wants charges. So he instructed Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney in Virginia, a Republican, to bring charges against James Comey, but Seibert refused for a simple reason: There was no evidence that James Comey had done anything illegal. So Trump fired Siebert, and he appointed his personal lawyer, who has never set foot in a courtroom, as the new U.S. attorney simply because he knew she would follow orders. Every career prosecutor in the office recommended she refuse to bring the charges--again, because there were no charges to be brought--but she did it anyway, as instructed. Not a single other lawyer in the office would sign the indictment--virtually unprecedented in a case like this. Trump cheered the indictment, and then he warned that there would be more charges brought against others that had vocally opposed his policies. That is not all that happened in the last 2 weeks. Trump ordered the FCC to issue threats to TV stations that did not remove one of his primary late night critics, Jimmy Kimmel, from the airwaves. He announced new military deployments to additional cities. He began a process to harass and arrest leaders of prominent political groups that oppose his Presidency, threatening at least one funder of groups that oppose his policies, George Soros, with arrest simply for supporting opposition to Trump. Much of this, though not all of it, has happened in the wake of the brutal, horrific murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. His assassination was abhorrent, and it was and still is a moment for all of us to consider what we can do to stamp out political violence and violence of all kinds. But his murder does not justify the dizzying campaign of political repression that has been carried out--often in his name--since. To exploit his murder to crush dissent or to censor speech is unacceptable. This brings me back to the debate over the expiring budget. I join with my colleagues in wanting this new budget to at the very least postpone the healthcare insurance increases that are coming for millions of Americans and that are going to ruin people's lives in this country--75 percent increases for people, who are going to make this awful decision about whether they should continue to pay their premiums, whether they should put food on their table for their kids, or whether they should risk going without insurance. I think that is a pretty reasonable ask. Just don't increase costs on families when it comes to healthcare at a time when the cost of everything else is going up because of President Trump's insane economic policies. But let me ask you this as well: Why would we not also simply say that any budget we pass should stop the worst of the lawlessness? Stop the deployments to our cities. Stop the witch hunt of Comey and Soros and Senator Schiff. Stop using the FCC to censor speech. Stop unconstitutionally ignoring the budget and spending only money that the President wants to spend. To me, this is simple: We should not willingly pay the bills for the most serious assault on political freedom since the Civil War--an assault that may collapse American democracy as we know it. Now, I know my Republican friends think this is hyperbole, that our fear for our democracy is just fearmongering, just politics. I swear it is not. Our Republican colleagues know why Comey and Senator Schiff and Soros are being targeted. They know that the President just picked the people that give him the hardest time and told his folks to come up with charges. My Republican colleagues know the impact that this has on people who want to politically and peacefully oppose the President but now won't do that because they fear for their freedom. Republicans know this. They should not defend it. Republicans know that it is wrong to sit down and agree to a budget and then cheer the President when he refuses to spend the money in blue States or on the priorities that got Democrats to sit down at the table to begin with. Republicans know that is not fair play. They shouldn't defend it. Republicans know that using the FCC to crack down on speech that the President doesn't agree with is wrong. They know, as Senator Cruz pointed out, that is a slippery slope we may never get off. I want to find agreement with the Republicans on stopping these premiums from going up. I do. I think that is really important for people in this country. And I think it is OK to admit that this is an odd arrangement that we have in American Government today, where the minority party in the Senate, so long as it has 40 Members, is kind of in a coalition government with the majority party because the budget can't pass without bipartisan agreement. But the majority party has an obligation to honor and fight for a basic set of protections for our democracy, and when it doesn't, it really stops being a good-faith negotiating partner. How do Republicans expect us to vote for a budget that funds a government that is lawlessly pursuing Democrats, that is arresting and harassing our members and our allies, that is deploying the Army and masked officers to our cities? We are at a moment of decision for this country. Right now, Republicans aren't even trying to keep the government open. They are not even here. They are not even here. They are rooting for a shutdown. But if we are going to keep the government open, why can't we all agree that it should only be a government that respects our democracy, that is not corrupt, that doesn't treat people and places that oppose President Trump as enemies deserving of indictment or military deployment. That also seems like a pretty minimalist ask. So it is decision time: Is this Senate going to fund the destruction of our democracy or are we going to do what is necessary to stand up for basic American values? I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I first note that we are horrified watching images and following the news out of Utah and we are sending all of our thoughts to Mr. Kirk, to his family, to survivors there. Mr. President and colleagues, there are a host of ways that democracies die. Institutions like universities and the legal profession capitulate to the leaders and the regime. They stop being forums for free speech and dissent. The legal system becomes perverted into a vehicle to punish opponents of the regime and to immunize loyalists. The press is threatened with sanction or retribution for telling the truth. They fold and they just silence criticism. Business leaders are offered lucrative deals for making loyalty agreements with the government using their economic power to back the regime. I wish this weren't true, but all of those things are happening in America today. It is why many of us come down to this floor fairly often to talk about our belief that we are sleepwalking into some version of, at best, deeply illiberal democracy where rights and dissent are functionally irrelevant or, at worst, authoritarianism where political opposition just vanishes. But today, I want to talk about another common part of this story about how democracies evaporate. And that is the subjugation of the legislative branch to a corrupt executive branch. Put another way, in healthy democracies, the legislature or the parliament sees itself as a check on runaway Executive power. It stands up regularly for its powers, its prerogatives, no matter who the President or the Prime Minister is. In a disappearing democracy, the legislature effectively operates as an arm of the Executive, simply taking orders, including orders to wind down the independent power of the legislature. This is what is happening here, right now, in the U.S. Senate. One of the most important checks on Executive power given to the Senate by the Constitution is the power of consent for nominees to high Executive Office. It prevents a President from installing in power unqualified or corrupt people. It allows the legislature--and through the legislature, the people--to make sure that the executive branch stays in its lane, executing the law--not making the law. Yesterday, we effectively gave that power up in an extraordinary way. Senate Republicans went nuclear. That means they used their majority power to change the rules of the Senate--unilaterally, without any Democratic support--so that now, in one single vote, the Senate can confirm 50 or 100 or 1,000 Trump nominees all at once. From the founding of our Republic until yesterday, without unanimous consent, the Senate voted on one nominee at a time. Now, the Senate can batch together dozens of hundreds of nominees in one vote, essentially obliterating our power of advice and consent. Republicans say: Well, this was originally a Democratic proposal. But that is not true. Yes, a few Democrats, years ago, floated a proposal to Republicans to work together in a bipartisan way to batch together 10 nominees at a time, and only lower level nominees. But this Republican rule, A, involves no consultation with Democrats; B, has no limits, either with respect to how many nominees are considered and, seemingly, what level of nominee. It would effectively allow, under the actual letter of the rule, for there to be one single vote on an entire slate of Cabinet nominees. I understand that the Republican leader will say that is not the intent of the rule; but read the rule. And there will be pressure-- increasing pressure now that the rules are changed--from the President of the United States to continue to open the aperture of what this rule allows. I will concede that our nomination process is broken. I am totally open for reasonable proposals for reform. But this is not reasonable. What do I do as a Senator if a batch of nominees arrives for a vote and I support 58 of them but I don't support two of them? If I vote no, then I have voted against 58 qualified people. If I vote yes, then I have given my consent, possibly, for deeply dangerous people to staff key Federal Agencies. It makes no logical sense to do this, at the very least, in this open-ended way. But it does make sense if you put yesterday's decision in context, because Senate Republicans increasingly view themselves as mere employees of their party's leader Donald Trump. They will look the other way when he violates the law. And when he asks to consolidate power, his employees grant his request without thinking twice, because this wasn't the first time congressional Republicans gladly gave up their power to make Trump's lawlessness easier. Trump has, effectively, seized the spending power from Congress. This is unforgivable because our Founding Fathers vested the spending power in Congress because they knew that a President with the unrestrained power of the purse could easily use that authority to seize full power of the government and wrest away from the people control of their government. Trump has frozen or canceled more than $400 billion in congressionally appropriated funding. Senate Republicans have done virtually nothing to counteract that extraordinary, unprecedented seizure of spending power. In fact, they have helped him take control of spending by supporting, for the first time in our Nation's history, a partisan rescissions bill that canceled billions of dollars of spending that had been appropriated through a bipartisan vote. Congressional Republicans have also, frankly, closed down any meaningful oversight of the corruption that is happening in the executive branch. Republicans enthusiastically rooted through every corner of the Biden administration to find every morsel of alleged corruption that they could find, including harassing virtually every member of the Biden family to find facts to corroborate this bogus FOX News-driven Biden crime family narrative. Meanwhile, Donald Trump and his family have made $3.4 billion off of his Presidency. The President is using White House resources, taxpayer-funded White House resources, to market a Trump cryptocoin. He bullied a foreign government into giving him a private jet. His family is setting up companies, as we speak, to profit off government contracts. It is a massive growing corruption racket. But now, all of a sudden, Republicans have no interest in oversight. One more example: Another power of the Constitution explicitly reserved for Congress is the power to declare war. The President cannot take military action overseas without Congress. And that is a really good thing. But Republicans have now totally outsourced to Donald Trump the decision as to whether we take military action overseas. I am not saying the Democrats were perfect in constraining the Executive's war powers, but at least we tried. Trump just carried out an air strike on a boat off the coast of Venezuela, a blatantly illegal act. And there was one single Republican Senator who raised a concern. History is full of examples of legislatures where, under pressure from an elected Executive who wants to convert a country from democracy to something like autocracy, they effectively close up shop. They decide to just take orders from the leader. And thus, they consent to this transition. Turkiye is no longer a healthy democracy today because the parliament supported consolidating massive new powers to the Presidency. In Sri Lanka, their democracy is in peril, in part because their legislature gave up key appointment powers to the executive. Part of the collapse, long ago, of Russia's short-lived democracy was the Duma's decision to view itself as a political arm of the Presidency. I know that some people are going to suggest that this is hyperbole. I don't think it is. We are watching a slow-motion daily assault on democracy take place. Institutions are shuttering venues of dissent. The Judiciary is being turned into just a mechanism to harass and imprison the President's political opponents. Our media are cutting deals with the President to silence loud critics of the administration. And now, this body will no longer get to vote on individual nominees to the administration who are likely going to carry out this campaign to undermine and, eventually, potentially destroy the rule of law. None of this is normal. None of this, including what is happening this week in the U.S. Senate, has any historical precedent before in this country. All of it is wildly dangerous and, perhaps, fatal if we continue to refuse to join together as Republicans and Democrats to rise to the challenge and protect our democracy. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MURPHY

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

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, every year, there are 6,400 veterans who die by suicide. This is an urgent crisis that I know matters to colleagues on both sides of the aisle. A few years ago, we made a change in law that restores gun rights to veterans who have been deemed mentally incompetent. These are veterans who can't manage their financial affairs, can't balance a checkbook-- about 35 percent of them are diagnosed with schizophrenia. All this amendment seeks to do is to collect information to see what the rate of suicide has been amongst that population of veterans, many of them deeply mentally ill, who now are able to purchase a gun. This is just an amendment seeking to get that information so that we can make our best determination on a bipartisan basis as to how to best protect veterans who are at moments of crisis in their life. If it were up to me, we would restore the previous policy for 30 years. Democrats and Republicans agreed that those veterans diagnosed with schizophrenia should not be able to buy a gun, but all I am asking for here is an amendment that would seek to get information on the rate of suicide for this population of veterans. I would hope that my colleagues would support the amendment.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 3447 and ask it be reported by number.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, eight times since 1974, when Congress created the rescissions process, one party has controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives--eight times. It is actually four times Democratic control and four times Republican control. Eight times one party had total control over the elements of the Federal Government necessary to pass legislation. And never before has either party done what Republicans are doing today: pass a partisan rescissions bill, double-crossing the minority party, and canceling spending that just months before both parties shook hands on. Why? Why has this never happened before? Well, because this is just an old-fashioned doublecross. It is a con job. Republicans and Democrats agreed on spending levels--first, in a bipartisan appropriations bill passed in March of 2023, and then again in multiple bipartisan continuing resolutions. When a party controls the White House and both Houses of Congress, it always has the power to use the rescissions process to pull a fast one: to agree with the minority party on a budget--because the rules say that you need 60 votes to pass a budget--to get majority party priorities funded in exchange for funding minority party priorities, and then to use the rescissions process to just doublecross the minority by using that process, which only requires 50 votes, to just then cancel the minority parties' priorities. That is immoral. It is unethical--suckering your partner into a deal in which you get something and they get something and then using the back door to cancel the part of the deal that you don't like. That is bad faith. It is why no party has done it since 1972. The power has always existed. Eight different times, either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party could have cut a bipartisan spending deal and then used the rescissions power to just cancel the parts of the deal they didn't like. But it has never happened because it is bad faith, because it destroys the ability of the Senate to function in a bipartisan way. It is kind of like, if you traded baseball cards as a kid and you made a trade with your best friend, and then, in the middle of the night, you snuck into his house, and you took your cards back, so that you had his cards, and now you had your cards as well. Nobody would think that is right. But that is exactly what is happening here. It will become hard, maybe even impossible--Senator Tillis laid this out very well--to write a bipartisan budget ever again because the minority party now knows that they can get doublecrossed. And believe me, if Republicans do this now, Democrats are going to do it when they are in charge. This will become the norm. Sit down. Do a bipartisan deal--wink, wink--and then, a couple months later, just cancel the agreement through a partisan rescissions process. And, of course, this is now the third time in 7 short months that the new Republican majority has made substantial, meaningful changes to Senate rules and norms. Senate Republicans created a brandnew rule that massively expands their ability to invalidate actions of the previous Democratic administration. Just a couple weeks ago, Republicans walked away from decades of precedent on how Senate bills are scored, and they used new magic math to create a score that hid the actual cost of their budget plan--and now this double-cross. But this isn't just about breaking the Senate. That is actually, probably, the least serious consequence of what is happening here. The most serious consequence is what is happening to American power around the world as Donald Trump and Republicans, in part through this rescissions bill, destroy every single nonmilitary tool that we use around the world to protect our interests. When I was, like, 8 or 9 years old, I collected G.I. Joe figures. And one Christmas, I remember being so excited because Santa Claus brought me the huge G.I. Joe aircraft carrier. It was awesome. I was obsessed with the military, like a lot of boys that age--the planes, the tanks, the ships. That is what I thought American power was--the U.S. military--period, stop. And, of course, that is an 8-year-old's view of the world. The world, as it turns out, is a lot more complicated. You need a lot more than just planes and tanks and ships to protect your interests. You need a powerful military. But adults--in particular, adults who have any experience in national security--know that the octopus of global power has a lot of arms: military might but also information might, economic might, diplomatic might, energy might, and humanitarian might. This rescissions bill cancels billions of dollars in investments in nonmilitary foreign policy tools, and it is a part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to destroy almost every tool that protects American interests other than our military. Over the last 10 years, the defense budget has grown from about $502 billion to $825 billion. That is an extraordinary 10-year increase of about $323 billion. Over that same period of time, the State Department budget has grown from $54 billion to $56 billion--a $2 billion increase. If you layer in emergency funds, that increase is more like $30 billion. But you are still talking about an increase for the military over the past 10 years that is 10 times the size of the increase for nonmilitary tools. This military myopia makes me remember my 8-year-old self because it is so childish, it is so immature, it is so divorced from reality. Donald Trump's national security strategy--fund the military and destroy every other way that we confront Russia, China, Iran, nonstate actors--it could have been constructed by an 8-year-old. It is that unsophisticated. It really amounts to surrender because as we stop projecting nonmilitary power around the world, China and Russia but especially China--they just celebrate and step into the void. Secretary Rubio announced on March 10 that 83 percent of USAID programs will be terminated. Meanwhile, China just announced an 8.4- percent increase in its own diplomatic budget for 2025, committing 500 million additional dollars to the World Health Organization over the next 5 years--an organization that the United States no longer belongs to. As a result of our cuts, standing next to China's investments in diplomatic power, China will surpass the United States this year for the first time as the largest bilateral assistance partner for 40 countries. China is now the power at the World Health Organization. They call the shots about the standards of global health and pandemic relief. China is now the preferred economic development partner for many nations. China is now the dominant force in standard-setting boards for global commerce. This is a choice the Trump administration is making to make China-- and to a certain extent Russia, in certain forms--the dominant power when it comes to economic statecraft, information statecraft, energy statecraft. Let me give you a specific example. Today, information is power. If you control information flows, you control politics, you control economics, and you control culture. China spends about $7 billion a year to promote their communist narrative, undermine U.S. leadership around the world, and foster a China-friendly media environment globally. Russia--it is hard to know how much Russia spends because they are not publicly reporting much of it, but they certainly spend at least $1.5 billion but probably double that. In many countries, Russia and China control the information space. Russian-backed candidates win elections in countries on their periphery simply because of Russian information programs. Asian countries boxed the United States and U.S. companies out of economic competition because of Chinese information programs. Faced with China and Russia spending somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 billion, where the United States today is spending only a fraction of that amount of money, it would stand to reason that this would be a moment where we should come together, Republicans and Democrats, and dramatically increase our information warfare investments, but, of course, we are doing exactly the opposite. Trump is in the middle of a powerful, relentless campaign to destroy--to destroy--America's global information power. The Trump administration just shut down the Global Engagement Center. That is the capacity of the State Department to try to counter Russian and Chinese propaganda around the world. Gone. Just gone. The Global Engagement Center was a bipartisan commitment set up years ago by myself and Rob Portman, supported by Marco Rubio when he was a Senator. Now it just doesn't exist any longer. The administration is dismantling the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the umbrella arm that oversees our information programs around the world. They laid off 92 percent of its staff. Voice of America, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia are on track to disappear. The arm of VOA that combats Iranian anti-American information--gone. Fifty-four different radio frequencies operated by Radio Free Asia to counter Chinese anti-American propaganda--gone. At the same time, China is opening up 80 new radio frequencies in multiple languages, including in those regions where America is disappearing. We are handing the world to China and Russia by deciding to view American power only through a military lens. This rescissions bill makes it worse by enacting billions of dollars of cuts to diplomacy, to economic development programs, and likely to information programs because we actually can't see the impact of all of these cuts. It is all surrender. China is throwing a blowout party as we disappear our nonmilitary power from the world. Trump terminated tens of millions of dollars from projects to upgrade Africa's power grid. What did China do? They announced $50 billion of new financing for Africa--Africa, a place where the critical minerals exist to power AI and future defense systems; Africa, the part of the world whose economy is going to explode with opportunity--now opportunity that will go to Chinese companies, not American companies, as we withdraw our relationships with that continent and as China steps into the breach. This rescissions bill, standing next to Trump's destruction of all our nonmilitary foreign policy tools, is surrender to our enemies. This bill is a doublecross. It is. It is a doublecross. It is going to harm our ability to ever be able to do a bipartisan budget process in the future. But even worse, this bill is surrender to our adversaries who are chomping at the bit to fill the void that we are creating by adopting the national security strategy of an 8-year-old boy. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, at the foundation of this bill is something very simple: the most massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the history of the country. That is essentially what we are talking about here. That is locally bad policy, but, just as importantly, it is also deeply, deeply immoral. This bill is going to ruin people's lives. There are going to be moms who will watch their kids go hungry because of the cuts in SNAP. People are going to die when 17 million people lose their healthcare; and for what? To give an average quarter-million-dollar tax cut to the wealthiest families in America. We have tried to convince our colleagues to throw less people off their healthcare or to make the nutritional cuts a little bit easier to stomach, but they won't do it. So now we are just trying to address the other side of the immorality. This amendment would just say: no tax cuts for people making over $500 million a year. If you are going to ruin people's lives by kicking them off their healthcare or cutting their food stamps, don't make the moral injury even worse by padding the pockets of the richest people in the country--tax cuts for people making over $500 million a year, while you throw 17 million people off their healthcare, yes or no?

Mr. MURPHY. I ask that further reading of the motion be dispensed with.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I have a motion to commit at the desk.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, in a 1793 letter to William Cabell, James Madison said this: In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. A few years later, in another letter, this time to Thomas Jefferson as part of their famous correspondence, Madison expounded on that very simple superlative, naming the war powers clause in the Constitution as the most important. He said: The constitution supposes what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature. Our Founding Fathers didn't get everything right. They didn't see ahead of time that this Chamber would be divided in two: Republicans on one side, Democrats on the other side. But they knew, having watched the course of human history, that Executives--in their day, mostly all Monarchs and Kings--had all sorts of reasons to drag their Nation into war. Power often came from war, the funding that could be raised for war, the loyalty commanded by war, the glory that occasionally came to the leader, the ruler, through war and through conquest. There was great risk in war, but there was also great reward in war. And there was far too much of it in the era in which our Constitution was being formed. The purpose of the Founders was to give the American people a voice in government--a revolutionary idea at the time--but it was also to order our government in a way that war would become less likely, would become less frequent. They imagined a world--this new America--in which peace would be the rule, not war, as it was at the time for the citizens of Europe who lived under the rule of Kings prone to war, incentivized to war, as James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson. So this part of the Constitution, with more wisdom in it than any other part of the Constitution, according to James Madison, is this section of our Founding document that says it is not up to the ruler; it is not up to the executive branch; it is up to the branch of government most connected to the people to decide whether we go to war; to require that there be a debate, a conversation that involves everyone in this Nation; that requires, that necessitates, a collective decision as to whether to put the brave soldiers of this country and the collective security of the Nation at risk. So we are here today because we still find wisdom in that clause of the Constitution. We still see great risk in moving into a world, which we are quickly moving to, in which that clause that James Madison named as the supreme clause of the Constitution, is a dead letter--is a dead letter. That is the risk because there are very few wars that are planned so far in advance that there is time to come and have a monthlong debate. Wars happen quickly, and they necessitate quick action, according to the Constitution. Yes, we have always accepted that there has to be an exception--but a limited exception--to that supreme clause in the Constitution. If there is an imminent attack against the United States, of course--of course-- the people of the United States want the ability of the President of the United States to respond to that imminent attack. But in the absence of an imminent attack, there is no exception. There is no ability to go around Congress. In the case of the hostilities against Iran that the President began last weekend, there was no imminent threat against the United States. There was no Army marching in this Nation. There was no nuclear bomb that even existed that could be dropped on the United States or our soldiers in the region. So it was required--it is required under the Constitution--that the President come to Congress. If the President doesn't need to come to Congress to attack another Nation preemptively, preventively, absent an imminent threat, then that provision of the Constitution is dead letter. Period. Stop. And the most important piece of this document, according to our most revered Founding Father, is no longer operational. And if we lurch into a world in which any Executive can send us to war without the participation of the American people, then we are in a world that our Founding Fathers could never have imagined. So I am very glad to be on the floor today, as a big fan of the wisdom of our Founders, to support Senator Kaine's resolution. I appreciate his consistency in bringing this question before us. I don't want to live in a world in which the greatest question that this country could envision, whether or not we send our brave men and women to fight on our behalf, is not a question that doesn't involve the collective conversation of this body and of the people of this Nation. I think it is an important resolution to debate here, and I hope my colleagues will support it. It doesn't really have to do with whether you think there is wisdom in this action or not, whether you think the President was right or wrong; this is an opportunity for us to stand up for our responsibility under the Constitution to be a coequal branch in setting foreign policy. I have my thoughts on the wisdom of this action. I have stated that I think it is very dangerous when the President of the United States deliberately misleads the country about the efficacy of our military operations overseas or the threats presented to this country. It is unforgiveable anytime a President doesn't tell the truth, but it is especially unforgiveable when the President doesn't tell the truth about national security intelligence. I know my colleagues here come to different conclusions, but if the reporting is correct that Iran, even after these strikes, still has centrifuges and still has enriched uranium and still has scientists who know how to put those things together, then it just is not true that the program has been obliterated. That is a program that can be reconstituted in a relatively short amount of time because, of course, knowledge is not able to be destroyed by bombs. The only way that you are going to make this country and this world safe from Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions--and they have them--is diplomacy. I hope that diplomacy got easier because of these strikes, but I don't think they did. I don't think diplomacy got closer because of these strikes and whatever follow-on strikes may come as President Trump is currently threatening. So if diplomacy is the only path, if you can't bomb out of existence knowledge, then I don't think this is a very good week for American national security. But I come to a different conclusion than many of my Republican colleagues do, even some of my Democratic colleagues. But Senator Kaine's resolution is so important because that is the debate that we should be having. That is the argument that we should be having in public. That debate over the wisdom of dropping bombs in a far-off land that could put our troops at risk, that could drag us into a war, that is not a debate that the Founding Fathers thought should take place behind closed doors at the Department of Defense, at the CIA, and the White House. That is actually the debate that they thought that this body should have--the U.S. Senate--that the House of Representatives should have, and that is the chance that we have today: to bring that debate out of the shadows, out of the secret, to the place where the Founding Fathers thought it should exist. That is why I urge my colleagues to support Senator Kaine's resolution. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, Senator Booker and I have now spoken multiple times on the floor. The Senator from California has been here multiple times. We are doing so because we saw the look in our colleague's eyes as he was being violently thrown out of that room. You lost contact with his eyes in the hallway as he was being pushed stomach-down onto the ground and handcuffed. One of our colleagues suggested that Senator Padilla got what he wanted. If you saw Senator Padilla's eyes, if you saw Alex's eyes as he was being pushed out of that room, you saw a man who did not expect to be treated that way. He thought that he was coming to register his dissent, his objection, to something deeply serious and illegal that was happening in his State. He had a responsibility as a Senator to speak truth to power. So we are here on this floor speaking repeatedly in hopes that at some point, some of our Republican colleagues, whether here or in other public statements, will register some degree of concern for what happened to their colleague. We lose our democracy if we lose our ability to dissent. In 1722, in a newspaper started in Boston by the name of the New- England Courant--one of the country's first newspapers--a series of essays began to appear that were speaking to some really radical ideas for 1722. This is 20 years before Thomas Jefferson was born. This was 50 years before Thomas Paine wrote ``Common Sense.'' This is 1722, and the author's name is Silence Dogood. Silence Dogood writes in the New-England Courant: Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of speech; a Thing terrible to Publick Traytors. Silence goes on to say: This sacred Privilege [of free speech] is so essential to free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the Freedom of Speech always go together; and in those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing . . . his own. In 1722, this was a radical idea, this idea that a tyrant must control the freedom of thought with violence in order to maintain control of the people. The New-England Courant was owned by a man named James Franklin, and he probably didn't know that Silence Dogood was a pseudonym for his 16- year-old brother named Benjamin Franklin. That is Benjamin Franklin writing in 1722, 16 years old. Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the [Freedom] of Speech. What happened to Senator Padilla today, it does stand in context. I say again, it does matter that on that day in which violence was used against the U.S. Capitol as a means to try to upset our democracy was cheered on by a President who then pardoned those violent rioters. It stands in the context of the arrest of a mayor in New Jersey and a Congressperson seeking to do normal and regular oversight. It stands in context with the use of the FCC to try to intimidate and harass news stations that carry coverage unfavorable to the President and stands in context of the banning of outlets having access to the White House or the Pentagon simply because they don't write things that are favorable to the President or use terms that are favorable to the President. If we lose our democracy, it is not likely that there is going to be this one moment, this one day, this one fight. It won't be like other revolutions where the Parliament building gets burned down or a coup occurs. No. It will be that, over time, the message has been sent that if you speak up against the government, there is a price to be paid, and that price involves violence. But if you use violence on behalf of the government, it will be excused. And so why we are still on this floor tonight is, sure, we have immense respect for our colleague, and I believe he has respect across the aisle. Senator Padilla is a decent human servant who doesn't deserve to be treated that way. We are here because he is our friend and our colleague. But we are also here because too many in this body take for granted that this democracy is natural, that it is just going to hang around, no matter the threats. The effort that this administration is undergoing to excuse and normalize violence when it happens in advancement of the administration's political priorities and then to suppress nonviolent speech in a multitude of ways when it objects to this administration's priorities, it sends a message to the public about what you can get away with and what you can't get away with. Now, I don't think this will be the result. I don't think the American people will be bullied into silence. I do not believe they will watch that clip of Alex Padilla being forced to the ground and handcuffed and decide to stay home. No, I think, in fact, the opposite will likely happen. I think more Americans will be out there protesting this government. I think more Americans will decide to be present this weekend, to stand up for the right of free speech. But if that were to be the case, it would be the exception to the historical rule, because in most countries when a ruler uses violence in order to suppress dissent, it works. People decide that they don't want to risk the fate of Alex Padilla. They don't want to be on the ground with their hands forced behind them and put into handcuffs. They stay home, and they just let the tyranny wash over them, their community, and their country. We are not there yet. I don't mean to exercise hyperbole. What I seek to say is that we should not take this democracy for granted and that there can be--history tells us there often is--a deep impact when violence is used against those who are protesting the regime. It becomes normalized. And it ends up scaring many people into a dissent away from civic participation, and that is where our democracy dies. This sacred privilege, the privilege of free speech, the privilege to protest your government--says 16-year-old Benjamin Franklin--``is so essential to free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the Freedom of Speech always go together.'' Men cannot be prosperous, he says, without having access to the freedom of expression. Senator Padilla was doing his job. Sure, you can decide that he was being disrespectful. That is not illegal. You could decide that he, in the alternative, should have waited until the press conference was over. But nothing he did warranted the treatment he got. And when you stand it side by side with the pardoning of the January 6 protesters, the attempt to bully the free press into toeing the administration's line, the deployment of the National Guard and the Marines to a protest in California that was largely peaceful and, basically, just encompassed 1 or 2 square blocks, nobody mistakes what that agenda is about. That agenda is about trying to bully the American people into silence. And once again, the first several comments from our colleagues justifying the handcuffing and violence to Senator Padilla simply because they believe he was disrespectful paints a really dangerous picture of where we are headed. Senator Booker is right. The focus should be on the violence that is being done to the American people's healthcare right now. We are debating a bill right now, as we speak, to rip healthcare away from upwards of 15 million Americans. That is extraordinary. That is a healthcare catastrophe. That is not just 15 million people losing their healthcare. That is hospitals, drug treatment centers, health clinics shutting down when you pull almost a trillion dollars out of the Medicaid system. There is a new budget analysis today that shows that the poorest 30 percent of the country, 40 percent of the country, will be poorer after this bill passes, just so that the richest 10 or 20 percent can get a massive new tax cut. In fact, the richest people in this country will get an average $270,000 tax cut. Literally, a transfer of wealth from the poorest people in this country--people who are working minimum wage jobs are going to be poorer after having passed this bill in order to enrich the folks who are doing super well, and we are going to add $3 trillion to the deficit--just going to put it on our kids' credit card. That is, maybe, the most unpopular piece of legislation that has ever come before the U.S. Senate. That is an agenda that you can probably only impose on the Nation by force--by force--because if people have the right to protest, if they have the ability to stand up to the most massive transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the rich in the history of the country, it might not pass. That protest movement might be big enough in order to change the minds of enough Members of this body so that that agenda might pass. It may be that that bill is so unpopular that the only way that you can get it to pass is by using violence and the threat of violence to suppress protest and free speech. So we are still here, hours after this incident, because we care about our colleague, because we believe this is ultimately going to do immense damage to this institution that we love. I have done hard work with many of my Republican colleagues. I deeply care about many of my Republican colleagues. I don't know all of them well, but I know enough of them to know that there are patriots; there are people who believe that America matters more than our party. I showed that video to several of my Republican colleagues as we were leaving the Chamber today. I saw their jaws drop. I know their human reaction to what they saw. But I also know that there is a tendency in this version of the Republican party to circle the wagons around one message. If Democrats say X, then Republicans have to say Y. That doesn't have to be the case every time. It just doesn't. There can be true things. And a true thing is this: That was an excessive, impermissible amount of force that was used on Senator Padilla today. We can say that together. Even if you agree with the President on his decision to deploy the National Guard, even if you hate every single one of those protesters, even if you don't like Senator Padilla--which is hard because he is a freaking hard guy not to like. But even if you believe all those things, you can say that what happened today is not all right and that the White House should admit that; that there should be an apology; and that there should be protocols set in place to make sure that if a U.S. Senator shows up to a public event--he didn't bust into a private meeting. This was a press conference designed to be public, to transmit public information. He wanted to make sure that that was accurate information. Maybe you don't like the way that he did it, but what he did is not illegal. What he did does not deserve that treatment. We can decide that that is wrong. We can recognize the danger to this concept of free speech, defended in 1722 by a 16-year-old Benjamin Franklin, is serious enough for us to speak together with one voice. So my Republican colleagues may think that we are belaboring the point, but this is an important moment for the Senate and for the Nation. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I agree with my friend from Maryland. This has to be a moment where we just drop our political affiliations, where we decide that we are Americans; that the Constitution matters; that dissent defines America; and we say and do the right thing. I think there is still time for our Republican colleagues here to speak out. I understand they may still want to collect more facts, but as each minute and each hour passes, it is becoming clear that the main justification seems to be simply that Senator Padilla was showing some level of disrespect. The first comments from our Republican colleagues, I think if you are an American who cares about free speech, are really concerning. One of our colleagues in the Senate said this: [Senator Padilla] has a responsibility to his constituents to show up at work, not to try to make a spectacle of himself. Well, that is certainly a legitimate opinion. You can criticize any of us for engaging in a spectacle. But spectacle is not illegal. Raising your voice is not a crime in this country. Protesting your government does not, cannot, and should not result in you being delivered to the ground by law enforcement and handcuffed. Another of our colleagues says: Was he disruptive? [Well,] he got what he wanted. Once again, the standard here seems to be disruption; that if you are speaking truth to power, then you are going to be met by violence. The definition of this country, the fundamental nature of America, is that protest is not met by violence. Protest is celebrated in this Nation; that what defines America against the rest of the world, against the totality of previous human history is that we protect the right of human beings living in the United States of America to raise protest--loud protest, sometimes disruptive protest--against their government. And, frankly, we protect that right equally, whether it is a U.S. Senator or an ordinary citizen with no formal power. So we can say today, well, this is really dangerous that a U.S. Senator got thrown to the ground and handcuffed simply because they spoke up at a press conference. But it is no more concerning that it is happening to a U.S. Senator than what is happening to many other citizens and residents of this country who, right now, are being met with equal physical force. We don't expect any different treatment of U.S. Senators than of ordinary citizens. But many ordinary citizens in Los Angeles, right now, are being treated with the same kind of force that Alex Padilla was met with today. So there is still time for us to come together and say: In this country, speaking truth to power, even in a disruptive way, is never rationalization for violence. But I will tell you, the first couple of statements from my Republican colleagues are deeply worrying. They misread the fundamental nature of this country. If we now live in a world where simple disagreements--vocal disagreements--where protest with this administration becomes justification for violence, I don't know how you can define that as America any longer. As someone who was sitting in this Chamber--I think at this very same desk--on January 6, it shouldn't be lost on us that there are forms of political protests that are protected by this administration-- celebrated, even. And then there are forms of political protests, as you saw today, that are met with violence. There are individuals out on the street today in America who, just a few years ago, were in this building or on the outskirts of this building beating the hell out of police officers--viciously, savagely attacking police officers; tasers to the throat; rendering those police officers unconscious; metal poles being hammered onto the heads of police officers. And in an exceptional moment, the President of the United States, in celebration of their violence, pardoned them and put them back out on the street, sending the unequivocal message that if you engage in violent protest on behalf of the White House, you get out of jail free. Pair that together with the message that is being received by the American public now on a daily basis, most prominently and visibly today, that if you engage in peaceful protests--Senator Padilla was asking a question; he identified himself as a U.S. Senator--of the administration, you will be met by violence. You carry out violence on behalf of the White House, you are excused. You lodge normal, protected protest against this White House, you are thrown to the ground and handcuffed, even if you are a U.S. Senator, though it should not matter. The early reaction here, it should be chilling because once this becomes normalized, I don't know how you put it back in the bottle. We shouldn't assume that this democracy survives forever. This is a revolutionary experiment, 250 years in. It is fragile. This idea that we govern ourselves, this idea that we respect through rule and force of law people who disagree with us--0.0001 percent of humans have ever lived under a system like that in which they decide for themselves the law, their protests, even against the most powerful people in the country, is protected by law. That idea is unnatural. It is, in some ways, almost destined to fall apart. Yet for 250 years, we have not let it fall apart. We have decided that our fealty to the idea of free speech, of protected free speech, even if it rubs up against the ruling elites, the ruling class of the White House, the most powerful people in the country in an uncomfortable way, will be protected. For 250 years, we have together--Republicans and Democrats--decided that that principle of free speech was more important than our political stripes, than loyalty to our party's leader or our party's ideas. At some point tonight, a Republican has to come down to this floor. At some point this weekend, some of our Republican colleagues have to speak out on behalf of this fundamental American idea, on behalf of the U.S. Senate, on behalf of our colleague. We can still fight on tax policy and immigration policy. We can have big disagreements about the reconciliation bill. It will not harm my Republican colleagues' ability to render argument on the things that matter to them. It is OK for us to agree that what happened to Alex Padilla 2 hours ago crosses a line. It doesn't compromise my Republican colleagues' integrity as Republicans to decide that there is still right or wrong; that not everything is black or white; that two plus two sometimes has to still equal four. What happened to Senator Padilla should not have happened. He identified himself. It is not true that he didn't identify himself. What happened to him in the room is not justifiable; but, certainly, what happened to him outside of the room isn't justifiable. Once he was removed from the room, being thrown to the ground as he is identifying himself as a Senator, being handcuffed can't be justified. So we are going to hang around on this floor in hopes that, at some point, somehow--and I know not all of our Republican colleagues are still in town--they speak up on behalf of this basic premise, this basic foundational idea of America: that even when protest rubs you the wrong way, even when you don't like the form or substance of it, that we are no longer the country that we love, the country that we teach our kids about, if we don't find a way to come together to object to protest being met with this kind of violence. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, this feels like a defining moment for the country but also for this body. I understand that it may take a few moments for our Republican colleagues to watch the full video, to gather some additional facts, to come to a conclusion. But we need our Republican colleagues to be on the floor right now with us because this is not simply an assault on Senator Padilla. This is not an assault on Democratic Senators. This is an assault on the rule of law. This is an assault on our democracy. And ultimately, we are robbing the ability of every single Senator to do our job if we are now going to be threatened with violence when we simply try to stand up for our constituents. Now, we all have townhalls, and we are all often met with constituents who oppose us, sometimes very vocally. But, speaking for myself, I don't ask law enforcement to throw my constituents to the ground and violently handcuff them because they have a different opinion from me. You know why I don't do that? Because we don't do that in a democracy. We don't do that against ordinary citizens, and we certainly don't allow the administration and the law enforcement that works for the administration to do that to a U.S. Senator. We will enter a banana republic if we don't find a way--Republicans and Democrats--to come together around this essential question of protecting our ability and our right as Senators to speak up for our constituents. Now, I understand that my Republican colleagues are going to need some time to gather the facts, but we already have a statement from the Department of Homeland Security that has accused Senator Padilla of being ``disrespectful,'' as if that is a rationalization for violence. Watch the video. Even if you believe that he was ``disrespectful''-- and, given the times, that is certainly in the eye of the beholder-- that never justifies what we saw on that video: throwing anyone--never mind an elected representative of the people--to the ground to be handcuffed. They say that he didn't identify who he was, and yet--watch the video--he clearly states: I am Senator Alex Padilla. They are going to spin this. But I am begging my Republican colleagues: Don't let them do it. Protect our ability as servants of the people to speak up for the people that we represent. Make sure that we do not normalize this kind of violence simply because the White House doesn't agree with people who dissent. If this is how a U.S. Senator can be treated, then none of us ultimately are immune. If this is how a U.S. Senator can be treated, none of our constituents are safe. This is a test for the country, but this is a test for the U.S. Senate as well. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, pursuant to section 36(b) of the Arms Export Control Act, I move to discharge the Committee on Foreign Relations from further consideration of S.J. Res. 54, as provided under the previous order.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am bringing before the Senate an opportunity for us to take a stand, to take a stand against the corruption of American foreign policy. The Senate will take a vote in just a moment to deny the President the ability to move forward with two arms sales--one to Qatar and one to the United Arab Emirates. I believe that this Senate should join Republicans and Democrats together in saying that any country that is willing to pay the President personally, to enrich our President personally, in order to receive favorable treatment from the United States of America in its foreign policy or to receive national security secrets from the United States of America shouldn't be able to do business as usual with this Congress or with this country. I want to tell you a story that is as heartbreaking as it is aggravating. We give the American President enormous power, and particularly we give the President enormous power when it comes to managing the foreign relations of this country. The President decides where we send arms. The President gets to negotiate peace treaties. The President decides how millions of troops are deployed all around the world. We trust that the President is going to use those powers for good, that the President is going to use those authorities to protect the United States of America. But they are vast powers. They are immense powers. So there is always the potential that those powers are going to be used for corrupt purposes, that instead of using those authorities in order to gain concessions from other nations that benefit the broad American public or benefit American national security, the President may use those powers in order to enrich himself personally. Our Founding Fathers actually thought a lot about this problem because they had watched their monarch. They had watched the King of England use the powers that he had in order--not to protect the British people but to amass enormous wealth. He used those powers both to control dissents and protests domestically, but he also used those powers in order to compel other nations and actors inside the empire to pay him tribute. President Trump has decided that he is going to use the powers that we have given him to demand the same kind of tribute that Kings and monarchs demanded. The reason we have to stand together today to vote against these arm sales to Qatar and UAE is because unfortunately these two countries, who are admittedly often allies, important allies of the United States, have decided to comply with President Trump's request to pay him that tribute. Shortly before the President went to the Middle East, he did not dispense to the region his Secretary of State. Instead, he dispensed to the region his business partners. Just before the President made his first major foreign trip to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and to Qatar, he sent his son and their business partner--who, not coincidentally, happens to be the son of Trump's Middle East Envoy--to the United Arab Emirates. Their request was pretty simple. Their request was not that the UAE do something that would be in the interest of collective American security; their request was that the UAE invest $2 billion in Trump's new crypto business--in particular, his stablecoin venture. This is the President of the United States going to the UAE and asking a foreign government to invest $2 billion in his personal business. The company is called World Liberty Financial. On World Liberty Financial's website, it says the majority of the company is owned by Donald J. Trump. This was a pretty exceptional request to make because his crypto business was brand new. At the time, it was a pretty minor player. So a $2 billion investment from a country like UAE would vault World Liberty Financial into the stratosphere. And, in fact, it did. When the UAE complied with that corrupt request, World Liberty Financial--the stablecoin that it issues became the fifth biggest stablecoin in the world overnight. Now, the UAE felt like it had to comply with the President's request because they had things they wanted from the United States. First, they wanted a continuation of arm sales, including the sale of Chinook helicopters that we will be voting on today. But they wanted something more specific, something that they weren't able to get from the first Trump administration or from the Biden administration. They wanted some of our most vital, most significant national security secrets. They wanted to be able to get their hands on computer chip technology, the kind of technology that will power the next generation of AI. We as a nation--again, based on bipartisan consensus--had been unwilling to give UAE that technology because it is a fairly open secret that the UAE has a very close, very cozy relationship with China, and there was a very real worry--there still is a real worry-- that that technology, if transferred to the UAE, would be quickly transferred to China, allowing China to be able to outpace us, to outrun us in the race to advanced AI. But the UAE knew that there was a way to get what they wanted, that there was a way to change the policy of the United States, and it was a $2 billion investment in Trump's business. Not coincidentally, just weeks after they announced they were putting $2 billion into Trump's crypto business, his father--who, again not coincidentally, is Trump's Middle East Envoy--went back to the region and announced that they would be moving forward with the transfer of these computer chips to the UAE--$2 billion into the Trump family's pockets and the most sensitive American technology that had been previously banned from going to the UAE, being sent to the UAE. Apparently, we didn't make any demands that the UAE divest itself from its security relationship with China. Instead, what we demanded was that the UAE make a $2 billion investment in Donald Trump's business. As you can imagine, once the word was out that the Trump administration was for sale, other countries decided to get into the mix. Donald Trump barely had taken a look at a luxury plane that the country of Qatar owned--reportedly the most luxurious plane in the world: gold plating, a spiral staircase designed by a famed French designer--and the President wanted it personally. So he dispensed the Department of Defense, apparently, to go to the Qataris and asked them to give him the plane, just like he had asked the UAE for a $2 billion investment in his business--a $2 billion investment that nobody else was going to give him except for a foreign power over which Donald Trump had leverage because of his role as President of the United States. He went to the Qataris and asked them to give him this jet because he liked it, because it was fancy, because he thought he deserved it, and he knew they couldn't say no. Why? Because the Qataris also have specific asks of the United States. More broadly, they were burned during Trump's first term. When the Saudis and the Emiratis ganged up on the Qataris and effectively implemented an economic and political blockade on Qatar, the Trump administration, in the first term, effectively took the side of the Emiratis and the Saudis. That was devastating for the Qataris. So first and foremost, they wanted to make sure that never again would Trump abandon them if there was a contest like that in the Middle East. So when he asked for the plane, just based upon their desire to make sure they did not get abandoned again, they felt they had to say yes. But they also wanted an arms sale, and the arms sale they wanted was a groundbreaking arms sale. Never before has the United States been willing to send our most sensitive drone technology into the Middle East, weren't willing to transfer our most sensitive computer chips. We also weren't willing to send our most sensitive drone technology. Qatar wanted that drone technology and once again, just like the UAE knew that they could get our most sensitive computer chip technology if they sent $2 billion to Donald Trump's business ventures, Qatar, having learned that lesson, realized that if they gave a massive gift to the President, maybe he would break with a bipartisan precedent not to send this sensitive drone technology into the Middle East. Guess what. They got what they wanted. The President has agreed to move forward with sending our most sensitive drone technology, the Predator drones, into the Middle East, selling them to Qatar. It is not a coincidence that they are also willing to send him this jet. I had the chance this morning to talk to the Secretary of Defense about this jet because one of the claims the administration has made is that the jet is actually being sent to the U.S. Government. But we learned some important facts this morning. It is true that right now the U.S. Government is buying two new Air Force Ones, and it is true that this contract is expensive and it is taking a little bit longer than both Republicans and Democrats had hoped, but both those planes from Boeing are due for delivery sometime at the end of Trump's term. What we learned today is that this plane that is being gifted temporarily to the U.S. Government is going to take several years to retrofit and will become available essentially at the exact same time that the two Boeing planes are made available. So we don't actually need this plane as a new Air Force One because the Boeings are still under contract, and they are going to be ready simultaneously. But the Secretary of Defense is committed to accepting the gift of this plane and then spending upwards of $1 billion of taxpayer money in order to retrofit this plane--$1 billion that we don't need because we are already spending $4 billion on the two Boeings. So now, instead of having two Air Force Ones, we are going to have three Air Force Ones. We don't need three Air Force Ones. But Trump is solving this problem because what he has said is that, when he leaves office, he is taking this Air Force One with him. Now, that has never ever happened before. We have never just given a President of the United States a gift on the way out the door. But we are going to spend $1 billion getting this plane ready. It, effectively, will not be used as an actual Air Force One because it won't be completed until the very end of his term. And then Trump is taking the plane, apparently, to his Presidential library, but who knows. And so this gift is actually going to Donald Trump, not to the American taxpayers. The Department of Defense is, effectively, a straw purchaser. It will hold the plane for a couple years; it will spend your taxpayer dollars to retrofit the plane; and then the plane will just be given to Donald Trump to take with him in his post-Presidency. So $2 billion from the UAE into the President's crypto venture, a plane that, when all is said and done, is probably going to be worth about $1.5 billion, straight transferred to Donald Trump personally-- this is unprecedented in the history of the United States of America. Never has a President of the United States, while in office, solicited, sought, and accepted billions of dollars' worth of investments in his private companies or gifts to him and his family. Remember, our Founding Fathers thought about this problem. They worried about this exact situation: a President using the vast power of the article II authorities he is given in order to trade favorable American treatment for foreign countries in exchange for personal enrichment of the President. They literally wrote a clause into the Constitution which, clear as day, says that a President of the United States cannot accept gifts from a foreign Prince, King, or nation. That is exactly what the President is doing. This plane is a gift. He advertises it as a gift--a gift that will be in the American public's hands for a nanosecond before it goes into his private hands. If we don't take a stand, if we don't act together against this unconstitutional corruption of our foreign policy, I don't know that we can ever get this genie back in the bottle. I understand that it is difficult for my Republican colleagues to stand up to this President, but we have an independent responsibility, as a coequal branch of government charged with upholding the Constitution, to call out wrong when we see it, to call out illegality when we see it. This is wildly unconstitutional. This is wildly illegal. So we have a chance today, with these resolutions, in order to make clear that we are not going to accept or make normal this kind of corruption of American foreign policy. Now, Mr. President, I will finish with this because my colleague from Maryland is going to add some remarks. I admit that these are imperfect vehicles. It is all part of the same story. Trump would not be moving forward with these arms sales if he wasn't getting what he wanted personally from these two countries. But I also admit that the UAE and, most especially, Qatar have been allies of the United States. We have worked together in our efforts, for instance, to combat terrorism in the region. Qatar specifically has, at times, been a heroic partner of the United States. We would never have been able to rescue thousands of Americans and American allies from Afghanistan without Qatar's help. Qatar has consistently acted as an interlocutor between warring and conflicting factions in the region. Qatar has taken risks on behalf of the United States. We, of course, have thousands of American troops and soldiers and airmen in Qatar today. And so what we need to say here is not that we are going to permanently pause our military relationships with these countries, but for the time being, while these two nations are willing to pay the President tribute, we cannot endorse or condone business as usual. These are important partners of the United States in the region. They will be important partners in the future. But this is an exceptional moment where the corruption and our effort to stop the corruption has to take priority and has to take precedent. And so I am going to vote for both of these resolutions while also still believing that we are going to have a continued, important bilateral relationship with Qatar and with the UAE. But if we start to endorse and grease the wheels of this kind of corruption, then there will be no end because once it becomes accepted, once it becomes implicitly endorsed by the U.S. Senate that foreign governments can put money into the personal treasury of the President in order to gain favorable treatment from the United States of America, that becomes the way our foreign policy works. So I appreciate my colleagues' time and attention to this matter, and I encourage them to support these motions when they come up for a vote later this afternoon. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, pursuant to section 36(b) of the Arms Export Control Act, I move to discharge the Committee on Foreign Relations from further consideration of S.J. Res. 53, as provided under the previous order.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, the U.S. Constitution and the American people give the American President vast power: the power to decide how billions of dollars are spent; the power to oversee the entire Federal criminal justice system; the power to sell arms around the world, to deploy millions of American soldiers, to negotiate peace treaties. We give him these powers--the Constitution gives the President these powers--so that he uses them on our behalf, to deploy that vast power of the American Presidency to increase our quality of life, to protect the American people. We place immense trust in the President not to abuse these incredible authorities that are given to him. But Donald Trump is abusing that authority in ways that, honestly, shock the conscience. Donald Trump is using the power of his office not to help or protect us but to enrich himself and his family. He is doing it publicly, brazenly, out in the open. He is, in effect, daring us-- specifically, daring the legislative branch, the coequal branch--to stop him. Nearly 3 weeks ago, news broke that the White House had dialed up one of our key allies in the Middle East, the Government of Qatar, and it asked that the Qataris give the President a luxury jet that is reportedly worth upward of $400 million. Now, the nicest jet that I have ever been on is Air Force One, and it is really nice. But the jet that Trump wants to make Air Force One-- that he is asking for from the Qataris--makes Air Force One, the current version, look like a tenement house. The Qatari jet that he is asking for, its interior is designed by a famed French designer, complete with a flowing grand staircase, sculpted ceilings, plush carpeting, leather couches, and gold furnishings. The plane has been called the world's most luxurious private jet. It includes nine bathrooms, five kitchens, swanky lounges, and a master bedroom suite. The arrangement that Trump proposed to the Qataris would briefly pass the jet through U.S. Government hands--but only, as reported, for just a year or two--before it would end up belonging personally to Donald Trump. The U.S. Government would essentially be a straw purchaser. The real owner of the jet, for all practical purposes, would be Donald Trump. Now, this kind of gift, a $400 million luxury jet, has no precedent in American history. No President has ever asked for--never mind been given--a $400 million gift from a foreign nation. Why? Well, because Presidents know that that is crossing a line; that is a massive abuse of their power. The leverage that Presidents have over other countries that they could use to ask for millions of dollars in gifts, it is supposed to be used to benefit the Nation's security, not to enrich themselves. But, also, it is just illegal. There is a very specific clause in the Constitution that forbids this kind of gift from a foreign government to a President, and this body is supposed to be in charge of helping to enforce the Constitution. Our Founders wrote that clause into the Constitution because they worried about this exact situation, where a President is using his authority, like a Monarch or a King, to make himself the richest person in the world. Now, the Qatari Government feels like it had little choice but to say yes when asked for this $400 million gift--again, briefly to the U.S. Government but really, for all practical purposes, to the President. They felt like they had no choice precisely because an American President has so much power; they have so much leverage, especially over a vulnerable country in the Middle East. In this case, Qatar really needs to keep the United States on its side. Middle East politics, they shift really quickly, and during Trump's first term, when the Qataris were not close to Trump, they paid a price. They found themselves badly and dangerously isolated in the region. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, if you remember, effectively ganged up to blockade Qatar, and Trump gave that move implicit consent. So Qatar, frankly, is willing to pay a very high price to avoid that fate again. But Qatar also has things that it wants from the United States. No Middle East country has ever been allowed to buy MQ-9 Reaper drones. These are the most lethal armed drones that America makes. We have previously judged that the region is just too volatile to allow any nation to possess the Reaper, and, arguably, there is an arms controls regime that doesn't allow us to transfer that technology. But Qatar wanted to break that precedent. Of course, they did. They wanted to be the first nation to have the Reaper technology, and Trump seemed willing to go along. So a $400 million gift to the President-- again, that the President was asking for--is a relatively small price to pay for that kind of military edge over your rivals in the region. But there was one more reason that Qatar had no choice but to give Trump--or, at least, they felt they had no choice but to give Trump-- this wildly illegal gift: because Trump had made it clear to the whole region, to the whole of the Gulf region in the Middle East, that he was for sale and that preferential American treatment was for sale and that if Qatar didn't pay, another country would. Qatar wasn't going to be protected, frankly, by a collective refusal of Trump's extortion in the region, and they had only to look next door to the United Arab Emirates to see how high the price was getting to win Trump's affection. At the exact moment that Trump was leaning on Qatar to give him the luxury plane, he was also leaning on UAE to give him not a $400 million gift but a $2 billion gift. And he didn't have to lean hard. Just before the Qataris committed to give Trump the plane, an investment firm backed by the Emirati Government and chaired by the Emirati Government's National Security Advisor shocked the world and announced that it would use Trump's brand new stablecoin--this is a form of cryptocurrency--in a $2 billion investment deal that this investment fund, essentially an arm of the UAE Government, was doing. And because of that $2 billion deal, overnight Trump's stablecoin became one of the five largest stablecoins in the world--massively inflating the President's wealth due to this one single investment. Now, this wasn't an ordinary investment decision. Out of all of the stablecoin companies in the world, the Emiratis chose what, at the time, was a brandnew, relatively small crypto company run by two people who had very little background in the industry. Why? To put money directly into the pocket of Donald Trump. On the website of World Liberty Financial--that is the company that is issuing the Trump coin--they don't hide the fact that this isn't the Trump kids that own the business. On the website it states, 60 percent of this company, World Liberty Financial, is owned by an entity affiliated with Donald J. Trump. But it gets even more corrupt because World Liberty Financial's other cofounder is a guy named Zach Witkoff, who, not coincidentally, is the son of Steve Witkoff, Trump's top Middle East adviser. The Trumps could have picked anybody in the world to run his stablecoin business with, but they chose the son of the Middle East envoy just so that when they were going around asking for money in the region, it was crystal clear that if you were doing business with World Liberty Financial, you were doing business with the people in the Trump administration who make all the decisions about the Middle East. So in one fell swoop, the Emiratis can put money into the family that controls the White House and the family that deploys and decides Middle East policy. Now, just like the Qataris, the Emiratis want something in return too. Their ask was for the United States to remove restrictions on selling the most advanced American-made computer chips to the UAE. The restrictions have been in place under Republican and Democratic administrations for a really good reason: The UAE has a very close--too close--relationship with China, and the United States has always, rightly, worried that if we gave advanced technology to UAE, it would pretty quickly potentially fall into the hands of the Chinese. Now, this would be very bad, especially regarding these microchips--these computer chips--because these chips power the most advanced and proprietary American AI systems. Losing these chips to China could cost us the lead to China on the global AI race. The UAE also wanted the United States to look the other way while they helped fund a death-spiral civil war in Sudan. The UAE is the main supplier of weapons to the worst of the two parties that are involved in the brutal, catastrophic, deadly civil war in Sudan. And they want the United States to keep giving them weapons--most recently asking for a resupply of Chinook helicopters, even as they use their military prowess to destroy Sudan. The end of this chapter of the story will not shock you. In coordination with the $400 million luxury plane and the $2 billion investment in Trump crypto, Qatar got signoff on buying the Reaper drones, and Steve Witkoff--father of the co-owner of World Liberty Financial--marched over to UAE right before the President was showing up himself and announced that the United States would, in fact, magically, lift those restrictions on the microchips. And just as unsurprisingly, Trump announced he will sell the Chinooks to Abu Dhabi, with no requirement that they stop fueling the war in Sudan. The blatant exchange of U.S. national security secrets, our most sensitive drone technology, and our most sensitive chip technology in exchange for cash into Donald Trump's pocket is perhaps the most brazenly corrupt act in the history of the American Presidency, and we cannot normalize it just because he is doing it out in the open in public. The Senate--the Senate--which is given the responsibility by the Constitution to be a coequal branch with the President--we have independent responsibility to uphold and protect the Constitution to set American foreign policy. We cannot pretend this is not happening. We cannot look the other way while the entire moral foundation of our foreign policy is being shattered. Republicans can't ignore this just because the President is their party's leader. We have that independent obligation to protect the Constitution, which clearly says that these gifts are illegal, whether they are going to a Democratic President or a Republican President. We have a responsibility to our taxpayers to stop a President from immorally enriching himself using the power we give him to help himself instead of helping us. What makes this moment so dangerous is that both UAE and Qatar-- especially Qatar--are key partners of the United States. They aren't our adversaries. They are our allies. They are imperfect allies, but they are our allies. In fact, I have been down on this floor in the past arguing on behalf of Qatar and the United States-Qatar relationship when other Senators have tried to denigrate the Qataris' contributions to regional peace. The Qataris have been a critical partner on so many important issues. It is worth saying that. There is no way that we would have been able to evacuate 124,000 people from Afghanistan on the eve of the Taliban takeover without Qatar's help. The Qataris today host thousands of U.S. troops at Al Udeid Air Force Base, the largest base in the region. The Qataris are critical mediators who have helped us send back- channel messages to secure the release of American hostages or negotiate peace deals. There is no question that Qatar is a country that helps stabilize the region and often is indispensable in protecting U.S. interests overseas. So I want to cultivate and strengthen that important relationship. I honor the work the United States and the UAE do all around the region to try to track down and hold accountable terrorists. These are real partnerships. But our relationship with Qatar and the UAE, it can't be a corrupt relationship. We can't sell drones to Qatar--our friend--if our friend is willing to take part in Trump's corruption. We cannot sell weapons to the UAE--our ally--if our ally is willing to take part in Trump's corruption. We will have a chance this week to make this clear; that the U.S. Senate will not facilitate--will not grease the wheels of Trump's corruption of our foreign policy. We can do that by voting to block these two arms sales to Qatar and to the UAE--not permanently but until both countries commit to deny Trump's requests for personal enrichment as part of the bilateral relationship. That is why Senators Van Hollen, Kaine, Schatz, and Sanders have joined me in two resolutions of disapproval for those Reaper drone sales and the Chinook sale, and we will have a vote on these two resolutions as early as this week. President Trump has declared that U.S. foreign policy is for sale, and the opening bids from two of the richest nations in the world is a $2 billion investment in Trump's crypto company from the UAE and a $400 million luxury plane essentially for the President's permanent personal use. At the exact same moment that Trump is trying to push a bill through this Congress that is going to ruin a lot of people's lives--cutting off their healthcare or leaving kids without food at night--he is making himself even richer by trading American national security policy for gifts and, to make it worse, trading away U.S. national security secrets in exchange. The net result is an American public that is poorer and weaker and less secure and a President who is richer. It is corrupt. It is corrupt. We have never ever in the history of this country allowed for a President to do this. Never in the 250 years that our Republic has been on the Earth has a President ever asked another nation to enrich himself in this way in exchange for preferential treatment from the U.S. taxpayers. If you are Republican or Democratic Senator, you have to see this as unprecedented, as terrible for our Nation, as corruption. American foreign policy should not be for sale. If we let these arms sales go through, we are greasing the wheels of that corruption. If we vote for these resolutions of disapproval, at least we have a shot to stop it. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

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

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. I am going to object, but I think the Senator has some remarks. Mr. President, I object.