Jeff Merkley

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, Robert F. Kennedy once said: ``We want to make sure that we bequeath to our descendants a better and safer world than the one in which we live today.'' For nearly four decades, Dan O'Neill has dedicated himself to creating that better, safer world for future generations. As he prepares to step back from his work and enjoy a much-deserved retirement, I want to share a few thoughts about this wonderful individual. As a young man volunteering for an NGO in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, Dan came face to face with some of the worst that humankind has to offer: extreme poverty, oppression, famine, and war. At first, he documented these horrors in photos, articles, and journals, until one day when he decided he couldn't just watch anymore. In the face of relentless horror and carnage, specifically the brutal genocide in Cambodia and coverage of the Khmer Rouge Killing Fields, Dan's conscience wouldn't allow him to just sit by as a witness. He knew he had to act; and act he did. In 1979, he founded the Save the Refugees Fund to give lifesaving aid to hundreds of thousands of Cambodians fleeing for their lives and safety. Three years later, he expanded on that effort by cofounding Mercy Corps, a global nongovernmental, humanitarian aid organization with the goal of alleviating suffering, poverty, and oppression by helping people build just, secure, and productive communities. Thirty-eight years later, Dan has traveled the world to meet with political and religious leaders; worked on the ground to establish and run Mercy Corps programs in some of the least hospitable places on Earth; and witnessed, firsthand, natural disasters, human catastrophes, political upheavals, war, and famine. The organization that he created, Mercy Corps, has provided over $4 billion in lifesaving assistance to more than 220 million people in need in at least 122 countries. Today, amid the world's most dire situations, you can always count on Mercy Corps to be there, building the foundation for those just, secure, and productive communities. Where this is a desperate challenge, you are likely to find Mercy Corps at work, providing vital aid and assistance to refugees in Jordan; giving water to famine- stricken families in South Sudan; or bringing desperately needed public attention to today's worldwide refugee crisis. All of that is, in no small measure, thanks to Dan O'Neill's inexhaustible passion and leadership. So to Dan O'Neill, who has done so much, for so many, for so long, I simply want to say, thank you. I wish him all the best as he begins this next chapter of his life.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I speak now to a bill we will introduce this Wednesday, the Equality Act. The Equality Act will be introduced by a group of us in the Senate and by another group led by Congressman Cicilline in the House. It is an appropriate moment for us to ponder in this Chamber why this piece of legislation is part of our American journey toward the vision of opportunity for all and why we all should be supporting this beautiful legislative proposal. My involvement in the Equality Act began in my home State of Oregon, when I was serving in the legislature there, and we had the question of how can we change the systematic discrimination against our LGBTQ brothers and sisters. How can we give them the same opportunity everyone else has? So we came together and said we should do an Oregon Equality Act, an Oregon Equality Act that would create the same basic protections the Civil Rights Act has for race and gender and ethnicity. We went about doing that. I was the speaker. I worked very hard to make that happen, and we succeeded. We ended discrimination in Oregon based on who you are or whom you love. Discrimination should be ended across the whole country. I arrived here in January 2009, and I was assigned to the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee--the Health Committee. I asked Senator Kennedy if I could possibly serve on this committee to help fight for health and education and labor, and he arranged that. I will never forget having his voicemail on my phone saying: Yes, you are a member of the committee. A few months later came the real surprise. Senator Kennedy was struggling with the brain cancer that killed him later that year, and through his team, he asked me to take on one of his civil rights bills, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. That was to end discrimination for LGBTQ Americans in employment, give them a fair chance to get a job here. Well, this is something that had been part of our Equality Act in Oregon. We had gotten that done, and because I helped lead that fight, he asked me to take over and lead the fight to end employment nondiscrimination. That was 2009. It took 4 years of work--work with the community and work with our legislators inside this building. Then, finally, in 2013, the time was ripe to put it on the floor and have this debate. This Chamber, with the supermajority, bipartisan vote, said, yes, let's end discrimination in employment, and we passed the Employment Non- Discrimination Act. Then I went over to the House, and it died without consideration. I got together with the advocates and asked, where do we go from here with the House not acting? Do we simply continue to reintroduce the Employment Non-Discrimination Act--which had been first introduced in 1996, first considered on this floor and almost passed just one vote short in 1998. Do we continue to do that? Out of that conversation, we developed a different vision. Let's do a full Equality Act like Oregon has done, like a number of other States have done and end discrimination not just in one sector or another, not just in places of accommodation, not just in financial transactions, not just in serving on a jury, not just in terms of housing, not just in terms of employment, let's base the Equality Act on providing the full spectrum, the full measure of protection for opportunity. I thought that was a pretty good idea. Later that year, I introduced the Equality Act in partnership with many others. We laid out that first Equality Act in the Johnson Room--the Johnson Room, which looks out at the Supreme Court and reminds us of 1964. In 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was passed, driven forward by President Johnson, who came from Texas, who came from the South, and said: It is time to end discrimination in the United States of America based on race and gender and ethnicity. He drove that legislation through, and it has been a foundation we haven't questioned since because we know it is right. We know it is part of this journey of the United States of America going back to our Declaration of Independence, going back to our Constitution--a vision of opportunity for all and liberty for all. We know it was imperfect, and we have worked now for almost two and a half centuries to perfect that vision of opportunity. Senator Ted Kennedy once said: ``The promise of America will never be fulfilled as long as justice is denied to even one among us.'' The promise of America--that promise of America that Thomas Jefferson so eloquently put, in 1776--is a vision where we are all created equal, with ``unalienable Rights . . . Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.'' How can that vision be propelled, sustained, and promoted if, in fact, as you pursue your life, the door is slammed shut on you, saying, ``No. There is opportunity for that individual but not you,'' and the door is slammed shut--liberty for that person but not you, and the door is slammed shut. We have come to understand that is just wrong. It is completely incompatible with the vision that was laid out, the vision of our Declaration and the vision of our Constitution. In fact, in this Chamber, we start with a pledge, and we talk about one Nation under God with liberty and justice for all. Classrooms across the country start their day with a pledge of liberty and justice for all, but what is liberty if the door is slammed shut? That is the denial of liberty. That is the opposite of freedom. That is the crushing of opportunity. So the story of America goes forward. The fight goes forward. We had the 1964 Civil Rights Act that was a culmination itself of decades of work. We had the voting rights struggle during the same time period, and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. We fought a number of battles-- battles of discrimination against those with disabilities. We fought for workers' rights, but our LGBTQ brothers and sisters still face discrimination all across this country. We are still in a situation where so many doors are slammed shut. We have had a lot of progress in the last 10 years. Ten years ago, we had the Defense of Marriage Act, and now we don't. We had don't ask, don't tell in the military, and now we don't. We had only three States that recognized same-sex marriage, and now it is the law of the land as the Supreme Court weighed in and said it is required by the vision of our Constitution. Discrimination in all kinds of ways is still legal in 29 States--more than half the country. In more than half the country, you can be married in the morning, denied service at a restaurant for lunch, fired from your job in the afternoon, and kicked out of your apartment that night because discrimination is still legal against LGBTQ Americans in 29 States. LBJ gave a definition of freedom. He said: ``Freedom is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.'' Discrimination is the opposite of freedom. Let freedom ring in this Chamber as we introduce the Equality Act later this week. Let freedom ring down the hall as the House of Representatives holds a debate in committee and on the floor in the months to come, and when that freedom bell rings so loudly that they pass that bill, the Equality Act in that Chamber, let them bring it down this hallway right into the Senate; that we might debate the same and put an end to the extraordinary, disgraceful discrimination that still marks the lives and slams the doors shut on millions and millions of Americans every single day. I yield the floor.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, it was a powerful opportunity to join my colleague from Delaware, Senator Carper, in traveling to the Northern Triangle of Central America--Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador--to try to understand more about the dynamics in that region, which are driving so many families to come north, to take the difficult journey through Central America, through Mexico, to come to our border and to ask for asylum. This has been a significant flow, which has expanded greatly. We have seen in the past that most of those arriving on our border were men from Mexico who were seeking work but not so much now. Now we have this flow of families from Central America. These families are traveling to find something better for their lives and for their children's lives. It is not an easy journey, and it is a journey that has created quite a conversation here in the United States of America. The conversation coming from our President has been this: How do we stop them from asserting asylum at the border? President Trump has a number of strategies to deter families from coming. His strategy was to separate children from their parents, treat those fleeing as criminals, create great trauma for the children, and use this as a strategy of deterrence. This was first laid out very clearly by John Kelly just months into the administration. In March of 2017, he said: Yes, this is exactly what we are considering. The administration then proceeded to implement it first as a pilot project and later as an all-out strategy to treat those migrating as criminals, lock up the parents, separate the children, inflict trauma, and deter people from coming. I can state that any strategy that involves mistreating children as a political tactic--a political message of deterrence--is simply evil. It comes from a very, very dark place in the heart of this administration to deliberately injure children in this fashion. Why doesn't the President look to Central America and ask: What is motivating these families to come? How can we change that motivation? What are the forces at work in that region? Those were the questions that Senator Carper and I were undertaking to answer on our recent trip, and I appreciate so much that he went through the great work of organizing it. We went first to Guatemala, then to Honduras, then to El Salvador. We met with the President. We met with the incoming President of El Salvador. We met with the civil society organizations--those who understand the roots of what is going on within the society--and here is what we learned. We learned there were three powerful forces driving families to leave those countries: security, economics, and corruption. Let's talk a little bit about those three things. Security. I had the chance to meet a woman and her daughter, Gabriella and her baby Andrea. Gabriella told me about her journey. She said that her family took a loan from a private bank, which probably meant a financial loan from the local drug cartel or financial group associated with a drug cartel. The family wasn't able to repay the loan. They were given a deadline. They were told: If you don't repay the loan, one of your family members dies, and that will be you, Gabriella. Gabriella was pregnant. She figured that as long as she was pregnant, they would not kill her. So when she was 8 months pregnant--1 month ago--she fled the country to save herself and to save her baby. I met her and her baby on the border. They had just crossed the bridge into the United States of America. I asked her: How did you get past the American border guards, who wouldn't allow anyone across the bridge if they didn't have a passport or visa? Her face lit up for a moment. She said: Well, I was rebuffed time and again at the center of the bridge, not allowed to come across and assert asylum, and I was desperate, blocked on the Mexican side. Then I saw there was a pedestrian bridge and a car bridge, and on the car bridge were folks who were washing windows for tips. So I asked to use an extra squeegee from one of the window washers, who gave it to me, and I washed windows on the car bridge to get into the United States of America. And there she was at the foot of the bridge with her baby. She told me that because she fled with her baby, those who were enforcing that private loan from that private bank killed her uncle. That is the security issue that comes with all of the various versions of that story. I met another woman, Patricia. Patricia had a 14-year-old daughter. Patricia had to pay extortion money. The President of Guatemala told me that every business has to pay extortion money. In this case, though, Patricia had no money left to pay the extortion. So the drug gang--or the gang that controls the streets and runs the extortion--came to her house and assaulted her 14-year-old daughter. So she fled. She fled to protect her daughter from any other such horrific circumstances. She came to the United States. That is a security issue. This is not a situation where if you don't pay the extortion money, they break your window. This is: If you don't pay the extortion money, we kill you; we rape your daughter; we kill your family--maybe we torture them. That is the security issue. Then there is the economic issue. In Guatemala, the median age is 18. I believe they said it is the youngest median age on the planet. A huge number of young people are coming into working age, and while they are working to create jobs, they are not possibly creating enough jobs. So you have this huge number of people without jobs. What are they going to do? I will state that one thing they do is go hungry. Malnutrition is a horrendous demon haunting the country of Guatemala. One individual showed us a picture of Guatemalan children against a wall and their average heights; they had lines across the wall for their heights. They had a similar picture of Guatemalan children being raised in the United States. It was to dramatize the fact that the children growing up in Guatemala at age 9 are 6 inches shorter than the Guatemalan children growing up in the United States at the same age. It is stunting-- stunting from persistent malnutrition. So joblessness and malnutrition, an insufficient network of schools and trained schoolteachers--all of these things are economic challenges. Let me tell you, it is not just the fact that you don't have a job. It is that in your small village across the country--across all three countries--you may see on a street, as was described to us, a shack, a second shack, a third shack, a fourth shack, and then a beautiful house. That beautiful house was there because somebody in that village made it to the United States of America, and they have been sending back money year after year in sufficient quantities that the family is now prosperous. They can build that beautiful house. That beautiful house stands as a billboard. It is an advertisement for what might happen if you can make it to the United States and get a job. So on the one hand, there are no jobs, and on the other hand, this beacon of hope is saying to you: If you can make it across the border, you might be able to be prosperous yourself and, basically, enable your entire family to be prosperous. Then we have corruption. This isn't garden variety corruption. For generations--for hundreds of years--there has been a class in these countries that is beyond the law. They call their efforts to change this a campaign against impunity. That is not a word we use a lot in America--``impunity''--but it means individuals who are never touched by the legal system. They can do whatever they want. They pay no fines. They never go to prison. They suck money out of the country. They suck money out of all of those layers of the economy below them. They have become extraordinarily rich. They talk about the 8 families in Guatemala and the 14 families in El Salvador. So that corruption we have been working to take on. We, the United States, in partnership with the governments there, have been working to take that on. So those three things--security, the economy, and corruption--are the factors driving people to flee north. A few years ago, then-Vice President Biden went to Central America to understand those issues better. Out of that came the Alliance for Prosperity--the Alliance for Prosperity--a strategy based on Plan Colombia, as my colleague from Delaware laid out, that would strengthen the programs to take on the security issues, to take on the corruption issues, to take on the economic challenges that are draining those countries so that people didn't feel that to survive, they had to flee north. We funded this at a modest level in fiscal year 2016. It was $754 million. Think of that as it compares to money we have been spending on the border--billions and billions and billions of dollars for physical infrastructure, for border security, for high-tech sensors, for a system of courts to adjudicate asylum, all of that. We spent only about three-quarters of a billion dollars to strengthen those three countries. Along comes the Trump administration, which says that it is concerned--very concerned--about this flow of people coming from Central America to our border, and they propose a 34-percent cut in this program. They propose cutting it from $754 million to a proposal of $460 million. Well, the Democrats and Republicans restored funding, put it back, not quite to the $750 million number but to $627 million. The Trump budget came out the next year and cut it again; they proposed a 30-percent cut. Again, here in Congress, we worked to restore those programs, not where they were before but, basically, $100 million more than the Trump administration asked for. So to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle: Doesn't it make sense for us to support the Alliance for Prosperity? For each dollar we send, they provide between $4 and $7; that is $4 to $7 in very poor countries. Doesn't it make sense to support the commissions against impunity, the commissions against corruption? In the last 2 years, the Trump administration has been undermining these commissions against corruption. Well, that is just wrong. The result, as you saw in El Salvador, was the election of the mayor of San Salvador, Nayib Bukele, a very young fellow in his thirties. What did he run on? Taking on corruption, taking on impunity. Shouldn't we be a partner with them in this? If we don't want families to flee north, then we shouldn't want the elite to operate with impunity and suck all of the resources out of the country and leave people starving. Let's partner with the governments there to take on corruption, not undermine these commissions of support. A trip to Central America will make you really appreciate our institutions, our economy, our education system, our healthcare system, our court system, our opportunities for our children. We can do far better, for sure, but every piece of what we have that works so much better than those parallel systems in Central America calls out to those there to come and participate in our society. If we want families to stay where they are, they are going to have to have an opportunity where they are, which means we have to take on the security issues, including the street-level extortion. We have to help them take those on. We have to help them improve their economy and their education system. We have to help them take on the systemic, high-level, massive corruption that drives resources into the hands of the very few at the expense of the very many. That is the mission we should be talking about here on the floor-- wrestling with here on the floor. Maybe we shouldn't return to the levels that Obama had that we had passed in a bipartisan way here. Maybe we should do double what was done in 2016--or triple--if we really want to help anchor those societies' rudders that have people fleeing for their lives to come here.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern, Mariah Shriner, may have privileges of the floor for the balance of the day.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I am pleased to be here on the floor with my colleague from New Mexico, who has been a champion for restoring our democracy, working year after year over the last decade toward that vision, and presenting tonight superb comments on the history of where we have been and where we should go. This last weekend, I went to Alabama. I went with Congressman John Lewis to be there to look into the history of discrimination in our Nation, the history in which we had separate entries to buildings for Whites and for Blacks and separate water fountains. We had front doors for White America and back doors for Black America. We were standing on the spot where Rosa Parks stood before she stepped onto the bus and said: I will not sit at the back of the bus. I will be treated like every other American. She asked for equality, and she started a big movement to break down discrimination. Last weekend, we also gathered together in Selma, AL, at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. This spot is where John Lewis and a whole set of individuals took a stand. They were planning a march. They were going to march for voting rights--for voting rights in America, voting rights that had been taken away as a strategy of suppressing the voice of the people, particularly the voice of African Americans. We have struggled in the history of our country toward full equality of opportunity--full equality to participate in this beautiful democratic Republic we call America. We started with a Constitution that was flawed by not recognizing the full equality of every American. We fought a war over slavery, and after that war, a strategy was devised to continue to strip the right to vote from African Americans by taking African-American men, arresting them as felons, and then saying that felons can't vote--a determined strategy both to reenslave, because the constitutional amendment said that you could put people to work if they were a felon, and to strip voting rights from them. That is a history we should be putting behind us--a history of voter intimidation and a history of voter suppression. Have we not come to the point where we can recognize that the real vision in our ``we the people'' democracy is that every person gets a full chance to participate, that we should be looking for voter empowerment, not voter suppression? This beautiful document we have worked to perfect and fulfill over time. It was President Lincoln who said: ``America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.'' Aren't we at that point now, where the vision of government of, by, and for the people has been corrupted by voter suppression, by voter intimidation, by gerrymandering, and by dark money flooding our campaigns? Aren't we at that point now that our very essence of our constitutional vision of government by and for the people is being destroyed by these corrupting forces? Here is what we have in America right now. We have a circle of power of those of great wealth and those of great privilege, and they want to run this government and write our laws to benefit those inside that circle. That circle isn't that large. It is a small percent of our population, but they use their great wealth and their great leverage to continue to corrupt the vision of our Constitution because the last thing they want is a government that serves the people. What they are invested in, what they fight for is government by the powerful few and for the powerful few. If anyone has any doubt that we have reached this point of huge corruption in this country, look simply at what happened in this Chamber in 2017 when the majority party said that we have two missions: Mission one, take down healthcare for 20 to 30 million Americans; mission two, raid the national Treasury for $1\1/ 2\ trillion and give it to the very richest Americans and largest corporations. That is what happens in a corrupted government by and for the powerful rather than by and for the people. That is what happens in dictatorships around the world where the elite raid the National Treasury and steal the money for themselves. I will tell you what else happens. They don't invest in ``we the people.'' They don't invest in the foundations for families to thrive. We know what those foundations are: good public education, debt-free college, employment programs that include apprenticeships and career technical education, a healthcare system that is simple and seamless and is there when your loved one is sick or injured, and it doesn't send you into bankruptcy, a system where drug companies can't gouge you and raise their prices dozens or even a hundredfold because the laws were written to let them do it, a system that invests in affordable housing so every family can have a decent home in a decent community, investment in infrastructure, rural broadband, repaired highways, expanded transit systems, all kinds of infrastructure that enable our economy to thrive and our people to do well. Did we see what this corrupted system now in place of government by and for the powerful, did we see an investment in healthcare or housing or education or infrastructure or living-wage jobs? We did not because this Chamber is now run by and for the powerful of the United States of America, not the people. So along comes the other Chamber at the end of this hall, and this other Chamber says: We want to restore the vision of our Constitution, and they put together H. Res. 1. They said: Let's take this on. Let's take on the gerrymandering. Let's take on the voter suppression. Let's take on the dark money. They put together this bill for the people--for the people, not for the powerful. They proceeded to say: Let's start with that challenge of gerrymandering. Let's make sure the people pick their leaders instead of their leaders picking their electors. Then they proceed to take on voter suppression and voter intimidation. It was President Lyndon Johnson who said ``the vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice.'' That powerful instrument is at the heart of our Constitution. It is the instrument that the powerful and privileged want to diminish, destroy, and take away so they can continue to run this country by and for themselves. So this bill says: Let's proceed to do voter empowerment. Let's extend early voting to all States. Let's ensure that there is an opportunity for people to register to vote, sign up to vote on the internet, and have same-day registration. Let's encourage vote by mail, which gives a full opportunity for everyone to participate without having to get to a poll on a day that it is difficult to get there, and let's make sure changes designed to suppress voting are not automatically approved, that we will restore the Voting Rights Act, which said we will protect the voting system, its sacred heart, the Constitution, and we will not let people's rights be stripped away. If you look back at November 6, and you look at what happened across the country, you see the plot--the plot to prevent the poor from voting; the plot to prevent minorities from voting; the plot to prevent college students from voting. One State went so far as to say you can't vote if your ID doesn't have an expiration date because the college IDs in that State didn't have an expiration date--strategy after strategy, purging people off the voting rolls without their permission right before the election. So this bill, the For the People Act that the House is working on right now and that we will introduce right here in this Chamber says: We believe in the Constitution of America; we believe in the power of the people, and we will protect the right to vote. The For the People Act takes on campaign finance. It proceeds to say: We will have disclosure of contributions. There is sunlight on the system that disinfects it--a phrase that so many of my colleagues used to say when they were opposing the McCain-Feingold limits. They said: We oppose caps on donations, but we support disclosure. It is the sunshine that disinfects the system. Suddenly, when the bill that provides disclosure was up before this body, the individuals who said that said: ``Oh, I was wrong, I don't want sunlight in the system,'' and voted against disclosure. So the House is saying: Let's do it. Let's create transparency. There is an honest ads component that says people need to be able to know who is funding the ads they are seeing. I know I have seen in my campaigns, attack ad, after attack ad, after attack ad funded by front groups. Wouldn't it be better for America if the folks behind those ads actually have to disclose that they are behind those ads? We have in this bill a small-dollar match so individuals who seek to run for the House or the Senate with small-dollar donations, donations up to $200, get a 6-to-1 match, encouraging breaking the grip of the vast dark money and the money that comes from the most affluent in large chunks, leveling the playing field for participation by regular Americans, freeing our elections from the grip of dark money. This bill, the For the People Act, says let's improve the ethics. Let's reduce or try to eliminate the conflicts of interest that haunt this Chamber and haunt the House Chamber down the hall. John Lewis stood on that bridge on Bloody Sunday. Congressman John Lewis, long before he was a Congressman, in 1965, stood on that bridge. He stood, and he was the very first person in line as the troops approached to beat up the protesters. They shoved him, they pushed him down, they struck him in the head, and then they proceeded to beat up and terrify the other protesters on that bridge. Those protesters were standing for the vision of our Constitution, were standing for voting rights, the most powerful instrument, as Lyndon Johnson said. They went back to that bridge the following Tuesday, and they marched up and were stopped, and they agreed to turn back--``Turn Back Tuesday.'' Then they reorganized again and more people joined. They came back a third time and they marched over that bridge and they marched all the way to Montgomery, AL, to fight for voting rights because it is the heart and soul of an individual's ability to participate in our democracy. John Lewis has said this: There is still work to be done. Get out there, push and pull, until we redeem the soul of America. The For the People Act that the House will pass and that we will introduce here in this Chamber is the fight to redeem the soul of America. Let's stand together--old-timers and new Members of the Senate, those who sit on the left of the aisle and those who sit on the right of the aisle, those who come from blue-collar communities and those who come from circles of power--to stand behind the vision of our Constitution, the ``we the people'' vision, so this Chamber will do the work of the people. Let's restore the soul of America together. I yield the floor.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, Henry David Thoreau asked: What is the use of a home if you don't have a tolerable planet to put it on? We are here at a unique moment in human history when the planet is threatened. It is not just our local stream that has been polluted by some factory. It is not a river that is so toxic that it catches on fire. It is not just a small section of my home State that has been afflicted by some new disease in the forests. It is our entire planet that is at risk. So any Member of this Chamber who is not coming forward to help figure out how to address that is guilty of vast malpractice, legislative malpractice, and moral malpractice and incompetence because that is what a legislature is about. When there are big problems that we face, we come together. We don't ignore them. We wrestle with the best way to take them on. That is what this conversation is about. Senator Carper's resolution says three things, the first of which is we have a real problem, and it is easy to demonstrate that. We can take a look at all of the information we have coming from every major scientific organization that tracks increasing heat on the planet, but maybe that is a little too complicated. Let's just ask a simple question. What have been the hottest years in human history? When have they been? Were they in the 1700s, in the 1800s, in the 1900s? When were those 5 hottest years? They were the last 5 years-- 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018. This is no coincidence because that would be an astronomically unlikely thing to occur. We have enough science to know why this is occurring, not just that it is occurring. It is occurring because we are generating carbon dioxide, and we are generating methane. They trap heat. We have been told, for the better part of a century, that this was going to be a problem, and the problem has arrived. It is not some theory. It is not some computer model. It is not some ivory tower. The facts are clearly evident. They are evident in our forests with longer and hotter fire seasons. They are evident in more powerful hurricanes than we have seen before because they draw so much more energy from an overheated ocean. We see it in the spread of diseases, like Lyme disease with the spread of tick populations. We see it with changing species. We see it with glaciers. We see it with melting permafrost. We see it with rising sea levels. We see it everywhere unless you are blind to the facts. We are not here to be blind. We are here to act. So we know the problem is real. That is the first point. The second point is we know what is causing it--human activities, our putting methane into the air and putting carbon dioxide into the air. Therefore, we know the third point, which is our responsibility to act. So many of us have come forward and have said: Here is an idea. How about this? This will completely change the amount of carbon dioxide from the transportation sector. Here is an idea. This would really change the carbon dioxide generated by power generation, electricity generation. How about this? This would greatly reduce the carbon dioxide generated from heating buildings. Yet, in that conversation, there is the sound of silence from the right side of the aisle. Do we hear multitudinous ideas? No. We hear none. That is where the legislative malfeasance and where the moral irresponsibility lies--in pretending that you can be a leader in this country, in this Senate Chamber, and not address this major challenge that is afflicting our planet. That is unacceptable. We don't need fake and phone debates on the floor of a resolution that hasn't gone through committee. We need real discussion and real engagement. It was not that long ago that Republican leaders across this Nation were taking on this issue. H. W. Bush ran for the Presidency to take on climate change. When he got into office, he didn't end up doing a lot, but he ran on it and campaigned on it. Other leaders have said we have a responsibility to be good stewards of our resources. I have heard that from the Republican side of the aisle for my entire lifetime--good stewardship. So why the silence now? Why the failure to look at the facts? Why the failure to bring forward ideas? This is not OK. We need real debate, real discussion. I have put forward ideas I would love to see debated, one being that we need to dramatically reduce the fossil fuels, which we own as a public, coming out of the ground. We have to lead the world, and we can't ask the rest of the world not to extract and burn fossil fuels if we are still profiting from doing so. I laid out the vision--the 100-percent mission in all sectors--and how we can get there over the coming decades. It is a 300-page bill that is full of ideas. Maybe they are not all the best of ideas, but I encourage my colleagues to read them, to find ones they like, and to bring forward their ideas. Where do tax credits play in this conversation? Where do limits play on pollution? Where do incentives to transition to renewable energy come in? Let's have that debate as serious policymakers and leaders of this country who are responsible for our Nation and for the future of our planet. Henry David Thoreau lived a long time ago, but he laid out the point that we are responsible for the health of our planet. Let's take that responsibility seriously. Let's engage. Let's debate every single idea. There are hundreds of them out there. Let's go through them. Let's forge a bipartisan plan. Let's not let any industry in America contaminate the process, the political process, through these dark donations. Let's not, any party in this country, be misled from addressing the serious issues before us because they are blinded by the hundreds of millions of dollars falling on their campaigns. Let's do what we have to do, what we have a responsibility to do. History will judge whether we have done that which cannot be delayed. That is our responsibility. I thank the Presiding Officer.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, Henry David Thoreau once said: ``What use is a home if you don't have a tolerable planet to put it on?'' We might just expand that question to say what use is anything if we destroy our planet because it is the only one we have. There is no planet B, no rescuing by going to some horrific other planet nearby. We have the gem, we have the treasure, and we have the responsibility to make sure we don't destroy it. Here we are. Within a single human lifetime, we have increased the percent of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by a dramatic amount--about 30 percent in my lifetime and more if you are older--and that chemistry change is really unseen in geological history on this planet, such a rapid change with rapid, deep growth. That is why we are coming to the floor to keep talking about this issue, reach across the aisle, reach across the country, and find partners to say this isn't a blue or red issue. This isn't a city or rural issue. It affects us all, and we need to all work together to respond. As we do so, we need America to lead the world in responding. Senator Carper's resolution says a couple simple things. It says we recognize that we have a very warming climate on Earth. It says we recognize that human activity burning fossil fuel has consequences, and it calls on us to act. There we are. It is time to confront this enormous threat to our beautiful blue-green home in the middle of the cosmos. There are some who say: That is so scary, so intimidating, so threatening. I just can't open my eyes or ears to hear that information. I have to pretend it is not real. We are here in the Senate. We are here where we don't have the privilege of covering our eyes, our ears, pretending it is not happening. We have the responsibility to face this when others shy away and act. There are others who say: You know, we just can't be sure exactly what is happening so let's wait another 10 or 20 years because we can't measure it as precisely as we want. It is like saying: Oh, cancer is ravaging my body, but I am not going to take any medicine because I am not sure if it has affected 15 percent or 16 percent of my cells. Well, you know you have cancer, and you know you need to act. So there we are. Let us not let our heads be buried in the tar sands. Climate chaos is real. It is ravaging our planet. It is because of human activity, and we do have the responsibility to respond. The year 2018 was one of the four hottest years on record. Nine out of the ten of the hottest years on record occurred since the year 2000. If we are looking at this chart, we don't see the Earth becoming any cooler. We see the Earth becoming a lot warmer. Four of the hottest years on record, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015--that was the last 4 years having been the 4 hottest years on record. The odds of that happening by accident is essentially none. We have some very serious scientific heft weighing in. In October, the United Nations climate panel said we must act dramatically within this next decade. A month later, on Black Friday, we had the release of the ``Fourth National Climate Assessment''--the Trump administration's ``Fourth National Climate Assessment''--and it concluded that ``Earth's climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities.'' There was a report from the Global Carbon Project that which found that global carbon emissions are going up. They went up 0.7 percent in 2018, hitting a record breaking 37.1 metric tons around the world. That is human activity putting out carbon dioxide that acts as a blanket on the planet. This isn't some new thought. We go back to 1959. We had an eminent scientist who became better known for his work in the nuclear world, but he was asked to address the 100th anniversary of the petroleum industry. At that speech in 1959, he said: The energy you have unleashed and harnessed can do dramatic things to change the world, but you have a couple of challenges. One challenge is that there isn't an infinite amount of petroleum in the ground. Another challenge is it creates carbon dioxide. It doesn't look like a pollutant because you can't see it and you can't smell it, but in fact, it traps heat. I think he framed it more scientifically, that it traps infrared energy. He said that is going to be a problem, and, of course, we are seeing that problem all the time now. You don't need these scientific reports out of a global panel or a fourth assessment from the administration to tell us what is going on because we see the facts on the ground. In my home State of Oregon, you can't move around the State without seeing the impact. In Eastern Oregon, you have the warmer winter. It is not killing the pine beetles. So the pine beetles are killing the trees. More pine beetles and less trees is not a good thing. If you are over on the coast, the oyster men will tell you they had a big crisis in 2008 and 2009 because all of the baby oysters were dying, not because of a bacteria but because the acidity in the Pacific Ocean has gone up. How is that related? Because carbon dioxide is absorbed by the ocean and becomes carbonic acid. We burn so much carbon dioxide that we changed the acidity of the ocean. Can you imagine that is possible? It seems impossible, but it speaks to how much carbon dioxide we released within a few decades of human civilization on this planet. You can keep going on with this story around Oregon. Our kelp beds are disappearing. They provide protection for all kinds of fish species. The kelp are dying because the blue sea urchins are eating them. The blue sea urchins are expanding rapidly because the starfish are dying because the ocean got too warm for them. It is one story after another. There is less irrigation water, less snowpack, warmer streams, and harsher conditions for trout and salmon all within the State of Oregon, and there are similar stories throughout our Nation. Perhaps the most destructive factor, though, has been the increased number of forest fires. There are bigger fires, hotter fires, and a longer fire season. They are not just ravaging our forests but producing smoke that has a huge impact on our towns. We take a lot of pride in our wine in Oregon, and a lot of our grapes had smoke taint and weren't usable this last year. We have towns where furniture salesmen said they couldn't sell the furniture because it had the lingering smell of smoke. It had an impact on the entertainment world. The Shakespeare Festival had to shut down and partially move inside to smaller venues, which is having a huge impact on their finances and a huge impact on the tourism attraction. This stuff is real. It is why we should all be here, Democrats and Republicans, talking about the challenge and saying: What higher calling is there in our life than to come together to discuss this honestly and to work together to find solutions? This isn't something where we can just say that the next generation can deal with it because the effects are cumulative. They build up. They become worse. It is a lot worse now than it was 10 years ago, and 10 years from now, it will be more so. There is no easy, fast way to strip the carbon dioxide back out of the air. We can work at it, but it is not easy. We can plant more trees, yes, but, meanwhile, those hotter fires are killing more trees. Those pine beetles are killing more trees. In other words, it is urgent. The time to act is now. In 1988 George H. W. Bush ran for President as an environmentalist. He announced he was going to take on global warming. His opponent, the Democrat, ran on the coal industry. That is not the same partisan alliance as you might hear today. George H. W. Bush said: ``Our land, water and soil support a remarkable range of human activities, but they can only take so much and we must remember to treat them not as a given but as a gift.'' Those words should echo in this Chamber. We have other words in this Chamber that seem to not address all of the facts that are right in front of us. One individual said: ``The satellite says it ain't happening.'' Well, one could probably pick out some one piece of data from one satellite somewhere and say it doesn't show the story, but you collect all the data together and it is happening. Here is a chart of how the globe is warming over time. It shows the difference in average temperatures. Here we are with just one tiny cache where there is a significant drop in temperature. There is a little bit of white and light blue showing that it stayed about the same, and there is a whole lot of red saying things are getting a lot worse. That is the collected data. Maybe there is some satellite that took a picture of one little spot here, but to cherry-pick data like that is dishonest. We can't afford to pretend that things are OK when we are facing such a dramatic challenge to our blue-green home in the universe. NOAA, or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, works at this, and they record all kinds of data from all around the world. Here is another chart that shows the Earth's climate record. This one shows the zigs and zags over time. We are going back to 1880, but if we look from 1880 to 1980, we see a significant rise in the temperature of the planet. If we go from 1980 until now, it is this absolutely frightening horror show of increasing temperature. That is what is happening when we talk about snowpacks. We talk about glaciers, we talk about coral, we talk about pine beetles, and we talk about 100 of these things where there is that feedback. All of those affect humans. Those aren't just some abstract things, like if a tree falls in the woods but nobody hears it, did it really happen? Did we really hear it? Does it matter? No. These reverberate back on our quality of life in this planet, including security concerns. The civil war in Syria that produced millions of refugees trying to get to Europe started with an extended drought because of the stresses of a warming planet. Our military weighs in and says that climate chaos accentuates all the security concerns we have. It creates instability around the world. If one doesn't want to listen to the scientists, how about if we listen to our own military? That is what the discussion of Senator Carper's resolution is all about. That is what the Green New Deal is all about. The Green New Deal says a few simple things. It says we have a big problem. Check. Yes, we do. It says we need to take it on boldly and aggressively. Check. Yes, we do. It says when we take it on boldly, we can create millions of jobs, and that will be a good thing for our economy. Check. Yes, it is. Creating those jobs is good. It says when we do that, we shouldn't leave our frontline communities behind. We should make sure those communities--rural communities and inner-city communities that have been left behind previously in different economic expansions--can't be left behind now. Check. That is absolutely right. Let's make this economic surge benefit everyone in every community, with special attention to communities that have been struggling. My colleague is here from Virginia. I am so glad he is. I am talking a lot about what is happening on the west coast of America. Perhaps he will fill us in a little bit on the perspective from the east coast. This is not one isolated spot on our planet. This is a concern to all of us. We need bipartisan work on this. Some suggest we put a fee on carbon. Let's have that conversation. Some suggest we provide more subsidies to renewable energy. Let's have that conversation. Some say we should do a green workforce--green corps training. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about every strategy we can bring to bear and come to a collective plan because there is no space in the urgency of this issue for us to retreat into blue and red corners. There is no time. It is unacceptable. I feel it is such a privilege to come to this floor and be part of this conversation, and I encourage all of my colleagues to do likewise. There are few issues that threaten us on this scale, but this one does. Let's work together to save our country and save our planet. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern, Cyrus Johnson, be granted privileges of the floor for the balance of the day.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, how do we make our communities, our States, our Nation, and our planet better for our children? How do we make it better for our children's children and their children? Isn't that the task we have in the U.S. Senate, to make things work better, not worse? We have this question before us: Do we have a carbon pollution problem? What is the answer, yes or no? I ask each of my colleagues, yes or no? Presiding today is a new Member of the Senate from Florida. I have been down to Florida. I will tell you that I heard about the rising seawater polluting the aquifers and creating freshwater supply problems for communities in Florida. I heard about coastal erosion. I heard about coral reefs being damaged and the fish offshore. I heard about the toxic red algae on the gulf side--so toxic it is killing fish and dolphins and turtles and manatees, and they are washing up on the shore of Florida on the gulf side. The people have two problems. The toxic algae is creating breathing problems, and then there is a stench arising from the dying sea life. People on the gulf side of Florida say: We have to take inland vacations. I know my colleague presiding today knows about these issues in his State because we see the impacts of carbon pollution and climate chaos in every single State. We certainly see it in my State. We see it through the more powerful forest fires--hotter, more acreage, and more destruction. We see it in the smoke affecting the communities and the economies throughout Oregon. Of course, we saw the devastating forest fires in California, wiping out the town of Paradise and afflicting so many other communities. It is not just the impact on the natural world; it is the impact on the people. When you affect the fisheries, you affect the fishermen. When you affect the forests, you affect the timber industry. When you proceed to produce conditions of more floods and more droughts, you affect the farmers and ranchers of America. It is the people of America. How about the Panhandle of Florida. It was wiped out by a more powerful hurricane, driven by those warmer ocean temperatures. What does one say to them--that there is not an issue; that we don't have a problem? The entire scientific community of the world has said you can see the facts on the ground, but we don't need them to see the facts on the ground. We see it through the everyday impacts on Americans, on our farmers, our ranchers, and on our communities plagued by smoke or wiped out by hurricanes. So we do have a problem. The answer is, yes, we do have a problem. If you say there is no problem, then your head is stuck in the tar sands, and you are failing your responsibility not just as a U.S. Senator, you are failing your responsibility as a human being. You are failing your constituents if you think there is no problem, while their lives and their economy are being so dramatically impacted by this issue. I ask my colleagues, did you come here to fail your constituents, to fail as a Senator, to fail as a human being to address this issue? Did you come to fail, or did you come to take on the issues that face us and build a better world for your children? If you believe there is a significant challenge, what are you doing about it? What actions are you planning? Because if you believe there is a problem and you are not putting forward a plan to address it, then your leadership is a failure. So we have a choice on the Republican side of the aisle. Is it that you are too obsessed with the power of the Koch Brothers to address the needs of the citizens of the United States of America, that you have your heads stuck in the tar sands? Is that the issue, or is it that you want to sit on the sidelines? You know there is a problem, but you want to sit on the sidelines and do nothing, in which case you are a failed leader. So how about reject ignorance, and how about reject failed leadership and come together to make a better world for our children. That is what we need to do, all of us, together, because the impacts we see from carbon pollution and climate chaos--those are not impacts affecting blue America or red America; they touch the lives of every citizen, no matter which political party they belong to. It is going to affect every child we have now and every child born in the future, whether they register as a Democrat or a Republican. We have already wasted decades in getting at this issue. Let's waste no more time. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MERKLEY

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

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I want to begin by recognizing two members of my team who will be leaving at the end of this week--Tricia Peebles and Adrian Deveny--who are on to new adventures and new opportunities to make the world a better place. Tricia has been with me on my Senate team for over 10 years--since I came to the Senate just over 10 years ago. Before that, she was with me on my team when I was speaker in Oregon for 2 years. So it has now been a dozen years of working together. From the very beginning of this wild ride, she has been with me as my State scheduler. I don't know how I could have done any of it without her. When you are inventing a State Senate office from the ground up and you need someone with imagination, creativity, and commitment, well, Tricia has all of those in spades. Out in Oregon, she is not only the gatekeeper and defender of my schedule, she is a real advocate, making sure I connect with and hear from and work with Oregonians from all walks of life, Oregonians from every corner of our beautiful State. She has used her uncanny knowledge of the map of Oregon and small cities to get me to townhalls in each of Oregon's 36 counties year after year for 10 years straight. She has done so with military precision. Seriously, it is amazing. Name any two cities in the State, and Tricia can tell you how long it takes to drive between them, any potential road hazards, and most importantly, the nearest Subway sandwich shop so the team can stop and get a bite to eat. It is always tough to lose an original member of a team, and I honestly don't know how we are going to fill the very large space that will be left in her absence, but I am very excited for her as she takes on her next adventure and wish her nothing but the best. Adrian Deveny joined my office back in March of 2011. Here we are, almost 8 years later, and he has been an indispensable member of my team. In his 8 years, he has been leading our efforts to tackle the greatest challenge facing humankind on this planet--the challenge of carbon pollution and climate chaos. He has taken us through initiatives, such as the Keep It in the Ground Act, which said that we as citizens of the United States must no longer profit from leasing out the fossil fuels that we own for extraction and combustion because it contributes to the problem, and the 100 by `50 Act, which said that we need to get to 100 percent renewable energy and that we need to do so by the year 2050 or earlier and laid out a detailed roadmap on how to do so in each section of the energy economy. He tirelessly advocated for programs that had real, direct impacts on people's daily lives, whether it was the Rural Energy Savings Program, which created the opportunity throughout rural America for families to upgrade the insulation in their homes and businesses to save energy and have it paid for in large part by those savings in energy, or reforming our Nation's outdated chemical laws with the significant reform of TSCA, where he played a central negotiating role to try to get us from the starting line to the finish line, or helping make electric cars more affordable. He did all of this and so much more and always with the type of steady disposition, cheerful attitude, nothing but kind words, and support for his teammates that really helped him to be a key facilitator with staff throughout the Senate. He has been the calm in a chaotic storm of a Senate office. It will be tough to see him go, but he won't be going too far away--just moving over from our office in the Hart Office Building to the minority leader's office, Chuck Schumer's office, here in the Capitol to help lead the Democratic caucus's collective efforts on issues related to energy and the environment. So our loss on Team Merkley is the Senate's gain. A big thank-you to Adrian for all of his hard work on behalf of the people of Oregon and on behalf of a better world, a better energy policy, a better environmental policy, a policy that points at taking on the biggest challenge facing human civilization on this planet. Thank you, Adrian, for all of your work to save our beautiful blue- green planet. Climate Change Mr. President, the most important words in our Constitution are the first three, ``We the people,'' written in supersized font so we won't forget about the core mission of our Constitution--a nation that, in President Lincoln's words, is designed to be ``of the people, by the people, for the people.'' Well, in a ``we the people'' nation, it is the responsibility of government and its leaders to put the interests and well-being of its citizens first. In July of 1932, while accepting his party's nomination for the Presidency in the height of the Great Depression; after the stock market had crashed, losing almost 90 percent of its value; after 11,000 American banks went bust; after nearly a quarter of the United States was unemployed, Franklin Roosevelt called for ``a new deal for the American people.'' He said that they were living in ``unprecedented and unusual times'' in which we must ``highly resolve to resume the country's uninterrupted march along the path of real progress, of real justice, [and] of real equality.'' Well, in our ``we the people'' Nation, we are once again finding ourselves in unprecedented and unusual times, and a big factor is the ravages of climate chaos, carbon pollution and the chaos that ensues from that wreaking havoc not only on the environment but on the lives of Americans all across our Nation. We see it in the wildfires that are burning longer and hotter than ever before, not just affecting our forests and the jobs in our forests and our forest economies but at times incinerating entire communities, such as Paradise, CA. Even when such a dramatic event doesn't occur, there is significant damage to our cities, their economies, and their people's health from the smoke. We have seen over time that the average number of large wildfires has grown. Back in the decade of the 1980s, there were about 140 per year. Now here we are after the turn of the century looking at nearly twice that--250 major wildfires per year on average. And the fire season has gone from roughly 5 months in the early 1970s to 7 months. This is just characterizing the impact of longer, hotter summers--one impact of climate chaos. We also see climate chaos in the oceans. They are growing hotter year by year. They are growing more acidic year by year as carbon dioxide becomes carbonic acid, actually changing the chemistry of the ocean. We have found that the oceans are about 30 percent more acidic than they were before the Industrial Revolution, affecting our coral reefs and our shellfish. A recent study found that the planet's oceans are heating up even faster than we anticipated--40 percent faster than we thought just 5 years ago. Now, 2018 broke the record for the warmest ocean temperatures. It beat out the previous record holder of 2017, and that 2017 record broke the previous record holder of 2016. Rising temperatures don't just harm our sea life; they are impacting citizens through impacts on the fishing industry, impacting the coastal communities for which coastal activities are their lifeblood. I was down on the gulf coast of Florida where they had a red tide that has been in place for 10 of the last 12 months. A red tide essentially is toxic algae that produces toxins that float inland and irritate the lungs and aggravate the asthma of those living near the seashore, and it kills sea life. In addition to the toxins from the red tide, they have dead manatees, dolphins, fish, and turtles washing up on the shores and decomposing, adding to the stench. People on the gulf coast of Florida take inland vacations that at times extend to months to escape the consequence of the red tide, and it causes a huge impact on the economy of those coastal cities. We see chaos in extreme weather events, massive storms like Harvey and Irma and Maria, which in that year cost our country $265 billion in damages, took the lives of thousands--thousands in just Puerto Rico-- and destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes in the gulf and the Caribbean. We also see it in wild temperature swings in communities like Chicago. Last summer, Chicago experienced recordbreaking heat and then was hit with a recordbreaking polar vortex. This is climate chaos. We the people, we the farmers, we the foresters, we the fishermen, and, of course, we the frontline communities of America, minority and low-income communities, whose health is being impacted, feel the impact, a devastating impact, and bear the brunt of climate chaos. So it is now another time for a new deal for the American people to take on this massive, immediate threat to our people and our planet--a threat we cannot delay responding to. This time, it must be a Green New Deal--a Green New Deal that not only transitions America to an energy economy that is powered by 100- percent noncarbon, clean, renewable energy, but a Green New Deal that creates millions of good, living-wage jobs in the process and continues our Nation's march along the path of real progress, real justice, and real equality. Let's think, for a moment, of what the core principles are when we say the words ``Green New Deal.'' Here are some of the core issues. The first is an energy shift that utilizes today's technology and utilizes and improves our electric grid and our transportation system from ones powered by fossil fuels to ones powered by renewable energy. A key principle of the Green New Deal is that of an energy shift to solar and offshore wind, wave energy, tidal energy, and geothermal energy--all potentially contributing to the noncarbon electricity to power our Nation. Here is the good news. The cost of noncarbon, nonfossil fuel energy has dropped. It has fallen about 90 percent over the last decade. It has gone from 35 cents per kilowatt hour with solar energy to about 3 to 5 cents per kilowatt hour. That is a massive change. Wind has fallen about 70 percent, and now it is down to 2 to 4 cents per kilowatt hour. What does this mean? This means that a decade ago, the costs were above the costs of burning fossil fuels. Now they are below or are even with the costs of burning fossil fuels because it is about 10 cents per kilowatt hour to create electrons from coal, and it is about 5 cents from natural gas. When you have wind at 2 to 4 cents and solar at 3 to 5 cents, you are competitive, and that means we can choose not only the energy that is best for the planet and best for our health but that is also the smartest investment for our economy. This is where we are now. We can pursue the smartest investment. If you don't have any understanding of the impact of the climate chaos that is devastating our resources and our cities and our people, you can still choose green power, because it is the smartest economic decision. The second core principle of the Green New Deal is to create millions of jobs. Our President likes to talk about jobs, and we need his help in actually creating jobs by renovating our energy economy, by investing in these technologies, and by advancing these technologies. It is so we are selling them to the world rather than buying them from the world. It is so they are employing people in the United States of America rather than employing people in China. We want this revolution to be here, driven by the United States of America--by red, white, and blue ingenuity and innovation. It is not for us to be on the receiving end of technologies that are developed elsewhere, and it is not for us to be on the receiving end of products made elsewhere. In creating these jobs, we need strong protections for American workers. We want these jobs to be living-wage jobs. We want to see workers able to organize and able to unionize so as to make sure these are family-wage jobs, because a good-paying job is better than any government program for a family's foundation to thrive. Right now, renewable industries are booming. Jobs in solar and wind are growing 12 times faster than is the rest of the economy. Over 3 million Americans now work in renewable energy and energy efficiency, outnumbering fossil fuels 3 to 1. This is the future of jobs in the United States of America. This is the future of good-paying jobs in the United States of America. Just think of how many more jobs we can create down the road if the United States is leading the world, not following. Let's be the leaders in this green technology revolution. Like Roosevelt's New Deal with the Works Progress Administration, which created jobs that paved a path for the economy to recover, the Green New Deal will drive tens of millions of good-paying jobs for Americans in the decades ahead. The third big principle is that no one gets left behind in this revolution. It ensures that all Americans have the benefits of the new green economy and that the hard-working Americans who are in the fossil fuel industry and have provided the power that has taken our Nation so far forward have the respect for what they have accomplished and have the opportunity for jobs in the future. It is a just transition into good-paying careers and for communities that have been stumbling in their efforts toward economic progress but have been bypassed in the economy of the past. They will not be bypassed in the green economy of the future because the point is to design that economy so that those communities can benefit from the clean energy and can benefit from the jobs that the Green New Deal creates. That includes there being access to clean public transportation, community development investments, and the ability of low-income families to not only receive clean energy but to get the clean energy jobs and job training and apprenticeship programs and healthcare and housing that everyone in America should have access to. Those are the three core principles of this vision. They are the three core principles that will take us forward quickly and productively and will put us in the economic lead of the world. It is a lead we are losing as we stumble--trapped by fossil fuel special interest money and its control of Congress. There are those who say this vision is too bold, that this vision is too far-reaching, but let us think of what Robert Kennedy once said: ``Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.'' For the sake of our planet and our Nation and our families and the ``we the people'' vision of our government, let us dare, and let us dare greatly. I thank the Presiding Officer.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, the freshmen of the House are speaking a lot of common sense in this letter. They are saying: Here we are, looking at bills that the Senate passed under Republican leadership and that the House has passed under Democratic leadership. That is the foundation for going forward. Let not the Senate leadership be the obstruction to common sense. Let not this Chamber sit empty, sit quiet, and sit without votes on these bills to put our government back to work. They want to see the Senate have the courage to take positions, to be here and argue, to say yes or no, but we don't say yes or no if there is no bill before us, and that must confound these 46 freshmen, who kind of expected that after more than 200 years of organizing, we would have a Senate that could actually operate as a legislative body, not sit here vacant and quiet in the midst of a national catastrophe--a catastrophe of the Trump shutdown affecting so many families. There are 800,000 families of Federal workers, hundreds of thousands more families of contractors, millions of Americans who simply want a core government service so that they can proceed with their lives--a business permit, a home mortgage, an agricultural loan, work being done to prevent forest fires, and a compromise to our national security in terms of our Coast Guard and our TSA agents. It makes no common sense for us to sit here without action. I praise the House freshmen for bringing a fresh, intense, commonsense view to the conversation on Capitol Hill. Let their words be heard in this Chamber. Thank you.

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

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I was just over in the Russell Senate Office Building, and a group of freshmen from the House intercepted me and handed me this piece of paper, this document, and asked that it be made part of the Record of the Senate, and I have come to do that. Let me explain that these freshmen House Members want to see the Senate engaged in debate on how to end this shutdown of our government. They see in their home districts across this country tremendous damage occurring in all kinds of fashions--damage to security; damage to the economy; damage to families trying to get a home mortgage, and they can't get their FHA approval; damage to farmers who are seeking that loan that is necessary to prepare for the next farming season; damage in the preparation for next summer's forest fires. I have been hearing about this from my home State. In Oregon, we just had a training for fighting fires canceled. We have prescribed burns that need to be done during the winter that are being canceled. We have thinning, which makes the forest more fire-resilient, that is being canceled. We have the reduction of fuels on the forest floor that add to the intensity of fires--the removal of those--being canceled. These just add more to the list of so many ways that folks are being affected across the country. I am going to share this letter with the Presiding Officer and our colleagues. It says: Dear Senator McConnell: We write as Members of the Freshman Class of the 116th Congress, an historic group that has the distinction of being the first Congress to be seated in the midst of a partial government shutdown. We as a legislative branch have the power to end this shutdown now. In December, the Senate unanimously passed legislation that would have kept the government open. In January, the House then passed those same bipartisan bills and sent them to the Senate. If the Senate were to pass these bills, we would be able to reopen the government and then proceed to debate about immigration reform and border security. However, it is impossible to have a meaningful policy discussion while the executive holds public servants hostage. We respectfully request that you allow the Congress to work its will and allow a vote on this bipartisan legislation to end this shutdown so that we can end this manufactured crisis and allow our devoted federal workers to get back to work for the American people. Sincerely Susie Lee, Member of Congress; Abby Finkenauer, Member of Congress; Mikie Sherrill, Member of Congress; Mike Levin; Jahana Hayes; Lori Trahan; Katie Hill; Ayanna Pressley; David Trone; Ed Case; Gill Cisneros; Rashida Tlaib; Kendra Horn; Angie Craig; Joe Cunningham; Chris Pappas; Andy Levin; Susan Wild; Sylvia Garcia; Katie Porter; Debbie Mucarsel-Powell; Ilhan Omar; Madeline Dean; Haley Stevens; Greg Stanton; Josh Harder; Lucy McBath; Abigail Spanberger; Chrissy Houlahan; Donna Shalala; Lauren Underwood; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; Veronica Escobar; TJ Cox, Dean Phillips; Jahana Hayes; and then a few more people who have added their names in script that I may not be able to read accurately. In total, there are an estimated 46 signatures on this letter addressed to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the letter be printed in the Record.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, the most important words of our Constitution are the first three: ``We the People.'' Those three words, written in big, bold, beautiful script, convey the mission of our Constitution. We are a nation, as Abraham Lincoln opined, ``of the people, by the people, and for the people.'' That was the mission. Our Constitution also lays out how our Founding Fathers intended to be a nation of, by, and for the people to be governed by coequal branches, with the branch carrying the weight of policy development being Congress: the House, and the Senate. The Executive is to have quite a different role in executing the laws. Judiciary has yet another role in weighing whether the laws are in accordance with the parameters of the Constitution--the principles of the Constitution. So there we are, the branch of government--the Senate and the House-- with the power of the purse, with the responsibility for laying out the governing vision and rules for our Nation. Yet, one-quarter of our government goes unfunded for a fourth week. Why is this Chamber not full of Senators? Why are we not debating funding bills? Why is there not a bill before the Senate right now? It is because the rhythm of the floor in this Chamber is guided by the majority leader. The majority leader refuses to put the bill on the floor so we can go about our work, putting the government back in business and ending this shutdown. The majority leader has refused to have the Senate fulfill its responsibility and, indeed, has said: `` . . . will not take up any proposal that does not have a real chance of . . . getting a Presidential signature.'' In the Constitution, we have the ability to set law without a Presidential signature. It is certainly not a waste of time to be here debating proposals for funding the government. In fact, this is a complete abdication of our responsibility. It is an abdication at a time when 800,000 American families have a mother or father who is not getting paid, when many more thousands of contractors are not getting paid. Millions of Americans are seeking government services and finding there is no one to answer their phone call or their letter or process their online application, whether for an FAA mortgage, whether for an agricultural grant or loan for the next farming season, whether it is any of a host of hundreds of roles the government plays in facilitating the commerce and life of this Nation. President Trump and the Senate majority are holding seven funding bills hostage. Hostage-taking is not the wisest move. Only one of these hostages has anything to do with the battle over the border. So why not release six of these hostages? Why not end the Trump-McConnell shutdown and release six of the seven hostages and on the seventh do a continuing resolution so we can continue debating the issues at stake while putting people back to work. That is a pretty good idea. Here is the genius of the idea, which is, these are bills that already have support in the Senate. If we were to look at that support, we would find it was substantial when these bills came through in a bipartisan fashion under a Republican-led Senate. You have the Republican endorsement from here and you have the Democratic endorsement from the House. That is the making of a path forward. Yet we need to remind the Members how our Constitution is constructed. Article I section 7 says in an abbreviated format: ``If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections.'' Then it goes back to the House and Senate, whichever body first initiated it. `` . . . and if approved by two-thirds . . . it shall become a Law.'' Let's recognize that the vision of our Constitution was not for us to sit on some chair or bench somewhere waiting for someone far down Pennsylvania Avenue to tell us what to do. That is not fulfilling our job. The President is supposed to implement the laws we pass--the vision we adopt--not for us to sit here doing nothing, waiting for the man in the Oval Office to tell us he has some message from on high on what we are supposed to do. No, that is not the vision of our Constitution. It is disturbing that a responsibility we all signed on to--we took our oath of office--is being neglected in this Chamber at this moment, when so many Americans are suffering as a result. Those funding bills that I was speaking of and that partisan support, how strong it was--the Agriculture bill, Interior, Financial Services, General Government, Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development. Those passed this floor just a few weeks ago on a 92-to-6 vote. How much more bipartisan does it get? The State and Foreign Operations bill passed out of the Republican- led Appropriations Committee 31 to 0. The Commerce, Justice, and Science spending bill passed 30 to 1 in our spending committee. Homeland Security passed out 26 to 5. So these have a powerful imprint of overwhelming bipartisan support in this Chamber, and yet we sit here afraid to take action and lay out the vision we have a responsibility to lay out. I hope every Member will say back home that they invite the feedback of their constituents; that they will hold townhalls because then they will hear what I hear, which is that is an absurdity. It is an irresponsibility. It is a failure of leadership. It is a neglect of duty, and that is not what this Chamber should be about. It is not a proud moment to have such dysfunction in the heart of the Senate. I am reminded of the historical reference: ``While Nero fiddles, Rome burns.'' It is a reference to the year A.D. 64, when Rome burned to the ground. The historian Suetonius records that Nero was responsible for the fire, and he watched it from a tower while playing an instrument and singing about the destruction of a different place--the destruction of Troy. Here we sit today with our leadership's fiddling while our Nation suffers, while our leadership watches from afar from the tower, playing some fiddle for its amusement, instead of taking action here on the floor of the Senate. While the Republican Senate leadership fiddles, our farmers aren't getting the funds or assistance they need to get through the winter to prepare for the next season because the Department of Agriculture is closed for business. While the Republican leadership of this Chamber fiddles, firefighters whom we ask to risk their lives in fighting massive infernos in our Nation's forests are missing out on critical training and preparation time for the next fire season. In addition, the work being done to thin the forests, to make the forests more fire resistant, is suspended. The work getting the fuel off the forest floors to make them more fire resistant is suspended. The prescription burns being done to make the forests more fire resistant are canceled. Yet this is the time they have to happen. While the leadership fiddles, it is setting the stage for more savage forest fires to wreak havoc on the Western States in the United States in the summer to come. While the Republican leadership of this Chamber fiddles, 100,000 low- income tenants are at risk because there is no staffer in place at Housing and Urban Development to renew the 1,100 affordable housing contracts that expired last month. While the leadership fiddles, small, rural economies, like that of Lakeview, OR, are stuck in limbo and are unable to move forward on critical projects. According to the South Central Oregon Economic Development District's director, they are working at trying to give a loan to a small business in Lakeview, but they need EPA staff approval to be able to use the grant funding for an environmental assessment before they can borrow funds to buy a building. So they are up the creek while the Republican leadership fiddles. The real victims in this misguided standoff are the hundreds of thousands of Federal workers who aren't being paid and the contractors who might never be paid. Let's listen to them. What do they have to say about this? Are they writing and saying: ``Love this dysfunction in the Senate. Love the failure of leadership. Love the incompetence. Love the fact that nobody is working here to solve the problem''? No, that is not what they are saying. Erin, a furloughed Forest Service employee of Sandy, OR, writes that both she and her husband are Forest Service employees who have been furloughed in the Mt. Hood National Forest, and they are terrified about their personal finances. Erin writes: I have two boys that I will still have to continue to pay daycare for so I do not lose their spot. That's $1,400 a month alone. She went on to write: We have to be smart on how we balance our finances because the cost of living is going up, but our salaries have not been increased besides a minor cost-of-living adjustment last year. So I am very worried what a long shutdown means for my family and my coworkers. Erin and her husband have every right to be worried about what is in the future for her family. They are suffering the effects of this shutdown through no fault of their own. Steven, of southeast Portland, writes: I am writing as a constituent, residing in southeast Portland, and as a furloughed Federal employee. I do not in any way support President Trump's efforts to build a wall along our southern border. The proposed wall is unneeded. It would be a wantonly wasteful use of taxpayer money. It would be environmentally destructive, and it would further the inhumane disregard of the rights of those seeking asylum. Steven is a Federal worker who is not being paid, and he doesn't support this shutdown. Julie, the wife of a firefighter in Redmond, OR, wrote last week that her husband ``isn't able to work because of the government shutdown.'' In just over a week, they are supposed to hire all of their seasonal firefighters for the summer. If they can't work, the hiring will get delayed or not happen, which will put communities at serious risk this summer from wilderness fires. This risk for this coming summer is very real in our State of Oregon. Julie writes: In no way is it OK to let the government shut down. . . . Don't participate in holding our own country hostage. Dr. Genevieve Grady, of Sheridan, OR, wrote: I am a licensed clinical psychologist who is working at the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Sheridan, OR. I am also a single mom with two children under the age of 5. As an essential Federal employee, I am required to continue to work without being paid. As a licensed psychologist, I could cultivate outside work with Agency permission to supplement my income. However, I am unable to do this due to having to continue working full time. Given that I am a single mother of two small children, I must provide care for my children during all other hours of the day. In order to maintain a roof over my and my children's heads, I have had to contact my Federal student loan company to seek relief. Unfortunately, they cannot alter my student loan status any earlier than February 6. My daycare provider, who watched my children so that I may continue going to work without pay, is an in-home provider with three teenaged children of her own. I cannot ask her to go without pay as she too needs to continue keeping her family financially stable. She writes: There are very few expenses in my life that can go without money: food, daycare, gas to get to work, car insurance to drive legally, a phone required for my job to contact me in an emergency, medical expenses. Both of my kids have been sick during this furlough and have had to see the doctor to get medication. After 26 days without pay, these bills continue to require cash to pay, and I continue to wonder how much longer I should keep coming to work or when I should look for another job. Linnea from Roseburg, OR, writes: The unrepentant hostage holding of people's wages is cruel and shows just how removed the Trump administration is from the American people. I live in a single-income household in which the only breadwinner is a government employee, my mother. This means that we went through the holidays not knowing when the next paycheck was going to come. We still don't know. Britt, a furloughed IRS worker who was proud of his government service and called it his small way of participating in our democracy, writes: My savings is small and will not last through an extended shutdown. I have already applied for unemployment insurance compensation, but that process takes several weeks before I actually receive any money. I have never had to file for unemployment before, and it's quite unsettling that I am forced to resort to government aid. Like so many other Oregonians in a State that is 20-percent National Forest, Brien, of Pendleton, OR, writes: As a United States Forest Service employee, I am waiting for relocation reimbursement on a current move. I used most of my savings to move duty stations 2 months ago, and with the current furlough, I cannot afford to miss a pay period even if I will get it in the end. I am currently paying interest on my move that was to be covered by the Forest Service. If the furlough lasts longer than January 13, it will be extremely difficult to avoid late payment charges on utilities, mortgage, and other bills. Don't hold me and my middle-class family hostage to rich men's antics. That is exactly what is happening with a President who is so far removed from the reality of ordinary people, with a President who worked with the leadership of this body in the Senate to approve a series of spending bills that we passed by a vast bipartisan majority but who then changed his mind and withdrew his support after they were passed. The President switched his position after the bills went through the Senate. The President bragged about owning this shutdown. He didn't have 1 second of worry about the plight of an ordinary American who was struggling to pay his bills. From his ivory tower, his skyscraper in Florida, and his club--and, oh, he is still happy with his golf courses--he has no idea of the pain this is inflicting on people. If someone explains it to him, he doesn't care. That says a lot about the failure of leadership. As this writer said, ``Don't hold me and my middle-class family hostage to rich men's antics.'' Air traffic controllers are essential to the safety of our air traffic across this country. I received a stack of handwritten letters last week--old-fashioned, ink on paper, all kinds of paper, all colors of pens. They were handwritten by Oregon air traffic controllers who have been absolutely incensed with what is going on. Being an air traffic controller is an unbelievably tough job. Air traffic controllers are responsible for thousands of lives at any given moment. They have to be on their game 100 percent of the time. It can't be 99.5 or a plane is going to crash on you that day. These folks are working without pay. It is inflicting stress and anxiety on people who should have their absolute, full attention solely on the job of making sure no plane hits another. James Ferguson, of Forest Grove, writes: If the shutdown lasts any longer, I will lose my health insurance and will no longer be able to pay for my 1-year-old son's physical therapy, potentially adding additional months to correct his spine and neck muscle problems. This is another example of the pain. Here is a parent who feels the medical affliction of his child is going to be accentuated by the actions of the Republican leadership in the Senate and President Trump in the Oval Office. James isn't complaining that he needs to go shopping for new clothes or that he wants to check out a new car. He is worried about getting medical care for his infant child. He is worried about his infant child's recovery and of his improvement being stalled or damaged by this callous, inhumane shutdown. Trevor Stokes, of Hillsboro, OR, and his wife are veterans of the U.S. Navy. They certainly are no strangers to sacrificing for their country. In fact, in his letter, Trevor writes: Over the past few weeks, during the shutdown, I have worked both Christmas and New Year's as well as their eves. I was not able to spend time with my family, which is a necessary sacrifice. Then he writes: Now our financial future is uncertain due to a potentially long unpaid period. I've had to withdraw from mutual funds just to cover monthly financial obligations. My family and the families of my air traffic colleagues have suffered from the sudden loss of income. Please end the shutdown. We ask so much of these people. We ask long hours and missed holidays in the name of protecting us as travelers. Shouldn't we also be looking out for them in their time of need? Why don't we reopen the Department of Transportation and make sure our air traffic controllers start getting paid? All of these individuals are saying: Do your job. Do your job. Do your job. Senate leadership, do your job. Put the bills that have passed the Senate already back on the floor so that we can send them to the Oval Office. Let us do our job. This Trump-McConnell shutdown, this inaction of the Senate, abdicating its responsibility--isn't that exactly parallel to Nero fiddling while Rome burned? That fire here in America is touching the lives of so many. There are 800,000 workers without pay. Thousands more are contractors. Millions of Americans are caught in limbo in the midst of an important transaction--applying for an agricultural loan, trying to get a mortgage, signing up for help from the Small Business Administration to launch their business, getting their paperwork processed in one of 1,000 different ways, and here, the leadership fiddles while the American public suffers. It is wrong. It may not be comfortable to have a debate on the spending bills. It may not be comfortable to vote on these bills. It may not be sweet to support or oppose a particular amendment, but do you know what is worse? What is worse is doing nothing. That is what this Chamber is doing right now. It is doing nothing, despite our responsibility to millions of Americans to act. Let's change that. Let's change it now. I understand that the majority is going on a retreat. Instead of going on a retreat to play the fiddle, how about you be here on the floor and put these bills on the floor? Let's get all 100 Senators on the floor to actually talk to each other, to actually wrestle with the issues, to actually make our arguments, and to actually take the votes instead of going off somewhere to party. That is just wrong. I encourage the majority leader to read the letter that was sent to him today from the freshmen from the House of Representatives down the hall. The freshmen haven't been here long enough to become cynical. They haven't become trapped in the partisan boundaries and warfare that seem to ensnare so much of this Chamber and the Chamber across the way. No, they are here, fresh from other occupations and other responsibilities, still full of common sense and the passion to do what is right for the American people. So let's listen to them. Today they sent a letter to Majority Leader McConnell, which I read on the floor earlier today, and they said: Put the bills on the floor, put the spending bills on the floor--the bills that have already passed here in the Republican-led Senate or that passed overwhelmingly by the Republican-led Appropriations Committee, endorsed by the Democratic House. Put them on the floor and act. Let's listen to the freshmen down the hall. They are reminding us that we have a responsibility to act, and let's do so immediately. Thank you.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern, Celine Wolff, have privileges of the floor for the remainder of the day.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, the most important words in our Constitution are the first three: ``We the People.'' With these three simple words, our Founders laid out the mission for our government; that is, a government to produce a form of legislation that reflects the will of the American people or, as Lincoln summarized it, a government of, by, and for the people. That mission is being corrupted and damaged in a significant and extensive fashion. It is being damaged with a goal of converting this vision of ``We the People'' to a government by and for the powerful and the privileged. That corruption, that fundamental corruption of our government, comes in many forms, but it certainly includes gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter intimidation, and dark money in our campaigns flooding our system with unidentified resources to serve the powerful and the privileged rather than the people. We in this Chamber, having taken an oath of allegiance to our Constitution, ought to be defending it, but we are not. The result is, we see many challenges facing our Nation unaddressed: stagnant wages and soaring income inequality, huge wealth inequality; skyrocketing healthcare costs; unaffordable higher education and homeownership; rent so high they drive people to live in tents; catastrophic climate chaos wreaking havoc on our planet with uncontrolled carbon pollution. We have been paralyzed on these issues because of this corruption of our Constitution, because of the gerrymandering, because of the voter suppression intimidation, because of the dark money. It has allowed the hijacking of our Constitution, and we need to end it. It has been hijacked by corporate and Wall Street executives swimming in recordbreaking profits and trillion-dollar tax breaks, shuttering American factories and shipping jobs overseas. It has been hijacked by fossil fuel barons who exhibit a greed for profits that trumps the direct damage--or concern about the direct damage they are inflicting on our beautiful blue-green planet. It has been hijacked by cabals of shadowy organizations, using vast sums of dark money, no identified source, to influence and buy elections, undermining our institutions at every level and driving massive cynicism among our youth. Our youth look at our government, and they see those beautiful words: ``We the People,'' and then they see the corruption, the corruption this body is doing nothing to address--not the gerrymandering, not the voter suppression, not the dark money. It is time to change that. I have laid out a blueprint for our ``we the people'' democracy. I unveiled this document last week. I am happy to provide copies to anyone. It is available on the web. It is a blueprint for restoring our democracy that takes on the corrupting influence of dark money, takes on the corrupting influence of gerrymandering, takes on the corruption of voter suppression to ensure equal representation for every American. Let's start by looking at dark money. We need to pass Senator Udall's constitutional amendment that overturns Citizens United and thereby end the corruption of the unlimited dark money. According to one analysis, the top 15 dark money groups in America has spent over $600 million on campaign-related activities in the last few years. That is just the top 15 groups, writing check after check to drown out the voice of the people. It is kind of like the dark money is a stadium sound system cranked up to the top volume so voices and concerns of millions of ordinary Americans are wiped out, unheard, unlistened to; thus, driving decisions of this body in favor of the powerful instead of the people. It is why we need to give Congress the ability to set reasonable limits on campaign spending and donations through that constitutional amendment. That is why we need to increase transparency on all money in the campaign system through Senator Whitehouse's DISCLOSE Act. His act calls for robust disclosure for corporate union, PACs, 501(c)(3)s that contribute over $10,000. It is why we need transparency through Senator Klobuchar's Honest Ads Act, which addresses the transparency of online ads, which are becoming a bigger and bigger part of our dialogue over campaigns in this country, the social media side. It requires those who purchase and publish those online ads to publicly disclose their financing. Thomas Jefferson laid out how important an equal distribution of power is among the voters. He called it his equal voice principle, and he said this: ``[A] government is republican in proportion as every member composing it has his equal voice in the direction of its concerns''--equal voice. He said in this letter, after he was President, that if we lose this, which he called the mother principle of our democracy, we would not have laws that reflect the will of the people. So here we are with the mother principle--a distribution of power among voters, a distribution of voice among voters. That, as the securing factor for government, reflects the will of the people. This is in complete opposition to the concentration of power through Citizens United. Let us turn to the corruption from gerrymandering. Now, there is a bit of a challenge to define what gerrymandering is, but let's try putting it this way: the drawing of funny-shaped districts in order to unbalance fair representation of voters in a State. Now, here are some of the warning signs if you want to say it is gerrymandered. First, look to the districts and see if they are of funny shapes like these--like Nebraska, like the Fifth Congressional District in Florida, like the Seventh Congressional District in Pennsylvania, like the Maryland Third Congressional District, like the North Carolina First District, and the Texas Thirty-third District-- blue States, red States, all exhibiting varieties of gerrymandering. Another way to look at gerrymandering is to look at an imbalance in wasted votes. That is, you take the number of votes required to elect someone in a particular congressional district and add up the surplus of those votes, and you add those up on the Democratic side and you add those up on the Republican side, and if there is a huge imbalance in the wasted votes, then probably these districts have been drawn to unbalance fair representation for people in the State. A third way to look at gerrymandering is to look at whether the congressional representation in the House of Representatives is proportional to the popular vote totals in a State. So those three things are warning signs. How should this be addressed? It should be addressed through having national standards for independent redistricting commissions so that the citizens of the United States across the entire United States get fair representation in Congress and for the ridding of gerrymandering in the United States of America. In 2016, North Carolina Republicans had 53 percent of the State's popular vote in House races but 77 percent of the congressional seats. That is a sign of gerrymandering. The same year, Pennsylvania Democrats won 48 percent of the popular vote in their State but only had 27 percent of the House seats. So these are signs of a rigged system, and if you want to drive cynicism, keep a rigged system. The House of Representatives is supposed to stand for equal representation for people, not for a biased, corrupted, rigged system that we get from gerrymandering. So we need to take the power for redistricting out of the hands of partisan elected officials and put it in the hands of independent commissions to draw fair, competitive congressional districts to truly reflect the voters' voices. Now, as for that Pennsylvania gerrymandered seat that I referred to, after the 2016 election, the State supreme court stepped in and redrew the district lines to make them more fair and representative. So what happened? Let's compare 2016 to 2018. In 2016, you had the Democrats receiving 48 percent of the popular vote and 27 percent of the congressional districts, a gap of more than 20 percent. After the redrawing, you had Democrats receiving 53 percent of the popular vote across the State and winning 50 percent of the contested seats. So a gap of 21 percent goes down to a gap of just 3 percent. That is a sign that the State has been more fairly drawn to reflect the distribution of voters. It shows that the voters are being heard and that the corruption of gerrymandering is being ended. But it shouldn't just be ended in Pennsylvania. It should be ended across the country. Now, the U.S. Supreme Court has punted on gerrymandering. In fact, it has been at the heart of each of these three corrupting practices: unleashing dark money through Citizens United; striking down the Voting Rights Act of 1965, allowing an unlimited set of strategies--a huge set of strategies--for voter suppression and voter intimidation; and never taking on the issue of gerrymandering. Maybe the U.S. Supreme Court should read the Constitution and realize what Jefferson was talking about and realize that it is their job to defend the integrity of the United States of America and take on these corrupting forces that they themselves have unleashed in two instances and failed to take on in the third. Well, voter suppression and voter intimidation are certainly alive and well as corrupting forces. That is why the Blueprint for Democracy calls for the passage of Senator Leahy's Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill would restore and modernize the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which the Supreme Court tore down in 2013 with their decision in Shelby County v. Holder. Now, realize that the Voting Rights Act reauthorization had vast bipartisan support here in the Senate. This wasn't a partisan bill. The voting right is the fundamental foundation of our democratic republic, and it had broad bipartisan support, as it should. But the Supreme Court, in the interest of the powerful and privileged, tore down--they are no longer the defenders of the vision of our Constitution but the destroyers of the ``we the people'' vision of our Constitution. That should concern every Member in this body. We have seen rampant voter suppression in our national elections used to block entire groups of people from exercising their constitutional rights at the ballot box. Just this last November, we saw thousands of Native Americans living on Tribal reserves in North Dakota kept from casting a ballot. In Georgia, we saw the former secretary of state, who was running for Governor, attempt to block 53,000 Georgians, predominantly African Americans, from voting because of what were described as minor clerical inconsistencies. We saw thousands of Ohio voters purged from voting rolls on the order of the secretary of state of Ohio, and done so in a way disproportionately benefiting one party over the other. That is just scratching the surface of the list of deplorable schemes to disenfranchise American voters. There was one positive development that was in Florida, where Florida restored the ability of felons to vote after they have served their sentences. Now, this process of taking away the ability of felons to vote has a deep, deep history of racism in our country. It was used after the Civil War to disenfranchise Black Americans so that White Americans could control areas that were predominantly African American. So this use of the felon disenfranchisement--failure to restore the right to vote after you have served your sentence--is something that has to be put away, and Florida set a great example in doing so. There is much more that we can do. We can have a polling place protection act, because the manipulation of polling places is just an irresistible strategy for election clerks. They move the polling places. They cut the hours of polling. Disinformation is put out about where they are. You have a process where some polling places that serve predominantly one community that may vote primarily on one party suddenly don't have enough clerks or enough voting machines so they have long lines here and short lines there to warp the outcome of an election. So how about a polling place protection act? Isn't that something Democrats and Republicans can come together and do? How about predatory purging of voter lists, where you analyze the voting list and decide for rules on purging voters in order to disproportionately favor one party over the other? Why not have standard policies across the country so that purging in a predatory partisan fashion is done away with? Shouldn't that be something on which Democrats and Republicans can come together and defend the integrity of American elections? How about requiring paper ballots so that every election can be recounted? I always heard about these electronic voting machines with no paper ballots. Now, out in Oregon, we insist on paper ballots. We want people to have confidence that the election has not been messed with, that the voting machines have not been hacked. I remember listening to a radio news story where a person went in and hacked the voting machine while they were on the radio with the reporter and changed the vote totals. So shouldn't we require paper ballots that can be recounted to give confidence in America that the vote is not being hacked? Isn't that something that Democrats and Republicans can come together to support? Isn't it something that helps to make sure that foreign agents--Russian agents, Chinese agents, who knows whom--are not trying to hack our elections? While we are at it, how about a national standard for early voting to ensure that people have the flexibility to come to the polls, to make sure the hours are not manipulated in a fashion to try to favor one party over the other. Better yet, how about Senator Wyden's Vote By Mail Act? In Oregon, we have a special affection for this. Back when I was first running for the Oregon House of Representatives 20 years ago, in my first election, half the people of Oregon voted by mail and half at the polls, and I started going door to door to campaign, and I didn't really like this whole vote-by-mail idea because I felt it was important for the community to do something together on election day. As I knocked on one door after another, one senior after another said: No, I really love this ability to vote by mail, because if it is rainy or icy in November, if there is snow that makes it hard to get to the polling place, it is no problem. They said: And moreover, I really love to be at the kitchen table with my children or with my grandchildren and have the ability, then, to talk with them about these issues as we vote and inculcate them with the civic responsibility of voting. Another said: You know, here in Oregon we have initiatives that can be very complicated. I love to sit at my kitchen table and study these initiatives and vote. So I realized how popular it was. So there it was--vote by mail, a very important contribution to the possibility of high integrity in elections of the United States of America. This last November, we had nationwide about 47 percent of the eligible adults voting--about 47 percent. That was better than 2014, when we had 37 percent. So that is pretty good--47 percent. In Oregon, with vote by mail, we had 68 percent of the eligible adults voting--20 percent over the national standard. So that gives you a little sense of how automatic voter registration and vote by mail can make a difference in enabling people to fully participate. If you believe in the vision of a democratic republic, don't you want to be on the side of voter engagement--not voter intimidation, not voter suppression? A fourth area is equal representation. So we have had a number of elections where we created a discrepancy between the popular vote and the outcome for President--another factor driving citizens. The whole electoral college was set up in a world in which communication was very difficult. It might take weeks to get the votes to the Capitol, but that is not the world we live in any longer. So isn't it time to go to a direct vote? Back in the 2000 election, 48 percent of the voters picked Al Gore for President, and that was a majority, but we had 8 years of George Bush. The electoral college is antiquated--an antiquated idea based on a historical factor of communication that no longer exists. So let's move to direct vote, either through the national popular vote, which can be done State by State by State by sending their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the majority, or through a constitutional amendment. And while we are at it, let's give voting representation in the House and Senate to the 4 million people who currently are American citizens who do not have a vote in the Presidential election. While we are at it, let's give voting representation in the House and Senate to the 4 million people who currently are American citizens who do not have a vote in the House or Senate. For the people of Puerto Rico, Guam, a number of other Territories, and the Virgin Islands, shouldn't there at least be one person in this Chamber representing them? I went down to Puerto Rico 8 months after the big hurricane to look at the restoration, and the restoration program was horrific. I came away thinking, if there was somebody who stood in this Chamber with a vote or in the House Chamber with a vote and could speak to the abysmal restoration of infrastructure after that hurricane, it would not have been such a disaster. We would all have listened and responded and helped. But there was nobody here that represented them. A number of us tried to carry their message, their plea, but it is different than having somebody who carries a vote. So let's figure out a system--some system. No system will satisfy everyone, but give at least a vote in the Senate and a vote in the House for the portion of the population of those American citizens who do not have a vote. So our constitutional system is in very deep trouble. When I came into political life we had a Voting Rights Act that had taken on the issue of voter intimidation and voter suppression. We don't have it today, thanks to the Supreme Court. Corruption is inhabiting our ``we the people'' Constitution. When I came in we had a system that was much more transparent with people making donations to candidates, and today we have vast dark money corrupting the system. Gerrymandering has been with us for a long time. Isn't it time that we address that? Shouldn't it be a situation in which voters pick their representatives, not representatives picking their voters? Isn't it time to address a national popular vote? We have allowed so much to happen. We haven't pushed back the failure of the Supreme Court to defend our Constitution. When they struck down the Voting Rights Act, they said Congress can repass another one. But have we done so? Have we had a vote on the floor of the Senate since the Voting Rights Act was struck down? Do we have bipartisan buy-in that it is our responsibility to protect voters to have a fair process? If not, why not? It is way past time. So let each of us ponder the vision of our Constitution--the ``we the people'' vision of our Constitution. Let's remember that we took an oath to honor this vision and that we are failing. Now, in recognition of that, let's come together--Democrats and Republicans, House Members and Senate Members-- and take on this vast corruption that is destroying the fundamental vision on which our Nation was founded--a vision I love, a vision that will produce laws by and for the people, a vision that produces laws the reflect, as Thomas Jefferson said, the will of the people. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I come to the floor tonight to talk about hostages, seven hostages--seven spending bills that have come through this Republican-led Chamber, bills the House is ready to move forward on that have, ironically, been taken hostage by the Republican leadership of the Senate and the President of the United States. Those seven hostages, those spending bills, the House has said: Well, Mr. President, we have a difference of opinion that has to be worked out, and that is Homeland Security. So let's continue that debate while setting the other six free--freedom for six bills passed by the Republican-led Senate so we can put America back to work. It sounds like a pretty good idea, but good ideas and common sense seem to be victims--victims of this Presidential temper tantrum over a symbol on the southern border. So it shut down nine Cabinet Departments: Agriculture, Commerce, Justice, Homeland Security, Housing, Interior, State, Transportation, and the Treasury--affecting all kinds of everyday functions for Americans. The local schools keep functioning. They figure it out. The local city doesn't shut down. The county doesn't shut down. Has your State shut down? I don't think so. So why this childish behavior, why this incompetence, why this disregard for the quality of life for Americans? There are 800,000 workers who are either instructed to work without pay or who are instructed to go on furlough. We are all affected. Every one of us is affected by these Departments being shut down, but those 800,000 workers don't get a paycheck. What does that mean when they try to write the check that will pay for their mortgage or their rent, their student's tuition, or their utility bill? How do they keep the lights turned on? It is all fine for the President. His lights are staying on. He is not inconvenienced, but these 800,000 Americans are more than inconvenienced. They are put into a hard place over this hostage-taking by the President and the Republican leadership of this body. Out in Oregon, the estimate--admittedly somewhat imprecise--is that 9,000 workers have been affected. It seems in the ballpark. Oregon's population is about 1 percent of the country, and 1 percent of 800,000 is 8,000. So 9,000 sounds in the ballpark. There are 9,000 Oregonians who are affected by this foolishness. An air traffic controller wrote to me and said, we are ``tired of being a pawn in the partisan games that are being played in Washington. . . . These shutdowns have compromised aviation safety.'' He said they hinder the FAA's ability to hire and train new controllers and upgrade air traffic control systems. They break down morale and an already understaffed and frustrated workforce. Then there is the constituent who wrote to me to say: ``It is unconscionable for Trump to deprive Federal employees of earned and necessary income, holding them hostage for his foolish wall.'' There are seven spending bills held hostage, along with 800,000 Americans and their families' finances. There is the young man in Lane County whom I spoke with after one of my townhall meetings last week. He was supposed to be moving to California to begin working in the Sierra National Forest this past weekend. He was all set to go, giving up his current living arrangements because he was going to be moving into Forest Service housing. Then the shutdown happened. Now he has no job, has no key to undo the lock. He has no ability to move into that Forest Service housing. He is stranded. There are just all kinds of everyday stories of challenges to Americans. To President Trump, I say: Listen. Listen to the voices of ordinary Americans who are having a hard time because of you and because of the leadership of this Senate--the Republican leadership of this Senate. Ordinary Americans are caught in the middle of this. This is your shutdown, Mr. President. You said so. You said it on television. You said it from the Oval Office. You said you were proud to own this shutdown. You said: I am not going to blame anybody else. This is my shutdown. Yes, it is, Mr. Trump. Mr. President, it is your shutdown, and it is not a shutdown with a mission, a mission that is important, because the mission that is important, that you talk about, is border security. Every Democrat, every Republican supports border security. All of us who were here in 2013 voted for huge sums. I have heard some describe that bill we passed in 2013 as $35 billion for border security. I heard in an earlier speech tonight that it was over $40 billion for border security, smart border security--smart border security. Don't you want to spend the taxpayers' dollars smartly? Do you want to waste them? Do you want to shut down the government and create a hardship for 800,000 people because you want to waste their money? Mr. President, and to my colleagues across the aisle, listen to the common sense of people in your home State who want border security, but they don't want a foolish shutdown. The President said there is a crisis--crisis--at the border because so many people are coming. How many people are coming to the border? Let's take a look. This shows the number of folks who have been apprehended at the border from the year 2000--19 years ago now--to year-to-date in 2018. This is slightly out of date, so you can add a little bit more to that final bar, but you see the point. There were massive amounts in the year 2000, really high numbers in 2001 through 2007, and then the numbers dramatically decline through 2011 and beyond. I just got the numbers before I came to the floor for the last month we had, which was October. About 60,000 people came to the border. In 1 month, in 2000, 200,000 people came to the border. That is quite a difference. That is now less than one-third than last month. There is no crisis there, only the humanitarian crisis, Mr. Trump, that you are creating with your war on children--your war on migrant children--shoving them back into Mexico to put them at the mercy of the Mexican gangs; proceeding to let them into the United States and then ripping them out of the arms of their parents while you lock up their parents; deciding you are going to lock up the children with their parents behind barbed wire and internment camps; establishing a national system of child prisons that, last month, held 15,000 children, which is up from 7,000 in June; failing to provide medical evaluations for these children when they cross the border. Two have died--one after 6 days in the care of the American border guard. You, Mr. President, have created a crisis, a humanitarian crisis. The arrivals on the border are not the crisis; it is your hardened heart, your dark and evil heart, your war on children; the deliberate strategy of inflicting trauma on children in order to send a message of deterrence, a political message of deterrence. Who here believes it is right to deliberately injure children to send a message of deterrence? That is the strategy Jeff Sessions announced last May that started this intense assault on migrant children. Who would defend it today? Find me one caretaker of children who believes that inflicting trauma on children is acceptable. Find me one religious tradition, one moral code that says that is OK--because it is not OK. Every human civilization recognizes that. Meanwhile, our farmers are wondering what happened to their Farm Service Agencies. They are closed down across the country, including 23 in Oregon. What happened to those payments that the President promised for those affected by tariffs? The payments can't be distributed because of the shutdown. How about our Federal firefighters who need to be in training right now for the fires we are going to see next summer because of climate chaos? We are seeing the impacts in every conceivable way, as my colleagues have been pointing out, and it is time to end it. It is time to release the hostages. It is way past time to end it. It has 18 days--3 days from the longest shutdown in history. It is time to end it, put people back to work, return to common sense, and at the same time quit afflicting children and migrant adults as a political strategy. Almost everybody--probably everyone in this room--came here as a descendant of immigrants, almost all Americans. Not many of us are directly descended from Native Americans. Most of us are descendants from immigrants. How did we want them to be treated? We wanted them to be treated with respect and decency as they waited for an asylum hearing, and that is what we have to return to. So release the hostages, return to common sense, and treat the American people with respect. Thank you.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I am pleased to come to the floor with my colleagues from Massachusetts and Delaware to address the grave threat to America and to our planet from carbon pollution and climate chaos. Over the last 2 weeks, representatives from nearly 200 countries have gathered together in Poland to continue the fight against climate chaos. They know that in each and every country we are seeing the impacts across this planet. There are more powerful hurricanes, like we have seen here in the United States, more destructive wildfires, like those we see in the Northwest of the United States, record breaking heat waves, air quality deterioration, loss of glaciers, loss of global ice, Arctic ice, insect-borne diseases that spread, and coral reefs dying. We are in trouble. The scientists tell us we are now driving the sixth great extinction on planet Earth. It is being driven by human conduct, and a big factor in that is our burning of fossil fuels. We are, in fact, facing the greatest threat humankind has known on the planet. When you begin to damage your own home, you really are in a situation that needs to be immediately addressed. It was back in 1959 that Edward Teller, a famed scientist, gave a speech to the 100th anniversary of the petroleum industry. He said: This energy that you have unleashed has done amazing things on the planet. It has given so much ability for humankind to magnify their efforts. There was a lot of positive in that, but then the scientist, Edward Teller, went on to say: But there are a couple of challenges here, one of which is that there are only so many fossil fuels in the ground and so, at some point, we will run out. Of course, we know that there are a lot more fossil fuels in the ground now than we knew about in 1959. He said that there is a second problem. When you burn this stuff, it creates an invisible, odorless gas. So it doesn't really sound like a challenge, but it traps heat. He said that because it traps heat, it will melt the poles, it will raise the oceans, and that will be a problem for humankind because humankind lives along the waterways. He didn't go into more details than that, but it was one of the first direct commentaries--in 1959--about how the age of fossil fuels was going to produce significant problems for human kind. Now, that speech he gave in 1959. That was 59 years ago, and what have we seen in the ensuing period? We have seen a roughly 100-point increase in carbon pollution on the planet. Or to take my lifetime, for example, in 1956, when I was born, we had about 312 parts per million of carbon. I will just put this chart up. What we see here on the red is the rising line of carbon, going back to roughly when I was born. About in here, 1956 until now, we see that it is accelerating, but essentially there is a 100 parts-per-million increase. We started at about 312 when I was born. We are at about almost 412 now at the very peak. That is a 30-percent increase in my single lifetime, just a little flash of time in terms of the life of this planet--a 32-percent increase in carbon in the atmosphere, and it is having a significant impact. The most obvious way to look at this impact is the global temperature year after year. So here we see the 10 hottest years on record. We see that only one of those years, 1998, was before the turn of the century. The rest of them have all been since the turn of the century. In fact, 17 of the 18 hottest years on record have occurred since the year 2000. Not only that, but look at the dramatic, dramatic change for 2014, and 2015, and 2016, and 2017--these last four years--and how much hotter the planet is than it was just a few years before. That should trouble all of us. We have seen all of this when global leaders came together in 2015 in Paris--the largest gathering of world leaders in human history. They said we have to put limits on what we are doing. We all have to apply a strategy of each reducing our carbon dioxide production. I would like to say that they have been successful, but they have not. Total global carbon production is still going up and, because of that, we are still in deep trouble. If we didn't have the information just from these bars of the hottest years on record, we could turn to a more complicated analysis, or several of them, that have come out just recently. Just back in October, we had the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, bringing the work of scientists across the planet together, and it painted a very stark picture of where we are right now and how this will only get a lot worse in the years ahead. Or we can turn to the Trump administration's report that came out the day after Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving, we give thanks for a lot of things. The day after, the administration informed us that we here on the planet have a big problem. What did they say in that report? Again, this is the Trump administration speaking: ``Earth's climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities.'' Or we could turn to a third report that just came out called the ``Global Carbon Project,'' and it says that after plateauing for several years, in 2018, global carbon emissions rose 2.7 percent. So we are back on an upward trajectory. We hit a recordbreaking 37 billion metric tons. How did the United States do? Well, similarly, our carbon emissions here in the United States went up about 2.5 percent. Over the last 2 years, the Trump administration has tried to do everything it can to make the situation worse. There were rules in place to cut methane leaks because methane is much more of a potent global warming gas than is carbon dioxide. So you never want to let it out of the pipe. But they worked to weaken those rules. They worked to weaken vehicle emission standards so we get more pollution for each mile, rather than less pollution. I did find one thing of interest; that is, when Judith Garber, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, went over to Poland to give a report for the United States. She bragged about our carbon capture utilization and storage technology, and how one powerplant in Texas is capturing more than 90 percent of the emissions from its blue gas stream. So she was holding this up as a vision of what the United States is doing to contribute to the technology in the world and to help things be better. What she didn't say is, the previous week, on December 6, the Trump administration issued a draft rule exempting new powerplants from carbon capture. That would have been a much more complete story about the record of this administration. Of the 20 nations represented at the recent G20 summit in Argentina, only the United States refused to sign a nonbinding statement saying countries were committed to fighting climate chaos. All we had to do is say, yes, we are aware it is a problem, and we are committed to fighting it, but the United States turned that down. Over in Poland, we joined with Russia and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait--three oil-rich nations--to weaken a statement recognizing the international report about the challenges we face. We need global leadership. Without our help, countries still came together in Poland to write a rule book to try to go forward without the involvement and leadership of the United States. They worked very hard on that rule book, and it addressed things like transparency and accountability; it addressed issues related to carbon credits; it addressed issues that were designed to develop a strategy for technical experts and exactly how you count carbon in your country. It wasn't a perfect rule book, but we now have one, and we can make improvements on it in the future. Think about how much faster we would go forward in tackling this problem if we had American leadership. We need this leadership. The world needs this leadership to tackle climate chaos. It is not something you can do just as good a job 10 years or 20 years from now as you can now because you can't get this carbon out of the atmosphere easily once it is in there. It stays for hundreds of years. It keeps adding to the trapping of heat for hundreds of years. We need to act now. We are facing the big challenge of feedback loops. What do I mean? Up in the Arctic, when you have less ice, you have blue ocean, the sunshine goes into the water, and it heats it up more than if it were reflecting off ice. So it gets warmer and warmer and warmer. How about this? Just a couple weeks ago, a picture was published of a lake in Alaska that was boiling--not with heat, but with methane; methane bubbling up out of the permafrost underneath the lake at such a rapid pace, it was a heavy boiling motion on the top of the water. That is a feedback loop that should scare us all because of the enormous heat-trapping properties of methane. All across the planet, as it gets warmer, permafrost and heat start off-gassing this methane. So there we are. We have to move fast. We need American leadership to be fully engaged in the vision of Mission 100, going to 100 percent clean and renewable energy in the fastest possible time. We have to quit subsidizing fossil fuels and start subsidizing renewable energy or at least put them on a level playing field with each other. We need a green new deal to completely rebuild our energy economy in the United States of America and create all kinds of jobs--all kinds of working American jobs: sheet metal jobs, electrician jobs, pipefitting jobs, jobs of every kind--as we rework the energy economy to build that vision of 100 percent renewable energy. Think how many jobs you would create if you just proceeded to renovate your house. Now think of the tens of millions of jobs if you renovate the entire energy economy of the United States of America. We need American leadership to work in partnership with other nations so every nation holds each other accountable to this vision of transitioning to renewable energy. We need American leadership to say to Germany: Yes, you have done some things very well on solar, but why are you building a Nord Stream 2 pipeline to bring massive amounts of natural gas from Russia for the next-generation dependence on fossil fuel? We need to say to Japan: You are putting your entire energy economy onto liquid natural gas. How can you meet your Paris obligations? How can you be a partner with the rest of the world if you are not willing to pursue renewable energy? We need leadership in America that says to Australia: You are doubling down on coal while your outback is burning in the middle of your winter, and your Great Barrier Reef is half dead over the last couple of years from water that is too warm and too acidic due to climate chaos. We need American leadership to tell China: Yes, you are investing in renewable energy at home. Great. Speed it up, but why are you financing 200 coal-powered plants around the world? That is not acceptable. Shut that down. We have to have American leadership. This is not a question between economic development and the environment. Quite the contrary. In this case, renovating our energy economy creates a strong environment. It allows us to go to the cheapest form of energy on the planet, solar and wind. Why is it the cheapest? Because there is no fuel. The fuel for solar is the Sun. We don't have to pay for that. The fuel for wind are the breezes that blow. We don't have to pay for that. In fact, just a few months ago Xcel Energy did a request for proposals for new electric generating capacity, and it came out at 2 cents per kilowatt hour for solar and 3 cents for wind. That is less than burning coal in an existing fossil fuel plant. If you believe nothing about the damage to our planet because it is just too terrifying, and you don't want to hear that bad news, then at least turn to the economic opportunity of taking America forward to the cheapest, cleanest energy we can possibly have. Wells Griffith, the administration's top adviser cop, said: ``We strongly believe that no country should have to sacrifice economic prosperity or energy security in pursuit of environmental sustainability.'' That is the big lie. That is the big Koch brothers lie to the planet; that somehow we must sacrifice our economy in order to pursue cleaner energy, when in fact the opposite is true. American leadership has helped take the world forward in all kinds of technology. Some of those famous moments was our leadership in splitting the atom and creating atomic energy, putting a man on the Moon, creating the internet, taking on significant diseases, and leading the world in wiping them out--diseases like polio. We need that kind of leadership today, leadership to work in partnership with the world to save our planet. I yield to my colleague from Florida.

Mr. MERKLEY. I appreciate so much the comments of my colleague from Florida. I had the chance to go down to Florida at the end of October at a rally to address the challenge of red tide, algae that was growing in the ocean that produces a toxin. The toxin is so powerful that it was causing a lot of respiratory problems for people who live along the gulf coast, and it was killing a lot of animals. People were talking about manatees, dolphins, turtles, and fish washing up on the beach. Not only did they have the toxins from the red algae, but they had the stench from the dying sea life. The sense of people who gathered to talk about this was that dramatic action is needed; that this was completely compromising the quality of life, the health of the oceans, and the ability to harvest food out of the ocean. People were saying they were actually taking inland vacations; that is, leaving the coast until the air would get better. They said that, unfortunately, the circumstances had been in that bad condition for 10 months of the last 12 months--meaning they might not actually want to go back, at least not keep a home there. I thought of the parallel from your State in Florida to my State in Oregon because we have an area in Southern Oregon that has been deeply afflicted by fire smoke the last two summers. The smoke has tainted furniture being sold. It has shut down outdoor events. It has stopped people from hiking the Cascade Trail. It is affecting the economy. House prices are changing. People are thinking twice about booking for--there is a different set of economic impacts. These are only the indirect impacts. There is the direct impact on the Panhandle of Florida. I just saw the pictures of complete devastation when the hurricane came across earlier this year. Of course, we saw the pictures of complete devastation for some of the communities that the forest fires on the West Coast burned to a crisp. So our two States and our citizens know there is a problem. Not everyone wants to face the underlying cause of methane and carbon pollution driving it, but everybody knows there is a problem. We are fortunate to have your scientists--your NOAA scientists, your NASA scientists--and all the satellite information they are feeding us so we can study it and stand on the floor of the Senate and say: We do know the cause, and it is our responsibility as leaders of this Nation, leaders in the Senate, to proceed to make sure we act aggressively in partnership with the world. I just want to say I thank you so much for your service in this Chamber and your knowledge about the scientific facts and willingness to never look away from them and to confront what those facts mean for the policies we need to adopt.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I rise to address a current-day scar, a wound in America--a wound in terms of how we are treating children arriving on our borders and seeking asylum. George Washington said America is a nation open ``to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions.'' This sense of the vision of America was repeated 100 years later through Emma Lazarus's poem that is carved into the foundation of the Statue of Liberty. Phrases of that poem include: ``Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . . . Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,'' but that spirit is lost right now in the USA. We are a nation almost universally of immigrants, and yet we are treating those children fleeing persecution as if they are criminals when they arrive at our borders. I went down this last weekend with Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota, with Representative Judy Chu of California and Representative Beto O'Rourke of Texas. Four of us visited two family internment camps--one in Dilley and one in Karnes-- and all five of us went to the Tornillo child prison in the desert in Texas outside El Paso. This war against children--this Trump war against children--was most dramatically demonstrated back in May and June when the U.S. Government implemented a ``zero tolerance'' policy that, in fact, said, if you assert your international rights and come to the border of the United States, we will treat you as a criminal. We will lock you up. We will rip your children out of your arms, and who knows if you will ever see them again. I went down June 3 of this year to shine a light on this and find out what was really going on. I saw children in cages. I tried to enter a facility--a former Walmart--that I was told had hundreds of kids locked up in it. I was denied entry because of the administration's desires to keep the effects of their child separation policy secret. There was an outcry from people across America saying the United States does not do this. We do not inflict trauma on children as a direct and deliberate strategy of sending a message to the world that we do not want you, if you are fleeing persecution, to come to our shores. We do not deliberately inflict trauma on children. In addition to the public outcry, there was court action. The administration agreed and said: OK. We will stop doing child separation. We will quit ripping children out of their parents' arms, but the President said, if we can't rip children out of their parents' arms, instead, we will lock them up. We will lock them up with their parents--still treating them as criminals as they await asylum here. In fact, the bill to that effect passed the House of Representatives, and 35 Senators in this Chamber signed on to this bill to expand this system of family internment camps at the request of the administration. I came to this floor. I pointed out the long and shameful history of family internment camps in America, and I proposed a different vision. I put forward a bill entitled the No Family Internment Camps in America Act. I noted it would be a fierce fight if those who want to proceed with internment camps attempted to do so. This body dropped that effort--stopped that effort. That is good, but the administration is still determined to pursue this, and they have been moving funds to people to expand family internment camps in places like Karnes and Dilley. So we went there to look at these family internment camps--one with fathers and sons; one with mothers and daughters. You know, the right thing to do as families await asylum hearings is for them to get that hearing on a timely basis of 6 to 12 months and have them under a Family Case Management Program of not locking them up in prison. Locking up children in prisons does deep, traumatic damage to these children, so we must continue to fight this internment camps strategy. The four Members of Congress who were there at Dilley met with a woman. She and her daughter have been locked up in Dilley going on 6 months. Yesterday was the daughter's 15th birthday. The Quinceanera is a big celebration--if you come from a Latin American tradition--of a young girl becoming a young woman. We asked the camp: Are you going to recognize this girl's birthday, this very significant 15th birthday, this quinceanera? No, we can't do anything special to recognize one child. We said: Well, why not have a policy of recognizing each child on his or her birthday, so you are doing the same for everyone? They said: No, too much trouble. We will have a monthly gathering and list the names of those who had birthdays that month. That will suffice. It is a symbol of the dehumanization with which we are treating people locked up--families we are locking up who have fled persecution and are awaiting an asylum hearing. That young woman is suffering significantly. We met with her mother. Her mother told us she is not sleeping well, she is not eating well, and she was really depressed over the fact that this very significant day would go unrecognized. We should never be locking up children for long periods of time. There is an agreement--a settlement--that said children will not be locked up for more than 20 days. It is called the Flores settlement. It was a settlement that came out of the fact that we recognized that locking up children hurts them, traumatizes them, that it should never happen, and it shouldn't happen for more than 20 days. Well, it is happening more than 20 days and not just with the mother and her daughter who are locked up there. They fled persecution by a drug gang--a gang that was extorting the family to make payments from their beauty supply business or beauty parlor. When she couldn't pay, the gang came to her house and assaulted her daughter. She told us they fled the next day. We need to improve the programs with which we are trying to help stabilize those countries and help decrease the power of those drug gangs, but, certainly, when those fleeing persecution come here to our shores, let's treat them with respect and dignity. This is a birthday card that several dozen Members signed yesterday that we are sending to this young woman locked up. The card says: ``Feliz Quinceanera.'' It is signed inside by dozens of Senators. It says: From your friends in the Senate of the United States. We want her to know--we want every child who is locked up in these child prisons under the Trump war on children to know that we are working to end this war. We went on to Tornillo--the child prison that was initially established to be an emergency shelter for 1 month for 450 children. It has now been extended 3 times, and it has been expanded to hold not 450 children but 3,800 children. At this moment, they cranked up the number of people there to 2,700, and they are purposely keeping this as a ``temporary shelter'' so they can bypass all the laws related to incarcerating children; they can bypass the requirements for education; they can bypass the Flores 20- day standard. I asked: How many children are here over 20 days of these 2,700, a couple of dozen? The director said: No, more than 2,000 of the 2,700 children here are over the 20 days. Then we were told that 1,300 of those children already have a sponsor. They already have the sponsors who have filled out all the paperwork and have done their fingerprints and everything. They could be released immediately, if the administration would complete the paperwork. He told us that 1,300 children could be in homes and schools and parks in 5 to 7 days from now if the administration would complete the paperwork. We proceeded to hold a press conference, and we said this is unacceptable that the paperwork is not being completed and these children are being locked up here. We held this on Saturday. We said this Tornillo prison camp should be shut down. This is not the spirit of the USA and certainly is not being used as a temporary shelter for 1 month. I have good news to report because yesterday the administration said they are changing the rules. They expect to release several thousand children within the next few days--that is the right thing to do--and we may shut down Tornillo. So let's keep the attention of America on this. Let's keep the spotlight on it. Let's not let this war on children continue with our money, on our territory, under our government, deliberately inflicting trauma on children. It must end. The Family Case Management Program, which was an alternative to locking people up, had a report from the Department of Homeland Security inspector general who said 99 percent of people show up for their check-ins and there was 100 percent attendance at court hearings. There was a closeout report for the program because the administration shut it down, and the closeout report called the program a success. It said 99.3 percent attendance for court proceedings overall, 99 percent compliance with monitoring requirements, including check-ins, and it costs $38 a day compared to many hundreds of dollars for internment camps or prison camps. Let's restart a program that made sense--a program that worked. We have seen this series of attacks on children--child separation, family internment camps, child prison camps. Let's put America back on track and treat children coming to this country fleeing persecution with respect and dignity as they await their asylum hearings. Thank you.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I praise my colleagues from the Atlantic coast of New Jersey and Pacific coast of California for today putting our entire Senate on record and on a pathway to recognizing the deep darkness of this national scar on our justice system and on our psyche. Work well done today in the U.S. Senate. Thank you.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern, Adam Berry, be granted privileges of the floor for the balance of the day.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, under our Constitution, we have article I, which addresses the powers of Congress, and article II, the powers of the Presidency. Our Founders were so concerned that the President would take us into war without justification that they made sure to explicitly place the power to go to war with Congress--with the House and Senate. But here we are, debating the issue of how the President took us into war in Yemen as a facilitator of Saudi Arabia, providing intelligence, providing advice, refueling planes, providing armaments. It is time for us to take a powerful and clear stand and change this and end this. Here is what has been going on. For multiple years now, Saudi Arabia has been bombing the civilian infrastructure of Yemen, indiscriminately slaughtering civilians, destroying schools and hospitals and neighborhoods and water systems. What is the result of destroying the water systems? The largest outbreak of cholera in the history of humankind. We now have well over 100 children under the age of 5 dying of hunger and starvation each day. We are told by the experts that 8 to 14 million people are at risk of starvation, but many are already starving, and not just children under 5--the whole spectrum of society. We have been directly involved in ways that, in my mind, violate the War Powers Act by directly facilitating the movement of armaments and assisting Saudi Arabia in this assault, and this assault must end. We have to send a strong message, and we can do that through this vote we are facing ahead of us. That is one piece of the conversation regarding Saudi Arabia. The other piece is that the Saudi Government has assassinated an American resident--an American resident who is also an American newspaper columnist. What do we have as a response? We have the weakest possible response from President Trump, with President Trump saying that we don't know what happened. The Saudi Crown Prince may have been involved; he might not have been involved. Who will ever know? We need a strong watchdog for American values. We need the President to stand up to Saudi Arabia. We don't need to hear that we are going to be weak in the face of an assassination of an American resident because they happen to buy armaments from the United States. Yet that is what we are hearing from President Trump--weakness, selling out American values because they buy some American products. What more trouble can we invite around the world if we don't stand up for human rights and we don't stand up for our residents and we don't stand up for our journalists, all tied in together here? Let's be forceful in how we vote on this resolution. Let's send a strong message. This challenge of the President in ignoring the article I powers in our Constitution, in which the power to be involved in war is vested in this body, Congress, is not the only problem we have. We also have core corruption of our Constitution in the form of gerrymandering and voter suppression and dark money, all of which erode the fundamental vision, the vision in our Constitution of a ``we the people'' government, one that serves as President Lincoln so eloquently said, to operate ``of the people, by the people, for the people.'' Instead, we have the government operating of, by, and for the powerful in this country--the 1 percent in this country. It certainly wasn't done in 2017 with a tax bill that took $1.5 trillion--or call it $2 trillion, if you include the interest on the $1.5 trillion--out of our Federal Treasury and gave it to the very richest Americans. Boy, that is not a ``we the people'' action. We didn't invest in healthcare. We didn't invest in education. We need apprenticeship programs. We need technical education. We need better public schools. We need affordable colleges. We didn't invest in education. We didn't make our healthcare system more affordable. We didn't take on the drug companies. We didn't proceed to invest in the challenge of unaffordable housing. We didn't invest in infrastructure and create living-wage jobs. Those are the four foundations of a thriving family-- healthcare, housing, education, and living-wage jobs. We ignored all of that and had the government of the powerful giving $1.5 trillion or $2 trillion, if we include the interest, to the richest Americans-- government by and for the powerful. Voter suppression is a key strategy in this. What did President Reagan have to say about that? President Reagan said: ``For this Nation to remain true to its principles, we cannot allow any American's vote to be denied, diluted or defiled.'' Now, there is a statement by a man who understood that voting is the foundation of our democratic republic--a core right of Americans--and he believed we needed to stand up and make sure that core value remains fully intact. But so often in our Nation we have seen those who wield power for the powerful proceed to deny or dilute or defile the power to vote, particularly in poor communities, particularly in communities of color. We have seen everything. We have seen poll taxes. We have seen literacy tests. We have seen post-Civil War good character tests. We have seen the use of felony charges to make it impossible for African Americans to vote in the South. We have seen voter intimidation, and we have seen it sometimes through racist dog whistling and political postcards. We have a long history of these types of actions to deny, dilute, and defile the power to vote. I would like to say there is something of our past that we saw with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but that act was struck down by the Supreme Court. We are seeing all kinds of forms of voter suppression emerge in 2016 and 2018. In 2018, thousands of Native Americans in North Dakota living on Tribal reserves and using their P.O. boxes for their mail address were kept from casting a ballot because of a law that came into effect in 2018. It said you can't vote without a conventional address--the North Dakota ``conventional address'' effort to dilute or deny or obstruct the power to vote. In Georgia, the then-secretary of State, Brian Kemp, who was himself running for Governor, attempted to block 53,000 Georgians from voting-- 70 percent of whom were African-American voters--because of minor differences in the wording of the way they filled out their registration form. If the name wasn't exactly identical or had some other slight variation, he was sitting on those voting registration cards--the ``identical name'' gambit from Georgia. In Ohio, a county elections board proceeded on the orders of Secretary of State Jon Husted to purge thousands of Ohioans from the voting rolls. If you are not on the voting rolls, you can't vote when the election comes. Again, who were disproportionately affected? African Americans--the Ohio voting roll purge strategy of voter suppression. What did we see in North Carolina? Thanks to a law passed by the Republican State legislature, nearly 20 percent of North Carolina's early voting locations were closed, forcing voters to travel longer or wait in long election-day lines to cast their vote. I will give you one guess on who was impacted the most. Who was this target aimed at? Well, it was aimed at African-American voters--the long line strategy from North Carolina and Kansas, as well. In Kansas, the county clerk in Dodge City, citing construction, moved the only polling place in a town that is 60 percent Hispanic from a spot downtown to an arena built for rodeo and farming shows outside the city limits. This was a location that had no sidewalk and is separated from the rest of the city by train tracks, making it as difficult as possible for voters to get there. It was targeted at a Hispanic community. We saw voting suppression aimed at college students, too. In Iowa, the legislature passed a bill to cut 11 days off early voting this year in order to make it harder to vote. It also had a tricky little deal on an ID requirement, which will not now go into effect until next year, but it created a great deal of confusion about this year because it made people think they weren't eligible to vote because it said your ID had to have an expiration date on it. Why was this tricky little thing done? Because college IDs often don't have an expiration date on them. Well, it is a total violation of the vision Ronald Reagan laid out, and really, of the foundation--the vision--of our Constitution and the power to vote. In New Hampshire, a bill was signed into law this past July aimed at suppressing college-age voters as well. It says students and other part-time residents have to become permanent residents. How do you become a permanent resident in order to cast a ballot? You have to buy an in-State license. If you have a car in another State, you have to reregister it in New Hampshire, which means registration fees, fees for license plates, and possibly separate State and municipal fees. It is like a poll tax placed on college students. So there we have this 21st century poll tax coming back aimed at college students. Why are all these voting suppression strategies aimed at poor communities, aimed at communities of color, African-American communities and Hispanic communities? Why are they aimed at college students? They are aimed at these three populations because those three populations vote primarily on the Democratic side of the ballot. It is wrong for any official in this country to simply target voters of the other party to try to prevent them from voting. It is un-American. It goes against the essence of what our Constitution is all about. It is wrong, and yet, since the Voting Rights Act was torn down by the Supreme Court of the United States, we see it time and again. We don't just see it before the election. We see it during the election day. In Georgia, we saw hours-long lines to vote in majority-minority districts, either because machines didn't happen to be working or they didn't have the extension cords to turn them on. In Arizona, one polling place didn't exist on election day because even though people were told to vote there, it was in a building that was locked up. Voting machines were inside, but the doors were locked. The building had been foreclosed on, but they didn't bother to move it next door or somewhere close by, enabling people to vote. In Texas, we heard about the machines that were changing people's votes from a Democratic candidate to Republican candidate. All the while, President Trump was working to cast doubt on the legitimacy of our normal election processes--tweeting out that ballots coming in after election night shouldn't be counted. What was he talking about down in Florida, about ballots that shouldn't be counted? We are talking about the absentee ballots for our soldiers overseas. But because the President was concerned that they might change the outcome, he didn't want them counted. If only Ronald Reagan could spend a few minutes with President Trump and remind him of what our Nation is all about, what our Constitution is all about, how important voting is, and that it should never be denied or diluted. None of these efforts are unique. We saw these efforts back in 2016, as well, in the first election after the Voting Rights Act was torn down by the Supreme Court. That was the Shelby County v. Holder decision. The Court thought this wasn't necessary any more. Maybe they should ask Congress whether it was necessary. Now that we find out it was necessary, maybe they should reverse their decision. We need to put a new issue before them. Maybe we need a new Voting Rights Act. Maybe it should apply to every State, rather than just the States that were in the 1965 Voting Rights Act bill. In 2016, that first election after the Voting Rights Act was torn down by the Supreme Court, we saw 900 fewer polling places open to voters than in 2014--2 years earlier. Most of that change was in the States that previously were under the regulation, the oversight of the Voting Rights Act. We saw that in Texas, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and North Carolina. When you reduce the number of polling places in poor communities and communities of color, you create long wait lines, and you deny the vote. Nearly 17,000 Wisconsinites--disproportionately minorities--were kept from the polls because of Wisconsin's voter ID law. The State saw its lowest turnout in two decades. This law had nothing to do with security. It had everything to do with voter suppression because it is a known fact that residents in low-income and minority communities are less likely to be able to access the IDs that are required for polls. This is keenly targeted. In fact, after North Carolina's voter ID law was struck down in 2016, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals decision noted that it targeted African Americans with ``almost surgical precision.'' The State resorted that year--after it was struck down--to eliminating early voting days, severely curtailing the number of polling places, and affecting their hours of operation in communities of color. By the way, the lead plaintiff in the case that challenged the voting suppression strategy of the voter ID law passed away this weekend at age 97. Ms. Rosanell Eaton was once described by President Obama as a beacon of civil rights. She was a life-long devotee of and advocate for voting rights. Now, that is a patriot. It is because of unsung heroes like her that our Nation has come far and why we must continue pushing ourselves forward to ensure justice and equality for all. In a ``we the people'' nation, can any of these efforts to suppress the vote be allowed to continue? The answer is no--not if we want the vision of government of, by, and for the people. How can any of us sit by and allow citizens of this country--citizens like Rosanell Eaton--to be systematically denied the most fundamental right? We have to work together--Democrats and Republicans--to honor and to strengthen the vision of the ability to vote. We need a fierce and formidable voting rights bill for the 21st century, ensuring in every way possible that every single American can exercise his or her right to vote freely and fairly. We need a voting rights bill that bans the type of shenanigans and the types of deceptive strategies that target poor communities, communities of color, and college students that I talked about today. But we also need a voting rights bill that requires preapproval for changes to voting procedures to make sure that they are not being changed in order to take away the ability to vote and to make it more difficult for some communities than for other communities within a State. We need a voting rights commission with the power to ban new voter suppression practices as they evolve because, surely, people will try new strategies from people who do not believe in the vision of our Constitution. From the 15th amendment of 1870, which recognized African-Americans' right to vote, to the 19th amendment of 1920, 50 years later, which recognized a woman's right to vote, and all the way up to the civil rights marches of the 1960s and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, America's story has been of expanding opportunity for every American to have a say in the direction of our government. But we are far from ensuring that today every American has that opportunity because the strategies of voter suppression are rampant, they are extensive, and they are targeted. Voter suppression and voter intimidation must end, and we need to ensure that every American has the unfettered right to have a voice in their government, that every American has the unfettered right to cast a ballot during the election. President Reagan had it right back in 1981. He supported the expansion of the Voting Rights Act. He said: ``For this Nation to remain true to its principles, we cannot allow any American's vote to be denied, diluted or defiled.'' Let's make it so. Thank you, Mr. President. (Mr. GARDNER assumed the Chair.)