Jeff Merkley

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, the most important words of our Constitution are the first three: ``We the People.'' These words were written in supersized font so that anyone standing across the room would know exactly what the vision of our Constitution is all about: government of, by, and for the people, as Abraham Lincoln put it--not a nation by and for the privileged, not a nation by and for the powerful, but for the people. Unfortunately, we see too much today of our government being taken over by the powerful. We see the use of gerrymandering, which has totally corrupted the distribution of power in the House of Representatives just down that hallway. We see the use of voter suppression in State after State. My colleague from Illinois just pointed out that a man nominated to be a judge here in the United States of America was a key advocate, a key participant, a key architect of voter suppression. That should deeply trouble every Member of this body because if you believe in the vision of our Constitution, you would be a full-on advocate for voter empowerment, not voter suppression. We see this played out in all kinds of different policies. We saw it played out in 2017 when the powerful drove through this body a $1.5 trillion theft of Federal resources and distributed it to the richest Americans. That is what happens in corrupt countries far overseas. But it happened right here, right in this Chamber--a theft of $1.5 trillion out of our Treasury, distributed through that tax bill to the richest Americans. I can tell my colleagues after having done 360 townhalls in my home state, 220 of them in very red counties, no one has ever come up to me--not from the left or the right or the center--and said: I have a great idea. Let's raid the Federal Treasury and distribute it to the richest people among us. Yet that is what we see with government by and for the powerful, as demonstrated right now, here in this U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives down the hall. I will tell you where else we see it. We see it in the neglect of our responsibility to care for our beautiful blue-green planet. All across the land, we are seeing the devastating consequences of carbon pollution and the heat that it is trapping and the consequences that is driving. Yet here in this Chamber, on this most important responsibility, we do absolutely nothing. In fact, we make it worse, with the majority serving simply as the implementers of whatever version of fossil fuel special favor, special interest, powerful interest policy they can possibly think up--more and more for fossil fuels, more and more damage to our country. This, certainly, is a situation we are in where we are seeing our land pillaged and polluted. That is a battle we have been waging for many years, but this last week we had a powerful reminder of just how much trouble we are in. Just last week--last Friday--the Trump administration released the ``Fourth National Climate Assessment,'' and what it has to say is frightening. It is shocking. Realize that this is not some environmental group; this is not some leftwing think tank; this is the Trump administration releasing this report. This is what it has to say. It says that our climate is changing, that its impacts are being felt all around us because of human activity and the carbon pollution being released into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels. This report was written by 13 Federal agencies, and it reiterates this point time and again, and it has the following sentence: ``Earth's climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities.'' This is the statement from the Trump administration's 13 agencies that came together to alert us to exactly where we stand. What does this mean in real terms? Well, it means we are going to see many more extremely hot days and far fewer cold days. We are going to see more extreme weather events, like the recordbreaking heat waves, like the extensive wildfires out West, like the intensified and deadly hurricanes that have been crashing on our shores. We are also going to see the impact in our economy. The report estimates that within our children's lifetime, climate chaos will cost our Nation upward of one-half trillion dollars each year in crop damage, in lost labor, and in extreme weather damage to public infrastructure and that we will lose another $1 trillion each year in lost wealth and real estate along our coasts because of rising sea levels and because of more powerful hurricanes--hurricanes that remind us of Michael, Harvey, Irma, and Maria over the last 2 years. We will also see an impact on winter tourism because of lower snowpack in the mountains, which means less skiing, snowboarding, and snowmobiling. Back home in Oregon, when the snow level drops, we see a dramatic drop in snow tourism. We don't just think of it as tourism; we also think of it as our joy of being able to participate in these activities in our beautiful Cascade Mountains. Of course, that smaller snowpack means warmer, smaller streams--not too good for fishing--and it certainly means less water for irrigation. The report--again, the Trump administration report--estimates that in parts of the Midwest, farmers will be able to produce less than 75 percent of the corn they produce today, with a similar impact on soybean yield, and corn and soybeans make up the vast majority of the 127 million acres of the Midwest's agricultural production. That area, in fact, is one of the most intense areas of agricultural production in the world, responsible for $76 billion per year in economic activity. So when it takes a big hit, the economy of the Midwest takes a big hit. That means a lot of farmers losing their farms. Then we have the health impacts that are laid out in this report-- again, the Trump administration report. It lays out that there will be an estimated 2,000 additional premature deaths per year from extreme temperatures and unsafe breathing conditions. Within our child's lifetime, the report says, Chicago could resemble Phoenix, with up to 2 months of over-100-degree days, and scorching temperatures could make Phoenix practically uninhabitable for up to 5 months of the year. Human health will also be affected with an expansion of mosquito- borne and tick-borne illnesses and water-borne disease, as well as ailments related to air contamination from wildfire smoke. This isn't just some future challenge; it is a challenge we have today. In both of the last two summers, a good portion of my State was covered by smoke from wildfires, and the result was that a lot of people had breathing difficulties and more intensified breathing difficulties, and a good number ended up in the hospital. A lot of asthma was triggered by that smoke. A lot of people cancelled their outdoor activities during the time of year when we most value the opportunity to be on the beach, in the mountains, on the hiking trails, and at the lakes. Certainly, we saw economic consequences. Many of our outdoor concerts and venues, including festivals, had to cancel performances. I talked to the owner of a furniture store who said that even he was impacted because of the taint from the smoke smell. Certainly, our wine producers were concerned about what that might do to the taste of Oregon's fantastic pinot noir--the world's best, the best on the planet--pinot noir wine. So who will bear the brunt of these health emergencies? Is it the powerful and privileged, who are driving the policies to keep burning as much fossil fuels as they possibly can to turn their multimillionaires into multibillionaires? No. The powerful and privileged, living in their gated communities, with their air-filtered and air-conditioned mansions, will protect themselves. They will move to where the impacts are the least. Who will bear the brunt? The young and the old, whose immune systems are more susceptible to health problems; low-income and middle-income Americans, who can't afford to move to where there are fewer consequences, whose jobs are most likely to be impacted by the economic consequences of climate chaos. I know President Trump wanted to ignore his own report and put it out on Black Friday because he figured that the day after Thanksgiving is the day when the fewest Americans would pay attention. That is why I am on the floor right now to draw attention to this report, the Trump report, on the devastating consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuels. Everything we saw laid out in this ``National Climate Assessment'' from the Trump administration was echoed by the international report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that was released last month. That report summarized that within the next 12 years--we are not talking 12 centuries or 12 decades but 12 years--we are going to start feeling intensified effects of climate chaos on top of what we have already experienced. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report was put together by 91 researchers in 41 countries. They summarized that we have already passed the 1-degree centigrade warming mark, which is almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit. They said we are well on our way to the 2-degree mark, which means catastrophic climate chaos. If you were in the middle of the fires in Oregon, if you were in the middle of the fire in Paradise, CA, if you were in the path of Hurricanes Irma, Maria, or Michael, you might already say we have catastrophic climate chaos, but they are using the term to describe a significant amplification from what we are seeing right now. They are ringing a five-alarm fire bell to say: This is the moment to wake up. Wake up, America. You are a democratic republic. You are supposed to be able to respond to the challenges that come before us. And we have a massive challenge: devastating consequences of carbon pollution. You must stop burning carbon. Find a path to change how we operate in transportation, how we operate in generating electricity. Address this issue. Hold every hearing, summon every scientist, ring every bell, and get to work. That is what these two reports are saying to us. So, colleagues, if you are sitting here asleep at the switch, you are not doing your job. If you are sitting here advocating for the fossil fuel industry, you are worse than not doing your job--you are helping to damage the land across this great Nation for all Americans. So wake up and get to work. This isn't a Democratic issue or a Republican issue, a blue county or red county. In fact, the biggest impacts are felt in our red counties, where the foundation of the economy is farming, fishing, and forestry, and every one of those is being impacted by this effect. So we, as representatives in our democratic Republic, with our ``We the People'' Constitution--it is our job to operate for the people, not for the powerful, not for the privileged. I will be introducing a resolution that recognizes and accepts the findings of these reports, acknowledges the expertise from 91 scientists in 41 countries and 300 scientists in 13 Federal agencies, the combined efforts of these two reports that say that we are in trouble and we must act, and we must act in partnership with the world. We need to act here. We need to say to Trudeau of Canada: You want to be a climate leader. You claim you are a climate leader. Why are you tripling the size of the pipeline that serves the tar sands? We need to say to the leadership of Australia: Your outback is on fire during your winter. Your coral reefs are dying. The Great Barrier Reef has died in the last 10 years. Why are you doubling down on coal? We need to say to Japan: Don't base your energy future on liquefied natural gas, which is simply another fossil fuel strategy. We need to say to Germany: Why do you want this gas pipeline from Russia as a foundation for your energy future? Let's all be in this together because if any nation acts by itself, we can't change the course--the big course, the big picture--of the damage carbon pollution is doing. We have to work together. That means we now pivot and say: Let's recognize that renewable energy is now the cheapest energy. It is less expensive to generate a kilowatt hour of electricity from renewable energy, from solar wind, than it is from fossil fuels. Let's not just realize that carbon is doing all this damage; let's also recognize that the strongest economy will be built on the cheapest energy, which is renewable energy. So we have every reason to act. Let's remember that we were founded as a ``we the people'' vision, and let's honor that vision.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, today, we honor and celebrate Joan Middleton's commendable service to the Senate Employees' Child Care Center. On September 30, 2018, Ms. Middleton retired from the Center, where she worked as a floater assistant teacher for no less than 32 years. She was an admired and respected member of the Senate Employees' Child Care Center Team, her devotion to which was only rivaled by her love for the Washington Redskins. Ms. Middleton carried important responsibilities at the center, including regularly assisting in each and every classroom, as well as supervising and closing the center each evening. She not only took these responsibilities seriously, but went well beyond the essential tasks of her post. Her deep care for the community was palpable, as was evidenced by her consistent, inclusive, and thoughtful leadership. Without a doubt, Ms. Middleton played an integral role in each student and faculty member's day. For the students, she prepared snacks and lunches every day. All faculty went to her for anything from a ballpoint pen to a safety pin, garnering her the name ``Ms. Resource'' among her colleagues. Whenever anyone had forgotten where to find something or where it belonged, Ms. Middleton knew. For over three decades, Ms. Middleton was a compassionate adviser who shared her wisdom with the many faculty members she took the time to mentor. While her invaluable institutional knowledge will be missed in her absence, her kind, diligent commitment to the center will live on through those members she guided throughout her tenure. The Senate Employees' Child Care center is deeply grateful for Ms. Middleton for all the positive ways she shaped the Center and enriched the lives of its students over these past 32 years.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Thank you, Mr. President. Today I rise to bring attention to the No Internment Camps Act. This is an important bill to make sure that America does not repeat the mistake of World War II and develop and expand internment camps here in the United States of America. One may think that this is something that is farfetched, that of course the United States would not establish internment camps, but the fact is, we already have 3, and the House passed a bill to greatly expand those internment camps. We have 35 sponsors of a bill here in the Senate to expand internment camps. We have the President issuing an Executive order asking Congress to expand internment camps. Recently, the President put forward a draft regulation to expand internment camps without the consent of Congress. So it is all very real. Where did this story begin? It began, as far as public awareness, on May 7, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a speech. He called this his zero-tolerance policy. I listened to the description of the zero-tolerance policy on arresting people at the border, and I said: You know, when you take away the fancy rhetoric, it sounds like he has criminalized families who are fleeing persecution from overseas. I thought, that is a pretty stunning situation because we in America often look to Lady Liberty and the words inscribed on the base or pedestal of Lady Liberty that say ``Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.'' The idea that our Attorney General is saying we are going to criminalize flight from persecution--and it was found, furthermore, that they were going to immediately throw adults into jail and rip away the children from their families. That is not possible. That is not possible here in the United States of America. So I arranged to go down to the border. I went down on June 3 and visited the McAllen processing center. The McAllen processing center is a location that the press had never been allowed into, so they were stationed outside saying: What are you going to find inside? What are you going to see? What is in there? I expressed surprise that the press here in America was excluded from this facility to see what was going on. I went in. I was given a tour. What I found was pretty shocking--a room in which huddled masses of families were shoved into wire link cages with nothing but an aluminum foil Mylar blanket. Then in an adjoining larger space, a warehouse space, we saw larger cages, 30-by- 30 foot cages where families were being separated into fathers in one cage, mothers in another, daughters in a third, and sons in a fourth. I stood in front of one 30-by-30 foot chain link cage and said: These young boys, who are lining up by height to prepare for being fed; these young boys, with the smallest being just knee-high to a grasshopper, maybe 4 years old; these young boys have been separated from their parents? The answer was this: Well, Senator, not all of them. Some of them arrived unaccompanied. I said: But many of these boys in this cage were taken away from their parents? They said: Yes. I said: Well, where did that happen? They said: Well, we brought the family in that door over there, and then, with some explanation, we said, ``We need to take your son away. We need to take your daughter away. We need to take your spouse away.'' And they were locked up in these various locations inside that warehouse. So it turned out it was real. The administration was criminalizing a flight from persecution, a flight that our ancestors know all too well, fleeing from civil war, from religious persecution, from famine to come here to the United States of America and see that beautiful, welcoming Statue of Liberty--``Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free''--but instead of that welcoming embrace, prison for the parents and, quite frankly, prison for the children, separating them. I went from there up to Brownsville. I had been told by immigration advocates that many of these young men were being stuffed into a single building up in Brownsville, a former Walmart run by a nonprofit called Southwest Key. I had asked permission to visit this location, and I had been told: No, no, no. You have to give 2 weeks' advance notice. They had a waiver system, so I asked for a waiver to be able to see what was going on inside this former Walmart. The waiver was turned down. Clearly the administration did not want any Member of Congress to see what was going on inside that building. Since I was there in Texas, I drove up the road to Brownsville and said: Well, I will just call them up when I get there and say, ``Surely you have enough members on your staff that one of them could come out and talk to me, or maybe one of them could give me a tour of what is inside.'' When I arrived and walked up to the door of this former Walmart, there was a phone number posted on the front of it. I proceeded to call that phone number and talk to the assistant to the supervisor of the facility. The assistant said: Yes, the supervisor would be happy to come out and talk to you. I waited 10 minutes. No supervisor appeared. I called again, and they said: Oh, no, the supervisor is on his way. Well, what the supervisor was really doing was waiting for the police to arrive. They called the police to come and arrest me. Very interesting--you are arrested for knocking on the door and asking to have a supervisor talk to you? Well, they didn't arrest me. They hadn't actually formally asked me to leave the property, but they certainly weren't going to let me inside to see what was going on or even talk to me about what they were doing. The immigration advocates have said: We have heard a rumor that possibly up to 1,000 young boys have been stuffed into that Walmart. I thought, that is not possible. As I was standing there and talking to the press, I repeated that. I thought, I shouldn't say this. I shouldn't say this because that is so outlandish. Surely no administration would try to stuff 1,000 boys into one building. So I was refused entry. I brought attention to this scandalous child- separation strategy--this strategy of deliberately inflicting trauma on children in order to send a political message. No one in the world can justify inflicting trauma on children to send a political message. It is not acceptable under any moral code. It is not acceptable under any religious tradition. But the dark heart of this administration had hatched this evil plan, and it was being implemented. I went back 2 weeks later, on June 14, and I went back with reinforcements--other Members of Congress. We went to that facility, and this time they granted a waiver and said: Yes, you may see what is going on. They allowed the press in as well. So we went in for a tour. I asked ``How many boys are here?'' thinking, at most a couple hundred. They said: Well, we are now ready to put 1,500 boys in this facility, and we are one busload short of filling it. I think they said there were 1,467 residents in this one building. They took me out to the outside area, where they had set up a soccer field. They said: Isn't this wonderful? We have a soccer field. Imagine how long it takes for nearly 1,500 young boys to circulate through a soccer field. They took me to a game room, and there was a broken Foosball machine. I thought, how long does it take 1,500 boys to circulate through a single broken Foosball machine? Maybe there were a couple of them; I remember seeing one. They were very proud that they had this soccer field and this game room. I said: You know, you expanded so fast. At the beginning of the year, how many boys did you have? They said: Well, we planned for 300. We had 300 bedrooms and 300 boys. They said that 2 months ago, they had increased to 500, and now they have 1,500 or almost 1,500. I asked: This rapid expansion--did you plan carefully for this? They said: Oh, yes. I said: Was there anything that you needed that you fell short on? The director of Southwest Key said: Yes. We don't have mental health counselors, or at least we are short. I said: How many are you short? They said: Ninety mental health counselors. Ninety? Wow. That is a big shortfall. Realize that these boys were fleeing persecution from overseas. So they had experienced trauma in their lives abroad, they probably experienced trauma en route, and now they are experiencing the trauma of being ripped away from their families and shuttled off to this warehouse. Yet there was no plan to have the mental health counselors needed for this population. This is one feature of the incompetence and callousness of this administration in implementing this policy. Public outcry was significant. I thank all Americans who participated in that public outcry, saying that this is not our America-- criminalizing a flight from persecution, locking people up while they await asylum hearings-- that is not our America and you must stop. The courts said the same thing because it is actually illegal to lock up children for more than 20 days under the Flores consent agreement. So President Trump sent a message. He sent an Executive order titled ``Affording Congress an Opportunity to Address Family Separation.'' Oh, how nice. The President is giving us an opportunity to address family separation. And what did the President ask for in that Executive order? He asked for us to pass a law to overrule the Flores consent agreement and allow the administration to establish family internment camps. Imagine--family internment camps here in the United States. That is what the President was asking for, that is exactly what the House of Representatives passed, and that is exactly what 35 Members of this body have signed on to cosponsor--family internment camps in the United States of America. That is absolutely wrong, it is absolutely unacceptable, and it is absolutely unneeded. You may say: Wait. You are saying that the children shouldn't be separated from their parents and that you shouldn't lock up families together, so what do you propose, Senator Merkley? What do you propose that we do? Well, the answer is, we had a very good program. It was called the Family Case Management Program. This Family Case Management Program said that when a family comes and is seeking asylum, they will be placed into the community and they will have intensive case management with somebody who speaks and writes their language, an individual who is in continuous contact with them, who makes sure they know exactly when their check-ins are and how to attend them and who knows exactly when the court hearing is and how to get to those court hearings. So I wondered, did this work? How well did this program work? It turns out that there is an inspector general report from Homeland Security that came out--I think the date was November 30, 2017. Here is what the inspector general found: ``According to ICE, overall program compliance for all five regions is an average of 99 percent for ICE check-ins and appointments, as well as 100 percent attendance at court hearings.'' So 100 percent--you can't get better than that. The Family Case Management Program--the inspector general under this administration said that there was 100 percent attendance at court hearings. So if you hear a Member of the Senate say ``Well, we are concerned about this catch-and-release because people don't show up for their hearings,'' that is a lie. That is inaccurate. That is inaccurate. If you hear the President saying, well, we are going to lock families up if they don't appear for their court hearings, that is inaccurate. That is a lie. The inspector general of this administration found 100 percent attendance at court hearings. Fortunately, Members of this body have come to their senses and rejected the language from the House establishing internment camps, expanding them, authorizing them. Fortunately, Members of the Senate have come to their senses and abandoned their effort--for now, at least--to establish permission, authorization, and funding for internment camps, as well they should because it doesn't fit the vision of America: a nation where most of us are the children of immigrants, if not immigrants ourselves; a nation where in our family tree we have individuals who fled persecution, religious persecution, who fled famine, who fled conflict to be welcomed by the vision of the Statue of Liberty. The story, unfortunately, doesn't end here. The President has now issued a draft regulation. That draft regulation says we in the executive branch are granting ourselves the authority to establish internment camps without permission or direction from Congress. Are you kidding me? A lengthy regulation designed to authorize themselves, without Congress acting, to establish family internment camps is totally out of sync with the traditions of America, with the values of America, or the law as it exists under the Flores consent agreement. Let me put this as simply as I can: Children belong in homes and playgrounds and schools. They don't belong behind barbed wire. I will fight as fiercely as I possibly can any proposal to put children behind barbed wire as they wait their asylum hearing. It is wrong. It is morally wrong. It is, from a policy perspective, totally unjustified, as was child separation. That is why I am introducing the No Internment Camps Act. Let us not repeat the mistakes of World War II. This act ensures that no Federal dollars will be used for the operation and construction of family internment camps. It creates a 1-year phaseout of three family detention centers currently in operation, and it saves money from the family detention centers and transfers it to the Alternatives to Detention Program in order to reestablish the Family Case Management Program--the program that had a 100-percent success rate in getting people to their hearings. Put money into programs that work, not into prisons that afflict children. There are many groups that have said how important this is and have endorsed the no internment camps legislation: Japanese American Citizens League, Human Rights Watch, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Women's Refugee Commission, the Anti-Defamation League, the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon, the American Immigration Lawyers Association of Oregon, Human Rights First, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Karen Korematsu, the daughter of Fred Korematsu, the lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that challenged Japanese internment camps in World War II. Let us put an end to the prospect of the administration expanding on its own, through Executive order, internment camps in the United States. Let's do so by passing the No Internment Camps Act.

Mr. MERKLEY

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

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I have a lot of concerns about the possibility of Brett Kavanaugh serving on the Supreme Court. They are concerns that come from many different directions, but let's start with the precedent that this body has not reviewed his full record. We haven't taken any look at all at the 3 years he was Staff Secretary to President Bush because the President's team intervened and asked us not to. And a couple Members of this body collaborated with the White House to deny everybody else here the possibility of looking at his record. The thing is that each and every one of us has a responsibility to review the record. This exceptional situation in which a few Members have made it impossible for anyone in the body to fulfill their constitutional responsibility is an extraordinary abuse of power in this body. Then we have the President of the United States reaching out in other ways--in ways we have never seen before--and putting the stamp of Presidential privilege on some 100,000 documents. These were documents from the time that Brett Kavanaugh served as a White House Counsel. We received a few documents, and there were a lot of troubling things in those documents, but 100,000 documents were censored by the President of the United States. I will just remind my colleagues that the President is not supposed to interfere with the work of the Senate in the confirmation process. It is called the separation of powers. Maybe some of you would like to pull out your Constitution and study it for a moment and realize that the President nominates but doesn't get to decide what this body reviews. Yet that stamp of Presidential power, untested, has done so for, as far as we can tell, the first time in U.S. history. Then we have the fact that he asked the same individual whom he had given the stamp of Presidential power to proceed to make some 140,000 documents confidential so the public couldn't see them. Well, that, too, was untested. That, too, was an original strategy. That, too, was a situation of minimizing the conversation that experts could have of what was in those records. Of those three phases, I think the one that bothers me the most is the second one--the use of the stamp of Presidential privilege on 100,000 documents. When Presidential privilege--otherwise known as Executive privilege--was used in the past, a document was looked at and it was determined, what constitutional test does this meet for special treatment? One would think that since these were documents from the Bush administration, the Trump administration couldn't make any of the arguments that normally are made about compromising conversations in the White House, but no explanation was given. This was just straight- out censorship across the board. I challenged that censorship, and the hearing that was supposed to take place unfortunately won't take place because of this rush to complete the confirmation before the Senate can get ahold of those documents, before that hearing can occur. Why the rush to cooperate with the White House to prevent this body from seeing those 100,000 pages that were censored by the White House? What is the President hiding? Is it Brett Kavanaugh's involvement in the policy of torture? Is it Brett Kavanaugh's involvement in holding the documents stolen from Senate Democrats, because we know he received them? Is it his involvement in other nominations where he said he wasn't very involved? What is in those 100,000 documents that the White House was desperate that this body not review? That is certainly troubling. No nomination should go forward without a review by this body of a nominee's records, certainly not for a lifetime appointment and certainly not for the Supreme Court. Then there is concern over the temperament of the individual. Out of the hundreds of millions of Americans across this land, certainly there are at least nine who have the temperament to serve. No need to turn to someone who is belligerent and condescending. No need to turn to someone who is angry and unstable. But what did we see? That is exactly what we saw when we heard him testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He said things like: ``Some of you were lying in wait and had it ready,'' although he said it in an angrier tone than that. He said: ``This confirmation has become a national disgrace.'' Well, I don't actually argue with that because it is a disgrace because of the compromises of fairness that have occurred in this process toward the women who came forward. When he was asked by Senator Klobuchar if he has ever been blackout drunk, he responded: ``I don't know. Have you?'' Well, interesting response. Did he respond ``I don't know'' because he can't remember because he blacked out? Was that his point? Then we saw the partisan rhetoric: a frenzy on the left to come up with something, anything, to block my confirmation. Angry and partisan, all in one moment. Then he went on to say much more about things being calculated and orchestrated, about things being a political hit, fueled with pent-up anger about President Trump. He talked about fear unfairly stoked. He talked about revenge on behalf of the Clintons. He threatened the Senate. He said: ``As we all know, what goes around comes around.'' This man with these quotes is qualified to serve on the special body known as the Supreme Court of the United States? I don't think so. He talked about the fact that he didn't drink too much and he didn't become belligerent. Yet we saw a lot of belligerence when he came before the body. This is called not having judicial temperament. That performance of intemperate behavior led to 2,400 law professors noting that it was improper, inappropriate, simply wrong, that this man should serve. They wrote a letter October 3rd: ``The Senate should not confirm Kavanaugh.'' The letter was presented to us the following day. They said this: Judicial temperament is one of the most important qualities of a judge. As the Congressional Research Service explains, a judge requires ``a personality that is evenhanded, unbiased, impartial, courteous, yet firm, and dedicated to a process, not a result.'' The concern for judicial temperament dates back to our founding. In Federalist 78, titled ``Judges as Guardians of the Constitution,'' Alexander Hamilton expressed the need for the integrity and moderation of the judiciary. The letter continues: We are law professors who teach, research, and write about the judicial institutions of this country. Many of us appear in State and Federal court and our work means that we will continue to do so, including before the United States Supreme Court. We regret that we feel compelled to write to you, our Senators, to provide our views that at the Senate hearings on September 27, Judge Brett Kavanaugh displayed a lack of judicial temperament that would be disqualifying for any court, and certainly for elevation to the highest court of this land. They continued based on their background--2,400 law professors from across the country--saying: The question at issue was, of course, painful for anyone. But Judge Kavanaugh exhibited a lack of commitment to judicious inquiry. Instead of being open to the necessary search for accuracy, Judge Kavanaugh was repeatedly aggressive with questioners. Even in his prepared remarks, Judge Kavanaugh described the hearing as partisan, referring to it as ``a calculated and orchestrated political hit'' rather than acknowledging the need for the Senate, faced with new information, to try to understand what had transpired. Instead of trying to sort out with reason and care the allegations that were raised to him, Judge Kavanaugh responded in an intemperate, inflammatory, and partial manner, and he interrupted and at times was discourteous to Senators. As you know, under two statutes governing bias and recusal, judges must step aside if they are at risk of being perceived as or of being unfair. As Congress has previously put it, a judge or justice ``shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.'' These statutes are part of a myriad of legal commitments to the impartiality of the judiciary, which is a cornerstone of the courts. We have differing views about the other qualifications of Judge Kavanaugh, but we are united as professors of law and scholars of judicial institutions in believing that he did not display the impartiality and judicial temperament requisite to sit on the highest court of the land. Signed, with their respective institutional affiliations, 2,400 law professors, saying that this man is not suited to serve. Another concern not mentioned in that letter was his fidelity to the truth--misrepresentations, inaccuracies, and straight-out whoppers. Some of our colleagues, like the senior Senator from South Carolina, said: I have argued to you that when you found that a judge was a perjurer, you couldn't in good conscience send him back into the courtroom because everybody who came in that courtroom thereafter would have a real serious doubt--a real serious doubt over whether the truth was being told. Brett Kavanaugh said that all witnesses to his alleged assault of Dr. Ford refuted her claim or said it didn't happen. What is the truth? Only one person said it didn't happen: Brett Kavanaugh. All of those other folks he said refuted it--nobody refuted it. They said they couldn't remember, but they didn't refute it. And one said that while she couldn't remember, she believed Dr. Ford. So Brett Kavanaugh, in the most generous capacity, simply doesn't have the ability to keep the facts straight on a pretty straightforward thing--big difference between refuting and not remembering--or he deliberately misrepresented the facts, in which case he lied. Brett Kavanaugh said he first heard of the Ramirez allegations in the period since The New Yorker published the story, but we have had multiple reports that Brett Kavanaugh and his team were working to discredit Ramirez before The New Yorker story. Why did he say that he learned about it after, when he was working to discredit it before? Did he think this was clever, that he could kind of say: Well, I heard about the full story in The New Yorker after The New Yorker article was published. Was that what he was trying to imply--like maybe I can slip by on that one--because he didn't want people to know that he knew about it early and had worked to discredit her? Another whopper from Brett Kavanaugh. Brett Kavanaugh said he did not travel in the same social circles as Dr. Ford, who went to Holton-Arms, but what was the truth? His classmates said they routinely socialized with the Holton-Arms girls. So much for that statement. Brett Kavanaugh said he categorically did not receive documents stolen from Democratic Senators and their staffs by Manny Miranda in the early 2000s, but in one of those documents that didn't get censored, that slipped its way through to the Senate, what did we find out? It shows that he clearly received the stolen documents--another lie from Brett Kavanaugh. Brett Kavanaugh said that Judge Pickering's nomination was not one he primarily handled. Well, let's just say that this is less than the full truth. Maybe if you emphasize the word ``primarily,'' you find some shred of accuracy, but it is certainly not a full and appropriate presentation because it turns out that he was involved in a number of critical aspects of the Pickering nomination. Brett Kavanaugh said he did not see or hear anything about President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program before it was publicly reported, but in some of those other documents that slipped through, we find out that he did know about them, and he emailed John Yoo about the warrantless wiretapping long before the program became public. Brett Kavanaugh said the Bush administration did not consider ideology when selecting or vetting judges, but the truth is that the documents show that they did consider ideology. Why did this man, Brett Kavanaugh, feel the need to misrepresent the truth time after time after time? He implied that when it came to drinking, he didn't drink excessively and he did not get aggressive. Yet we have person after person after person saying that is exactly what happened. He said the phrase ``Renate Alumnus'' in his yearbook was ``clumsily intended to show affection.'' Let me repeat that: ``clumsily intended to show affection.'' And he continued: ``and that she was one of us.'' Isn't it nice that he and his colleagues got together to pick out this one young lady and show in their yearbooks that they had affection for her, when everyone else involved said that is not what it was all about at all? It was about this group of men bragging about sexual conquests. It may not have actually occurred, but they were laughing over the prospect of disgracing this individual. What kind of a warped character goes out of his way to either brag about sexual conquests or to imply-- imply--a character that she did not have, to tear her down? But that is Brett Kavanaugh. He went on to tell some real whoppers--that folks in his circle say the term ``ralphing'' refers to throwing up when drinking. He said: No, it refers to a sensitive stomach. They are all things that he had written. ``Boofing,'' what was that all about? He said that has to do with flatulence, but everyone around him says: No, that was a crude sexual activity that he was describing. That is what that word means. I will not give the details of it. He said ``devil's triangle'' is a drinking game, when everyone else says: No, it wasn't a drinking game; it has another sexual connotation. So he couldn't bring himself to be honest and say: I don't feel comfortable giving the definition of those in a public hearing because I am such a nice, sweet guy. But instead, he lied. Lying came so easy-- lie after lie after lie. As my colleague from South Carolina said: When a person lies once, you don't trust them after that. How would anyone, after breaking the truth, be believed in the future? So we have the fact that his character is one of hurting and attacking others, of lying even to the U.S. Senate. Some 2,400 law professors note that his temperament, his animosity, and his partisanship make him unqualified to serve on the Court. So what is this all about? Why are my colleagues across the aisle so intent on getting him confirmed? It has to do with his judicial philosophy and taking no risk that this seat is not filled with this judicial philosophy--this philosophy for the powerful over the people. There have been some interesting aspects of this philosophy. One is that he believes that the President is above and beyond the law and should not or cannot be indicted or investigated while he is in office. The Court may well have to make some rulings on how President Trump conducts himself. President Trump might just fire the special prosecutor. Is that within his power? The Court may have to decide. The President may decide to pardon himself--something never done in U.S. history--given all the investigations into egregious conduct. Why did the President pick this individual, who has the most expansive view of Presidential power, to serve on the Court? Maybe he is trying to write himself a ``get out of jail free'' card. But if you can't find in the Constitution that the President is above and beyond the law--and I dare you to try; I dare anyone in this Chamber to find that in the Constitution, because it is not there--why are we putting a man on the Court who thinks it is, who is so comfortable twisting and torturing the words on the page to reach a predesired conclusion? Yes, he was handpicked by the Federalist Society after Trump promised to appoint anti-Roe v. Wade judges who would strip away the constitutional right to a full range of reproductive services. It bothers me a lot--the idea of a judge who believes the government should be in the exam room, between a woman and her doctor. The government does not belong in an exam room, between a woman and her doctor on difficult medical life issues. But in every decision--or virtually every decision--Kavanaugh finds a way to twist the circumstances in order to find for the powerful over the people. That is what this rush to jam this person onto the Court is. Does he believe the Court should take on gerrymandering, which is a huge blight on equal representation of the people? There is no sign that he does. We currently have a Court where the majority has not wanted to take on those issues, despite the fact they are the ones who are supposed to maintain the integrity of the Constitution. Do we have any sign that he is upset or concerned about the tearing down of the Voting Rights Act, which this Chamber passed and the House passed and was law for decades but was torn down by the court? Rather than letting this Chamber or the House together decide to adjust that law, they decided to tear it down, saying: We don't have to worry about this anymore. Is there any sign that Judge Kavanaugh cares about the desecration of the opportunity of citizens to vote in this country? No. An offense against the Constitution, yes. His concern, none. What about the dark money that is the consequence of a huge concentration of wealth and influence--a huge concentration of influence because the Supreme Court opened the door with the case Citizens United? I found it kind of bizarrely humorous to hear colleagues across the aisle complaining about dark money, because they have been absolutely arguing that dark money should be permitted. When we had the idea of not having dark money and shining a light on it--it was called the DISCLOSE Act--every single Republican in this Chamber voted against it. Every single one voted against sunlight. Why is that? The Koch brothers essentially are the puppet masters of this Chamber. They invested hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money, thanks to Citizens United, in making sure that they had control of this Chamber. Did we hear Judge Kavanaugh have any interest in cleaning up this mess? Thomas Jefferson was speaking to the core architecture of our Constitution, and he said that the mother principle--he referred to it as the ``mother principle''--was that there would be an equal voice among the citizens. Now, we know it was not the case that everyone had an equal voice. Communities of color did not have an equal voice and women did not have an equal voice, but what Jefferson was speaking to was the distribution of power across the electorate. He said only then will you have laws that reflect the will of the people. But Citizens United is the opposite of that. It concentrates power. If you have an individual like the Koch brothers who can put $100 million into a campaign and you have an ordinary person who can put $100 into a campaign, then you are granting the Koch brothers 1 million times the influence. It is the exact opposite of Jefferson's ``equal voice'' principle. Does Kavanaugh have the slightest understanding that the construction of the Constitution was to avoid the powerful--running the government by and for the powerful? The Constitution was a response to that very problem in Europe. There is no sign of that, no interest in that--in fact, quite the opposite. He has bragged about being the most pure on the First Amendment. What does that mean? It means that he loves the weaponization of the First Amendment, twisted as an instrument to give the powerful victories over the people time and again--decisions against the environment, decisions against workers, decisions against consumers, decisions against reproductive rights. That is the rush to put this man, unqualified in every possible way, to serve on the Supreme Court--not having the temperament, not having the integrity. That is the rush--to secure and ensure that Jefferson's concept of equal voice is destroyed. The most troubling is his conduct toward women. The fact that he collaborated with other boys to damage the integrity of a young woman was troubling. Troubling beyond troubling is the story of his assault on Dr. Ford, but you might say: Wait. We don't have any corroborating information about that. But Dr. Ford asked for her corroborating witnesses to come before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and how many of those were allowed to come before the committee? None. None. Zero. The committee was determined to make it just ``he said and she said,'' without any other information. That is treating an individual unfairly--absolutely unfairly--to cherry pick information and only to allow it to support one side of the argument and to deny her the ability to bring her corroborating people before the Judiciary Committee. Even in 1991, that was not done with Anita Hill. This body treated Dr. Ford worse. Then the sham of the reopened FBI investigation, which was only opened because one courageous colleague from Arizona said: I am not going forward unless we really examine these situations that involved his assault on women. But the decision on how to conduct that FBI investigation wasn't up to this Chamber. It was up to the President, and the President does a scoping document and tells the FBI whom to talk to. Apparently, he consulted with the leadership, it is reported-- the Republican leadership of this Chamber--on whom to let the FBI consult with, and the result was not to consult or talk to or interview a single one of those eight people that Dr. Ford asked to be interviewed. It would take some time, I guess, to know exactly who said what to whom. It was the President's decision. So the responsibility rests there. But in the interest of fairness, was there not one Member of this body in that conversation who could speak up and say: We want the facts not a whitewash. We want the facts. Apparently, no one did. No one insisted on that. They said: No, we will go forward, even if we hide all of the facts. Then, there was Debbie Ramirez, who shared her story of being assaulted, her story from the college dorm. In that case, she said there were 20 people that the FBI should talk to. Well, she wasn't invited to appear by the Judiciary Committee at all, and none of her 20 individuals whom she suggested should be talked to were invited. So she got no hearing--complete exclusion. Yet many Members of this Chamber attacked her. Do you think that is fair, attacking a person but not letting her come before this Chamber to give her story? Do you think that is fair? It is not fair. Then we have the FBI receive instructions from the White House, after consultation with the Republican leadership, and the result is they didn't talk to one of her corroborating witnesses--not one. Why, in this day and age, where we have been in the middle of a ``me too'' conversation, can individuals in this Chamber on the right side of the aisle take such joy in being so unfair to a woman coming forward to share a story? It is even worse because each one knew, if they read the newspapers, that there was a lot of corroborating information. Kenneth Appold was in the same suite in the dorm. He lived in the same suite--two bedrooms, sharing a common space--and he heard the story. He independently recalled many of the same details that Ramirez shared, including that a male student had encouraged Kavanaugh as he exposed himself. The classmate recalled that the party took place in a common room on the first floor. I have known this all along, he said. It has been on my mind all these years when his name came up. It was a big deal. How come his voice was not allowed to come before the Senate? Why did the FBI not talk to him and put it into the report? I will tell you why. It was so Senators could go down and review the report and say, oh, there is no new information. Of course, there is no new information. It is because the President's team reportedly asked the Republicans' leadership what they wanted done, and apparently it didn't want any of the people who had corroborating information to be talked to or reported on. That is a betrayal of justice. That is a complete corruption of justice. Mr. Appold is a professor now at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is deeply respected. He said: ``It had been on my mind all of these years when his name,'' referring to Kavanaugh, ``came up. It was a big deal.'' The story stayed with him, he said, ``because it was disturbing and seemed outside the bounds of acceptable behavior even during heavy drinking at parties on campus.'' He said he had been shocked but not necessarily surprised because the social group to which Kavanaugh belonged often drank to excess. He recalled that Brett Kavanaugh was relatively shy until he drank, at which point he could become aggressive and even belligerent. Now, this individual, Kenneth, may be quick to judge, and one may say, well, he just invented this memory, except here is the problem--he shared it with his roommate from his first year in graduate school. He told what had happened that year, so he has a lot of credibility. He is a professor at a theological seminary. He lived in the same suite. He heard the story about it shortly after it happened. It disturbed him so much that he shared it with his roommate from his first year in graduate school. That is a pretty persuasive substantiation of Debbie Ramirez's story. There was another classmate, Richard Oh, an emergency room doctor in California. Soon after the party, he recalled overhearing a female student tearfully recount to another student an incident at the party involving a gag with--well, you know the story--followed by a male student exposing himself. Was Richard Oh invited to come before the Senate and tell his story? No, he was not--another transgression of justice. Did the FBI talk to him? No, because it had instructions not to talk to these individuals who had corroborating information. This is situation in which, when a woman comes forward to share her story, she is treated with disdain by this institution. That is why these women didn't want to come forward. They thought they were mistreated. Unfortunately, it turned out to be right, and everyone supporting and voting for Kavanaugh shares the shame of the mistreatment of Dr. Ford and the mistreatment of Debbie Ramirez. Across this land, it has caused women to relive the experiences they have gone through, with many of them having written to our offices. I encourage every Senator to read every one of the letters they are getting before voting late this afternoon on the question of whether Kavanaugh should serve on the Court. I read five letters earlier, but I have received a lot of letters. I am going to read more of them now. This individual writes: Please do what you can to block the Kavanaugh vote to the Supreme Court. I was also a victim of sexual assault when I was in graduate school in the early 1970s. I never pursued that due to fear of consequences and feeling that this was my fault. ``This has to stop,'' she concludes the letter. Do you think that she got any encouragement from the completely unjust way this body treated these two women? No. It is exactly the classic setup and rigged response with which, so often, women have met when they have had the courage to come forward with their stories. Another woman wrote: I cried all the way to work, listening to Dr. Christine. She is referring to Christine Blasey Ford. If you can do anything as my Senator, do everything you can to change the course of our national Court decision. There isn't much more I can say as a mom, as a professional, as a sexual assault victim who has never come forward. Please. I appreciate her writing to me, and I share her concern and the belief that we should change the course we seem to be on at the moment because there is nothing like confirming this man without fairly examining the women who have been courageous enough to come forward. It is more insulting to all of these women who have gone through the experiences of being assaulted. Another Oregonian wrote to me: I am a survivor of sexual abuse. I was assaulted as a child by someone my family trusted, then again by a stranger when I was in college. In both instances, I remember the sinking feeling I had afterward--the feeling that even if I spoke up, I wouldn't be believed. I have long felt trapped inside my own trauma, but over the past couple weeks, I have drawn such strength from the sisterhood of survivors who have shown up, protested, and shouted out their own survivor stories. I have drawn strength from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's testimony. I know that because she stepped forward, other survivors will feel brave enough to speak up too. There is power and comfort when women come together and speak our truth before the world. I say to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, I am sorry you were treated in this horrific manner by the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate. I am sorry you were treated so unfairly that not a single one of your corroborating witnesses was pulled before the committee. I feel terrible that those at the FBI did not talk to any of the people you asked them to talk to. It was a rigged system. You were set up. You were betrayed by the leadership of this body, but your courageous action in coming forth was not without results. This woman, like thousands of others, is looking to you and saying thank you--thank you for the courage you had to share. Even though you were afraid that you would be treated unfairly, you came forward anyway, and that gives others courage to share their stories. Unfortunately, your fears, Dr. Ford, were justified. May it never be again the case. The only right thing now is for us not to send Brett Kavanaugh to the Court. There was an article that appeared in an Oregon newspaper, and I am going to read the story but, like the newspaper, not share her name. The newspaper story starts out this way: The event happened 75 years ago when ``Dorothy''--[not her real name]--watched the testimonies of Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh on television, on Thursday, during Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation hearings. The memories came flooding back, and for the first time, she felt she must tell her story--a story she never told her mother, a story she didn't tell her husband either. Dorothy's story is similar to the story Blasey told, on Thursday, in testimony that was part of the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Nominee Kavanaugh. Blasey accused Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her when they were both at a house party with a group of high school students. Kavanaugh denied the accusations, which are now the subject of an FBI investigation. Dorothy, now 91, was a student at Reedsport High School in the 1940s. One day, she was at a friend's house where several kids her age were gathered. She said she was carried into a bedroom by a popular football player, and before she knew what was happening, she found herself pinned to a bed, underneath the boy, who was struggling to get her pants off. He was both a ``big man'' on campus and ``just big.'' She was 85 pounds. In some ways, Dorothy's story is different from Blasey's in that she was carried and not pushed into the room. There was no one in the room except her and her attacker. Dorothy said she was able to push the boy enough that he hit his head on the bed's headboard, and with his weight off of her, she was able to yell for help, and her friend and her friend's brother rushed in and rescued her. Dorothy doesn't want The News-Review to use her real name, so she is being referred to by a name that was given to many girls in the year she was born. She still has difficulty dealing with what happened to her in high school. For most of her life, she has refused to think about it. She has had plenty else to think about. She has raised kids, been widowed, remarried, widowed again, but it is still with her. She said: You try to bury all of that, and you do for a long time. Then something like this news comes up, and it brings it all back. Dorothy started off talking about sexual harassment. It was later when she felt able to call what had happened to her by a more legally accurate name--attempted rape. Dorothy said she was naive when she was 16: I was pretty shy and naive and unsure of myself, I guess. I don't know if feeling ``inferior'' is the right word. I made good grades, and I worked in the school office, but I was a country kid. She couldn't talk to her mother about sex. If I tried to ask her anything about sex, she said, ``That is dirty. We don't talk about that.'' She had a general idea, enough to understand what her attacker was after. She didn't know if he and other boys were drinking, but she was not. The kids had been dancing before it happened. It never occurred to her to report the incident. That just wasn't done in those days, and she was ashamed--embarrassed--as if the whole incident were her fault. The story got around at school, though, and the other kids were not sympathetic. You look, and people are kind of giggling as you walk by. They had heard about it. Now she wonders if the same boy went after other girls. It is part of life, and it happens a lot more than people realize. It probably happened to other girls in the same school, she said. Many years after the event, Dorothy said she saw her attacker. He was in a wheelchair, and she couldn't help thinking, ``Great. He got what he deserved.'' Even though 75 years have passed, she has never forgotten what he did. I can still shut my eyes and see that guy packing me over his shoulder and throwing me on the bed and jumping on top of me. Watching Thursday's hearings made Dorothy furious. She believed Blasey, and she was horrified by the Senators who defended Kavanaugh. They are so unfeeling, you know? I would hate to be their wives. If they just sit there and take this guy's word for it, I feel sorry for the wives of these guys who are so macho that they can't see a woman's point of view. The hearing motivated her to come forward. I just felt now is the time to tell my story, and maybe other women will come forward, and maybe they will do something more about the way that women are disbelieved. She said it was a relief to finally share her secret. ``I am about to get weepy,'' she said. Do you think this woman, who is now in her nineties and went to Reedsport High School, takes any good feeling away from the Senate in the way the Senate treated Dr. Ford with regard to the fact that it did not allow anyone supporting her story to appear or with regard to the fact that leadership was consulted by the White House and that the result was a scoping document that did not allow the FBI to talk to the people who had supporting information? Do you think she takes any good feelings away from the way this Senate treated Debbie Ramirez in its attacking her and disqualifying her without even letting her come and tell her story and not talking to the 20 people she suggested had corroborative information? Do you think she takes anything good away from the horrific way these women were treated and the unfair way they were treated? I do not think so. You must look at the way the Senate behaved and say that is supposed to be a distinguished body, that it is supposed to being an esteemed body. We should expect the best from the U.S. Senate and we got the worst. Another woman wrote: You must stop the confirmation of Kavanaugh, especially after his angry, abusive testimony today that was full of lies. I am a sexual assault survivor, and I am absolutely full of despair this evening. I am not the only one getting these letters. So, to my colleagues, I ask: Are you doing anything to address the anger about the way Dr. Ford was treated? Are you insisting that she get fair treatment before you vote to send Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court of the United States? Are you insisting those who can corroborate Debbie Ramirez's story, including a professor at the Princeton Theological Seminary, have the chance to tell their stories before you send Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court? Are you? Another individual wrote: Please, please, please vote no to elect Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. As a victim of domestic violence, I am full of fear for everyone who would be affected by the decisions Kavanaugh would have the power to make. This letter starts out: Senator, I want to thank you for expressing your concerns regarding the Kavanaugh issues. I am a survivor of rape by my best friend's older brother at the age of 10. I also survived many years of abuse by my ex-husband. While watching the coverage of the Kavanaugh news, I have heard Senators make very hurtful comments about the women who have come forward. I was proud of my Senator for having the courage to publicly announce that the way this has been managed by the Trump administration is wrong. I totally relate to what Dr. Ford describes as being held down and not being able to breathe. The only word that adequately describes this type of treatment is torture. I do not know where my former best friend's brother is; however, my ex-husband walks around with a religious cross around his neck. He is a pillar of his church, has the admiration of our daughter. I never told my children, while I am left with years of nightmares and fear. The Kavanaugh allegations in the news have triggered memories I have tried to bury for decades. She says: Though, your comments have renewed my faith that other than my older brother, there exists good men who want to support women who live with the torment of sexual abuse. I would love it if this letter said: I was afraid that the all-male majority of the Judiciary Committee would treat Dr. Ford unfairly. I was afraid but relieved when they heard her out. I was relieved when they insisted that those who could back up her story were allowed to testify. I was relieved and pleased they took her seriously enough that they insisted the FBI--they told the President the FBI has to talk to those folks for us to have any credibility. I would love for this letter to say that, but it doesn't say any of those things because this body, this leadership, let her down and let every woman across America who has been a victim of sexual violence down. Another woman wrote and said: Today's hearing was difficult yet important to watch. As a victim of sexual assault myself, I applied your support hearing Dr. Ford's accounts and believing in doing what is right and just. Wouldn't it be better if this letter could say: I applaud the Senate, the Senate leadership, and the President of the United States for believing in doing what is right and just. We didn't get letters like that, did we. Another individual writes: Today was an extremely difficult day watching the Kavanaugh hearings. I was so amazed by the bravery Dr. Ford showed throughout her testimony. Her experience was raw and credible. As a young victim of sexual assault, I feel emboldened because of Dr. Ford's testimony. Women need to be heard and believed. We have to hold the Supreme Court to the highest standards. Brett Kavanaugh is clearly not a candidate for the Supreme Court. Isn't that right, that we should ensure that we have the highest standards for those who serve on the Supreme Court? All those district judges across the land writing their decisions, they get appealed to the circuit courts, and all those circuit court judges writing their opinions, they get appealed to the Supreme Court, to nine individuals. Isn't it important that we proceed to ensure that we ``hold the Supreme Court to the highest standards''? We will not do that if we confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Court. We will be setting an abysmally low standard for integrity for all of the falsehoods he has told and an incredibly low standard for behavior. We saw the behavior and the partisanship. We didn't see judicial temperament and impartiality. He violates basically every standard we set for someone to serve on the Supreme Court. Yet we are having a vote later today with an indication that he will be approved. Here is another letter: I am a sexual assault survivor. I watched today. The sex crimes prosecutor looks like she had nailed Kavanaugh by his own calendar. Dr. Ford testified that it was early evening and casual. It appears the assault happened at the home that Kavanaugh and his friends worked out. This is when one of the majority Judiciary members took over and became angry partisans. That is all she writes, but I think what bothered a lot of people was that the majority chose to bring in a prosecutor--a prosecutor--to question Dr. Ford, as if Dr. Ford had committed a crime. She didn't commit a crime, my friends. She is a brave woman who came forward to share her story, hoping she would be taken seriously and treated fairly, afraid she wouldn't, and it turned out her fears were justified. They hired a prosecutor to treat her like a criminal. Wow. That is insult to injury. This letter is longer. It is the 16th story I am reading that I received from constituents back home. Watching Dr. Ford's treatment in the Senate today, I am having a hard time getting my own work done. Dr. Ford's assault experience parallels my own in ways I have not thought about in years. However, unlike Judge Kavanaugh, my assailant was able to complete the assaults he set out to do because we were not inebriated at the time he violated me. He merely used his size to overpower me, outweighing me by 150 pounds. Like Brett Kavanaugh, my assailant attended an all-boy's Catholic school, attended a prestigious university, went on to become an attorney. I have considered, because of the types of clients he represents, bringing the multiple assaults he perpetrated over the course of 2 weeks, while I stayed with his family across the country from my own, to the attention of the State bar where he practices or journalists in the State where he defended Catholic priests accused of abusing children. Seeing now what Dr. Ford is being put through, knowing she was driven from her home and threatened, is now being assaulted by her colleagues, gives me pause. My assailant isn't up for any prestigious promotions. He is not on the short list for a Federal judicial position or running for any public office. It has been 18 years, and the statute of limitations in the State where this took place may or may not have run out, depending on how the acts are defined. If my assailant decides to follow through with his goal to become a politician, my calculus may change. For now, I need you to do what you can to shut this nomination down, to show the world that you not only believe Dr. Ford but you honor--honor--her testimony. Your colleagues, your Republican colleagues, clearly believe her; they just don't think it matters. Please, as a survivor and as a constituent, I am begging you, make her testimony matter. Are we going to make her testimony matter? We are not going to make it better if we send Kavanaugh to a seat on the Supreme Court. Her desire, her interest, her possibility of coming forward is cut short by the way she saw this Senate treat Dr. Ford. That is a very sad commentary on the injustice perpetrated by this body. This is letter No. 17. I have more than 50 letters here. As you can start to hear, the themes of women being assaulted are very similar; women hearing in Dr. Ford's story their own experience, and they are asking the Senate to treat the women who have come forward with fairness and justice and are being deeply disturbed that they have not been treated with fairness or justice. There is still time. There is still time until we vote and send Kavanaugh forward, if we vote no, as these women asked because an individual with this record does not belong on the Court. Then we will admire the courage of these individuals to come forward. The next letter: As a survivor of assault, it's important to me that the nominee for one of the highest offices have an impeccable record, which Kavanaugh has demonstrated he does not have, both through his reactionary hearing and the accusations against him from survivors. I implore you to be a voice of reason in the chaos. My first assault happened in 2011. I am so ashamed that the only way my sister found out was because she found an STD test I had received from Planned Parenthood and asked me about it. I was 24. I had nightmares for months. It changed everything. My second assault happened in 2015. I was drunk and in an unfamiliar part of town. An acquaintance offered to give me a ride when I was leaving a bar and my phone died. She goes on to describe the attack. She says: I say this not for shock value, but to emphasize how painful watching this hearing was and how unsurprised I will be if Kavanaugh is confirmed. Unsurprised because she doesn't expect men to treat women fairly who have been assaulted and have come forward. And everything that has happened in this Chamber confirms that. The next letter notes: As a survivor of sexual assault, this issue is of the utmost importance. I rarely speak of these events and have tears streaming down my face just writing this. I was unable to report my assault for various reasons, including explicit death threats, fear of exposure by the media, and threats by several powerful men who had the ability to end my career before it had even really begun. This situation hits so close to home that it has been physically painful--physically painful--for me to watch much of the coverage. I have been unable to obtain justice for myself, and that is soul- crushing. But what would be a greater travesty is to allow a serial predator a lifetime appointment affecting the lives of every single woman in America. Are we going to be part of a greater travesty? Letter No. 19: As a constituent and a victim, I am writing to you to make sure that you vote against Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation. During his hearings, Kavanaugh misled the Judiciary Committee under oath. He refused to say whether a sitting President must obey a subpoena and refused to answer whether President Trump could pardon himself or bribe someone with a pardon. And now, Kavanaugh has been accused of sexual assault by multiple women. Kavanaugh's answers during his confirmation hearings add to the evidence that Trump nominated him not to protect the American people, not to protect the Constitution, but to protect himself. It was only a few weeks ago that Trump's former lawyer incriminated him in two felonies. It's becoming inevitable that a Trump case will reach the Supreme Court, either over his role in crimes to win the White House or a subpoena to answer questions from the special counsel. We already know that Kavanaugh believes sitting presidents should not be under Federal prosecution or even investigation. Now, under oath, Kavanaugh isn't even pretending to be an impartial justice. That is exactly why Trump nominated Kavanaugh--to be his get-out-of-jail-free card. Letter No. 20 begins: As a rape victim myself, I am livid that this man is even being considered for a high position. Brett Kavanaugh's views are extreme. His belligerent behavior during the hearing shows that he should not sit on the highest court in the country. I urge you to reject that radical choice of a justice who would put our basic rights at risk. Use your constitutional authority of advice and consent to ensure that the President cannot place unfit extremists in positions of power that can affect us for decades. Serving for life on the highest court, justices have the solemn responsibility to be fair, to be evenhanded, to uphold the sanctity of our laws and our Constitution, and to keep faith with the letter and the spirit of the Nation's core, public health, environmental, civil rights, and labor laws. His record rejects these principles. Please do all in your power to stop Brett Kavanaugh's nomination. Letter after letter reminds us that the Supreme Court is so important. We should only send individuals to serve on that Bench who are of unimpeachable character. Letter No. 21: I am deeply concerned about Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court after hearing Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's story. There is no need to wait to publicly say that you believe Dr. Ford. She has generously offered more than enough information for us to fiercely support her. I, too, am a victim of sexual assault. When I was 21, my boss at the time raped me, leaving me with a lifelong disease, and it never was reported. I had no support. I was embarrassed and humiliated and wanted to just forget about it. Looking back, I wish I would have tried to report him. I was a single mother with a 2-year-old child and my 12-year- old sister present when the assault occurred in the middle of the night as they slept. This happened to me in 1974. I am now a 66-year-old woman who has had relationship problems her whole life and self- esteem and anxiety and sexual dysfunction ever since. A lifetime impact from sexual assault. Each of these women wants us to take seriously the experiences that were shared, and to take it seriously means we would look into it with fairness and credibility, but we didn't. The Senate didn't. Letter No. 22: It would be beyond unethical to continue with Kavanaugh's nomination in the wake of Dr. Blasey's story. I am counting on you. Signed, a MeToo survivor. Letter No. 23: As a victim of sexual assault during my military service, I, too, told next to no one. Why? I wasn't about to subject myself to being treated the way these courageous women who have spoken up are being treated. I am counting on you. Thank you. We hear this time and again. Women say they didn't speak up because they thought they would be treated unfairly--unfairly--just the way the Senate treated the women who came forward and shared their stories about Brett Kavanaugh. Isn't that a sorry legacy for this body? Isn't that a shameful result, that women say they didn't speak up because they thought they would be treated unfairly, just like the Senate is now unfairly treating Dr. Ford and Debbie Ramirez? Wouldn't it be a beautiful thing to have done it differently, to have proceeded to say: Your story matters, so we will talk to those you suggested have corroborating information. We will report what information there is for the consideration of the Senate. We do appreciate that you have shared your experience, and we will look into it. Wouldn't that have been a very different message to send, an example to send for everyone across this country--for companies when an employee reports an assault, for places of worship when a parishioner reports an assault, for schools, universities, when a student reports an assault? Wouldn't it have been great to set an example--a high example of how to treat an individual fairly? But we did the opposite. We showed exactly the type of treatment that these women fear--a rigged, unfair, unconcerned response. But there is time to remedy that by not voting to confirm. One of the reasons I am reading these letters is that many of the women who wrote said they were writing to try to make a difference. My team called and talked to a number of them, and they encouraged their letters to be used. They want to be heard. They want to be honored with our intention that we care about the experiences they have suffered, that we take them seriously. They want us to think about what we have done and take Dr. Ford and Debbie Ramirez seriously. That hasn't happened, but there is still time by not confirming Brett Kavanaugh. In this letter, the individual says: How you vote on Brett Kavanaugh's nomination is one of the most crucial votes you will cast. Please vote no. Prior to hearing this round of hearings, I was concerned about his ability to be truthful. Now, as a survivor, I am fearful for the entire female population. I urge you to vote no for all of those reasons. Letter No. 25: I believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. I do not believe a man who could have stifled a frightened woman's screams while he felt entitled to put his hands on her body without her permission. I do not believe such a person is fit for one of the highest courts in our country. She took a lie detector test. He did not. She called for an FBI investigation. He did not. She was calm and collected. He was not. As a sexual assault survivor and your constituent, I implore you to stand with women. Letter No. 26: Thank you for fighting. I was a victim of sexual assault at age 12. I am now 71. I remember it vividly. It has affected my whole life. If Kavanaugh is confirmed, we will put a horrible man on our highest court. Thank you for highlighting the serious deficiencies in the process of President Trump's nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, to the Supreme Court. Letter No. 27: I am heartened by your efforts and like-minded Members of Congress who have joined the 21st century, many whose eyes, ears, hearts, and minds have witnessed the scourge of sexual misconduct. I am a 58-year-old Native American, native Oregonian. I grew up on a Catholic Indian mission with both my parents and seven brothers and sisters. Later in life, I recalled through discussions with my younger sister that my older brothers had most likely sexually abused me when I was a very young girl, less than 7 years old. I never reported it because I didn't recall it until I was in my 40s. My parents were alive and it would have destroyed them. I am a sexual assault survivor who never told my best friend in high school when one rape occurred. She proceeds to share information about several other assaults when she was serving in the Army, and she says that each time, she didn't report it. All of these incidents left me fearful, feeling vulnerable, psychologically damaged, PTSD, emotional trauma, physical trauma, and other problems too incalculable to quantify. I think these topics are often not discussed. Women in our own lives may have had experiences they have never shared with us, thinking that they might be blamed, feeling that they are ashamed, considering that they might not be believed, anticipating that they might expect that we would feel they should somehow have prevented it or somehow invited it. All of these conflicts--they sense they will not be treated with respect and dignity as the victims they are. Let's treat them with respect and dignity when they bring forward their stories. Dear Senator Merkley: I have never taken the time to write a Senator. With Trump as President, or having Trump as President has caused depression and anxiety, but I have gritted my teeth, battened down the hatches, and tried to weather the storm. However, this saga with Kavanaugh has mobilized me to speak out and protest a person of his moral ineptitude. I am a victim of sexual assault. I am sure you're hearing the outpouring of messages like mine from hundreds of women. I am so angry and so bitter about the current environment that promotes racism, sexism. The things I have seen voted in make me despair. Rather than the Senate behave in a way that makes women despair, what if we behaved in a way that inspired, set an example, had people say: We didn't think you would rise to the challenge because so often we have seen mistreatment when they bring forward their stories, but you shocked us because you took it seriously and you treated these women fairly. Wouldn't that be a beautiful story rather than the reality of where we are right now? Letter No. 29: There are a number of viable options for this Supreme Court seat--individuals not accused of any crimes--and regardless of innocence or guilt, Kavanaugh has shown himself to be unqualified to remain impartial as a judge. Furthermore, the backlash of there being any question of guilt regarding rape accusations is too great for him to successfully fulfill the duties of that position and will cause a division between voters that will likely never be healed. Speaking as both a concerned voter and rape survivor, there is no legitimate reason that we cannot find another candidate for this job. If he is appointed despite these allegations, it will be all but impossible for a rape survivor to ever feel safe in the U.S. again. How could we if an accused rapist is presiding as a member of the highest court in the country? She makes a point. There are many other people who can be considered to be brought forward. Why this individual who demonstrated such partisanship? Why this individual who bent and, yes, broke the truth many times before the committee? Why this individual who wrote offensive, mocking, accusing, disgracing things, attacking a woman in his yearbook? Why this individual who chose to join a fraternity with a reputation for assaulting women? Why this individual who chose to join a secret society with a similar reputation? Why this individual about whom credible women have come forward and shared their stories of assault? And why this individual when we had the full opportunity to have considered the corroborating information from 28 individuals who they asked that we talk to and we didn't? There is still time to reject this nomination and somehow restore the tarnished reputation that is the product of the behavior of this body during this nomination process. Letter No. 30: I am 66 years old, nearly 67. I can tell you exactly what occurred when I was a victim of sexual assault and attempted rape at age 16. It was burned into my memory and will forever be a part of me. I continue to be shaken to the core that anyone would explain such behavior as normal, part of young men growing up. It is unconscionable, unacceptable, and must no longer be ignored. Letter No. 31: Dear Senator Merkley, I am reaching out to you as a survivor of teenage rape. Like so many other survivors, I have been following the events surrounding Judge Kavanaugh's nomination with so much emotion that I cannot really begin to express it. I do not believe that I need to ask you to say no when it comes to a floor vote, but I want you to add my voice to the many who are speaking out in the hope that the country will listen. Sexual assault affects millions of girls, boys, women, and men. Too many of us live our lives in shame and silence, disbelieved if not outright blamed. Nearly 30 years have passed since a fellow student in my small town high school took my innocence, to then proceed to publicly shame me. People believed him, not me. This has to stop. People need to realize that we may forget some details, but we will never, never forget what happened. And when we know the perpetrator, we will never forget his name. He may grow old. His appearance may change. But his name will remain etched in our brains forever. She goes on to say: Putting Kavanaugh on the court means telling all of us, the countless millions, that we do not matter. She closes by saying: We matter. I matter. Yes, you do. And when you say that you are adding your voice to the many who are speaking out in the hope that the country will listen, I commend you. I commend you for being brave enough to share your story and to ask those in this Chamber to listen. But so far, they have not listened because listening would mean treating with respect and dignity the women coming forward. Listening would mean giving these women the opportunity not just to present their case, their experience, but to have those who can corroborate their information come before the Judiciary Committee and share their stories. Listening would mean insisting that the FBI actually talk to the corroborators rather than not talk to the corroborators. So you have not been listened to, I am sorry to report, but there is still time for someone--for several people--to say: We have reflected on this situation and realize how unfair and unjust we have been, how much we add to the trauma of millions of women by not listening to the women who have come forward, not taking them seriously, and rigging the system, as they feared would happen. This individual writes: I have a voice even if those screams were stifled inside of me so long ago. Today that voice says that Kavanaugh is not fit to be a member of the Supreme Court. Beyond the details of what transpired when he was a teenager, his atrocious display during Thursday's hearing should disqualify him outright. Integrity, level-headedness, respect for the rule of law, and lack of partisan bias should be fundamental requirements of any justice. Kavanaugh did not display any of those traits. His confirmation would stain the Senate and the judiciary for years to come if not permanently. I will conclude by saying that Dr. Ford's incredible courage has helped me more than any therapy session. She spoke. In speaking her truth to power, she spoke for all of us. I have shed so many tears watching and following these proceedings, but finally feel like I can stand tall, that I do not need to hide or live in shame. Her story is, in so many ways, my story. The smart girl who loved math and somehow made it through Stanford, completed a PhD, and embarked in a career in research despite the trauma that followed. . . . All too often we hide behind a smile and mask of strength so that people do not see that inside we cannot stop shaking. Lawmakers would be well advised to not underestimate the strength of our power when we raise our heads, shed our shame and reclaim our voices. We may tremble, but we will speak. We will be heard. We will NOT be dismissed. Letter No. 32: I am a victim of sexual abuse as a child, rape as a young adult, and sexual harassment during my professional career. I am also a successful practicing Child/Adolescent/Adult psychiatrist, with 20+ years of experience. Since Ms. Ford's testimony, on Friday I saw two female walk-in patients, one of whom revealed to me her own sexual assault, which occurred around the time of Ms. Ford's. She confessed this is the first time she has told anyone about this. The other woman I saw that day told a similar story. From the press I understand crisis lines lit up all over our nation, doubling their traffic in some cases. I write because I am worried. The press reports that only two of the three women making complaints against Mr. Kavanaugh will be interviewed by the FBI. . . . I am concerned that only two of the three alleged victims . . . will be heard. To establish a pattern . . . the FBI must include as many credible victims and witnesses as possible . . . particularly given the timelines and deadlines they are up against. Statistics on rape in the United States are shockingly high, higher even than many less developed countries. She was concerned the FBI would not be able to speak and interview those who could corroborate the experiences. It turned out far worse than she could ever have imagined: 0 for 28--0 out of 28. Not, well, we talked to 5 out of 28. Not we talked to 8 out of 28. The FBI was 0 out of 28, not because the FBI would choose to do that but because they could only talk to people whom they were allowed to talk to by the President's scoping instructions. Those instructions were not to talk to anyone who had credible supporting information. That is such a violation of fairness, of due process, of justice. There is that beautiful set of words carved into the front of the Supreme Court: ``Equal justice under law.'' Wouldn't anyone who had the right character to serve there have insisted--insisted--that these women get fair treatment? But we didn't hear Judge Kavanaugh insisting. He didn't even want an FBI investigation. He certainly didn't insist on there being one that actually talked to the people who had information. If your conscience is clean, if your life experience is clear, you don't fear an investigation. This letter goes on: Furthermore, currently our Congress and Senate do not reflect the 50.5% of Americans who are female. In fact, in 2017 US female representation by gender in Congress and the Senate was far lower in the US than Germany, France, United Kingdom, Sweden, Belgium, Netherlands and Spain. She cites the source as the Inter-Parliamentary Union Parline Database on National Parliaments. As a result we rely on men to understand and act on this predominantly female problem. American women depend on your gallantry to ensure our government does right by us. I plead with you to persuade our leaders to do the right thing. Think of your mother, your wife, your daughter and the women you love. Show us we are valued. As you make your phone calls know American women watch with fear and hope. Don't let us down. Did we treat Dr. Ford and Debbie Ramirez in the way we would want our mother, our wife, our daughter, or the women we love to be treated? No, we did not. She wrote asking for us to not let her down, and we have let her down. There is only one appropriate thing to do, and that is not to send this man who has bent and broken the truth many times before the U.S. Senate to the Supreme Court, not to send this man who has credible accusations of sexual assault that we were unwilling to investigate to the Court. The letter next notes: As a sexual assault survivor it's essential to me that no person who perpetuates such crimes ever sits in a position of power ever again. That kind of sums it up. This is letter No. 34. She says: I am a 52 year old proud Oregonian woman. . . . I too am a victim and survivor of sexual abuse, and sadly a member of the ``Me too'' club. Should you confirm Judge Kavanaugh, you will be disrespecting every Me Too victim in America, young or old. Victims of abuse are across the spectrum, and no doubt probably also in your families. Judge Kavanaugh is a nominee for a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, an interviewee. HE IS NOT A VICTIM. . . . I did find it, by the way, so disturbing to hear colleagues treat the women who come forward as the criminals and treat the nominee as the victim. That is exactly the type of inversion that women fear. That is exactly the type of reversal that has women deciding that they will never get a fair hearing, and it is exactly what happened right here in the U.S. Senate. The letter continues: Mrs. Ford was very brave in her testimony. . . . All of you on the Judiciary Committee--WAKE UP! It is 2018, not 1991 with Clarence Thomas, we now acknowledge and believe victims that come forward to tell their stories, aka HER- stories. We will never forget your actions in this confirmation process. Well, the writer is saying it is 2018, not 1991, and yet we treated Dr. Ford and Debbie Ramirez worse--worse than we treated Anita Hill in 1991. Letter No. 35 is a letter from Oregon constituents writing in to share their anger, their angst, their concern, their desire that women coming forward be treated fairly, their desire that we treat them seriously enough to actually talk to corroborating witnesses. Yet, unfortunately, we did not. In letter No. 35, the woman writes: I was also a victim of sexual assault when I was in graduate school. I never pursued that due to fear of consequences and feeling that this was my fault. This has to stop. Letter No. 36: Senator Merkley, I write to you today to urge you to vote no on the Kavanaugh nomination. The time has come for women to have a say in this society that men will listen to. I am a victim of sexual abuse. My case happened when I was 22. I never told anyone about my experience until I remarried 39 years ago. I have an 8-year-old granddaughter, and I pray that she will not ever have to battle someone to save herself. I am now 75, and I remember the exact time and place this incident occurred. One never forgets. Letter No. 37: I am myself a sexual assault survivor. I listened to the testimony of Dr. Blasey Ford . . . last Thursday. It was clear to me that her testimony was credible. The likelihood that she may not accurately recall the identity of her assailant, who was known to her before the assault, is extremely improbable. Trust me. It is not the sort of detail that an assault victim forgets. The likelihood, on the other hand, that Brett Kavanaugh may have failed to remember assaulting a . . . woman when he was inebriated is quite probable. Not only does excessive alcohol consumption dull the memory, but males who think so little of women that they would thus assault them are likely to dismiss the experience from memory as inconsequential. I implore you to continue to work tirelessly to encourage your colleagues to vote no on Kavanaugh's confirmation. . . . His integrity and character are in serious question, and he showed a total lack of judicial temperament. . . . I urge you to stand up. I know these letters didn't just go to individuals on this side of the aisle. So I ask my colleagues, have you read the letters that you have received that have asked you to take seriously the experiences shared by Dr. Ford and by Debbie Ramirez? Have you taken them seriously? Did you insist that their corroborating witnesses be interviewed? The President's team says it consulted with the Senate's leadership on how the FBI investigation should be done. We now know that, in the way it was done, none of the 28 corroborating witnesses were talked to--none. Did you take seriously the women in your home States who wrote to you the way the women in my home State wrote to me? Letter No. 38: If the FBI's investigation was limited to Ford's and Ramirez' allegations and excludes the third credible allegation of Avenatti's client, it is wrong to cherry pick credibility. I emphatically state that this third allegation reflects my personal experience. I do not divulge this lightly. It happened to me when I was 14. It was both legally and morally wrong, and I never reported it. This was in 1971 in Southern California. It was a recurrent event before I came to learn that others were victimized in the same manner--rendered unconscious in order to be engaged without consent. It seems incredible that I would end up attending other gatherings where individuals participating in such activities would also be, but, in fact, this is my experience as well. One of my sisters--9 years younger--recounted that this culture existed during her high school years in a party environment in Northern California. In these environments, there are certain coalitions of males who covertly foster these environments, and the victim is typically isolated in some back room or even some hotel room. Please maintain my anonymity, but take seriously the consideration of my deeply personal account. There are many qualified jurists who possess the appropriate qualities to sit on the highest Court of America. That was letter 38. Yet there are so many more letters pouring into my office, reading: Take our experiences seriously. Take seriously the voices of Dr. Ford and Debbie Ramirez. This institution has failed them. I ask you, are you comfortable voting for this nomination when this body did not hear from the individuals who had corroborating information and you did not invite them to testify? Even that was done in 1991. Are you comfortable voting to support this nomination when the FBI investigation was limited by a scoping document that excluded having interviews with any of the 28 people, put forward by the 2 victims, who had information to support them? Are you comfortable with that? You shouldn't be. You shouldn't be comfortable voting for a nominee who is under a shadow of allegations that we didn't even bother to explore. It confirms everything that women across this country fear--that when they come forward and share their stories, they will not be taken seriously, that the system will be rigged, and that they will be blamed. Everything they saw in the way the Senate handled this situation was shameful and embarrassing and beneath the dignity of this body that should have given a stellar example of how to respect and investigate, but it did not. My colleague from New York has arrived to share her thoughts. I thank her for her strong and fierce defense of women across this country who have suffered so much and been silent so often in fear they will be disrespected as the two women who came forward, Debbie Ramirez and Dr. Ford, feared they would be disrespected. This body confirmed every fear they had. Let's not vote to put on the Supreme Court of the United States an individual who bent and broke the truth many times before the committee; an individual with a record--even, as we know, from his high school and college years--of abusing women; an individual of arrogance and anger; an individual with partisan sentiments; an individual who thinks the President is beyond the law; an individual who finds, time after time, for the powerful over the people. That is not the person who should be confirmed to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States of America. I thank the Presiding Officer.

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

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I wish my colleagues were here to share in this dialogue because there is such an absence of other Members sharing with each other their perspectives. We have a world that is enhanced by a media world that lives in a different universe that accentuates the differences between the parties. I think we are on a course that does deepen the differences across America. I hope there is some way we can find in this Senate to be able to communicate across that growing chasm in a more effective manner. I have heard many of my colleagues speak to the issue of fairness on this floor. I offer just a brief, couple of sentences of points for you to consider as to why not all of America shares the perspective that this has been fair. When Dr. Ford was invited to come to speak to the committee, she said that she would like to come, but she wanted some time, and she would like to have corroborating individuals be able to appear before the committee. That was denied by the committee, and that bothered many people in this Chamber a great deal. Even in 1991, Anita Hill was given that opportunity. What is also very bothersome to individuals is that Dr. Ford had put forward a list of eight individuals whom she had asked the FBI to talk to, to be corroborating witnesses, and the FBI could talk only to those within the scoping document that comes from the White House because, at that moment, they are not doing a criminal investigation, they are doing a background investigation, and they have to follow the President's instructions. Those instructions, we are told, were not to talk to any of the corroborating witnesses, not the 8 she put forward and not the 20 who were put forward by Debbie Ramirez. So 28 individuals were not brought before the committee and not talked to by the FBI. I hope we have lots of opportunities to share our perspectives across the aisle to understand as we struggle with the issue of fairness because for many of us, fairness has not been achieved. The bigger message to these two women who came forward to share their journeys, to share their experiences, is that the U.S. Senate was unwilling to hear them out, unfortunately. Thank you.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, our Founders had a very clear design for the ability to put individuals into high posts of great responsibility. They really wrestled with it. They considered giving the ability to appoint judges and executive officers to the assembly, as it was referred to. I think we have to worry a lot about individuals swapping favors. One person saying: You support my friend, and I will support yours--that wouldn't lead to those with the best qualities serving in these key positions. They concluded after great debate that it would go to a single individual, the President, to nominate. They realized that the President can go off track. They thought the President might express favoritism of a variety of sorts. Alexander Hamilton talked about this at some length: maybe favoritism to people in the home State, maybe favoritism to a close group of friends, maybe favoritism to individuals who were doing favors for the President. Who knows? Therefore, there had to be a check on the potential abuse of the appointment process. That is where the Senate came in, to advise and consent--the President, to nominate; the Senate, to consent. What that meant is that the Senate could not interfere with the President on the nomination process, and the President was not to interfere with the Senate in the confirmation process. Yet we have right now, for the first time in U.S. history, as far as anyone has been able to ascertain, a case in which the President of the United States has interfered greatly, first of all by requesting that the Senate not look at all 3 years in which this individual, Kavanaugh--the nominee--served as Staff Secretary to President Bush. Second of all, the President appointed an individual to provide the stamp of Presidential privilege on documents for when he served at the White House that they did not want the Senate to see. We have some of those documents. He said: Those are OK. Yet they censored 100,000 documents with the Presidential privilege stamp. This has never been done, ever, as far as we can determine. This body, on a bipartisan basis, requested all of those documents. This was not a case of the President saying ``Please don't request,'' like with the Staff Secretary; this is a case in which the Senate together said ``Give us the documents,'' and the President refused. This is something we should all stand together and say: Unacceptable. It is unacceptable that the President stepped across the separation of powers to interfere with the work of this body to review the nominee's record. The fact that there have not been loud cries of protests from the leadership of this Senate is a shame on this institution--that it has not fought for the separation of powers embodied in the Constitution. It has not fought for the ability of each and every Senator to be able to exercise full responsibility when we took our oath of office to review the records of nominees, engage in the advice and consent exercise. Is this to be a precedent for the future because the leadership here has so shamefully abandoned the core principles of the Constitution and the responsibilities of this Chamber? I hope not. I hope that, together, all 100 Senators will find in the future they will make sure the President cannot interfere with our responsibility. This is only one of the many problems, the many concerns, about Brett Kavanaugh. Brett Kavanaugh didn't raise a single voice about the interference of the President with the exercise of this body. He is being nominated to the Supreme Court. He is supposed to have read the Constitution at some point. He is supposed to understand the separation of powers. He is supposed to stand up for the principles embodied in that great document, and he did not. That alone should tell you this man does not belong on the Supreme Court. Then, of course, there is the fact that he has a view of Presidential power that is above and beyond the law. Try to find that in the Constitution. Among the 25, he was the one who had the most expansive view of Presidential power. He is the one the President chose. Why is that? Because the President is under investigation for conspiring with Russia to fix the election. That is why. He is worried. He is up at night. He wakes up early. He tweets out to the world--angry, hostile. He wants to make sure he has a Justice on that Court who can help write a ``get out of jail free'' card. What a conflict of interest. What a conflict of interest that this Court might have to rule on whether a President can pardon himself. It is something we have never had to worry about before, whether a President can fire a special prosecutor, despite the writing under the law. That is not all. We have before us a nominee who has been deceptive and misleading to this Chamber time after time. Different articles have put up different lists. They all come down to here is what he said, and here is the truth. Here is what he said, and here is the truth. I want to pivot, though, to perhaps the most shameful, difficult part of this nominee; that is, his record of abuse toward women and the complete failure of this body to look into that. I heard earlier on the floor of this Chamber a number of my colleagues across the aisle use the word ``fairness.'' ``We want fairness.'' I heard it from one, two, three, four colleagues, ``fairness.'' Did a single one of them express any regret that when Dr. Ford came forward and asked for those who could corroborate her testimony, asked for the Judiciary Committee to hold a hearing with those folks able to testify? Did they express any regret they turned her down? Even in 1991, the Judiciary Committee brought forward people to corroborate Anita Hill's story. Here we are 27 years later, and we don't treat a woman coming forward to share an experience of sexual abuse--we don't even allow those individuals who can corroborate to testify before the Judiciary Committee. Did I hear a single Republican stand up and say ``I am embarrassed we treated her so poorly''? Let's take Debbie Ramirez. She laid out a list of 20 individuals. The Judiciary Committee had a lot to say about her experience. Did they invite her to testify and be able to tell her side of the story? No, they did not. She had a list of 20 individuals who could provide corroborating information. Did they ask a single one of those 20 to come before the committee? Did they allow a single one to come? No, they did not. There was no fairness in that committee. Let's be clear about that. Let's not hear more highfalutin arguments about fairness from the other side of the aisle when these two women were treated in such an egregious and awful fashion. Then, there is the phony FBI investigation. I praise my colleague who insisted that the record be reopened, the background check be reopened for the FBI to provide an opportunity to check out these experiences shared by Debbie Ramirez and by Dr. Ford. On a background check, it is not a criminal investigation, and the FBI can't decide who to talk to. Did I hear a single Member across the aisle express any embarrassment about the fact that they let the President constrain the investigations so not one--not one--of the eight people Dr. Ford asked to be talked to was talked to? Not one. Zero. You call that fair? That is not fair. That is not fair to her, that none of the people she asked to be talked to were talked to. Did I hear a single person across the aisle express any reservations about the fact that that FBI investigation was so constrained by the President of the United States, with advice from the Republican leadership, that they did not talk to one of the 20 people Debbie Ramirez asked to be talked to about her experiences in college? You know, 1 of the 20 was a suite mate of Mr. Kavanaugh's. Well, when you go through your freshman year and you are a suite mate, you share a common living area, and there is one bedroom here and one bedroom here, so you are with each other all the time. You know a lot about the other folks. Well, that is a pretty powerful association. That individual is now a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, and he heard this story when it happened. He heard about it, and he lived right there in the suite, and he thought it was horrific. I heard some colleagues say there was no one who could substantiate her story. That is simply false, and it is shameful to allege that there is no one when you know there is. It is unacceptable to call something fair when you deliberately instruct or encourage the President to make sure that the people who can provide the information are not talked to. This individual, now a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, has a very fine reputation. He was so upset about this, he talked about it with his roommate his first year in graduate school long before Mr. Kavanaugh ever came close to any type of nomination debate. So you can't really say that he made it up now when he told another person about it long ago. And that individual was on the list to be talked to, but did the FBI talk to him? No, because the President wouldn't let the FBI talk to him, and the President consulted with the Republican leadership, and they didn't want anybody talked to who could actually corroborate these stories. That is a rigged system. For anyone on this floor to say that is anywhere close to a form of justice, that is not true. These women have been horrifically treated by this Chamber. Just as the country knew Anita Hill was treated so poorly, so will, for decades from now, people talk about the abuse of power that emanated from my colleagues across the aisle against these women. Across this land right now, women have been reliving their own experiences of abuse. It has been an extraordinarily painful experience. They have been calling our offices. I am sure they have been calling all of our offices. I got on the phone and took many calls today. I heard story after story. It takes a lot of energy out of your heart to listen to individuals say, I am sharing this with you, and they start crying on the phone--person after person. I also have all of the stories that have been written and sent to me as letters. I thought I would share a few of them with you. Here is a letter: What a farce! The disrespect to Dr. Ford and to victims everywhere. I am sincere in saying that this TRIAL is turning my stomach. I have fought back tears. I am a victim of similar offenses. It is no better, and in some ways worse, that it is a woman going after Dr. Ford in a subtle attempt to cloud the trust of her experience. Well, what is she referring to when she says it is a woman going after Dr. Ford? She is talking about the fact that the leadership on the Judiciary Committee hired a prosecutor to come in and act as if Dr. Ford were a criminal on trial and to interrogate her as if she were a criminal on trial. That is what this individual said ``is turning my stomach.'' And it turned my stomach, too, to see that abuse of power here in the U.S. Senate. Another letter: Hello, Senator. It has been 21 years since I was raped. I had at the time only shared my story with the emergency room doctors, the police, and my mom. Since it occurred, I have only shared my story with my husband, until this week on Twitter with the ``why I didn't report'' hashtag. With each new accusation against Brett Kavanaugh, it has forced me to relive all the horrible memories from the night my assailant raped me. This moment in history and the fact that the majority of Republican Senators who have either tried to discredit the women coming forward or victim blame and shame them has literally made the event so fresh in my mind; as though it just happened all over again yesterday. As like Dr. Ford, the details of dates, exact time, exact clothing, are not extremely forthcoming to my memory, although I remember the colors of what we were both wearing. The fear, his actions, what I was feeling, and what was said during the rape, I will never forget. And I will never forget the smell of the cologne he was wearing and how it makes me physically ill when I smell it to this day. Kavanaugh can have his fake tears and shout his anger all he wants because I guarantee you, if the man who raped me was trying to get a job on the Supreme Court, and if I had the strength to come forward like Dr. Ford did, then he too would yell and scream at the realization he was being confronted and that it was about to be taken away from him. Not to mention, my sexual assault assailant would NOT require an FBI investigation either. And what is she referring to there? She is referring to the fact that Dr. Ford took a polygraph exam, and Dr. Ford asked for an FBI investigation. Mr. Kavanaugh did not take a polygraph exam, and Mr. Kavanaugh did not want an FBI investigation. Quite a difference there. Here is another story: Five years ago, I was assaulted by a trusted friend in my dorm room. Although I don't recall some critical details, indelible in the hippocampus is the humiliation and fear of retaliation. That is why I never reported, even when school nurses urged me to. Years later, I suffered PTSD and rarely feel entirely safe. Watching Kavanaugh's angry, arrogant performance was deeply triggering to me--would my attacker act the same way if I outed him? And would he also find the support of 33 percent of Americans, just like Kavanaugh? Until now, I haven't shared that I am a survivor with even the closest of my friends and family. But it is too important to stay quiet now. Here is another story: Hello, Senator Merkley. When I was young in the early 1970s, I was raped for an entire year by someone close to our family. I didn't tell. I didn't tell because his warnings and threats were too powerful and frightening for the child that I was. The man went on to become active in a leadership role. He was, in fact, in a position to give talks about morality and principles, all the while knowing how he affected my life. Because that was the year he took my childhood away. Watching Dr. Ford's testimony was tough, but I did it. I always knew if I came forward against the man who did this, it would be his word against mine and as a female, I would lose. So I stayed quiet, never naming him publicly and never will. But I'm writing today to ask you for two thing, please--if you hear any of your fellow Senators say ``I know his character. He would never do that. He's never done anything like that in front of me,'' please remind them that they don't like witnesses. For me, there was never a hint of an assault until he got me alone. And if you hear your fellow Senators say, ``But it happened almost 40 years ago,'' please assure them that in the victim's heart, mind and life, it happened last week. It happened yesterday. It happened today. Because you never get past what was done to you. Ever. You can't. She went on to share that she wrote this letter to me and deleted it and wrote it again and deleted it several times. She had just deleted it again when her husband came in the door carrying a statement that someone had posted on the doors in the neighborhood that happened to have a quote from me, one of her two Senators, and she took it as a sign, and she decided to write that letter again and send it. She said: Now maybe what happened to me will bring about some good. I know all of us are getting letters like this. When she said she never came forward because it would be ``his word against mine and as a female I would lose,'' she is relating exactly what happened to Dr. Ford. It was set up he said, she said, with no corroborating witnesses called even though Dr. Ford asked for them. And then because it was he said, she said, my colleagues could stand up and say: Just can't prove it. Can't prove it. But why didn't my colleagues stand up and say: It is an outrage that we didn't call the people she asked us to call. It is an outrage that there was this phony FBI investigation that didn't talk to any of those people. What she was talking about right here is how Dr. Ford was treated in this Chamber, that she would lose because men in power would rig the system and find for the man. That is what has happened here. That is what happened with Ms. Ramirez, Debbie Ramirez. She had corroborating information from the suite mate of Brett Kavanaugh, but we here, this Senate, we rigged the system so that that information could not be considered. That is what this woman is talking about, why she didn't come forward, because it would be her word against a man's. The system would be rigged and would find for the man. That is what is so disturbing to women all over this country--a rigged system, that we couldn't find in our collective judgment, in our collective process, the ability to rise against partisanship and give fair treatment, a fair process, to the individuals who came forward. It may not have changed the course of events and the final vote, but at least women would know we have come from where we were. We may not have been entirely fair to Anita Hill, but we have learned and we have come further. Instead, we did worse. That is a regrettable, powerful consequence of what has happened. Another constituent wrote to say that although he was not a direct victim of assault, both of his brothers were repeatedly sexually abused by a Catholic priest who spent 8 years in prison for abusing as many as 150 boys. He went on to say that this priest was in charge of a boys' choir even though it was known that he had issues with sexual abuse. His brothers were part of the choir, and he is troubled, he writes, that his younger brother served in the same choir he did, and even though he was aware there was a problem, he didn't intervene. He says, referring to the priest: He ruined our lives. Though I was not directly a victim of his abuse, I carry with me the shame of not knowing to speak up about what I saw. He says that shame is amplified because his younger brother sang in the same choir for a time. He goes on to talk about a culture of power and privilege, where people think they can abuse others and get away with it. He says: We are seeing this behavior being accepted at the highest level of office in our country. He goes on to relate that this is similar to the culture of abuse towards women. He says: The culture of abuse towards women is being openly perpetuated by the leaders of our country. The people we are supposed to put trust in. That was the end of his quote. He went on to say: I have never felt like it was my story to tell. The only reason I tell it is because it illustrates how dangerous these power structures can be and how easily they can be abused. We have to take great care when choosing who to give great responsibility to. Have we in this Chamber recognized how easily our power structure can be abused? Did we rise to insist on fairness for individuals who brought their stories forward? Did we insist that they have the opportunity to have their witnesses and corroborating information considered by this Chamber? We did not. We failed them. We failed this country. And when he says that we have to take great care when choosing who to give great responsibility to, he is saying we should have taken great care. And we know that in this particular nomination, there are two powerful pieces of it. One, it is lifetime, so the person will serve for decades. The second is, it is the top Court. Are there not individuals in this land of hundreds of millions of people who have stellar records of character who could serve on that Court? I hope that across America, it will come to great discussion and lead to changes in how we think and how we behave. I hope that between now and the vote tomorrow afternoon, there will be some Members of this Chamber who will decide to take seriously the responsibility that we had and that we failed to exercise appropriately. We will decide that, you know what, yeah, we are going to close debate, but we haven't yet voted to put this man on the bench, and with the committee having conducted a completely rigged process, we need to stop and rethink what we are doing and not put Brett Kavanaugh on the Court. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, moments ago, I was outside at a rally on the lawn of the Capitol, looking at the Supreme Court of the United States of America. When you look at that beautiful building, you see the phrase ``equal justice under law'' above the big, beautiful doors of entry--equal justice under law. That is the concept behind the Supreme Court. Every other court can make decisions, but they can be appealed--the final determination, balancing the parts of the Constitution against each other, understanding and exercising the fundamental vision contained in this beautiful ``We the People'' document. That is what those nine Justices are all about. For an individual to become a Justice, it takes two steps. The first is, it is considered by the President as to whom to nominate. Having nominated, it comes over to the Senate. This is the confirmation process. The Founders, when they wrote the Constitution, wrestled with, how do you appoint individuals to these key positions? They said: Well, we could give the power to the assembly, so that would be a check on the executive or a check on the judiciary getting out of control. But they worried that Senators might trade favors: You put my friend in this position; I will put your friend in that position. They said that the nominating power needed to rest with one individual--that being, of course, the President of the United States of America. Then they said: What happens if a President goes off track? Alexander Hamilton spoke to this and called it favoritism--favoritism of a variety of types. What if the President goes off track and starts nominating friends when they are qualified for particular positions? What if he only nominates people from his home State, ignoring the qualities of many people who might be better qualified? What if there comes a situation where perhaps favors are done for the President in exchange for a position? The Founders said that there needs to be a check; that is, the Senate confirmation process. It is a pretty good design. I can't think of any one better. Essentially, the confirmation process is like a job interview: Is this individual fit to serve in the executive branch? Is this person fit to be a judge? Is this person fit to be a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America? That term, ``fit,'' is the term that Alexander Hamilton used when he was writing about the fundamental goal of the Founders to decide if an individual by experience and character was fit or unfit. That is our job here. Throughout our history, it is a clear separation of powers. The Senate cannot intervene in terms of whom the President nominates, and the President cannot intervene in terms of the review process of that nominee. Now we have something that has happened in an extraordinary fashion. It has never happened in the United States before, as far as we are aware; that is, the President of the United States, President Trump, has violated that separation of powers, and he has done so in three fundamental ways. After nominating, he did not leave the Senate to review the record. He instead had his team call up Senators who lead the Judiciary Committee and say: Don't let the Senate get their hands on any of the records for the 3 years in which the nominee served as Staff Secretary. That is a direct intervention, a violation of the separation of powers. When I say ``he,'' I am referring to his team. That intervention was unacceptable. Then the Senate requested the records for the time he served on the White House Counsel. In this case, the President assigned an individual and gave him a stamp labeled ``Presidential privilege,'' and that individual proceeded to stamp not 10 pages of documents, not 100, not 1,000, not 10,000, but 100,000 pages of relevant information were stamped ``Presidential privilege'' and were not delivered to the Senate. The President of the United States, instead of responding to the Senate's request for records, proceeded to exercise what he referred to as Presidential privilege or what we know to be Executive privilege and prevented the Senate from getting those documents. Why did that happen? We got some of the documents that made it through that censorship process but not all of them. From the documents we did receive, we found some information. We found out that when he served, he had been very involved in several nominations, discussions on nominations, even though he had indicated he had not played much of a role. We found out that he was involved in the conversation on torture, even though he had said he had not been involved. We found out that he had directly received documents stolen from the Democrats, even though he said he had not received those documents. That is just in the documents received. What is in the 100,000 documents the President marked ``Presidential privilege'' so we could not get them? What is being hidden in those documents? This violation of separation of powers--a violation that has never occurred in this manner to this degree, to this extent or anything close to it as far as any researcher has been able to ascertain--is unacceptable. The Senate must stand up for its right to be able to review the record of nominees. Sure, some of my colleagues are pretty happy that these documents got blocked because they don't want to know what is in them because they have already made up their minds. But reverse the situation. Consider that maybe a different President is in place, proposing a judge of a different judicial philosophy. Do we really want to compromise the fundamental rights of the Senate, their responsibilities of the Senate of advice and consent? We do not. It is wrong. Each of us, every one of us, took an oath of office to uphold the Constitution. Now, that Constitution gives each of us, every one of us, the responsibility to review the record of nominees and decide if they are fit or unfit, and none of us can do that if we don't have those records. So let's stand up together and tell the President to deliver those documents. Well, now, you might ask: Isn't there some justification for this Presidential privilege? Consider this: These are records that occurred under President Bush, but it is not President Bush asserting privilege, it is President Trump. How could his--that is, President Trump's--conversations be compromised by records from a previous administration? Doesn't this sound suspicious? The only reason anyone can think of is not that they compromise confidential information about the Trump administration but that simply they have information that would not look good in regard to our review of Judge Kavanaugh's record. So when you have this situation, this abuse of power, we sometimes turn to the courts to say stop that abuse, and that is what I have done. I filed suit and said: Stop this abuse of power by the President stepping in and blocking the Senate from seeing those 100,000 documents, for which no justification has been provided. It isn't that the President said: Well, on this page there is this type of sensitive information and that is protected because it affects my administration. No, no justification. So that alone tells you this Senate should never confirm this individual because we have not had the opportunity to review his record. The President is hiding these documents. He does not want us to see them because it probably has a lot of information unbecoming to this nominee. You don't hear the nominee saying: No. Deliver the records. I want the Senate to know everything about me. No, the nominee is not interested in us being able to actually see his judicial views or his character in that context. So this is one reason he should be rejected. How about this. Should anyone serve on the Supreme Court, that beautiful place where we consider equal justice under the law, who has repeatedly lied to the U.S. Senate during his confirmation hearings? He lied in 2006 time after time. My colleagues who served in 2006--I did not--have pointed this out in detail. He lied on key issues, key issues related to the documents I was referring to. Then we had his performance in the Senate just last week where he proceeded to tell all kinds of whoppers. The press has laid them out. Some articles talk about 20-plus whoppers he has told, and by ``whoppers,'' I mean lies. I mean deceptions. I mean inaccuracies. I mean things he knew not to be true. That is unacceptable, to put any individual on the Court who cannot be truthful when questioned before Congress. Then we have the fact that he has this record of engaging in behavior abusive to women. Now, it took a lot of courage for Dr. Ford to come forward and tell her experiences in high school, and it took a lot of courage for Debbie Ramirez to come forward and talk about her experiences in her freshman year. She shared how Mr. Kavanaugh--Judge Kavanaugh--had directly engaged in massively inappropriate sexual behavior. When women come forward to share these experiences, we need to treat them with respect; we need to treat them with dignity; we need to hear them; we need to understand their pain, but what did the Senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee majority do? They hired a prosecutor in order to treat her as a criminal. Yes, the 11 Republican men hired a prosecutor to treat Dr. Ford as a criminal when she appeared before the committee. Now, she asked for an FBI investigation. The committee didn't want to give it to her. The leadership of the committee didn't want to give it to her, and I praise my colleague from Arizona who said it is so important to investigate the credibility of her story, to talk to those who have additional information. She asked for that. She invited that. She wanted that. She provided a list of eight individuals whom, if you want to corroborate her story, these are the people you should talk to. So the President, at the request of my good friend from Arizona, said: Yes, we will reopen the background investigation, the FBI investigation, but the President produced a scoping document that says whom the FBI can talk to. So of those eight women, those eight women who are on Dr. Ford's list, you would expect, if the goal was to explore her experience as she presented it, the FBI would be authorized by the President to speak to all eight. To my colleagues, have you paid attention to how many individuals the FBI was allowed by President Trump to talk to who were on that list--Dr. Ford's list? The answer is zero. So any colleague in this Chamber who says that was fair treatment of Dr. Ford I will contend is absolutely wrong because Dr. Ford presented individuals who had relevant information, and the President's scoping document prevented the FBI from talking to them. Now let's talk about Debbie Ramirez. She is there during Judge Kavanaugh's freshman year at Yale, in the dorm, and he behaves in a totally inappropriate manner, according to the information she relayed about excessive drinking, followed by this individual, this nominee, exposing himself to her and laughing about it. She provided a list of 20 individuals who have corroborating information about that experience--20. So, of course, if the FBI was going to reopen the background investigation and it was going to be an investigation with any form of integrity, any form of legitimacy, any form of fairness, the FBI would be allowed to talk to those 20 people. How many of those 20 people did the President, in his scoping document, allow the FBI to talk to? None. Zero. Not a single one. That, again, is not fairness to the individual who came forward with her experience. Now, why is it that the President didn't want the FBI to actually talk to these individuals? Well, let's discuss one of them. One of them lived in the suite, lived right there in the same cluster of bedrooms with a common area as did Mr. Kavanaugh that freshman year, and he heard about this story in real time. He heard about it and he remembered it and he thought it was outrageous that Mr. Kavanaugh had behaved in this fashion. Now, he remembered it so clearly that when he was in a discussion with his roommate in his first year in graduate school, he shared that story with his roommate years and years and years before Kavanaugh was ever nominated to a judicial position. So here you have a suitemate who heard the story of what was done by Mr. Kavanaugh to Debbie Ramirez, who relayed that story to another student in his first year of graduate school and who went to the FBI and said: Come and talk to me because I can tell you she is telling the truth. I may not have witnessed it, but I heard about it after it happened, and I am not making it up now because I told somebody about it, and they are willing to come forward and talk to you. So it goes to the FBI. Could the FBI talk to him? No, they couldn't because the President of the United States prohibited the FBI from talking to anyone who had real information about the two experiences those two women brought forward. That is just beyond wrong. Think about how much worse this body is treating these two women than the Senate treated Anita Hill in 1991. Think about that comparison. You would think in the nearly three decades since we would have improved, 27 years--but have we? With Anita Hill, the President immediately reopened the FBI investigation of his own volition, wanting to get a full background check of the issue. The committee held hearings over multiple days, had multiple people come forward who had corroborating information. They heard them out. How many of those 28 individuals have been given an opportunity to come before the Judiciary Committee to share their experience? Not a one. The leadership of the Judiciary Committee has blocked all of them--has not invited one of them to share their story. The President blocked the FBI from talking to them. The leadership at Judiciary blocked the Judiciary Committee of this body from hearing them out. This is perhaps the worst example of injustice we could envision in this body, and I would like to call it an esteemed body, but how can I call it that when my colleagues are treating these women in such a horrific fashion? Should an individual serve on the Supreme Court based on this job interview that we are conducting? Would you hire this individual into your company, into a position of trust, after the testimony of these two women? Wouldn't you say: If I am even giving a thought to hiring the individual, I will check out these stories, not block these women from being able to have the corroborating information shared with the Senate, not block the FBI from being able to talk to them? No. This is a failure. We cannot allow this to stand. We have a responsibility, particularly more with the Supreme Court than any other organization, to exercise our advice and consent through a responsible process, a process of integrity, of fairness, of decency, of transparency, none of which is happening at this point. So we have deep differences over this man's judicial philosophy, but I know that if he is rejected, then the President will propose someone of a similar judicial philosophy. So my colleagues who support that philosophy can be assured they will have a chance to put another person in who hasn't lied to the Senate, another person who doesn't have a record of abuse toward women. I heard some interviews this evening of some of my colleagues saying things like: Oh, it is so horrific that these women are trashing his reputation. Are you really telling me that for a woman to share a horrific experience from her life, who is willing to have the FBI investigate it and who provides people who have corroborating information, you are calling that an attack? You are calling that person the wrong person? How dare they come forward with their story, you are saying. That is just wrong. That is so completely wrong to treat women in that fashion. So to my colleagues who want somebody of a similar judicial perspective, you will have a chance to have that person, but you will do incredible harm to this institution if this man, after this record, is put onto the Court, and that is why he needs to be rejected. That is why the President should withdraw him. That is why my Republican colleagues should call up the President and say: Withdraw this nominee and send us another. I happen to disagree with his judicial philosophy as well. We are in a battle in this country between the ``we the people'' vision of the Constitution, as it was written, and a rewrite done by a group of lawyers who want to have government not by and for the people but by and for the powerful: Don't worry about those consumers. Let the company run over the top of them. Don't worry about those healthcare opportunities. Snatch them away. Don't worry about those environmental laws. Knock them down. It is government by and for the powerful. That is Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh has gone through decades of a process designed to prepare him to execute that philosophy--government by and for the powerful on the Court. They are so happy. The powerful in this country are so happy to jam him through that they are putting extreme pressure on my colleagues to approve him despite his horrific personal record. I say to my colleagues: Stand up for the integrity of the Senate. Stand up for the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. Don't allow yourselves to be brought into a vortex of determined outside power saying: This must be done, and this must be done now, and this must be done with this flawed individual. I am deeply disturbed--deeply disturbed--about where we stand right now with the vote to close debate tomorrow and to send this body into 30 hours of final debate before a decision. That timeline gives us no chance that the courts can provide us the documents that have been censored by the President of the United States. It gives no chance to reawaken the opportunity of the committee to hear from those 28 individuals whom the FBI did not investigate because the President of the United States wouldn't let them--no chance to get to true justice. Remember that phrase across the front of the Supreme Court: ``Equal justice under law.'' That phrase will be tarnished, the Court deeply diminished, and the people deeply divided, if we proceed to the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. It is a great question or a great point because when you have resources, you can respond to the impact far more easily. You can take and say: My house has been devastated, but I have the resources to go buy another house in a safer area, in a drier area. Take, for example, the flooding of New Orleans. When New Orleans was flooded after Katrina, we saw that affluent families moved, and poor families had two options: One was to leave everything behind, leave the State, and start over but start over with no assets, which meant they were in extremely difficult circumstances, or stay and hope to rebuild. It was extremely difficult for low-income individuals to be able to do so. As we look at the disparate impacts around the world, we can look within the United States and realize, for example, the impact on the Native American populations of Alaska are being significantly impacted by the shoreline eroding, by the ice disappearing, and with that, the traditional way of life is disappearing. Various groups have, therefore, had to appeal for help to be able to move their villages, as a result. There is very little to be done to address the very changing nature of the commerce they have carried on with the sea. Their fishing or their hunting, which has gone on for thousands of years, now is being dramatically impacted. We do see a hugely disparate impact. If we broaden this discussion to look at countries such as Syria, we find that when climate change affected the farmers and they had drought year after year, they had to abandon their farmlands and flee to the city, and they had no resources. It created competition for resources. It helped to launch the civil war and Syria has been in deep, massive conflict ever since, just as an example.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I am delighted to be here with my colleague from Rhode Island. This is a coast-to-coast presentation, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and on around the world, because our oceans are in deep trouble from climate chaos. It is indeed time to wake up, and this week is my colleague's 222nd speech addressing that fact. It is so important not just that we speak but that the world act. Driving these factors--whether we are talking about the impacts on the land or the impacts on the ocean--is carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide pollution. It is facts on the ground everywhere that people can pay attention to, but I think every now and then it is good to return to the basic science. So I am just going to share this chart which shows, with this red line, rising carbon dioxide levels. This chart ends a little bit early, but we are now well over 400 parts per million. When I was born, we were at about 314 parts per million, and we are approaching 414. This generation over the last 62 years is the first generation to experience a 100-point climb in human history on this planet, the first one to experience this dramatic growth in carbon dioxide. If it were just growth in carbon dioxide, if it were just a matter of changing the air chemistry a little with no impact, we wouldn't be here talking today, but now we have this set of black dots representing temperature changes. We can see, essentially, as the carbon dioxide levels rise, the temperature of the planet is rising as well. The heat that is being trapped has been well understood for a long time. It goes back more than a century. In more recent times, in 1959, there was a scientist, Edward Teller, who was quite famous for his work on nuclear issues. He gave a speech to the 100-year anniversary of the petroleum. He said: This energy that you are pulling out of the ground--oil and coal and gas--is pretty powerful in helping humans transform the world and it can do a lot of good, but then he went on to say, it has two problems. The first problem is, there is a limited supply in the ground. It turns out there is a lot more carbon stored in the ground than Edward Teller had any idea about in 1959, but, he said, the second problem you have is that when you burn this resource, you create carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide traps heat and you are going to have a dramatic impact on the planet. He focused specifically on the issue of rising sea levels and the fact that most people around the world live next to the sea. That is a proper introduction to us recognizing that this issue has been understood scientifically for a long time, but in terms of our politics, individuals are reluctant to embrace that challenge because it requires action, and that action is sometimes hard to come by to shift the status quo to address this rising threat. In the 10 years I have been in the Senate, we have seen dramatic, dramatic impacts, and I will focus on the oceans today. Oceans absorb 90 percent of the heat. I didn't know this statistic until my colleague from Rhode Island questioned a scientist who was being nominated for a key position in the administration and asked her that question, thinking it was just basic knowledge. I said to myself, actually, I wasn't sure how much the oceans absorb. I knew the open blue waters--non-ice-covered waters--absorb a lot of sunlight energy. I know they cover three-quarters of the Earth, but I didn't know that statistic that 90 percent of the energy is trapped by the ocean. So we see impacts around the world. We see coral reefs dying at an unprecedented rate, both from the warming of the ocean and from the increasing acidity of the ocean. You may wonder why I raise the question of acidity. What does that possibly have to do with that? As that rising carbon dioxide level that was on the chart I just put up lifts, waves incorporate more of that carbon dioxide into the ocean, and it becomes carbonic acid. Essentially, we are pouring incredible amounts of acid into our oceans via carbon dioxide pollution. When I stand on the shore on the coastline of Oregon and I look out to sea and see that ocean, I find it hard to imagine that we as humans could have changed the basic chemistry, but there was a rude-awakening fact that occurred when I came to the Senate back in 2008, when I was elected, and in 2009. That fact was the baby oysters being hatched in the Oregon State hatchery, the Oregon hatchery on the coast, started dying. They all started dying. So the hatchery rushed in experts from Oregon State University. They thought they would find a bacterium, they thought they would find a virus and they didn't and they were mystified. What is the answer? Why are they dying? It turned out it was simply the increasing acidity of the Pacific Ocean, the ocean having increased 30 percent over the time that humans have been burning fossil fuels for energy. When those baby oysters try to pull the molecules out of the ocean to form their shell, it is so much harder when it is a higher acidity, and they die. So now we have to artificially buffer the water in which the baby oysters are hatched in order for them to live. We lost a billion baby oysters. Then, of course, we have the impact, and we have climate chaos in the form of hurricanes. Boy, have we received that message through storm after storm in 2017 and 2018. Hurricane Harvey came rolling in, September of 2017. The storm formed and dissipated between August and September. The numbers are ones you really can't get your hands around: Twenty-seven trillion gallons of water dumped in Louisiana and Texas; 34,000 people displaced; 13,000 had to be rescued from rising floodwaters. The estimated damage: about $125 billion from that one storm, second only to Katrina. Then, a few weeks later, here comes Hurricane Maria, devastating Puerto Rico, devastating the Virgin Islands. It knocked out the power grid in Puerto Rico for almost a year. I went there about 8 or 9 months after the storm to check it out, and I saw an island where thousands of families still had blue tarps over their roofs--a testament to the amount of destruction they had experienced, also a testament to how unprepared FEMA was to respond to that: an estimated $90 billion in damage; an estimate of roughly 3,000 deaths coming from the storm and the aftermath, many of them affected by the knocked-out healthcare services and the heat that followed. Together, 2017 broke the record for the cost of the hurricane season, 16 major billion-dollar weather events costing over $300 billion. Why are these hurricanes more devastating because of climate chaos, because of carbon dioxide pollution? The energy comes from the temperature in the ocean. The warmer the ocean, the more energy, the more powerful the storms. A short explanation is that the warmer oceans produce more evaporation, more water vapor in the atmosphere. It increases approximately 7 percent for every 1.8 degrees of temperature rise. Then the storm as a whole moves across the ocean and across the land more slowly, which means not only do we have a more powerful storm, but it is more likely to hover over a given area for a longer period of time. Between 1949 and 2016, it is estimated that hurricanes slowed down at sea by about 10 percent and by about 20 percent once they make landfall. The result: a lot more rain and a lot more wind hits any given area, a recipe for disaster. If 2017 wasn't enough, we have already experienced Hurricane Florence this year. Again, unusually warm ocean temperatures. It is estimated that by previous understanding, this was a once-in-a-thousand-year event; that is, we go through 1,000 years, we would see something like this once, but we didn't just see Florence. We saw in the previous year Maria, Irma, and Harvey. In other words, these 1,000-year-events are becoming far more common as a result, setting record rainfalls, doing record damage. It is more deaths, more damage, and now we have thousands still in shelters as a result of Hurricane Florence and an estimated some $38 billion in damage. There are other effects we should realize from these massive storms. One is that when the rivers flood up over the land, they tend to flood areas that were never intended to be flooded; things like, for example, leftover waste dumps from the ash from coal-burning powerplants. That ash can turn a river into a gray pudding, and you can see it from space. That ash contains arsenic, boron, copper, lead, and mercury, and giant ponds of coal ash throughout North Carolina were flooded. It has happened before. In 2014, there was a catastrophic event at a Duke Energy plant that spilled some 39,000 tons into the Dan River. That spill urged more regulations to strengthen those coal ash deposits to prevent them from escaping during floods, but what happened last year? Well, President Trump's EPA and the North Carolina legislature weakened those regulations. Then, last month, two other Duke Energy ponds flooded in Hurricane Florence and released tons of coal ash into rivers and onto private property. Imagine that toxic sludge flooding across your land. How would you feel about that? Imagine that toxic sludge going into the river your city takes its water from. How would you like that? I know you wouldn't. Another source of pollution: hog waste. North Carolina has roughly 3,000 unlined, open air pits containing millions of gallons of hog waste. The hurricane's flooding released a lot of that waste into the rivers. Again, how do you imagine the impact of that hog waste spreading across your flooded property or through the river you take your water out of? Not a pretty sight. We are in the situation where so many legislatures want to put their hands over their ears and eyes and not acknowledge the basic science that is resulting in a warmer planet, warmer oceans, and all of the effects--the coral reefs; the Pacific blob and the impact it had on sea birds; the dying oysters; the pine beetles that live through the winter because the winter is warmer and kill the pine trees; the ticks that live through the winter in New Hampshire, New England, and kill the moose; the ticks that live through the winter and spread disease that humans get--devastating disease. We have to stop and be honest about this impact on our planet. We used to talk about computer models, and many mocked those models saying that is just some ivory tower estimate; it is not really going to happen. Now the facts are on the ground, and what we are seeing is damage to our forests and to our fishing and to our farming. This is not an urban issue or a rural issue. It is both an urban issue and a rural issue: urban cities getting flooded, rural areas having their farming and fishing and forestry profoundly affected. So let us come together. Whether we come from an urban area or a rural area, whether we come from a Republican State or we come from a Democratic State, this threat doesn't discriminate, nor should we make it a partisan issue. We have a responsibility to this generation, yes, but the impacts are accelerating. We have a responsibility for the next generation and the generation after that and 70 more generations that will all ask: When the facts were before you in such an obvious and dramatic way, why didn't you act? Acting means we have to drive through massive transition from gaining energy from fossil fuels to producing energy without fossil fuels-- producing energy with winds and tides and currents, producing energy with solar power. We have this massive fusion reactor called the Sun, and it distributes energy on Earth through the wind and the sunshine. Let's harvest that for the benefit of human kind. I am pleased to be able to come to the floor to help celebrate the 222nd speech by my colleague on the Atlantic coast and to share a little bit on the perspective from the Pacific coast, but this is an issue that affects all points in between and around the globe.

Mr. MERKLEY. I will be happy to.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern Berenice Vargas-Sierra be granted privileges of the floor for the balance of the day.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, the most important words of our Constitution are the first three, ``We the People.'' This describes the entire purpose of our Constitution, which is to create a government responsive to the people and to produce laws that reflect the will of the people. It requires a close adherence to the vision embodied in the Constitution, including the advice and consent vision in the Constitution. We know that the Founders of our country struggled with how to appoint people to high positions in the executive branch and in our courts. It was Alexander Hamilton who laid out the deliberations. He said: If a body or an assembly has that power, there will be a lot of horse trading back and forth, and we will not get the best people suited to the positions in the executive branch and in the courts. So the responsibility should rest with one person. That is how the nominating power came to be vested with the President. The Founders also discussed the fact that a single person can go off track. The President might have favoritism toward people from his or her home State. The President might favor people who, in turn, had done favors for him or her and so forth. They said that the way to avoid this is to have the Senate be a check upon the President, and that ``would tend to greatly prevent the appointment of unfit characters.'' That is how Alexander Hamilton summed it up. Our responsibility is to review the record of individuals and make sure that no one is appointed who is of unfit character. That separation of powers has been honored over the centuries with the President nominating and then the Senate reviewing the entire record of the individual to honor its responsibility to figure out if this individual is fit or if this individual is unfit. But now we have something we have never seen before, which is that the President's team has intervened in a massive way to block a thorough review of the nominee's record. There are three parts of this intervention. The first was to weigh in with Senate leadership and say: Don't request anything about his 3 years as Staff Secretary. There was a conspiracy then between the President's team and a few Senators to prevent the entire body from being able to review Nominee Kavanaugh's record. That is unacceptable because each and every one of us has that responsibility. Each and every one of us takes the oath of office. This isn't just a responsibility that exists for one or two people who refer to themselves by title like majority leader or chairman of the Judiciary Committee. This is a responsibility that every one of us has, and that responsibility has been violated with this violation of the separation of powers. The second thing the President did was to proceed to appoint an individual to use the stamp ``Presidential privilege,'' meaning executive privilege, to deny access to the Senate of some 100,000 documents when the individual served in the capacity of a lawyer on the team of White House Counsel. In this case, the Senate did request the records. This is solely the exercise of the President and perhaps, therefore, it is the clearest example of the violation of the separation of powers. We have from the individual himself the statement: ``The White House . . . has directed that we not provide these documents.'' That is referring directly to the documents on which William Burck marked ``Presidential privilege''--100,000 documents. Why are these documents important? Well, we know from the more limited ones we have received that it addresses his actions and his opinions on a host of important topics. The documents reveal, for example, that while he said he wasn't involved in the discussions around certain nominations, we know that, at least in a modest way, he was, from the documents we have. But we don't have the bulk of the documents to explain the whole story. He said he wasn't involved with the discussions regarding the use of torture, but we have a limited glimpse from the documents we did get that he was involved in those discussions. The remaining documents probably have a much more expanded vision of his involvement. He said he wasn't involved in the receipt of stolen documents that regard nomination discussions--documents stolen from the Senate Democrats--and yet we find out from the existing documents that we have that he was and that these were received directly by him. Here we are with this limited glimpse of three cases in which he misrepresented the story. We certainly didn't get the full story. What is in the 100,000 documents that were censored that we never got? We have never been in this situation before where a President deliberately obstructed the review of the nominee's record in this vast procedure. Did the President's team go through them carefully and say: Oh, well, because of the sensitivity of XYZ, therefore, we are going to block documents ABC, and therefore create an index explaining that. No, they did not. We have a whole-scale blockage of key parts of the record. There is more than that. There is also the President's role in marking documents ``committee confidential.'' Here is the challenge. We have a responsibility--a constitutional responsibility--that has been violated. That is why today I filed a motion to compel the President to provide those 100,000 documents marked ``Presidential privilege'' to us in the Senate, so we can review them and do our responsibility under the Constitution. Let me switch topics. I have heard Senators here say: Well, we certainly couldn't vote for this individual if he lied to the committee in his testimony. That certainly would mean he was unsuited to serve. Yet we have numerous instances in which he has lied to the committee, and he is unsuited to serve. At a minimum, the President should withdraw this nominee. It is certainly an enormous dark mark on the integrity of the Court to take someone who misled the Senate--Democrats and Republicans--about numerous topics. In just those three issues I mentioned, we had deception. On issues related to whether he received stolen documents, he did. He said he didn't. Was he involved in the proceedings for certain nominees? He said he wasn't, but he was. Was he involved in the conversations over torture? He said he wasn't, but he was. That is just with the limited information we have. Then we have the hearing in which he said that his friends who were at the gathering with Dr. Ford refuted her story. That is a straight- out lie. Not one of them refuted her story. They said they didn't remember. They said they didn't know. They certainly didn't refute it. That is a lie. He said she wasn't in the same social circle, but we know she was. She dated his good friend. When he was asked about certain things like ``boofing'' and ``Devil's Triangle,'' he lied to the committee about what those terms meant and what all his friends knew they meant. They meant things I will not discuss here, but he wasn't honest with the committee. The list then goes on and on. He said he was not aware of the story until he read it in The New Yorker magazine. It turns out that it was not true when, in fact, he intervened to try to sabotage that story before it was ever printed because he knew about it beforehand. Colleagues, look, there are times when we may have an individual who suits one's judicial philosophy but who is totally unsuited to serve on the Court. Stand up for this institution. Stand up for the Senate. It has been unable to carry out its responsibility under the Constitution of reviewing this man's whole record. Stand up for the integrity of the committee process and the fact that we don't put people on the Court who lie to this body. Stand up for the vision of the United States of America--the vision of a ``we the people'' nation, not of a government by and for the powerful. Yet that is exactly what his decisions stand for. Stand up for the vision of a President and a republic instead of for the vision of a King and a kingdom, which is what his view of Presidential power turns into--a President above and beyond the law. Colleagues, do your job. That means we do not vote until we have the documents and review his entire record, and when we vote, if he is still the nominee, we reject him because he lied, because he demonstrated intense partisanship, because he is angry under stress, because he threatened retaliation, because he is unsuited to serve on any court, let alone the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

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

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern, Blanca Gaytan Farfan, be granted privileges of the floor for the remainder of the day.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I want to take a moment to recognize a wonderful member of my team who, after 9 years, will be leaving us at the end of this week. For more than 9 years, Jodi Niehoff has been the heart and soul of our operation. She has been our administration and correspondence manager. She has been our intern coordinator and our unofficial planner for party events celebrating legislative victories or comings and goings of staff or birthdays. She has been the hostess and MC of our annual holiday gift swap and so many other things, adding to the esprit de corps of our team. My team has pulled together a few stats, and these statistics indicate just some of the work she has done over these years during which I have had the privilege to work with her. She has been a staunch believer not just in communicating with constituents but doing so quickly and in a meaningful and heartfelt way. Under her leadership, we have worked to have a substantive response to every single letter that comes into our office and try to get out that response, whenever possible, on the same day or the next day and when more research is needed, to do so within a few days. It is a huge challenge because so many people now are communicating via email, and we have weeks in which we can receive 10,000 or 12,000 or 14,000 letters. So in the course of responding to all those diverse issues that constituents have raised, Jodi has guided our team in producing 5,774 unique letters that are now in our constituent correspondence library. That averages out to nearly two letters a day 365 days a year for more than 9 years. During her time on our team, she has mentored 227 interns, and 14 of those interns have gone on to join our team as staff members. So helping to enable them to have a significant experience here on Capitol Hill is a real contribution to the public. I first came here as an intern--a summer intern for Senator Mark Hatfield from Oregon--and at that time, you only had a few interns. You didn't have that much mail. There were three of us over the course of the summer. I was the last to arrive, so it was my job to come in early, run all the letters--of course they were all paper letters--run the envelopes through the cutter, take out the sheets of information, the letters, and stack them into one of four stacks for the different correspondence. Well, that now sounds like such a simple task compared to that which Jodi has guided with more than 200 interns and more than 5,000--almost 6,000--unique letters being drafted to respond. Thank you so much. Jodi, you will be dearly missed by everybody here in Washington, DC, who has had the pleasure to know you, to work alongside with you, to partner with you over nearly a decade. I wish you all the best as you head back home to Minnesota to begin the next chapter of your life and the next chapter of your family's life. I know that the next chapter will be one in which a new set of individuals will have the pleasure, the delight, to be able to work with you. We invite you back here anytime. We wish you and your family all the best. Thank you, Jodi, for your service to our team and your service to our Nation. Nomination of Brett Kavanaugh Mr. President, today I filed a lawsuit related to a violation of the separation of powers. Our Constitution lays out a very clear framework in which the President of the United States nominates and the Senate proceeds to review the record of an individual in order to determine if that individual is of fit character to serve. This strategy came as our Founders struggled with how to enable staff to fill key positions in the executive branch and key positions in the judiciary, and it is something that Hamilton wrote about extensively in his Federalist Papers. No. 76 was written in 1788 as a letter to the people of the State of New York. In it, he addressed this separation of powers at length. He said that the Founders had considered giving the assembly--that is a large group--the ability to choose those who would fill posts in the executive branch as a check and balance to the President but that they had considered the fact that Senators would probably horse trade, that one Senator from one State would want their friend in one position and another Senator from another State would want a different person, and that that horse trading would not produce the best set of individuals to populate the executive branch or to serve as judges. So they came to rest on the idea of having one individual--the President--nominate individuals to serve. Here is a short piece of his longer discussion. He said: ``The sole and undivided responsibility of one man will naturally beget a livelier sense of duty and a more exact regard to reputation. He will, on this account, feel himself under stronger obligations and more interested to investigate with care the qualities requisite to the stations to be filled, and to prefer with impartiality the persons who may have the fairest pretensions to them.'' He goes on to applaud the many merits of having one individual bear the burden of making these nominations. But then, of course, it is a nomination; it is not an appointment. And to be appointed, the Senate must confirm. He addresses this question of the role of the Senate. Alexander Hamilton, writing to explain the action and the design of the Constitution in his letter to the people of New York in 1788, says: To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters. . . . He goes on to say that a President might be influenced by favoritism to people in his own State or favoritism to people in his family or family connections or favoritism because he had a friendship or a pursuit of popularity triumphing over professional skills. So for all of these reasons, the Senate process exists to review the record of the individual and to determine, as Hamilton put it: Is that individual a fit character or an unfit character? Now, we all in the Senate took an oath of office to uphold the Constitution, and, certainly, that means defending and exercising our responsibility under the advice and consent clause of the Constitution. We cannot interfere in the ability of the President to nominate. That is the President's responsibility. We can give our suggestions, but in the end, whatever the President says in regard to an office, whatever person the President identifies, that is the nominee, and we cannot interfere with that. But so, too, then, the President cannot interfere in the exercise of the Senate in reviewing the record of the individual. Certainly, the President can share his or her insights on the individual and his or her encouragement to speed up the process but cannot interfere in the underlying exercise of reviewing the record. But here we are in this extraordinary moment where the President of the United States has crossed the boundary between the separation of powers and has proceeded to interfere with the deliberations of the Senate, and he has done so not once and not twice but at least on three significant occasions. I will proceed to share those occasions. The first was the President's team intervening to stop the Senate from accessing Nominee Kavanaugh's records when he served as Staff Secretary to President George W. Bush. Senator Leahy, the longest serving Member of the Senate and a longtime member of the Judiciary Committee notes in a letter that the committee has a ``longstanding, bipartisan expectation . . . that any materials produced while a nominee was a public servant that could shed light on his or her views, thinking, or temperament, that are not privileged, should be subject to public scrutiny and carefully considered by the Senate prior to confirmation.'' Now, this was a view that was a bipartisan view. It is a view that was expressed by a senior member of the Judiciary Committee--a Republican Member. That individual, Senator Cornyn, proceeded to note that the documents that Judge Kavanaugh had ``generated . . . authored . . . or contributed to'' during his tenure as White House Staff Secretary should be conveyed to the Committee. This ``just seems like common sense,'' he added. In other words, it just seems fundamental to our responsibility here in the Senate to review the record of Judge Kavanaugh, but just days after the senior Republican member of the Judiciary Committee expressed those sentiments, Republican Senators were summoned to the White House by the White House Counsel, Donald McGahn, and immediately following that summoning and those instructions--those directions from the White House--suddenly, Senators were being denied the opportunity to see those documents. In fact, it went so far as the chair of the Committee proceeding not to ask for the documents after this direction from the White House. So, certainly, that intervention did directly compromise our ability as Senators to review the record of the nominee and, therefore, violated the separation of powers and violated each of our abilities to fulfill our constitutional responsibilities. The second occasion is that Defendant William Burck, who has a series of close connections to the White House, proceeded to exercise the power of executive privilege on behalf of the President to deny the Senate access to 100,000 pages of White House Counsel documents. What did this individual say when he was exercising this power of censoring the documents that would be obtained by the Senate? He said: ``The White House . . . has directed that we not provide these documents. . . .'' That is a direct interference in the advice and consent deliberations of the Senate, and all of us together--Democrats and Republicans, northern Senators and southern Senators, eastern coast, western coast, heartland--should defend our responsibility under the Constitution to provide advice and consent, which means the ability to review the record of the nominee. Then there is a third occasion where Defendant Burck proceeded to label documents being presented to the Senate as ``committee confidential.'' In fact, the Committee consulted with him during the process to see what the extent of this was and why they were done. There is no index that provides information to the Senate on why so many documents were blocked by Burck from ever getting to us. That log or that index doesn't exist saying: Yes, we looked at this, document and here is why executive power prevails. There is no record or log for why more than 141,000 pages of documents were labeled ``committee confidential,'' preventing Senators from proceeding to talk about the contents, to have the contents examined by experts, to have the contents examined by the public, to take feedback from the citizens of the United States, to have staff be able to look at these documents and to be able to review them, and to be able to get feedback on them to fulfill our responsibility as Senators to examine the record of the nominee. Thus we are in uncharted territory. Never before have we seen this direct, substantial, and extensive intervention by the President in violation of the separation of powers under the advice and consent clause of the Constitution. Thus, it is important that we ask for judicial intervention. There is no more important document to us than the Constitution--our ``we the people'' Constitution--of the United States of America. We will be failing if we do not aggressively pursue our responsibility to review the record of a nominee. So let us do that. Let us ask the courts for intervention to ensure that we have access to this record. We have had over the past few days new information regarding the nominee--new information from women who have shared their difficult, difficult experiences. What would be the appropriate conduct here in the Senate? It would be for the FBI to investigate--not a criminal investigation but a background investigation. That was accorded to Anita Hill in 1991, a reopening of the background investigation to get the facts. How is it that a Senate and a President that could support the proper role of the FBI in 1991 will not stand up today for fairness for women who are coming forward? Why is it that the nominee, steeped in the law, who has said he wants a fair hearing--he wants a fair hearing--does not demand an FBI investigation so it is fair to him and fair to these three women--Dr. Ford, Deborah Ramirez, and Ms. Swetnick--who are coming forward? They are being treated very poorly by this institution. They are being treated as if they are a problem, when they are, in fact, courageous Americans helping us to do our advice and consent responsibility to understand the record of the individual and whether the individual is fit or unfit. To those who say that, well, these might not be true, wouldn't you be the first, then, to stand up and say that the FBI should reopen the FBI investigation and that nothing should go forward until the President authorizes that? If you want fairness, you want facts. Here we are. Not only are we failing the test of 1991 in terms of the FBI investigation, but we are failing the test in terms of the witnesses. In 1991, numerous corroborating witnesses came forward to share and expand the dimensions of the events under consideration with Anita Hill. Now the Judiciary Committee is saying that we are only going to allow a ``he says, she says'' dynamic. This is absolutely unfair to the women who have come forward. Now the Judiciary Committee is saying they are going to bring an individual to prosecute, as if this is a trial of the woman that is coming forward. How wrong is that to try to turn this into a trial? If you want a trial, well, then, shouldn't you have the FBI investigate and get the facts? It shouldn't be a trial. We should be listening carefully, and we should be allowing fairness to both, those with corroborating information and, certainly, for the nominee, as well as those who are sharing their experiences from the past about the nominee. Give transparency and opportunity to both but not this farce of a hearing planned by the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee. We should be able to do so much better. We have had decades of experience since 1991, since we went through a parallel situation of allegations regarding personal conduct. How is it that now, 27 years later, we are doing so much worse in respecting women coming forward to share their stories. Why are we doing a worse job of respecting dignity, a worse process in terms of listening to facts, a worse process in terms of trying to turn it into a trial of a courageous woman who came forward to share her experiences? Well, I have never felt so burdened by the misconduct of this Chamber as I feel right now. Let's stand up for decency and dignity and honor those who have come forward, respect them, listen to them, and explore the stories and the experiences they share so that their voices can be fairly heard before this body. Let us not let the President of the United States trample all over the Constitution by violating the separation of powers and blocking our Chamber from receiving the documents necessary to review the record of the nominee.

Mr. MERKLEY

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

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, thank you so much to my colleague from Oregon for his remarks on taking on the systematic corruption of dark money as it relates to this nomination.

Mr. MERKLEY. I yield the floor. Cloture Motion

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, the most important words of our Constitution are the first three--``We the People.'' It is the mission statement of our Nation--a nation of the people, by the people, for the people, as President Lincoln so eloquently stated, not a nation of, by, and for the powerful and the privileged. Yet the powerful and the privileged are working overtime to undermine our Constitution. Ironically, they are using the courts to do it. We have seen it happening all week long as the Judiciary Committee has barreled ahead with hearings on Judge Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. This is the same Judge Kavanaugh whose record from 5 years of serving in a Presidential administration is still being hidden from the Senate and from the people of the United States of America. For 5 years, Brett Kavanaugh had the ear of the President on a number of critical issues--on how we treat enemy combatants, conduct wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, use and expand Executive power through signing statements, or how the authorization for the use of military force is utilized. For 5 years, in the inner circle of America, he had been engaged in policy after policy after policy. Yet Chairman Grassley and the committee Republicans are unwilling to allow that record of insights on his views to be shared with Senators under advice and consent responsibility. Then there is this parallel process in which the documents that are being made available are first being vetted by Bill Burck. Who is Bill Burck? He is a partisan Republican lawyer who used to work for the nominee. He is the one who has the final say over what the Senate sees. He is the one who has the final say over what documents are released, not just to the Senate but to the American people. He is the one who decided to release 42,000 pages of documents--not the ones from those 5 years we are talking about--just hours before the hearing began. Who could possibly review 42,000 pages the evening or the night before the hearing occurs? It is humanly impossible. There we are with a process normally headed by the nonpartisan National Archives, which is still trying to do its work but can't do its work until the end of October to vet these documents. So instead of nonpartisan public servants vetting the documents, we have a partisan Republican lawyer, who worked for the nominee, deciding what we are going to see in the U.S. Senate, what the public and the United States is going to see. This is not transparency. This is censorship, and censorship is absolutely wrong in numerous contexts but particularly in intervening with the responsibility of the Senate. Instead of integrity, we have deceit. Instead of honoring advice and consent responsibility, we are dishonoring that fundamental constitutional role. This is a rigged system, completely and absolutely rigged through the censorship of the documents we see and the blockade for the documents we need. As Kristine Lucius, who is a former Judiciary Committee staff director who worked on half a dozen Supreme Court nominees, said, this process is ``not just breaking the norms. It, frankly, is bordering on absurdity.'' Absurdity, censorship, a complete failure of integrity, that is what is happening right this moment during the U.S. Senate's deliberation of the Supreme Court nominee. Not long ago, there was a time when my Republican colleagues argued for a full, transparent examination of a nominee's record before the Senate could consider the nomination. When Justice Kagan was nominated 8 years ago by President Obama, Members of this body, my Republican colleagues, said: We stand for the principle of transparency. They said: We need the full record of the nominee's White House service. Chairman Grassley said on the Senate floor: ``In order for the Senate to fulfill its constitutional responsibility of advice and consent, we must get all of her documents from the Clinton Library and have enough time to analyze them so we can determine whether she should be a Justice.'' That was the Kagan standard articulated by my Republican colleagues and shared by my Democratic colleagues, a standard that was nonpartisan, a standard that was bipartisan, and a standard that was supported by Republicans and Democrats for the nomination process for a Supreme Court Justice. The Kagan standard is one Democrats supported under a Democratic President and a Republican President. That is called integrity. That is called principle. What we have today is my Republican colleagues saying: We supported transparency under a Democratic President, but we support censorship and the blockade of documents under a Republican President. That is the opposite of principle. That is the opposite of integrity. The Kagan standard, supported by both sides just a couple of years ago, should be the standard we all support today. We can't fully evaluate Kavanaugh's record if we don't have the full record of his involvement on so many issues during his time working in the executive branch. Hearings are supposed to give us a chance to get at some of those issues, but what have we heard? Well, we heard the same, tired, obligatory responses, such as: I will be a judge who calls balls and strikes. We have heard that before, and then we have seen the rightwing judicial activists legislating from the bench on issue after issue after issue--on workers' rights, on environmental rights, on consumer rights, on reproductive rights. We know it is ``umpire'' before you get there, and then suddenly it is a desire to implement a far-right, anti- American, anti-Constitution philosophy of control by the powerful and privileged, undermining the core principle of the Constitution of the United States of America. What else have we heard from Judge Kavanaugh? We have heard: Well, that is settled law. That is, perhaps, the most artificial, phony response we can possibly hear. Why is it artificial and phony? Because when you are on the Supreme Court, the decisions you make become the interpretation. You either reinforce or you unsettle, but you have no obligation to follow what the courts have done before. The Roberts Court has overturned ``settled precedents'' time after time after time, and for a nominee of the Supreme Court to pretend that isn't the case, it means either he is ignorant or deliberately deceptive. I don't think Judge Kavanaugh is ignorant. He knows the record. He knows the Supreme Court changes prior precedents. He knows they change ``settled law,'' and so to evade an issue saying, well, that is settled, is simply to be deceptive. Sometimes, in addition to the hearings, we learn some information through a nominee's meetings with Senators, but Judge Kavanaugh has refused to answer even the most basic questions about his jurisprudence, said Senator Schumer, following his own meeting with the nominee. Senator Schumer went on to say that Mr. Kavanaugh refused to say if Roe v. Wade or Casey v. Planned Parenthood were correctly decided because that would actually be to indicate some sense of one's judicial view, and we are getting nothing. As Senator Schumer said, he couldn't ``recall his level of involvement in a number of controversies during his time in the Bush White House.'' Here is a thought: If we get the records on his involvement in the Bush White House, we will actually know what his thoughts were, and maybe we can jog his memory that he so carefully and conveniently lost somewhere along the way. The American people deserve integrity in this process, and we are not getting it. We do know a fair amount from his previous public decisions. We know he likes to legislate from the bench against workers, against consumers, against clean air, and against clean water. We know he doesn't believe healthcare is a fundamental right in the United States. We know he wants to strike down Roe v. Wade. We know he has a view of the Presidency that is appropriate for a King and a kingdom but not for a President and a republic. He has this extraordinary view of Presidential power. He doesn't believe a President can be indicted. He doesn't believe a President can even be investigated. He believes a sitting President can choose to ignore laws passed by Congress if the President says they are unconstitutional, even if the court has said they are constitutional. Think about that for a moment. Here is a judge saying he believes the President can ignore what the courts say is constitutional and unconstitutional. You can't get more expansive Presidential power than that. So why was Judge Kavanaugh chosen off of this list of 25 individuals? The answer is pretty clear. It is because he is the one who can write a ``get out of jail free'' card for the President of the United States-- our President, who is under investigation. He is under investigation for colluding with foreign powers and flaunting our laws to win a national election. His former campaign chairman has been found guilty on eight different criminal charges. His former lawyer and fixer pled guilty to eight criminal charges and testified, as directed, to make illegal campaign payments at the direction of--drumroll, please--a candidate for Federal office. Who is this candidate for Federal office? None other than President Donald Trump--President Donald Trump, directing a felony crime. When one hasn't been indicted in that situation, it is referred to as an unindicted coconspirator. The Watergate grand jury used that term, ``unindicted coconspirator,'' to describe the role President Nixon played in that national scandal, and it fits perfectly with the role President Trump is playing today. To say that a dark cloud of corruption hangs over this administration and hangs over this nomination would be a massive understatement. Until that cloud is lifted and until this President is cleared, this nomination should not be considered by this body. We have already seen that my colleagues have flipped their position from having a Democratic President to a Republican President. They have turned transparency into censorship. They have taken the Kagan standard and trashed it. We cannot act as if all is well in the Republic. We cannot act as if everything is normal. We cannot act as if this is any other nomination put forward by any other President because it is not. It should be clear to all of us that this nomination should not go forward until the Mueller investigation is concluded. I know my colleagues are not prepared to take that stand, but surely we can agree that the Senate cannot perform its advice and consent while our hands are tied by a partisan vetting process, hiding hundreds of thousand documents from the Senate and from we the people. I call upon my colleagues to rise from this low point of censorship and the trashing of the responsibility of advice and consent. Stand up for the same principles you stood up for just a couple of years ago, when you demanded the full record for the Senate to undertake its investigation into a nominee. Bring courage and integrity into this process. Publicly refuse to proceed until we the Senate and we the people have the full set of documents about this individual's records. To do any less is to bring shame and injustice upon this body that I believe in so strongly, a responsibility of advice and consent that I believe in so strongly, and a responsibility that my colleagues believed in so strongly just a couple of years ago. Let's stand together, as we stood together just a couple of years ago, Democrats and Republicans, demanding transparency and integrity. Let this not be the moment when my colleagues fail to uphold their constitutional responsibilities. Thank you.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern, Amelia Ziegler, have privileges of the floor for the balance of the day.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, somebody once said: What is the use of a house if you don't have a tolerable planet to put it on? That is a question that we should all grapple with in this Chamber. It is a question that propels my colleagues from the Environment Committee to come to the floor and take note that the Trump administration's plan to replace the Clean Power Plan with a dirty power plan is one egregious step in damaging our planet. It is an egregious step to increase carbon pollution. Carbon pollution has all kinds of effects that we are seeing across the country, from raging forest fires in the Northwest, with my State covered in smoke, to the stronger, more powerful hurricanes that hit the city of Houston of my colleague from Texas and the cities in Florida of my colleague from Florida, to the impact across the country on agriculture, to the impact with greater droughts in some cases and greater floods in others. One of the single most effective steps that can be taken is to reduce the amount of carbon pollution from powerplants and transportation. Let's be clear. This dirty power plan from the administration increases the damage to the citizens of the United States, all just to pander to polluters. We have seen so much of this in the last year and a half. I know that we are living in an era in which the administration has created a parallel universe of alternative facts, where truth isn't necessarily truth, as the President's lawyer said this past couple of weeks. But let's remember that if you are outside that parallel universe, if you are in the real world, there are real numbers. By 2030, the Clean Power Plan would stop 870 million tons of pollution from poisoning the air that you and I, our families, our children, and our friends breathe. That is represented here by looking at this blue line in the year 2030 and the descending line of carbon pollution that is driven both by the fuel economy standards and the electricity standards. What we see under the President's dirty power plan is that, from here into the future, there is no further reduction--essentially zero reduction--then, past 2030, an increase in the carbon pollution that is doing all this damage across the country. There is damage in every one of our States. This damage doesn't just happen in blue States. Texas is not a blue State. Texas suffered horrific consequences of this carbon pollution, so certainly representatives from that State would want to do something about it, and so on, through every single State. The amount of difference in the carbon pollution between the Clean Power Plan and the dirty power plan is equivalent to the pollution from 166 million cars on the road for a year. It isn't just the impact on forest fires and the impact on hurricanes and the impact on drought, affecting agriculture, and the impact on floods. It is also the impact on human health. The estimate is that, by the year 2030, the difference between the Clean Power Plan and the dirty power plan is 4,500 premature deaths. So this decision kills people. The difference between those two lines, by the year 2030, is 90,000 children's asthma attacks. The difference between those two lines is 1,700 heart attacks. Picture that many children with asthma attacks going to the hospital, 90,000 children. Picture that many heart attacks. Picture that many premature deaths. Aren't we here to make America stronger and better, not to kill Americans, not to put Americans in the hospital? Yet the President's plan does exactly that. Those health problems result in a lot more expenses. The Clean Power Plan could result in $54 billion in health and climate benefits, and it creates a lot of jobs by driving renovation of the energy industry. When you renovate a house, you create a number of jobs. When you renovate an energy economy, you create a lot of jobs--millions of jobs--millions of jobs in clean and renewable energy, in wind and solar and geothermal. The dirty power plan the President is putting forward says this: Instead of having a plan, we will simply tell the States to develop an idea of what they should do. In other words, the States have the responsibility, but no requirements, to act. There is a little bit in there about improving the efficiency of coal-fired plants. But the idea is that if you extend the plants for a couple of years by making them more efficient, then you will reduce the adoption of renewable energy that is cheaper. So we are also talking about more expensive power by keeping inefficient, expensive forms of power, producing into the future. These ideas that the administration has put forward about making the plants work a little bit more efficiently come with the caveat that, if you do that, you don't have to put the additional modernization pollution controls on them. It means more fine particulates, it means more sulfur, and it means more mercury--all things that damage human health. So it all keeps coming back to this assault on the health of Americans and on ag and on forests and on fishing. All three of those are affected by carbon pollution and climate chaos. That is the basic picture we are looking at. Why don't we take a step back and just ask the simple question: What is the best outcome for America? Is it the adoption of cheaper renewable energy over more expensive fossil fuels? I would say: Yes, let's adopt the cheaper energy. Is it the adoption of cleaner energy over dirtier energy? Yes, let's keep our air cleaner. Is it doing what is right for the health of Americans? Yes, let's do right by the health of Americans. Is it taking and contributing to a strategy of driving carbon pollution hopefully, eventually, down to zero? We want a plan that drives carbon down, not a plan that drives it sideways--that is, no change--or works eventually upward. The question that David Thoreau put before us, ``What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?'' includes great significance for those American citizens who had their homes burned down this year because of carbon pollution. It would certainly be very relevant to those working in agriculture in America who are losing their farms because of drought or floods. It would certainly be relevant to those citizens living in Texas and Florida who have been deeply damaged by the hurricane storms of last year. So let's do right for Americans, and let's reject this dirty power plan that will hurt us in every way possible.

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

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I come to the floor to talk about two things. The first is that this Saturday will be the 1-year anniversary of the beginning of a horrific genocide against the Rohingya in the country of Myanmar. This genocide was preplanned. All kinds of preparations were put in place, as various independent investigations have established. It is time for the United States to take a strong response as a statement of global leadership on human rights on behalf of this horrific circumstance. We have 350 or so villages burned, countless individuals slaughtered as they ran from their villages, shot from helicopters, systemic rape, and children tossed into burning piles. It doesn't get much worse anywhere in the world at any time in history. Now 700,000 refugees who escaped have found their way to Bangladesh, but there is no room in Bangladesh. Bangladesh is a country half the size of Oregon. Yet Oregon has 4 million individuals, and Bangladesh has 160 million individuals. Here are some things the United States should do right away on or before this Saturday. The State Department should release the report it has been compiling on the factual circumstances. Second, they should send this report to their legal counsel for an official determination if this constitutes genocide. The third thing they should do is ask the Senate to act quickly on the repatriation resolution that sets standards for the return of these refugees back to Burma, back to Myanmar. The fourth thing they should do is call on the Senate, followed by the House, to pass the Burma Human Rights and Freedom Act, which creates specific sanctions on those who planned and carried out this horrific ethnic cleansing. Elie Wiesel said: ``A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.'' But if we do not respond clearly and effectively when there is this type of ethnic cleansing, this type of assault, then we are failing to prevent future assaults by those leaders who will be so tempted to divide their country on ethnic or racial lines, to take brutal action against a despised minority community. The seeds of this slaughter began with a military coup in 1962, following which the military demonized this ethnic group year after year. Not only should the United States respond with a State Department report and a clear decision if this is genocide--and clear sanctions-- but it is time for the President of the United States to speak out boldly and clearly on the international stage on this issue. A year has passed, and we have not a single public statement from the leader of the United States of America. So let that change. Nomination of Brett Kavanaugh Madam President, the second issue I am here to talk about--and I am going to keep this short because my colleague is here, prepared to speak to his amendment--is the issue of whether the Senate proceeds to have hearings on nominee Brett Kavanaugh for the U.S. Supreme Court. The answer should be, by every Member in this Chamber, a resounding no. First, we have the Kagan standard that has been set by the Republican majority, which states, when there is a Supreme Court nomination, it is essential to have all of the facts, all of the records that have been touched on, because only then will Senators be able to exercise their responsibility under the Constitution for advice and consent. So, if individuals want to exercise their responsibility effectively under advice and consent on a nominee from a Democratic President, shouldn't the same individuals make the same argument to exercise their responsibility effectively when the nominee comes from a Republican President? The standard should be the standard. Let's stand up, out of the partisan troughs that have been dug, and fight for the vision of a fair and transparent and fully credible nomination process. No hearing should be held until we have the full set of documents. It escapes no one's vision in the United States of America that only a fraction of the documents have been delivered. It escapes no one's vision in the United States that even those documents have been vetted by a Republican lawyer, a partisan lawyer, who has worked beforehand for the nominee. That is not transparent; that is not fair; and that does not allow us to have the full scope of the record. Furthermore--and I will say this in just a summary format--there is an enormous conflict of interest here by which the President is attempting to print a ``get out of jail free'' card. Out of his 25 nominees who had been put forward from the list of names that had been given to him from the Federalist Society, one of them had an expansive view of the Presidency; that being that the President of the United States cannot be indicted and that the President of the United States cannot be investigated. That is the standard that says a President is above and beyond the law. I challenge every Member in the Chamber to pull out the Constitution and find the provision that says our Founders established a kingdom and a King because I think they are going to find that is not the case; that there is no clause in our Constitution that says the President is above and beyond the law. As our oath of office requires, let's exercise our responsibility appropriately with the advice and consent responsibility, and let's get the full documents and resolve this conflict of interest before any hearing is held. I thank the Presiding Officer.