Rand Paul

Mr. PAUL

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

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, if good intentions created good laws, there would be no need for congressional debate. I have no doubt that the authors of the bill on the floor genuinely want to protect children, but the bill they have written promises to be Pandora's box of unintended consequences. The Kids Online Safety Act, known as KOSA, would impose an unprecedented duty of care on internet platforms to mitigate certain harms associated with mental health, such as anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. While proponents of the bill claim that the bill is not designed to regulate content, imposing a duty of care on the internet platforms associated with mental health can only lead to one outcome: the stifling of First Amendment-protected speech. Today's children live in a world far different from the one I grew up in, and I am the first in line to tell kids: Go outside and touch grass. With the internet, though, today's children do have some advantages. They have the world at their fingertips, and that can often be a good thing. Just about any question can be answered through the internet by finding a scholarly article or a how-to video with a simple search. Doctors' and therapists' offices close at night and on weekends, but support groups are available 24 hours a day online, 7 days a week, for people who share similar concerns or who have had the same health problems. People can connect, share information, and help each other more easily than ever before. That is the beauty of technological progress. But the world can also be an ugly place. Like any other tool, the internet can be misused, and parents must be vigilant. Parents must be vigilant in protecting their kids online. It is perhaps understandable that those who sit in this body might seek a government solution to protect children from any harms that may result from spending too much time on the internet, but before we impose a drastic, first-of-its- kind, legal duty on online platforms, we should ensure that the positive aspects of the internet are preserved. That means we have to ensure that the First Amendment rights are protected and that these platforms are provided with clear rules so they can comply with the law. Unfortunately, this bill fails to do that in almost every respect. As currently written, this bill is far too vague, and many of its provisions are completely undefined. The bill creates a Board that is empowered to regulate content that might affect mental health. Yet KOSA, the bill, does not explicitly define the term ``mental health disorder.'' Instead, it references the fifth edition of the ``Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders'' or ``the most current successor edition.'' So we are going to regulate items on the internet that might cause anxiety or might affect mental health based on a definition that evolves over time in a book, that we are never going to vote on again. It is going to be decided by whoever writes the DSM sixth, seventh, and eighth versions for mental health. Written this way, not only would someone looking at the law not know what the definition is, but even more concerning, this definition could change without any input from Congress. When the diagnostic manual changes, the law will then be changed according to what the new definition of ``mental health'' is. The scope of one of the most expansive pieces of Federal tech legislation could drastically change overnight. Congress may not even realize it until after it has already happened. If the diagnostic manual on mental health changes the definition, the law changes, and Congress will have had no input on what the definition of ``mental health'' is. None of my colleagues would be comfortable with a definition that effectively delegates--or should be comfortable with a definition that effectively delegates Congress's legislative authority to an unaccountable third party. Second, the bill would impose an unprecedented duty of care on internet platforms to mitigate certain harms. It sounds good. They want to mitigate harms such as anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. But the legislation doesn't define what it considers harmful to minors, and everyone will have a different belief as to what causes harm, much less how online platforms should go about protecting minors from that harm. The sponsors of the bill will tell you this is not out of a desire to regulate content, but the requirement that platforms mitigate undefined harms to mental health belies the bill's effect to regulate online content. How can you mitigate the effects of things that might cause anxiety, because they all involve content? This bill will be setting up a Board to regulate the content of the internet. Imposing a duty of care on online platforms to mitigate harms associated with mental health can only lead to one outcome: the stifling of constitutionally protected speech. For example, if online services use endless scrolling to promote Shakespeare's works or algebra problems or the history of the Roman Empire, would any lawmaker consider that to be harmful? I doubt it, and that is because the website design does not do the harm. So then you say: We are going to address the design of the website and not the content, but the only way you can mitigate the so-called harm is by mitigating the content. It is content, not design, that this bill will regulate. Last year, Harvard Medical School's magazine published a story called ``Climate Anxiety; The existential threat posed by climate change is deeply troubling to many young people.'' So this bill is going to regulate anxiety. What makes your kid anxious? Well, climate change makes a lot of kids anxious. Are we going to regulate the discussion of climate change for minors? This article mentioned that among a cohort of more than 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25, 60 percent of them are described as being very worried about the climate, and nearly half said they have anxiety affecting their daily functioning because they are worried about the climate. Are we going to protect them by censoring and removing content about climate change? The world's most famous climate activist, Greta Thunberg, famously suffers from climate anxiety. Should platforms have stopped her from seeing things about climate warming or cooling or whatever the conjecture is this year? Should they remove that because it makes Greta Thunberg anxious? She has admitted that, as a teenager, Greta wouldn't eat. She didn't eat for nearly a year. She lost weight. Some say her growth was stunted. Should we remove climate change discussion from teenagers because it creates anxiety? This bill has the potential to do that. Under this bill, Greta Thunberg would have been considered a minor, and she could have been deprived from engaging in the online debates that made her famous but also made her anxious. Anxiety and eating disorders are two of the undefined harms that this bill expects internet platforms to prevent and mitigate. Are those sites going to allow discussion and debate about the climate? Are they even going to allow the discussion of a person's story about overcoming an eating disorder? That certainly could make people anxious. What if you hear the story of someone with anorexia, and it makes you think that you are an anorexic? Instead of getting the moral that it was a bad idea to engage in this sort of psychological problem, it may cause you to be anxious because you now have to address the situation. Could that be regulated? Under this bill, it could. What will happen is the fear of liability, the fear of lawsuits, the fear of what will happen under the penalties of this bill are going to cause people to censor themselves. Online platforms will be forced or feel themselves forced or coerced to censor themselves. There is a question: Will pictures of thin models be tolerated lest it result in an eating disorder for the people who see them? There is a discussion of this all over. Now everybody sees, you know, the obese models who are now hired for Sports Illustrated in order to not cause anxiety. Well, if that is done voluntarily by a magazine, by all means, but if we are going to coerce these online platforms and say ``you can't show people who are too thin,'' what is too thin? That is one of the results that could happen from this bill. What about violent images of war? I think even adults are made anxious by that, but what of kids? Should we restrict images of war? There is a war going on in Gaza, and there are a lot of young people with opinions on that. Should we say, ``Well, young people shouldn't be allowed to see images of Gaza because it might make them anxious''? Should we silence discussions about gun rights from either side--from the right or the left--because it might cause people anxiety? I would think that if you had been in a school where there was a school shooting, every time you would read about it, it would probably cause you anxiety. Should this be something that parents should try to address? or colleges? psychiatrists? By all means, parents should be involved in what their kids do online, but once the government sets it up, it depends on who is on the Board. If the Democrats are in power--and they aren't really fond of the Second Amendment--if they are in power, my guess is the people they appoint to the Board will believe that gun ownership or gun use is wrong and causes anxiety and shouldn't be on children's sites. Conversely, when the Republicans are in charge--and we are more for allowing the Constitution to be applied through the Second Amendment to gun ownership--we probably would want to police people telling kids they are not allowed to. It works both ways. There is enough to hate this bill from the right and the left because the government shouldn't be making these blanket decisions. What of online discussions of sexuality? Would pro-gay or anti-gay discussion cause anxiety in teenagers? I would think it might. This bill would allow the children's online safety to regulate things that cause anxiety. If a discussion of sexuality causes anxiety, it would be eligible under this bill for mitigation. They didn't want to use ``censorship'' because it sounds bad, but that is what they want to do. They are appointing a committee called the children's online safety council, which will be able to censor things that cause anxiety: climate change, sexuality. What about pro-life messaging? Should pro-life discussions cause anxiety in teenage mothers considering abortion? I am guessing that whole scenario from either the pro-life or the pro-abortion, you know, perspective is full of anxiety. But are we going to protect the teenage mom who might be offended that a pregnancy center is offering her a way out or is offering her a lifeline to have her child, because maybe somebody else thinks that she should have an abortion? Maybe she decides one way or another, but it is anxiety. That is probably full of more anxiety than most of us can imagine, but are we going to ban teenagers from seeing that? This is insane. This bill is not well thought out. This bill is Pandora's box for censorship. In truth, this bill opens the door to nearly limitless content regulation as people can and will argue that most any piece of content could contribute to some form of mental health disorder. In addition, financial concerns may cause online forums to eliminate all anxiety-inducing content for all users, regardless of age, if the expense for policing teenagers is prohibitive. So think about it. If we make this onerous process that adds a great deal of cost to the people developing the websites and they have to be liable and the State attorneys general can sue them, which this bill allows, maybe they say, ``Gosh, is it worth my while having any discussion of anxiety-producing content?'' which basically means things that are controversial. ``Maybe we should stay away from that.'' Maybe there will be a self-policing effect to this bill where people are going to say, ``I am not going to do it for my adult users because I don't want to be sued.'' The bill gives the unlimited right and cause of action for every State attorney general. Some of them are on the far left, some of them are on the far right, and you can imagine each of them has their own pet cause to want to sue to say: You should take this content down. This bill does not merely regulate the internet; it threatens to stifle important and diverse discussions that are essential to a free society. And who is empowered to help make these decisions? The task is entrusted to a newly established speech police. This bill would create a kids' online safety council--aka speech police--to decide what constitutes harm to minors and what platforms would have to do to address the harm. So the harms are broadly defined--mental health, anxiety, gambling, alcohol--but then the specifics of how it is going to be regulated are left to this new regulatory body. This is what many on the right have referred to as giving the power to bureaucrats. There was a famous case called the Chevron case where they said the government should give deference to anything created by government. That is under review now, but this is the same problem. You are giving power to this new group that can censor that is virtually unlimited and ill-defined. These are the types of decisions that should be made by parents and families, not unelected bureaucrats serving as a censorship committee. Those are not the only deficiencies of this bill. The bill seeks to protect minors from beer and gambling ads on certain online platforms-- not everywhere, just in some places. So we are going to put this duty on some platforms that your kid can't watch gambling ads and can't watch beer ads, but on other platforms, we won't. So there will be a differential to financial cost. Some places won't have to pay anything, and other places will have to pay an amount to figure out how to set up a website that doesn't let kids watch golf with gambling commercials. The bill seeks to protect kids from beer and gambling ads on certain online platforms, such as Facebook or Hulu. But if those same minors turn their phone off and turn their TV on, they can jolly well watch as much PGA with the announcer saying: FanDuel says gamble on Bryson DeChambeau this week or Rory McIlroy. This is a bizarre bill. We are going to make it illegal to talk about certain things online or to advertise online for gambling or beer, but your kid can simply turn the TV on and watch PGA, which is full of ads. You can have a variety of opinions on whether we should have gambling ads on TV, but they are perfectly legal. So we are going to punish certain groups on the internet and still say your kid can just turn the TV on--that is bizarre. It is just completely meaningless and bizarre. Your kid can watch the Super Bowl with about a thousand beer commercials on it. And I haven't really heard of a lot of people jumping up and down and saying we should ban the Super Bowl or we should say the Super Bowl can't have beer ads. But that is what this says. So with all the stuff your kid can watch on TV, he is now going to be limited--not on the whole internet, because you can go to PGA.com, and it has got an exemption because it is primarily news on sports. So they carved out all of these exemptions, and then there are going to be certain areas you can't go to on the internet. So this is a punishment bill for certain aspects of the internet, not all of the internet, because there are a lot of exceptions, and not for TV. This is a crazy notion. Yet you are going to see it pass overwhelmingly today because of the title: Kids Online Safety Act. Who could oppose that? There are some tragic stories of people who have committed suicide or died because of things that happened on the internet. No one is here to discount that. But it has to be thoughtful, how we fix it. Is removing all discussion of climate change, abortion, gambling ads, and beer ads going to do anything that would have addressed the life of any of the children who tragically lost their lives? I think not. This is a hand-fisted bill that will not fix the problem but will be the first big bill to regulate speech online. It doesn't make any sense. Should we prevent online platforms from showing kids the same content they can and do see on TV? Should sports viewership be effectively relegated to the preinternet age? You can watch golf on TV; you can't watch golf on a streaming service. Even if it were possible to shield minors from every piece of content that might cause anxiety, depression, or eating disorders, it still is not enough to comply with KOSA--KOSA is the bill--because KOSA requires websites to treat differently individuals that the platform knows or should have known are minors. As you can realize, it is not easy to tell what someone's age is online. The standard had been that if there were rules for minors, you had to know they were a minor, and you had to know you were broadcasting adult content to a minor. But it is kind of hard to enforce. So they are going to change the standard from ``you knew it was a minor'' to ``you should have known it was a minor.'' This means that the media platforms that earnestly try to comply with the law could be punished because the government thinks it ``should have known'' a user was a minor. This dumbing down of the standard will broaden the fear of this bill, broaden the impact of this bill, and lead to countless lawsuits. This bill, then, does not just apply to minors. A ``should have known'' standard means that this bill is an internetwide regulation. Every website will have to figure out who and how old they are so they don't get in the way of the speech police or they don't get in the way of being sued by the attorney general from that State. This is opening pandora's box. It is not going to be just sites that might have kids. It is every website, every streaming service that is now going to have to police themselves at a cost and live in fear of these people coming after them. Adults and minors alike better get comfortable with providing a form of ID every time they wish to visit a website. This knowledge standard destroys the notion of internet privacy and interactivity. I raised several questions about this bill today, but no one--not even the sponsors of this bill--can answer these questions honestly because they don't know the answers. They are creating something that is going to create the regulation of the internet. This is the problem of most of the legislation in Washington. They are not creating the censorship standards. They are creating an autonomous body that will regulate things that cause anxiety. They haven't told us what causes anxiety. So I have given you examples. They are not in the bill because the bill doesn't tell what this new body is going to regulate. It says things that cause anxiety, things that might involve gambling or beer or eating disorders. It could be any of those things. But they are just going to tell you that we are going to let this body decide. So the Senate is not going to decide what they are going to censor today. They are going to create a committee today that then will be the censorship committee, and, at a later date, we will decide what they want to censor. This is an insane encroachment on the First Amendment. The inability to answer these questions is a result of several vague provisions in this bill, and once enacted into law, these questions will not be answered by elected representatives. They will be answered by unelected bureaucrats who are on this council, who will make the decision as to what will be censored. There are good reasons to think that the courts will strike this bill down. They would have a host of reasons to do so. Vagueness pervades the bill. The most meaningful terms are undefined, making compliance with the bill nearly impossible. Even if we discount the many and obvious First Amendment violations inherent in this bill, the courts will likely find this bill void for vagueness. We can only hope so. But we should not rely on the courts to save America from this poorly drafted bill. The Senate can reject this bill today and force the sponsors to at least provide greater clarity of the bill. This bill, KOSA, is a Trojan horse. It purports to protect our children by claiming limitless ability to regulate speech and depriving them of the benefits of the internet, which include engaging with like- minded individuals, expressing themselves freely, as well as participating in debates among others with different opinions. Government mandates and censorship will not protect children online. The internet may pose new problems, but there is an age-old solution to this issue. Free minds and parental guidance are the best means to protect our children online. Opposition to this bill is bipartisan, from advocates on the right to the left. A pro-life organization, Students for Life Action, commented on this bill stating: Once again, a piece of federal legislation with broad powers and vague definitions threatens pro-life speech. . . . those targeted by a weaponized federal government will always include pro-life Americans, defending mothers and their children--born and [unborn]. Students for Life Action concluded their statement by saying: Already the pro-life generation faces discrimination, deplatforming, and short and long term bans on social media on the whims of others. Students for Life calls for a No vote on [this bill] to prevent viewpoint discrimination from becoming federal policy at the FTC. So you could say: I don't really care. I am on the other side of that issue. I am a liberal, and I am pro-abortion. I don't care what pro- life students say. Well, maybe you should care what the ACLU has to say about this. The ACLU brought more than 300 high school students to Capitol Hill to urge Congress to vote no on this bill because, to quote the ACLU, ``it would give the government the power to decide what content is dangerous to young people, enabling censorship and endangering access to important resources, like gender identity support, mental health materials, and reproductive healthcare.'' So here you have it. You have people on one side who are pro-life, like myself, who are worried that pro-life language will be stifled because it might cause anxiety on teenagers. But you have people on the other side, such as the ACLU, who would have--I believe when they refer to ``reproductive healthcare'' they are talking about abortion. They are worried that people in favor of abortion would be stifled as well. This bill is opposed from the right and the left by anybody who is thoughtful about freedom of speech, about freedom of association, about freedom of discussion of ideas online. In the next few minutes, I will ask unanimous consent to have an amendment to this bill. What you will notice is, while the supporters of this bill will come forward and say, ``It doesn't do that; it doesn't do that,'' one thing that is for certain is they won't allow amendments to this. So there will be no amendments to this bill. The reason I am asking for an amendment from the floor is because they have already said privately they will not allow amendments. One reason they won't allow amendments is, when I read the content of my amendment, people would be aghast that anybody could vote against it. And a vote against it would be deeply damaging for people running for office, Republican or Democrat. The bill contains too many flaws as is. Even my one amendment wouldn't fix this bill, but at least put people on the record who don't believe that there should be restrictions for limiting religious or social speech. The Senate should tackle the most glaring problem with this bill: that it will silence political, social, and religious speech. My amendment seeks to address this concern, shared by many in the pro-life movement, as well as anyone who values the principles of free speech. My amendment merely states that no regulations that will be put forward by this magical and mysterious new censorship police that will be in the future--who we don't know who they are, and we don't know what they will be regulating--but if my amendment were to pass, they will not be allowed to regulate, and it will not apply to political, social, and religious speech. Another name for that would be constitutionally protected speech. My amendment is intended to address the legitimate concern that the bill threatens free speech online. If the supporters of this legislation really want to leave content alone, they will allow the amendment. So the fact that they will deny me this amendment effectively tells Americans they don't want any dissent, and they acknowledge that this is a bill of censorship. They don't want anything to mitigate or lessen the ability for the committee to censor you. So they will not allow this amendment. They won't even allow a vote on it because they are afraid to be on record. Really, the sponsors of the bill are here today, and they will rebut my words. I would like them to state publicly for all of us how they would vote on the amendment and why they are blocking the amendment. If the supporters of this legislation really do want to leave content alone, they will welcome and vote for my amendment to protect political, social, and religious speech. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that if cloture is invoked on the motion to concur with further amendment in the House amendment to S. 2073, amendment No. 3022 be set aside, and it be in order for me to call up my amendment No. 3085. I further ask that, at a time to be determined by the majority leader in consultation with the Republican leader, there be 30 minutes of debate, equally divided between the proponents and opponents of my amendment; finally, that following the use or yielding back of that time, the Senate vote on my amendment No. 3085 with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, a few comments on the support the authors of the bill have come forward with. The discussion is that State attorneys are not empowered when, in actuality, if you read the bill, the State attorneys are empowered. They are specifically referred to in the bill, and they are specifically empowered to sue if and when the Child Online Safety Committee promulgates rules to the FTC. This is specifically given to all these State attorneys, but also the rulemaking authority is given in the bill. State attorneys general will also be allowed to sue even if no rule is made. This does empower State attorneys general across the Nation to sue over whether or not people are adequately suppressing or censoring speech based on anxiety. So that is a factual dispute we have with the authors. One of the authors says: We can't trust the online people. We can't trust the people hosting these platforms. Well, of course you can't. That is why you are supposed to be parents. That is why you are supposed to be involved with your church and community and you are supposed to try to police. Everything is imperfect, but you are supposed to try. It isn't the government. So he says: We can't trust them. But, you know what, I have also heard another comment: Trust us; we are from the government. Trust us; we are going to give this Child Online Safety Committee unlimited, unchecked power to regulate anything that causes your teenager to feel anxiety--from climate change to sexuality to who knows what to eating disorders to thin models to gambling on the PGA or any website, or beer commercials. This is Pandora's box, and we need to be aware of what it actually does allow to occur. The rule of construction, the amendment that is being blocked, is typical. This is a bill to block free speech. So in order to pass a bill to block free speech, you block the free speech on the floor of the Senate and disallow amendments. Who in America would think it would be wrong to limit this bill and to protect political, social, and religious speech? That is what they are actually saying. They won't allow amendment on it, but they are not for exempting political, social, or religious speech. What does that mean? It means they conclude that the bill will allow regulation of political, social, and religious speech. Mark my words: We will revisit this issue. The court is either going to strike this thing down or we are going to come back here in a year or two, and people are going to go: Oh, my God. Did anybody read the bill before they passed it? They have 70 cosponsors because nobody reads the bills. Nobody thinks of the implications of the bill. The bill gives virtually unlimited purview to the Children's Online Safety Committee to determine what causes anxiety. Everything causes anxiety in teenagers. Every controversial subject could potentially cause anxiety. This is a huge mistake to give this authority to unelected bureaucrats--who we don't know who they are yet or who will appoint them--who will make the decisions over what causes anxiety. So while these people--I grant them good motives. I grant them wanting to do the best for people. I grant that there are terrible and tragic cases where children have committed suicide or otherwise, but this isn't the answer. The answer isn't to abbreviate or take away the precious rights guaranteed under the First Amendment.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the following interns in my office be granted floor privileges until August 9, 2024: Krrishh Kamal, Haley Leipzig, Daniel James, William DuVall, and Chad Schumacher.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, the title of this amendment is the ``Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale.'' The Fourth Amendment is no mere limitation of government power. The Fourth Amendment is fundamental to the concept of American liberty. The Fourth Amendment was a response to the British writs of assistance, which served as general warrants and permitted almost limitless searches of homes and ships of colonies. In 1761, an attorney named James Otis forcefully attacked the writs of assistance, and John Adams described that he was so inspired by Otis and the arguments that, then and there, the ``child of Independence'' was born. The Fourth Amendment prohibits these kinds of general warrants. For a search to be reasonable, the Fourth Amendment dictates that the government must identify the individual, the items, and the location to be searched, but, today, all it takes to eviscerate the Fourth Amendment is some cash. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act already requires the government to seek a court order before compelling service providers to disclose contents and records, but this law does not restrict providers from voluntarily selling that information to nongovernmental third parties. Due to this loophole in the law, American Government has effectively resurrected the idea of general warrants that the Founding Fathers were so appalled by. Thankfully, the House of Representatives voted to close that loophole. The House voted overwhelmingly this week for the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act. I am so glad that the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act is popular; that Senator Schumer has been a cosponsor of this. I hope he will vote with us tonight. But if he chooses not to vote with us tonight, the bill has passed the House. All he would need to do is bring it up in the next few weeks, and we could actually put it on the books. Leaders of both parties from across the political spectrum have come together to say you shouldn't be able to buy your way around the Fourth Amendment. The Senate must not prove itself to be less concerned about the Fourth Amendment. I hope that we will take this up. The data you transmit can reveal much about your life, such as where you work, where you drop off your child for daycare, whether you visit a gun range, who you associate with, your health data. Some of these applications sell that data to third-party brokers who then sell it to the government. It may be concerning that some of your information is traded away, but we should insist that the Fourth Amendment should be respected so that individuals are not tracked and investigated without a warrant. When law enforcement suspects you of a crime, the supreme law of the land is clear: Officers must demonstrate to a neutral judge in an open court that probable cause of a crime exists. In fact, if you want to find the people in our country who respect the Fourth Amendment, meet with any local police officer, any local sheriff. They know they don't come into your house. What has happened is the politicized aspects of our intel Agencies don't have the same respect for the Fourth Amendment that local law enforcement does. According to Professor Matthew Tokson, a professor at the University of Utah, after the Supreme Court prohibited warrantless collection of cell phone location data in Carpenter v. United States, the government Agencies just began buying that information anyway. They were told not to by the Supreme Court. So they just went and purchased it and eviscerated a Supreme Court decision. This is something we should not tolerate. A recent report by the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security demonstrated that several DHS Agencies, including the Secret Service, bought Americans' phone location data without a court order. The IRS purchases location data without a court order. The FBI purchases your location data without an order--to just name a few. The NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency--all have bought Americans' location data without a court order. The embrace of this tactic proves that the feds will zealously exploit any loophole and test the limits of their authorities, to the detriment of our constitutionally protected liberties. It is time to end the use of cash to purchase general warrants that the Fourth Amendment should have abolished over two centuries ago. Let's ensure that the Fourth Amendment is truly not for sale. I ask for a ``yes'' vote. Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 1829 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. PAUL. The idea that we don't have time is a specious one. The only reason we wouldn't have time is because the supporters of this bill delayed to the last hour. We have 5 years to renew this. We delayed it until we have 4 hours left, and then we are told we can't amend it because we don't have enough time. That is a false argument. The House is still here. They are going to be voting tomorrow. We should pass the good amendments today, send them to the House tomorrow. This is an argument that has been forced upon us by the supporters of FISA who want no debate, and they want no restrictions. They want no warrants, and they want nothing to protect the Americans. They want to allow whatever goes, whatever happens to happen, and to hell with the American individual citizen and the Bill of Rights. I say: Don't listen to the people who don't want amendments and don't want debate, and let's pass this amendment. Vote on Amendment No. 1829

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

Mr. PAUL. I call up my amendment No. 1828.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, Benjamin Franklin warned us that those who would trade liberty for security might wind up with neither, but somewhere along the way, we lost our courage. It takes courage to defend the Constitution. It takes courage to defend the Fourth Amendment. It takes courage to understand that, even when people are guilty of crimes, we let them have lawyers. We have open courts. We have an adversarial process. People think: Well, gosh, a murderer gets a lawyer. Yes, everybody in our system gets a lawyer, at least under the system of the Fourth Amendment. But as we became fearful of terrorists, we said: Well, we can't exist under the Constitution. We have to lower the standard of the Fourth Amendment. So in 1978, we set up FISA, and it went after foreigners under a different standard. It was probable cause, not of a crime but probable cause that you are associated with a foreign government. And for even myself, I am fine with that for foreigners. But for Americans, we still have the Constitution. So my amendment would simply say this: You can investigate all the foreigners you want under 702, under FISA, whatever you wish for foreigners, but for Americans you go to an article III court. They work.

Mr. PAUL. We have prosecuted over 300 terrorists in article III courts, and we could do it. My amendment says that FISA would only be utilized on foreigners, not Americans.

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

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, Congress is poised to do what no American family would ever do. Congress is poised to spend one-third more dollars than they receive. This is essentially equivalent to a family at home making $45,000 but spending $60,000. No American family can do that. But that is what is happening here. The spending that has been brought forward for our spending plans this year will lead to a $1.5 trillion deficit. So we bring in about $4.5 trillion, and we are going to spend $6 trillion. It is reckless. It leads to inflation. It is a direct vote to steal your paycheck. Because what happens, as we borrow more money, the Federal Reserve just prints up more money, and they will pay for all the debt that is created today. But that devalues your dollar. So when you go to the grocery store and your prices have risen 20 percent, you can thank the people today that are all for you, and they are going to give you everything you want. Every program under the sun that grandmother and mother and apple pie wants, they are going to give you. But they are going to borrow the money. This is a bait-and-switch. It is like: What do you want, America? Here, we will give it to you. It is free. You don't have to do anything. But it is borrowed. When they give you stuff that they buy with borrowed money, they create inflation. This has been going on for a while. But it has accelerated. It is at an alarming pace now. With the COVID lockdowns, we were borrowing $3 trillion. Then with the Biden years, we were borrowing over a trillion. We are still borrowing at $1.5 trillion. Why? Because their spending proposals take most of the spending off-limits. Two-thirds of our spending is entitlements--Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps. That is two-thirds of the spending. That equals all of the money you pay in taxes. They have taken that off the limit. They have stuck their head in the sand, and said, ``We will not ever touch entitlements.'' Well, if you don't, you are not a serious person. If you don't, you are part of the problem. Entitlements is two-thirds of the spending. Do I take joy in knowing that we have to reform these? No. But if you don't reform them, they are an anchor around the neck of America, and they are destroying us by spending money we don't have. So two-thirds of the spending they are not even going to address. Now, of the remaining third of spending, that is what we vote on-- military spending and nonmilitary spending. They call this discretionary spending. Of that remaining third, they took half of that off the table. So entitlements is two-thirds of the spending. That is going up at about 5 to 6 percent. The remaining third that we vote on is military and nonmilitary. They say: Well, we have to continue to expand the military. It is going to go up to 3 percent. So what are we left with? We are left with one-half of one-third, one-sixth of government, about 16.6 percent. And we are going to say: Oh, we are going to really try to rein in spending there. And there what they do is, they almost slow it down to 1 or 2 percent. This bill spends a third more than comes in. And what it is going to lead to--and has been leading to--is the erosion of your paycheck, the explosion of your gas prices, and the explosion of your grocery bills. Nothing is changing. And you ask yourself: Where are Republicans? We have a Republican majority in the House, and, ostensibly, Republicans are for reducing the debt. We have a filibuster-proof minority in the Senate and, ostensibly, Senate Republicans are for taking control of the debt. And yet what happens? Nothing happens. The spending goes on apace. The deficit grows by day. So when did we get this spending bill? They have months and months to do this. When did we get it? At 2:32 a.m. on Thursday. And now it is: rush, rush, rush; we have got to shovel that money out the door, most of which we don't have or a third of which we don't have. We have to borrow it quickly, shovel it out the door because the government is going to shut down Friday at midnight. Why is the government shutting down, and why are we up against a deadline? Because they didn't give us the thousand-page bill until 2:30 in the morning on Thursday. Do you think we ought to read it? Do you think we ought to know what is in it? Republican and Democrat leadership gave this to us at 2:32 in the morning--1,012-page bill, spends over a trillion dollars. No one will be able to thoroughly read and know what is in this until after it has passed. But it is rush, rush, rush; borrow more money; spend the money; and then try to deceive you into thinking that we gave you--we brought you manna from Heaven. We gave you all these gifts, these baubles. You are going to get a lot of free stuff. Every cause you like under the sun, you are going to get something for it in there. But they won't tell you the truth--that it is borrowed, it leads to inflation, and it is the biggest threat to our country. We are not threatened by other countries invading our country. We are a strong and mighty country to which I do not believe we have an external threat. But we have a threat internally, and most of it resides in this body. Most of it resides in this body and in the House with profligate spenders who are not adequately concerned with spending what comes in. They are just jolly well borrowing it. They are jolly well borrowing it and sending it abroad. You know, look, my sympathies are with Ukraine, but my first obligation to my oath of office is to my country. We can't just borrow money to send it to Ukraine. You know, once the war is finally over, which one day it will be over, the whole country is destroyed with bombs on both sides, and someone is going to be asked to pay for it. That is going to be you. Uncle Sam, Uncle Sucker will be asked to pay for it. This bill that we are looking at has 138 pages and over 1,400 earmarks, totaling $2 billion. What is an ``earmark''? It is pork. It is not acknowledged by the Constitution. The Constitution says we can tax and spend money for the general welfare. We are allowed to spend money up here, according to the Constitution, only if it is for everyone. So a bike path in Rhode Island is for people who live in one city in Rhode Island. They should tax the people of Rhode Island. But you don't tax everybody for a bike path in Rhode Island. That is against the principle and the spirit of the Constitution. Now, these 1,400 earmarks are on top of the 6,000 earmarks we had last week for $12 billion. So total between the two bills in the last 3 weeks, we have over 7,000 earmarks for $14 billion. That is a lot of pork. Democratic and Republican leadership want this reckless spending bill to pass quickly to make sure that no one has time to read or scrutinize the bill. Likely, no one will ever have the time to review all of the $2 billion worth of earmarks before this is passed. Now, earmarks and pork barrel spending is not brand new; it has been going on a long time. There was a conservative Democrat by the name of William Proxmire. This was a long time ago, in the old days, when there used to be conservative Democrats who cared about the debt. And one of the programs that he talked about was--and he gave out a Golden Fleece Award to point out waste--but he said it was one of his favorites. He said the government, in their infinite wisdom, decided to discover whether or not, if you gave gin to a sunfish versus tequila, which would make the sunfish more aggressive? Think about it. These are oppressing problems: $100,000 to give tequila to sunfish and gin and see which one made them more aggressive. Now, you would think that is so crazy, certainly it was one off and that we discovered this kind of waste, and we made it better. He talked about this for 15 years. And throughout the 15 years that he talked about the research money going to crazy research like this that not a penny should be spent on increased. In fact, fast forward to last year--we are now like 30-some-odd years after William Proxmire was talking about this--last year, the main organization that is probably the most wasteful scientific accumulation of grants up here is the National Science Foundation. What did this body do, Republicans and Democrats? They voted to double the budget for the National Science Foundation. What else do they do at the National Science Foundation? Let's see. Nearly $1 million was spent studying whether or not Japanese quail, if you give them cocaine, whether or not they are more sexually promiscuous-- your tax dollars. Every time they are bragging about what they are doing--it is worth borrowing the money--you remind them of what they are spending it on: nearly a million dollars to study Japanese quail to see if they are sexually promiscuous when they take cocaine. Another one was ostensibly for autism. But when they got to the autism and they subgranted it and sent it here and there, and you never know where it is going to wind up, $750,000, and it went to some, let's just call them eggheads--that is the nicest word I can think of--to study what did Neil Armstrong say when he landed on the Moon. Was it ``One small step for man'' or was it ``One small step for a man''? So $750,000 was spent studying what he actually said. They listened to the crackly old audio from the black-and-white tapes from the Moon landing. And in the end, $750,000 later, they couldn't decide, was it ``One step for man'' or ``One step for a man''? This is the craziness that goes on. Yet it goes on and on and on. Here is what I will tell you. Even when it is something justified--I have family members who have Alzheimer's. My mother-in-law died not too long ago with it. So I have a great deal of sympathy for the disease. I think we are a big, rich country and government; we could spend money on Alzheimer's disease. At the same time, we can't bankrupt our country. Let's say we spent $100 million last year on Alzheimer's disease. Am I a cruel person for saying we don't have enough money; we should spend $95 million this year? That never happens. Nothing ever gets smaller around here. Everything gets bigger. Everybody who wants something gets it. Put it on Uncle Sam's tab. We have a $34 going on $35 trillion debt. The biggest payment now in our budget within about a year is going to be the interest on that. Here are a couple of the new earmarks that are in this bill: $2 million for the construction of a kelp and shellfish nursery in Maine. You might say: Well, kelp might taste really good. I like to eat kelp. Good. There is already a $15 billion private market for kelp. There are companies, including in Maine, that are growing kelp for farms. I say wonderful. I am not so sure if giving it to the government or to government universities is going to help these businesses or compete with them. But I don't think it is the job of the Federal Government to be involved in these parochial concerns. Another earmark that we discovered in this bill is $1.5 million to encourage video gaming in New York. Now, you know, I have nothing against people who play video games, sure. But $1.5 million to encourage people? I have seen kids. I don't think they need any encouragement. In fact, we might be better off spending $1.5 million to discourage kids from playing video games. I see no reason, when we are down and in the hole this year $1.5 trillion, that we should do this. This is an add-on. These add-ons are earmarks. They are in the name of probably the Senators from New York. They decided they want this video gaming thing in there. Maybe they know somebody in that industry, I don't know--maybe a friend of theirs. That is why you don't earmark things. That is why things are supposed to be for the general welfare. You don't say: Here is something I am going to give to a specific parochial interest in my neighborhood or my State. The third item we have is $388,000 for Columbia University. I am sure the people who put this earmark in would be saying: I just love education, and I am just for education. Well, so am I. I am a product of public school education, private school education, lots of education. I am all for it. But do you know what? Columbia University has a $13.6 billion endowment. They make $388,000 in 20 days of interest. You would think maybe they could spend their own money. If you want to take a summer program to get into Columbia--which I think this money may be related to--it costs $12,500 for a 3-week course at Columbia. We are talking about extraordinarily wealthy people paying this and going to this school. But there is no reason for the taxpayers to be giving a rich university that has $13 billion any money. The next earmark we found was $249,000 for the Baltimore Symphony. People say: Gosh, I love the symphony, and I love music. So do I. The thing is, the way government is supposed to work is if you think that there is a general need for symphony money, you would pass a general symphony bill and we give money to all the symphonies and make them part of government. We don't have the money to do that. Instead, we do something even worse. We shouldn't be in the symphony business. It is not part of the general welfare. What happens here is the people on the Appropriations Committee who have seniority--that means you have been here between 50 and 100 years most of the time--that is an exaggeration. Let's just say 50 years. They have been here 50 years and rise to the top and, by golly, they get money for their symphony in their city. That is not the way government is supposed to work. There might even be less complaints if we have a surplus. But this is in the midst of borrowing it. So the $250,000 is going to be borrowed from China. Everybody is all up in arms about China. We are borrowing money from China. We are becoming weaker than China because we keep spending money we don't have. The next earmark was $1 million for Cambridge, MA, Community Center to install some solar panels. I like solar panels as well as anybody. I think it is kind of cool to get some of your energy from solar panels. This is a rich community. This is where Harvard is. This is where some of the largest, most successful corporations and research are in Boston. You think they can't pay for solar panels? Solar panels aren't for general welfare. Our Founding Fathers said all spending and taxation had to be for the general welfare. And they went one step further. In article I, section 8, they laid out all the powers of Congress, all the things we are allowed to do. And not listed in those was to buy solar panels for one town. You would think all the wealth with MIT and Harvard and all that wealth that is attracted to Cambridge, they would be able to buy their own solar panels. It has no place in a budget that is $1.5 trillion in the hole and only makes us weaker. The next earmark is $1 million for Martha's Vineyard Hospital, one of the richest ZIP Codes in the United States. I have been to Martha's Vineyard. It is beautiful. But I could only afford to go one time. The thing is, if you live there, that is wonderful. I am all for wealthy people. I love that they have all these beautiful homes. I think President Obama may have a place there. The thing is, pay for your own hospital. I have little, tiny hospitals with 40 beds in a really rural community that because of all the rules and resolutions, are barely breaking even in Kentucky, and I don't see sending millions of dollars to Martha's Vineyard. Once again, why did it go to Martha's Vineyard? Because somebody has been here for 50 years. They are on the Appropriations Committee. They put an earmark and said: I want the pork to go to Martha's Vineyard. Nobody makes a debate about whether Martha's Vineyard needs a bed more than Harlan, KY. They stick an earmark in here and get it because they have been here a long time. It is a terrible way to legislate, but it is a terrible way to legislate in the context of this enormous debt we are amassing. This bill is teeming with about $2 billion worth of earmarks at a time when we can't afford the additional debt. Just days into the new year, the Treasury Department announced the U.S. debt had surpassed $34 trillion. That is hard to fathom. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve came out and said it is an urgent problem. Jamie Dimon with JPMorgan Chase came out and said it was an urgent problem. On the heels of people saying it is an urgent problem, what happens? Congress rises to the occasion and borrows more money. Talk about tone-deaf--completely tone-deaf. We are just going to borrow another $1.5 trillion on the heels of $34 trillion. We are spending at such a rate that right now, we are averaging a trillion dollars to the debt every 90 days. If that pace continues, instead of $1.5 trillion, it could be up to $4 trillion in the next year. Since this year, the United States is borrowing money at $7 billion a day. Think about that. We are borrowing money at over $300 million per hour, and $3 million per minute is being borrowed. We are borrowing money at $85,000 a second. This is just spinning, literally, out of control. If you look at the debt clock online you can see the numbers just spinning like crazy. If we are to judge the backroom negotiations between the ``uniparty'' leadership in Congress and the White House by its results, we can only conclude that they do not take our spending problems seriously. Even Republicans who talk such a good game about government spending and respect for taxpayer dollars when they are at home cannot be depended upon to fight for fiscal sanity when push comes to shove. Our Nation's greatest threat comes not from abroad but from within the Halls of Congress, which at every opportunity looks for ways to ignore our spending problem and expedite our economic decline. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts we will add an average of $2 trillion to our debt every year for the next decade. But there is a breaking point. There is a point at which they print so much money that you can have a catastrophic loss of the value. This is what has happened in South America for decades. It is what has happened in Central America. And we don't want it--at least I don't want it--happening in our country. The CBO also estimates net interest payments will outgrow defense spending this year and will become the largest item--over $800 billion just in interest. This reckless level of borrowing and spending is unsustainable. The ever-increasing heights of our debt in a weak economy, high inflation, and confiscatory tax rates--in other words, today's spending threatens tomorrow's prosperity. We are approaching a predictable economic crisis in the United States. In my time in the Senate, I have proposed spending freezes, balanced budgets, spending cuts designed to get our Nation back on path. Today, though, instead of a balanced budget, I merely ask that this bill be sent back to the Appropriations Committee and that they report to the full Senate about how to responsibly cut 5 percent from this bloated monstrosity. We wouldn't eliminate everything, but everything you are going to spend money on--grandma, motherhood, apple pie--is going to get 5 percent less. That is what it would take to start balancing our budget. We wouldn't do it just on this bill because we would actually have to do that to everything in all our spending. Doing it here today shows somebody is serious about the spending. My instructions even leave the Appropriations Committee open to determine where to reduce the spending. This isn't asking that much. It is a lopsided compromise in which the select handful of Members who wrote this bill get 95 percent of everything they want. That is what it would mean if we were to pass this cut. Realize that when we vote on this cut though, not one Democrat will vote to cut one penny. Seriously. If we offered an amendment to cut one penny, every Democrat would vote no on it. They are resisting voting no now because they are worried people at home will discover what they are voting for. It is more than just the Democrats. No Democrat cares about the deficit. Many Republicans profess to care, but half of them will vote with the Democrats as well. This is really a bipartisan problem. Don't let anybody tell you this is just about Joe Biden; it is about the previous administration as well. They borrowed $7 trillion. They shut the economy down. COVID lockdowns led to extravagant borrowing, more than we have ever seen, and we are continuing it now. But this is a bipartisan problem. It means that rather than spending $1.2 trillion in this package, my proposal would spend $1.14 trillion. Some would look at that and say: Gosh, that is not very dramatic at all. How did you become so moderate? And you know that is true; I am quite the moderate. It would cut $60 billion--$60 billion. But they will unanimously, on the Democrat side, vote against this because they are against cutting one penny. And our side, half of our people on our side will vote against any cuts also. This is a modest cut and only the beginning of what you would have to do to bring fiscal sanity. I am willing to accept a reasonable compromise, even one that does not balance the budget significantly or even cut the necessary spending. I am willing to vote for something to cut some spending. By agreeing to this motion, which will be an amendment later today, we can show to our constituents that we respect them as taxpayers and are open to the most reasonable attempts to shave down the unsustainable level of spending. I ask that all consider a ``yes'' vote on my amendment when the time comes. I yield the floor.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the next four amendments be considered simultaneously and individually; that each individual amendment be listed at the table by number; that over the next 15 minutes we will vote on all four. Each person who is for the amendment can speak a minute for it, and each person who is against it can speak a minute against it, as we have been doing. But four amendments will be considered over the next 15 minutes, individually, at the desk. Each Senator will come forward and vote on all four amendments one at a time, but we will be done with four amendments in 15 minutes. I ask unanimous consent.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I move to refer the message to accompany H.R. 2882 to the Committee on Appropriations with instructions.

Mr. PAUL. I yield back my time.

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

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I rise to honor the passing of a great Kentuckian, Donald Overton Neagle. He passed away on February 20, 2024, at the age of 86. Don was born on November 3, 1937, in Green County, KY. While Don accomplished many things in his life, it was his 65-year career in radio that made him a well-known name across South Central Kentucky. His storied career brought him to radio stations across the Commonwealth, from Greensburg to Harrodsburg, and Bowling Green, before settling in Russellville in 1958 with WRUS Radio Station. During his six decades with WRUS, he became part owner of the station and hosted and directed multiple programs. He was best known for his program ``Feedback,'' where he interviewed politicians, listeners of the show, and other notable figures. I had the privilege of being regularly interviewed on his show and always enjoyed the chance to speak with him and his audience. My wife Kelley is a Russellville native and grew up listening to Don's shows. He has been a household name for both the Pauls and the Ashbys, and he will be greatly missed. While we share in the sadness of his passing, it is with great joy we look back at his life, his many accomplishments, and the positive impact he had on his community and Kentuckians across the Commonwealth. We honor Don and his family, and may he rest in peace.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, porkbarrel spending elicits images of politicos, fists full of cash to be passed out to the special interests. Porkbarrel spending sounds bad and smells worse. Porkbarrel spending is the original sin of Congress that Big Government types can't rid themselves of, can't rinse themselves clean of. Porkbarrel spending is the grease that eases billions and trillions of deficit dollars to flow. What did our Founders have to say about porkbarrel spending, about earmarks? The Constitution is quite clear: Taxation and spending are only allowed if they are for the general welfare. Justice Story, in our history, ruled that the general welfare clause was not a general grant of unlimited powers but, rather, a limiting clause that meant that government taxation and spending must be for the general welfare of the people, not for parochial interests. It is not for a sex club in Philadelphia. It has to be for the general welfare of all people in the United States. It is not for a parade in Detroit. It is for the general welfare of people. The earmarks are porkbarrel spending, and they are not included in the Constitution. Justice Story referred to Jefferson in reaching this conclusion. Jefferson wrote that ``the laying of taxes is the power, and the general welfare is the purpose.'' So you can tax people generally, but you have to spend the money generally. It has to be what is good for everyone in America. It can't be good for the ``Bubba Gump Shrimp Museum'' in Louisiana. It can't be good for sugar cane in Louisiana. It is supposed to be for the general welfare of the entire United States. That is what Jefferson said. He said that ``to lay taxes ad libitum for any purpose they please,'' it shouldn't be so but ``only to pay [for] the debts or provide for the general welfare of the Union.'' Jefferson continued: ``In like manner, Congress is not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare, but only to lay taxes'' for what truly is ``for the general welfare'' of everyone in the country. Madison argued that spending must be tied to the specifically enumerated powers in article I, section 8 of the Constitution. Why would the Founders have written the Constitution and said we have specific powers that we are allowed to spend money on? Why would they write those specific powers and then say, ``Oh, well, whatever, just spend money on whatever you want to spend it on''? They wrote these specific powers because that is what they intended us to follow. The 9th and 10th Amendments said if the powers weren't granted to Congress, they were left to the States. A lot of these earmarks could be funded by the States, but States have to balance their budget. Why do the earmarks bump from the State to the Federal Government? Because there is a printing press up here, and it is going full stop, 24 hours a day--printing, printing, printing--and putting the next generation into debt. If you read article I, section 8, which enumerates the powers for spending in the Constitution, you will find no references to funding organizations that host sex parties. The Senators from Pennsylvania stuck an earmark in here for an organization that has public sex parties with whomever, whenever-- groups, no numbers--in a public forum. That is what your money is going for. The Senators from Pennsylvania put an earmark in here for public sex parties--really. Does anybody think that that is in the general welfare? Does anybody not see our Founding Fathers rolling over in their graves that Democrat Senators from Pennsylvania wanted to fund sex parties in Philadelphia? There is nothing in the Constitution that allows that. They also want to fund environmental justice centers--whatever that means--hell-bent on banning gas stoves. Really? The bill has 6,000 earmarks, over $12 billion in spending. So this is the cusp of it, but the overall spending is hundreds of billions of dollars, and the spending at this rate will lead to $1.5 trillion borrowed. What happens to the borrowing? The Federal Reserve buys it, and your prices go up at the store. Why does a steak cost 20 bucks in the grocery store now? Because they have diluted the value of your currency by all these earmarks, all this giving, and all this unconstitutional spending. Decades ago, William Proxmire rose in this esteemed body to tell the American people about government waste. He was a conservative Democrat, back when that existed. He awarded the ``Golden Fleece Award'' to the worst examples of government spending. Every month for 13 years, he did this. Among the things he pointed out: A $27,000 study to investigate why prison inmates try to escape. Really? We couldn't figure that one out on our own? A $6,000 guide on how to use Worcestershire sauce. But here is my favorite, and Proxmire himself said this was one of his favorites: $100,000 research grant to study whether sunfish that drink tequila are more aggressive than sunfish that drink gin. This is where your money goes. This is why we are bankrupt. It never gets better. The organizations that fund this, like the National Science Foundation, they doubled their budget last year. Do you think we are going to have more or less of this crazy spending on drunk fish if you give them more money? They doubled the amount of money to the people who are studying whether sunfish getting drunk on tequilas are more aggressive than sunfish getting drunk on gin. There was always a certain amount of punch to Proxmire's proclamations. We could laugh at the lunacy of government. But that was in 1988, when our overall debt was only $2 trillion. Now it is $34, going on $35 trillion as we speak. Perhaps government waste is not so funny anymore. There are 600 pages of earmarks in this bill--over 6,000 earmarks of porkbarrel spending for which the Constitution does not approve. It adds up to $12 billion. It would be difficult to choose which single earmark is the worst, but here are some of the top 10: $4 million for a waterfront walkway in New Jersey. You heard that right--$4 million for a walkway, for a fancy new boardwalk to help the New Jersey shoreline compete with Staten Island's. We are $34 trillion in debt, and they are going to take money that is supposed to be for the general welfare to help one specific town. This is a town with a median income of $100,000. Do you think maybe they could pay for their own boardwalk? And $3.5 trillion for Detroit's Thanksgiving parade float maker's new headquarters. So the people who make the floats for the parade in Detroit are going to get a new headquarters. Does anybody think that is for the general welfare? This actually is giving money to a private company. Where in the Constitution does it say we can take money from everyone and give it to a private company? That is unconstitutional. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is given $1.75 million. You say: Well, I love art. We need to fund art. This is a regional art museum, and it is a museum that has a $5 billion endowment. Some of the richest people in our country give to this museum, and that is great. Their names are on the wings of the museum. That is great. We have always had support by rich people in our country for museums. That is great. But we don't need to be taxing the everyday working man in our country to send another million dollars to a museum in New York that has a $5 billion endowment. They also have a million dollars for the environmental justice center in New York. It used to be justice that we thought should be color blind. Now we have justice that is meted out based on the shade of your ideology. So if you are a crazy climate alarmist and you think the world is going to end and the polar bears are drowning from too much water--note to self: Polar bears swim in the water; they live in the water. The polar bears are not drowning because of global warming. So we have the environmental justice center, which is full of a bunch of crazy people who are only on one side of the issue. They believe that we should ban everything: cars, gas stoves. Your money is being sent to fund this politically charged nonsense that has nothing to do with justice. And $500,000 for gardens in San Francisco. Now, I understand the smell is bad in San Francisco from the human feces, from the waste, from the trash, from the litter, from the drug addicts who strew all of their needles across the place. It is a bad deal in San Francisco. But do you know what? They need to clean their city up. They don't need to be asking for taxpayers in Kentucky and around the country to plant flowers for them to obscure the smell of their problem because they have let their city go to rotten ruin. A million dollars to a nonprofit in Minnesota to build a coffee shop for refugees. Think about this. You have just come to this country. Many of these are good people. They are some of the best Americans. They just got here, but we want to teach them about America. So instead of teaching them frugality--someone who is new, who doesn't have much money, they should go to the grocery store, and for 26 cents a cup, you can make your own coffee--instead we say: Why don't we give a million dollars to a refugee center so they can have a coffee shop and serve up $7 lattes to teach the immigrants that this is what is great about America? No, what is great about America is to get $7 lattes when you are paying for it, not when the government is paying for it. And $500,000 for a cyber crime vehicle for the Honolulu Police. Who the heck knows if that is a competitive price? But for $500,000, you can apparently get 2 Ferraris, 10 Teslas, and 20 Toyotas. The question I have about cyber crime is: Are they using warrants? Are they eavesdropping on all of us? Or are they actually doing warrantless searches of innocent Americans? But this is not something the Federal Government should be funding. A $1.2 million earmark for bike paths in Rhode Island. Look, I am a bike rider. I like bike paths as much as the next person. They should be funded locally. That is not the general welfare. A bike path in Rhode Island is the business of Rhode Island. Why should Rhode Island pay for it? Because Rhode Island balances their budget. Like every other State, they only can spend what comes in because they have no printing press. Why do they ask the Federal Government to fund their bike paths? Because we have a printing press. But that only is not for the general welfare. It hurts the general welfare by causing inflation. Deficit spending causes inflation, and that is what you get with this bike path. Rhode Island has 28,000 millionaires. Why don't they tax their millionaires? I don't care what they do to their millionaires for their bike paths. Let them take care of it. But don't tax the rest of the people of the country to pay for a bike path in one State. The final earmark we have today is $209,000 for an air conditioner in the Charles Town Old Opera House in West Virginia. You might ask yourself how that is of general interest or in the general welfare, and you would be right. It is not. It is very parochial. But you would also ask why they spent $100,000 last year fixing the air conditioner that is going to cost another $200,000 this year. Maybe competitive bidding is not so good when you actually get free money from the government. These are the 10 of over 6,000 wasteful earmarks included in this minibus. I don't know which single one of them would receive Senator Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award, but these are my terrible 10, and there are more. And this is only funding half of government. In a couple more weeks, they are coming back. And if there were 6,000 earmarks this week, I am guessing they will have 6,000 next week. It gets worse. It is leading to generalized inflation. So not only are they ignoring the general welfare clause, which means that spending and taxation are supposed to help everyone equally--it has to be for a general cause, such as the national defense, that we don't have for Maine or Rhode Island or Kentucky. The national defense is for everyone. It is a general cause. But when we spend it on parochial causes, when we run up this enormous deficit, it hurts us all generally. Inflation is a general punishment. So I would say this bill is not for the general welfare of the country; it is for the general punishment of the country because it continues a $1.5 trillion deficit that leads to inflation that causes all of us to not be able to afford food, clothing, gasoline. That is what this is. This bill is an insult to the American people; the earmarks are all the wasteful spending that you could ever hope to see; and it should be defeated.

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, what we have here is a pork fest of epic proportions. You can't imagine how much pork barrel spending is going on in this bill, but you should know about it. There are 6,000 earmarks in this bill. What is an earmark? An earmark is where a Congressman or Senator says: Hey, I have this special interest--maybe they are a donor; maybe they are somebody important in their area; maybe they are a relative-- and they want to name Bubba Gump Shrimp Museum after them or they want to name some kind of museum after one of their donors, and that is what gets put into these bills and bloats them beyond imagination. It is also sort of the grease that eases in billions and trillions of other dollars, because you get people to buy into the total package by giving them a little bit of pork for their town, a little bit of pork for their donors. Porkbarrel spending elicits the images of politicos with hands and fists stuffed with dollars, passing these out to the special interests. And that is exactly what it is. In 2010, 2009, there was this Tea Party uprising. There were people concerned that their government had gone beyond its constitutional limits and had begun spending money like there was no tomorrow, and that the debt was rising at an extraordinary pace. People came to Washington, and one of the things Republicans vowed to do was be better. We voted within our conference to ban earmarks. And for nearly a decade--maybe a little more than a decade--Republicans didn't put forth earmarks. But it is sad to say that when we look at the blame for the debt, that the blame goes to both parties. People often ask me: Whose fault is it, Democrats or Republicans? My answer is, yes, it is both parties. Now, both parties have different priorities, but they do get together and they support each other. They pat each other on the back, and everybody gets more money, because the one truism about Washington is, they believe there are no limits to the money. In your State capitol, the revenue that comes in is spent. In your county government and your city government, the revenue that comes in is spent. The one place where there are no restraints, where there are no tradeoffs, where the printing press runs 24 hours a day is Washington. The Federal Reserve simply buys the debt. But it is not without repercussions. As the deficits spiral upwards and as the Federal Reserve prints more money to buy the debt, the value of your dollar goes down. And the people who get the money first are able to profit by the inflation before it trickles down to the regular working class. If you are a banker on Wall Street and you buy and sell the bonds, you get the money right when it is printed, when the ink is still fresh, and you get to spend it on par. You get to spend the money while it still has 100 percent of its value. When it gets to you, when it gets to America, and when it gets to all of us, it has lost its purchasing power, so it no longer buys as much; and we see the prices in the grocery store going up, and we saw wages sluggishly chasing those prices. This is inflation. Inflation is the bait and switch of Big Government. People in Big Government on both sides of the aisle offer you something for nothing. It is a bait and switch. The emperor has no clothes. The emperor has no money. Your government has nothing to give you but borrowing. They borrow from the future, and they give you stuff. They give you these items that glisten in the Sun, and they are shiny objects. And they say: Here, have this. More food stamps. You don't have to work for a living. Or if you are a corporation, they will give you a special perk or a benefit. You get all these things that are not supposed to cost anything. The cost is inflation. It is a deceitful way of running your government; it is a deceitful way of borrowing from the future. But it is what goes on day in and day out. The Republicans, at least, put up a pretense. They say to the people at home, and they go home, and they pound the desk and say: We are the conservatives, and we believe in balanced budgets. But when you see how the voting goes, it is not true. Some of the Republicans are conservative. So we had a vote recently to get on this bill. All the Democrats voted for the 6,000 earmarks and all of the spending. There hasn't been a spending bill that there has been significant Democrat opposition to that I know of in modern history. They all vote for the spending. But the secret unknown to a lot of people at home is that there are 12 or 15 Republicans--the Big Government Republican caucus--who vote with the Democrats; because, see, what has happened is we have abdicated the power of the purse. The power of the purse we hold and could use at any time. See, 41 Members of a party or a caucus or a conservative group could stop legislation and demand that the other side compromise. But that is not what happens. The conservatives can never muster 41 votes because there are 10 or 15 Big Government Republicans who side with the Democrats; and, therefore, there is really no power to the purse. There is no ability to restrain spending. In fact, the opposite happens. A lot of people don't understand this. They think there is no compromise in Washington, and the opposite is true. There is compromise every day on every spending bill; but it is not compromise between Big Government and constitutional government, it is compromise between Big Government Democrats and Big Government Republicans. The Big Government Republicans want to send foreign aid to all far- flung reaches of the planet. They also want to fund the wars in all far reaches of the planet, and they want to fund the military-industrial complex. That is the traditional Republican condition. The Democrats take that position now, too. So they are all together on this. And then on the welfare proposition--the idea that you don't have to work and, basically, we will just pay you not to work and that the payment for nonwork is actually now exceeding the payment you get for work--that is a Democratic proposition. But the Big Government Republicans say: Oh, that is fine; if we can get the military- industrial complex money, we will give you the welfare money. So it is welfare and warfare. And they do come together. The media won't report this. They either don't understand it or are ignorant or just incompetent. They don't report it to you. They say that the problem is not enough compromise, the problem is not enough dialogue. No. The country is bankrupt because there is too much compromise and too much dialogue between people who believe in Big Government. And so we have, on an annual basis, a deficit of $1.5 trillion. Now during COVID, it was even worse. During COVID, it was like $3 trillion. But we are now adding debt at about $1 trillion every 3 months. It used to take a decade to add a trillion in debt; now we are adding a trillion in debt in 3 months. Our interest payment has doubled. Interest, within a year or two, will be the largest item in our budget. Now, interest doesn't let you buy anything. It is just paying the bankers for the privilege of borrowing from the future. As your interest payment grows and crowds out everything else--it is sort of like having credit card interest, and all of a sudden you have got so much on your credit card and your interest payment is so high that it crowds out all of the spending and forces bankruptcy. That is where we are headed. But we don't use the power of the purse because Big Government Republicans are really no different than Big Government Democrats. They all have come together, and they have compromised. We get the warfare and the welfare State, and they are more than adequately funded. We spend about $6 trillion, and we bring in about $4.5 trillion. And you ask: Well, how long can that last? I, frankly, don't think much longer. We bring in $4.5 trillion. That is a lot of money. It is not like we do nothing for people. We should do 4.5 trillion dollars' worth. People say: Are you for no government? I say: No, I am for what we bring in. We bring in $4.5 trillion. That is not a tiny government. I would probably actually be for smaller than that, but I would settle for: Let's have 4.5 trillion dollars' worth of government. Let's have what comes in is what we spend. But if you put it in perspective and you try to say: What would $4.5 trillion buy of our government expenditures? How much would the tax base that we have pay for? It is interesting. If you add up Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and food stamps, it equals about $4.5 trillion. The four entitlement programs, the big entitlement programs, would consume all of the money. So we vote on a budget every year. You think that is all of the spending. No. We only vote on a budget that is one-third of the spending. Two-thirds of the spending is entitlements, and nobody ever votes on it. It is never reformed. If you touch entitlements or say anything about it, AARP will send out notes to all your constituents saying: Tell them to take his hands off my Social Security--even if your goal is actually trying to preserve Social Security for another generation by actually reforming it. It is the only way it will last. I will tell you the honest truth that nobody else will tell you. Social Security is going to have to rise in age--the eligibility rate. We did it once in 1983; the age rose from 65 to 67. We did it gradually a couple months a year over 20 years. And, really, once it was enacted, there weren't that many complaints. Did people love it? No. Do I want to raise the age? No. But if you want to preserve Social Security, you have to raise the age. And to do nothing, to stick your head in the sand and say ``we are not going to talk about entitlements'' means you are not a serious person. Because the entire budget that we vote on excludes all of the entitlements and is military and nonmilitary--they call it discretionary spending. It is about $1.5 trillion. So the deficit actually equals our budget. If we zeroed out our budget, that is how we would balance the budget. We are not going to do that. But if you were to take everything and cut a very small amount of every program, including the entitlement costs--not necessarily the benefits but the costs--if you were to cut across the board, you could actually begin to balance your budget. It is what any normal business would do. It is what any family would do. And yet we do none of that, and it goes on and on and on. So this year, we will have a deficit of $1.5 trillion. The bill before us codifies that. It is not all the spending; there will be a little bit more spending next week. But all the spending together is still at the rate that we will borrow $1.5 trillion. Some people don't quite grasp this. They are like, oh, it is this big number, but it does not mean anything. We have had a debt forever. But what it means is higher prices in the grocery store. If you are not bothered by higher gas prices or higher grocery prices or higher electricity prices, then you don't need to listen to me. Just forget about it and pay the higher prices. But people are being squeezed. The people being squeezed are those at the lowest part of the socioeconomic ladder, those with fixed incomes, or those retired. But we have now linked most of the retirement benefits and most of welfare to inflation. So they are kind of getting their bumps to try to keep up with inflation. It is actually more the working class, those who are working for a living, being paid privately, who are having more trouble keeping up with this. This is the problem we face. But we add to this the parochial interests of letting people get stuff for their city or for their State or a bike path here or there. Our Founders looked at this, and they put it into our Constitution. Our Founders said that spending and taxation should be for the general welfare. And this was discussed over and over again because if it only said ``the general welfare,'' the argument would be, what does that mean? That could mean anything, right? But that isn't where they left it. They said that all spending and all taxation should be for the general welfare, and then they listed what they thought were the Federal prerogatives or powers that apply through general welfare. They are things like the national defense. We don't think it would be very convenient or very efficient for each State in the United States to have their own defense, so we agreed that was a Federal problem. We agreed that commerce between the States shouldn't be interrupted. We agreed that the border surrounding us should be--they aren't being currently--but should be a national concern. But for most other things like a bike path or a museum, we agreed that was a parochial interest. We didn't tell your State government they can't do it. So there is nothing in the Constitution that says that your State can't provide museum funding or for a bike path, but it is in the Constitution that the Federal Government doesn't do that. Now, why do they want to buy a bike path up here--so there is a bike path in Rhode Island that they want? Why do they want that? Well, the people from Rhode Island stuck it in there. It is an earmark. They want it so they can go home and they can get their name put on the bike path, and then people will love them because they act as if it was their money that they brought back. Well, it is not. It is everybody's money, and it is not being spent constitutionally because it is being taken to Rhode Island, and nobody in the rest of the States authorized that in the Constitution. You can tax the people of Rhode Island to pay for bike paths, and you can tax the people of Kentucky, but it is not constitutional to take our money and send it back. It is also unwise for another reason. Why do you not want earmarks? Why do you not want pork-barrel politics coming from Washington? Why? Because we have no limits. We have got a printing press. I mean, we just print money 24/7, all day long. The debt? We borrow--I think it is--more than $2 million a minute. We have probably borrowed $40 million since I started talking a few minutes ago. I mean, it is just out of control. But why do we want the bike path in Rhode Island to be paid for with U.S. tax money instead of Rhode Island tax money? Because Rhode Island only has so much money coming in--so does Kentucky, so does Texas, so does Tennessee. Now, States will borrow, but they typically have to borrow against some sort of capital or they have to sell bonds. You know, we just borrow. We borrow from ourselves up here. States don't have a Federal Reserve, for the most part, and cities don't, so you want the spending to be local. Why? Because your local mayor or your city council or your State legislature has to make a decision. So, for example, everybody wants something. Let's say that there are 10 roads in your town that you want to be paved or improved, and everybody kind of agrees we need to improve these 10 roads. You list them 1 through 10, but you only have got enough money to fund repaving 8 roads. Do you repave all 10 or do you repave 8? No. If you work for a city government, whether you are a Republican or a Democrat or an Independent, you pave what you have money for that year, and you put the last two that you couldn't pay for this year first on the list for the next time. When I mention that here, that is such a foreign concept that I had a chairman from the opposite party of one of the committees look at me and say: We shouldn't have to choose. I said: What do you mean? He said: Well, we shouldn't have to choose. If it is a good cause, we should give them money. Well, everything is a good cause, but we don't have the money. But in Washington, it is not a choice; it is ``Put it on my tab.'' There is never really the realization that there is a finite amount of money. There is never really a realization of the pros and cons of spending money we don't have. Like I have said, look, we bring in $4.5 trillion. There are a lot of things we can do with $4.5 trillion, but we would have to look for some savings places. Both Republicans and Democrats are guilty of saying: We can look everywhere but not at entitlements. So we had a big debate about a year ago when McCarthy was the Speaker over there, and he ended up losing his Speakership over this. They made a deal to raise the debt in an unlimited amount for 2 years, beyond the next election, in exchange for these spending caps, but the spending caps were high enough that it still looked like many on the other side wanted more money, so they made a side deal. All of these deals, though, were to expand the amount of spending. It didn't really cause any restraint. Then, when you looked at how much was actually being spent by this debt deal, you found that we were still leading to a $1.5 trillion deficit in 1 year. The spending goes on and on and on. There doesn't seem to be any sort of restraint. People say: Well, we are in the minority. Republicans are in the minority. What could we do? It only takes 41 of us. About an hour ago, we had a vote. If 41 Republicans would have said no, we would have exerted the power of the purse, and they would have had to compromise. Instead, we don't compromise conservative with liberal, Big Government with constitutional government; we compromise with the Big Government Republicans siding with the Big Government Democrats to spend more money. There is no conservative influence on the spending of money because it just goes out the door--it flies out the door--and it is printed up, and the debt is bought, and your prices at home go up. This has been going on for a very long time. Our Founding Fathers looked at the general welfare clause and said that the money should be spent for the general welfare. Justice Story ruled in 1833 that the general welfare clause was not a general grant of unlimited power but, rather, a limiting cause that meant government taxation and spending must be for the general welfare. It must be for something that is for everyone, as opposed to something that is just for one State or one city. Jefferson agreed, and Justice Story quoted Jefferson in his argument. Jefferson wrote that the laying of taxes is the power and that general welfare is the purpose for which the power is to be exercised. Taxes were not to be laid or spending was not to occur for any purpose that Congress pleases but only to pay the debt or provide for the welfare of the Union. Congress was not to do anything they pleased to provide for the general welfare but only to lay taxes for the purpose that would be beneficial to the entire country. It wasn't for bike paths. It wasn't for museums. It wasn't for sex parties in Philadelphia. The Pennsylvania Senators actually had an earmark in here for sex parties-- communal sex parties--in Philadelphia. Even they were embarrassed after that one came out, and that earmark they have taken out now, but that is the kind of stuff that gets stuck in here. There was a road to nowhere in Gravina, AK, from a few years ago--all kinds of parochial interests that are not part of the general welfare and not allowed by the Constitution. Madison reiterated this in the sense that he said that the money to be spent for the general welfare must be tied to one of the specifically enumerated powers from article I, section 8. Article I of the Constitution has to do with the spending powers, the powers granted to us. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution says those powers not granted to us are left to the States and people, so just because our Federal Government is not supposed to build bike paths doesn't mean your State can't. That is left to your State, and you can decide if you have enough money to do it and how you want to spend your money. People have written, if the Constitution only said you have to spend for the general welfare but listed nothing else, that it could be interpreted that the general welfare meant anything, but because we said for the general welfare and then we listed specifically the powers of Congress, the understanding is that the powers of spending for the general welfare are limited to the specific powers given to Congress, and we listed them. They wanted to be very certain that this wouldn't become an all- encompassing government, taking all of our taxes, and government would become so huge that it couldn't be controlled, but that is largely what has happened over time, is that government has grown and grown and grown. William Proxmire was a conservative Democrat back when there used to be conservative Democrats. There really aren't any left--they have either become Republicans or gone extinct--but William Proxmire used to talk about spending in the way Republicans do now, and he would point out some of the worst spending. One of the things he pointed out, I remember, was a study about happiness--$50,000 to study what made people happy and another $100,000 to study what made people fall in love. But my favorite one is this-- and this was one of Proxmire's favorites. It was $100,000 spent to study whether or not sunfish drinking tequila were more aggressive than sunfish drinking gin. So we did a study on fish to see which made them more aggressive, tequila or gin. This is the kind of insanity we live with. You think, Well, maybe it got better over time; maybe we instituted reforms, and they quit wasting our money so much. I will give you a recent example. Because the dollar is no longer worth as much--this is a recent example--I think it was three-quarters of a million dollars to study whether or not Japanese quail on cocaine are more sexually promiscuous than Japanese quail that are not on cocaine. This is the craziness of your government. So any time you think, Well, government is doing everything possible, and we can't possibly cut one penny, remember what they are spending your money on. A lot of the worst waste from government comes from the National Science Foundation. You say: Well, certainly, they have put some reforms in place since they were studying what made people love each other or what made people happy; certainly, they have put some reforms in place. No. They just give them more money. We had a bill just 2 years ago that nearly doubled the amount of money going to the National Science Foundation. Do you think they are more or less likely to be frugal and wise and less wasteful with our money if we double the amount of money we give them? This is what passes for oversight in this town, and this is a real problem. The earmarks are the tip of the spear that make it worse because, often, if you have got someone wavering in the wind and they actually think that they might be conservative and that they might not vote for the spending bill, they say: What if we give you this? What if we give you this airport? We will even name the airport after you in your district. An airport named after you? Boy, that is a bonus. Then, if you do that, you need to vote for the entire bill. So what happens is the entire bill gets bigger and bigger as everybody gets an airport or a park named after them. I personally think we shouldn't name any parks after politicians. It is not their money; it is your money. I mean, it is taxpayer money. If you are a person who worked hard and gave money to build a park in your town, by all means, put your name on it, but we shouldn't have any politicians' names on it. At the very least, they ought to be dead. I am not saying we should cause their deaths. I am just saying they ought to be at least dead before you put their names on it. But we have living politicians with dozens and dozens of parks with their names on them. It is not their money to give. There is a famous story of Davy Crockett, who was a Congressman here, and it is called ``Not Yours to Give.'' There had been a fire in Georgetown, and they raced over there to put the fire out. In those days, there was a communal fascination and a communal eagerness to help put fires out. There weren't as many official fire departments. Georgetown is a pretty good, probably, buggy or horse ride from here. But they raced over there--even the Members of Congress--to try to put the fire out. Sure enough, the next day, they said: Well, we need to give them money. And Davy Crockett was persuaded. He voted to give them money. But he got home, and he got to talking to a farmer across the fencepost. The farmer said: Well, you know, you saw that fire, and you saw that damage, and you saw the calamity of those people. You wanted to help them, and I understand that sympathy, but you are not here at home, in Tennessee, to see the suffering of the people in your own community who have an equal need and an equal right to that. But, really, charity is not something that was part of the government's mission. Government was supposed to be the law-and-order parameters to allow the engine of capitalism to create the wealth that allows us to take care of people, but more and more, it has become to replace charity and to become the bread and to become the sole focus of generation after generation who don't know the wonder of work. I have often said to people that I think everybody ought to work. Everybody who can work should work. I wouldn't give out any benefits to anybody who can work who doesn't work. It sounds harsh, but, really, you have got to think work is actually a bonus; work is a benefit; work is a privilege; work is something that everybody should want. I don't care whether you clean the carpets here or you own the building. Work is a redeeming value, and it is how people get their self-esteem. But we now live in a generation where everybody gets a trophy if you participate: Hey, come participate in the welfare program; here is your trophy. But it actually is demeaning to the people, and it keeps more and more people on this. People say: We need Medicaid for everyone. I say: No. We want Medicaid for only those who can't help themselves. We want that number to be 5 or 10 percent of the public, not 40 percent of the public or 50 percent of the public. That means you are failing. We want to grow business where people have their own insurance, where there is private insurance, where there is a marketplace where prices would come down, but that doesn't happen as government becomes more and more involved. If you look at the two areas where prices are rising the fastest-- education and healthcare--what do they have in common? Government dominates these spaces. Government gives free tuition--the endowment of Harvard's billions of dollars--and the tuition goes like this. You would think there would be some sort of semblance of competition, some sort of semblance of price competition, and there doesn't appear to be because the government subsidizes it. It is the same with our drug policy as well. We are here today to discuss spending, but the other side is just discussing, Oh, well, the government will shut down. While I don't want the government to shut down--I think it is chaotic to have interruptions in government--I do think that there is an argument for whether or not keeping the government open and spending money at the same level we are spending it and causing the debt to rise at this same degree--whether keeping it open and borrowing so much money is actually good or bad for the country. I actually think we are damaging our country. The greatest threat to our national security is actually our debt. The threat is from within. We are not going to be overrun by foreign armies. We really are not in danger of being invaded by a foreign army. Now, you can't tell the people who spend the money on military that because they want more, more, more. So when you look at the negotiations over the debt deal from last year, they first said that two-thirds of the spending entitlements wouldn't be touched. So how do you expect to balance your budget or do anything significant to your budget if two-thirds of the spending is taken off the table? So all of the entitlement spending was taken off the table. We were not going to look at that. So the remaining third is what we vote on, on the budget, when we have a budget. We haven't had one in years. I produced my own budget, just from my office, just so we can actually have a vote on what a balanced budget would look like. But whether it is Republicans or Democrats, most of the time, they don't even put forward a budget. We spent $6 trillion with no budget. Can you imagine a corporation of any kind of size spending that kind of money and having no budget? So two-thirds of the spending is entitlement spending. The remaining third is half military and half nonmilitary. We call it discretionary spending. The budget we vote on is about $1.5 trillion. That is about equal to the debt. So, if you eliminated all of that spending, that is what it would take to actually balance the budget. But when we did this big debt deal about a year ago, the people who wrote it said it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. They said: Well, we are not going to put any caps on entitlement. So two-thirds of the spending is rising at about 5 to 6 percent a year. This is the bulk of the growth of government. It is coming from the entitlements--Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and Social Security. Of the remaining third of spending that we vote on, half is military. The hawks on the Republican side said ``We have to grow the military'' even though our military budget is bigger than the next 10 countries combined. We have an enormous military-industrial complex, but they said it has to grow at 3 percent. So the entitlements are two-thirds of the spending. They are growing at 5 to 6 percent. Then a sixth of the spending, which is military, is growing at 3 percent. So now we are looking at 16 percent of the government--the nonmilitary discretionary budget--it is about $700 billion. McCarthy actually made a decent point on this. He said: Look, you don't want me to look at entitlements. They are going to go up. You don't want me to look at the military. It is going up. You want me to look at the nonmilitary discretionary spending. Sixteen percent of the budget, and you expect me to do something with it. I think this deal was a bad deal. It went along with just continuing the status quo. But his point was well made and well taken. If you don't look at all of the budget, you really can't do anything with it. It is just going to keep growing and growing. If you take entitlements off the table and you say ``We are not going to look at entitlements,'' that is a fearful way of looking because you are afraid the people will be unhappy with you. We have a trillion-dollar Medicare budget. Is there anybody in America who doesn't believe we couldn't save some money in that without actually cutting patient care? A trillion dollars. If you talk to executives from hospitals or executives from big corporations and you tell them you have a trillion-dollar budget, is there no place that you could reduce spending--there are all kinds of improper payments in Medicare and Medicaid, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. There are problems with efficiency. There are problems that--through leverage and size, we could reduce costs, but it doesn't happen. You ask yourself, why is government so inefficient? I think the best way to look at it is--Milton Friedman put it this way. He said that nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely as their own. That is the difference between government and the free market. If I ask you for $1,000, and we are going to put it all together, and 50 people are going to give me $1,000, you are all going to think about, what did it take to make that thousand dollars? What was the work and the labor expended in that? What are the chances that I lose my investment? You are going to make a heartfelt decision. It is not always going to be perfect. But if I ask you who is going to make the wiser decision--the person giving up $1,000 of their own money or a city council man giving up a million of someone else's money--they can never have quite the same heartfelt, feeling-in-the-gut decision making if it is not their money. Nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely as their own. The other difference is this: When a business spends money, they get automatic feedback. They get, every day, a report. They get a report if it is a profit or loss. They know whether they are making money every day, every week. They can lose money for a while, but if they do--they have to make payments to the bank--they will have to adjust their practices. There is a constant feedback loop. Government doesn't have that. Government, in fact, has really the opposite. It may be a lag time of years, and, really, things can go on decades up here losing money. We can go on decades doing something that is horrific, and nobody figures it out; nobody ever changes it or even reauthorizes it. I will give you an example, and this has come up recently--the child tax credit. The Democrats love this. This is a refundable program. It is not really a tax credit. You get it if you show some effort to work. But you don't get your tax money back, you get somebody else's tax money. The problem with this program is that 25 percent of the people getting the tax credit are cheating. It has a 25-percent fraud rate. There are people abusing the system who came into the country illegally, had a child here, and then they are putting the Social Security number down of the child who got here even though they came here illegally. There are people putting fictitious names down. And the government will issue you a taxpayer identification number even if you don't have a child. Twenty-five percent of the money is going out fraudulently, but about half of it is being refunded to people who don't pay taxes. So it is an enormous welfare program. This is the problem. What we need to do is incentivize work. Instead, there are reforms being looked at for this program. The Democrats have decided: Well, we think work should be like maybe work once every 3 years. Currently, the work requirement is a little bit of work each year, and you still get other people's money, but now the Democrats want to change it to, well, if you work once every 3 years, you still get somebody else's money. Everything is to dilute the value of work, all within the context of a government that borrows $1.5 trillion a year. We are borrowing money so rapidly. We have never, ever before borrowed money like this. We are exceeding even the level of borrowing of World War II. Am I the only one bringing this up? The Chairman of the Federal Reserve, who is not typically seen as a partisan Republican or a partisan conservative, said that the problem of the debt is urgent. Jamie Diamond, head of one of the biggest banks in our country, Morgan Chase, said essentially the same thing about 2 weeks ago. Nassim Taleb, who wrote the book ``The Black Swan,'' is saying the same thing. Various economists are warning us that this is a predictable crisis coming. This is a slow-moving but yet one of the most predictable crises in our history, the debt crisis. It is coming. You are already seeing the signs of it. You see the signs of it when you go to the grocery store. You see the rising meat prices. You see the rising gas prices. You see the rising electricity prices. It is not really the prices that are going up; it is the value of your dollar that is shrinking. It is basically--they are inverses of the same principle, but the value of your dollar is shrinking because we print more dollars to pay for the debt. The debt is paid for by printed money, so the supply increases. We have been lucky probably for decade after decade. It has been somewhat of a scheme in a way. We are the world's reserve currency. So as we print up money to buy our debt--some of the people who buy our debt don't live here. China has about $1 trillion worth of our debt. Japan has close to $1 trillion. England and Europe have another trillion. About a third of our debt is owned by foreign countries, so often, when they buy our debt, the money doesn't necessarily circulate here. We also tend to import more than we export. So when we import goods, we pay foreigners with our dollars. The dollars often go overseas as well. You can go to the far-flung reaches of our planet, to small villages, and there will be people trading in dollars. Why is that good? We give them our inflation. We have passed on our inflation. If all that money came home, we are chasing our goods, and you might see 20 percent inflation at this point. But even as it exists now, realize that inflation is a hidden tax that hurts the working class and the poor the most. The rich can always do well. The expenses for the rich, you know, are a small fraction of their salaries. If you are working class or poor, most of your salary goes to your rent, to your mortgage, to your gas, to your electricity, to your food, to your clothing. So as the pressure of the prices rises, wages struggle to keep up with it. But the people who get the money first--the people on Wall Street; the people who buy and sell the bonds; the people who then buy the equities and buy the stocks--they are getting the money first before it loses its value. They have been known to bid up the stock market, and the rich have gotten richer, and it has become harder and harder for the middle class. This is the bait-and-switch because your politicians--they run for office, and they promise you something for nothing. It is a scheme. It has been going on since the beginning of time. They will come and say ``You don't want to work? Here is money for not working'' or ``If you want money for the military-industrial complex, we will give you this money, it is free, and there are no repercussions to handing this money out.'' But there are; there is just a delay or a lag time. What happens is, the inflation is this hidden tax that you pay. It is not free. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Something for nothing doesn't exist. It only exists as a figment or as a fairytale or as something that people who want to run for office use to try to trick you. They are saying: Take this; it is manna. Take this; it is free. Here--dangle this shiny object--take this, and you will be better off. But in the end, the country is teetering in the balance, and people sense this. People have a way of sensing this more than the leaders. The elite up here think they know everything, but talk to the common man. I tell any politician up here: Talk to a man or a woman who has grease on his hands and ask them what they think about the welfare state. Ask them how much sympathy they have for people who don't work. Ask the guy or the woman who has grease on their hands and works hard. You can tell they work hard. You can tell by the grip on their hand that they work with their hands each day. Ask them what they think about people who don't work. You will get less sympathy than you will get from anybody you ever meet because they work hard, and they are tired of their tax dollars going to people who are not working. Are there people who can't work? There is a very small percentage. Of those who aren't working, it might be 1 or 2 percent who can't work. The vast majority are able-bodied; they can work. The vast majority should be sent back to work immediately. The vast majority should be told: Get a job or your benefits run out. We don't do that. We go on and on and on. Through the pandemic, we kept adding Federal benefits. At one point, we had $52,000 a year for not working between State and Federal benefits. If you were a couple, two, you could be getting over $100,000 a year not working. Who is going to work when you can get a hundred grand for not working? This why there has been a sluggishness getting people back into the workforce. The thing to remember about our country is the incredible engine that freedom and capitalism and volunteerism and trade has brought to this country. People are dying to get into this country. It shouldn't be lost in the debate over immigration what a great place this is and how many people want to get here. Some of the best Americans just got here. I know many people are first-generation Americans, and they are great people. They bring a work ethic. In fact, sometimes there is a better work ethic from the people who just got here than the people who have been coddled generation after generation after generation of not working. It is not that anybody is inherently bad, but we bring out the worst tendencies in people by offering them things. It is not good for people not to work. There is an interconnection between addictiveness and lack of work. There is a self-fulfilling--there is a reward, a self-esteem-building aspect to work. Everyone should work--not as punishment but as a reward. But we have a system where, if you say that people should work and that we shouldn't pay people for not working or that the wage for not working shouldn't be anywhere near the wage for working, you are seen as somehow being too harsh, but the opposite is true. If you truly care about your fellow man and woman, you would want them to work. You would want to have in place very few obstacles to work. The benefits for not working should be short-lived and small and, frankly, not that good to get people back to work. There are millions of jobs unfulfilled right now. We often think, well, there is only, you know, 3, 5, 8 percent unemployment, but it is really about 30 to 40 percent not participating. They have something called the labor force participation rate. It hovers around 60, 62 percent, which means you have a high 30 percent of people eligible for work not working. This is the problem we have. If we look at what made our country great, what made America great in the first place, it is freedom, being left alone, low taxes, low regulation, a small Federal Government, a small footprint for government everywhere so people can thrive. I have traveled this country, and I have seen amazing things. I have seen amazing success, from the vast wealth of the wealthiest to the vast wealth of the middle class. In this country, in my State, you could be of modest income, two people of modest income, and own your own house and live on several acres of land. The American dream is out there. It is still waiting. We have too many people, though, proclaiming victimhood. The color of my skin, my ethnicity, or this and that--I am a victim. Nobody will hire me. It is completely untrue. People need to know that actually there has never been a better time to be alive. There has never been less racism, less bigotry, less unfair business tactics than at any time in the history of the world. If you don't believe that, you need to know more about history because history is replete with really awful kinds of situations for people from different races and different backgrounds. This is the best time ever to be alive. Don't let anybody tell you that there is not something great around the corner for you. If you get a college degree, people want to hire you. They don't care the color of your skin, I promise you. There is not a publicly traded company in our country discriminating against people. If anything, they want you more because they want diversity. Don't let us get absorbed in this idea of victimhood. What we need to understand is what made the country great, or there is not going to be all these jobs; there is not going to be this engine. This engine of prosperity is from letting people be free, leaving people largely alone, and keeping government out of their way. But it can't be a government that coddles us from cradle to grave. It can't be a government that says you can't have a gas grill. It can't be a government like California, where they say everything causes cancer. My favorite is, if you are at home putting together a gas grill, which is an impossible task, if you ever did it--it can take hours, but maybe that is just me. When you are putting your gas grill together and you look at the warning sign on it, the warning sign will be: This gas grill is safe in every State, but it causes cancer in California. I mean, that is the kind of stuff we have. Unfortunately, they have been leading the way with stifling-type regulations that, then, the rest of the country emulates until they run into problems with it. We now have people wanting to ban cars. They want to have no internal combustion cars like within the next 10 years. Well, when you have mandates coming from elites who don't work, have never worked, don't know anything about work, never been to the grocery store, and they are telling you that you can't drive a car or that all the trucks are going to be electric within 10 years, you have got people who are elitist who think they know best for you. But, really, what our country is about is choice. It is about freedom of choice. These are the same elitists who would tell you: Oh, you have to take the COVID vaccine. If you look at the science of taking a COVID vaccine, there is no indication for a COVID vaccine for young people--none, zero. There hasn't been from the very beginning. Most of Europe doesn't require it for under age 12 or even suggest it for under age 12. If you look at parameters, usually, you have to prove some kind of parameter to prove why you should take a vaccine. The vaccine in children--actually, and adults--doesn't stop transmission. They have all finally admitted this. The vaccine does not stop transmission. So it is not about you protecting other people. It is only about you. Now, there is still a question on hospitalization and death. If you look at targeted categories of people who might die from COVID, particularly back in 2020, 2021, over age 65, there was a reduction in hospitalization and death for the vaccine. I have admitted that from the beginning. But it varies wildly depending on your age. If you look at healthy and under 25, what you find is virtually zero deaths among healthy individuals--unless you have an extraordinary problem, virtually zero deaths from COVID. So, when they look at it, they try to say: Does it improve things? It doesn't stop transmission. That is the key to a lot of vaccines. They stop you from getting it. This one doesn't. But if you look at hospitalization and death, you can't find a difference because, under age 25, it is virtually zero. The death is very close to zero, if not zero. The hospitalization is very close to zero. So you can't really prove it. So when I have challenged the so-called experts on this, they have said: Well, we decided that kids should take it from 6 months on because they will make antibodies. If you give them a vaccine, they make antibodies. My response to Anthony Fauci was: I can give your kid 100 vaccines. He will make antibodies every time. It doesn't mean he needs to be vaccinated 100 times. It is really supposed to be about efficacy and preventing disease. But this is the same sort of loss of belief in individual choice. The choice of whether or not you give your kid a vaccine should be yours. A lot of people don't realize this, but the CDC's vaccine advisory committee and the FDA's vaccine advisory committee suggested that only people at risk for COVID should end up taking the booster. It didn't suggest anybody under 65 really needed to take the booster. The Biden administration, though, came forward and decided they would make it 6 months based on antibody production. You can give any foreign protein and cause the body to make any foreign protein, and you will make antibodies. That is not proof that you need something. If you want valid studies to know whether or not you should vaccinate your children, you would have to have a variable within the study that says: Has my child been previously infected. Why? Because inoculation-- vaccines are basically based on natural inoculation. When you get COVID and you have an immune response, that is what the vaccine is trying to emulate. We now know, by looking at the studies of this, that, actually, among those who were infected but not vaccinated, compared to those who were vaccinated but not infected, you find that the chance of getting infection again is much less in those who were naturally infected. Now, some have taken this to argue and say: Oh, you just won't be able to be infected. That is not true at all. That is ridiculous. No one has said that or would say that. What I have said is people want to know the truth if they have already been infected. Much of the country over age 65 got vaccinated at least twice. Like 97 percent of people over 65 got vaccinated twice. Most of them have been infected at least once or twice. What they would want to know is the truth: What is my chance of dying or going to the hospital if I have had two vaccines and been infected twice? Well, the studies aren't including--this is from our government, and we wonder the reasoning--they aren't including whether you have been infected. Well, if you don't include the variable of whether you have been infected or not, how would you know whether to get vaccinated again or whether you need to. We know a couple of things for certain. The virulence of the virus was much greater in 2020 and 2021. It has gotten less each year. So the virus has mutated to be less dangerous. We also know that the amount of immunity, both from vaccine and from natural immunity, has grown. And as the two have grown, what we have now is an endemic virus. Unfortunately, even in this body, we still have a crazy rule telling our pages that they have to have three vaccines. With kids, it actually goes against, I think, medical advice to do that because there is a risk of a heart inflammation with the vaccine. It is not a huge risk, but it is about 4 in 15,000. But what is their risk of hospitalization and death at this age? Virtually zero. So if you categorize or section this out by age, what you end up finding is that, in the elderly population at risk for COVID, it, in all likelihood, still makes sense for vaccination. In the younger crowd, where the death rate and hospitalization rate are virtually zero, what you find is that the risk of the vaccine actually exceeds the risk of the disease. If you want to be vaccinated, you should be allowed. It is a free country. But we shouldn't have mandates throughout government that actually may well be malpractice. Most of Europe doesn't recommend vaccination for COVID for kids. Most of it doesn't recommend that, when you are sick, you get vaccinated. I heard a story recently, and this is just bizarre in its nature. It has to do with the idea of submission. A man took his mom to the hospital in California. She was 83 years old, and she was very sick with COVID. They would not admit his mom to the hospital until she was vaccinated. She was sick with COVID, and they would not admit her until she was vaccinated. She is in the process of getting the worst inoculation you have ever seen, she is about to die, and they want to vaccinate her. The reason you don't do that and the reason why it should be malpractice for these idiots to have done that--it is mandated by government. That is the first problem. But even the CDC, for a year or 2, admitted that you don't vaccinate people while they are sick, and you don't vaccinate people within a couple of months of being sick because they have already had a significant immune response. And we know that the side effect of heart inflammation is an exuberance of the immune response. So when someone is already mounting an immune response, you don't want to accentuate that. In most of the deaths in COVID, by the time you die from COVID, you are no longer testing positive. You are now dying from this overly exuberant immune response, this cytokine storm that is flooding your system and causing your blood vessels to leak fluid into the tissue of your lungs. It is a terrible situation and a situation where we can learn more. But the interesting thing, as we went through the treatment for COVID, that we discovered was that the one thing that worked better than any of the newer drugs and almost anything was actually an old drug, probably discovered in the thirties or forties. That was Solu- Medrol, or IV steroids. It had a 37-percent reduction in death among those severely ill. When I asked some of the elites--when I asked Anthony Fauci about using IV steroids in March of 2020, his response was: We have tried that, and it doesn't work. We are going to use remdesivir. In the end, remdesivir may have helped, but there were a lot of people who have equivocations as to whether or not, in the end, that remdesivir was of great benefit. Ultimately, when we look at healthcare, we should let the individuals make their choice. I met a doctor this week from Maine who had her license removed simply because she chose to give alternative treatment. The alternative treatment--I am not positive of the efficacy, but I do know that one of the alternative treatments that people were giving was already an off-label treatment for malaria. If you look at hydroxychloroquine, it was originally given for malaria. And then you look at hydroxychloroquine, and what it is most commonly used now for is rheumatoid arthritis. One of the brand names is Plaquenil. I saw thousands of patients with this because we examined them to see if there was an eye complication. So a drug that is being used off label was used off label again, and they took this doctor's license away. We have been using drugs off label for a long, long time. Sometimes, they are used off label because it costs so much to get an approval. It might cost billions of dollars to get an approval and to prove to the FDA to say it has this efficacy. Colchicine is another medicine like this that has been used in arthritis--severe arthritis of the feet--and colchicine has never been given the exact approval because of the money entailed it would take to get there. As we look at this spending bill and as we look at whether or not we should continue spending money like there is no tomorrow, I think it is important that we realize that this is a debt that is being passed on to the next generation. It is being passed on to the working class, the poor, and those on fixed incomes as we speak, but it is also being shoved onto the next generation. There is a lag time between the printing of the money and the spending of the money and the rising of the prices. Now, for 2 years, we have been told by this administration that it is transitory, that inflation is transitory, and inflation has persisted. I think there is so much money that has been put into the system. When we had COVID, the entire economy was shut down, and they passed out free checks to everyone. I thought it was a mistake then. We never should have shut the economy down. I don't think it affected, really, the transmission rate. If you look at the transmission rate and you look at the culprits of it, most of the deaths in the early stages came from group homes. In New York, nearly 50 percent of the people who died in New York died in group homes. Before we had the vaccine, there were some things we could have done, if we understood or at least appreciated natural immunity. One of the things you could have done early on, when there was no vaccine, would be to have the people staffing the COVID wing be people who had recovered. I actually suggested this for the Secret Service guarding the President--that you should put Secret Service agents who have already recovered from COVID as the primary people around the President--before we had a vaccine. There are things that we could have done. But in discounting natural immunity and sort of acting as if it wasn't a thing, that it did not have potential, it was a real disservice to people. It also was used to fire people. They fired firemen, policemen, doctors, nurses. It is kind of interesting that, in the beginning, they were firing all these people for not having a vaccine, and, in the end, they were letting doctors and nurses work with masks on who were still positive for COVID. In fact, if you look around this body and you see somebody with a mask, it is usually somebody who has COVID. So we kind of still do the opposite of what historically we would do. If you were sick or you had a disease, you stayed home. Now, we tell people: Oh, wear a cloth mask with your favorite sports team on it to work, and you can still work positive with COVID--the opposite of good sense. Good sense went out the window. But when we look at whether or not we can spend this money--spend money we don't have--we need to look at the ramifications of that. The ramifications are basically inflation, rising prices. And so I think that it is a disservice. But it is a bait and switch. It is people saying: Oh, let's help people by just giving them stuff, giving them stuff they want. And when we give them stuff they want, we don't tell them there really is a hidden price, and that the price will be inflation--that your steaks might cost $20 at the store; that gasoline will go up; that potatoes, vegetables, all these things will rise; but that your salary will not rise as much. We don't talk about the disincentive to work. We pay people more not to work than to work. Our Founding Fathers were quite clear about this. Our Founding Fathers said that generalized spending from Washington should be for the general welfare. It shouldn't be for bike paths for Rhode Island. It shouldn't be for an S and M club in Philadelphia. It shouldn't be for some environmental alarmist museum that wants to ban gas grills in New York City. It was supposed to be about the general welfare, things that we all kind of agreed to. National defense, something we can't do city by city, protecting our borders--those are the things that the general welfare is to provide for. If you wanted other things, it was to be provided for by States and by localities and by charities. We got away from this. And as we have gotten away from this, we are damaging our country. There is a rot and ruin that is coming from within, and that rot and ruin is threatening. It is threatening our very existence. There may come a time in which there is a panic, and the panic may be when people suddenly lose confidence. Right now, they say the dollar is like the cleanest shirt in a closet full of dirty shirts. All the currencies of the world are dirty shirts. They all have their imperfections, and they all have inflated, and they all have leveraged their currencies. They say: Well, the dollar is the least bad of all these bad currencies. That has been largely true. The dollar has been the reserve currency, so it goes around the world to finance both sides of transactions around the world, so it hasn't all come home. But there is always the possibility of a loss in faith. We are accumulating debt like no other country in the world. Most of Europe actually balances their annual budget. The fact that we don't and the fact that our debt accumulation has risen--there may come a time in which there is a panic, in which the world says: No more. We are going to quit buying the dollar. Does it happen gradually or does it happen suddenly? If it happens suddenly, what happens in the calamity of a dollar losing 25 percent of its value in a day instead of 25 percent of its value over several years? These are my concerns, and I think that it behooves all of us to do something very simple, very practical, something that every American family has to do, and that is simply to spend what comes in. It doesn't mean we won't be able to help people who are poor, people who are hungry. It doesn't mean we won't have a military. It just means we can't be everything to everyone all the time, and there needs to be some limitations. The limitations need to be basically, let's spend what comes in. It is a reasonable proposition for the American family. It should not be an unreasonable proposition for our country. I recommend that we say to this deficit spending: No more. Let's make America great again by balancing our budget and being responsible about our money. Mr. President, I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, today I rise to honor Officer Matt Davis from the Bowling Green Police Department. On July 6, 2023, Officer Davis responded to a call of a disturbance at a used car dealership in Bowling Green, unknowingly stepping into an incredibly volatile and dangerous situation. Upon entering the establishment, Officer Davis encountered an armed suspect. Without hesitation, he raised his voice, alerting and instructing others to take cover. The assailant fired at Officer Davis, resulting in multiple gunshot wounds and severe, life-threatening injuries. Despite his injuries, Officer Davis was able to neutralize the assailant, and no one else was injured. Thankfully, Officer Davis survived the shooting. However, he has had to endure a long road of surgeries and rehabilitation. He plans to one day make it back to the force, and I look forward to the day that he returns to work. Despite the grave risks, Officer Davis put his life on the line and likely saved the lives of many of the patrons in the car dealership that day. His bravery exemplifies the dedication and sacrifice of those who serve and protect our communities. Officer Davis' actions that day are a testament to the resilience and valor exhibited by members of law enforcement and first responders across Kentucky and our Nation.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, today I rise to honor Officers Anthony Roach and Richard Isaacs of the Louisville Metro Police Department. On August 16, 2023, Officers Roach and Isaacs responded to a call of a woman screaming for help from a home in West Louisville. Upon arriving at the scene, the officers saw a woman in distress on the second floor but discovered that all the windows and doors on the first floor were barricaded. Fortunately, neighbors lent a ladder to the officers, and they were able to enter a window on the second floor that had been shattered. Once inside the house, Officers Roach and Isaacs found the woman with a chain around her neck that was bolted to the floor. The officers sprang into action with a hatchet found in the room, and they freed her from the floor. Once outside, first responders used bolt cutters to remove the chain and finally free the victim. Within 2 days, Louisville Metro police officers were able to make an arrest in the case. Officers Roach and Isaacs are to be commended for their heroic and lifesaving actions. Despite the potential risk to themselves, the officers put the life of victim before their own. Louisville is fortunate to have these brave men serving our communities and protecting Kentuckians. May the actions of each of these officers be forever remembered as a clear display of heroism in action.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, what we have here is a clear case of quid pro quo. If Turkiye releases its hold on Sweden's membership in NATO, then Turkiye gets America's F-16s. You may remember the last time we had a famous case of quid pro quo here. Boy, everybody was all up in a lather, and they said that we had to impeach Donald Trump because it is a quid pro quo. Apparently, it depends on what the quid is and what the quo is. Quid pro quo, though, is actually more the norm than it is actually the exception. The speakers you have seen here today were adamantly against Turkiye and adamantly against them getting the F-35 because they possess a Russian defensive weapon system that may well allow exploitation and allow Americans to become more vulnerable. But now they are adamantly for it because it got Sweden into NATO. Thank God Sweden is in NATO. We can all rest easy. Rewarding Turkiye with the sale of $23 billion of F-16 fighters, though, has some repercussions, and we should think about it before we do it. I maintain that there are deep concerns about the sale as it was initially proposed in 2021, and I have maintained my opposition given Turkiye's dismal human rights record, its unreliable behavior as a NATO ally, and its disruptive military actions in the Middle East, the Caucuses, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Congress must not serve as a rubberstamp for President Biden's side deals. The quid pro quo to expand NATO should not come at the expense of rewarding the alliances most embarrassing member. President Biden pledged to center U.S. foreign policy on the defense of democracy and the protection of human rights. But Biden's own State Department issued a human rights report for Turkiye in 2022 which identifies significant human rights issues, including arbitrary killings, suspicious deaths of persons in custody, forced disappearances, torture, arbitrary arrest, and the continued detention of tens of thousands of persons, including opposition politicians, former members of Parliament, lawyers, journalists, human rights activists, and even an employee of the U.S. Mission. It doesn't sound like one of our best allies. The Human Rights Foundation of Turkiye, a nongovernmental organization operating out of Ankara, reports that some 1,130 individuals were subjected to torture and other forms of mistreatment while in custody or at extra-custodial places--meaning not jails, some, you know, out-of-the-way place that no one can see where the torture happens--and this sadly also includes the torture of children. In March 2023, it was reported a 14-year-old boy on his way home in southeast Turkiye was stopped by the police with no justification. He was subsequently abducted and subjected to torture. The police beat him with their guns and, according to the boy's lawyer, tried to force him to say: I am a Turk, a curse upon the Kurds. When he refused, the police instructed him to memorize the Turkish national anthem by the next day, threatening to shoot him if he failed to do so. The police then bound his hands and threw him into a swamp, before local villagers, hearing his cries for help, rescued him and brought him to the hospital. The State Department's report also identifies--our State Department-- identifies severe restrictions on the freedom of expression and assembly in Turkiye, violence and threats of violence against journalists in Turkiye, increased censorship, criminal liable laws, and unfortunately much more. Since 2014, it is estimated that more than 160,000 people were investigated for insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and more than 35,000 went to trial. Imagine if it were a crime in the United States to criticize the President how many people would be in jail. Of these trials, 12,881 individuals were convicted and 3,625 people-- including 10 children--were sentenced to prison. While Erdogan is imprisoning men, women, and children for insulting him, he is openly praising Hamas. So these people come to the floor and they say: Oh, we were against giving the planes to Turkiye before we were for giving them. And we don't like that Turkiye gives to Hamas, but we are playing real politics here because we want Sweden in NATO, and whether Turkiye gives money to Hamas, we are going to turn a blind eye. That, to me, is a quid pro quo not worth taking. After Hamas's brutal October 7 attack on Israel, Erdogan defiantly claimed: Hamas is not a terrorist group; it is a liberation group. Do you think we should be sending our best weapons to a country that said, after one of the worst terrorist activities in modern history, October 7, Hamas is not a terrorist group? Should we be sending our prized F-16s to a country that says Hamas is not a terrorist group; it is a liberation group--mujahideen--waging a battle to protect its lands and people? No. They went to a concert and killed young people, and we are going to send our weapons to them? Why? Because we made a quid pro quo. We got Sweden in NATO, so we are going to look the other way with Turkiye giving money and support to Hamas. This is the type of government we want to send our weapons to? Shouldn't the United States require countries to reflect our values before we send them billions of dollars' worth of advanced weapons? Shouldn't we demand that a NATO ally in particular at least respect the rule of law and basic human rights? President Biden certainly doesn't seem to think so. The United States cannot proudly proclaim human rights to be at the center of our foreign policy while it arms a country that commits gross violations of human rights. I also remain deeply concerned about the negative strategic implications of this proposed sale given Turkiye's reckless military actions in recent years. Just last October, a U.S. F-16 shot down a Turkish combat drone in Syria that was operating dangerously close to U.S. forces. Ironically, this sale provides Turkey with 40 brandnew F-16s and modernizes an existing fleet of 79. We are giving them the weapons system that we just used to shoot down their drone. Why was a Turkish drone operating so close to U.S. troops? It was targeting the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, whom we have supported for years to fight against ISIS. Turkiye views the Syrian Democratic Forces as terrorists, so in the eyes of our NATO ally, our partners in Syria are their enemy and legitimate terrorists. Does something seem a bit confusing here? They are shooting against people we consider to be our allies in the war against ISIS. They have drones up close to us, so we have to shoot down their drones. And we are sending them our modern planes and updating their fleet. The American taxpayers are paying to arm and train these Syrian Democratic Forces, and the Biden administration is giving Turkey advanced fighter jets that will inevitably be used to shoot and kill these same people. This utter lack of strategic foresight has unfortunately become commonplace in Washington foreign policy. This was also not the first time that U.S. forces were threatened by Turkiye's reckless military actions in Syria. In November of 2022, a Turkish drone strike on Syrian Democratic Forces put U.S. soldiers at significant risk, leaving the Pentagon to call for an ``immediate de- escalation.'' In October 2019, U.S. forces came under Turkish artillery fire which sources claimed was a deliberate effort to push American troops away from Syria's northern border. The shelling was purportedly so severe that U.S. personnel considered firing back in self-defense. This is our ally. We are sending these people F-16s who have been shooting at us and shooting at our other allies. There is also the fact that Turkiye--and this is not an insignificant fact--Turkiye bought the S-400 air and missile defense systems in 2019 from Russia despite strong U.S. protest. That decision prompted the Trump administration to remove Turkiye from the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program. At that point, the leadership on the Republican and the Democratic side were opposed to the F-35 Program. They have now only switched their minds because of the quid pro quo. They have been given membership for Sweden, they salivate over making NATO bigger, and they do that in exchange for now sending these weapons to Turkiye. But there are concerns that the S-400 could expose classified F-35 stealth capabilities to Russian intelligence gathering. You see, when you have missile defense, you are gathering defense on the plane that is flying towards you. If you own both the planes and the defense system, you can coordinate with them to learn more about the vulnerabilities of the planes that might be attacking your defense system. The same is true with the F-16. So this is strategically and militarily, No. 1, a huge cave-in to the Turks, but it actually puts our soldiers and our pilots at risk because now we are exposing the F-16, one of our planes, to the S-400, the Russian weapons system, and allow the intermatching of the two, and this will inevitably put our pilots more at risk. The risk of the S-400 serving as a Russian Trojan horse to compromise NATO's most advanced stealth fighter was clear to everyone in the alliance, but Turkiye proceeded nevertheless. President Trump subsequently imposed sanctions on Turkiye's defense procurement agency, which the Biden administration has kept in place. Nobody has really reversed themselves and said Turkiye is behaving and deserves a plane because they have switched course. Everybody is just saying Turkiye gets what they want because Turkiye used a form of extortion. You can call it ``quid pro quo''--that sounds better than ``extortion''--but basically Turkiye said: We are not going to let Sweden into NATO unless you give us more planes. It looks like extortion works. This actually reinforces bad behavior. What will Turkiye do the next time they want something? They will simply act like a bad ally and hold up something we need in order to get something they want. So both the Trump and Biden administrations don't trust our supposed ally Turkiye to keep the F-35 capabilities secure, but now we are giving them the F-16. Perhaps Congress should examine some of the ways in which Turkiye has used F-16s recently. The Armenian Ministry of Defense claims that on September 29, 2020, in support of Azerbaijan's war to conquer the Nagorno-Karabakh region, a Turkish F-16 shot down an Armenian Su-25 attack aircraft in Armenian airspace. Turkiye has stood closely by its Azerbaijani ally in its efforts to subjugate the region, providing combat drones, military equipment, training, and, if we are to believe the Armenian Government, direct combat support. So the planes we give to the Turks, the F-16s, are actually being used in another war with Armenia. I have not heard of any debate on which side of that war we are supposed to be on--Azerbaijan or Armenia--but your weapons will be going in the middle of that war as well. The war in 2020 and Azerbaijan's subsequent military operation in 2023 killed thousands and created a humanitarian disaster, forcing more than 100,000 people to flee--more than three-quarters of the population of that region. Turkiye also continues to be an unreliable ally within NATO. Not only did Turkiye blackmail the alliance by delaying Sweden's NATO bid to extract concessions, the Turks continue to regularly threaten Greece, another NATO ally. In 2022, Turkish fighter jets and unmanned aerial vehicles violated Greek airspace more than 10,000 times. President Erdogan continues his hostile rhetoric, threatening to hit Athens with missile strikes and claiming that Turkish forces may land in Greece ``suddenly one night.'' It sounds like the unstable ramblings of a leader who doesn't deserve to have our most advanced fighter jets. Last August, Mesut Hakki Casin, an adviser on security and foreign policy to Erdogan, claimed that ``the Mediterranean Sea belongs to us, and no one should even think about raising a sword against us there. They [Greece, Cypress, and their allies] better not forget this.'' These are the people banging the drums for war with another fellow NATO ally that we are sending these weapons to. Without a hint of remorse on their side, they just held us hostage over Sweden. Sweden gave in. Quid pro quo. You get your jets. These statements from Turkiye sound more like the bombastic threats from North Korea's dear leader than a NATO ally. Do we really think giving Turkiye more fighter jets will modify their behavior? Actually, withholding them was the only chance of modifying their behavior. This sale will only embolden Turkiye to continue its disruptive actions at the expense of American interests and regional stability. What do we get in return? Greater risk to U.S. troops in Syria, instability in the Caucasus, continued threats to Greece, and the privilege of defending Sweden. While NATO is supposed to be a collective security agency, the reality is that if Sweden were ever attacked, it would be American forces doing the majority of the fighting--unless anyone truly thinks Turkish F-16s will come to their aid. The $23 billion sale is reckless. It fails to advance the security of the American people and does nothing to alter Turkiye's immoral human rights record, its unruly behavior within NATO, or its irresponsible actions in the Middle East, the Caucasus, and eastern Mediterranean. I urge my colleagues to vote in support of the joint resolution of disapproval to reject this disastrous deal.

Mr. PAUL. The difference between Russia and Turkiye is no one is offering to sell F-16s to Russia. I am not for selling F-16s to Russia; neither am I for selling F-16s to Turkiye. This is a clear case of quid pro quo. All of the folks who are now for it were against it just months ago. The reason they have changed their opinion is they have been given something. Turkiye extorted us. Turkiye said: If you want Sweden to be in NATO, you have to give us these planes. So they gave up Sweden in exchange for getting the planes. It doesn't change any of the facts. The facts are these: Them having F-16s and Russian S-400s allows them to steal some of our technology, to match the technology of our fighter jets against a Russian defense system and potentially give that to Russia. This is a problem. It has been a problem. It hasn't changed. These are the same problems that opponents of this were mentioning over and over and over again. That is why for 2 years they have been opposed to this. They have flipped. They have sold their opposition to Turkiye for admission for Sweden. It is a quid pro quo. It is a trade. They made a trade, but publicly they will have to acknowledge they made a trade and they think somehow it is more important to sell these planes to Turkiye than it is to protect the integrity of the technology of these planes against Russian military systems.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I move to discharge S.J. Res. 60 from the Foreign Relations Committee.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I yield back my time, and I ask for the yeas and nays.