Jack Reed

Mr. REED

Mr. REED. Mr. President, today I am reintroducing the Librarian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act. I am pleased to be joined in this effort by Senators Whitehouse, Durbin, Klobuchar, Smith, Cardin, and Van Hollen. In 1989, a seven-year civil war broke out in Liberia that claimed the lives of over 200,000 people, displaced over half of the Liberian population, halted food production, and destroyed the country's infrastructure and economy. A second civil war then followed from 1999 to 2003, further destabilizing the country and creating more turmoil and hardship for its people. Then from 2014 to 2016, Liberia faced an Ebola virus outbreak that devastated the country's fragile health system and killed nearly 5,000 people. As a result of these tragedies, thousands of Liberians sought refuge in the United States, living and working here under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) systems, extended under both Republican and Democratic administrations beginning in 1991. The reality is that for more than a quarter of a century, the United States has been home to law-abiding and taxpaying Liberians. They fled violence, turmoil, and disease to come here. Many now have children who are American citizens, some of whom serve in the Armed Forces. They have worked hard, played by the rules, paid their dues, and submitted to rigorous vetting. But now, as a result of President Trump's decision to terminate DED for Liberians, this population could face the risk of deportation on March 31st. Uprooting them now would be cruel and harmful to them, their families, employers, and communities. And while things are improving on the ground in Liberia, following the first democratic transition of power in decades, there are still serious concerns about the country's stability and ability to maintain peace and deliver essential services to its population. So though few in number, the influx of Liberians from the United States could overburden the country's limited infrastructure and reverse the progress that the Liberian people and government have made. Given these challenges, we believe that it is in the national security, foreign policy, and humanitarian interest of the United States for this population to remain here. I have introduced the Liberian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act in every Congress since 1999 because this community deserves a long-term solution after decades of uncertainty. This bill provides legal status and a pathway to citizenship for qualifying Liberians. I have worked with several of my colleagues over the years to include this pathway in comprehensive immigration reform bills that passed this body only to die in the House of Representatives. The Liberian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act would end the perpetual limbo for Liberians here in the United States and ensure our security interests in fostering Liberia's continuing postwar and post-Ebola recovery. This legislation offers much-needed certainty for the Liberian community, and it should be part of any bipartisan and comprehensive solution for our broken immigration system. I thank Senators Whitehouse, Durbin, Klobuchar, Smith, Cardin, and Van Hollen for cosponsoring this bill and urge our colleagues to join us to finally provide a pathway to citizenship for eligible Liberians who contribute so much to our American community.

Mr. REED

Mr. REED. Mr. President, today I am reintroducing the Librarian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act. I am pleased to be joined in this effort by Senators Whitehouse, Durbin, Klobuchar, Smith, Cardin, and Van Hollen. In 1989, a seven-year civil war broke out in Liberia that claimed the lives of over 200,000 people, displaced over half of the Liberian population, halted food production, and destroyed the country's infrastructure and economy. A second civil war then followed from 1999 to 2003, further destabilizing the country and creating more turmoil and hardship for its people. Then from 2014 to 2016, Liberia faced an Ebola virus outbreak that devastated the country's fragile health system and killed nearly 5,000 people. As a result of these tragedies, thousands of Liberians sought refuge in the United States, living and working here under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) systems, extended under both Republican and Democratic administrations beginning in 1991. The reality is that for more than a quarter of a century, the United States has been home to law-abiding and taxpaying Liberians. They fled violence, turmoil, and disease to come here. Many now have children who are American citizens, some of whom serve in the Armed Forces. They have worked hard, played by the rules, paid their dues, and submitted to rigorous vetting. But now, as a result of President Trump's decision to terminate DED for Liberians, this population could face the risk of deportation on March 31st. Uprooting them now would be cruel and harmful to them, their families, employers, and communities. And while things are improving on the ground in Liberia, following the first democratic transition of power in decades, there are still serious concerns about the country's stability and ability to maintain peace and deliver essential services to its population. So though few in number, the influx of Liberians from the United States could overburden the country's limited infrastructure and reverse the progress that the Liberian people and government have made. Given these challenges, we believe that it is in the national security, foreign policy, and humanitarian interest of the United States for this population to remain here. I have introduced the Liberian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act in every Congress since 1999 because this community deserves a long-term solution after decades of uncertainty. This bill provides legal status and a pathway to citizenship for qualifying Liberians. I have worked with several of my colleagues over the years to include this pathway in comprehensive immigration reform bills that passed this body only to die in the House of Representatives. The Liberian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act would end the perpetual limbo for Liberians here in the United States and ensure our security interests in fostering Liberia's continuing postwar and post-Ebola recovery. This legislation offers much-needed certainty for the Liberian community, and it should be part of any bipartisan and comprehensive solution for our broken immigration system. I thank Senators Whitehouse, Durbin, Klobuchar, Smith, Cardin, and Van Hollen for cosponsoring this bill and urge our colleagues to join us to finally provide a pathway to citizenship for eligible Liberians who contribute so much to our American community.

Mr. REED

Mr. REED. Mr. President, public schools play a vital role in every community across the Nation. They play a central role in our democracy--educating the next generation, serving as polling places for our elections, hosting community meetings and events, and so much more. When there is a natural disaster or an emergency, people often gather at their public schools for shelter, information, and resources. They are essential facilities and must be included in any new major federal investment in infrastructure. That is why I am proud to partner with Chairman Scott in the House of Representatives in introducing the Rebuild America's Schools Act to fix our schools. I would like to thank my Senate colleagues who are joining in this effort, including Senators Brown, Cortez Masto, Hassan, Warren, Whitehouse, Casey, Cardin, Duckworth, Merkley, Harris, Hirono, Gillibrand, Van Hollen, Rosen, Blumenthal, and Sanders. Safe, healthy, modern, well-equipped schools are essential for advancing student achievement and ensuring that the next generation is prepared to meet the economic, social, environmental, and global challenges our nation faces. Yet, too many of the over 50 million students and six million staff who learn and work in our public schools spend their days in facilities that fail to make the grade. A 2014 Department of Education study estimated that it would cost $197 billion to bring all public schools into ``good'' condition. Nationally, there is also a $38 billion funding gap in annual capital construction and new facility funding, as reported in the 2016 State of Our Schools report. Despite the benefits and need, however, Federal funding accounts for 0.2% of the total current capital investment in our schools. State and local communities cannot bridge this gap alone. Last November, Rhode Island voters approved a general obligation bond of $250 million dollars--the largest statewide bond ever--to upgrade our public school facilities. However, the State had identified over $2.2 billion in needed improvements to school infrastructure. Rhode Island is not the only State facing a school infrastructure crisis. In fact, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave public school buildings across the country an overall grade of D+ in their 2017 report card. The scope of the school infrastructure crisis is more than many, States or communities can address on their own. The Federal government can and should be a partner in upgrading our public school facilities. Addressing this need is not only the right thing to do for our students; it will also give a needed boost to our economy, putting people to work in family sustaining jobs. According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, every $1 billion spent on construction generates 17,785 jobs. The Rebuild America's Schools Act of 2019 will create Federal-State partnership for school infrastructure. It will provide, over ten years, a total of $100 billion in direct grants and school construction bonds to help fill the annual gap in school facility capital needs, while creating nearly two million jobs. Specifically, the Rebuild America's Schools Act will provide $7 billion per year in formula funds to States for local competitive grants for school repair, renovation, and construction. States will focus assistance on communities with the greatest financial need, encourage green construction practices, and expand access to high-speed broadband to ensure that all students have access to digital learning. Our legislation would also provide $30 billion for qualified school infrastructure bonds (QSIBs), $10 billion each year from FY 2020 through FY 2022, and restore the Qualified Zone Academy Bonds (QZABS) that were eliminated in the Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The legislation also eases the matching requirements and expands the authority and eligible purposes of QZABS to allow local education agencies to construct, rehabilitate, retrofit, or repair school facilities. The Rebuild America's Schools Act also supports American workers by ensuring that projects use American-made iron, steel, and manufactured products and meet labor standards. I would like to thank the broad coalition of educators, community organizations, unions, civil rights advocates, and employers that have provided feedback and support for this legislation, including the American Federation of Teachers, Association of Educational Service Agencies, Association of School Building Administrators International, Brick Industry Association, Californians for School Facilities, Council of Great City Schools, Healthy Schools Network, International Union of Operating Engineers, International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, National Association of Elementary School Principals, National Association of Federally Impacted Schools, National Association of Secondary School Principals, National Concrete Masonry Association, National Education Association, National PTA, National Rural Education Advocacy Consortium, National Rural Education Association, National Urban League, North America's Building Trades Unions, Organizations Concerned About Rural Education, Public Advocacy for Kids, Rebuild America's Schools, Rural School and Community Trust, Secure Schools Alliance, Teach Plus, Twenty-First Century Schools Fund, and U.S. Green Building Council. We look forward to expanding this coalition in the weeks and months ahead. We have no time to waste in fixing our deteriorating school infrastructure. In the words of a student activist in Providence, ``Students cannot learn in a crumbling building, a school that isn't fit to uplift our minds.'' We need to listen to our students, strengthen our communities, and improve our school buildings. I urge all of our colleagues to support the Rebuild America's Schools Act and press for its passage.

Mr. REED

Mr. REED. Mr. President, public schools play a vital role in every community across the Nation. They play a central role in our democracy--educating the next generation, serving as polling places for our elections, hosting community meetings and events, and so much more. When there is a natural disaster or an emergency, people often gather at their public schools for shelter, information, and resources. They are essential facilities and must be included in any new major federal investment in infrastructure. That is why I am proud to partner with Chairman Scott in the House of Representatives in introducing the Rebuild America's Schools Act to fix our schools. I would like to thank my Senate colleagues who are joining in this effort, including Senators Brown, Cortez Masto, Hassan, Warren, Whitehouse, Casey, Cardin, Duckworth, Merkley, Harris, Hirono, Gillibrand, Van Hollen, Rosen, Blumenthal, and Sanders. Safe, healthy, modern, well-equipped schools are essential for advancing student achievement and ensuring that the next generation is prepared to meet the economic, social, environmental, and global challenges our nation faces. Yet, too many of the over 50 million students and six million staff who learn and work in our public schools spend their days in facilities that fail to make the grade. A 2014 Department of Education study estimated that it would cost $197 billion to bring all public schools into ``good'' condition. Nationally, there is also a $38 billion funding gap in annual capital construction and new facility funding, as reported in the 2016 State of Our Schools report. Despite the benefits and need, however, Federal funding accounts for 0.2% of the total current capital investment in our schools. State and local communities cannot bridge this gap alone. Last November, Rhode Island voters approved a general obligation bond of $250 million dollars--the largest statewide bond ever--to upgrade our public school facilities. However, the State had identified over $2.2 billion in needed improvements to school infrastructure. Rhode Island is not the only State facing a school infrastructure crisis. In fact, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave public school buildings across the country an overall grade of D+ in their 2017 report card. The scope of the school infrastructure crisis is more than many, States or communities can address on their own. The Federal government can and should be a partner in upgrading our public school facilities. Addressing this need is not only the right thing to do for our students; it will also give a needed boost to our economy, putting people to work in family sustaining jobs. According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, every $1 billion spent on construction generates 17,785 jobs. The Rebuild America's Schools Act of 2019 will create Federal-State partnership for school infrastructure. It will provide, over ten years, a total of $100 billion in direct grants and school construction bonds to help fill the annual gap in school facility capital needs, while creating nearly two million jobs. Specifically, the Rebuild America's Schools Act will provide $7 billion per year in formula funds to States for local competitive grants for school repair, renovation, and construction. States will focus assistance on communities with the greatest financial need, encourage green construction practices, and expand access to high-speed broadband to ensure that all students have access to digital learning. Our legislation would also provide $30 billion for qualified school infrastructure bonds (QSIBs), $10 billion each year from FY 2020 through FY 2022, and restore the Qualified Zone Academy Bonds (QZABS) that were eliminated in the Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The legislation also eases the matching requirements and expands the authority and eligible purposes of QZABS to allow local education agencies to construct, rehabilitate, retrofit, or repair school facilities. The Rebuild America's Schools Act also supports American workers by ensuring that projects use American-made iron, steel, and manufactured products and meet labor standards. I would like to thank the broad coalition of educators, community organizations, unions, civil rights advocates, and employers that have provided feedback and support for this legislation, including the American Federation of Teachers, Association of Educational Service Agencies, Association of School Building Administrators International, Brick Industry Association, Californians for School Facilities, Council of Great City Schools, Healthy Schools Network, International Union of Operating Engineers, International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, National Association of Elementary School Principals, National Association of Federally Impacted Schools, National Association of Secondary School Principals, National Concrete Masonry Association, National Education Association, National PTA, National Rural Education Advocacy Consortium, National Rural Education Association, National Urban League, North America's Building Trades Unions, Organizations Concerned About Rural Education, Public Advocacy for Kids, Rebuild America's Schools, Rural School and Community Trust, Secure Schools Alliance, Teach Plus, Twenty-First Century Schools Fund, and U.S. Green Building Council. We look forward to expanding this coalition in the weeks and months ahead. We have no time to waste in fixing our deteriorating school infrastructure. In the words of a student activist in Providence, ``Students cannot learn in a crumbling building, a school that isn't fit to uplift our minds.'' We need to listen to our students, strengthen our communities, and improve our school buildings. I urge all of our colleagues to support the Rebuild America's Schools Act and press for its passage.

Mr. REED

Mr. REED. Mr. President, today I rise to continue my series of speeches on Russian hybrid warfare. I have done a series of speeches on the Russian hybrid warfare threat. It poses a great challenge to our national security. Russian hybrid warfare occurs below the level of direct military conflict, yet it is no less a threat to the national security and integrity of our democracy and society. One tactic that Russia deploys as part of their hybrid warfare arsenal, and the one I would like to focus on today, is information warfare. Russian information warfare includes the deployment of false or misleading narratives against the targeted civilian population or government, often through deceptive means, in order to intensify social tensions, undermine trust in government institutions, and sow fear and confusion, which advances their strategic objectives. The Defense Intelligence Agency highlights in their Russia military power report in 2017: ``The weaponization of information is a key aspect of Russia's strategy . . . Moscow views information and psychological warfare as a measure to neutralize adversary actions in peace and to prevent escalation to crisis or war.'' Russia developed its playbook over time, enhancing both the technical and psychological aspects of these information operations in capability, sophistication, and boldness. Lessons learned from previous information warfare campaigns culminated in the attacks the Kremlin unleashed against the United States during the 2016 Presidential election. The 2016 information warfare campaign, according to our intelligence community, ``demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.'' Let's be clear. Russian interference in the 2016 election was an attack on the Nation. It was just not a type of attack that has been commonly recognized as warfare. As former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper stated recently, ``[I]t's hard to convey to people how massive an assault this was.'' While Russian hybrid attacks were detected by our intelligence community and our National Security Agencies in a runup to the 2016 election, the seriousness of the threat was not absorbed across the government, including Congress. There are a variety of reasons for this, including political paralysis and a collective unwillingness to believe that these attacks could compromise our political and social institutions. Two years on, we still have only scratched the surface in our understanding of about the nature of Russian information warfare attacks. Gaps in our knowledge include the extent to which these attacks have been perpetrated at Putin's direction, by Russian military intelligence units, known as the GRU, and through Kremlin-linked troll organizations. Yet we have no time to waste. Information warfare attacks continue against us, our allies, and our partners to this day, and they continue to pose a threat to our national security. Former CIA Acting Director and Deputy Director Mike Morell characterized the attacks of the Russians against our elections as ``the political equivalent of 9-11.'' In the aftermath of the tragic September 11 attacks of 2001, we established a nonpartisan commission to understand what happened and why. One of the 9/11 Commission's conclusions was that the U.S. Government showed a failure of imagination by not anticipating and preventing the 2001 attacks by the terrorists. We have had no similar wholesale reckoning in the aftermath of the attacks from 2016. Some elements of our government and society have taken steps to focus attention on this pressing problem. However, these efforts have not been sufficiently comprehensive, and the nature of the threats has not been fully communicated to the American public. As senior vice president for the Center of European Analysis, Edward Lucas assessed in a recent New York Times documentary on Russian disinformation, we ``are still playing catch up from a long way behind. We are looking in the rear view mirror, getting less bad at working out what Russia just did to us. We are still not looking through the windshield to find out what's happening now and what's going to be happening next.'' We must recover from our collective failure of imagination. We must rethink and refocus our strategy for countering these threats and implement necessary institutional policy and societal changes to support that strategy. Importantly, we must develop a playbook of our own to fight back. While the West has been slow to recognize the extent of the threat, these types of attacks are not new. Historically, informational warfare has long been a part of the Soviet and Russian arsenal. As security scholar Keir Giles noted in ``The Handbook of Russian Information Warfare,'' ``For all their innovative use of social media and the internet, current Russian methods have deep roots in long- standing Soviet practice.'' During Soviet times, information warfare tactics were part of a broader collection of operations that were referred to as active measures. The State Department described active measures in a 1981 report as including ``control of the press in foreign countries; outright and partial forgery of documents; use of rumors, insinuation, altered facts and lies; use of international and local front organizations; clandestine operation of radio stations; and exploitation of a nation's academic, political, and media figures as collaborators to influence policies of the nation.'' Active measures were run by the KGB, which at its height employed approximately 15,000 officers devoted to these tactics. The same State Department report described the strategic rationale for such operations, stating: ``Moscow seeks to disrupt relations between states, discredit opponents of the USSR, and undermine foreign leaders, institutions and values.'' The tactics of contemporary Russian information warfare mirrors Soviet-era active measures but have gained vastly greater potency in the digital age. The irony is, these are the tactics the Soviets employed, but they have been supercharged because in a digital age, you can reach more people, you can be more effective. Under Putin, Russia has institutionalized informational warfare with a 21st century twist that capitalizes on the interconnectedness of our global society in the speed and reach of today's informational age through cyber space. This has important advantages for Moscow. For example, the Soviet-era KGB agents worked for years to get an information warfare campaign to ``go viral'' and be picked up in multiple news outlets. Today, GRU- and Kremlin-linked troll organizations spread propaganda and disinformation campaigns across social media platforms with ease--virtually instantaneously. These information warfare operations are not simply opportunistic meddling by Russia. Russia's purpose is to further its strategic interests. Putin seeks to advance several strategic objectives, including preserving his grip on power and enhancing his ability to operate unconstrained domestically or in Russia's perceived sphere of influence near and abroad. Putin further seeks for Russia to be seen as an equal to the United States on the world stage and regain the great power status it lost at the end of the Cold War. Putin knows that for now, Russia cannot effectively compete with the United States in conventionally military ways and win. Instead, Putin seeks to use tools from his hybrid warfare arsenal, including information warfare to divide the United States from our allies and partners in the West and weaken our institutions and open society from within. By weakening our democracy, Putin can make Russia look more powerful in comparison. It is not surprising that Putin, who spent most of his Soviet career in the KGB and its successor, the FSB, has deployed these techniques during his rule. Putin mourned the downfall of the Soviet Union, lamenting in 2005 that the breakup of the Soviet Union was, in his words, ``the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.'' When he assumed power, Putin revitalized a number of methods of hybrid warfare from the Soviet system, including information warfare. Over time, Putin came to see Russia's nearly continuous campaign of information confrontation with the West as both a justified and defensive response to perceived U.S.-led international activism, regardless of our intentions. Keir Giles confirms this idea, assessing that Russia interpreted the color revolutions in former Soviet states and the Arab Spring as resulting from information operations by the United States and the West. Those operations were seen as posing a serious and growing threat to Putin's rule. The Kremlin's development of its information warfare capabilities reflects those perceptions and Putin's concern with preservation of his regime. Putin moved from earlier ad hoc information warfare campaigns, such as the operations against Estonia in 2007 and in Georgia in 2008, to the systematic application of these tools. Most experts point to the Russian's public reaction to Putin's return to the Presidency for a third term in 2012 as the turning point that led to development of Russian information warfare as we experience it today. It began with the announcement in September 2011 that Putin--then acting as Prime Minister--and Medvedev--then serving as President-- would switch roles. This revelation, coupled with the rigged parliamentary elections in late 2011, created an unexpected backlash from the Russian people. Massive demonstrations ensued, with thousands of people taking to the streets. To Putin, the grievances of the protests appeared personal as they chanted ``Putin is a thief'' and ``Russia without Putin.'' The year of 2011 is particularly relevant for revolutions and the overthrow of dictatorships. The year 2011 gave rise to the Arab Spring, in which dissidents relied heavily on Facebook and Twitter--American inventions--to organize their protests and cast-off authoritarian governance in places across the Middle East. Again, Putin conceived U.S. actions in places such as Egypt and Libya as proof that the United States actively cultivated regime change. Protests in Russia began to resemble the protests of the Arab Spring, including the similar use of Facebook and Twitter. Putin viewed these activities as a threat to his hold on power. Around that time, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised concerns about the Kremlin's electoral conduct. She urged that the ``Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted.'' In response, Putin accused the United States of interfering in the Russian elections and blamed Secretary Clinton for the massive protests taking place in Russia, alleging that Secretary Clinton gave the, in his words, ``signal to some actors in our country to rise up.'' He further bemoaned what he called ``foreign money'' being used to influence Russian politics and warned: ``We need to safeguard ourselves from this influence in our internal affairs.'' After his inauguration for a third term, Putin promoted a close ally and tasked him with getting control over the Russian's people use of the internet. Putin and his cronies also put political pressure on the creators of prominent websites. Those who were not willing to cooperate, such as the owner of the Russian version of Facebook, were pushed out so that the chosen oligarchs could become majority shareholders and then begin to control content. About the same time, the Russian Parliament passed legislation helping the Kremlin monitor and criminalize unfavorable cyber activities. In concert with the new online restrictions, the Kremlin began paying bloggers to slip in pro-Russian material amongst other benign posts, which was the beginning of government-directed troll operations. In late 2013, a leading Russian newspaper reported that the tools put in place to co-opt new forms of media were ``recognized as so effective that [the Kremlin] insiders send these weapons outside--to the Americans and European audiences.'' This may mark the beginning of Putin's move to institutionalize a more sustained and permanent state of information confrontation with the West. Russia also used these external operations to further develop its toolkit for information warfare. Central to these efforts included what many experts agreed was the development of a hybrid warfare doctrine, as articulated by the chief of the general staff of a Russian Armed Forces general, Valery Gerasimov, in 2013. Gerasimov argued that asymmetric approaches to dealing with conflict, including the use of ``political, economic informational, humanitarian, and other nonmilitary measures,'' have grown and in many instances have ``exceeded the power of force and weapons in their effectiveness.'' He further discussed how hybrid warfare tactics, including what he termed ``informational actions,'' can nullify the enemy's advantage and reduce its fighting potential. One of his conclusions was ``that it is necessary to perfect activities in the information space,'' including the defense of our own objectives. About the same time, in August 2013, RT, which is a Russian television station, reported on Russian plans to create a new branch of the military that would ``include monitoring and processing external information as well as fighting cyber threats.'' In the article, Putin acknowledged that information attacks are already being applied to solve problems of a military and political nature and that their striking force may be higher than those of conventional weapons. Based on RT's reporting and observations of the GRU's activities, it is clear that Russia has created ``information warfare troops'' with no parallel in the United States. These GRU units combine the arts of technical cyber operations with psychological manipulation. Malcolm Nance, a former U.S. naval intelligence officer, characterized the GRU as ``the armed forces of Russia and the intelligence apparatus that does reconnaissance, surveillance, and . . . strategic cyber operations.'' Russian security services expert Mark Galeotti explained: [H]istorically, the GRU has been Russia's main agency for operating in uncontrolled spaces, which mean civil wars and the like. In some ways, the internet is today's uncontrolled space. In hindsight, we can trace Russia's development and conduct of its information warfare campaign against perceived foreign threats from its neighbors and the West. These campaigns generally progressed along three major lines of effort, all of which benefited from advances in technology from the Soviet days. First, the campaigns involved overt propaganda and disinformation, much of it carried out on Russian state-owned media, such as RT and Sputnik. The second line of effort involved covert cyber attacks, including hacking and weaponizing stolen information. The third line of effort in the Russian information campaigns involved weaponizing the internet, particularly social media networks, to amplify messages to a vastly greater audience and promote themes that advanced Russia's strategic interests. While Russia's technical and psychological capabilities grew over time, the outlines of the Russian information warfare playbook were evident during Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and during the United Kingdom's Brexit debate the following year, but we largely did not understand the extent of these operations and the threat to our national security and that of our allies and partners. Our collective failure to understand the pattern of Russian information warfare emboldened Putin. The Kremlin's tactics and techniques were further refined and deployed in the Russian information campaign against the U.S. Presidential election in 2016. Starting in 2014 and 2015, Putin turned his information arsenal first on the near abroad, deploying information warfare operations against Ukraine during the conflict over Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Russia used Ukraine as a testing laboratory for experimenting with new tactics of information warfare through cyber space and social media. The impetus for Russian intervention in the Ukraine arose in response to domestic unrest which caused the Russian-backed Ukrainian President to flee the country. Events tipped off when Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych signaled he was no longer willing to continue efforts to integrate Ukraine with the West, which had broad public support. Instead, he accepted a Kremlin offer of a $15 billion bailout for Ukraine and a deal on gas imports. Protests broke out, which grew into what was known as the Maidan revolution. The numbers and strength of the protests alarmed the Kremlin. Putin wanted to ensure Ukraine stayed in Russia's sphere of influence. He deployed hybrid warfare, including a full-scale information warfare campaign, to force the Ukrainian people back in line. The goal of the information warfare campaign was to convince the people of Ukraine that they were in imminent danger from fascists and Nazis who were taking over the country and committing atrocities on their fellow citizens. The Kremlin deployed all three lines of effort that I laid out for their information warfare campaign against Ukraine--a barrage of overt propaganda and disinformation; cyber attacks, including weaponizing stolen information; and the manipulation of the internet and social media platforms. These efforts sowed fear and magnified mistrust toward the Ukrainian Government, which the Kremlin was able to exploit for the seizure of Crimea and to achieve other Russian strategic interests. The Russian campaign deployed a significant volume of propaganda and disinformation against Ukraine to magnify a climate of fear and distrust amongst the Ukrainian people. Examples include photos doctored to look like scenes of carnage from Ukraine, fake stories of dead children caught in the crossfire, supposed attacks on Jewish Ukrainians who were forced to flee the country, and, allegedly, a 3-year-old who was crucified by Ukrainian soldiers. The messages also portrayed the Russians as the Ukrainian people's saviors and that Russia had to intervene to help restore order. The second line of effort--covert military operations in cyber space--was also deployed as a Russian campaign against Ukraine. At the time, attacks against Ukraine were described as coming from CyberBerkut, which the U.K. Government's National Cyber Security Centre has recently announced ``is almost certainly'' the same branch of the GRU that infiltrated the Democratic National Committee. The GRU forces responsible for these ``hack-and-weaponize'' information operations were later named by their unit numbers in Special Counsel Mueller's July 2018 indictment and have been given many names, including CyberBerkut, Fancy Bear, and Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) 28. In the spring of 2014, as Ukraine held its Presidential election, CyberBerkut penetrated Ukraine's Central Election Commission, directly altering the nationwide Presidential vote tallies in favor of Russia's preferred candidate. The Ukrainian officials caught the change before the results were announced, although it was broadcast on Russian news that the Russian-backed candidate had won, sowing doubt on the validity of the election and magnifying distrust in the Ukrainian Government. Seeing as how they couldn't change voting tallies and fully get away with it, Russia's tactics evolved to try to change people's minds about whom to vote for or make the public so distrustful of the system that they wouldn't vote at all. These same units began to steal private information through cyber intrusions on Ukrainian Government and political officials and weaponize it by posting it on the internet. As the Defense Intelligence Agency noted in the ``Russia Military Power'' report from 2017, the intent of publicizing the stolen information was ``to demoralize, embarrass and create distrust of elected officials.'' A third line of effort by the Russian campaign focused on leveraging cyber space to reinforce and amplify their messaging, which was carried out by the GRU and Kremlin-linked troll organizations. While these efforts were often unsophisticated, this may have been the first time that organizations embarked on wide-scale social media campaigns to amplify information warfare beyond Russia's borders. The Washington Post reported, based on internal Russian military documents, that the GRU fabricated numerous accounts on social media after Ukrainian President Yanukovych fled in 2014. These accounts on Facebook and the Russian version of Facebook, known as VK, posed as ordinary Ukrainians who were against the Kiev protests. They preyed on people's emotions, magnifying fear and distrust. One example of a message posted by the GRU from a fraudulent social media account was ``brigades of Westerners are now on their way to rob and kill us. . . . Morals have been replaced by thirst for blood and hatred toward anything Russian.'' The same GRU unit was also responsible for the creation of the fictitious persona ``Ivan Galitsin,'' who placed pro-Kremlin comments on English language websites. The intercepted Russian military documents also detailed how the GRU created four fraudulent groups on Facebook and its Russian equivalent to support its campaign in Crimea and used paid Facebook ads to increase traffic to their fraudulent sites. Subsequent reporting by the Washington Post uncovered the specific GRU unit--54777. The GRU unit responsible for this operation bragged to their superiors that these 4 groups alone received at least 200,000 views. All of these tactics would appear in later information warfare campaigns. This information warfare campaign against Ukraine also appears to be one of the first uses of a complementary social media effort--deploying Kremlin-linked trolls--against the population of a foreign country to enhance and amplify the GRU operation. A close Putin crony, Yevgeny Prigozhin, founded and funded the operation--known as the Internet Research Agency and its related companies--to amplify the Kremlin's messages across social media platforms. According to a Russian press report in 2014, during the Ukraine operations, the Internet Research Agency was employing about 250 people to engage in online discussions ``with a goal to undermine the authority of Ukrainian politicians and post hate speech and fake stories, thus shifting attention from the real events.'' Copying the model that the Kremlin developed to manipulate its own citizens, these fake Ukrainian personas would pretend to be regular, local Ukrainian people and slip in politically charged messages. BuzzFeed detailed one such campaign entitled ``Polite People'' which ``promoted the invasion of Crimea with pictures of Russian troops posing alongside girls, the elderly, and cats.'' The trolls used innocuous pictures to gain a group of followers; then they were easily able to pump out pro-Kremlin messages to readymade audiences. Although the tactics were relatively simplistic--both for whom they were trying to reach and the technical aspects of their campaign--the Kremlin information warfare campaign appeared largely successful against Ukraine and contributed to the Kremlin's seizure of Crimea. Indeed, Gen. Philip Breedlove, then head of the U.S. European Command and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, warned at the time that Russia was ``waging the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg in the history of information warfare.'' Even as these information operations overwhelmed Ukraine, the potential threat they posed to Western societies was largely unrecognized, and calls for help in combatting these types of campaigns--including manipulation of social media--went unanswered. The Washington Post reported last October that high-level Ukrainian officials, including President Poroschenko, personally appealed to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg in the spring of 2015. One of his deputies stated that they told Facebook: ``I was explicitly saying that there were troll factories, that their posts and reposts promoted posts and news that are fake. . . . Have a look.'' Facebook officials failed to take these pleas seriously and in 2015 declined President Poroschenko's request to open a Facebook office in Kiev to address the problem. In a foreshadowing of events in the United States, Facebook failed to imagine the significant impact these campaigns could have on Ukrainian politics and security. Our government, too, failed to realize the full extent of the threat. While we have been able to uncover a lot about Russian attacks on Ukraine, we have not been able to piece together the full picture of what Russia perpetrated against the United Kingdom in connection with the spring 2016 referendum on whether the United Kingdom should leave the EU, commonly known as Brexit. UK members of Parliament and others investigating these attacks have been able to piece together evidence that the Kremlin mounted an information warfare campaign to encourage and amplify anti-EU sentiment in the run up to voting day. However, because these investigations are limited to their committees of jurisdiction and there is no equivalent to the U.S. special counsel's investigation pulling the disparate pieces of information together, we have yet to understand the full picture of what the Russians perpetrated against the British people. What we have learned so far indicates that the Kremlin appeared to run a more sophisticated campaign against the British people than the attacks it perpetrated against Ukraine. In this operation, the Kremlin was pushing one side of the argument, as they were in Ukraine, but they showcased increased psychological complexities in their attacks. This campaign focused on targeting segments of the British population that would likely be frightened by threats of increased immigration, particularly from Muslim-majority countries. The Kremlin and Kremlin- linked actors also pushed messages that the EU was corrupt and had little accountability to the people of the United Kingdom, which magnified feelings of mistrust of the EU. The first line of effort for this Kremlin information warfare campaign and the one that the West was able to track and analyze was propaganda and disinformation. The Kremlin unleashed a slew of overt Russian propaganda in English, advanced on TV and the internet by Kremlin-controlled media outlets. A United Kingdom parliamentary inquiry on disinformation cites 261 articles on RT and Sputnik with a heavy anti-EU bias in the 6 months prior to the referendum. These outlets advanced a steady drumbeat of stories stressing the continued dangers as long as the United Kingdom remained part of the EU's so- called ``open borders.'' This included disinformation intended to magnify fear by alleging that British women would be subject to increased attacks from dangerous Muslim immigrants. It has yet to be determined whether the second line of effort--covert GRU operations in cyber space--was deployed as part of the Russian campaign promoting Brexit. It does not appear that hacking and weaponizing stolen data was deployed in connection with Brexit. However, as detailed in a separate parliamentary inquiry, on the night of the Brexit referendum, there was a suspicious crash of the voter registration website likely attributed to denial-of-service attacks. The timing of this attack appears consistent with other GRU covert cyber attacks, which aim to take key infrastructure or information offline at crucial times to advance Kremlin objectives. This crude information warfare tactic has been tied to GRU in previous operations, particularly Eastern Europe. Further, the UK Government has been able to tie the GRU to other cyber attacks, including attacks on a United Kingdom television station and the United Kingdom foreign office. If these Russian actors were culpable in this denial-of-service attack, then it would fit with the Russian playbook. The third line of effort, the use of cyber space to amplify and reinforce messaging, featured prominently in the information warfare campaign relating to Brexit. While we don't know what role, if any, the GRU played in this line of effort, we have been able to identify a sustained campaign on social media against the British public by Kremlin and Kremlin-linked actors. These attacks included the use of trolls and automated bots amplifying pro-leave messages ahead of the date of referendum. The New York Times reported that tweets from the Russian accounts ``sought to inflame fears about Muslims and immigrants to help drive the vote.'' Tweets surged in the last days of the campaign, spiking from about 1,000 tweets a day to 45,000 tweets in the 48 hours prior to the polls closing. In the final days before the referendum, less than 1 percent of Twitter users accounted for one- third of all the conversations surrounding the issue, showing that these actions were artificially boosting the pro-leave messages to increase viewership size. Joint analysis from Swansea University and the University of California, Berkeley, concluded that the attacks emanated from 150,000 Russian-based accounts and that their tweets were viewed hundreds of millions of times. It must be noted that Russian amplification efforts in connection with Brexit also received a boost from local surrogates in the UK. One pro-leave local surrogate was Nigel Farage, then-leader of the rightwing populist UKIP Party. Whether unwittingly or not, Farage echoed aspects of Russian propaganda, including lending his voice to stories broadcast on Russian propaganda channel RT. Farage was also often quoted in Russia media articles, including when he warned that British women could be at risk of mass attacks of gangs of migrants due to ``big cultural issues'' should Britain choose to remain in the EU, again, echoing the message that Russian agents and authorities were promoting. Here, too, it seems we have just begun to scratch the surface of our understanding about what the Kremlin was doing, including how they had insight into whom to target with their information warfare campaign. Member of Parliament Damian Collins, who is leading an investigation into Russian disinformation connected to Brexit, fears that what we know at this point about the extent of the Russian attack against the British people ``may well be just the tip of the iceberg.'' We can't point with all certitude to whether the Kremlin's information warfare campaign made a difference in the outcome of the vote. However, we know that those who voted to leave the EU won by a small margin. It was a stunning upset that no one expected, let alone then-Prime Minister Cameron. He cited the outcome as the reason for his resignation. The Kremlin has also turned these weapons on the United States. The most prominent example was the sustained, multipronged information warfare campaign deployed against the American people, as I stated, during the 2016 Presidential election. While the Kremlin's information warfare campaign against Ukraine and Brexit supported and amplified one side of an issue, for this operation Russia showed increased technical and psychological advances by targeting multiple aspects of contentious issues to advance the Kremlin's objectives. Grievances about race, religion, immigration, social justice, and even U.S. institutions writ large were woven into anti-Clinton, pro-Trump fabric. These efforts were a toxic mix, trying to poison Clinton's candidacy, promote Trump's favorability, taint the electoral process, and weaken democratic institutions altogether. Similar to the information warfare campaign against Brexit, we are still trying to get a full picture of how Russia attacked us during the 2016 election and, particularly, the role that the GRU played. But what is now clear is that the Kremlin's information warfare campaign regarding the 2016 election was not neutral or even-handed in its messaging on Clinton compared to that of President Trump. As affirmed in the intelligence community's January 2017 assessment, in their words: ``Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election, the consistent goals of which were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.'' They also assessed, in their words, that ``Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference'' for President Trump. Similarly, Special Counsel Mueller's February indictment against the Kremlin-linked troll operation found that the Russians ``engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and the candidate Donald Trump.'' The clear anti-Clinton and pro-Trump themes in Russia's efforts aligned with Russian strategic interests. As mentioned earlier, Putin blamed Hillary Clinton for protests in Russia in December 2011. Weakening Clinton as a candidate would reduce the perceived threat to Putin's grip on power from a Clinton Presidency. President Trump, on the other hand, offered Russia a freer hand in conducting its affairs. Similar to Brexit, the Russian information warfare campaign against the American people in 2016 demonstrated a high degree of sophistication in targeting susceptible groups of Americans, potentially including the use of data analytics. We are still learning details of how the Russians were able to build an audience for its information warfare attacks and whether they had any help from any Americans. However, Justice Department indictments, including those from the special counsel, and two reports commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee analyzing data provided by social media companies are providing a better picture of the information warfare campaigns against us. One of those reports, a joint study by Oxford University and the social media analytics firm Graphika, assessed that the Kremlin-linked troll organization was able to segment users into different groups based on ``race, ethnicity, and identity.'' Once they categorized people in such a manner, they tailored ads to entice users to engage with their fraudulent accounts and pages. This process engineered messages to manipulate and polarize receptive audiences. The other study commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee, a collaboration between the social media research firm New Knowledge, Columbia University, and Canfield Research, confirms this idea, detailing how specific ethnic and Russian groups were targeted. Their analysis concluded that these operations were directed overwhelmingly at African Americans. As the Washington Post technology reporter Craig Timberg explained, social media companies created this technology and, in the process, have ``atomized'' us into different categories and put us into a ``thousand different buckets.'' The Russians co-opted this American technology, just as they have exploited other aspects of our open society and democratic system, and weaponized it against us. Similar to campaigns in the past, this information warfare operation followed the three established lines of effort as detailed in the intelligence community's January 2017 assessment. The Kremlin's campaign ``followed a longstanding Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations--such as cyber activity--with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries and paid social media users or trolls.'' The first line of effort involved overt propaganda and disinformation focusing on a number of themes that advanced Russia's strategic interest. Having tested their methodology in previous campaigns, including in Ukraine and Brexit, the Russians had an arsenal of tried- and-tested methods of influence they deployed in the U.S. Presidential election to maximize fear and distrust. Propaganda and disinformation to stoke these negative emotions were pumped out by Kremlin-funded channels RT and Sputnik. They sought to flood an unsuspecting American public with stories portraying Secretary Clinton as untrustworthy and dangerous, thus amplifying negative feelings toward her. Articles painted Clinton as a warmonger who would lead the United States into future conflicts or alleged that she was of ill health and hiding her condition from the public. Additional reports were aimed at bolstering the perceptions that she was not trustworthy and accused her of nefarious dealings detailed in the emails she deleted as a coverup of her so-called ``crimes.'' A third group of accounts alleged that Clinton used her high-ranking position as Secretary of State to enrich her family foundation with foreign donations by engaging in quid quo pro schemes. In contrast, Kremlin-funded media pushed positive stories about President Trump, promoting him as a pragmatist who understood that the United States needed to stop interfering in the internal affairs of other countries. An additional widely used theme, which sought to maximize feelings of distrust and ran through much of what Kremlin media broadcast, revolved around corruption in the United States, American hypocrisy, and that our elections were rigged and fraudulent. Painting the American political system as unfair, biased, and tainted served Putin's strategic interests, allowing the Kremlin to counter pro-democracy forces within Russia by asserting a moral equivalence between a ``flawed'' American democratic system and his autocratic rule of Russia. The second line of effort in the Kremlin's information warfare playbook, covert Russian operations in cyber space, repeated tactics used against Ukraine but this time with greater sophistication. In particular, the Kremlin and Kremlin-linked actors engaged in hacking and weaponizing the release of stolen data. From what our intelligence community, the Department of Justice, and FBI have compiled, it appears that the GRU undertook the largest share of this aspect of the information warfare campaign, with complementary efforts undertaken by the FSB. The special counsel's indictment from July 2018 detailed how the GRU ``intentionally conspired . . . to gain unauthorized access into the computers of U.S. persons and entities involved in the 2016 election, steal documents from those computers and stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.'' As we now know, two of the main targets of this operation were the DNC and Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta. Press reports indicate that approximately 50,000 emails and documents were stolen. Once in possession of these stolen documents, the GRU repeated its playbook from the earlier campaigns. It sought to weaponize the hacked information by releasing it in a manner and at key times when it could cause the most damage, while concealing Russia's role in the process. As the Mueller indictment against the GRU describes, ``They did so using fictitious online personas, including `DCLeaks' and `Guccifer 2.0.''' The Mueller indictment from last July further detailed the GRU's use of fake persona, Guccifer 2.0, which the GRU falsely claimed was a Romanian hacker. Guccifer 2.0 released stolen documents and was active in promoting so-called ``exclusives'' of stolen information as a way to launder it to third parties, including journalists from traditional media outlets. The GRU's covert efforts also took advantage of a willing amplifier, WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks had an established reputation for spilling State secrets, including those of the U.S. Government and military. WikiLeaks also offered a ready-made audience and had an understanding of how to time releases for political impact. Indeed, according to the Mueller indictment, the GRU, posing as Guccifer 2.0 ``discussed the release of the stolen documents and the timing of those releases'' with WikiLeaks ``to heighten their impact on the 2016 presidential election.'' WikiLeaks released the stolen documents during the Democratic National Convention to cause conflict between Clinton and Sanders supporters at a time when many Americans were very likely to be paying attention. WikiLeaks also released documents in the last few weeks of the election, again, when the Nation was very likely to be following campaigns. The first release of stolen emails from the Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta, coincided with a warning from the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence in October 2016 about Russian attacks against our election. It also occurred on the same day as the release of the Trump ``Access Hollywood'' tape. These efforts, too, suggest a high level of sophistication that hadn't been seen in earlier Russian influence campaigns. The third component of the Russian information warfare campaign, message amplification and reinforcement through social media, was deployed in parallel with the other lines of effort to achieve an unprecedented impact. While we don't know the full extent of the GRU's involvement, the Mueller indictment revealed that an entire military intelligence unit--74455--was active in this line of effort. In his July 2018 indictment, the special counsel explained that unit No. 74455 assisted in the promotion of the released stolen material ``and the publication of anti-Clinton contact on social media accounts operated by the GRU.'' That includes the site DCLeaks, which was, in fact, established by the GRU. It went live in early June 2016, posing as a site run by American hacktivists, promising to ``expose the truth'' about U.S. politicians. The GRU even created a DCLeaks Facebook page, authored by the fictitious U.S. woman Alice Donovan, which sought to drive traffic to its site. The July indictment further details how the GRU used additional fake accounts posing as Americans named Jason Scott and Richard Gingrey to promote the DCLeaks site. Before it was shut down in March of 2017, the DCLeaks site was viewed over a million times. The GRU also used social media to magnify fears about Hillary Clinton. The July indictment from the special counsel revealed that the GRU was the true operator behind the fraudulent Twitter account @BaltimoreIsWhr [Baltimore is War], which encouraged U.S. audiences to ``[j]oin our flash mob'' opposing Clinton and to share images with the hashtag ``Blacks Against Hillary.'' In addition to the GRU's weaponizing social media against the United States, there was a complementary effort from the Kremlin-linked troll organization, the Internet Research Agency. By the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, the deployment of the troll organization appeared to be a standard part of the Kremlin's playbook. The October 2018 indictment of the Internet Research Agency's accountant in the Eastern District of Virginia provides additional confirmation of the troll organization's role in the information campaign. The indictment confirms the existence of the Agency's operation known as Project Lakhta--since at least May of 2014--and notes that this project targeted Ukraine, Europe, and the United States with a stated goal in the United States to ``spread distrust toward candidates for political office and the political system in general.'' Social media researchers, including P.W. Singer, have also noted how some of the same trolls were repurposed for different operations. The accounts that pretended to be Ukrainian then posed as British citizens and then as Americans as the focus of attacks shifted over time. Against the United States, the troll operation capitalized on issues of importance to groups inside American society to magnify fear and distrust in ways that aligned with the Kremlin strategic interest of hurting Clinton and helping President Trump. As the special counsel's February indictment detailed, ``These groups and pages, which addressed divisive U.S. political and social issues, falsely claimed to be controlled by U.S. activists when, in fact, they were controlled by [Kremlin-linked trolls].'' The indictment further asserted this was the manner in which the troll organization reached ``significant numbers of Americans for the purpose of influencing the Presidential election of 2016.'' The report prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee by New Knowledge, Columbia, and Canfield Research that analyzed certain data from social media companies identifies a number of tactics employed by the Internet Research Agency in its assault on the 2016 election. These include building brands across platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram; deploying or repurposing popular memes to spread propaganda; reinforcing key themes by resharing the same story across multiple accounts; impersonating local media on Twitter and Instagram to win the trust of Americans in their local news; and amplifying conspiratorial narratives among both left- and right-leaning audiences. As I mentioned, the report found that one of the troll organization's concerted lines of attack was against African Americans. These efforts, however, went beyond just trying to sow discord and reinforce fears about Clinton. Campaigns against African-American groups were pushed across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube with the goal of suppressing voter turnout ``through malicious misdirection, candidate support redirection and turnout depression.'' Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a scholar who studies political campaigns, examined polling data throughout the campaign and documented similar tactics at disenfranchisement in her recent book, including fake ads that encouraged minority viewers to text or tweet their support for Clinton rather than to vote at the polls or to rally support for other candidates in the race. These efforts may have been particularly effective in peeling off voters who would have been likely to vote for her candidacy. They also may have influenced undecided voters at a key time. Polls in the final month of the campaign showed a marked drop in the number of Americans saying they intended to vote for Secretary Clinton. The reports prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee highlighted that Twitter was an important component of the attacks Kremlin-linked troll organizations deployed against the American people. The nearly 4,000 inauthentic Russian Twitter accounts, like their Facebook counterparts, promoted messages related to divisive social issues, such as gun control, race relations, and immigration. The troll organization also deployed bots, or automated accounts, to amplify messages and drive traffic to specific Facebook pages, Kremlin propaganda sites, or other targeted websites. The Kremlin-linked troll operation went into overdrive on election day with strategic messaging that mimicked the spike in activity on Twitter during the Brexit referendum. According to the Daily Beast, Kremlin-linked trolls began a ``final push'' and used ``a combination of high-profile accounts with large and influential followings and scores of lurking personas established years earlier with stolen photos and fabricated backgrounds'' to send ``carefully metered tweets and retweets voicing praise for Trump and contempt for his opponent from the early morning until the last polls closed in the United States.'' As the recent studies commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee illuminate, the information warfare campaign against the American people was an extensive, widespread, coordinated effort across many social media platforms, both big and small. The increased sophistication of the troll organization's techniques on social media provided a relatively low-cost but highly effective method of influencing the American public. For example, these trolls spent only $100,000 on 3,000 ads on Facebook. While this may seem like a small amount compared to the millions of dollars spent on the Presidential campaign, the impact and reach of these Kremlin ads, once amplified through these Russian operations, was extensive. While Facebook estimates that approximately 126 million Americans saw Kremlin-linked messages, Jonathan Albright, the research director for Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, extrapolated that they could have been shared hundreds of millions and, perhaps, many billions of times. Kathleen Hall Jamieson concluded that the widespread reach of the troll organization's disinformation ``increases the likelihood'' that the Russian activities changed the outcome of the election. A study from the Ohio State University on propaganda and disinformation affirmed Hall Jamieson's assessment and concluded Russian information warfare attacks ``most likely did have substantial impact on the voting decisions of a strategically important set of voters--those who voted for Barack Obama in 2012. Indeed, given the very narrow margins of victory by Donald Trump in key battleground states, this impact may have been sufficient to deprive Hillary Clinton of a victory in the Electoral College.'' That is their conclusion. As with the Brexit campaign, the Russian information warfare campaign during the 2016 election was aided by others who, either wittingly or unwittingly, helped to advance Russia's strategic objectives. Among these were major American news outlets, which covered much of what was in the WikiLeaks disclosures. They treated it as legitimate news without reminding viewers of how the information was obtained or that it was being pushed by a foreign adversary. Thomas Rid, a professor of security studies at King's College, testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee in March of 2017 that the journalists functioned as ``unwitting agents . . . who aggressively covered the political leaks while neglecting or ignoring their provenance'' or, as Kathleen Hall Jamieson concludes, the American media ``inadvertently helped [the Russians] achieve their goals.'' Further, as in the Brexit campaign, a number of local surrogates appeared to echo the Kremlin messages. This included associates of the Trump campaign and even the President himself. He boasted of his love of WikiLeaks at least 124 times in the last month of the election alone and even tweeted a link to access the stolen disclosures from WikiLeaks. According to the Washington Post, at least five close Trump associates, albeit perhaps unknowingly, retweeted messages from Kremlin-linked troll accounts, including the account @Ten--GOP, a Russian fake handle that impersonated the Tennessee Republican Party. The President and his campaign also used talking points that were similar to Russian propaganda and disinformation, including disparaging Secretary Clinton's health and accusing her repeatedly of being ``crooked.'' The President encouraged Russia, in many respects, to continue these activities. From what we know from the July indictment from the special counsel, the night that Trump called on the Russians to hack her emails, the GRU did, in fact, attack the server that housed Clinton's personal accounts. As journalist and legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin characterized it, ``All of these separate [Russian] efforts are completely aligned with Donald Trump's interests, often word for word.'' Some have argued that despite this extensive and sophisticated Russian influence campaign, there was no effect on the outcome of the election because no vote tallies were changed. While we may never know definitively what the actual impact of the Kremlin's operation was, it is hard to believe that the Kremlin would mount a sustained, multiyear information warfare campaign against our democratic institutions if it had no reason to expect that it would have an impact. To the contrary, based on its experience in Ukraine, Brexit, and elsewhere, the Kremlin had every reason to believe that it could successfully influence the outcome of the 2016 election with minimal risk of being discovered or suffering retaliation. As I have laid out, Russia is engaged in a sustained information warfare campaign against the United States, our allies, and partners. This Russian interference can't be dismissed as a one-off operation. As Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told the Aspen Forum last July, the Russian effort to influence the 2016 Presidential election is ``just one tree in a growing forest. Russian intelligence officers did not stumble onto the idea of hacking American computers and posting misleading messages because they had a free afternoon. It is what they do every day.'' Our intelligence community assessed in January 2017 that the campaign against us represented a ``new normal'' in Russian influence efforts in which ``Moscow will apply lessons learned from its campaign aimed at the U.S. presidential election to future influence efforts in the U.S. and worldwide.'' Russian information warfare operations have a real and ongoing impact on our national security. Russia has not paused its information warfare operations since the 2016 election, and, in fact, the level of Russian operations has increased since then. As John Kelly, the founder of Graphika, a social media intelligence firm, who testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee in August and who collaborated on one of the reports for the Senate Intelligence Committee I discussed earlier, stated: ``After election day, the Russian government stepped on the gas . . . confirming again that the assault on our democratic process is much bigger than the attack on a single election.'' This idea was confirmed by data in both his report and the other report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the Kremlin-linked troll organization. The report done by New Knowledge, Columbia University, and Canfield research noted that the Kremlin-linked troll organization went after those who are investigating Russian information warfare and other malign influence activities in the United States, including attempts to label Russian interference in the election as ``nonsense'' and casting former FBI Director James Comey and Special Counsel Mueller as corrupt. We don't have to look too far for other examples of Russia's ongoing campaign against the American people and our allies and partners. Kremlin-linked troll operations flooded Twitter with messages that were intended to sow division and disinformation in the wake of numerous controversies, including the tragic shootings in Las Vegas and Parkland, FL, and during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. Last September, we learned from an indictment in the Western District of Pennsylvania that GRU officers, including some agents who were previously indicted by Special Counsel Mueller, attempted information attacks against prominent world organizations, including those who were investigating Russian malign influence activities. It is now clear that Russian information operations also targeted the 2018 midterm elections. The October indictment from the Eastern District of Virginia details an ongoing and advanced operation to influence the American electorate up through 2018. As the indictment states, this campaign ``has a strategic goal, which continues to this day, to sow division and discord in the U.S. political system.'' The indictment also details how Russian troll operations are using U.S.- based virtual private networks, or VPNs, paid for with Bitcoin through multiple bank accounts, to disguise the origin of Russian messaging on social media. The sophistication of these operations continues to increase. The Internet Research Agency has a dedicated ``search engine optimization'' department that is devoted to manipulating social media search algorithms to advance the goals of Russian troll operations. The troll organization spent millions of dollars annually in 2017 and 2018 and is still buying ads on Facebook and Instagram. These operations continue to cover a broad range of divisive issues, and as the indictment details, the organization's employees are instructed on strategies and guidance for targeting particular audiences with carefully tailored messages. Despite efforts by Facebook and Twitter to eliminate inauthentic accounts, there are still thousands of active social media and email accounts appearing to be U.S. persons when they are, in fact, Kremlin-linked trolls that are acting as part of an information warfare campaign. Last February, in testimony before the Armed Services Cyber Subcommittee, Russia expert Heather Conley warned that Russian information warfare campaigns in 2018 and 2020 will adapt and ``look more American, and [it] will look less Russian.'' The New Knowledge, Columbia University, and Canfield research study notes that we need to be on the lookout for increasingly sophisticated operations, including ``increased human-exploitation tradecraft and narrative laundering.'' The technology already exists to create ``deepfakes,'' false videos of real people saying or doing things that are damaging. Advances in artificial intelligence are enabling rapid, automated responses on social media that mimic authentic accounts. We are still gathering data about information warfare attacks, including the 2018 midterms. Between the indictments I referenced and the additional Kremlin-directed troll operations discovered by Facebook in conjunction with our Intelligence Committee, the FBI, and DHS, we seem to be getting better at responding to the types of attacks perpetrated against United States in 2016, but that is no indicator that we have become better at anticipating future attacks. The Director of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned last November that ``the [2018] midterm is . . . just the warm-up or the exhibition game. . . . The big game . . . for the adversaries is probably 2020.'' I want to thank my colleague for being generous and patient with my presentation, but I do want to make, I think, an important and concluding point that ties in directly with what is going on right now. Government Funding Mr. President, we have been talking about this shutdown. After I described the activities that have transpired over the last 5 to 10 years, we should be aware that they are continuing, and the consequences of this shutdown are more than theoretical. We are missing some of our most critical tools for countering Russian information warfare for protecting systems that are vital to our democracy. As Andrew Grotto, a former cyber security adviser for Presidents Trump and Obama stated, ``Defending Federal networks is already an act of triage . . . furloughs make a hard job even harder.'' While I applaud DHS for reorganizing into the new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, they have since had to furlough 43 percent of their employees. That is over 1,500 workers who right now are unable to continue key missions and protect us from attack. The FBI is also affected by the shutdown in critical functions related to countering Russian hybrid and information warfare. A recent FBI Agent's Association report highlighted how efforts to investigate and prosecute cyber criminals have been impacted. That includes a lack of resources to pay for wiretaps and subpoenas. One anonymous FBI agent quoted in the report remarked: ``These delays slow down our work to combat criminal activity on the [internet] and protect the American people.'' All the while, Russia continues to attack us with information warfare. They were not closed for business. With this unnecessary government shutdown, we are fighting blindfolded with one hand tied behind our backs. I am confident in the ability of our government and our society to come together. I am confident that with the American vision and ingenuity, working across the aisle and across the Atlantic, these are challenges that we can meet and conquer, but we must remember that this is not a Democratic or Republican problem. This is an attack against the Nation by a foreign power. This is a problem of our national security. We have no time to waste. If we are looking for another reason why we should open this government immediately, it is to continue our protection against the attacks by foreign entities. With that, let me particularly thank the Senator from Florida for his patience and thank the Presiding Officer for his patience as well. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. REED

Mr. REED. Madam President, I come to the floor again to urge an end to the Trump shutdown, which is over a month old--the longest in history. Let's be clear. This is the Trump shutdown. The President called for a shutdown two dozen times, and he said he would be proud to own it. Regrettably, it is clear that he does not care about the impact his shutdown is having on families across the United States. He barely acknowledges their pain. If you needed any reminder of the low regard the President has for the Federal workforce, remember that on December 28, in the midst of the shutdown he instigated, he signed an Executive order that will freeze pay for the civilian workforce in 2019--assuming he ever reopens the government. With his announcement on Saturday, the President is now playing games with the lives of hundreds of thousands of refugees and Dreamers, who, because of his earlier actions, could face the real threat of deportation. Meanwhile, his administration is playing favorites, rewarding those with deep pockets and good connections, forcing IRS employees back to work without pay to process tax returns, reopening the Department of the Interior to help pave the way for oil and gas leaks. For those without resources, it is often a different story. Recipients of Federal housing assistance, for example, are wondering what their status might be in the next month. FBI agents are worried about the effect the shutdown will have on active investigations. Air traffic controllers, FAA inspectors, and TSA workers are working long hours to keep flights on time and safe, but the cost to them and their Agencies will stretch years into the future. Transit agencies, unable to draw down needed Federal capital and operating funding, are also feeling the pinch, which could affect service and safety down the line. We have seen this coming. That is why Democrats have been pleading with the majority leader for weeks to allow a vote on the funding bills that Senate Republicans wrote last year so we can reopen the government. These measures have broad bipartisan support. In fact, the leader voted for each of them, but for weeks, the majority leader refused to allow a vote on these and other bills, saying the Senate will not waste floor time on show votes, on bills he believes the President will not sign. By his definition, he can only bring up bills that can pass the House, earn 60 votes in the Senate, and get the President's signature. As the leader knows, when there is a veto-proof majority--as there has been in the Senate on these very bills to fund the government--the President is, quite frankly, irrelevant. Here is what the record shows: Last year, the Senate passed the Agriculture appropriations bill 92 to 6. We passed the Interior appropriations bill 92 to 6. We passed the Financial Services-General Government appropriations bill 92 to 6. We passed the Transportation- HUD appropriations bill 92 to 6. Although they didn't come to the floor, the Appropriations Committee passed the Commerce-Justice-Science bill and the State-Foreign Operations bill unanimously. As for the Department of Homeland Security, we passed a continuing resolution in the Senate unanimously last year to keep the Department funded at least temporarily. There is no reason we can't pass that measure again and start paying our coastguardsmen and other DHS personnel. What cannot pass is President Trump's demand for billions and billions to build hundreds of miles of ineffective wall through places where it is unwarranted. Don't take my word for it. Listen to Congressman Will Hurd, a Texas Republican, who represents a district he says includes 820 miles of the roughly 1,900-mile border with Mexico. Congressman Hurd has called the wall ``the most expensive and least effective way to secure the border.'' He is correct, and MIT engineers and other experts have estimated this wall will cost well north of $30-plus billion. Democrats want to focus on border security infrastructure but the improvements of greatest need, including ports of entry and more effective technology to detect illegal border crossings and drug smuggling. Once the government is open, there is room for debate on how best to improve border security and even on longstanding immigration matters. It will not be easy. First, the President's call for a wall is as political as the day is long. He is focused on motivating the roughly 30 percent of Americans who think keeping the government shut down is a good thing. Second, negotiating with this President has proved a difficult job, even for members of his own party because he has a hard time keeping his end of the bargain. In December, when Republicans controlled both the House and Senate, the Senate unanimously passed a bipartisan deal, sponsored by the majority leader, to keep the government funded until the beginning of February. The clear understanding was that the President, as communicated by Vice President Pence, would sign the legislation, but, within hours, the President scuttled the agreement. Going back to March 2018, the President nearly vetoed the Republican Omnibus appropriations bill that was based on funding levels he had already agreed to. As far as funding for border security, the President changes his demands constantly. First, Mexico was going to pay for the President's border wall. Last February, he asked taxpayers for $1.6 billion. Then it became $5 billion. Now it is $5.7 billion. How is it possible to make a deal with, frankly, such an unreliable party? Here is one other point, and it goes beyond President Trump. If Congress capitulates to his demands because he has shut down the government, he will be emboldened to use the same tactic again and again and again. If he succeeds, then every President who follows will feel justified in using the same ploy. Rather than ending one shutdown, we will be inviting more in the future. The only choice we have in Congress is to pass the bills we know have overwhelming bipartisan support and reopen the government with or without the President's signature. Tomorrow the majority leader will be asking the Senate to surrender to the President's cynical demands for wall funding. That proposal is a dead letter purposely filled with poison pills: It will not get 60 votes in the Senate and will not pass the House. It fails the very test the majority leader has been saying must be met. It is, by his own definition, a show vote. As an alternative, the Senate will have the opportunity to vote again on the majority leader's proposal from last December, which would reopen the government through February 8. Added to that measure will be much needed disaster assistance. It will be interesting to see if the Senate Republicans will support or oppose this measure, which is essentially one they wrote. I hope they will take yes for an answer and vote with all of us to reopen the government and to begin serious, thoughtful, and principled discussions on ways we can improve borders and many other topics. I yield the floor.

Mr. REED

Mr. REED. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Dimitrios Meritis, a fellow in my office, be granted privileges of the floor for this session of Congress.

Mr. REED

Mr. REED. Mr. President, I rise to discuss President Trump's ongoing shutdown of the Federal Government--how we got here, the impact on the people of my State, and how we can make some progress. It is past time for the President to stop holding the American people for ransom through this government shutdown. It is past time to stop the misinformation campaign and to stop making unwarranted demands for the ill use of American taxpayers' dollars. The President needs to open the government. The Senate did its work on the budget. We have bipartisan, compromise bills that are ready for the President's signature. Chairman Collins and I worked together, on a bipartisan basis, to develop the fiscal year 2019 Transportation-HUD bill, which was reported out of committee unanimously. Our bill was then approved by the full Senate as part of a package that included three other bipartisan appropriations bills-- Agriculture, Financial Services, and the Interior. Together, these bills passed by a veto-proof margin of 92 to 6. I am very proud of the work that Chairman Collins did and that I was able to assist with during this process to provide an additional $10 billion to rebuild our roads, our bridges, and our airports and to develop new affordable housing opportunities to more than 5 million low-income Americans who strive to make ends meet. These investments will grow our economy, spur job creation, and improve communities across America. The T-HUD bill--on an issue that both Chairman Collins and I care deeply about--will continue to make a major commitment to address homelessness among youth, veterans, and survivors of domestic violence. We are making real progress through the HUD-VASH Program, which has brought down homelessness among veterans by 49 percent since 2010 and is helping 64 communities in 3 States effectively end homelessness among veterans. In September, a Senate-House conference committee that I served on had essentially reached an agreement on a final version of these four bills. They could have been passed and signed into law by the start of the fiscal year last October 1. It would have been a victory for the American people--both for the smart investments these bills would make and for the restoration of good government and regular order, which Chairman Shelby and Vice Chairman Leahy have both made it a priority to achieve. Instead, a final agreement was slow-walked and stalled by the House leadership and then the White House in order to give the President greater leverage for the shutdown he had been angling for over many months. Here we are, 3 months into the fiscal year and 3 weeks into a shutdown, and 800,000 Federal employees have either been furloughed or forced to work without pay. Thousands of Federal contract employees are also out of work and may never be compensated. Trash is piling up at national parks, and damage is being reported. Employers can't access the government's E-Verify system to assure that they are hiring legal residents. Soon, the shutdown may prevent HUD from renewing project- based rental agreements. Press reports indicate that the shutdown is causing States to scale back in awarding highway and transit contracts. Starting as soon as this Friday, many Federal district courts will start feeling the Federal shutdown pinch more acutely, with just skeleton crews or just a few people working without pay, making it harder for Americans and businesses to get their day in court. Like everyone else, Federal employees--from Coast Guard officers and enlisted personnel to FBI agents, to air traffic controllers--have rent, mortgages, student loans, childcare, and healthcare bills to pay. Many work paycheck to paycheck. The President has said that he is willing to continue this shutdown for months or even years without a care about the effect it will have on their lives. Indeed, during his speech last night, the President didn't even mention these Federal employees. In Congress, we hear their stories. On Monday, air traffic controllers from T.F. Green Airport visited my office. They explained that this shutdown not only creates financial hardships for them, it also clogs the pipeline for the hiring and training of new controllers who are desperately needed to replace those who are eligible for retirement. I am hearing from other constituents too. A USDA meat inspector from Chepachet, RI, sent me an email over the holidays saying: I'm one of the Federal employees that will be impacted by the government shutdown/impasse. . . . I'm required to report to work without pay for the duration. I have 3 children under 5 and a stay-at-home husband, with no contingency plan for lack of pay, especially during the holiday season. I realize it's Christmas, and you all have families too. The holidays are stressful enough without additional financial stress. I hope the President will act and reopen the Department of Agriculture, the FDA, and other Agencies that keep our food and medicine safe. A Coast Guard lieutenant from Westerly, RI, also wrote me to say: I respectfully implore you to represent the needs and values of servicemembers such as myself, as well as the hard- working Coast Guard civilians who work alongside me. During the shutdown, our missions are stunted and our dedication is disrespected. As the only household income and as I continue to fulfill my commitment to active duty service, my ability to meet financial obligations for myself and my two young children is at great risk if the shutdown continues. Likewise, the government is not living up to its end of the contract made with my crew of both active duty and civilian members. Please share this plea with your fellow Congress members. Lieutenant, thank you for your service and for the additional sacrifice you and your colleagues are making today. As we think about border security, let's remember the important job the Coast Guard is doing to protect our border, particularly to prevent illegal drugs from entering the United States. In 2017 alone, the Coast Guard seized illegal drugs valued at $6.6 billion wholesale and detained 708 suspected smugglers for prosecution. So it is interesting to have the President talk about drug smugglers coming across our Mexican border while the Coast Guard is out there, unpaid, protecting us on all of the seas and oceans that abut the United States. It is not just Federal employees. An executive at a small shipyard in North Kingstown, RI, wrote to me this week to say: We do a great deal of work for the U.S. Coast Guard, and for the last three weeks, we have not been paid. We currently have about a half a million dollars due with an additional $200,000 going in for review and payment in the next week or so. This situation is beginning to hinder our ability to pay our vendors, and it's created a cash flow deficiency that, if not resolved soon, will be difficult and costly to manage. Please feel free to share this message with whoever needs to hear about this. This is a small business in Rhode Island, repairing ships for our Coast Guard, that is facing financial distress--in fact, perhaps, disaster. Those are the people who are being harmed by this shutdown. Certainly, I hear this message, and I know my colleagues are listening, but for whatever reason, the President doesn't seem to be listening. So how does this get resolved? Democrats have offered several paths forward, but now the President--the person who caused this shutdown, who proudly declared on television he would take full credit for it-- needs to commit to reopening the government without precondition. I know that many people say: Why can't you just make a deal with the President? Unfortunately, the President can't stick to basic facts, numbers, or a bargain. Originally, Mexico was going to pay for his border wall. Then he decided that American taxpayers should pay for it, so he asked Congress for $1.6 billion to build 65 miles of wall. Last Sunday, his request became $5.7 billion for more than 230 miles of wall. By Monday, he was considering declaring a national emergency and using national defense dollars without congressional approval. To the idea that the President would use defense dollars to build a border wall, let me say that his proposed wall has no core defense function. We are not at war with Mexico. In fact, the Pentagon's most recent national defense strategy doesn't mention the southern border as a national defense priority. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has billions of dollars in infrastructure backlogs, ranging from military construction projects for new missions to deferred maintenance in facilities sustainment, restoration, and modernization. There is no credible argument that a border wall takes priority over any of these. Of course, the President doesn't have a real plan for building the border wall. In July, the Government Accountability Office warned that the Trump administration's approach increased risks that the wall--in their words--``will cost more than projected, take longer than planned, or not fully perform as expected.'' Is there any wonder congressional GOP leaders rejected his wall when they controlled every branch of government in the last 2 years? The President has not been honest with the American people. He hasn't even been straight with members of his administration or Members of his own party in Congress, who are often hung out to dry. In fact, 2 days before the shutdown, the then-Senate majority whip told CNN, after a meeting with Vice President Pence, that the President would sign a clean continuing resolution to keep the government open until after Christmas. Less than 24 hours later, that position was reversed by a Presidential tweet. Even when the President makes a deal, he has trouble keeping it, especially when he is under criticism from rightwing talk radio and TV personalities. After negotiating overall funding levels for defense and nondefense spending last year, the President nearly vetoed the final 2018 Omnibus appropriations bill because he was criticized for the size and scope of the bill. Secretary Mattis had to be summoned to the White House to explain how important the bill was to the Pentagon before the President grudgingly agreed to sign it. Now there is no Secretary Mattis or anyone of his stature to give the President good counsel. If the President remains implacable about his wall, it will be up to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to join with Democrats to pass the bipartisan bills we have already agreed on together and reopen the government. I hope they do so, and soon, as the lives of our constituents and the health and businesses of our States are at stake. The answer we have to give is not to the President. The answer is to that young woman working every day without pay to protect the American public by inspecting foods that we eat. The answer we have to give is to that young Coast Guard officer who is working every day, trying to pay for and to afford things for a young family without being paid. The only answer we can give them is that we are opening up this government immediately. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. REED

Mr. REED. Mr. President, today I am once again introducing, along with my colleagues Senator Whitehouse, Senator Blumenthal, and Senator Murphy, legislation to designate river segments within the Wood- Pawcatuck watershed as part of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System. Following more than three years of intense study, this legislation would formally recognize the recreational, natural, and historical qualities of portions of the Beaver, Chipuxet, Green Fall-Ashaway, Pawcatuck, Queen-Usquepaugh, Shunock, and Wood Rivers that flow through Rhode Island and Connecticut while providing access to Federal resources and promoting strong partnerships for their restoration and protection. The Wood-Pawcatuck watershed is a National treasure that not only holds natural and scenic value, but also is an important economic driver for the area. Indeed, the 12 local river communities experience direct economic benefits from their proximity to these rivers through increased recreation and tourism. The watershed provides many opportunities for visitors to explore history and experience nature, including viewing early industrial mill ruins, trout fishing, bird watching, and kayaking. I have long been a supporter of protecting and restoring these special rivers, which is why I sponsored the Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Protection Act in 2013. The process that was initiated by that law has been a critical tool for bringing together stakeholders from Rhode Island and Connecticut including representatives from State agencies, local governments, and conservation groups in order to develop a collaborative path forward. The resulting Stewardship Plan, which has been formally adopted by the study committee and is supported by all twelve local river communities, builds upon currently existing efforts to preserve and manage the river ecosystems while also considering what steps will need to be taken collectively in the future in order to protect them. I would like to commend Representatives Langevin, Cicilline, and Courtney for again introducing companion legislation. In October 2018 we commemorated the 50th anniversary of the landmark Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and I am proud that after all these years we are continuing our work to protect such extraordinary places. I look forward to working with all of my colleagues to pass this legislation so that we can preserve the rivers of the Wood-Pawcatuck watershed for the enjoyment of current and future generations.

Mr. REED

Mr. REED. Mr. President, today I am once again introducing, along with my colleagues Senator Whitehouse, Senator Blumenthal, and Senator Murphy, legislation to designate river segments within the Wood- Pawcatuck watershed as part of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System. Following more than three years of intense study, this legislation would formally recognize the recreational, natural, and historical qualities of portions of the Beaver, Chipuxet, Green Fall-Ashaway, Pawcatuck, Queen-Usquepaugh, Shunock, and Wood Rivers that flow through Rhode Island and Connecticut while providing access to Federal resources and promoting strong partnerships for their restoration and protection. The Wood-Pawcatuck watershed is a National treasure that not only holds natural and scenic value, but also is an important economic driver for the area. Indeed, the 12 local river communities experience direct economic benefits from their proximity to these rivers through increased recreation and tourism. The watershed provides many opportunities for visitors to explore history and experience nature, including viewing early industrial mill ruins, trout fishing, bird watching, and kayaking. I have long been a supporter of protecting and restoring these special rivers, which is why I sponsored the Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Protection Act in 2013. The process that was initiated by that law has been a critical tool for bringing together stakeholders from Rhode Island and Connecticut including representatives from State agencies, local governments, and conservation groups in order to develop a collaborative path forward. The resulting Stewardship Plan, which has been formally adopted by the study committee and is supported by all twelve local river communities, builds upon currently existing efforts to preserve and manage the river ecosystems while also considering what steps will need to be taken collectively in the future in order to protect them. I would like to commend Representatives Langevin, Cicilline, and Courtney for again introducing companion legislation. In October 2018 we commemorated the 50th anniversary of the landmark Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and I am proud that after all these years we are continuing our work to protect such extraordinary places. I look forward to working with all of my colleagues to pass this legislation so that we can preserve the rivers of the Wood-Pawcatuck watershed for the enjoyment of current and future generations.

Mr. REED

Mr. REED. Mr. President, I want to take a moment to salute my colleagues who are departing the Senate at the conclusion of the 115th Congress: Bob Corker of Tennessee, Jeff Flake of Arizona, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Dean Heller of Nevada, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Bill Nelson of Florida, and Jon Kyl of Arizona. All of these Members have dedicated themselves to serving their constituents, their States, and our country. The institution of the Senate and the Nation as a whole are stronger because of their service and commitment. I have been privileged to serve with each and every one of them and want to spend a few moments thanking each of them for the wisdom and experience they brought to their work and for their friendship. Bob Corker and I worked on many foreign policy matters together, given my role as ranking member on the Armed Services Committee and his as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. I have appreciated Bob's willingness to reach across the aisle in an attempt to remove barriers to gaining bipartisan cooperation on bills and other policy matters. I also appreciate how much Bob was willing to speak his mind and stand up to administrations of his party and of my party over the last several years, particularly with respect to his very astute analysis of the situation with Russia and other major issues confronting the United States today. He has long focused on international development and human rights, causes I have been glad to support alongside him, including a joint resolution, Supporting a Diplomatic Solution in Yemen and Condemning the Murder of Jamal Khashoggi; for promoting economic growth in developing countries through U.S. business investment in the recently enacted BUILD Act; and consistently fighting to end modern slavery. We also served together on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. Here, too, he spent his time reaching across the aisle, trying to find constructive solutions, and informing our work on issues ranging from financial system reforms to housing finance. We will miss his bipartisan spirit, and I wish Bob only the best as he leaves the Senate. I have also had the privilege and pleasure to join with Jeff Flake in many moments; last week, we were at an event together honoring the late Senator John McCain. He reminisced about the times he worked with John on key policies that aimed to put our country over party politics. He worked hard to resolve tough issues like immigration reform and protecting the special counsel investigation, and his preferred route to addressing these challenges was not to increase the heated rhetoric but to turn down the volume of the debate, so all sides could be heard and so the Senate could try to move forward in a rational and bipartisan way. Just as with Bob Corker, Jeff's approach will be missed in this body. I hope others on both sides of the aisle will recognize what they have done and take up their mantle. Orrin Hatch has long served the people of Utah with distinction as chairman of three committees: Finance, Judiciary and what was once called the Labor Committee but is now the HELP Committee. He worked across the aisle to pass landmark laws, often with his friend Senator Ted Kennedy. He was instrumental in passing critical laws, like expanding access to healthcare for children through the CHIP program and providing help to those suffering with HIV/AIDS through the Ryan White CARE Act. I was pleased to have the opportunity to work with him in 2005, 2010, and 2015 to reauthorize the Stem Cell Therapeutic and Research Act, to build upon and improve the National Marrow Donor Program and the National Cord Blood Inventory to better treat diseases and expand access to lifesaving therapies. Most recently, he helped enact the Music Modernization Act, which I know meant a lot to him, given his own musical interests and talents. He ends his service here as the Senate's President pro tempore. I wish him health and happiness in his retirement. I think his retirement will be just as active as his days in the U.S. Senate, given his personality and also given his determination to serve wherever he is. Heidi Heitkamp, as she put it ``beat the odds'' to get here. A breast cancer survivor, the lesson she learned from that experience is to use the time she has been given for ``good and noble purposes.'' She ``chose for good or for bad to come to the United States Senate'' and has served a noble purpose with noble action. We are so grateful that she did. Heidi has been a tireless champion of North Dakota throughout her time in the Senate. She worked hard to advance opportunities for Native Americans and veterans, to boost funding for flood protection, and to secure the northern border, to name just a few. She and I worked together on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. Most recently, I was particularly appreciative of her insight on proxy access and her support for my legislation on this matter, S. 3614, the Corporate Governance Fairness Act. Heidi has also been a relentless advocate for a functioning Export- Import Bank, an issue critical to many North Dakotans. Her voice and insight will be missed on this issue and so many others that come before the banking committee. In addition, over the last 2 years, Heidi has taken on the issue of maternal mortality rates in our country. More women in the United States die from pregnancy-related complications than in most developed nations, and the number is increasing. This has impacted so many families in North Dakota and across the country, and Heidi has worked across the aisle to put forth solutions. In the coming days, we expect President Trump to sign into law her legislation, which I was privileged to cosponsor, to help address this issue. I salute her and wish her the best. Dean Heller and I worked together with a great deal of energy and commitment when both of our States and our Nation were in deep crisis in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Nevada and Rhode Island took turns having the sad distinction of the highest unemployment levels in the country. We worked to ensure extensions of emergency unemployment assistance in order to provide relief to Americans who lost their jobs through no fault of their own. Our work together was of great importance, and I wish him the best in all of his future endeavors. I want to turn my attention to three Members I had the privilege to work with and serve with on the Armed Services Committee. Joe Donnelly has been the ranking member of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee. He chose this position because of the Navy's installation in Indiana called the Naval Surface Warfare Center--Crane. This installation serves as the primary engineering center for the Navy's Strategic Systems Program, which manages our fleet of ballistic missile weapons systems. I had the chance to join Joe on a visit, and I was most impressed with their capabilities but more impressed with his tireless efforts to ensure that this facility--and indeed all of Indiana--had the very best. In addition to ensuring our men and women in uniform have the resources and tools they need--like those manufactured in Crane--Joe has always been concerned about caring for veterans and is a well-known advocate for suicide prevention programs. Indeed, it was his legislation, more than any others, that helped establish a program to assist veterans and to assist Active-Duty personnel who are coping with suicidal tendencies. That was something Joe did with great passion and great commitment and great success. Joe assumed the seat that Senator Richard Lugar previously held and carried on the legacy of Senator Lugar's Cooperative Threat Reduction Program into the future, which today continues to secure stocks of nuclear, chemical, and biological agents around the world. His work on reducing stockpiles of these dangerous weapons is a critical component of making the world safer for generations to come. Joe Donnelly has done great work here, and I wish him well. He is a gentleman and someone I admire and respect immensely. I have also been extremely proud to serve alongside Claire McCaskill on the Armed Services Committee. Claire has been a leader of the Senate effort to prevent and respond to sexual assault in our military. She was a principal cosponsor of the Victims Protection Act, a bipartisan package of reforms that represent a substantial leap forward in preventing and responding to sexual assaults in the military. It is a testament to Claire's determination and hard work that these laws are in place, but, also, she was the first to recognize that our work is not done. She was continually involved in ensuring that whatever legislative initiatives we passed were actually implemented. That work is ongoing, and Claire's efforts have given us a strong foundation to continue those efforts. In addition to the Victims Protection Act, Claire led the effort to reform management of Arlington National Cemetery to address significant problems with the burials of servicemembers and helped to establish a single agency responsible for POW-MIA recovery and accounting efforts. Claire has also worked tirelessly to end wasteful wartime contracting practices, following in the footsteps of another Missouri Senator and one of her political heroes, President Harry S. Truman. Claire has been a steadfast advocate for oversight throughout her career, and her work to root out waste and strengthen accountability has made a difference in how effectively the government works for the American people. Again, I wish her well in the future and know it will be a future that is also committed to service to others. Bill Nelson has been a close and valued colleague for many years in the Armed Services Committee. He is the only Senator to have flown in space and, as a result, has been our acknowledged expert, to both Republicans and Democrats, on matters pertaining to space. His knowledge of military and civilian space issues was particularly important during our debate on replacing the Russian RD-180 rocket engine, which is used in a number of national security launches, with a U.S. variant. That debate, along with his leadership on NASA reauthorization legislation, has introduced competition for space launch to a wide array of new companies. As a nation, we are much better off for his efforts. Because of Senator Nelson's leadership, we now have a vibrant and entrepreneurial launch and satellite industry that reaches well outside the traditional national security realm and is lowering the cost of access to space. Recently, he took on the cyber mission as the ranking member on the Cybersecurity Subcommittee. His steady hand was integral in guiding this new subcommittee during a time in which we face countless cyber threats. We will miss his knowledge and leadership as we debate pressing issues of our national security in the next Congress and Congresses to come. He has also done able work as the lead Democrat on the Commerce Committee, fighting for consumers. And, as a strong advocate for stricter gun control legislation, we worked together on the 3D Printed Gun Safety Act of 2018 and on the Extreme Risk Protection Order and Violence Prevention Act. I also want to thank him for his leadership in enacting the Military Lending Act in 2006, which caps the annual interest rate for an extension of consumer credit to a servicemember or his or her dependents at 36 percent. Because of his efforts, servicemembers and their families have strong consumer protections that defend them against unscrupulous lenders who unpatriotically prey upon them while they are selflessly and courageously defending our Nation. He has done a remarkable job because this legislation truly does protect our protectors--those men and women who serve overseas--so they are not taken advantage of here, back at home. I enjoyed our time serving together and wish him the best as he goes forward. He is a great American. Finally, I would like to recognize Senator Jon Kyl. I thank Jon for his willingness to serve again following the passing of Senator John McCain. I had the privilege of serving with him in his prior stint in this body. He served for many years in Republican leadership, including as minority whip. He was also a longstanding member of the Finance Committee. I was not on this committee, but given my advocacy for extending unemployment insurance--for which there was a critical need at the time--I did have a chance to serve with him on the Conference Committee for the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012. It was a pleasure to serve with him. He is a man of principle, a man of great decency and dignity, someone who has honored the Senate with his service, honored Arizona with his service, and makes us all very proud to know him. It was indeed a pleasure to serve, all too briefly, with him as a member of the Armed Services Committee. I would like to thank him for his service and wish him well as he leaves this body once more. To all my colleagues, I give them my greatest respect and admiration for their service to their States, to the Senate, and to the United States of America. I yield the floor.

Mr. REED

Mr. REED. Mr. President, I rise to express my concern about the continued violence and humanitarian crisis in Yemen and to share my views on the resolution that is currently before us. The conflict in Yemen has persisted for far too long. I strongly support the efforts of the U.N. Special Envoy for Yemen, Martin Griffiths, to bring the internationally recognized Government of Yemen and the Houthis to the negotiating table in the near future, with the goal of reaching a sustainable political solution. I also welcome the call by Secretary Mattis and others for a cease-fire that would provide space for such negotiations to occur while also providing a measure of relief to the Yemeni population that has suffered so horrifically during this conflict. According to the United Nations, half of Yemen's population-- approximately 14 million people--are on the brink of famine and entirely reliant on external aid for their own survival. These challenges have been exacerbated by mass displacement in much of the country and recent fighting in the vicinity of Hudaydah--one of Yemen's only functioning ports through which approximately 70 percent of Yemen's food and other supplies enter the country. Even when food is available for purchase, reports indicate that currency inflation has made it too expensive for most Yemenis to afford. More must be done by both the coalition and the Houthis to facilitate the flow of humanitarian aid into and throughout Yemen. I also have significant concerns about persistent reports of civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure in Yemen caused by both the Houthis and the coalition of Armed Forces led primarily by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, UAE. According to the United Nations, there have been nearly 17,000 documented civilian casualties since the beginning of the conflict, although that number is likely much higher given the difficulty of investigating such incidents in a conflict zone. Most of these casualties have been the result of airstrikes led by the Saudi-led coalition. Unfortunately, well-intentioned efforts by the United States to help the coalition avoid civilian casualties have not produced sufficient results. Far too many of the strikes by the coalition have killed or injured civilians and resulted in the destruction of infrastructure needed to provide basic services to the population, thereby exacerbating the humanitarian crisis. Secretary Pompeo's September certification that the coalition is taking demonstrable action--in his words--to reduce the risk to civilians does not seem to be borne out by the facts on the ground. According to reports, civilian casualty incidents increased dramatically over the summer. Indeed, Secretary Pompeo's own certification acknowledged that ``recent civilian casualty incidents indicate insufficient implementation reforms and targeting processes'' and ``investigations have not yielded accountability measures'' into the behavior of coalition pilots flying missions into Yemen. Any U.S. support to the Saudi-led coalition needs to be considered in a thoughtful and deliberate manner. From a policy perspective, we should distinguish between assistance that is provided for defensive or noncombat purposes and that which could be used to enable offensive military operations in the Yemeni civil war. I strongly support the recent announcement by Secretary of Defense Mattis that the U.S. would no longer provide aerial refueling support to the Saudi-led coalition-- an outcome I have long advocated for. Earlier this year, I led an effort with Senator Blumenthal and a number of other colleagues to raise concern about the apparent inability of the Department of Defense to account for the required reimbursements from members of the Saudi-led coalition for aerial refueling support provided by the United States. We were informed yesterday afternoon that, as a result of our inquiry, the Department has found errors in accounting and will now be seeking full reimbursement from Saudi Arabia and UAE for aerial refueling support provided from March 2015 through September of this year--an action that is expected to recover millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer funds. Going forward, I believe that any U.S. assistance to members of the Saudi-led coalition should be explicitly limited to the following objectives: first, enabling counterterrorism operations against al- Qaida and ISIS; second, defending the territorial integrity of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, including against ballistic missile and UAV threats; third, preserving freedom of navigation in the maritime environment around Yemen; and fourth, enhancing the training and professionalism of their armed forces, with a primary focus on the adherence to the law of armed conflict and the prevention of civilian casualties. With particular regard to defense against ballistic missile and UAV threats, the United States cannot be in the position of providing targeting information in Yemen that would be misused by Saudi or UAE forces either deliberately or through carelessness. I recently joined a bipartisan group of colleagues in introducing a bill that would advance these principles. Among other things, the bill would suspend offensive weapon sales to Saudi Arabia, prohibit a resumption of U.S. refueling of Saudi-led coalition aircraft, and require sanctions for persons blocking humanitarian access and those who are supporting the Houthis in Yemen. I believe these actions would contribute to a resolution of the conflict in Yemen by making the best use of the tools and leverage available to the United States. The United States can and should engage with the Saudi-led coalition if there is a possibility that we can help minimize collateral damage by providing them with training and advice on best practices. To date, such engagement by U.S. military personnel has resulted in the incorporation of a no-strike list into target development procedures, a cessation of the use of cluster munitions, and the formation of a joint assessment team to investigate strikes that result in collateral damage. These are positive steps, but it is clear that the coalition has not sufficiently minimized the impact of the war on Yemeni civilians, and more must be done. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE face a significant threat from Houthi rebels armed with ballistic missiles--apparently with the technical assistance of Iran. There have reportedly been dozens of such attacks against Saudi Arabia since the spring of 2015, including against numerous civilian targets. I support the right of our partners to defend themselves from these threats and believe that continued sharing of U.S. intelligence for strictly defensive purposes--not to be used as an excuse for offensive operations in Yemen--is appropriate. I continue to support U.S. engagement for the purposes and in accordance with the principles outlined above--activities that I do not believe conflict with the War Powers Resolution. The resolution before us would make clear that Congress does not support the introduction of U.S. forces into hostilities in Yemen absent an affirmative authorization for the use of military force. I commend my colleagues-- Senators Sanders, Murphy, and Lee--for their continued efforts to keep focus on the need to bring an end to the violence in Yemen. When we last considered this resolution 8 months ago, I was hopeful that a negotiated settlement to the conflict was attainable and expressed concern about the possibility of escalation. I also hoped that the principles I articulated above could be rigorously adhered to. Unfortunately, since that time, fighting in Yemen has continued to intensify, civilian casualty incidents have risen, and the humanitarian crisis has only worsened. The status quo cannot persist, and the Senate should take every opportunity to make its views clear. For that reason, I intend to support this resolution. Moreover, the administration must make it clear to both the Saudi-led coalition and the Houthis that there is no military solution to this conflict and that the time has come to reach a negotiated settlement. The conflict in Yemen has negatively impacted the strategic security interests of the Saudis, the Emiratis, and the United States. It has emboldened Iran and relieved pressure on al-Qaida and ISIS. Most importantly, the conflict has resulted in the largest humanitarian disaster facing the world in recent memory. It is time for this war to stop. It is also appropriate to reassess our relationship with Saudi Arabia in response to the brazen murder of Jamal Khashoggi and other violations of human rights. We must ensure that all individuals who played a role in directing, planning, and carrying out the murder are held accountable. Despite denials by the President, it is inconceivable to me that such an operation would be conducted without at least the awareness of Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman--if not in its planning, then certainty in its immediate aftermath. The Crown Prince effectively controls all levers of power in Saudi Arabia, and it is no coincidence that those who have been publicly identified as most directly responsible for the murder included his closest adviser and numerous members of the Saudi Royal Guard. If the Saudis are now being honest-- despite repeated denials and shifting explanations for the disappearance of Khashoggi--then they should voluntarily submit to an independent international investigation. President Trump should also publicly release a declassified assessment of our intelligence community with respect to what role Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman and other Saudi leaders had in the murder. Finally, the Senate should immediately take up and pass the bipartisan Saudi Arabia Accountability and Yemen Act of 2018, which is comprehensive legislation to ensure effective congressional oversight of U.S. policy toward Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and demand meaningful accountability for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. I yield the floor. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. REED

Mr. REED. I again want to thank my colleague Senator Whitehouse for his very eloquent words about a great American, Claiborne Pell. Just a final comment. If you ever want to feel truly beloved, embraced by constituents, respected and admired, do what I did several times--march in a parade with Claiborne Pell and pretend they cheer for you. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. REED. Mr. President, next week will mark what would have been the 100th birthday of my predecessor, Senator Claiborne de Borda Pell, who was born on November 22, 1918. This year, appropriately enough, the date falls on Thanksgiving. We lost Senator Pell nearly 9 years ago after a long struggle with Parkinson's disease, which robbed him of his mobility but not his spirit. He was sustained by the love of his wonderful family, especially his beloved wife, the late Nuala Pell. A person who dedicated his life to selfless service to Rhode Island and the Nation, Senator Pell would not want a showy commemoration of his centenary. He was not one to seek the limelight. Moreover, for him, his birthday--November 22--became a somber day for remembrance and mourning the loss of his dear friend, President John F. Kennedy. But at a time when differences seem more striking than our common cause and when there is a question of whether America's role in the world community should be guided solely by narrowly defined self- interest or by our democratic ideals, it is helpful for us to recall the example and standard Senator Pell set--both his accomplishments and the civility he maintained throughout his career. He was born into a family of great wealth and privilege, yet Claiborne Pell never exhibited a sense of entitlement. At a defining moment in the history of our country and a defining moment in his life, Claiborne Pell demonstrated that privilege and wealth was not a way to avoid the rigors of life. Rather, for him, they offered the opportunity and responsibility to meet the challenges of the times with vigor and wisdom and optimism. As World War II approached, Claiborne Pell, with family connections, poor eyesight, and a high draft number, could have easily secured a sinecure, a safe posting to ride out the war. Instead, before Pearl Harbor, he decided on his own to enlist in the Coast Guard and eventually sailed the dangerous North Atlantic convoy runs. Significantly, Claiborne chose to enlist not as an officer but as a seaman so that he could get a chance at sea duty. The complete lack of regard for status or pretense, which he showed in his World War II service, would continue to mark his public service and endear him to generations of Rhode Islanders. For 36 years, Claiborne Pell did not simply represent Rhode Island in the U.S. Senate; he represented the ideal of what a public servant should be. He said that his motto or statement of purpose was to ``translate ideas into action and help people.'' And that is what he did. One hundred years after his birth and 58 years after his first election to the Senate, millions of Americans continued to be helped by his ideas translated into action. He believed that government had a critical role in providing opportunity, particularly the opportunity for a good education for every American, and he knew that there were unbounded horizons for the initiative, invention, and innovation of these well-educated sons and daughters of America. Truly, they would continue and enhance the great endeavor that is America. He authored the legislation that established the Basic Education Opportunity grant, now known as the Pell grant. Today, roughly 7.5 million students rely on Pell grants to help pay for college. He wrote the legislation that created the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. To this day, these agencies support artistic, educational, and cultural programming in communities large and small across the Nation, fulfilling Senator Pell's commitment to strengthening and preserving our national cultural heritage for all Americans. He led the effort to establish the Institute of Museum and Library Services, helping libraries and museums across the Nation transform their communities through access to information and opportunities for lifelong learning. According to the Institute, people visited libraries over 1.3 billion times in 2015, and 55 million student groups visit museums each year. The vision he articulated in the early 1960s for high-quality passenger rail service connecting the major population centers on the east coast into a megalopolis led to the creation of Amtrak and the Northeast Corridor. Decades later, it is interesting to see not only how much of his vision has been achieved but also how much of his vision is now reflected in ideas like Elon Musk's ``hyperloop.'' Touched by the death of two members of his staff who were killed by drunk drivers, Senator Pell authored the first Federal anti-drunk driving bill in 1976--4 years before the founding of advocacy group MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Senator Pell's legislation became the model for Federal policy efforts to combat impaired driving by giving the States strong incentives to toughen their laws. Senator Pell was also deeply committed to America's role in securing world peace. His notion of a powerful America leading the world--not standing apart from it--and his notion that our values, our system, and our commitment to human decency would prevail in the face of totalitarianism were wisdom of the ages. In his service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he espoused those views, seeking to remind us that our destiny would take us far beyond what simply a military operation or our economic power might because of our ideals and commitment to creating a world community. Senator Pell's approach to legislating was unfailingly kind and civil. In his farewell speech to the Senate, he laid out his guiding rules. In his words: ``First, never respond to an adversary in ad hominem terms.'' In his six campaigns for the U.S. Senate, Claiborne Pell never ran a negative ad or attacked his opponent personally. Rhode Islanders rewarded him with an average vote of more than 60 percent for each of his elections. ``Second, always let the other fellow have your way.'' For Senator Pell, winning an ally to achieve a legislative victory was more valuable than getting exclusive credit. ``Third, sometimes half a loaf can feed an army.'' He lived by those rules, but he feared that our politics and our media were pulling us in the opposite direction. That is why he used his farewell speech to urge us to stay true to a practice of politics worthy of our Democratic tradition, saying: If I could have one wish for the future of our country in the new millennium, it would be that we not abandon the traditional norms of behavior that are the underpinning of our democratic system. Comity and civility, transcending differences of party and ideology, have always been crucial elements in making Government an effective and constructive instrument of public will. But in times such as these, when there is fundamental disagreement about the role of Government, it is all the more essential that we preserve the spirit of civil discourse. Those words ring very true and relevant today as they did when he gave them in his farewell address. Following in Senator Pell's footsteps, I am one who is in awe of his presence and accomplishments and feel a deep responsibility to continuing his legacy. He forged an enduring bond with the people of Rhode Island. He put ideas into action to help people. He was always civil and ready to find common ground. As we celebrate Senator Pell's 100th birthday, let's take inspiration from his spirit of service and collegiality. Let's translate ideas into action and help people. Mr. President, I know my colleague Senator Whitehouse is here. Mr. Whitehouse is someone who knew Senator Pell well, and he continues in the image and spirit of Senator Pell by being someone who brings his great talents and skills to serve the people of Rhode Island and the Nation with dignity, civility, and great energy. With that, Mr. President, I would like to yield to my colleague Senator Whitehouse.

Mr. REED

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

Mr. REED

Mr. REED. Mr. President, today I am joined by Senators Perdue, Heitkamp, Tillis, and Jones in introducing the bipartisan Corporate Governance Fairness Act to ensure investors can continue to rely with confidence on the advice of proxy advisory firms by requiring the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to regulate all major proxy advisory firms under the Investment Advisers Act (IAA). This advice is critical for investors as they decide how to vote their shares on important corporate governance matters, such as director elections or whether to sell the company. Indeed, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters has stated that the ``independence of the research provided by proxy advisors is a critical element of our right, as shareholders, to hold the board of directors accountable and to cast informed proxy votes on corporate governance and proxy voting policies.'' According to the Council of Institutional Investors, ``ensuring unencumbered shareholder access to independent research is a crucial underpinning of effective corporate governance.'' And the National Association of State Treasurers has emphasized the need to ``maintain the integrity and efficacy of the relationship between institutional investors and proxy advisory firms.'' In short, proxy advisory firms are clearly an essential tool for investors. Given the importance that investors have placed on continued access to proxy advisory firms, it is critical that proxy advisory firms are appropriately regulated and held accountable, and this is the purpose of the bipartisan Corporate Governance Fairness Act. Under our legislation, all major proxy advisory firms would be required to register as investment advisers under the IAA, and therefore have a fiduciary duty to their clients. So as to not discourage new entrants into the proxy advisory business, our bill provides smaller proxy advisory firms the choice to voluntarily register under the IAA but does not require them to do so. The legislation also directs the SEC to conduct periodic examinations, which must include a serious review of the conflicts of interest policies of registered proxy advisory firms and whether firms knowingly made false statements to any of its clients. Lastly, our bill requires the SEC to consult with all relevant stakeholders and report back periodically to the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee with recommendations for any additional investor protections beyond continued access to proxy advisory firms so that investors have the tools to make informed investment decisions and exercise their rights as shareholders. In short, the Congressional intent of this legislation is to preserve the critical role played by proxy advisory firms and to hold them accountable to investors. I would like to thank Senators Perdue, Heitkamp, Tillis, and Jones for working with me in crafting this bipartisan legislation, which is supported by the Consumer Federation of America, Harvard Law School Securities Regulation Professor John Coates, who is also a member of the SEC Investor Advisory Committee, the New York Stock Exchange, and the Society for Corporate Governance. I urge all of our Senate colleagues to join us in working to pass the Corporate Governance Fairness Act.

Mr. REED

Mr. REED. Mr. President, today I am joined by Senators Perdue, Heitkamp, Tillis, and Jones in introducing the bipartisan Corporate Governance Fairness Act to ensure investors can continue to rely with confidence on the advice of proxy advisory firms by requiring the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to regulate all major proxy advisory firms under the Investment Advisers Act (IAA). This advice is critical for investors as they decide how to vote their shares on important corporate governance matters, such as director elections or whether to sell the company. Indeed, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters has stated that the ``independence of the research provided by proxy advisors is a critical element of our right, as shareholders, to hold the board of directors accountable and to cast informed proxy votes on corporate governance and proxy voting policies.'' According to the Council of Institutional Investors, ``ensuring unencumbered shareholder access to independent research is a crucial underpinning of effective corporate governance.'' And the National Association of State Treasurers has emphasized the need to ``maintain the integrity and efficacy of the relationship between institutional investors and proxy advisory firms.'' In short, proxy advisory firms are clearly an essential tool for investors. Given the importance that investors have placed on continued access to proxy advisory firms, it is critical that proxy advisory firms are appropriately regulated and held accountable, and this is the purpose of the bipartisan Corporate Governance Fairness Act. Under our legislation, all major proxy advisory firms would be required to register as investment advisers under the IAA, and therefore have a fiduciary duty to their clients. So as to not discourage new entrants into the proxy advisory business, our bill provides smaller proxy advisory firms the choice to voluntarily register under the IAA but does not require them to do so. The legislation also directs the SEC to conduct periodic examinations, which must include a serious review of the conflicts of interest policies of registered proxy advisory firms and whether firms knowingly made false statements to any of its clients. Lastly, our bill requires the SEC to consult with all relevant stakeholders and report back periodically to the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee with recommendations for any additional investor protections beyond continued access to proxy advisory firms so that investors have the tools to make informed investment decisions and exercise their rights as shareholders. In short, the Congressional intent of this legislation is to preserve the critical role played by proxy advisory firms and to hold them accountable to investors. I would like to thank Senators Perdue, Heitkamp, Tillis, and Jones for working with me in crafting this bipartisan legislation, which is supported by the Consumer Federation of America, Harvard Law School Securities Regulation Professor John Coates, who is also a member of the SEC Investor Advisory Committee, the New York Stock Exchange, and the Society for Corporate Governance. I urge all of our Senate colleagues to join us in working to pass the Corporate Governance Fairness Act.

Mr. REED

Mr. REED. Mr. President, today I rise to continue my series of speeches on Russian hybrid warfare and the threat it poses to our national security. Russian hybrid warfare occurs below the level of direct military conflict, yet it is no less a threat to our national security and the integrity of our democracy and our society. We must reframe our thinking to understand that these are attacks from a foreign adversary on our democratic institutions, our free markets, and our open society. We recently honored our fallen and observed the attacks of September 11, 2001. The 9/11 Commission Report, which looked into what happened after the attacks, assessed that one of our government's failures in preventing those attacks was a failure of imagination. Now, too, we have the Director of National Intelligence telling us that the ``system is blinking red,'' akin to the threats we received before 9/11. We must be focused on the current problem as a national security threat. This threat requires that the United States defend itself against hybrid attacks with the same level of commitment and resolve as we would against a military attack against our country. For far too long, we have failed to recognize that hybrid attacks are the new Russian form of warfare. As laid out in the Russian National Security Strategy of 2015, the Kremlin's approach to conflict includes weaponizing tools and resources from across government and society. The Russian strategy states: ``Interrelated political, military, military- technical, diplomatic, economic, informational, and other measures are being developed and implemented in order to ensure strategic deterrence and the prevention of armed conflicts.'' The Russian strategy describes the conventional and nonconventional arenas of warfare as the Kremlin envisions it and how Russia has utilized all of the tools of statecraft to engage an adversary without, in many cases, firing a shot. These different disciplines make up a Russian hybrid approach to confrontation below the threshold of direct- armed conflict, a method that has been developing and escalating since the earliest days of Putin's rise to power in Russia. The main tenets of the Kremlin's hybrid operations are these: information operations with cyber tools, which people commonly think of as hacking; propaganda and disinformation; manipulation of social media; and malign influence, which can be deployed through political, legal, or financial channels. A further characteristic of Russian hybrid warfare is denial and deception used to obscure its involvement. The Kremlin deploys more than one hybrid warfare tactic simultaneously to provide maximum effect. A look at the Russian hybrid warfare doctrine also illuminates that the Kremlin sees deterrence and prevention differently than we do. This is a critical point. We see deterrence as a way to avoid conflict. They are not merely using these tactics as deterrence or strategic prevention in the way we think about these conflicts. Instead, they are deploying these tactics aggressively but below the threshold of where they assess we will respond with conventional weapons. One such example was the hybrid warfare operations the Kremlin deployed in Crimea, including covert forces sometimes referred to as ``little green men'' and the use of coercive political tactics, including an illegitimate referendum. Now, previously I have addressed aspects of Russia's hybrid warfare operations against the United States dealing with tactics of financial malign influence and multiple hybrid tools they have deployed against our democratic elections. Today I will discuss another Russian tactic and its hybrid warfare arsenal: the use of assassination, politically motivated violence, intimidation, or detention to pursue the Kremlin's objectives. These tactics are sometimes referred to as dirty active measures. With dirty active measures, the immediate attack is deployed against an individual who is working counter to the Kremlin's strategic goals by challenging Putin's power base, exposing corruption, or unearthing hybrid warfare operations. But the damage of these hybrid warfare tactics goes well beyond the individual killed, hurt, threatened, or jailed by the Kremlin. These tactics cause chaos, fear, and instability to bystanders and have a deterrent effect, sending a chilling message to others that might seek to challenge the Kremlin's rule. Further, the reach with which Putin has deployed these weapons inside Russia, across Ukraine, Europe, and even in the United States instills fear that if the Kremlin wants to get rid of you, there is nowhere to hide. Like all aspects of Russian hybrid warfare, dirty active measures are part of a pattern of behavior that serve Russia's strategic interests. Putin's highest strategic objective is preserving his grip on power. He also seeks to operate unconstrained domestically and in the near abroad. Finally, Putin seeks for Russia to be seen equal to the United States and to regain the great power status it lost at the end of the Cold War. He knows he cannot effectively compete with the United States in conventional ways and win. Instead, he seeks to use tools from his hybrid warfare arsenal in order to divide us from our allies and partners in the West and weaken our democratic societies from within. The Putin regime has been engaged in a pattern of dirty active measures for more than a decade, and the tempo has only increased since he retook the Presidency in 2012. These tactics have increasing implications for the United States and allied national security. I want to address this tactic of dirty active measures because it has taken on greater urgency due to recent events. In particular, I am thinking of the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer, and his daughter on British soil and Putin's threat against Ambassador McFaul and other U.S. Government officials at the Helsinki Summit. These events may seem unrelated, but they are actually part of a pattern of malicious and threatening Russian behavior. Today, I will explain the connection and make recommendations for how we can deter and counter Russia's use of dirty active measures as part of its hybrid warfare operations below the level of military conflict. Dirty active measures have a long and sordid history in Russia and the Soviet Union, dating back to czarist times. For assassinations, poison was often the weapon of choice, including the attempted cyanide poisoning of Rasputin in 1916. In 1921, Lenin opened a poison laboratory to test methods to be used against political enemies named the ``special room,'' which was also known as the ``lab of death.'' At this lab, they developed the nerve agents known as novichoks, which were designed to be undetectable and were recently deployed against the Skirpals. These tactics were amplified under Stalin and featured killings by hired assassins, staged automobile accidents, and poisonings, used inside Russia and deployed abroad. Stalin notoriously said: Death solves all problems. No man, no problem. Given President Putin's background as a spy master, it should come as no surprise that Russia's use of dirty active measures have continued under his regime. Before becoming Prime Minister and President, Putin spent the majority of his career in the KGB, the state's security service, and its successor, the FSB. As Russian journalist Andrei Soldatov wrote, the KGB's ``main task was always to protect the interests of whoever currently resided in the Kremlin.'' In this system, loyalty and fidelity to the state is prized above all, and Putin's values were shaped by it. In 2005, Putin lamented that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. When he assumed power, he resurrected a system that reflected Soviet methods. He employed all of the instruments of the state, including the Parliament, the courts, and security services, to protect his power base and to allow him to pursue strategic objectives in the foreign arena unconstrained. Putin's use of hybrid warfare tactics of assassination, political violence, intimidation, and detention--the dirty active measures--are tenets of this system he created to cement his hold on power. Putin has also manipulated the Parliament and the court system to make and enforce laws that manufacture legal consent for tactics of dirty active measures. As opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who survived being twice poisoned, wrote recently in the Washington Post, ``in Vladimir Putin's Russia, laws are often passed with specific people in mind, whether to reward or punish.'' Notably, in July of 2006, the Russian Parliament gave President Putin permission to use Russian armed forces and security services to perpetrate extrajudicial killings abroad on people that Moscow accused of extremism. Companion legislation passed about the same time expanded the definition of extremism to include libelous statements about Putin's administration. This legislation effectively gave those who carry out dirty active measures immunity. In addition to the use of the legislative and legal mechanisms at their disposal, the Kremlin unleashes a barrage of propaganda against those targeted for dirty active measures. These information operations contribute to a climate of fear targeting both the individuals the Kremlin is trying to silence and the broader population. Propaganda campaigns are also deployed after the dirty active measure is carried out, in order to sow confusion and make people doubt whether Russia is culpable. Putin and his inner circle have drawn a distinct narrative, branding those who oppose the Kremlin as criminals, thus deeming them as deserving of punishment. They are often also accused of being part of the so-called ``fifth column,'' Russians that Putin defines as advancing foreign interests. Worse than criminals in Putin's mind are those the Kremlin viewed as having been loyal in the past but who are now working against the interest of the state. These people are branded as traitors, and as the New York Times reported last month, traitors hold a special status for Putin. Putin's disdain for traitors stems from the early days of the end of the Cold War, when dozens of former Soviet intelligence officers became defectors or informants for the West. According to the Times, ``Mr. Putin cannot speak of them without a lip curl of disgust. They are `beasts' and `swine.' Treachery, he told one interviewer, is the one thing he is incapable of forgiving. It could also, he said darkly, be bad for your health.'' Putin publicly threatened those considered traitors on multiple occasions. One of those episodes occurred in 2010. After a spy swap between Russia and the United States, which included the recently poisoned Skripal, Putin stated ominously: ``A person gives his whole life for his homeland, and then some . . . [blank] comes along and betrays such people. How will he be able to look into the eyes of his children, the pig? Whatever they got in exchange for it, those thirty pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them. Believe me.'' For Putin, labeling his political opponents in these stark terms helps to justify the dirty active measures deployed against these individuals. These tactics of dirty active measures have been used with impunity inside Russia to silence and intimidate Kremlin critics and preserve the system of power Putin created. They have been unleashed against journalists, opposition leaders, oligarchs, and others seen as betraying the system. A Senate Foreign Relations minority staff report from January detailed more than two dozen Kremlin critics who died under mysterious circumstances in Russia since Putin took power in 2000. The report separately compiled violent attacks and harassment on human rights activists and journalists. Russian opposition activists are also a target of dirty active measures inside Russia. One example was the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, a popular regional Governor and Deputy Prime Minister under Yeltsin, who became disenchanted with Putin's political system. He publicly exposed extensive corruption and covert use of Russian hybrid warfare tactics in Ukraine. Arkady Ostrovsky, a Moscow correspondent for the Economist, described the tactics of intimidation deployed against him, including that he was stigmatized as a ``national traitor'' and an ``American stooge.'' He was demonized on television and on the streets banners with Nemtsov's face were hung on building facades framed by the words ``fifth column--aliens among us.'' These threats were followed with Nemtsov being brazenly assassinated steps from the Kremlin. Nemtsov appears to have been killed for exposing corruption in Putin's inner circle and trying to serve as a constraint on his ability to conduct hybrid warfare operations in Ukraine. These acts were clearly seen as a threat to Putin's power and his ability to act with impunity. Attacks of dirty active measures inside Russia continue unabated. This April, Russian journalist Maxim Borodin fell to his death after investigating the Wagner paramilitary forces linked to a close Putin ally and Russian troll farm patron, Yevgeny Prigozhin. Three additional Russian journalists who were investigating Prigozhin-sponsored, Kremlin-linked military activities, particularly in the Central African Republic, were killed under suspicious circumstances in August. Just a few weeks ago, the publisher of a website that exposes Kremlin abuses in the criminal justice system fell ill from apparent poisoning. This attack occurred on the same day he expected to receive the results of an investigation he commissioned into the deaths of the journalists in the Central African Republic. As I have detailed here, these attacks are not officially linked back to the Kremlin, allowing for plausible deniability, but are part of a clear pattern of tactics deployed against those who work to expose activities that may hurt Putin's base of power. Putin has resorted to using dirty active measures beyond Russia's borders, which demonstrates the willingness of the Kremlin to use these tactics not only for domestic political purposes but also as part of its hybrid warfare operations to advance Russia's strategic interests against other countries. Similar to other tactics of hybrid warfare operations, Ukraine is usually where Russia deploys these tactics first, a testing ground for tools that may be deployed in the West at a later time. We see these tactics of dirty active measures deployed in Ukraine as far back as 2005, when the more Western-oriented Viktor Yushchencko was poisoned after he won the Presidency, beating Victor Yanukovych, the preferred pro-Russian candidate. The Kremlin continues to deploy dirty active measures, including assassination, in Ukraine with impunity. Last May, Denis Voronenkov, a former FSB colonel and a former Russian Parliament Member, was shot in the head on a crowded Kiev sidewalk in broad daylight. Voronenkov was once a close Putin ally who used his position to promote key Kremlin priorities, including, ironically, annexing Crimea. He fled to Ukraine in October of 2016 and began to criticize Putin's government. He was slated to provide testimony to Ukrainian authorities that would expose Kremlin deliberations prior to hybrid warfare operations against Ukraine. Forebodingly, a few days before his murder, he told the Washington Post: ``They say we are traitors in Russia.'' Again, the idea that he could be shot brazenly in broad daylight served as a warning to others who might want to expose hybrid warfare operations to think twice, and that they can't escape even if they leave Russia. Similar tactics were deployed against Montenegro as it considered and ultimately chose to join NATO in 2015 and 2016. The Kremlin saw the Montenegrin Government's decision to move closer to the West as a threat to its strategic interests, including Russia's ability to operate in Eastern Europe unconstrained. When several other hybrid warfare operations, including propaganda and information operations, failed to keep Montenegro from joining the alliance, Russian military intelligence officers planned and attempted to execute an election day coup that included a plan to assassinate the Montenegrin Prime Minister. The attempt on the Prime Minister's life was unsuccessful, fortunately. However, it showed the extremes to which the Kremlin would go and the methods that were used to try to maintain its strategic interests. Beyond Ukraine and Montenegro, the Kremlin has increasingly demonstrated a willingness to use dirty active measures in the West, suggesting a sense that Russia feels it can operate with impunity even in these countries. One Western country where a pattern of Russian dirty active measures appears prominently is in the United Kingdom. Investigative reports have unearthed an estimated 16 suspicious deaths over the past 12 years, and that may not even be the totality. The most well-known measure of Russian dirty active measures inside the UK is Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB and FSB officer who blew the whistle on corrupt practices of the FSB. While Litvinenko had retired from spying, he did consulting work with the British and Spanish intelligence services, helping both governments understand connections between the Russian mafia, senior political figures, and the FSB. Further, he continued to speak out against the Putin government and expose Kremlin corruption. Because of these actions, the Kremlin branded Litvinenko a traitor. He received threatening emails from a former colleague who told him to ``start writing a will.'' Litvinenko was later poisoned with polonium- 210. The poisoning also served as a deterrent to others. The day after Litvinenko's death, a member of the Russian Parliament stated: The deserved punishment reached the traitor. I am sure his death will be a warning to all the traitors that Russian treason will not be forgiven. Litvinenko's poisoning served as a prologue for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal 12 years later. Skripal was a former Russian military intelligence officer who was convicted of being a double agent and sentenced to prison. As I mentioned earlier, he was traded as part of a spy swap in 2010. He was given asylum in the United Kingdom. Press reports indicate that, similar to Litvinenko, Skripal appeared to have been working with the Spanish, Czech, and Estonian intelligence services. This March, he and his daughter were poisoned by novichok sprayed on the door handle of his Salisbury, England, home. In conjunction with the assassination attempt, Kremlin officials deflected, denied, and deployed absurd propaganda and disinformation. They unleashed an estimated 2,800 bots to cast doubt on Prime Minister May's assessment that Russia was responsible and to amplify divisions among the British people. They blamed the West for the poisoning and suggested it was a hoax. Once the UK named suspects and pointed a finger at Russian military intelligence, the two alleged perpetrators went on TV and absurdly claimed to be sports nutritionists with a yearning desire to visit a Salisbury cathedral. Again, these killings are part of a pattern. Both Litvinenko and Skripal were part of security services. They turned on the state and were deemed traitors. Even when they appeared to be safe, they were targeted for dirty active measures, sending the message that the Kremlin was the ultimate arbiter and that they could reach traitors anytime or anywhere. This message was also directed at others who might wish to expose Putin's secrets in the future or try to constrain or challenge his power. The pattern of dirty active measures also extends to the United States. This includes Mikhail Lesin, a former Kremlin insider who was crucial to Putin's consolidation of the Russian media. Lesin was also responsible for the rise of Russian TV and internet platform RT, a tool the Kremlin uses to deploy propaganda and disinformation across the world, including against the United States during the Presidential election in 2016. Lesin was reported to have had a falling out with two members of Putin's inner circle, including a longtime friend known as Putin's banker. Lesin was found dead in a Washington, DC, hotel room in November of 2015. The DC coroner concluded that the death was accidental and that he died alone, despite noting that Lesin had sustained blunt force injuries to his neck, torso, and upper and lower extremities. Lesin was allegedly planning to tell the secrets of a major component of the Kremlin's hybrid warfare operations to the Justice Department when he appeared to have conveniently died before he could explain its inner workings. Similar to other dirty active measures campaigns, the Kremlin unleashed a disinformation campaign to ensure plausible deniability and generate confusion about the circumstances surrounding his death. Here, too, Lesin appears to fit the pattern of being targeted for revealing aspects of the hybrid warfare campaigns that the Kremlin has come to rely on. In what appears to have been an even more brazen move for Putin, he engaged in dirty active measures while the whole world was watching. While standing next to President Trump in Helsinki, President Putin proposed that he would allow Special Counsel Mueller to interview the 12 Russian military intelligence officers indicted on charges of ``large-scale cyber operations to interfere with the 2016 Presidential election.'' But there was a catch. Putin announced that in return, he would expect that Russian authorities would be able to question current and former U.S. Government officials whom Putin described as having ``something to do with illegal actions on the territory of Russia.'' President Trump stood next to President Putin during this disinformation operation and endorsed it as being an ``incredible'' offer that he and his administration actually considered. The very next day, Russian officials announced a list of 11 accused ``criminals'' whom they wanted to interrogate because, in the course of doing the work of the United States of America, they took stances that the Kremlin opposed. Among those listed was a congressional staffer who helped write the Magnitsky sanctions act and former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, who served as the point person during the Obama Administration and as Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. During McFaul's time as Ambassador to Russia, the Kremlin unleashed its hybrid warfare playbook against him. They denounced him as an enemy and had security forces follow his family. The Kremlin also deployed a disinformation campaign against him that accused him of being a pedophile. The Kremlin was using these active measures in an attempt to instill fear in him and others that they could be killed, hurt, or jailed for doing the work of the U.S. Government. The United States and Western countries more broadly must understand that these attacks are not random; they are part of a pattern, a doctrine of hybrid warfare being expressed across the globe. We need to understand that assassinations, violence, threats, and intimidation are tools and tactics that Putin is using to achieve strategic or foreign policy goals, and these activities are harming our national security. For instance, the New York Times reported in August that vital Kremlin informants have gone silent, leaving our intelligence community in the dark about what Russia's plans are for November's midterm elections. The report continues that American officials familiar with the intelligence ``concluded they have gone to ground amid more aggressive counterintelligence by Moscow, including efforts to kill spies.'' These are not just brutal tragedies or incidents; the use of dirty active measures are purposeful and are intended to advance Putin's agenda short of using tools of conventional warfare. The United States must lead with strong denouncements against dirty active measures and all other hybrid tactics used by Russia or any other country. It is particularly critical that the President denounce Russian threats against U.S. officials for their actions in carrying out U.S. foreign policy or advancing our national security interests. Instead, the President's deference to Putin at Helsinki sent the wrong signal to Putin in the face of his threats. Fortunately, the Senate has taken some action, including voting 98 to 0 to protect our diplomats and other government officials implementing U.S. policy after Putin requested they be turned over for questioning. However, our government must speak with one voice and send consistent messages that this kind of action will not be tolerated and that Putin will pay consequences for his behavior. While it is important that we respond to these attacks, including with unequivocal denouncements of these tactics by the President and by the Congress, we should not be in the business of trying to respond to these attacks symmetrically. Putin resorts to using these tactics because he believes they give him an advantage over the West. We need to stay true to our ideals of democracy, human rights, and liberty. We don't need to normalize or legitimize these methods by engaging in them ourselves. Doing so would simply create a false moral equivalence that plays right into Putin's hands. Instead, we must employ responses that play to our strengths. We stand for transparency and accountability in the United States. We stand for the rule of law. We must develop and implement a comprehensive strategy that deploys tools that are consistent with and showcase these values. We must shine a light on corruption at the highest levels of the Putin regime. We must shine a light on how Putin's cronies are hiding their ill-gotten gains in the West. We must deploy a systematic and strategic messaging campaign that counters the base of Putin's power, reputation, and funding. We must take these actions in concert with our allies and partners. In response to the Skripal poisoning, the United States expelled 60 Russian diplomats, joining with more than 25 ally and partner nations in applying diplomatic pressure on Russia. This action sent a strong signal that the world would not allow Putin to act with impunity. When we act together with our allies and partners to push back against these hybrid operations, it imposes a cost to Putin's reputation on the world stage, which thwarts one of his major strategic interests. While these steps were in the right direction, they have been undermined by the President's words and actions. Despite punitive measures in response to the Skripal poisoning, the Kremlin thought that the Helsinki summit erased that damage. Press reports indicate that Western and U.S. intelligence agencies assessed that the Kremlin was pleased with the outcome of the summit at Helsinki and is confused as to why President Trump is not implementing more Russia-friendly policies. One important tool in our arsenal for holding the Kremlin accountable is sanctions, including those on Putin's inner circle. In particular, sanctions implemented under the Magnitsky Act appear to be particularly threatening to him. This act was passed in response to the death of Sergei Magnitsky, who uncovered massive tax fraud and corruption that was traced back to Kremlin officials. He was arrested in Russia and placed in jail, where he was tortured until he died. The origins of the Magnitsky Act were to hold accountable those in the Russian Government who were complicit in Magnitsky's abuse and death by sanctioning their assets and barring them from receiving American visas. Subsequently, the Magnitsky Act has been expanded to include others who are culpable of acts of significant corruption and abuse. Russia expert Heather Conley of the Center for Strategic and International Studies testified recently at a Banking Committee hearing about the significance of the Magnitsky sanctions to Putin. She said: Because the Kremlin has based its economic model and its survival on kleptocracy, sanctions and other policy instruments dedicated to preventing the furtherance of corruption--or worse yet in the minds of the Kremlin, to providing accurate information to the Russian people of the extent of this corruption--are a powerful countermeasure to Russia's malign behavior. The Magnitsky sanctions, along with those designated under the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, or CAATSA, threaten Putin's power structure and present a counter-narrative of corruption and abuse by the Kremlin. We need to continue to use these sanctions to hold those who are complicit in dirty active measures and those who are responsible for aggression, corruption, and interfering in our elections accountable. Ratcheting up sanctions on those in Putin's inner circle is a way to make Putin and his cronies feel pain and has the potential to change their behavior. Additional sanctions should be imposed on oligarchs and high-ranking government officials to target Putin's base of power and further expose the corrupt nature of their sources of income. We should also consider declassifying the so-called 241 report compiled by the intelligence community along with the Departments of Treasury and State. This report required an assessment of the net worth of senior Kremlin officials and oligarchs, their relationship to Putin and his inner circle, and evidence of corrupt practices. If we were to release such a report--with redactions for portions with national security implications--to the public, it would further expose malign activity and unexplained streams of wealth. Congress has provided many tools for the administration to implement, and it is time to utilize them fully. Implementing them in a transparent, public manner is likely to cause reputational harm to Putin himself and restore a level of confidence in the administration here at home. However, specifically targeting sanctions this way is unlikely to cause large-scale harm to the Russian people or to our European allies. It is very clear that implementing sanctions is far more effective when done with the cooperation of the international community. The most effective sanctions regimes are those that are implemented in a multilateral fashion. I urge the administration to engage with our allies and partners to coordinate sanctions enforcement and further escalatory steps as warranted. That includes working through diplomatic channels to ensure that the sanctions placed on Russia by the European Union remain in place. A coordinated front of the United States and our European allies provides the greatest chance of successful implementation of sanctions and deterring further aggression by Russia. The administration must also place a premium on exerting diplomatic pressure to isolate those who flout or do not enforce sanctions on Russia. Another form of pressure should be an increase in assistance to pro- democracy and civil society groups in Russia and in nations of the former Soviet Union. Working with these groups in conjunction with our allies, partners, and the private sector would provide another means of raising the costs of Putin and his oligarchs. Putin is threatened by the success of democracies and private enterprise. In addition to sanctions, we must continue to play a strong role in law enforcement, along with our allies and partners. That includes aggressive prosecution of murders and threats of violence to limit the impunity. With Litvinenko, it took almost 10 years for the United Kingdom to have an official inquiry into the assassination. The United Kingdom has acted quicker in the wake of the Skripal poisoning, moving to identify suspects and hold the Kremlin accountable for these actions. We need to adopt UK's lessons learned to ensure that those who seek to use these weapons will be prosecuted fully and without delay. We have missed too many of these dirty active measures operations for far too long. We must recognize this is an element of Russia's hybrid warfare. We must not fail to have the imagination to see what is happening right before our eyes. We must do more to identify and attribute these attacks from Russia. These attacks have only grown more brazen and will not stop unless we take strong measures to counter them and send the message that dirty active measures are unacceptable and will be costly to Russia or any other country which uses them. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. REED

Mr. REED. Mr. President, I join the city of Providence and the State of Rhode Island in celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Loew's Theatre Building, home of the Providence Center for the Performing Arts. From silent films to the Mighty Wurlitzer to live concerts and Broadway productions, the Loew's Theatre Building has delighted, educated, and entertained generations of Rhode Islanders. On October 6, 1928, the theater opened its doors to more than 14,000 people who came to see its splendor and the silent film ``Excess Baggage.'' Designed by the renowned theater architects George and C.W. Rapp, the Loew's Theatre featured marble columns, gilded plasterwork, and crystal chandeliers. After early years of success, the theater saw a decline in its economic fortunes as movie attendance waned. The theater sustained damage during the hurricanes of 1938 and 1954 and barely escaped demolition in the 1970s. Fortunately, local leaders stepped in to save this landmark. In 1977, the Loew's Theatre Building was officially listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the following year, a nonprofit organization was founded to restore its luster and establish a performing arts center for the community to enjoy. Today the Providence Performing Arts Center is a hub of cultural activity. It not only brings top-flight productions to town but also offers a broad selection of community outreach programs, fulfilling its mission of serving ``the entertainment needs of the State's various populations by presenting the widest possible variety of arts and cultural events.'' The center presents free, community concerts featuring the Mighty Wurlitzer, the rare 1927 pipe organ, one of only three ever made. There is a seats for servicemembers initiative that offers preferred orchestra seating to our military families. There are arts scholarships, summer theater programs, and special opportunities for students to experience live theater productions. Ninety years ago, Rhode Islanders flocked to the Loew's Theatre Building to share in something grand. We are grateful for the steady leadership and many contributions of the board of directors, dedicated staff, and generous benefactors who have made this historic landmark a living institution that continues to enrich the cultural life of our community. The Providence Performing Arts Center is still grand. May it continue to be so for generations to come.

Mr. REED

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

Mr. REED. Mr. President, I rise to express my strong opposition to the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy as an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. I opposed Judge Kavanaugh's nomination to his current seat on the DC Circuit because I had serious concerns about his partisan history, expansive view of Presidential power, and his lack of candor about his work in the Bush White House during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Judge Kavanaugh's work on the DC Circuit demonstrated that I was right to be concerned about his view that the President is above the law. I intend to discuss his jurisprudence in a moment, but first it is necessary to list just how many ways in which this process has revealed that Judge Kavanaugh lacks the temperament to serve as a Justice of the Supreme Court. He began this process by continuing to stonewall, and perhaps even mislead, Senators about his career as a political operative and partisan lawyer in the Bush Administration. He dissembled when asked basic questions about his approach to the law--a tactic we have come to expect from nominees who have been selected and vetted by far-right interest groups. Yet when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez, and others came forward with serious and credible allegations of sexual assault against him, this body saw the real Judge Kavanaugh. He emerged at his second hearing combative, blatantly partisan, disrespectful, evasive, and in no way reassuring that he has told the truth to this body and the American people. I will discuss these in turn, but the bottom line is this: Judge Kavanaugh is unqualified for a seat on the Supreme Court because he lacks the basic qualities and judgment for a position that could affect Americans' everyday lives for generations to come. The American people are watching this debate with serious, real-world concerns about what a Justice Kavanaugh would mean for them. They are worried that they could wake up someday soon to news that a conservative 5-to-4 majority on the Court has stripped them of their health insurance, abolished their right to privacy and control over their reproductive health, or revoked their right to marry whomever they choose. They see inequality of historic proportions--with the top 1 percent now earning more than the bottom 50 percent combined, according to the World Inequality Report--and a Supreme Court that continues to overturn laws that were enacted to prevent corporations and wealthy individuals from using their money to rig the political system. It is abundantly clear, given Judge Kavanaugh's selection by special interest groups and the mad rush to confirm him at all costs, that powerful interests are counting on him to further these trends, which point to a future in which political power will be directly tied to wealth and status. Worse yet, given that we still don't know the whole truth about the allegations against Judge Kavanaugh, continuing this rush to place him on the Court sends a terrible message to survivors of sexual assault that accountability for these crimes depends on the extent to which the accused person serves the interests of the powerful. The American people deserve better when it comes to this body's obligation to advise and consent on the next Supreme Court Justice, and the majority has failed in that obligation time and again in the course of this confirmation process. When my Democratic colleagues and I expressed concerns about whether a President under such serious criminal investigations should appoint-- prior to seeing the investigative process thorough and completed to the end--a Supreme Court Justice who likely could be called to rule on critical matters in a case against the President and his campaign, the majority ignored us. When we demanded that Judge Kavanaugh's hearing follow the standard practice for Supreme Court nominees--providing Senators and the public alike with access to the nominee's full record of public service through appropriate document disclosures from the National Archives-- the majority fast-tracked Judge Kavanaugh's hearing before the National Archives could process the records from his work in the Bush White House. In place of the appropriate process, the majority enlisted a private Republican lawyer to curate a small subset of records for Senators to review, and even that subset was subject to an assertion of ``committee confidentiality,'' meaning Senators were barred from sharing anything with the public that they may have learned about Judge Kavanaugh. Thousands more records were withheld under a dubious assertion of executive privilege. Even given the small number of Republican-selected records that had been made available to this body, my Democratic colleagues on the Judiciary Committee uncovered troubling inconsistencies that called into question whether Judge Kavanaugh had been truthful in his Senate testimony. No other nominee for the Supreme Court would get away with this. Why is the majority giving this free pass to Judge Kavanaugh? Why does he deserve to shield his record when no other member of the Supreme Court received such treatment? Why must his documents--records of taxpayer- funded public service--be controlled by a private Republican attorney instead of the National Archives like they are for every other man and woman who currently sits on the Supreme Court? Just what is it about Judge Kavanaugh that has rendered stalwart defenders of the Senate's power to review nominees, including those on the Judiciary Committee, to have such a profound about-face? No one is entitled to a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. Yet the majority has treated this job like the personal property of Judge Kavanaugh ever since the President announced his nomination. My Republican colleagues have said a great deal about the importance of preserving a fair process for the consideration of the Supreme Court nominees. Some of these arguments are simply outrageous. In the recent past, Democrats and the majority worked on a bipartisan basis to obtain nearly all relevant documents from then-Solicitor General Kagan's work in the White House before holding a vote on her nomination to the Supreme Court. Today, we are set to vote on Judge Kavanaugh with roughly 90 percent of his record still kept secret. Yes, in the recent past, Democrats made the difficult choice to end Republicans' historically unprecedented obstruction of hundreds of President Obama's judicial nominees by eliminating the 60-vote threshold for judicial nominees, except to the Supreme Court of the United States. Democrats recognized that the Supreme Court is one of the most important institutions in this country, that it operates as the effective check on both the legislature and the executive branches, that it is the ultimate interpreter of the Constitution of the United States, and that in order to have members on that Court who are consistent with the Constitution and thoroughly accountable to the American people, not special interests, a simple majority to get to the Court is inadequate. This process demonstrates that. Last year, they broke historical precedent and basic decency by denying Chief Judge Merrick Garland so much as a meeting or a hearing on his Supreme Court nomination. Again, for over a year, the Republican majority refused to consider the nomination of Judge Garland to the Supreme Court, and now they insist we have to move expeditiously to fill this gap, that it is so critical that we can't wait 2 weeks, 3 weeks, or 4 weeks for a thorough investigation. We have to do it now. But we didn't have to do it when President Obama submitted, pursuant to the Constitution, the nomination of Judge Garland. Once Judge Gorsuch was presented to us, the Republicans abandoned the 60-vote threshold, and at every turn, Republicans have, in my view, escalated these so-called judicial wars, and this rush to confirm Judge Kavanaugh, despite the allegations against him, brings us closer than ever to a crisis of confidence in the Court. The need for more time and more answers with regard to Judge Kavanaugh's record have become overwhelming since Dr. Ford, Deborah Ramirez, and others came forward. These women have put aside their privacy, professional lives, and the safety and security of their families in order to bring to light their allegations against Judge Kavanaugh. Regardless of how one feels about the truth of their claims, they have been met with treatment that should be beneath us as a nation. They have been mocked and attacked in disgraceful and sexist terms by public figures who should know better, including the President himself. They have been called liars, had their motives questioned, and had their private lives picked apart on the national stage. The Judiciary Committee has now had the opportunity to hear from Dr. Ford, and the FBI has conducted a limited background check on some of the allegations against Judge Kavanaugh, but this process still doesn't pass the simple common sense test. If there is no truth to these allegations, as the nominee and our Republican colleagues claim, why was it so difficult to agree to an FBI investigation in the first place? For that matter, what serious investigation is forced to finish in less than a week with limits on which leads it can follow? What person, upon hearing that a child or a relative of his or her own had been harmed, would be satisfied with such a short and apparently outcome-driven process? What is the majority hiding? I will not parse the details of every allegation against Judge Kavanaugh here today, but I will say this to my Republican colleagues: Look around you. Our Nation is undergoing a historic and long-overdue reckoning with abuse of power, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. It is regrettable that the Supreme Court confirmation process has once again become a forum for the larger debate about these matters, but there is no convenient way to reckon with longstanding and painful injustice. This is the issue before us, and we must face it. History will not look kindly, if it looks at all, on those who take the easy way out, using distraction, false equivalence, and personal attacks to preserve a partisan win at all costs. Given the growing number of doubts that this process has raised about Judge Kavanaugh's honesty and trustworthiness, he cannot begin to meet the test that I have applied to every Supreme Court nominee, regardless of party, during my service in the Senate. I have voted against nominees in the past because I did not believe that their jurisprudential records demonstrated that they would use their discretion to give meaning to the promises of the Constitution. But never before have I had to stand here and oppose a nominee to the Supreme Court for those very same reasons and because I do not believe that he is trustworthy. I regret that I must do so now. When it comes to Supreme Court Justices, character is a nonnegotiable requirement. Supreme Court Justices are expected to have a record of high personal and professional achievement. They are not supposed to be partisans or politicians. They are given an awesome power for life. They can certainly have flaws, but their relationship to the truth and their willingness to avoid the appearance of emotion are not up for debate. To serve in judgment of 325 million of their fellow citizens, they must be above the fray, particularly in these difficult and divided times. If Supreme Court decisions were simply a mechanical application of foregone legal conclusions, then it wouldn't matter who sat on the Court. Rather, a Justice's power rests in the discretion to choose among competing and well-reasoned arguments to decide how the promises of the Constitution will apply for generations to come. In order to support a Supreme Court nominee, I must believe she or he will use that discretion to give meaning to the American tradition of equal justice under law. This means strictly scrutinizing laws that obstruct and distort the effective operation of government and channels of political participation. It means rejecting arbitrary abuse of power and demanding the most compelling justification for laws that single out powerless, discrete, and insular minority groups for disfavored treatment under the law. When the Court has acted in accordance with these principles, it has resolved issues of national concern that threaten to tear the fabric of our Nation apart, and has done so in a manner that preserves the perception of impartiality that is vital to our judicial institutions. The Court struck the final blow against legal segregation. It safeguarded constitutional voting rights, guaranteed Americans the power to choose how to start their families, separated church and State for the mutual benefit of both institutions, and even ordered sitting Presidents to comply with the law. The snarling, conspiratorial partisanship that Judge Kavanaugh displayed at his second hearing was a far cry from the historical principles that have preserved the Court as an institution. Without evidence, he blamed ``the left'' and ``left-wing opposition groups'' for revelations about his past behavior, calling it ``a calculated and orchestrated political hit.'' He characterized Dr. Ford and others as liars and claimed that their desire to come forward was simply ``pent- up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election.'' How many of the advocacy organizations that regularly try cases before the Court fit his definition of ``left-wing opposition groups''? How is anyone supposed to believe that Justice Kavanaugh would approach a politically charged case with an open mind after this display? I fear that some are willing to overlook the clear defects in this nominee and this confirmation process because they want a Justice Kavanaugh to deliver long-desired legal victories for partisan causes. President Trump has clearly expressed his expectations for his nominees to the Court and even outsourced the vetting process to far-right special interest groups. The goal of this process is no mystery: a decisive majority on the Supreme Court that will eviscerate the underpinnings of Roe v. Wade and undo the constitutional right to privacy, as well as expand the Second Amendment to block even commonsense gun safety laws. Critically, the President also wants to bring even more functions of government solely under the control of the White House so that he can quickly and easily dismantle protections for workers, the vulnerable, and the environment. This wish list is nothing new. It has long been the agenda of groups like the NRA and the Federalist Society to take control of the Supreme Court and accomplish from the Bench what they cannot win from the ballot box. In President Trump and this majority, however, they have found their opportunity to radically change American law for the few and the powerful. I have no illusion about Judge Kavanaugh's familiarity with, and enthusiasm for, the partisan victories he is expected to deliver for President Trump and special interest groups as a Justice. It is also difficult for me to imagine that there would be such a rush to put Judge Kavanaugh on the Court if he were not a lifelong DC political operative and reliable partisan and an architect of the conservative legal movement, which is designed to pack the Federal judiciary with outcome-driven ideologues like him. He has already amassed a body of work that shows how he can and will deliver for the movement that has groomed him for this moment. Judge Kavanaugh has demonstrated a dangerously expansive view of Presidential power. The President is not a King, and this is because the Constitution establishes separation of powers and a system of checks and balances to ensure that no arm of government can overpower the others. The Framers recognized the particular danger of a Supreme Court without judicial independence. In Federalist 78, Alexander Hamilton quoted Montesquieu, saying that ``there is no liberty, if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers.'' He added that ``liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would have everything to fear from its union with either of the other departments.'' Based on his writings, I fear that a Justice Kavanaugh is predisposed to provide the deciding vote on the President's agenda before cases against him even reach the Supreme Court. For example, the Supreme Court has never had to decide whether a sitting President can be prosecuted for Federal crimes. It is perhaps more important now than ever in our history to ensure that a nominee to the Court can approach questions of Presidential accountability with independence and an open mind. Judge Kavanaugh cannot seriously claim to have either on this issue. As a veteran of the Starr investigation into the Clinton White House, Judge Kavanaugh understandably has strong feelings on the issues of civil and criminal prosecutions of sitting Presidents. In 1998, Kavanaugh authored a law review article discussing a now-defunct independent counsel statute in detail and recommending changes to the statutory scheme. He argued there that Congress should pass a law prohibiting the indictment of a sitting President until after the President's term in office. But he made it clear at several points that he believes such a law would codify what to him is already plain in the Constitution--that a President is above our criminal law while he holds office. His views about Presidential accountability did not evolve over time, as seen in the various ways he continued to share his views over the years. In 1999, he told a reporter that he doubted whether the Supreme Court got it right in United States v. Nixon, the landmark case that held the President could not always use Executive privilege to escape a subpoena to turn over records in a criminal case. For those who lived through Watergate, it was the Supreme Court's decision that I think, more than anything else, preserved the stability of the Union and the power of the Constitution over partisan politics. It led to President Nixon's resignation. It also convincingly showed that the Court could take a decision seriously with respect to the Constitution without considering the political effects. Justice Kavanaugh believes they were wrong, that President Nixon should have been allowed to defy the Court, defy the country, and maintain secret the tapes of his discussions in the White House that ultimately led to his resignation. In 2008, as a judge on the DC Circuit, Kavanaugh published another article suggesting policies to improve the functioning of the Federal Government, which reiterated his support for a law to defer all civil and criminal cases against the President while the President holds office. To be clear, lawyers and legal academics have debated these issues of Presidential power and accountability from the founding of the Republic. This debate is particularly relevant in light of how easily a governing majority of the President's party can crush congressional efforts to investigate wrongdoings by the President and his administration. Judge Kavanaugh has every right to publish his thoughts for legal academia, but he cannot have it both ways. He cannot spend 20 years arguing that the Constitution forecloses criminal investigations of a sitting President and claim now that he approaches the issue with an open mind. We may soon need clear answers from the Court about whether a President can pardon himself and whether he can be subpoenaed, indicted, or otherwise held to account for wrongdoing. If such a case were to rise to the Supreme Court, it would be gravely damaging to the Court as an institution if the American people were to believe that the President had already secured the votes he needed to win because of his judicial appointments. It is also clear that Judge Kavanaugh comes to this nomination with his mind made up to deliver other important victories for the President and powerful corporate interests at the expense of Federal agency autonomy and independence. Judge Kavanaugh spoke 2 years ago on a panel before a conservative special interest group where he was asked if he could think of a case that deserves to be overturned. After some hesitation, he answered that he would ``put the final nail in the coffin'' of Morrison v. Olson, which upheld the constitutionality of an independent counsel who could be fired only ``for cause'' by the President. This deserves consideration. When given the chance to name any case he would overturn, Judge Kavanaugh did not think to name any of the most egregious cases from our early history as a nation, such as the now-overturned Korematsu decision, which upheld Japanese internment, or Buck v. Bell, which upheld compulsory sterilization of the intellectually disabled. Instead, Judge Kavanaugh made it clear that he would strip Congress of its constitutional authority to protect apolitical public officials, like Special Counsel Mueller, from arbitrary interference and firing by the President. Just this year, Judge Kavanaugh showed that he was serious. In PHH Corporation v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the full DC Circuit upheld the constitutionality of the statute creating the CFPB and providing that its independent Director could be removed by the President only for cause. In his scathing dissent, Judge Kavanaugh quoted at length from Justice Scalia's dissent in Morrison v. Olson and made it clear that he would have placed the CFPB Director under the thumb of the President. I believe it is safe to assume he would have gone even further in undermining the consumer agency's independence if he had the power to overturn Morrison altogether. This is not the only area where a Justice Kavanaugh would deliver long-sought-after victories for conservative operatives and special interests. He has also made clear that he would undercut or even overturn the law of Chevron deference. As this body discussed at length in debate over Justice Gorsuch's nomination, the Chevron case stands for the proposition that when someone sues a Federal agency and a reasonable person could read the statute at issue in more than one way, the Court should defer to the agency's reasonable interpretation of the law that the agency is charged with enforcing. Put simply, Chevron prevents big businesses that are trying to escape regulation from pouring millions into lawsuits to second-guess and slow down every piece of the rulemaking process that they don't like. Even Justice Scalia defended Chevron as a reasonable check on judicial activism. But like Judge Gorsuch, Judge Kavanaugh has made it clear in his academic writings that he would overturn Chevron as we know it and systematically tip the scales in favor of well-funded challengers of regulation. In my view, such a major change in the law would put our Nation on a path back to the bad old days when companies could pollute the environment, scam their customers, and discriminate against their employees as long as they could pay enough lawyers to get the right judge when the Federal agency sues. This would bring us one step closer to the ``deconstruction of the administrative state'' that the Trump administration envisions and could severely obstruct future administrations in their efforts to protect consumers, the environment, and those who need a helping hand against the very powerful. I would like to take a minute to return to the concept of judicial discretion. As I discussed, I have evaluated every nominee for the Supreme Court during my time in this body based on whether I believed the nominee would have an open mind to be able to use his or her discretion to promote equal justice under the law, and to safeguard the powerless against the powerful. Upon review of Justice Kavanaugh's opinions, I do not believe he would. He has routinely sided with employers and big business against workers, consumers, and those seeking to hold powerful interests to account. Two of his notable opinions illustrate the contrast between his treatment of interests he favors and those he does not. The case of SeaWorld of Florida v. Perez concerned a tragic incident at the theme park in which a killer whale grabbed its trainer, pulling her into the water and killing her. This was not the first trainer this whale had killed in this way. The Department of Labor sanctioned SeaWorld upon concluding that the company knew about the danger this whale posed to trainers and failed to take reasonable steps to lessen the risk. A Federal district court affirmed this conclusion, as well as the District of Columbia Circuit. Judge Kavanaugh dissented. He argued that it was inappropriately ``paternalistic'' for the Federal Government to regulate matters of workplace safety for entertaining displays such as killer whale exhibitions. To him, the free market, rather than potentially lifesaving workplace safety regulations and standards, should decide how dangerous is too dangerous for workers. Compare this narrow view of a worker's right to a safe workplace with Judge Kavanaugh's broad view of an employer's religious right to opt out of regulations. The case of Priests for Live v. HHS concerned an attempt to broaden the Supreme Court's holding in the Hobby Lobby case. In Hobby Lobby, a 5-to-4 majority of the Supreme Court held that a closely held, for- profit corporation could refuse to comply with the Affordable Care Act's mandate that employers provide health coverage, including contraceptives, on grounds that doing so would conflict with the corporation's purported religious rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA. In Priests for Life, a religious nonprofit corporation similarly objected to providing contraceptives to its employees on religious grounds but also objected to an accommodation provided under Affordable Care Act regulations specifically for religious nonprofits. Under the accommodation, the organization could file a form that lodged a faith- based objection to contraceptive coverage, thereby permitting its employees to access coverage through alternative means, and not through the company directly. Priests for Life sued to invalidate even this alternative, claiming that filing the faith-based objection was a religious burden because it caused its employees to receive contraceptive coverage. The DC Circuit decided against the organization because the organization was wrong, strictly as a matter of law, that the filing of the form caused a change in the employees' access to coverage. Judge Kavanaugh dissented, arguing that it should not matter whether a nonprofit's religious objections were strictly correct as a matter of law in order for the objection to excuse it from complying with the law. If the Supreme Court were to adopt this view, it would open the door to dangerous possibilities. In addition to nonprofits, for-profit corporations like Hobby Lobby and others could use religious objections to excuse themselves from an untold number of Federal laws, ignoring, in the process, the religious and practical needs of the employees--the men and women of conscience who work there and the consumers who would suffer the consequences. Contrasting these two cases--one showing Kavanaugh's narrow view of an employee's right to a safe workplace, the other demonstrating his troublingly broad view of an employer's right to opt out of following the law--it became clear to me that Judge Kavanaugh would use his discretion as a Supreme Court Justice to expand the rights of the powerful at the expense of everyone else. Supreme Court Justices hold extraordinary positions of authority in our constitutional system because they are the only ones with the power to decide that the governing majority--as well as prior Justices on the Court--got it wrong. The Constitution guarantees every American certain rights that are beyond the reach of the President or a simple majority of Congress to change because the popular majority cannot always be trusted to protect the interests of the minority, particularly when that minority includes the most powerless, alienated, and derided among us. The Supreme Court's work is not automatic. It is not an assembly line. The men and women who sit on the Court must use their values and experience in order to reach the conclusions that determine how the Constitution applies to our daily lives. I read Judge Kavanaugh's legal record to show that he would advance a dangerous partisan agenda from the bench. Some may disagree with that conclusion, but the fact of the matter is that the majority is advancing Judge Kavanaugh's nomination in the absence of critical facts that go directly to his character and values. A full and fair investigation--one without predetermined limits-- could clear Justice Kavanaugh's name or it could cause him further trouble. But if the majority proceeds now, and he is confirmed, the shadow of doubt will always linger over his position, over the Court, and over the U.S. Senate. Americans will wonder why this nomination was rushed, and the obvious conclusion will be that it served the interests of partisan politics. Rightly or wrongly, that impression will further harden the cynicism and tribalism of those who are inclined to believe the system is rigged. That doubt in the fundamental fairness and integrity of our government is contagious, and our whole Nation suffers as it spreads. I believe we should stop this and show the American people that facts matter and that character matters. Before I yield the floor, I would like to say one more thing to my colleagues. This process, and the majority's elimination of the 60-vote threshold for the Supreme Court to confirm Justice Gorsuch last year, is now the precedent for future Supreme Court nominations. Democratic Members should expect nothing more from the Republican majority. Every Senator should think long and hard if they are prepared for what will come next as a result of this dissolution of the Senate rules that historically preserved the institutions of the Senate as well as the Court. The supermajority requirement for the confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice was a vital backstop against the kinds of displays we have witnessed in the past few weeks. That is why Democrats kept the 60-vote requirement in place when they were forced by a Republican blockade of lower court judges to fill a whole host of judicial vacancies with nominees who had cleared committee for district and circuit courts. Now, with a simple majority threshold, any party in power can pack the Supreme Court on party-line votes with nominees like Judge Kavanaugh, who otherwise could never rise to the highest Court of the land. I would also note that there is no longer any obligation for a nominee to disclose all of his or her records of prior service, nor is there a need to hold fair or impartial hearings. FBI background checks need not be anything more than a mere formality, and nominees have a free hand to appear in campaign-style commercials, disrespect the Senate, and disregard traditions of decorum, so long as they put on a show that plays well with the President and the majority. After all, there is no longer any need for bipartisan consensus for a Justice of the Supreme Court. I have served in this body for over 20 years. I have not been here for all of the so-called judicial wars, supposedly beginning with the nomination of Judge Bork, who, I will remind everyone, was defeated on a strong bipartisan vote, but I have been here for enough of the deterioration of this process to know there is blame on both sides. Democrats in this body have been aggressive when they were in power, but I would also add that scholarly research of many has documented that Republicans always found another way to escalate things each more, resulting in the position in which we now find ourselves. Without some major change on the part of the majority, I hope there is no illusion among my colleagues that what we have endured over the last few weeks is anything but the beginning of what is to come. I stand ready--and I think many of my colleagues on the other side stand ready--to search for a bipartisan solution and return to a path in which all of us--at least the vast majority of the Senate--have overwhelming confidence in the ability and the dedication of a nominee to the Supreme Court under the Constitution of the United States. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. REED

Mr. REED. Mr. President, today I am introducing, along with my colleagues Senator Whitehouse, Senator Blumenthal, and Senator Murphy, legislation to designate river segments within the Wood-Pawcatuck watershed as part of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System. Following more than three years of intense study, this legislation would formally recognize the recreational, natural, and historical qualities of portions of the Beaver, Chipuxet, Green Fall-Ashaway, Pawcatuck, Queen-Usquepaugh, Shunock, and Wood Rivers in Rhode Island and Connecticut while providing access to Federal resources and promoting strong partnerships for their restoration and protection. The Wood-Pawcatuck watershed is a national treasure that not only holds natural and scenic value, but is also an important economic driver for the area. Indeed, the twelve local river communities experience direct economic benefits from their proximity to these rivers through increased recreation and tourism. The watershed provides a range of opportunities for visitors, from viewing early industrial mill ruins, to trout fishing, to bird watching, to kayaking. I have long been a supporter of protecting and restoring these rivers, which is why I sponsored the Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Protection Act in 2013. The study that was initiated by that legislation has been a critical tool for bringing together stakeholders from Rhode Island and Connecticut including representatives from State agencies, local governments, and conservation groups in order to develop a collaborative path forward. The resulting stewardship plan, which was formally adopted by the study committee and supported by all twelve local river communities, builds upon currently existing efforts to preserve and manage the river ecosystems while also considering what steps will need to be taken collectively in the future to protect them. I would like to commend Representatives Langevin, Cicilline, and Courtney for introducing companion legislation. It is particularly fitting this week, as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the landmark Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, that we are continuing our work to protect these special places. I look forward to working with all of my colleagues to pass this legislation so that we can preserve the rivers of the Wood-Pawcatuck watershed for the enjoyment of future generations.

Mr. REED

Mr. REED. Mr. President, today I am introducing, along with my colleagues Senator Whitehouse, Senator Blumenthal, and Senator Murphy, legislation to designate river segments within the Wood-Pawcatuck watershed as part of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System. Following more than three years of intense study, this legislation would formally recognize the recreational, natural, and historical qualities of portions of the Beaver, Chipuxet, Green Fall-Ashaway, Pawcatuck, Queen-Usquepaugh, Shunock, and Wood Rivers in Rhode Island and Connecticut while providing access to Federal resources and promoting strong partnerships for their restoration and protection. The Wood-Pawcatuck watershed is a national treasure that not only holds natural and scenic value, but is also an important economic driver for the area. Indeed, the twelve local river communities experience direct economic benefits from their proximity to these rivers through increased recreation and tourism. The watershed provides a range of opportunities for visitors, from viewing early industrial mill ruins, to trout fishing, to bird watching, to kayaking. I have long been a supporter of protecting and restoring these rivers, which is why I sponsored the Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Protection Act in 2013. The study that was initiated by that legislation has been a critical tool for bringing together stakeholders from Rhode Island and Connecticut including representatives from State agencies, local governments, and conservation groups in order to develop a collaborative path forward. The resulting stewardship plan, which was formally adopted by the study committee and supported by all twelve local river communities, builds upon currently existing efforts to preserve and manage the river ecosystems while also considering what steps will need to be taken collectively in the future to protect them. I would like to commend Representatives Langevin, Cicilline, and Courtney for introducing companion legislation. It is particularly fitting this week, as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the landmark Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, that we are continuing our work to protect these special places. I look forward to working with all of my colleagues to pass this legislation so that we can preserve the rivers of the Wood-Pawcatuck watershed for the enjoyment of future generations.

Mr. REED

Mr. REED. Mr. President, I am pleased to be joined by a group of members on both sides of the aisle and in both bodies in introducing legislation today to renew the law that expands the reach of libraries and museums and enables them to better serve their communities. These vital institutions educate, inform, engage, and connect people from all walks of life. Our legislation, the Museum and Library Services Act of 2018, is similar to legislation I also introduced on a bipartisan basis in December. That legislation was developed with input and insights from the library and museum communities. Since that time, it became apparent in the library community that a vital change was needed to ensure that funding increases for the State formula grant program would be more broadly shared by States around the Nation. Under the current formula, smaller States have seen little in the way of new funding even as funding significantly increased over the last few years. The last time we addressed this issue was in 2003, and an update, while ensuring no State would lose funding, is needed today so that more communities can benefit from increased investments in our Federal library program. I am grateful our revised bill has the support of the American Library Association, the American Alliance of Museums, and many of their affiliated associations. I thank Senators Collins, Gillibrand, Murkowski, and our many colleagues who are joining us in introducing this bill today. I look forward to working with them and the entire Senate on moving this bill swiftly to passage.