Jeff Merkley

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, a lot is happening right now across our country and in Washington, DC, and in the House and the Senate--and across the globe, for that matter. There are a lot of issues. There is one that has not received the attention it should, which is about a group of Americans who have suffered enormous calamity in the last few days who deserve our attention and our focus. I am speaking, of course, about the devastation in Puerto Rico. Seismologists report that over 1,200 tremors, earthquakes, and aftershocks have struck the island since January 1. More than 70 of these were of a magnitude 3.5 or greater. Residents on the island have felt at least 100 of these earthquakes. The largest of the quakes, a magnitude 6.4, struck last Tuesday, taking one life and injuring many others. More than 2 weeks after the Earth started shaking, these quakes and aftershocks are still going on. In fact, this last weekend, the island was struck by an earthquake with a 5.9 magnitude. Yesterday morning, a 4.6-magnitude tremor could be felt. This morning, there was a 5.1- magnitude quake. The damage from these quakes is so severe, it can be seen from space. According to NASA, the satellite shows the land in parts of Southern Puerto Rico, near the epicenter of the quake, has moved 5\1/2\ inches. That is a very dramatic change in the landscape. You don't have to be in space; you don't have to have those images or be orbiting the planet and looking down to see the damage because the damage is everywhere. There is $110 million in damages estimated by the Governor's office. Other estimates from the Geological Survey now have the damage approaching $1 billion. Power has been restored to most of the island, but periodic outages are still happening in different parts of the island, and severe energy conservation is in place. The Costa Sur plant in the town of Guayanilla was so severely damaged, they are telling us that it will take over a year to get it up and running. That island needs 500 megawatts of emergency generation until that plant is fixed. As of last Thursday, hundreds of thousands were without water. The world-renowned chef Jose Andres' relief organization World Central Kitchen has served tens of thousands of meals in just the last few days. Buildings and homes have collapsed and been destroyed. Thousands are living outside of their homes, both with the damage done and the damage feared. It is reported that a total of 559 structures are affected. Look at this picture. Look at this pile of rubble lined up and crossing the street of collapsed buildings, hundreds of piles like that where building, or parts of buildings, once stood. There are 4,000 to 6,000 residents in shelters, thousands sleeping in hammocks or inflatable mattresses and in tents because they are afraid to sleep in their homes. My heart goes out to the people of Puerto Rico who are enduring yet another natural disaster, while they still have been fighting to rebuild their homes and their lives after the destruction of Hurricane Maria 3 years ago. The truth is, we haven't done nearly enough to help them. Not nearly enough from the last disaster has made it to the island to help them repair all of that damage done. The aid that has come has not come quickly enough. Indeed, just today, we are hearing that the aid that was supposed to be released no later than last September--$8 billion related to Hurricane Maria--is being released, or at least put in the Federal Register so it can be prepared to be released years after the disaster, when that aid was needed immediately after the disaster to rebuild. The citizens of Puerto Rico are American citizens. They don't have a vote in this Chamber, and that is a problem we should remedy. What we see is, when citizens don't have a Senator who represents them, there is no one to stand up and advocate with the same ferocity and determination and passion as somebody who is elected by those individuals, so the rest of us need to stand in--Democrats and Republicans, Senators from the South and the North and the East and West--we need to stand in together on behalf of our fellow Americans in this devastated landscape of Puerto Rico. This neglect of the citizens of Puerto Rico, of this island that is part of America, is staggering. That is why I have joined with Senator Schumer and 31 of my Democratic colleagues in a letter to President Trump supporting the Governor of Puerto Rico's request for a major disaster declaration, but this shouldn't be a partisan letter. Let's all join together--Democrats and Republicans together--to fight for the aid that is needed by our fellow citizens. President Trump signed a declaration that provides only $5 million for immediate emergency services. Five million dollars isn't close to addressing what the Geological Survey says is close to $1 billion in damage. That $5 million is useful, but far more is going to be needed-- far more--for removing debris, building temporary shelters, providing electric generators, distributing food and water, providing immediate emergency lifesaving medical care. They are going to need a lot of help, in addition, for long-term rebuilding. A major disaster declaration can help in that. That has not happened. It has been sitting on the desk in the Oval Office since last Saturday. Let's join together--Democrats and Republicans together--and say: Mr. President, sign that declaration that brings along with it crisis counseling, help rebuilding homes, help repairing roads, help restoring bridges, water control, water supply. Clean water supply is so important to health. Water treatment, which is so important in preventing cholera, job training, aid for businesses--that is the type of thorough, significant assistance the people of Puerto Rico need, and they need it right now, not tomorrow and not a month from now, not years from now. They need it now. I say, let's join together and call on President Trump to sign that major disaster declaration that unleashes this help. There is a lot going on in the world, a lot here in Washington. We prepare for one of the rare moments in American history where we will be conducting a trial related to Articles of Impeachment. Just a week ago Tuesday, 8 days ago, I was sitting in front of a television very worried about escalation to major war with Iran. There are big issues going on, absolutely, but don't let these big issues prevent us from addressing the plight of our fellow Americans. Let's pay attention. Let's make sure the people of Puerto Rico are neither ignored nor neglected. Swift action is needed. Let's join together and make it happen.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I want to take a few moments to recognize an individual, Lauren Oppenheimer, who, after nearly 5 years as an invaluable member of my team, has recently moved on to begin the next chapter of her career. We all on Team Merkley are very sad to see her go, but we do feel extraordinarily fortunate that she hasn't gone far-- just over to Senator Jones' office on the other side of the Hart building. So Oregon's loss has been Alabama's gain. Lauren joined my team in 2015, back when I was a member of the Banking Committee, to handle that important portfolio. It was a position that she was extremely qualified for, having a wealth of experience working on those issues in both the House and at the Center for American Progress. But then a seat opened on the Foreign Relations Committee, and I had to turn in my credentials for Banking in order to take that Foreign Relations position. Well, we knew that that really kind of undermined the vision of why Lauren had come to our team, to really take on that set of banking issues. It would not be an understatement to say it was not a completely thrilling day when I shared this news with her. But being the dedicated team member that she is, she willingly and graciously took on a new role within the team and a whole new portfolio of issues to work on--issues like election reform and telecom, judicial nominations, rules reform. It might not have been the job that she signed up for, but she excelled at it nonetheless. She excelled because she is extremely smart and talented and because she is passionate about her work, and she threw herself into this new set of issues. I mean it when I say she is passionate. A quick conversation about Fintech can last for hours, as she excitedly informs you about all of the recent developments in that emerging industry--an industry, by the way, that I had hardly heard of before Lauren came to my team. Martin Luther King, Jr., once said: ``Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable.'' It requires ``the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.'' Well, Lauren is certainly one of those dedicated and passionate individuals, and throughout her time on Team Merkley, she has helped move our country forward in ways large and small. For years she has worked on ensuring the implementation of the Volcker rule, a key part of the Dodd-Frank Act, which closed the Wall Street casino by separating old-fashioned banking from high-risk, high- leverage bets on the future prices of stocks and exchange rates and interest rates and commodities--bets that placed our entire banking system and economy at risk. Lauren wrote the bipartisan SAFE Banking Act, which had its hearing in the Banking Committee just a couple of months ago, to ensure that legal cannabis and hemp businesses have access to the same banking services as any other business. She established the Senate Cannabis Working Group to coordinate the Senate's efforts around this issue. She has worked to ensure the integrity of our judicial system by vetting the nominations for judgeships and, in one case, produced significant insights and records that resulted in the Senate rejecting the nomination of Ryan Bounds for the 9th Circuit. In her spare time, Lauren has been fighting to save our democracy. Earlier this year she created my ``Blueprint For Democracy'' to introduce six specific bills, and she was the point person on my team for finalizing the Senate version of the For the People Act, a comprehensive election reform bill which takes on anti-democratic practices such as gerrymandering, voter suppression, and dark money. But beyond those accomplishments and many others that I haven't mentioned, she made one contribution that I will always remember and deeply appreciate. As many are aware, I spent a significant amount of time over the last year and a half shining a light on the Trump administration's policy of cruelty toward immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers on our southern border. Even though immigration issues are not in her portfolio, it was Lauren who inspired me to get involved. I was reading the speech by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions--a speech labeled his ``zero tolerance'' speech--and the name didn't strike me as unexpected. But when I read the details, it sounded as if the plan was to discourage refugees from coming to our border by deliberately traumatizing children, to rip them out of their parents' arms. I refused to believe that any American administration would ever actually do this, and, as I was expressing the belief that no American administration would ever resort to hurting children as a strategy to deter immigration and would not resort to a strategy of hurting children to do anything that is not acceptable under any moral code or set of ethics or religious standards, it was Lauren who said: There is one way to find out, and that is to go down to the border. So I went that next weekend, that next Sunday, and became the first Member of Congress to see the children being sorted into cages after being separated from their parents and to be turned away from any conversation in front of a former Walmart where I had heard that hundreds of separated boys were being held. The video of that really sent a message to the entire Nation of what this administration was hiding, but the fact that I was there at that processing center and the fact that I was there at that former Walmart, seeking to find out what was going on with those hundreds of boys who had been taken from their parents, was because Lauren Oppenheimer said: The best way to find out is to go down to the border yourself. Thank you, Lauren, for playing such a critical role in all of these efforts. You are such a valued member of our team, and you are still valued as a member of our team. You will always be a member of our team, even as you go on to work for our colleague from Alabama. Our office notices your absence, without the energy and enthusiasm emanating from your desk and your unceasing willingness to take on new challenges and your very valuable work to mentor other team members. Know that all of us on the team wish you the very best as you continue to fight for a better world in this new chapter of your career. I am excited that you are returning to your world of expertise, the world of banking. I may be calling you now and then to get your insights on that set of issues that you know so well. All of us look forward to seeing the insights and understanding you will help us gain from your perspective when you are fully immersed in the banking world. It will be valuable to all of us in the Senate and valuable to our Nation. I thank you for your service. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I wish to state for the record that although an important engagement in Oregon kept me from being present in the Capitol to participate in the cloture vote on this year's National Defense Authorization Act, NDAA, I would have voted nay had I been present. I am pleased that the NDAA would phase out the reduction of survivor benefit plan annuities to ensure that the families of our fallen servicemembers receive the Federal support they need and deserve; would guarantee 12 weeks of paid family leave for Federal employees; fence funds for the introduction of new Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, INF; limit nuclear cooperation agreements under section 123 of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act with countries that lack safeguards; and support the legally-binding and verifiable limits of the New START Treaty as being in the national security interest of the United States. However, other aspects of the bill are cause for serious concern, outweighing these strong points, and must not be overlooked. I am deeply concerned by this legislation's failure to prohibit funds for unauthorized war with Iran. There is no doubt that war with Iran would be a reckless, disastrous mistake. Yet the President has made a number of impulsive, provocative public statements that risk escalating tensions. Congress must protect its authority to declare war, and that means no blank checks to the administration for an unauthorized war with Iran. It is also unthinkable that the final NDAA does not prohibit funds for intelligence support to the Saudi-led coalition in a war that has caused a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in Yemen. Communities have crumbled as a result of this conflict, and an acute cholera outbreak and famine have killed more than 85,000 children under the age of 5. The United States has no place supporting, prolonging, or being complicit in this war's widespread civilian casualties. In addition, I am concerned that the NDAA does not prohibit funds for the deployment of a low-yield warhead on a submarine-launched ballistic missile. The use of this powerful and aggressive tool could drastically increase the risk of instigating a destabilizing nuclear arms race. Here at home, the final NDAA conference report removed provisions to address PFAS water contamination. More than 16 million Americans currently drink water contaminated with PFAS chemicals, which can affect every major organ in the human body and put humans at higher risk of a wide variety of health conditions and complications including liver and kidney damage and thyroid disease. The decision to reject remedies to this urgent public health issue in the NDAA is deeply disturbing and completely unacceptable. Finally, this NDAA does not include adequate safeguards to ensure accountability for wasteful defense spending. At a time when America far outspends every other nation in the world militarily, while working families are grappling with stagnant wages and rising costs of living, it could not be more important that the Pentagon and its contractors are accountable to American taxpayers. We should be doing far more to scrutinize defense spending and to evaluate whether we could maintain a strong military while redirecting badly needed funding to the American people's priorities on health care, housing, education, and infrastructure. Mr. President, I wish to state once again that I would have voted nay had I been present. I look forward to working with all of my colleagues to resolve these critical issues in future bills and to advance the health, safety, and well-being of all Americans.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, it is now my pleasure to also say some words of tribute to my colleague from Georgia. When I first came here and found out about his real estate background and his interest in homeownership, I felt it was a powerful connection, in that while I was never in the real estate business, when I went back to Oregon in 1991, I found a connection with Habitat for Humanity and eventually became their director, and it was all about homeownership. So I spent a tremendous amount of time working to advance homeownership for families in Oregon. Certainly, that is what the residential rules say business is all about, and he spent decades in that world before he came to Congress. In fact, I also felt a connection because of his service in the House of Representatives in Georgia. I only had 10 years in the Oregon House, and he had far more than that in the Georgia House of Representatives. I don't know if the Georgia House is like the Oregon House, but the Oregon House was a very functional place, where people came to the floor and listened to each other and shared ideas. They were only allowed to speak for 5 minutes so everybody could hear each other. You could borrow time from others, but if you borrowed time, then, people started to say: The longer that you speak, the less support you will have. So it was great to have the entire group present, talking to each other, working, and talking on the floor. That is how I envision the Georgia House, as well, which I think is a tremendous foundation for networking ideas, working with others, realizing that relationships make such a difference as we strive for policies we believe in. But the pathway involves relationships. John F. Kennedy once said: ``Let the public service be a proud and lively career.'' When I think about my colleague's career spanning the Georgia House and Georgia Senate and the U.S. House and now the U.S. Senate, and all that he has worked on, I think of it as exactly that--a proud and lively career not only that he can be proud of but that all of us can be proud of, as evidenced by the many folks who have come to the floor to say thank you for your service. There was one particular event that I will never forget, and that is after the passage of Dodd-Frank. I heard that a problem had occurred related to the interest on lawyer trust accounts, known by the term IOLTA. This interest, which was not allowed to accrue directly to the company of lawyers, was dedicated by law to funding legal defense funds for noncriminal assistance to American citizens facing court proceedings so they could get a fair day in court. So I was trying to get unanimous consent for us to fix this, and I needed a partner on the Republican side of the aisle. I was walking from one Senator to another to another. I probably went through about 15 Senators, and I would say: Have you ever heard of IOLTA? And, universally, the answer was no. I would explain what it was and say why it might make a difference, and each time I spoke they would say: Well, it is probably not something near the top of my list to spend time on. Then, I asked Senator Isakson: Have you ever heard of IOLTA? He said: Of course, I have. I explained to him exactly what it was and why it mattered, and I said: Would you be a partner and try to fix this so that the funds will go to the public legal defense fund? And he said yes. We had to persuade, collectively, a number of folks who had holds on the amendment, which we did. We finally had one Senator who was still putting a hold on it, and we met with him--I don't know if my colleague from Georgia will remember this, but we met with him--and explained our case. He said that, well, he would think about it, and we decided to inform him that we were going to ask for a unanimous consent motion on the floor at a certain time on a certain day, and that he was welcome to come back and object if he wanted. He did come back, and he met with us at that moment and withdrew his objection, and we passed that fix. Now, interest rates have not been as high. So the amount of funds that went into the fund were not equivalent to what they were in a previous era, but it is an example of bipartisan work. It is not blue or red work. It is work to help make something go a little better for people in the United States of America. So to my colleague from Georgia, thank you for doing many things to make life better for the citizens of the United States of America, working with that goal in mind, not partisanship. Bless you and your family. Thank you for your service. I yield the floor.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, on June 9, the streets of Hong Kong filled with over 1 million individuals peacefully protesting what they saw as an unjust law and attack on democracy. It was an incredible visual of people standing up for democracy and standing up for human rights. Here we are 5 months later, and the images are much different. You would be forgiven if you saw them and thought they were in a war zone. Hundreds of student protesters barricaded themselves in a Hong Kong university surrounded by armored riot police, pummeled by rubber bullets and tear gas, fires raging, destruction, devastation, and smoke everywhere. There have been 5 months of protests, rising anger, and tension. There have been 5 months of police crackdowns on peaceful protests, spurring further protests and resistance, and U.S.-made, U.S.-exported police equipment being misused by the Hong Kong police to violate the human rights of protesters. So far, over 10,000 rounds of tear gas have been fired into the crowds of protesters. We believe in free speech, freedom to assemble, freedom to protest, not state-sponsored oppression and violence. It is time to ban the export of U.S.-made police equipment to Hong Kong that is being used to abuse their human rights. That is why I am so pleased to introduce, in partnership with my colleague from Texas, S. 2710, which prohibits the export of munitions and crowd-control equipment to the Hong Kong Police Force. Since the protests in June, over 1,700 Hong Kong residents have been injured and over 5,000 have been arrested. Amnesty International verified incidents involving the dangerous use of U.S.-made pepper spray, batons used to beat protesters, rubber bullets, and tear gas. One young woman was clubbed from behind with a police baton and continued to be beaten even after she was on the ground with her arms zip-tied behind her. We have seen tear gas fired into confined spaces, in violation of the U.N. Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms. We have seen brutal police tactics that continued even when women and men were held in captivity or in custody. There has been report after report of violent assaults taking place inside police stations. We cannot turn a blind eye. It is time to stand with the people of Hong Kong who are demanding a democratic future and against the violent suppression of free speech. The bill the Senator from Texas and I have introduced lays out a series of products that we will no longer export to the Hong Kong Police Force: tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, foam and bean bag rounds, pepper balls, water cannons, handcuffs, shackles, stun guns, and tasers. This bill is backed by many colleagues on both sides of the aisle. I say a huge thank-you to Senator Markey, Senator Blackburn, Senator Leahy, Senator Scott, Senator Coons, Senator Wicker, Senator Blumenthal, Senator Inhofe, Senator Gillibrand, Senator Cardin, Senator Wyden, Senator Braun, Senator Gardner, and Senator Van Hollen. I am really proud to stand here in a bipartisan representation tonight, to stand with my colleagues who have introduced the Hong Kong Human Rights Democracy Act, and to stand together in a bipartisan fashion to ban the export of these brutal crowd-control strategies being misused in Hong Kong by their police to abuse the protesters. I turn to my colleague from Texas.

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, on behalf of myself and Senator Cornyn, as in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be discharged from consideration of S. 2710 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I further ask unanimous consent that the Merkley amendments, which are at the desk, be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern Olivia Geveden be granted privileges of the floor for the remainder of the day.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, Canadian historian Michael Bliss wrote in his 1982 book, ``The Discovery of Insulin,'' that ``[w]ith insulin, the stone was rolled away, and diabetes became a matter of the quality of life, not speed of death.'' For thousands of years, human beings have battled diabetes. When the pancreas stops producing insulin, all kinds of bad things happen--heart attacks, stroke, blindness, kidney failure, foot disease, foot amputations, small blood vessels throughout the body being impacted by that high blood sugar. In some cases, within months, individuals waste away, fall into diabetic comas, and die. All that changed about a century ago thanks to the work of four Canadian scientists--Frederick Banting, Charles Best, J.B. Collip, and John Macleod. These four men discovered how to extract, develop, and refine a pure form of insulin that could be injected into the human body. It changed the world. Thirty million Americans--almost 10 percent, 9.4 percent, of the American population live with type 1 or type 2 diabetes today. Of those 30 million, 7.4 million depend on insulin for their survival, but one- quarter of the people who depend on insulin for their survival have had to ration their insulin in the past year because of the extraordinary, over-the-Moon cost of this drug that was developed a century ago. Rationing the drug, and therefore producing episodes or enduring levels of high blood sugar, has extensive health consequences. It does a lot of damage. Diabetic Americans are being gouged by the drug companies, and it needs to stop. Today I am introducing, in partnership with Senator Durbin, the End Price Gouging for Insulin Act to end this egregious practice. I want to ensure that every single one of those 7.4 million Americans who need insulin to survive can afford it. I want to ensure that not a single person has to ration their insulin. I can tell you that vision of every person having affordable insulin is what the four scientists who invented it nearly 100 years ago envisioned. They didn't ask for great wealth from their work. They did receive recognition. A Nobel Prize went to two of them for their role in this. They certainly weren't asking for huge payouts or a high price. Do you know what they did? For the health of humanity, they sold their patent to the University of Toronto for $3 to make insulin available to the world. All they cared about was saving lives. They wanted everyone who needed it to have it. What do we see today? Almost a century later, the price of insulin is going higher and higher with the extensive greed of the companies that produce it. Over the last decade, the companies selling the four most popular types of insulin have tripled the price of their product-- essentially the same product. They tripled the price. Nova Nordisk has two of these drugs; Sanofi has one; Eli Lilly has another--and they all tripled the price. In 2012, the average price of insulin was about $234 a month. By 2016, it was $450 a month. Now we have seen it continue to rise since 2016. They have some explanations. There are some who say: Well, it is due to their vast input into research and development. Remember, these are drugs invented a century ago. Sure, there are slight variations, yes, but the money is going largely to profit. There are those who say the price is higher because more people need it. More people buying it means more efficiencies, which means the price should drop. The nonprofit Health Care Cost Institute looked at the rising cost of insulin and said the excuses given by the drug companies just straight out aren't true. ``It's not that individuals are using more insulin or that new products are particularly innovative or provide immense benefits. Use is pretty flat,'' said Ms. Fugelsten Biniek, one of the authors. ``And the price changes are occurring in both older and newer products.'' The reason the prices are going up--the companies are charging more-- is because they can because we don't negotiate the price of drugs in America by law for Medicare. These companies have some tricks up their sleeve. One is that when the generic competition gets all lined up, they proceed to pay the generic companies not to produce the generic drug, resulting in sustaining the price gouging in America. Now, I think this practice is ``pay to delay.'' I think it is a horrific predatory practice. It is a noncompetitive practice. It should be against the law, but we are not doing our job to make it against the law, apparently. The other thing is they make slight changes. They produce a new patent on every tiny, microscopic change--it is called the evergreening of patents--so then they can line up a vast array of lawyers and say: If you produce generic insulin, we will go after you in every which way. We have more lawyers than you have, and we have deeper pockets than you have. So good luck. The result is a continuation of the extensive price gouging of Americans. A quarter of those 7.4 million Americans who need insulin to treat their diabetes are rationing their prescriptions. Sometimes that means just straight out skipping the doses altogether. Folks from Oregon have written to me, people like Richard from Beaverton, OR. Richard needs three lifesaving medications to get by, including the insulin Humalog, which costs over $1,800 a year. Richard doesn't have $1,800 to spare. He is 77 years old, blind, and recently finished chemo treatments for bladder cancer. Through it all, he has continued to work odd jobs to supplement his Social Security to be able to put food on the table for him and his wife, to be able to keep their house, and try to pay for those prescriptions. Another constituent whom I will call Antonio is 58 years old and is living with type 1 diabetes, but like so many others, he has trouble affording the prescription. Antonio either uses insulin samples that he finds in his truck, which are about 10 years old, or he rations out the insulin that he does have to make it last until his monthly disability check comes in, which is when he can afford to get a new refill on the prescription. This is a terrible strategy for managing an illness. It has led to hospital stays, diabetic ketoacidosis, kidney failure, visual impairment, and other diabetes-related ailments. Yet, from Antonio's perspective, what can he do? He can't afford the massive price increases these major drug companies have put on insulin. As for the generic he would like to buy, those same companies are blocking it from coming to market. There is also Maria. Maria has sores on her feet because of her diabetes. She has been to the emergency room several times for foot infections. It turns out that her feet keep getting infected because she is forgoing her insulin to be able to afford basic necessities for her family--food, the cost of her housing, and transportation. It turns out Maria's insurance doesn't cover the $50 copay on diabetic shoes or her insulin or the injection medication that she takes to reduce her insulin needs, all of which would have reduced or eliminated the need for Maria to go to the emergency room. Yet her insurance does cover the emergency room visits. So, time and again, with her not being able to afford the medicine, that is where Maria ends up. Another Oregonian whom I will call Phillip is living with type 2 diabetes. He said he takes less insulin than his doctor has prescribed. Why? He isn't able to afford the prescription. Yet Phillip doesn't want his provider to know any of this, because he is embarrassed about it. So his blood sugars are routinely at high levels and are doing a lot of damage to his body. It has led to the diabetic-related complications of severe kidney damage, visual impairment, peripheral vascular disease, and heart disease. Think about this for a moment. The pharmaceutical companies are gouging him on the price, but it is Phillip--he who has the diabetes-- who feels embarrassed. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't the companies be embarrassed about gouging Americans? I think so. The drugmakers are profiting off of sick Americans, and their predatory practices are designed to keep competitors from coming to the market. These are American citizens who are being affected while living in one of the wealthiest nations on the planet--the United States of America. Yet they can't afford a century-old drug that is meant to be freely shared with the world. It doesn't have to be this way. The same kind of insulin that costs $373 here in the United States costs $47 in Australia. Why? The Australian Government negotiates the price. It is past time we stood up for the American people and put an end to the price gouging of Americans. In France, the drug Lantus is $47. In Australia, it is $54. In Germany, it is $61. In the United Kingdom, it is $64. In Canada, it is $67. In the United States of America, it is $373. That is six times the median price of the drug in these other developed nations. Why don't we insist that the companies that get all kinds of benefits from being here in America sell to Americans at the median price or at the average price--either one--which is what they sell to the rest of the developed world? Why is it a fair price for every other country, but it is gouging for Americans? Americans pay the price. Those who have diabetes but who cannot afford that insulin start rationing it and start to see the devastating impacts on their bodies--from the kidneys, to the vision, to the feet, to the heart disease. Then they end up in the hospital, as well, with there being more costs to the U.S. healthcare system. Don't we care about the health of Americans? Are we here to protect greed for these companies or the health of Americans? Senator Durbin and I have introduced a bill that says you can't charge more in America than the reference price that is charged in key developed countries around the world--Canada, Australia, Japan--or charge more than the median price in the group of eight of the largest European nations. It doesn't even have to be the lowest price in the world under this formulation. This is called a reference price bill, wherein we essentially attach ourselves to the fair prices charged to the rest of the world. The drug companies will say: We want to make more money so we can do more research. Well, raise your price on these other countries while you are dropping the price for the United States. That is a pretty simple solution that ends the price gouging in the United States of America. If a company violates this reference price, then it pays a fine of 10 times the difference between the reference price and the price it charges Americans. Where does that money go? It goes to the research and development of new drug products in our bill. That is the vision. There is no reason that Americans should be paying six times the median price of other developed countries--six times. This is not 6 percent more or 60 percent more, which would be outrageous. This is six times the price charged to other developed countries. It is way past time that we stood up for the American people, not the greed of the pharmaceutical companies. It is way past time that we stood up for sick Americans like Richard and Antonio and Maria and Phillip and millions more in every one of our States. Millions of Americans are forced to ration their insulin or skip doses altogether because of corporate greed. It is way past time to end the price gouging of Americans. Let's put this bill on the floor, and let's pass this bill for our citizens across this great land.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, Canadian historian Michael Bliss wrote in his 1982 book, ``The Discovery of Insulin,'' that ``[w]ith insulin, the stone was rolled away, and diabetes became a matter of the quality of life, not speed of death.'' For thousands of years, human beings have battled diabetes. When the pancreas stops producing insulin, all kinds of bad things happen--heart attacks, stroke, blindness, kidney failure, foot disease, foot amputations, small blood vessels throughout the body being impacted by that high blood sugar. In some cases, within months, individuals waste away, fall into diabetic comas, and die. All that changed about a century ago thanks to the work of four Canadian scientists--Frederick Banting, Charles Best, J.B. Collip, and John Macleod. These four men discovered how to extract, develop, and refine a pure form of insulin that could be injected into the human body. It changed the world. Thirty million Americans--almost 10 percent, 9.4 percent, of the American population live with type 1 or type 2 diabetes today. Of those 30 million, 7.4 million depend on insulin for their survival, but one- quarter of the people who depend on insulin for their survival have had to ration their insulin in the past year because of the extraordinary, over-the-Moon cost of this drug that was developed a century ago. Rationing the drug, and therefore producing episodes or enduring levels of high blood sugar, has extensive health consequences. It does a lot of damage. Diabetic Americans are being gouged by the drug companies, and it needs to stop. Today I am introducing, in partnership with Senator Durbin, the End Price Gouging for Insulin Act to end this egregious practice. I want to ensure that every single one of those 7.4 million Americans who need insulin to survive can afford it. I want to ensure that not a single person has to ration their insulin. I can tell you that vision of every person having affordable insulin is what the four scientists who invented it nearly 100 years ago envisioned. They didn't ask for great wealth from their work. They did receive recognition. A Nobel Prize went to two of them for their role in this. They certainly weren't asking for huge payouts or a high price. Do you know what they did? For the health of humanity, they sold their patent to the University of Toronto for $3 to make insulin available to the world. All they cared about was saving lives. They wanted everyone who needed it to have it. What do we see today? Almost a century later, the price of insulin is going higher and higher with the extensive greed of the companies that produce it. Over the last decade, the companies selling the four most popular types of insulin have tripled the price of their product-- essentially the same product. They tripled the price. Nova Nordisk has two of these drugs; Sanofi has one; Eli Lilly has another--and they all tripled the price. In 2012, the average price of insulin was about $234 a month. By 2016, it was $450 a month. Now we have seen it continue to rise since 2016. They have some explanations. There are some who say: Well, it is due to their vast input into research and development. Remember, these are drugs invented a century ago. Sure, there are slight variations, yes, but the money is going largely to profit. There are those who say the price is higher because more people need it. More people buying it means more efficiencies, which means the price should drop. The nonprofit Health Care Cost Institute looked at the rising cost of insulin and said the excuses given by the drug companies just straight out aren't true. ``It's not that individuals are using more insulin or that new products are particularly innovative or provide immense benefits. Use is pretty flat,'' said Ms. Fugelsten Biniek, one of the authors. ``And the price changes are occurring in both older and newer products.'' The reason the prices are going up--the companies are charging more-- is because they can because we don't negotiate the price of drugs in America by law for Medicare. These companies have some tricks up their sleeve. One is that when the generic competition gets all lined up, they proceed to pay the generic companies not to produce the generic drug, resulting in sustaining the price gouging in America. Now, I think this practice is ``pay to delay.'' I think it is a horrific predatory practice. It is a noncompetitive practice. It should be against the law, but we are not doing our job to make it against the law, apparently. The other thing is they make slight changes. They produce a new patent on every tiny, microscopic change--it is called the evergreening of patents--so then they can line up a vast array of lawyers and say: If you produce generic insulin, we will go after you in every which way. We have more lawyers than you have, and we have deeper pockets than you have. So good luck. The result is a continuation of the extensive price gouging of Americans. A quarter of those 7.4 million Americans who need insulin to treat their diabetes are rationing their prescriptions. Sometimes that means just straight out skipping the doses altogether. Folks from Oregon have written to me, people like Richard from Beaverton, OR. Richard needs three lifesaving medications to get by, including the insulin Humalog, which costs over $1,800 a year. Richard doesn't have $1,800 to spare. He is 77 years old, blind, and recently finished chemo treatments for bladder cancer. Through it all, he has continued to work odd jobs to supplement his Social Security to be able to put food on the table for him and his wife, to be able to keep their house, and try to pay for those prescriptions. Another constituent whom I will call Antonio is 58 years old and is living with type 1 diabetes, but like so many others, he has trouble affording the prescription. Antonio either uses insulin samples that he finds in his truck, which are about 10 years old, or he rations out the insulin that he does have to make it last until his monthly disability check comes in, which is when he can afford to get a new refill on the prescription. This is a terrible strategy for managing an illness. It has led to hospital stays, diabetic ketoacidosis, kidney failure, visual impairment, and other diabetes-related ailments. Yet, from Antonio's perspective, what can he do? He can't afford the massive price increases these major drug companies have put on insulin. As for the generic he would like to buy, those same companies are blocking it from coming to market. There is also Maria. Maria has sores on her feet because of her diabetes. She has been to the emergency room several times for foot infections. It turns out that her feet keep getting infected because she is forgoing her insulin to be able to afford basic necessities for her family--food, the cost of her housing, and transportation. It turns out Maria's insurance doesn't cover the $50 copay on diabetic shoes or her insulin or the injection medication that she takes to reduce her insulin needs, all of which would have reduced or eliminated the need for Maria to go to the emergency room. Yet her insurance does cover the emergency room visits. So, time and again, with her not being able to afford the medicine, that is where Maria ends up. Another Oregonian whom I will call Phillip is living with type 2 diabetes. He said he takes less insulin than his doctor has prescribed. Why? He isn't able to afford the prescription. Yet Phillip doesn't want his provider to know any of this, because he is embarrassed about it. So his blood sugars are routinely at high levels and are doing a lot of damage to his body. It has led to the diabetic-related complications of severe kidney damage, visual impairment, peripheral vascular disease, and heart disease. Think about this for a moment. The pharmaceutical companies are gouging him on the price, but it is Phillip--he who has the diabetes-- who feels embarrassed. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't the companies be embarrassed about gouging Americans? I think so. The drugmakers are profiting off of sick Americans, and their predatory practices are designed to keep competitors from coming to the market. These are American citizens who are being affected while living in one of the wealthiest nations on the planet--the United States of America. Yet they can't afford a century-old drug that is meant to be freely shared with the world. It doesn't have to be this way. The same kind of insulin that costs $373 here in the United States costs $47 in Australia. Why? The Australian Government negotiates the price. It is past time we stood up for the American people and put an end to the price gouging of Americans. In France, the drug Lantus is $47. In Australia, it is $54. In Germany, it is $61. In the United Kingdom, it is $64. In Canada, it is $67. In the United States of America, it is $373. That is six times the median price of the drug in these other developed nations. Why don't we insist that the companies that get all kinds of benefits from being here in America sell to Americans at the median price or at the average price--either one--which is what they sell to the rest of the developed world? Why is it a fair price for every other country, but it is gouging for Americans? Americans pay the price. Those who have diabetes but who cannot afford that insulin start rationing it and start to see the devastating impacts on their bodies--from the kidneys, to the vision, to the feet, to the heart disease. Then they end up in the hospital, as well, with there being more costs to the U.S. healthcare system. Don't we care about the health of Americans? Are we here to protect greed for these companies or the health of Americans? Senator Durbin and I have introduced a bill that says you can't charge more in America than the reference price that is charged in key developed countries around the world--Canada, Australia, Japan--or charge more than the median price in the group of eight of the largest European nations. It doesn't even have to be the lowest price in the world under this formulation. This is called a reference price bill, wherein we essentially attach ourselves to the fair prices charged to the rest of the world. The drug companies will say: We want to make more money so we can do more research. Well, raise your price on these other countries while you are dropping the price for the United States. That is a pretty simple solution that ends the price gouging in the United States of America. If a company violates this reference price, then it pays a fine of 10 times the difference between the reference price and the price it charges Americans. Where does that money go? It goes to the research and development of new drug products in our bill. That is the vision. There is no reason that Americans should be paying six times the median price of other developed countries--six times. This is not 6 percent more or 60 percent more, which would be outrageous. This is six times the price charged to other developed countries. It is way past time that we stood up for the American people, not the greed of the pharmaceutical companies. It is way past time that we stood up for sick Americans like Richard and Antonio and Maria and Phillip and millions more in every one of our States. Millions of Americans are forced to ration their insulin or skip doses altogether because of corporate greed. It is way past time to end the price gouging of Americans. Let's put this bill on the floor, and let's pass this bill for our citizens across this great land.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I am honored to join my colleague who has led this battle for the vision of the For the People Act that will restore the ``we the people'' democratic republic. Here we are on the floor of the Senate. It is an institution that once reverberated with great debates on the great issues our Nation faced--issues of war and peace, of civil rights, of healthcare and housing, of education and infrastructure, and of living-wage jobs; issues of equal opportunity and of environmental pollution; issues that affect the fundamental success of each family in America and our collective success as a nation. Yet, if you are sitting here today and are observing the Senate from the benches up above, you will be hard-pressed to see any of that because those debates are not happening in the U.S. Senate. This Chamber is silent on the great issues that face America. Before he was the majority leader, the majority leader promised that things would be different under his leadership. He said: A Senate majority under my leadership would break sharply from the practices of the Reid era in favor of a far more free-wheeling approach to problem solving. I would work to restore its traditional role as a place where good ideas are generated, debated and voted upon. Now, one of the fundamental principles is that every Senator should be able to raise any issue and have the chance to defend it, to present it, to see it attacked, to respond to those attacks, and to have the American people see where we stand. But, today, the Senate is not operating in that manner today. The reality is reflected in a different quote by the majority leader from this past year. He said: Donald Trump is still in the White House, and as long as I am Majority Leader of the Senate, I get to set the agenda. That's why I call myself the Grim Reaper. The majority leader is taking great pride in preventing this Chamber from being the legislative body that was envisioned in the Constitution, one in which we examine the issues that the citizens of our States present to us with great concern and ask us to resolve so as to take this Nation forward. Instead, we are deeply mired in the legislative graveyard that the majority leader has been so proud to create. How about the Bipartisan Background Checks Act? It is now engraved on a tombstone. The Paycheck Fairness Act? Engraved on a tombstone. Violence Against Women? On a tombstone--or how about Save the Internet? Or the Climate Action Now Act? How about healthcare? Across my State, in rural areas and urban areas, everybody wants the same fair price, even if they have preexisting conditions. That is the fundamental nature of an effective insurance strategy for healthcare, but the Protecting Americans With Preexisting Conditions Act has never been debated on this floor. The American Dream and Promise Act, the Securing America's Federal Elections Act? How about the Raise the Wage Act? How about the Equality Act that grants every member of our society, LGBTQ Americans, the full opportunity to have the doors of opportunity opened, rather than slammed shut--debated and passed just down the hall, each and every one of these bills, but here, they haven't been debated. The Senate is failing its constitutional responsibility. In fact, during the last 2 years, there has only been three priorities that have seemed to have arisen in this Chamber. One was the goal of stripping healthcare from 30 million Americans. It failed by the slimmest of margins. A second is to pack the courts with judges who believe in a supercharged amendment to give power to the powerful, rather than power to the people. The third is a $2 trillion tax cut to enrich the richest Americans. In any chamber that truly represents the people, you don't see the goal of destroying healthcare for 30 million Americans and giving $2 trillion to the richest Americans. But that is what we have seen here, while we fail to see the bills on healthcare, on housing, on education, on infrastructure, on living wage jobs--the fundamentals by which the American families prosper. Why is it that this Chamber is now a completely owned subsidiary of the most powerful people in this country? It is because of the fundamental corruption of our constitutional system, starting with gerrymandering. Many of us hear that phrase, ``equal representation,'' and understand we are talking about fundamental fairness of distributed power, but gerrymandering is the opposite of that. The Supreme Court has given complete license to extreme partisan gerrymandering, instead of defending the constitutional vision of equal representation. It is principle in a democracy and in a republic that the citizens choose their legislators, the legislators don't choose their citizens. But that legislation to address that, to create nonpartisan commissions to prevent that gerrymandering, hasn't been debated on the floor of this Chamber. A second piece of corruption is voter suppression. The Supreme Court opened the doors by gutting the Voting Rights Act, again failing to defend the vision of the Constitution. But have we remedied that here on this floor? Have we addressed that fundamental corruption in which all kinds of tactics are created to prevent people from voting across this country--all kinds of clever ID laws to disempower communities that are minority communities or college communities or poor communities or Native American communities? We have not. There is perhaps the most vicious form of corruption, the dark money flowing through our campaign systems. Jefferson was very clear that if you have government by the powerful, you end up with laws for the powerful. So you have to have distributed power so that the power of the people results in laws that reflect the will of the people. That is the difference between the vision of our constitutional system here in the United States of America and the system of kingships that dominated Europe. But because of the corruption of dark money in our campaign system, it has created the concentration of power, the exact opposite of what Jefferson laid out and our Founders laid out in our Constitution. We start our Constitution with those powerful first three words, ``We the people,'' because that is the vision of our Constitution--not ``We the powerful,'' not ``We the privileged.'' So a bill has been crafted, H.R. 1, the For the People Act. My colleague from New Mexico has led this charge to address this fundamental corruption in order to restore the vision our Nation was founded on because, if we restore that foundation, then we would be addressing healthcare on the floor of the Senate, making it more affordable, stopping the price gouging of Americans, the challenges of access in communities across this country. We would be addressing the shortage of housing that is driving a homeless epidemic in this country, partly because of the economics, the structure of our economy, and partly because of unaddressed mental illness and drug addiction. We would be addressing education because education is the path to full participation; yet today, we have seen a shrinkage of the opportunities through apprenticeships for working people and through college--affordable college for the dreams taking you in that direction if you weren't previously burdened by a debt the size of a home mortgage. We would be addressing infrastructure and jobs. We would be addressing the environmental challenges our planet faces if we restore the vision of our Constitution. This For the People Act is the most important piece of legislation because everything else we care about as Americans is going to fail if we let this Chamber be controlled by powerful special interests through this corrupted system. So let's take it on. Let's take on the gerrymandering and the voter suppression and the dark money. Let's have the courage to debate it on this floor because that is what we were elected to do, was to work on the big challenges facing our Nation, and there is perhaps no bigger challenge than this. Madam President, I yield back to my colleague from New Mexico.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern, Antonio Pena Anaya, be granted privileges of the floor for the remainder of the day.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I am deeply saddened to hear the news on Monday of the death of our former colleague, Kay Hagan. She is the sister, the wife, and the aunt of Navy veterans; daughter- in-law to a two-star Marine Corps general; daughter of a former Florida mayor; and niece to a former U.S. Senator and Governor. Service was in Kay Hagan's veins. She spent an early career in financial services, but it was only a matter of time until she decided to get directly engaged in public policy. In office, she was a fierce and unwavering advocate for our men and women in uniform, a staunch fighter for the right of every American to have healthcare, and a warrior for women and children. The people of North Carolina and the people of the United States are far better off because of her years of service in the North Carolina Senate and the 6 years in the U.S. Senate. When she was here she worked on so many different issues. She immersed herself in trying to assist our military personnel. She was the founding member of the Military Family Caucus. She championed the program that offers education support for military spouses. She cosponsored the repeal of don't ask, don't tell, and she drove the investigation of the contamination of water at Camp Lejeune and legislation to rectify that. She introduced the Hire a Hero Act to try to enable our veterans to get jobs and make that transition from military service to civilian life. She led the effort for overdue recognition of African-American marines who were forced to train at a separate camp outside Camp Lejeune, and that led them to being awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. When it came to women and children, she was there every day in that fight--the fight for a stronger Violence Against Women Act and the fight for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, so women can be paid commensurate with their male colleagues. She authored the Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act to maintain and continue the support for mandatory screening for newborns. She fought for workers and middle-class America and manufacturing jobs for Americans and for equal opportunity by sponsoring the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, which passed on the Senate floor 6 years ago. She proceeded to work on banking and financial issues. She was the lead on the SAFE Act Confidentiality and Privilege Enhancement Act, which had to do with some of the nitty-gritty of mortgage licensing. She worked to ensure that groups like Habitat for Humanity could lend money on a zero-interest loan to their homeowners and be able to do so without violating the legal precepts of American law. It was issue after issue. When I think of her journey, I think about the parallel structure between her life and mine, in that she ran for the legislature in North Carolina the same year that I ran for the legislature in Oregon. I won a seat in the Oregon House and she won a seat in the North Carolina Senate. We both spent 10 years there. We both then decided that we should attempt to take our philosophy of fighting for the people to the U.S. Senate. We threw our hats into the ring at the same moment, running campaigns against incumbent Senators, and we both won. I recall how every time I checked on how she was doing, she was always doing 5 to 10 points better than I was, and I just kept thinking: I just have to follow Kay Hagan's example. Then, before the campaign was over, she called me up one day, and we hadn't actually met much or talked much, and she said: I just want to check in on how you are doing. We connected and bonded over our parallel paths and the fight we were in, which was such an intense effort of campaigning with the desire and determination to make this country a better place. Of course, as I have noted, when she got here, she threw herself into so many aspects of our national life and our legal structure. I was pleased that we were both assigned by Senator Kennedy to the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. We were able to work on the ACA, or the Affordable Care Act, to try to greatly increase health coverage and make it more affordable and available throughout America-- really important for the people of North Carolina, the citizens of my State, and citizens across this country. Then, we were both assigned to the Banking Committee, and it was Dodd-Frank. We worked on questions such as how do we end some of the predatory lending practices? Both of us worked on payday-loan predatory actions, where interest rates could be 500 percent. We knew the damage done to our families across the country. We didn't succeed on that particular piece of legislation--the payday loan piece--but we were stemming in this fight from the same place. I so applaud her determination to end predatory practices and lending. Many of the things that we were fighting for did get into Dodd-Frank in terms of fairness and mortgages so that homeownership would be a dream of homeownership that would result in equity for middle-class Americans rather than a nightmare of homeownership, in which interest rates would double after 2 years, and the family would go bankrupt, and they would be foreclosed on and could lose their house. Apart from all of that, Kay was such a beautiful voice and spirit in this Chamber--cheerful, determined, thoughtful, gracious. She just made you enjoy being here. I also think about her, as when she served, she was the healthiest Member of this Chamber. She paid a lot of attention to the diet she ate, the food she ate, how she exercised, how she brought balance to her life. That, too, was an inspiration to us. Here we find that our journeys on this planet are pretty precarious. We never know what is going to happen on the next day or the next week. I think it is a reminder to all of us to use our moments wisely, to treat each other with the sort of graciousness she exemplified--this sort of spirited fighting for ``we the people,'' the people of the United States for whom she was determined to deploy and champion on the floor of the Senate. Her illness and her death are a real loss to all of us. It is important that we carry her in our hearts. She certainly has a place solidly secured in my heart and, I think, the hearts of everyone who served with her.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, thank you and a huge thanks to my colleague for not just deferring to me to make comments, which I am going to make very brief, but also for the leadership of the subcommittee and the bipartisan work. It is the way the Senate should work. Let's just expand that spirit to the entire Chamber, and we will make a lot of progress. This bill maintains funding for important rural development programs, including housing and rural broadband, which is essential all across America. It provides assistance with farm ownership and farm operating loans because access to credit to farmers is critical to stay in business, and it helps new farmers come into the farming and ranching community, including minorities, women, and veterans. It provides critical funding for SNAP. In our country, no one should go hungry. It assists with school meal equipment grants, the Farmer's Market Nutrition Program, and the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, all relevant to making sure our children and our families have basic nutrition. It assists on the international front with Food for Peace, the McGovern-Dole program that feeds millions of children around the world. I was down in Central America and found that the average child in Guatemala at 9 years old is 6 inches shorter than the average Guatemalan child raised in the United States--stunning. It is a huge factor and affects the entire course of the mind. America is doing incredible work around the world in poverty-stricken countries. This food program also increases school attendance, particularly among girls. Critical funding for the Food and Drug Administration is part of this bill for a whole host of reasons. There is only one thing in this bill that I have disagreement with, and that is funding for the relocation of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the Economic Research Service. I think those organizations do a far better job when they are here networking with the other key critical policy groups and when folks coming from Oregon and places remotely around the country visit NIFA and ERS at the same time as visiting other programs. Tribute to Bob Ross Mr. President, for 11 years, Bob Ross has been a detailee from the Department of Agriculture to our subcommittee. That is because he is fabulous, and we just couldn't let him go here in the U.S. Senate. Most people in rural America haven't heard of Bob Ross, but millions and millions have benefited from his work, particularly his superb work on rural housing. He has been invaluable to us. Few people get a chance to leave such a mark to make the world a better place as much as he has. He is on to the next chapter of his life, retirement, and perhaps many adventures in retirement. Bob is sitting behind me. We thank him for his years of service and wish him all the best of luck in the chapters to come. I thank the chair of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture. It is a pleasure to work with him.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent for my intern, Allie Kirchoff, to have privileges of the floor for the remainder of the day.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I come to the floor today to recognize Kaitlin Gaffney, a longtime member of my Senate team who, after nearly 11 years, is leaving to start a new chapter in her life. Kaitlin has been a key part of Team Merkley since our earliest days. In fact, she was part of the original team that built our office and our constituent services operation from scratch. I don't know how many folks here have been part of opening a Senate office, but it is not easy. It is daunting. You walk into a completely empty office. There are no computers, no phones, not even the basics in terms of pens and paper, and you know you have responsibilities, and you need to start fulfilling them. In the early days, we didn't have a computer system to track our constituents' thoughts or opinions, so Kaitlin and the team wrote everything down on paper before moving to spreadsheets. There was no training on how to serve constituents, but from day one, that is exactly what we were determined to do and she was determined to do. So you have to hit the ground running, learning as you go, and Kaitlin did hit the ground running like an Olympic Gold Medalist. She built our constituent services operation from the ground up, and I am proud to say that today, 11 years later, it is an operation that is second to none and one that Oregonians across our State know they can rely on for help. It is Oregonians who know that if they are in a bind, the team they can call on is my constituent services team, and often that is Kaitlin, specifically. In the beginning days, we were in the middle of the mortgage crisis, and that crisis was forcing Oregon families out of their homes--to where they couldn't afford the balloon payments or the doubling of the interest rate at the expiration of the teaser rate. They couldn't pay the high rate on the triple option loan. They were desperate, and they called Kaitlin. Kaitlin was the point person on our team fighting to keep roofs over their heads. She is the one who day after day had to consult with them in that very stressful situation where often a mortgage company was simultaneously telling a family they will be evicted for nonpayment and simultaneously saying we have this program in which you can sign up and don't worry. She is the one who brought together advocacy organizations, housing authorities, and local elected leaders to help assist a massive caseload of struggling Oregonians. Her direct involvement meant that a very large number of them were able to solve the challenge and stay in their homes. Even today, as I go around the State, I hold a townhall in every county every year, and people will come up to me at those county gatherings and say: By the way, I just wanted to tell you that a decade ago a person on your team, Kaitlin, helped me out and I still have my home today and it is en route to being paid off. That meant so much to families. There were all kinds of different challenges that came up over the years that she was able to assist with. There was a time when she helped rescue an Oregon constituent who was stranded on an island in the Pacific. One day, she got a call from a woman who was worried about her son who was on a trip to Thailand and had gone missing. His friend said he had told them he was going to swim across the ocean to a specific island, and they hadn't heard from him. There were strong currents between the mainland and that island, and the efforts to find him on that island had turned up nothing. There wasn't really any organized effort to look for him. So Kaitlin did what she does so well. She picked up the phone, and she started making calls. Eventually, she was able to convince an office in Thailand to send out a search and rescue helicopter to go looking for this lost Oregonian. Because she did, he was eventually found, and he was rescued. Thus, the currents of the world changed with him still with us when it might have turned out quite disastrously. That is the type of team member she is--always determined to go to any length necessary. That includes a situation when the life of a sick baby was in danger because this baby was being barred from the United States to receive a lifesaving medical procedure. Baby Fatemah was being barred because of a policy that had been adopted to block Muslims from coming into the United States. It was early 2017, and this baby needed an immediate procedure to save her life. It was considered by the experts that there was a very small chance of her surviving with this procedure in Iran. The Oregon Health Science University in Oregon said they really understood this procedure, had very high odds of it going well, and that was her best shot. So we had to work to lobby the administration, and, boy, I tell you, Kaitlin was right at the heart of that, working to coordinate all the phone calls. In the end, Baby Fatemah was granted a waiver, she did come to Oregon, and her life was saved. In case after case, Kaitlin succeeded because she cared about the individuals involved, and she worked every avenue to assist them. She certainly embodied the spirit of my complete constituent services team. I can't thank her enough for her dedication, the intensity of her efforts, and her incredible contributions to solving challenges for Oregonians. She leaves extremely large shoes to fill, and we will dearly miss her. After almost 11 years, she is on to another chapter, and I know she is just going to be as much of a phenomenal success in that chapter as she has been on my team, and we wish her well. I yield the floor.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, it is with a heavy heart today that I honor the incredible life of Mary Gautreaux, an Oregonian who never stopped fighting to make our State and our world a better place for all. Throughout her decades-long career working with my colleague Senator Wyden as a fellow, a field representative, and as deputy State director, she was deeply committed to not only preserving Oregon's natural treasures but making sure Oregonians in every comer of our State had the opportunity to experience them. Her love for helping others was only paralleled by her passion for Oregon's incredible public lands, which was a cornerstone of her life even long before she joined Senator Wyden's team. Previously, she fought wildfires and maintained our forests--strenuous, courageous work that is critical to keeping our communities safe. When she transitioned to Senator Wyden's office, her hard work continued and culminated in countless accomplishments that will shape the lives of Oregonians for generations to come. On behalf of all Oregonians, I thank her for her generous spirit and her unwavering dedication to serving the people of Oregon. Her contributions will be felt for generations to come, and she will be dearly missed and never forgotten.

Mr. MERKLEY

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

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I am rising to speak tonight as a Senator that comes from a passionate Second Amendment State. The citizens of my home State of Oregon value their guns for collecting, for target practice, for personal defense, and, certainly, for hunting. But it is also a State where citizens have said they do not want individuals who are deeply disturbed or individuals who have felony backgrounds to get ahold of guns because we have a responsibility to make sure that guns don't end up in the wrong hands and that guns are not abused. Our State then proceeded to do a series of things to strengthen a background check system. It was in the year 2000 that the citizens drew a ballot measure supported by almost 62 percent of the State that chose to close the gun show loophole that previously had allowed purchasers to buy guns at gun shows without completing a background check, making a background check in gun stores essentially irrelevant. It was in 2015 that the citizens of Oregon closed the Craig's List loophole, and it was in the year 2018 when they closed through the legislature the ``boyfriend'' loophole, saying that if an individual had a restraining order against them or a stalking conviction, they shouldn't have the ability to buy a gun in our State. Now, I do a lot of townhalls. I do one in every county every year. At the end of this year, I am hitting about 400 townhalls since the time I have been in the Senate. Of the 36 counties I go to each year, 22 of them would be what you would describe politically as being very red counties, and gun violence comes up all the time. Yet even in those conservative red counties, people are incredibly supportive of having a background check system nationally like Oregon has created, because right now in Oregon it is kind of a big hole if somebody just ignores a background check and goes across the border to another State to buy guns. Then we have the challenges of straw buyers, and we need to have rigorous enforcement of that. It is only with a national system that this works. Every year, thousands of people go to more than 4,000 gun shows held across America, and they purchase between 4 to 9 percent of all the annual firearms that are sold in America at these events. Because gun shows in most States don't require background checks, people who couldn't pass a background check simply can go and acquire their weapon in that fashion. For this reason, guns purchased at gun shows are disproportionately the ones that are used in criminal activities. The same is true for individuals purchasing guns in other States through websites like Craig's List. Just like gun show purchasers, individuals purchasing firearms online from private sellers are exempt from background checks in all but 12 States and the District of Columbia. So, nationally, there is powerful support for a solid background check system that doesn't have loopholes that just make it irrelevant-- closing of the loophole for gun shows, closing the loophole for Craig's List, and closing the loophole for stalkers and domestic abusers. Speaking of domestic abusers, in just an average week, about 17 women--about 17 women--are fatally shot by former or current romantic partners. As we talk about the challenge with guns and violent deaths in America, we have the names of various cities ringing in our ears-- cities like Dayton, 9 dead and 27 wounded; El Paso, 22 dead and 24 wounded; Odessa and Midland, 7 dead and 21 wounded. But recognize this: While those extra traumatic events capture the headlines, there is a mass shooting in America more than once per day. As of September 1 of this year, which was the 244th day of the year, there have been 283 mass shootings. What is a mass shooting? It is a situation in which more than four people are hit by gunfire. So it is time to act. Right now, this is the moment that demands action because 92 percent of Americans favor a background check for all gun sales. We owe it to Americans to support background checks for all gun sales and to actually act. We owe it to our children, who are now scared of going to school and who are forced to practice hiding from a crazed murderer in active shooting drills. We owe it to our teachers, who are prepared to put their lives on the line for their students in case of an emergency. And we owe it to the families of the countless Americans who have lost their lives to gun violence--to the mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers, and the loved ones of those who are lost. They have an unhealable pain. One of those individuals, Fred Guttenberg, is here tonight. On Valentine's Day 2018, Fred's 14-year-old daughter, Jamie Guttenberg was gunned down at her school in Parkland, FL. Jamie was, in her father's words, ``tough as nails,'' but also ``silly, funny, energetic . . . wherever she went, she was the energy in the room.'' She wanted to be a pediatric physical therapist and work with children to make their lives better. She was a 14-year-old with her whole life ahead of her. She was a competitive dancer. She was a freshman in high school with so many life chapters to be written. But she didn't get to write those chapters--chapters having fun with her friends, chapters getting stressed out by back-to-school homework or planning for the prom or making plans for the future or deciding what path to go in life and where to attend school. All of it was stolen from her and stolen from her family. Her father Fred has said: ``Everybody thinks this gets easier as time goes on. It actually doesn't. It gets harder, because every day there's just going to be a new reminder of what you lost.'' She was the second to the last to be shot. She was shot in the spine running away from the shooter. Fred notes that it was his daughter, but it could have been your daughter. It could have been your son. It could have been the child of any one of us. (Mr. BARRASSO assumes the Chair.) Mr. President, we are here in the Chamber to help make life better. We are here to keep Americans safe, but we are doing nothing, and doing nothing with 90-plus percent of America crying out and saying: Have the guts to act. Mr. President, let's have the guts to act. Let's have the guts to put the bill here on the floor. The House passed H.R. 8, the basic background check bill. We are not here to do the interests of big corporations. We are not here to do the interests of special interests. Ninety-plus percent of Americans say to act on the basics of doing a background check when people buy a gun, no matter where they buy it. Let's act. Let's hold a debate. Let's actually talk to each other. Let's make the arguments pro and con. Let's hear why we shouldn't listen to the vast majority of Americans. It is the vast majority of Democrats, it is the vast majority of Independents, and it is the vast majority of Republicans, with virtually no difference in the level of support between the Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. All of America is saying that background checks make sense. The American people deserve safety in their homes, workplaces, schools, and their communities, but all I have heard is a majority leader who says that he will only allow a bill on the floor when the President says it is OK. Well, the last time I checked the Constitution, it is our responsibility here in the Senate and House to act, not to hide behind the skirts of the President. This President, we know, has been spineless--absolutely spineless. One call from a special interest group, one meeting with the NRA, and suddenly his conviction dissipates like light rain on hot asphalt. Are we going to abdicate our responsibility to legislate to a spineless President? It is not his role to decide what bills are passed in this country. It is our responsibility here in the Senate. I believe that if Democrats and Republicans come together and honor their responsibility to act and pass the bill, the President will be in the Oval Office signing it because all of America is crying out for him to do so. It has been a long time since the bill was passed in the House. It has been 202 days. That is 202 opportunities that we have had to debate the House bill and take a vote on it. It has been 202 opportunities in which the leadership of this Chamber has failed the American people by refusing to have a debate on this floor. When I came here, not long ago, virtually any Senator could get any issue before the Senate. Suddenly, we have a dictator in the Senate. The majority leader says only the bills that he wants will be considered and only the amendments that he wants will be considered on the floor of the Senate. What happened to my Republican colleagues who believed in the right to amend and the right to legislate, who now yield to one individual in the Senate dictating what is considered in this august Chamber? We are not much of a legislative chamber if only one person can determine what is considered here on the floor of the Senate. The American people are asking for better. Let's deliver much better. Let's consider H.R. 8. Let's get it on the floor. Let's debate and let's vote. Thank you.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I rise in recognition of a friend and colleague, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, on this special occasion of his 250th speech in his ``Time to Wake up'' series, a series of speeches, as far as I know, unparalleled in the history of the Senate for addressing a major national issue, a major world issue--the issue of carbon pollution and climate chaos. As we take in a breath of air at this very moment, when you are sitting on the dais or at one of the desks or sitting on the benches, that breath of air contains air very different from the air when I was born. The air contains 33 percent more carbon. This has never happened over the lifetime of any individual in the history of the human species on this planet, and it means big changes because every molecule of carbon is grabbing heat and holding on to it. Out in Oregon that means there are warmer winters, which is wonderful for the pine beetles and bad for the pine trees. It means there is a smaller snowpack that melts earlier, on average, resulting in less irrigation water for our farmers and ranchers. It also means less healthy streams for salmon and trout. It means that a lot of the carbon will be absorbed into the ocean and become carbonic acid, and now we have to artificially buffer the Pacific Ocean seawater in order for baby oysters to survive. The list goes on, but the point is that these changes are happening not just in my State but all over our country, and not just in our country but all over the world. Most of these changes have manifested themselves within the last 10 years, that is, when we actually see what is happening. Just a couple of years ago, the sea stars off the coast of Oregon started dying, and off the coast of Washington and off the coast of California. In fact, in some areas they have been completely wiped out. The result of that is that the blue sea urchins have exploded without the sea stars to eat them. The result of that is the rapid disappearance of big kelp forests that harbor thousands of species. Who knows what impact that will have on the chain of life in the ocean or on the fisheries that are such an important part of our economy. In place after place, effect after effect, effects can be measured with a thermometer or with litmus paper for acidity or with a ruler--effects that can be seen by our ranchers, farmers, fishermen, and the forests and timber economy; effects that are felt by the 180 million Americans who suffered through an extraordinary heat wave in what is now expected to be the hottest month in human recorded history, this July. So we face a huge challenge, but we cannot respond by saying: Oh, my goodness, it is overwhelming. I want to ignore it. Or it is such a large challenge that I cannot make a difference. Instead, we have to increase our attention. We have to increase our efforts. We have to drive a faster transition off of fossil fuels that are creating the carbon to renewable fuels, and, in so doing, create millions of jobs and make sure they are good-paying jobs, and have a race to the top with project labor agreements and with good family wages and benefits. We need to make sure that we move forward in a fashion that puts jobs in places where they are needed, including in our frontline communities, in our frontier communities, as I like to call them, and in rural parts of Oregon, in our rural communities, in our former fossil fuel communities. Our former fossil fuel workers who did the hard work, took the risks, and suffered black lung should be first in line for new energy jobs in our economy. But we have no time to wait. This needs to be bipartisan. This is not blue or red. This is planet Earth. We are all on it together. We are all on this little remote planet, a long distance to our next planet, a long distance between our star and the next star. There are an estimated 2 trillion galaxies in the universe with perhaps a billion stars each, but all we have is our little blue-green orb. So let's save it. Can human civilization rise to the task? That hangs in the balance. We are not doing very well so far. But my colleague from Rhode Island has given his attention to this analysis, bringing everything to bear, saying: Pay attention and work hard. So I applaud him and thank him for his weekly speeches and his efforts to understand and establish a momentum around a solution and applaud him in this very robust form of leadership on such an important undertaking. Thank you.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my fellow, Dan Becerra, have privileges of the floor for the balance of his fellowship and that Luchanna Sagoo, my intern, have privileges for the balance of the day.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I rise to recognize two members of my team who are leaving the Senate after their years of dedicated and important work. Becca Ward will be leaving on August 7, and Meredith Booker will be leaving on Friday, July 26. Both of them joined my team as interns. They have worked their way up within Team Merkley and have made tremendous contributions to my office and to our Nation. I know they are both going to do extraordinary things in the next chapters of their lives, but, first, it is worth reflecting on their service in the U.S. Senate. Becca Ward has been an invaluable member of our team for 6 years. She started as an intern in my Oregon office, and she worked her way up to be my lead adviser on climate chaos and energy policy. Becca joined Team Merkley as a full-time staff assistant in 2013. Over the years, she rose to be a legislative correspondent and then a legislative aide. She drafted and sent responses to more than 225,000 Oregonians who were concerned about the climate and the environment. Becca's terrific work made it clear that she was capable of more, so she became my top policy adviser on the threat of climate chaos. Climate chaos presents an existential threat to our planet. Her professionalism, her substantive expertise, her creativity, and the network she created proved to be powerful tools in our working to advance a progressive climate agenda. When Becca first started working on climate change, she took the lead and the effort to protect the Arctic Ocean from oil and gas drilling, which led to the introduction of the Stop Arctic Ocean Drilling Act. Over the course of her years on this portfolio, she has helped a lot with the mission 100 bill, which aims to transition the United States into a 100-percent clean energy economy, and with my Keep It in the Ground Act, which would stop the expansion of the leasing of our Federal publicly owned properties for the production of fossil fuels. More recently, she has contributed by collating the Senate's version of the Green New Deal, which has set a high bar for progressive climate efforts in the future. Just last week, she led my staff through the introduction of the Good Jobs for 21st Century Energy Act--a bold, new bill that required extensive coordination between the environmental community and the labor community. It is designed to create good- paying, family-wage jobs and to have high labor standards--a race to the top in employment during the transition to clean energy. Becca's efforts to take on the global challenge of climate chaos hasn't been limited to the United States. She has repeatedly traveled with me and on my behalf to U.N. Conference of the Parties meetings and to other international events to engage in the diplomacy that is necessary for a true global response to a global crisis. She has shepherded my efforts through the Appropriations Committee to maintain funding for climate programs and to introduce and pass bipartisan amendments that support the Green Climate Fund. In addition to her substantive policy responsibilities, she has been an incredible team player and a remarkable individual to have with us. I think it is safe to say that Becca will likely go down in Team Merkley history as the only member of our team who is also an Olympic medalist. She has been a fantastic manager and mentor to the members of the climate team and has been a huge contributor to our office's efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in our work. I know her absence will be felt especially strongly every year when the annual cherry blossom run comes around. Becca, you might need to plan a trip to DC for next spring. While Becca is going to do incredible things for the planet in her next chapter of helping to expand a recently formed environmental organization, the Clean Energy Leadership Institute, she will be greatly missed here as a colleague, as a friend, and as a mentor to so many of us on the team. We are counting on you, Becca, to save the planet, so no pressure. We appreciate your service to Oregon and to our country, and I look forward to hearing about your efforts in your journey ahead. Now we turn to another member of Team Merkley, Meredith Booker, who is, sadly, leaving us in July--in fact, at the end of this week. Meredith embodies the heart and soul and work ethic of Team Merkley, and she will be sorely missed by everyone in the immigration, civil rights, housing, and LGBTQ rights portfolios. Meredith joined our team as an intern in August of 2016 and quickly became indispensable, joining the legislative correspondent ranks in December of 2016. In June of 2018, she was promoted to legislative aide and hasn't looked back, taking on more and more responsibility. She came into this position with a deep understanding and background in criminal justice and has brought a top-notch performance to every project and task she has touched. I think most of our office would agree. She is the best organized member of our team. Her meticulously crafted policy-tracker spreadsheet has helped our team stay on track in many areas and will remain a lasting part of her legacy here on Capitol Hill. It doesn't matter whether it is the smallest project or the biggest high-stakes moment, Meredith always gets it done and gets it done well. This work ethic has extended from volunteering countless time to pitching in with coding parties. Coding parties are when the team stays late in the evening to work to try to have a prompt response to the thousands of letters we receive from Oregonians. It stems from that to hustling to perfect every line and section of the 2019 Equality Act, resulting in a record of 47 Senate sponsors and bipartisan passage in the House of Representatives this May. That act has yet to be considered on the floor of the Senate, but it is way past time that we establish equality of opportunity for every single American. Meredith skillfully navigated working with two different legislative assistants at times--and sometimes with one LA and sometimes with no LA--without letting a single decision, memo, or project fall through the cracks. She managed reintroduction of the American Savings Act to expand high-quality retirement savings accounts to every American. She managed our annual August Breastfeeding Month resolution to recognize the importance of breastfeeding to American families and to the health of the children and the health of the mothers. Just a short time ago, when the Department of Agriculture laid out a plan to destroy Civilian Conservation Corps centers across America, she dove into the tricky and wonky world of that and proceeded to work intensely to prevent that from happening and worked successfully to do that. She threw herself into the challenge of the retirement integrity act, designed to make IRAs work more cost-effectively for working Americans rather than be a loophole for the megawealthy. Though we have always known we were lucky to have Meredith on Team Merkley, she has truly stepped up and gone above and beyond in the last year, after my June 2018 trip to Brownsville led to intensive work on the issue of family and child separation and to a lot of efforts by many parties to push back against President Trump's cruelty to migrant families. When President Trump proposed locking families up in internment camps, she led the drafting of the No Internment Camps Act to say that we will never repeat that shameful chapter in our history. When President Trump threw thousands of children into unregulated child prisons at Tornillo and Homestead, she leapt into action and worked with the immigration team to draft the Shut Down Child Prison Camps Act to end this horrific practice. Just a few weeks ago, she was instrumental to the introduction of the Stop Cruelty to Migrant Children Act, legislation to ensure we treat children with dignity and respect, and that act already has 40 Senators sponsoring it. As I have traveled to investigate the Trump administration's policies toward migrants over the last year, Meredith's codel, or congressional delegation, binders have become legendary. Whether they are assembled in support of trips to Texas or Central America--or when she joined the trip herself, as she did earlier this year when we went to the child jail in Homestead, FL--you have never seen a binder assembled with so much meticulous care and attention to detail. In addition to her many accomplishments supporting legislation and oversight trips, she worked with countless outside groups to organize a hugely successful hearing through the Democratic Policy and Communications Center, or DPCC, on family separation in June of 2018. She reprised that role this week--in fact, today--working to help organize another DPCC hearing on the treatment of children at the southern U.S. border. It occurred just earlier this afternoon, with the focus on stopping the cruel treatment of migrant children. She has done all this without letting the effort to respond to Oregonians' letters fall through the cracks. She probably holds the record for our team responding to constituent mail, having responded to more than 256,000 emails in less than 3 years and, in doing so, created 350 unique letters for those responses. That means, on average, that Meredith has created nearly 150 letters per year and sent approximately 100,000 responses per year. That is a lot of communicating with folks back home. America is very lucky that Meredith is taking her talents to the legal arena. She will be starting at Loyola University of New Orleans this fall, working toward her law degree. Knowing how much she has done without a law degree--probably more than most fully accredited lawyers--I know the world is going to benefit enormously as she pursues that degree and puts it to work in the fight for justice and equality. The world of justice and equality will benefit just as we experience the loss of her talents here in the Senate. Meredith, we are tremendously grateful for your contributions and will deeply miss you on Team Merkley. We will absolutely miss you both. You leave a tremendous hole in our team. Your final assignment is to make sure that we have some very talented people to carry on the terrific work you have been doing. Thank you.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, as our Founders worked to design what would become the Constitution of the United States, they had certain core principles in mind--certain principles that were the exact opposite of the way government worked in Europe. They did not want to see America be a land run by a dictator or a King. They wanted to make sure that power was distributed between voting Americans, a principle Jefferson called the equal voice principle, because distributed power among the people would lead to laws by and for the people, not laws by and for the powerful. They had another principle, and it was the opposite of what existed in Europe, where a King and perhaps the King's circle were above the law, not accountable to any core principles of conduct or any rules. What they did in their lives as rulers in that fashion just simply was accountable to no one. But our Constitution had a different vision. The goal was to have everyone in America accountable to the law--that we are all in this together. No one is a King. No one is a dictator. That vision is really embodied in four simple words carved into the facade of the doors of the Supreme Court: Equal Justice Under Law. If you stand here in the Johnson Room, just across the hallway, and you look out the window toward the Supreme Court, you see this: Equal Justice Under Law. It is a principle so foundational to our vision of a citizen-run nation, a nation by and for the people, that it was the source of my first political act. If memory serves me well, I was a junior in high school. I read an article in the evening newspaper. Now, at that point, many cities in the country had a morning newspaper, which was more of the business community's newspaper, and an evening newspaper, which was more the workers' newspaper, which made sense. For my father, a union machinist, his work started at 7 in the morning and concluded 9 hours later at 4 in the afternoon. He would come home, get the evening newspaper, read it, have dinner, and watch the evening news on television. In that newspaper that evening, there was an article about Spiro Agnew, our former Vice President. He was convicted of taking $100,000 in bribes, but what was his penalty? His penalty was a $10,000 fine. I was enraged: Like, what? People get sent to prison for stealing a loaf of bread, and the Vice President illegally took $100,000 and gets to keep 90 percent of it. What kind of a story is that to America, that if you are wealthy and powerful, you can commit crimes and keep the vast share of what you have taken in that crime? So I wrote an outraged letter to the newspaper, and the newspaper published it. Equal Justice Under Law--it is a very important principle to our Nation. But today we face a political crisis--a crisis about whether we have a President who is above the law, and that somehow this phrase, this principle, the foundation of our country, doesn't apply to this particular President. If that stands, then we will have lost a core principle of our democratic Republic. Tomorrow we are going to have testimony from former Special Counsel Mueller in the House of Representatives. He is scheduled for some 3 hours before the Judiciary Committee of the House and another couple of hours with the Intelligence Committee. He will be following up to share insights and answer questions related to this hefty document: Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election. There is a lot in this report. You wouldn't know that if you just listened to our Attorney General, because our current Attorney General Barr said there is nothing here--nothing in this. That is not the case, and I have come to the floor tonight to make that absolutely clear. Here is the easiest way to summarize it. We received an open letter from more than 1,000 former prosecutors evaluating what is in this hefty book. It says: We are former federal prosecutors. We served under both Republican and Democratic administrations at different levels . . . line attorneys, supervisors, special prosecutors, United States Attorneys, and senior officials at the Department of Justice. The offices in which we served were small, medium, and large; urban, suburban, and rural; and located in all parts of our country. Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice. The Mueller report describes several acts that satisfy all of the elements for an obstruction charge, conduct that obstructed or attempted to obstruct the truth-finding process, as to which the evidence of corrupt intent and connection to pending proceedings is overwhelming. These include: The President's efforts to fire Mueller and to falsify evidence about that effort; The President's efforts to limit the scope of Mueller's investigation to exclude his conduct; and The President's efforts to prevent witnesses from cooperating with the investigators probing him and his campaign. This statement goes on in some detail, but the point that needs to be repeated is this point: ``Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report would, in the case of any other person . . . result in multiple felony charges.'' In other words, 1,000--in fact, more than 1,000--Federal prosecutors said, in their minds, reading just this report, that the President has committed multiple crimes. What happened to the principle of equal justice under the law? There are 1,000 Federal prosecutors who said that anyone else--you or you or you--would be indicted for felonies as a result of the conduct that is in this report. But the President has not been indicted. Why has he not been indicted? It is simply this: An indictment has to stem from the Department of Justice, which is now run by an Attorney General who has dedicated himself to preventing the President from being held accountable rather than to the principle of equal justice under the law. No one who does not believe in the founding principle of our Nation should ever serve as Attorney General of the United States. Yet he serves and refuses to conduct his responsibilities under the Constitution. That is why there is no choice but for the House to act. In the failure of Attorney General Barr to honor the principle that our Nation was founded on, equal justice under the law, the only recourse is the House of Representatives. Down this hallway, through these double doors, not far away, is the House of Representatives, which is charged under the Constitution with determining if a President has committed high crimes and misdemeanors. While there may be a discussion of exactly what is meant by high crimes and misdemeanors, surely they entail acts of obstruction of justice for which any other American would have been indicted. Surely, felony crimes qualify. The House doesn't determine guilt or innocence. The House plays the role of Federal prosecutors who are deciding whether to indict. Is the evidence sufficient to say it is credible and substantial that the individual conducted a felony, a crime? The answer by 1,000 Federal prosecutors is absolutely. It can't be done by the Supreme Court. It can't be done by the judiciary as long as the Attorney General is blocking it. It can be done only by the House. That is why the House has to act now and has to proceed to put together a committee on impeachment or this principle means nothing. Then it would come to this Chamber to hold the actual trial. But there will be no trial if there is no indictment. There is no trial in the Senate Chamber if there is no impeachment, and there is no credibility to this principle in America if the House doesn't act. So I call upon the House to convene that committee and to conduct that impeachment inquiry, and if they come out of that inquiry with 1,000 Federal prosecutors, they must act and vote to impeach. This cannot be about politics: Is it a smart thing to do? How will it affect the next election? Will it put our Presidential candidates in a strange space? Let's do an opinion poll of America. No, absolutely not. Our institutions are under assault, and we have a responsibility because we took an oath of office to the Constitution to defend this principle. The House took the same oath, and they have a responsibility to defend that principle. I am going to take the time to lay out four of those charges of obstruction justice just to set the stage for tomorrow. This is what is referred to as a ``heat map.'' It lays out different cases in which the President interfered with the judicial process, and then it proceeds to ask: Is there substantial evidence of the three things that are needed as a foundation for saying that a felony crime has been committed? The first is, was there an obstructive act? The second is, was there a nexus to an issue? The third is, was there criminal intent? There are four cases in which capable individuals have reviewed the Mueller report and have said yes on all three--meaning, each of these is red. Let's take a look at this. First, let's turn to this issue of efforts to fire Mueller. I am reading now from page 87 of this hefty report on the investigation, the special counsel's report. On page 87, under ``Analysis,'' it proceeds to say: ``In analyzing the President's direction to McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed, the following evidence is relevant to the elements of obstruction of justice.'' Then he walks through each of these three pieces: Obstructive act. As with the President's firing of Comey, the attempt to remove the Special Counsel would qualify as an obstructive act if it would naturally obstruct the investigation and any grand jury proceedings that might flow from the inquiry. Even if the removal of the lead prosecutor would not prevent the investigation from continuing under a new appointee, a factfinder would need to consider whether the act had the potential to delay further action in the investigation, chill the actions of any replacement Special Counsel, or otherwise impede the investigation. A threshold question is whether the President in fact directed McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed. After news organizations reported that in June 2017 the President had ordered McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed, the President publicly disputed these accounts, and privately told McGahn that he had simply wanted McGahn to bring conflicts of interest to the Department of Justice's attention. . . . Some of the President's specific language that McGahn recalled from the calls is consistent with that explanation. Substantial evidence, however, supports the conclusion that the President went further and in fact directed McGahn to call Rosenstein to have the Special Counsel removed. First, McGahn's clear recollection was that the President directed him to tell Rosenstein not only that conflicts existed but also that ``Mueller has to go.'' McGahn is a credible witness with no motive to lie or exaggerate given the position he held in the White House. McGahn spoke with the President twice and understood the directive the same way both times, making it unlikely that he misheard or misinterpreted the President's request. In response to that request, McGahn decided to quit because he did not want to participate in events that he described as akin to the Saturday Night Massacre. That is a reference to Watergate. He called his lawyer, drove to the White House, packed up his office, prepared to submit a resignation letter with his chief of staff, told Priebus that the President had asked him to ``do crazy shit,'' and informed Priebus and Bannon that he was leaving. Those acts would be a highly unusual reaction to a request to convey information to the Department of Justice. Second, in the days before the calls to McGahn, the President, through his counsel, had already brought the asserted conflicts to the attention of the Department of Justice. Accordingly, the President had no reason to have McGahn call Rosenstein that weekend to raise conflicts issues that already had been raised. Third, the President's sense of urgency and repeated requests to McGahn to take immediate action on a weekend-- ``You gotta do this. You gotta call Rod.''--support McGahn's recollection that the President wanted the Department of Justice to take action to remove the Special Counsel. Had the President instead sought only to have the Department of Justice re-examine asserted conflicts to evaluate whether they posed an ethical bar, it would have been unnecessary to set the process in motion on a Saturday and to make repeated calls to McGahn. Finally, the President had discussed ``knocking out Mueller'' and raised conflicts of interest in a May 23, 2017 call to McGahn, reflecting that the President connected the conflicts to a plan to remove the Special Counsel. And in the days leading up to June 17, 2017, the President made clear to Priebus and Bannon, who then told Ruddy, that the President was considering terminating the Special Counsel. Also, during this time period, the President reached out to Christie to get his thoughts on firing the Special Counsel. This evidence shows that the President was not just seeking an examination of whether conflicts existed but instead was looking to use asserted conflicts as a way to terminate the Special Counsel. So those are the obstructive acts, efforts to fire special counsel Mueller. Nexus to an official proceeding [the second test]. To satisfy the proceeding requirement, it would be necessary to establish a nexus between the President's act of seeking to terminate the Special Counsel and a pending or foreseeable grand jury proceeding. Substantial evidence indicates that by June 17, 2017, the President knew his conduct was under investigation by a federal prosecutor who could present any evidence of federal crimes to a grand jury. On May 23, 2017, McGahn explicitly warned the President that his ``biggest exposure'' was not his act of firing Comey but his ``other contacts'' and ``calls,'' and his ``ask re: Flynn.'' By early June, it was widely reported in the media that federal prosecutors had issued grand jury subpoenas in the Flynn inquiry and that the Special Counsel had taken over the Flynn investigation. On June 9, 2017, the Special Counsel's Office informed the White House that investigators would be interviewing intelligence agency officials who allegedly had been asked by the President to push back against the Russia investigation. On June 14, 2017, news outlets began reporting that the President himself was being investigated for obstruction of justice. Based on widespread reporting, the President knew that such an investigation could include his request for Comey's loyalty; his request that Comey ``let[] Flynn go''; his outreach to Coats and Rogers; and his termination of Comey and statement to the Russian Foreign Minister that the termination had relieved ``great pressure'' related to Russia. And on June 16, 2017, the day before he directed McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed, the President publicly acknowledged that his conduct was under investigation by a federal prosecutor, tweeting, ``I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director!'' That covers the nexus to an official proceeding, but what about this third issue, this issue of intent? Reading again from the special counsel's report evaluating this, going to the issue of intent on efforts to fire Mueller: Substantial evidence indicates that the President's attempts to remove the Special Counsel were linked to the Special Counsel's oversight of investigations that involved the President's conduct--and, most immediately, to reports that the President was being investigated for potential obstruction of justice. Before the President terminated Comey, the President considered it critically important that he was not under investigation and that the public not erroneously think he was being investigated. As described in Volume II . . . advisors perceived the President, while he was drafting the Comey termination letter, to be concerned more than anything else about getting out that he was not personally under investigation. When the President learned of the appointment of the Special Counsel on May 17, 2017, he expressed further concern about the investigation, saying ``[t]his is the end of my Presidency.'' The President also faulted Sessions for recusing, saying ``you were supposed to protect me.'' On June 14, 2017, when the Washington Post reported that the Special Counsel was investigating the President for obstruction of justice, the President was facing what he had wanted to avoid: a criminal investigation into his own conduct that was the subject of widespread media attention. The evidence indicates that news of the obstruction investigation prompted the President to call McGahn and seek to have the Special Counsel removed. By mid-June, the Department of Justice had already cleared the Special Counsel's service and the President's advisors had told him that the claimed conflicts of interest were ``silly'' and did not provide a basis to remove the Special Counsel. On June 13, 2017, the Acting Attorney General testified before Congress that no good cause for removing the Special Counsel existed, and the President dictated a press statement to Sanders saying he had no intention of firing the Special Counsel. But the next day, the media reported that the President was under investigation for obstruction of justice and the Special Counsel was interviewing witnesses about events related to possible obstruction--spurring the President to write critical tweets about the Special Counsel's investigation. The President called McGahn at home that night and then called him on Saturday from Camp David. The evidence accordingly indicates that news that an obstruction investigation had been opened is what led the President to call McGahn to have the Special Counsel terminated. There also is evidence that the President knew that he should not have made those calls to McGahn. The President made the calls to McGahn after McGahn had specifically told the President that the White House Counsel's Office--and McGahn himself--could not be involved in pressing conflict claims and that the President should consult with his personal counsel if he wished to raise conflicts. Instead of relying on his personal counsel to submit the conflicts claims, the President sought to use his official powers to remove the Special Counsel. And after the media reported on the President's actions, he denied that he had ever ordered McGahn to have the Special Counsel terminated and made repeated efforts to have McGahn deny the story, as discussed in Volume II. . . . Those denials are contrary to the evidence and suggest the President's awareness that the direction to McGahn could be seen as improper. So there it is--obstruction, a nexus to an investigation, and criminal intent. Those are the efforts to fire Mueller. That is the first one laid out in this quote that I am reading from, the first one that I am conveying to you all, and there are four of these I am going to go through to set the stage for understanding the gravity of what is happening in the United States. I think this conversation has been going on for so long that people have lost sight of the egregious nature and the criminal nature of the President's conduct--at least the degree laid out in exquisite detail, as I am reading it to you--and that more than 1,000 former Federal prosecutors who have looked at these top four issues and others have said that anyone else would be indicted, meaning that in their minds, these acts met the three tests for felony conduct; that is, in their view, the President committed crimes. So the second issue is efforts to curtail the Mueller investigation. The first was to fire Mueller, and the second was to curtail the investigation. I will start reading the analysis laid out starting on page 97, continuing through page 98. In analyzing the President's efforts to have Lewandowski deliver a message directing Sessions to publicly announce that the Special Counsel investigation would be confined to future election interference, the following evidence is relevant to the elements of obstruction of justice. Looking first to the obstructive act. The President's effort to send Sessions a message through Lewandowski would qualify as an obstructive act if it would naturally obstruct the investigation in any grand jury proceedings that might flow from the inquiry. The President sought to have Sessions announce that the President ``shouldn't have a Special Prosecutor/Counsel'' and that Sessions was going to ``meet with the Special Prosecutor to explain this is very unfair and let the Special Prosecutor move forward with investigating election meddling for future elections so that nothing can happen in future elections.'' The President wanted Sessions to disregard his recusal from the investigation, which had followed from a former DOJ ethics review, and have Sessions declare that he knew ``for a fact'' that ``there were no Russians involved in the campaign'' because he ``was there.'' The President further directed that Sessions should explain that the President should not be subject to an investigation ``because he hasn't done anything wrong.'' Taken together, the President's directives indicate that Sessions was being instructed to tell the Special Counsel to end the existing investigation into the President and his campaign, with the Special Counsel being permitted to ``move forward with investigating election meddling for future elections.'' So the obstructive act was perceived to box in the Mueller investigation so it wouldn't touch on the President. That is an obstruction of justice. But is there a nexus to an official proceeding? That is next addressed in the Mueller report as follows: As described above, by the time of the President's initial one-on-one meeting with Lewandowski on June 19, 2017, the existence of a grand jury investigation supervised by the Special Counsel was public knowledge. By the time of the President's follow-up meeting with Lewandowski-- I bet you would like to know what comes next, but take a look here. I can't tell you because it has been blacked out. So whatever it was, it created a key point about the nexus to the official proceeding. The section goes on after the blacked out section: To satisfy the nexus requirement, it would be necessary to show that limiting the Special Counsel's investigation would have the natural and probable effect of impeding that grand jury proceeding. So nexus and substantial evidence. Let's go to intent. Again, I am reading from page 97: Substantial evidence indicates that the President's effort to have Sessions limit the scope of the Special Counsel's investigation to future election interference was intended to prevent further investigative scrutiny of the President's and his campaign's conduct. That sums it up. Then it goes on in some greater detail: As previously described, see Volume II . . . the President knew that the Russian investigation was focused in part on his campaign, and he perceived allegations of Russian interference to cast doubt on the legitimacy of his election. The President further knew that the investigation had broadened to include his own conduct and whether he had obstructed justice. Those investigations would not proceed if the Special Counsel's jurisdiction were limited to future election interference only. The timing and circumstances of the President's actions support the conclusion that he sought that result. The President's initial direction that Sessions should limit the Special Counsel's investigation came just 2 days after the President ordered McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed, which itself followed public reports that the President was personally under investigation for obstruction of justice. The sequence of those events raises an inference that after seeking to terminate the Special Counsel, the President sought to exclude his and his campaign's conduct from the investigation's scope. The President raised the matter with Lewandowski again on July 19, 2017, just days after emails and information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and senior campaign officials had been publicly disclosed, generating substantial media coverage and investigative interest. The manner in which the President acted provides additional evidence of his intent. Rather than rely on official channels, the President met with Lewandowski alone in the Oval Office. The President selected a loyal ``devotee'' outside the White House to deliver the message, supporting an inference that he was working outside White House channels, including McGahn, who had previously resisted contacting the Department of Justice about the Special Counsel. The President also did not contact the Acting Attorney General, who had just testified publicly that there was no cause to remove the Special Counsel. Instead, the President tried to use Sessions to restrict and redirect the Special Counsel's investigation when Sessions was recused and could not properly take any action on it. The July 19, 2017 events provide further evidence of the President's intent. The President followed up with Lewandowski in a separate one-on-one meeting one month after he first dictated the message for Sessions, demonstrating he still sought to pursue the request. And just hours after Lewandowski assured the President that the message would soon be delivered to Sessions, the President gave an unplanned interview to the New York Times in which he publicly attacked Sessions and raised questions about his job security. Four days later, on July 22, 2017, the President directed Priebus to obtain Sessions' resignation. That evidence could raise an inference that the President wanted Sessions to realize that his job might be on the line as he evaluated whether to comply with the President's direction that Sessions publicly announce that, notwithstanding his recusal, he was going to confine the Special Counsel's investigation to future election interference. It is laid out in great detail--an obstructive act, a nexus to an official proceeding, and the issue of intent. This did not happen by accident--not on the efforts to fire Mueller and not on the efforts to curtail the Mueller investigation. Now we will go to the third major point here--the order to McGahn to deny the attempt to fire Mueller. This analysis in the special prosecutor's report starts on page 118. In analyzing the President's efforts to have McGahn deny that he had been ordered to have the Special Counsel removed, the following evidence is relevant to the elements of obstruction of justice. First, obstructive act. The President's repeated efforts to get McGahn to create a record denying that the President had directed him to remove the Special Counsel would qualify as an obstructive act if it had a natural tendency to constrain McGahn from testifying truthfully or to undermine his credibility as a potential witness if he testified consistently with his memory rather than with what the record said. There is some evidence that at the time the New York Times and Washington Post stories were published in late January 2018, the President believed the stories were wrong and that he had never told McGhan to have Rosenstein remove the Special Counsel. The President correctly understood that McGhan had not told the President directly that he planned to resign. In addition, the President told Priebus and Porter that he had not sought to terminate the Special Counsel, and in the Oval Office meeting with McGhan, the President said, ``I never said to fire Mueller. I never said `fire.' '' That evidence could indicate that the President was not attempting to persuade McGhan to change his story but instead offering his own but different recollection of the substance of his June 2017 conversations with McGhan and McGhan's reaction to them. Other evidence cuts against that understanding of the President's conduct. That is an important line to understand. Is it possible that the President simply had a different recollection? And the answer in the special prosecutor's report is this: ``Other evidence cuts against that understanding.'' The special counsel continues: As previously described, see Volume II . . . substantial evidence supports McGhan's account that the President had directed him to have the Special Counsel removed, including the timing and context of the President's directive; the manner in which McGhan reacted; and the fact that the President had been told the conflicts were insubstantial, were be being considered by the Department of Justice, and should be raised with the President's personal counsel rather than brought to McGhan. In addition, the President's subsequent denials that he had told McGhan to have the Special Counsel removed were carefully worded. When first asked about the New York Times story, the President said, ``Fake news, folks. Fake news. A typical New York Times fake story.'' And when the President spoke with McGhan in the Oval Office, he focused on whether he had used the word ``fire,'' saying, ``I never said to fire Mueller. I never said ``fire.'' He then said: ``Did I say the word `fire'? The President's assertion in the Oval Office meeting that he had never directed McGhan to have the Special Counsel removed thus runs counter to the evidence. In addition, even if the President sincerely disagreed with McGhan's memory of the June 17, 2017 events, the evidence indicates that the President knew by the time of the Oval Office meeting that McGhan's account differed and that McGhan was firm in his views. Shortly after the story broke, the President's counsel told McGhan's counsel that the President wanted McGhan to make a statement denying he had been asked to fire the Special Counsel, but McGhan responded through his counsel that that aspect of the story was accurate and he therefore could not comply with the President's request. The President then directed Sanders to tell McGhan to correct the story, but McGhan told her he would not do so because the story was accurate in reporting on the President's order. Consistent with that position, McGhan never issued a correction. More than a week later, the President brought up the issue again with Porter, made comments indicating that the President thought McGhan had leaked the story, and directed Porter to have McGhan create a record denying that the President had tried to fire the Special Counsel. At that point, the President said he might ``have to get rid of'' McGhan if McGhan did not comply. McGhan again refused and told Porter, as he told Sanders and as his counsel had told the President's counsel, that the President had in fact ordered him to have Rosenstein remove the Special Counsel. That evidence indicates that by the time of the Oval Office meeting the President was aware that McGhan did not think the story was false and did not want to issue a statement or create a written record denying facts that McGhan believed to be true. The President nevertheless persisted and asked McGhan to repudiate facts that McGhan had repeatedly said were accurate. So that is the evidence of the order to McGhan to deny that he had been instructed to fire Mueller by the President. But is there a nexus to an official proceeding--the second test? The special counsel's report continues to address that issue. Nexus to an official proceeding. By January 2018, the Special Counsel's use of a grand jury had been further confirmed by the return of several indictments. The President also was aware that the Special Counsel was investigating obstruction-related events because, among other reasons, on January 8, 2018, the Special Counsel's office provided his counsel with a detailed list of topics for a possible interview with the President. The President knew that McGhan had personal knowledge in many of the events the Special Counsel was investigating and that McGhan had already been interviewed by Special Counsel investigators. And in the Oval Office meeting, the President indicated he knew that McGhan had told the Special Counsel's Office about the President's effort to remove the Special Counsel. The President challenged McGhan for disclosing that information and for taking notes that he viewed as creating unnecessary legal exposure. That evidence indicates the President's awareness that the June 17, 2017 events were relevant to the Special Counsel's investigation and any grand jury investigation that might grow out of it. To establish a nexus, it would be necessary to show that the President's actions would have the natural tendency to affect such a proceeding or that they would hinder, delay or prevent the communication of information to investigators. Because McGhan had spoken to Special Counsel investigators before January 2018, the President could not have been seeking to influence his prior statements in those interviews. But because McGhan had repeatedly spoken to investigators and the obstruction inquiry was not complete, it was foreseeable that he would be interviewed again on obstruction-related topics. If the President were focused solely on a press strategy in seeking to have McGhan refute the New York Times article, a nexus to a proceeding or to further investigative interviews would not be shown. But the President's efforts to have McGhan write a letter ``for our records'' approximately ten days after the story had come out--well past the typical time to issue a correction for a news story--indicates the President was not focused solely on press strategy, but instead likely contemplated the ongoing investigation and any proceedings arising from it. So that is the nexus. And now to intent. Substantial evidence indicates that in repeatedly urging McGhan to dispute that he was ordered to have the Special Counsel terminated, the President acted for the purpose of influencing McGhan's account in order to deflect or prevent further scrutiny of the President's conduct towards the investigation. That summarizes the intent. Let me just repeat a piece of that. Substantial evidence indicates that in repeatedly urging McGhan to dispute that he was ordered to have the Special Counsel terminated-- In other words, his repeated efforts to have McGhan lie-- the President acted for the purpose of influencing McGhan's account in order to deflect or prevent further scrutiny of the President's conduct. . . . Several facts support that conclusion. The President made repeated attempts to get McGhan to change his story. Not just one, but repeated attempts. As described above, by the time of the last attempt, the evidence suggests that the President had been told on multiple occasions that McGhan believed the President had ordered him to have the Special Counsel terminated. McGhan interpreted his encounter with the President in the Oval Office as an attempt to test his mettle and see how committed he was to his memory of what had occurred. The President had already laid the groundwork for pressing McGhan to alter his account by telling Porter that it might be necessary to fire McGhan if he did not deny the story, and Porter relayed that statement to McGhan. Additional evidence of the President's intent might be gleaned from the fact that his counsel was sufficiently alarmed by the prospect of the President's meeting with McGhan that he called McGhan's counsel and said that McGhan could not resign no matter what happened in the Oval Office that day. The President's counsel was well aware of McGhan's resolve not to issue what he believed to be a false account of events despite the President's request. Finally, as noted above, the President brought up the Special Counsel investigation in his Oval Office meeting with McGhan and criticized him for telling this Office about the June 17, 2017 events. The President's statements reflect his understanding--and his displeasure--that those events would be part of an obstruction-of-justice inquiry. So there it is--the intent, all laid out very, very clearly in this report--obstructive acts, a nexus to an official proceeding, and the clear intent. So let's turn to the fourth issue: Conduct toward Manafort. This can be found on page 131 of the special counsel's report. In analyzing the President's conduct towards Flynn, Manafort-- And a third person who has been blacked out in the record-- the following evidence is relevant to the elements of obstruction of justice: Section a, Obstructive act. Here we are addressing if there is evidence--is there substantial evidence--of the President's conduct toward Manafort. With respect to Manafort, there is evidence that the President's actions had the potential to influence Manafort's decision whether to cooperate with the government. The President and his personal counsel made repeated statements suggesting that a pardon was a possibility for Manafort, while also making it clear that the President did not want Manafort to ``flip'' and cooperate with the government. On June 15, 2018, the day the judge presiding over Manafort's D.C. case was considering whether to revoke his bail, the President said that he ``felt badly'' for Manafort and stated, ``I think a lot of it is very unfair.'' And when asked about a pardon for Manafort, the President said, ``I do want to see people treated fairly. That's what it's all about.'' Later that day, after Manafort's bail was revoked, the President called it a ``tough sentence'' that was ``Very unfair!'' Two days later, the President's personal counsel stated that individuals involved in the Special Counsel's investigation could receive a pardon ``if in fact the [P]resident and his advisors . . . come to the conclusion that you have been treated unfairly''--using language that paralleled how the President had already described the treatment of Manafort. Those statements, combined with the President's commendation of Manafort for being a ``brave man'' who ``refused to `break,' '' suggested that a pardon was a more likely possibility if Manafort continued not to cooperate with the government. And while Manafort eventually pleaded guilty pursuant to a cooperation agreement, he was found to have violated the agreement by lying to investigators. The President's public statements during the Manafort trial, including during jury deliberations, also had the potential to influence the trial jury. On the second day of trial, for example, the President called the prosecution a ``terrible situation'' and a ``hoax'' that ``continues to stain our country'' and referred to Manafort as a ``Reagan/ Dole darling'' who was ``serving solitary confinement'' even though he was ``convicted of nothing.'' Those statements were widely picked up by the press. While jurors were instructed not to watch or read news stories about the case and are presumed to follow those instructions, the President's statements during the trial generated substantial media coverage that could have reached jurors if they happened to see the statements or learned about them from others. And the President's statements during deliberations of Manafort ``happens to be a very good person'' and that ``it's very sad what they've done to Paul Manafort'' had the potential to influence jurors who learned of the statements, which the President made just as jurors were considering whether to convict or acquit Manafort. Let me point out here that I see in this book substantial sections have been blocked out under No. 8, the Obstructive Act and under section C, the Intent. In spite of part of that section being blacked out, that was the substantial evidence of the effort to influence Paul Manafort and obstruct justice. Nexus to an official proceeding. The President's actions towards Flynn and Manafort and a third person blacked out in this book appeared to have been connected to pending or anticipated official proceedings involving each individual. The President's conduct towards Flynn principally occurred when both were under criminal investigation by the Special Counsel's Office and press reports speculated about whether they would cooperate with the Special Counsel's investigation. And the President's conduct toward Manafort was directly connected to the official proceedings involving him. The President made statements about Manafort and the charges against him during Manafort's criminal trial. And the President's comments about the prospect of Manafort ``flipping'' occurred when it was clear the Special Counsel continued to oversee grand jury proceedings. So there is the nexus laid out very clearly in this report on this effort to influence Manafort's testimony. And then to intent, page 132. Evidence concerning the President's conduct towards Manafort indicates that the President intended to encourage Manafort to not cooperate with the government. Before Manafort was convicted, the President repeatedly stated that Manafort had been treated unfairly. One day after Manafort was convicted on eight felony charges and potentially faced a lengthy prison term, the President said that Manafort was a ``brave man'' for refusing to ``break'' and that ``flipping'' ``almost ought to be outlawed.'' At the same time, although the President privately told aides he did not like Manafort, he publicly called Manafort ``a good man'' and said he had a ``wonderful family.'' And when the President was asked whether he was asked whether he was considering a pardon for Manafort, the President did not respond directly and instead said he had ``great respect for what [Manafort]'s done, in terms of what he's gone through.'' The President added that ``some of the charges they threw against him, every consultant, every lobbyist in Washington probably does.'' In light of the President's counsel's previous statements that the investigations ``might get cleaned up with some presidential pardons'' and that a pardon would be possible if the President come[s] to the conclusion that you have been treated unfairly.'' The evidence supports the inference that the President intended Manafort to believe that he could receive a pardon, which would make cooperation with the government as a means of a lesser sentence unnecessary. To read that again: The evidence supports the inference that the President intended Manafort to believe that he could receive a pardon which would make cooperation with the government as a means of obtaining a lesser sentence unnecessary. The special counsel continues under intent: We also examined the evidence of the President's intent making public statements about Manafort at the beginning of his trial and when the jury was deliberating. Some evidence supports a conclusion the President intended, at least in part, to influence the jury. The trial generated widespread publicity, and as the jury began to deliberate, commentators suggested that an acquittal would add pressure to end the Special Counsel's investigation. By publicly stating on the second day of deliberations that Manafort ``happens to be a very good person'' and that ``it's very sad what they've done to Paul Manafort'' right after calling the Special Counsel's investigation a ``rigged witch hunt,'' the President's statements could, if they reached jurors, have the natural tendency to engender sympathy for Manafort among jurors, and a factfinder could infer that the President intended that result. But there are alternative explanations to the President's comments, including that he genuinely felt sorry for Manafort or that his goal was not to influence the jury but influence public opinion. The President's comments also could have been intended to continue sending a message to Manafort that a pardon was possible. As described above, the President made his comments about Manafort being ``a very good person'' immediately after declining to answer questions about whether he would pardon Manafort. You might be very interested in the additional information about intent, but I can't read it to you because it is blacked out. Nonetheless, in that previous paragraph, it is clearly declared the evidence supports the inference the President intended Manafort to believe he could receive a pardon, which would make cooperation with the government as a means of obtaining a lesser sentence unnecessary. Those are the first four cases of obstruction of justice in which a special prosecutor lays out substantial evidence on the obstructive act, on the nexus, and on the intent on the efforts to fire Mueller, on the efforts to curtail the Mueller investigation, on the order to McGahn to deny that he had attempted to fire Mueller, and on the effort to influence Manafort by alluding to a potential pardon. There is a lot more in this book--many other cases that, in the eyes of analysts, isn't as strong as the first four, but the evidence could support it, whether it is substantial evidence, but still very serious stories of efforts to obstruct justice. Ordinary Americans might say: If, in fact, the special prosecutor found all three standards met on at least four of these cases, then why hasn't the President been indicted? Well, indictment has to come from the executive branch and the Attorney General, who runs the Department of Justice, who isn't going to do that. There is a policy within the White House that basically says a President can't be indicted. Pull out your Constitution and try to find where the Constitution says that a President can't be indicted. Try to find that because it is not in there. ``Equal justice under law.'' That is what our Constitution is about, not the case of a King who is above the law, so we have a democratic republic, if we can keep it. But that means that we are in this principle ``equal justice under law,'' and if the special prosecutor is not going to make recommendations based on the White House executive branch principle that a President can't be indicted and the Department of Justice is not going to do it, there is only one option, and that is the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives has the huge responsibility of defending this principle ``equal justice under law.'' No one else is going to do it. It can't be done here in the Senate because the Constitution says the responsibility is in the House of Representatives to decide whether to impeach a President. There has been a lot of discussion of politics: Is this a smart thing to do? Does it take up too much time? How will people respond? I can tell you this, if the House fails to act, then this ``equal justice under law'' means nothing. This book is full of events that a thousand former Federal prosecutors have told us constitutes criminal conduct, and that is why the House must, in defending their oath of office to the Constitution, bring a committee together and defend the Constitution--the vision-- that no one in the United States of America, not even the President, is above the law. It is time--past time--to convene impeachment proceedings.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, tonight I am rising to talk about legislation that I have introduced that now has 40 Senators sponsoring it. It is called the Stop Cruelty to Migrant Children Act. I think all of us in America have seen so many stories of refugee children being treated in a horrific manner at the border or beyond the border in a system of child migrant prisons. Just recently, we have had the story about 3-year old Sofia and her parents--Tania and Joseph--proceeded to experience horrific circumstances in which a gang killed Tania's mother and her sister-in- law. A note was posted on the door that they would be killed, that they had 45 minutes to leave. I imagine all of us would flee with our children under those circumstances. They made it to the border of the United States. They did get through an initial hearing which is designed to determine if there is credible fear of return, and that sets the stage then for an asylum hearing. But we are shipping folks back into Mexico to await that asylum hearing. In this case, the little girl in the family--she has a heart problem, and she had suffered a heart attack--a 3-year old girl--yet we sent that family back into Mexico without friends, without family, without funds. It is only because a Member of Congress heard about it--a Member in the House, Congresswoman Escobar--and intervened, that the little girl was allowed to remain in the United States. Even then, the administration said you--the little girl, the 3-year old--you have to choose between which parent will be in the U.S. and which one will be sent back without funds, family, and friends into Mexico with the rest of the children. It is a horrific situation to split the family in this process, horrific to ask a little girl to have to decide who would be in the safety of the U.S. and which parent would be sent back into very dangerous territory across the border. This is just one example out of thousands. President John F. Kennedy said: ``This country has always served as a lantern in the dark for those who love freedom but are persecuted, in misery, or in need.'' If President Kennedy were speaking today, he couldn't say those words because today our country, under the current leadership, is not conducting itself in a manner that serves as a ``lantern in the dark for those who love freedom but are persecuted, in misery, or in need.'' Instead, we have a new policy. It is a policy that was articulated by John Kelly just weeks after the administration took office. The policy was that if we inflict pain and suffering on refugees, it will deter immigration. The strategy of deliberately inflicting pain on refugees is not supportable under any moral code, under any religious tradition, or under any system of ethics. Shortly after John Kelly, who was then head of Homeland Security, expressed this, there was a reaction. This was in the early months of 2017. As a result, they took the program underground for a little more than a year, until June of 2018, when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a speech called ``Zero Tolerance.'' Six months out from an election, it is not unusual to have an Attorney General give a speech in which getting tough on crime is emphasized. But as you read the details of that speech, you realize this wasn't about getting tough on crime. This was about returning explicitly to the vision that John Kelly had laid out originally of tormenting refugees in order to discourage immigration. That is a whole different thing. It is not zero tolerance; it is zero humanity. Every one of us can picture relatives coming to this country and to this border and would want them to be treated with respect and decency as they pursue asylum. Most people do not win their asylum hearings. The rate of success is different in different districts. In some, it is 15 percent. In some, it is 20 percent. In some, it is 30 percent. But the burden of proof is on the refugee. The burden of proof is difficult to establish, so most people do not succeed if they do not have extensive evidence to make their case on the fear of return. The initial hearing is easy in the sense that you simply have to assert that you have a credible fear based on your story, but in the asylum hearing, you have to prove it. You carry the burden of proof. Is it too much for us to continue the vision of treating those fleeing war and those fleeing famine, those fleeing conflict and violence--is it too much for this America that we love to treat them with decency and respect as they go through the adjudication process for asylum? It is not. In fact, that has been the vision of America; that has been the process in America to say that if you are truly fleeing these horrific circumstances, then we light a torch to shine your way forward. I cannot understand how it is possible that the administration persists in this strategy of traumatizing children. It starts at the border, where Customs and Border Protection has been instructed to set up a blockade and block children who arrive right at the line on the middle of the pedestrian bridge or the pathway and then block them from entering while they call up Mexican officials to come and drag them away. I saw this down in McAllen a year ago June. Three CBP officers were stretching across the bridge. Anyone who did not have a passport or a visa was sent back into Mexico in violation of international law and our domestic law. I asked why we would do this to refugees fleeing persecution. Basically, the answer was this: We are too busy. We are too crowded. The only thing was, there was no crowding, not at that time. There was no crowding at all. The interview rooms were empty. The processing center at McAllen was empty. It was simply a strategy of slamming the door shut. For these families sent back across the border without friends and family and extension funds to support them, it is very dangerous across the border. This is happening with children at Tijuana. I was told of numerous circumstances where unaccompanied children would come to the border, and they would be blocked at the entry, and then the CBP would say: Well, we can't let you step across that line until we consult with the manager. Then the U.S. side would call up the Mexican side to come drag these kids away. I got a phone call. I was in my office here, working late at night. I think it was about 11 p.m. at night. I got a phone call from a group that has helped escort children. They said: We have three French- speaking children on the border in Tijuana. They are at the line with the U.S. gate, and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer is blocking them from stepping across that line, and they are very worried because if the Mexican officials come and apprehend them, they could be sent back to the horrific circumstances--the life-and-death challenges that they were fleeing from. I had spoken previously to the head of that sector. I had a phone conversation, and he said: No, our policy is to facilitate the movement. Our instructions to our officers are to facilitate the children in crossing that line as if they were our own children. I said: Well, do you have training for this, because I keep hearing reports of the blockade at the border. He said: Yes, we have musters. I said: Well, do you have training documents that say that it is your policy to treat these kids as if they were your own and facilitate bringing them across? He said: Yes, absolutely. The Legislative Affairs Director cut in on the phone call to say: I will have that for you tomorrow. I will have those for you tomorrow. We are still waiting for those documents. I don't know that they exist. I don't know that the training exists. What I do know is that after I had that conversation, I got a call from the border with this volunteer group, and they had these three French children who were being denied entry. I asked the volunteer who was with the children--I said: Hand your phone to the American officer. I will explain the conversation I had with the head of the sector and the policies that he says are in place and the training that is supposed to be in place that says you are supposed to treat these children as if they were your own and facilitate their passage across the border. The CBP officer said: No, I am not talking to a U.S. Senator. I will talk only to the President of the United States. I said: Turn on the loud speaker on the phone. Hold your phone up so that they can hear what I am saying. I told them the same thing--that I had met with their supervisors for the sector, and their bosses had said: These are the guidelines. Your guidance is to treat these children who are in front of you as if they were your own and to facilitate their passage across that line to safety and not leave them stranded in Tijuana. Realize that being stranded in Tijuana for any child is horrific. Imagine it is your child. Whether your child is 17 or whether your child is 5, Tijuana is an incredibly dangerous place. There are all kinds of sex industry operators there who thrive on pulling little kids and teenagers into that sex industry. Do you want your child there with no friends and family or funds on the street in that setting? There are gangs who prey on the children who are on the street. Do you want your children in that setting? No, of course you would never want them left in that situation. This border blockade is the first piece of traumatizing children to discourage immigration. It is morally wrong, and it needs to end. Then there is the metering program. Basically, metering says that if you come to the border, we will not let you cross. But if you come the following day to a square near the border, there will be a book, and you can put your name in the book and get on a wait list. That is called metering. So I went to the square in Tijuana where this is done to watch the metering process. People arrive with the book, and they place it on a little table under a little canopy. They start calling out names. That day, the United States was taking about 30 people, and when all of the spaces were full, that was it. Then everyone else on the wait list is waiting. If I recall right, the wait had been about 6 or 7 weeks for people to be able to get just a credible fear interview, which is the very first step. Realize that a credible fear interview is not complicated. It can be done expeditiously. It means 6 to 7 weeks with no money on the streets of some hostile city across the border. I want to show you a picture that perhaps you have seen. It is a picture that deeply, profoundly disturbs me. This is a father and little girl swimming the Rio Grande. They didn't just try to swim the Rio Grande. They came to a port of entry of the United States of America. They did what the President of the United States, President Trump, said to do. They came to the port of entry, and they asked for asylum. They were metered and sent back to Mexico to fend for themselves for who knows how long--as long as the wait list ends. It is dangerous to have a mother, a little girl, or a father on the streets of a hostile city. If you wouldn't send your child into that, if you wouldn't send your sister and your sister's child into it, then we shouldn't be sending others into this perilous circumstance. It is so perilous there, and you have no way to even buy food. You certainly don't have money for a hotel. You have been stripped of your funds during your journey. You fled suddenly to begin with and probably didn't have resources on the front end of the journey. So what do you do? You say: Well, I can starve and be beaten up--or who knows what horrific treatment here--or I can go and cross between the ports of entry and ask for asylum. That is what they did. It was because they were rejected at the port of entry--the very place President Trump said to come--that they lie dead on the banks of the Rio Grande, trying to get out of the incredibly hostile situation across the border. This is the deliberate infliction of trauma, and for every situation like this, there are life-and-death decisions. This is not the end of it. Let's say they had made it across the border and had been taken into a processing center. What would happen in those processing centers? Well, in the first one I went to in McAllen, there wasn't room to sit down. There certainly wasn't room to lie down. You had little kids in there who were crying and mothers who were crying, and the fathers were in cells that were across the aisle on the other side. They were holding these Mylar blankets. There were no cushions on the ground, and there were lights left on all night long. We have heard the reports of all of the various things we have done to children in these processing centers--of our not providing diapers, showers, soap; of our making it difficult for them to go to the bathroom; of our making it difficult for them to get water; of our not providing three meals a day; and of our not providing medical aid. What kind of country treats children in this manner? Who does this with our tax money, on our land, and by our government? This is more than wrong. This is cruel. This is evil. This is the depth of darkness to treat children in this fashion. That is why 40 of us have introduced this Stop Cruelty to Migrant Children Act. The processing center isn't the end of it. Then we have a for-profit prison in Homestead that is paid $750 a day on a no-compete contract. Who is on the board of that? He is the same John Kelly who started the child separation strategy in March of 2017 and who then served as the President's Chief of Staff. He is paid to be on the board of a for-profit. He is paid to lock up children. It is the largest child prison in American history. Now, if some other country had wanted to throw children back across the border into hostile circumstances, if some other country had set up a metering program that had left children vulnerable for weeks before their initial credible hearings, if some other country had proceeded to put children into holding cells and kept the lights on all night and had given them no mattresses to lie on and had not supplied diapers, hygenics, food and water, or medical treatment as appropriate, and if some other country had locked up children in a child prison that had been built to a capacity of 3,200 children at a for-profit and had had no incentive to pass the children on to State-licensed care facilities or to sponsors with homes, we would have 100 Senators down here on this floor, saying we have to stop this because we stand up for children in the United States of America. So what I want to know is: How come there aren't 100 Senators down here today, standing up against this type of treatment? I invite all 100 of my colleagues to join this bill to stop cruelty to migrant children. I was struck by some of the comments by the kids who were being held down in Clint. A 12-year-old boy said: I'm hungry here at Clint all the time. I'm so hungry that I awaken in the middle of the night with hunger. Sometimes I wake up from hunger at 4 a.m. and sometimes at other hours. A mother recounted that when she asked for medicine for her son's fever, an agent retorted: ``Who told you to come to America with your baby anyway?'' How about, instead, we get help for the child who has a fever. There are children being held in cages, children being marched in single lines between Army-style huts, children who have been inflicted with trauma through child separation, children who have been locked up in a for-profit prison that has no incentive to move children to State- licensed facilities. In fact, it is the opposite. It is by a company that got a no-compete contract. Who is on the board? He is the former Chief of Staff to President Trump. So what does this bill do? It ensures that children are not thrown back across the border when they come up to the border of the United States. It ensures that children receive prompt medical assistance. Many children have died from fever. By just using a simple device to check the fever, it would enable you to know if this child needs additional help. It would ensure that basic hygiene and three meals a day are provided. It would allow for more caseworkers to be hired to help children to be moved quickly to State-licensed facilities or to homes, and homes are really where they should be while they await asylum. Children belong in schools and homes and on playgrounds, not behind barbed wire in a for-profit prison that is designed to hold 3,200 people down in Homestead, FL. This bill would prohibit that devilish, misdirected strategy of paying for and incentivizing the imprisonment of children. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said: ``Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.'' I hear a lot of silence in this Chamber on the horrific treatment of children. Let's have a little less silence and a little more advocacy. Let's have 100 Senators sign up for the Stop Cruelty to Migrant Children Act. America is better than the way we have been treating these children. I give thanks to all 40 Senators who have signed on to this legislation. In our hearts, I think it is fundamentally understood that deliberately traumatizing children in order to discourage immigration is wrong. We have a responsibility to end it. Thank you.

Mr. MERKLEY

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