Brian Schatz

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, Scott Pruitt, Mike Flynn, Betsy DeVos-- there is a pattern here. This administration keeps choosing people who seem like the wrong fit to run their agency, and now we are about to add Jay Clayton to the list. He is different in a lot of ways. I met with him. He is a good person. He is a sensible person desiring to be a public servant, and he is a very smart lawyer. But he is not the right candidate to lead the SEC because it is on the frontlines of making sure that Wall Street follows the rules. And that is the No. 1 issue here because Mr. Clayton has too many ties to the industry that he would be in charge of overseeing. Wall Street is full of his friends and business contacts, and there is nothing wrong with that, generally. We need lawyers in the securities industry. We need honorable people who help companies to do an IPO, but that doesn't mean that individual is appropriate to be in charge of the SEC and in charge of reining in Wall Street. That causes the problem. I do not question Mr. Clayton's integrity. I have no doubt that he is a good person. But how can we say that the best person to hold Wall Street in check is someone with strong ties to the big banks, someone who has built his career there, who very well may go back to his old law firm in a few years? I talked with Mr. Clayton at his confirmation hearing about whether he would go back to Wall Street after his time at the SEC ended, and he said he couldn't rule it out. That is just one of several concerns that I have. If we look at Mr. Clayton's statements about the SEC, it is clear that he is not the right person to be the cop on the Wall Street beat. He has talked about ``monitoring'' the financial sector; that is the word he used--``monitoring.'' But the United States does not need someone to ``monitor'' Wall Street. We need someone who will aggressively enforce the rules, to make sure we don't have a repeat of 2008, when the big banks made so many bad and reckless decisions that our economy failed. We have a very short memory in Washington about what happened to our country less than 10 years ago, but the rest of the country remembers. There are far too many communities still working to recover from the great recession. Now is not the time to walk back the small steps toward progress we have made in protecting the economy from bad actors on Wall Street. But I am afraid this is what could happen under this administration, including if Mr. Clayton should be confirmed. In his confirmation hearing, he said he wants to lighten the penalties companies face when they get into trouble with the SEC, and that is not something I can support. We cannot expect big banks and investment firms to play by the rules when they know they can pay a small fine and keep behaving badly as a cost of doing business. Regulation and enforcement has a cost, but that cost is meant to put the burden on the actors who are causing the problem instead of allowing the burden to fall on the rest of us--to fall on American families. The cost is there, one way or the other. The question is, Who should pay it? Even if the Senate disagrees on enforcement and regulation, I hope we can agree that conflicts of interest have gone too far. This administration has diminished the meaning of public service in the context of conflicts of interest. Instead of looking out for conflicts of interest, it has leaned into them. Instead of protecting the country from corruption, it is putting our country in real danger. And at some point, it is up to the Senate to be a Senate--to do something. We have to decide where to draw the line. How long do we let this go on? I am a ``no'' on Mr. Clayton's nomination. I urge all Senators who care about ending conflicts of interest and putting a tough cop on the Wall Street beat to join me and vote no on this nomination. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

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

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, what is the purpose of the Senate? The authors of the Constitution laid the foundation of the Senate without really knowing what it would look like once it was standing. They knew it would rival and restrain the House of Representatives. After all, the Senate has a higher age requirement, Members serve 6-year terms, and they have to represent not just a district but an entire State. But it was clear from the beginning of the formation of the Senate that it would take time before the purpose of this body was truly realized. For several decades in our Nation's history, it was the House of Representatives--not the Senate--that hosted the great debates and introduced major legislation. It wasn't until the Nation began to splinter in the shadow of slavery that the Senate came into its own. While the rules of the Senate gave us its basic structure, it was the Members of the Senate--the people who made up this body--who had to stand up and lead. We remember them today as lions of the Senate: Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, and Henry Clay. This body owes its status to them and their leadership because they began to define the Senate in a way that no one had before. Over time, this place became one that valued bipartisanship, deliberation, and compromise. It has become a Chamber that balances the right to debate with demands for action. In some of the toughest moments in our history, the Members of the Senate have used this body to lead, particularly when the President has faltered. Take President Nixon. The Watergate scandal had weakened the Presidency in ways that do-nothing Presidents never had. But the Senate, led by a Member of the President's own party, didn't stand by and watch the void, unmoved. They filled the vacuum for the good of the country. It is this kind of history that has shaped the Senate into what it is today, a body that examines, considers, and protects. Senator Byrd, the longest serving Senator in U.S. history once said: ``The Senate is a source of wisdom and judgment--both on the actions of the lower house and on the executive.'' That is what the Senate is for. That is our purpose. We achieve that purpose through customs and traditions; through members who serve 6- year terms and represent whole States; through rules that force bipartisanship, deliberation, and compromise. Now the majority leader has placed one of those rules on the chopping block because they can't get to 60. He can't find the 60 votes needed to end debate on the President's nomination to the Supreme Court. We shouldn't be surprised to find ourselves here because, after all, back in February, President Trump told the majority leader to change the rules if he had to. Now, as this administration closes in on its first 100 days without passing a single piece of major legislation, the Senate majority leader is ready to fulfill the President's request and change the rule, instead of changing the nominee. The question I have for this body is this: Should we change the rules in order to give the President a win before spring break? Should we be weakening the Senate at a time when the executive branch is so weak? Isn't it our obligation to assert ourselves into this void, instead of receding from responsibility? I can think of no instance in the history of any great legislative body in which a legislature decides to diminish its own power. This is beyond strange in the world's greatest deliberative body, in the world's most powerful legislative Chamber. For what good reason would we give up our own prerogatives? This administration has been ineffective. Now the Senate majority leader is suggesting that the Senate respond to this executive weakness by weakening ourselves. This is wrong. The purpose of the Senate is achieved through bipartisanship, deliberation, and compromise. The 60- vote threshold for Supreme Court nominees preserves these ideals. Changing this rule will make it harder to get there. Look at the House of Representatives. Look at the way the House Intelligence Committee has dissolved so quickly into partisanship, unable to do its job. Look at the country. Look at the campaign last year. We are a country divided. Polarization is at an all-time high. Now is not the time to crush a cornerstone of the Senate's foundation. I don't think this is inevitable. This is not unstoppable. This is up to all of us. It is up to the Members of the Senate to decide if we are going to damage the world's greatest deliberative body at a time when the country needs us the most. The Senate has always been defined by its Members. The rules, the customs, and the traditions--they help. But at the end of the day, it is the Members of the Senate--like Calhoun, Webster, Clay, Kennedy, Inouye, Hatch, McCain--who make the Senate relevant and necessary. We are going to find out who we are, as Senators. I would ask that at a minimum, the Senate take its time on this decision. Don't rush. That is not who we are. That is not how we get to the best decisions. This is about the future of the Senate and the future of the Court. The nuclear option will mean nominees for the Supreme Court won't have to even meet with the minority party to be confirmed. It will mean that the Senate's habit of being slow--sometimes maddeningly slow--will go away. That tradition that allows the center to hold--not just in this Chamber but across the country--will be undermined. So to my Republican colleagues, please take a few weeks before you decide to change the Senate forever. Take your time here. This is probably one of the most serious decisions that you are ever going to make as a Senator because it is about the Senate itself. This is worth talking about. This is worth deliberating over. It is worth thinking over. Go home and talk to your constituents. If you want to do this, you have the votes. You can do this three Mondays from now, anytime you want. But for goodness sake, there is no harm in thinking about it. All we need are three members of the Republican Party to go to the majority leader--either publicly or privately--and say: Give us some time to find another way to do this. Otherwise, you will make the Supreme Court, this place, and this country more extreme and more divided. You will answer this difficult moment in history by weakening one of the last bastions of bipartisanship, and I believe you will regret it. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Madam President, when our country was founded, corporations were on the minds of no one. They are not mentioned in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, and when the topic finally came up to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Marshall called corporations a ``mere creature of the law.'' People have certain unalienable rights. Corporations do not. We established corporate personhood so that companies could raise capital and enter into contracts, but nobody ever thought that this term that was used--``personhood''--actually meant that corporations were people. They are not. It is not complicated. Corporations do not eat. They do not sleep. They do not worry about their children or their elderly parents. They do not get sick. They do not retire, and they do not have complex motivations. In fact, under the law, they have only one motivation, which is to maximize profits. Any logical person knows that corporations are not people, but in Judge Gorsuch's America, they are. There is no doubt that he is a very smart person, but he, actually, had a hand in creating this theory that corporations have the same rights as human beings--that they are, in fact, people. We are supposed to pretend that this premise is not insane, but it is crazy, and it is hurting our democracy. For the past several decades, we have increasingly limited people's rights in favor of corporate rights. Now Republicans want us to confirm a judge who says that corporations have religious rights. Judge Gorsuch was a part of the Hobby Lobby decision that went before the Supreme Court, in which the Tenth Circuit decided that corporate personhood extends to First Amendment religious rights, and because the corporation itself--not just the people who own it--has been granted those rights by judges like Neil Gorsuch, the rights of corporations now usurp the health and the rights of American citizens. That is the problem with Judge Gorsuch's worldview. It is not just that he is a conservative; it is that he actually thinks that corporate entities have the very same rights as American citizens--rights, by the way, that do not come with the same responsibilities that we all have as American citizens. Yet this judge wants to confer more rights onto corporations when we are already past the tipping point as a society when corporations have more power than people. We are in the absurd position of asking: How far are these corporate rights going to extend? They have been given First Amendment rights. They have been given Fourth Amendment rights. Do they get the right to vote next? Do they get the right to keep and bear arms? How many more constitutional rights are we going to give to corporations before we say that enough is enough? We are already well beyond the point at which corporate interests beat out the individual, whether it is at the polls or in the workplace. There are a lot of other things about Judge Gorsuch's worldview that I object to, but, at my core, I think I might be able to get around some of those things in knowing that the Constitution requires the Senate to advise and consent, not agree with. Yet his worldview regarding corporations as people embodies everything that is going wrong with our country and with the Court. By the way, it is probably fair to say that almost every nominee whom we have seen this year embodies this worldview. Time and again, Democrats in the Senate have raised the alarm about this administration's nominees, and we have been overruled. What is the result? You have Cabinet Secretaries destroying American diplomacy. You have Secretaries trying to ban Muslims from entering the United States. You have an EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt, leaving a dangerous product on the market that has been proven by his own scientists to hurt children. Why? Because they prioritize corporate rights over people's rights. The problem is this: Cabinet Secretaries come and go; Supreme Court Justices do not. Let me put it this way: This administration's Cabinet is like a date. It is a really bad date, but at least it comes to an end. A Supreme Court Justice on the other hand is not a bad date; it is a marriage. It is a lifetime appointment that will have an impact on generations of Americans. The fact that he is out of the mainstream is absolutely essential for us to consider. The fact that he thinks corporations are people is, in my mind, disqualifying--so disqualifying that I will vote no on cloture, and I will vote no on final confirmation if it comes to that, which brings me to the question of cloture. When the Senate votes on cloture, the question before the Senate is, Is it the sense of the Senate that debate should be brought to a close? For the Supreme Court nominee, we have rules, and those rules say that you need 60 Senators to end debate--not 59, not 51, not 57. There are 59 Senators who do not get to decide when to end debate; 60 do. If you cannot get 60 votes to end debate, you do not have cloture. After 2013, there is only one position--one appointed position that retains that 60-vote threshold, and that is the U.S. Supreme Court. That is for a very straightforward reason. It is that we have decided as a body that the Supreme Court needs to have bipartisan support; that if a person cannot get 60 votes, you change the nominee, you do not change the rules. We have decided that this position--this institution, the Court itself, the highest Court in the land--should be beyond our partisan disputes and differences. That is the foundation of the U.S. Senate. It is the way this place works. Without this rule, the reality will be grim. Without this rule, if you are a Member of the minority party, the President's nominees don't have to listen to you, meet with you, think about you. Without this rule, advice and consent is rendered meaningless for whichever party is out of power. I have been here now 5 years, about 4\1/2\ years. Even in my short time here, the door swings both ways in Washington. Remember that today, this week, for the Republicans it might feel satisfying to use power maximally, to use the greatest authority possible under the U.S. Constitution, but without this rule, the Senate itself will be undermined by its own Members. I have never seen any legislative body endeavor to diminish its own authority, and that is what is going to happen this week. We can argue about how we got here. Was it in 1987 when the Senate rejected Robert Bork? Was it in 2013 when Leader Reid responded to historic obstructionism by eliminating most filibusters on nominees? Was it last year when Merrick Garland was not even given a hearing? We all have our talking points. At the end of the day, both sides own some of this mess. I am a Democrat. I think it is 80/20. Republicans will think it is 80/20 on the other side. The general public may think it is 60/40 or 50/50. I am not sure that matters anymore. The question of who is at fault is not the most important question. The question is, What do we do next? Will the Senate undermine its own authority and strengthen the power of partisanship? I would say this to my Republican colleagues: Think about what you are going to do next. Think about what this is going to mean the next time you are in the minority party, because it will not be Senators Duckworth and Cortez Masto who can't even get a meeting with a Supreme Court nominee, it will be you. This is about the future of the Senate and the Supreme Court. The nuclear option will mean nominees for the Supreme Court will not have to meet with or consider minority opinions. It will mean that the Senate's habit of being slow--sometimes maddeningly so, but we know it is in the best interests of the country--will go away for this appointment. That tradition allows the center to hold, and it will be undermined. To my Republican colleagues, I am not asking you not to do this. I am asking you to take your time. In the world's greatest deliberative body, there is no reason to rush this decision. I am asking you to wait. I am asking you to take a few weeks before you decide to change the Senate forever. Take your time. This is probably one of the most consequential decisions you are going to make in the U.S. Senate because it is about the Senate itself. This is worth talking about. This is worth deliberating over. It is worth thinking over. Go home. Talk to your constituents. If you want to do this, you can do this anytime you want. You can do this the Monday we get back from our spring work period. For goodness' sake, there is no reason not to think about it for a little bit longer. All we need are three Members of the Republican Party to go to their leader, publicly or privately, and say: We are not with you on nuclear yet; give us some time to try to save this important aspect of the Senate. Otherwise, you will make both the Supreme Court and the world's greatest deliberative body more extreme and more divided, and I believe you will regret it. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, distance or delays should never be the reason that veterans don't get the healthcare they need, but that is exactly what is happening to veterans across the country. That is why the Veterans Choice Program was started--so that thousands of veterans and their families can get the care they deserve when and where they need it. Instead of traveling long distances or waiting months on a list, veterans can use the Choice Program to get the healthcare they need in their own communities. As the ranking member of the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Subcommittee, I want to give a little perspective on what would happen to our veterans if we don't pass the bipartisan Veterans Choice Program Improvement Act. Now, I know that the Choice Program is not funded through my subcommittee, but what we do today has an impact on the VA as a whole. If the Veterans Choice Program Improvement Act does not pass, the funding we appropriated to the VA will expire before it has all been used. It is not a small amount of funding. It is $1 billion, and the VA does not have $1 billion elsewhere in the budget to make up for this loss. In other words, if we don't pass this bill, it is going to be a disaster for veterans because all of the veterans who use this program for their healthcare are going to have to go back to the VA. That means the wait times that everybody was complaining about over the last couple of years will grow longer and longer and longer, and especially in rural America, where access to care is such a challenge, it will get worse and worse. To manage the increase in patient load, the VA will have to scramble to find funding that can take away from other VA programs, including hospital maintenance and medical equipment. That is what is going to happen if we don't pass this bill. This is an urgent matter for veterans across the country. Whether you are a participant in the VA Choice Program or you go to a traditional VA clinic or hospital, one way or another, this is going to impact you. Now, I know the Choice Program isn't perfect, but this temporary extension, coupled with the improvements in the system contained in the bill, gives Congress the time we need to develop a long-term, comprehensive solution. And while we are working on a solution, let's not punish veterans by cutting off $1 billion toward a program that is designed to improve services for people who have served our country. So I hope we can come together to find a way to pass this bill. Our veterans are counting on us. I yield the floor. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SCHATZ

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

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, last week TrumpCare died, and lots of people are trying to figure out exactly what happened. In my view, it was not a lack of strategy; it was not a lack of effort; it was not a lack of personal relationship between the Speaker and the President. It died because the policy stank. It died because people actually--left, right, and center--decided that cutting Medicaid by $900 billion in order to provide a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans of the exact same amount was just not a good idea in policy or in politics. Now that TrumpCare has crashed and burned, Republicans are essentially going to try to do the same thing--tax cuts for the rich. Yet, this time, instead of funding it by cutting Medicaid, they are going to charge people more for groceries. Here is their proposal: They want to cut taxes for corporations again. That is what they want to do. Whether one is talking about infrastructure or whether one is talking about healthcare or whether one is talking about so-called tax reform, their solution to everything is to cut taxes for corporations. They want to cut taxes for corporations again, but this time American families will pay for it through taxes on groceries and the other stuff they have to buy on a day-to-day basis. We have seen this before. It is a giveaway for corporations and the wealthiest among us, but, as usual, they have to find a pay-for, a way to make the arithmetic work, a way to pay for it. They are going to keep proposing so-called solutions for healthcare, infrastructure, or in this case tax reform, but they are basically the same proposal. It is a subsidy for Wall Street. It is because they cannot help themselves. This particular giveaway will cost the average American family thousands of dollars. Families will have to pay more for gas, medicine, clothes, cars, food. That is how a so-called border adjustment tax works. Everything one buys in the United States will be taxed, and everything outside of the United States will not be taxed. The sort of principle behind that is that somehow we are going to stimulate exports and disincentivize imports. It is not just that you are paying more on the stuff that is imported; it is that everything in the United States that you purchase you will have to pay more for in order to incentivize exports. But all you are doing is charging the American people more. This is essentially a sales tax. I talked to members of my staff, and they were trying to get into the sort of technocratic, legal details about whether it is technically a sales tax or a value-added tax or a border adjustment tax that fits into some other legal category. But for a regular person, it does not matter what you call it; if you pay more and the government is collecting it, it is an increase in taxes. They are going to dazzle you with complexity, and I think some in the House Republican leadership are very skillful at trying to make this more complicated than it is. They are trying to dazzle you with complexity so you do not know what they are doing. They are raising taxes on groceries and all of the stuff you buy. That is their version of tax reform. I can understand. The Tax Code is awful, it is a mess, and we have been trying to do tax reform for I think 30 years. It is not unreasonable for the average American to say ``Yes, you ought to reform the Tax Code,'' but, remember, when they talk tax reform, they want you to have to go to the store and buy a steak, a hotdog, a head of lettuce, gasoline, pillows, diapers, paper--whatever you need--and it is going to cost more with so-called tax reform. If they succeed, the average American family could pay up to $1,700 more per year in order that corporations can get their tax cuts. Think about what $1,700 means for families across the country. For a family of four, with two kids in middle school, $1,700 pays for a few months' worth of groceries. In Hawaii, $1,700 will cover rent for a month, and in lots of other places, it will cover rent for 4 or 5 months. For some people, it pays a year's worth of an electric bill. In the State of Hawaii, it will pay for 4 or 5 months of your electric bill. We know for certain this will hurt consumers, but on a macroeconomic level--in other words, for the entire country--we have no idea what a border adjustment tax would actually do in terms of our international relationships. I understand. I voted against the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the trade promotion authority. I have been very, very concerned about the extent to which we have not been getting the better of these trade deals, especially when it comes to people who are in unions across the country. But we do not want to engage in a trade war. We do not want to screw up American manufacturing, American farming. We have no idea what the impact would be. Even if one is willing to accept increasing the cost of goods in the United States for some theoretical possibility that this will incentivize exports, we have no idea what it is going to do to the American economy overall. Even in the best-case scenario, entire industries will fall apart. Take tourism. In 2016 alone, tourism supported nearly 5.5 million American jobs directly and almost 10 million more in industries like restaurants and retail. The tourism industry pumps $2.6 billion into our economy every day. That is more than $30,000 per second. I will say one other thing about tourism. As we worry about automation, as we worry about artificial intelligence, as we worry about a global economy that is going to eviscerate some of our core industries, tourism is one thing that cannot be taken away from us. If people want to go to Los Angeles, if people want to go to Cleveland, if people want to go to Hawaii, if people want to go to St. Louis, MO, or Kansas City, MO, or Florida, these are jobs that cannot be taken away. So if you want to infuse cash into an economy, create a tourism economy--all of these jobs and all of this revenue will be under threat if this works out the way they want it to work out because the dollar will be so strong that Americans will want to travel abroad and foreigners will want to travel far, far away from us. Why are we punishing consumers and small businesses? Why are we putting entire industries at risk? House Republicans will tell you it is because they think the corporate tax is too high, but here is the truth: Right now, major corporations have huge teams of tax lawyers who set up fake shell companies so that they get around paying Federal taxes at all, or they abuse loopholes to drastically lower what they owe to the U.S. Government. That is why we see some corporations that end up paying zero dollars in Federal income tax year after year even though they are making a healthy profit in the United States. Together, Republicans and Democrats should be going after these tax dodgers. Instead of just getting rid of loopholes, they have decided to tax consumers. This makes no sense, and that is why we have to stop it. Last week, we saved healthcare for 24 million Americans because people across the country of all political persuasions stood up to fight. This week, the fight goes on. Once again, far too many people are in the crosshairs. I believe strongly that so long as we continue to stand together, we can win this one too. A huge tax cut for the wealthy cannot be funded by increasing the cost of groceries. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SCHATZ

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

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Madam President, today, we will vote on a resolution that will take away privacy protections from the American people. By voting for this resolution, Congress is ignoring the fact that people want more protections online, not fewer. In 2016, Pew did a study to determine the state of privacy in the United States, and the center found ``Americans express a consistent lack of confidence about the security of everyday communication channels and the organizations that control them.'' Pew found that this is especially true when it comes to the internet. People no longer trust organizations--public or private--to protect the data they collect. Today, we are going to make that worse. That is because broadband providers know our complete browsing history. Think about that for a second. They know everything we do online, everything we search for on a daily basis. Think about how personal that information is, how it paints a picture of who we are. It is totally reasonable for broadband providers to have to ask customers for their consent before they take that information--our browsing history, what we do online--and sell it to a third party. That will no longer be the case after the Republicans vote for this bill and it is enacted into law. Broadband providers will be able to take your browsing history and sell it without your permission. The FCC spent months on this rule, and by using the CRA to get rid of it, Congress is taking away the FCC's authority to do anything like it ever again. That will mean there is no Federal agency--not the FTC, not the FCC--that will even have jurisdiction over the issue of privacy for broadband providers. What is the solution here? We should work with the private sector, the FCC, and the FTC to find a comprehensive solution together. At a time when data collection and use is increasing exponentially, Republicans should not be rolling back protections for consumers. This is yet another repeal without replace. Fifty-five years ago this month, President Kennedy gave a seminal speech about consumer rights. He spoke about the march of technology-- how it had outpaced old laws and regulations and how fast that progress had occurred. That progress is only getting faster. The next massive technological change will be the ``internet of things,'' in which we will have tens of billions of devices connected to each other and interacting with us whether we like it or not. As technology marches on, what stays the same is the bedrock principle that President Kennedy outlined, which is that consumers have a right to be safe, a right to be informed, a right to choose, and a right to be heard. Those rights are in jeopardy. The FCC took a small but important step, but the Republicans are walking it back. Let me be clear. This is the single biggest step backward in online privacy in many years. I urge a ``no'' vote. I ask unanimous consent all time be yielded back.

Mr. SCHATZ. Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I would like to talk about U.S. support for Israel. It used to be that U.S. support for Israel was bipartisan. One of the most deeply disappointing realities in Washington today is that this support is becoming characterized as increasingly partisan. That is because--what happened was Republicans came out against one of President Obama's signature foreign policy achievements, the Iran nuclear deal. That opposition came in the face of consensus among national security experts across the political spectrum, both here and in Israel, that this deal was good for the security of Israel. Ultimately, what happened is, it politicized our foreign policy in the Middle East to the point that what would have otherwise been a bipartisan vote for a bipartisan consensus Ambassador to the country of Israel from the United States, will now be confirmed along mostly party lines. People will look at this confirmation and say: U.S. support for Israel now exists largely on a partisan basis. Let's be clear. It does not. I support every penny that goes to Israel. I think it is critical that the country maintains its qualitative military edge in the region, and I take a backseat to no one in my personal or professional passion for the United States-Israel relationship. That is why I cannot support Mr. Friedman's nomination to be the U.S. Ambassador to Israel. He has radical views. He has made outrageous and offensive statements on a wide range of issues. Here is a sampling of his past comments. Mr. Friedman has said that the State Department is anti-Semitic. He has said that President Obama is an anti-Semite. He has said that the two-state solution solves a ``nonexistent problem.'' Mr. Friedman has called for Israeli citizens who are Arabs to be stripped of their civil rights. He has lobbed one of the worst words in Jewish history at large parts of the American Jewish community, calling them ``kapos,'' which is a term for the Jews who worked for the Nazis in concentration camps. These are more than just provocative statements by Mr. Friedman; they are lies. For decades, the United States has stood firm as an honest broker of peace. We have said to both sides that they can trust us to help end this conflict, and that is based on the principle that the United States is passionate about peace in Israel but dispassionate about how we get there. Mr. Friedman is not objective about how we get there. On the contrary, he is very passionately for settlements, and he is very passionately against the two-state solution, which means he is basically against decades of bipartisan U.S. foreign policy. Just a few months ago, the organization he led advertised that they have a new program that will train students to ``successfully delegitimize the notion of a two-state solution.'' This group is actively working to take the two-state solution off the table. I understand that the Senate is not fully aligned on U.S. foreign policy when it comes to Israel. I understand we have our disagreements. We may disagree on whether a two-state solution is best, on where our Embassy should be located, and on how to approach the peace process, but there are some things we ought to be able to agree upon: that our Ambassador to Israel should not be more involved in Israel's politics than our own, that our Ambassador to Israel should not be so provocative that they wouldn't even be welcome at the negotiating table, and that our Ambassador should not be the kind of person who uses language to fuel violence, hate, and instability. That means we should be able to agree that our Ambassador to Israel cannot be Mr. Friedman. I urge my colleagues to join me in voting no to support U.S.-Israel relations and reject Mr. Friedman's confirmation. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Thank you, Mr. President. It is really a simple proposition and it is a scary one. As soon as this legislation is enacted, internet service providers can collect your browsing data and sell it without your permission. Right now there is a lot of conversation about who has jurisdiction, the FTC or the FCC, and who is more appropriate to govern internet privacy, whether this should be public sector or private sector, but the basic question is this for the pending legislation, Should ISPs, your internet service provider, be allowed to collect your browsing data without your permission and sell it? I think the answer for 98 percent of the public is a resounding no. Right now there is a single Federal agency that has the authority to protect consumers and their privacy when it comes to data collected by ISPs, and that is the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, but the Republicans are proposing that the Congress strip the FCC's ability to protect your privacy, and when they succeed, the American people will lose the very few Federal protections they have when it comes to online privacy. Think about how much of your life is on line today--banking, health, your interactions with your kids, your kids' interactions with other kids. It is incredibly personal, and it is not just confidential information in a traditional sense or in a legal sense, it is really a complete picture of everything you are. That is why this is worth fighting about. It is worth protecting. That is why the FCC made these rules--to recognize that we live so much of our lives online and that in a lot of instances we don't really feel like we have a choice about whether we are going to engage in a contract to get broadband service. That is a necessity for many of us. Consumers deserve some basic protections, not only do the Republicans want to get rid of the FCC rule that basically says an ISP cannot collect your data and sell it for commercial purposes, but they want to do it in a way that will ensure that no Federal agency, not a single one, will have jurisdiction over privacy for consumers using broadband. They are trying to take the referee off the playing field and for good. The problem is very simple. There are actually two agencies that could have jurisdiction over privacy online, but there was a Ninth Circuit Court decision that made a ruling that removes the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission over online privacy in the broadband space. So of the two agencies, the FTC and FCC, the FTC, according to this Federal court, no longer has jurisdiction. Now it is on the FCC's side of the house, but if we repeal the FCC rule, the way the Congressional Review Act runs is that it will prevent us from ever addressing something ``substantially similar'' again. This isn't about agreeing or disagreeing with this rule. This isn't about whether you think the FCC or FTC ought to appropriately deal with this. This isn't a question about whether you think we should exercise our prerogatives in the public or private sectors. This is about whether you think nobody should have jurisdiction over your privacy online. So what is the solution here? Well, we should work with private sector leaders, the FCC, and the FTC to find a comprehensive approach to privacy online. That is what this legislative body should be doing. Instead of aggressively digging into this issue on behalf of consumers, we are actually blowing up the only thing we have, which is this FCC rule. To repeat, by using the Congressional Review Act, Republicans are forever preventing the FCC from protecting your privacy if you use broadband. I want to end by noting that 55 years ago this month, President Kennedy gave a seminal speech about consumer rights. He spoke about the march of technology, how it had outpaced old laws and regulations, and how fast that progress had occurred. He noted that in just a few decades supermarkets went from carrying 1,500 products to more than 6,000, doctors wrote 90 percent of their prescriptions for drugs that no one had even heard of 20 years before, but let's fast forward to the present day, and we have blown those numbers out of the water. The average supermarket carries 40,000 products; in 2015 alone, the FDA approved 51 new drugs; and of course we now have the internet, which in the United States grew from 148 million users to nearly 240 million in just 15 years. The next nonincremental change in technology in our lives will be the internet of things, in which we will have tens of billions of devices connected to each other and interacting with us whether we like it or not. So the march of technology goes on, but what stays the same is the bedrock principle that President Kennedy outlined; that consumers have the right to be safe, they have the right to be informed, they have the right to choose, and they have the right to be heard. Those rights are in jeopardy. The FCC took a small but important step, and now the Republicans are blowing that up. Let me be clear. This is the single biggest step backward for online privacy in many years, and we have failed the American people when it comes to their privacy. We should be staring this problem in the face, but what we are doing tonight and tomorrow is making it worse. That is why I will vote no, and I will urge my colleagues to vote no on this resolution. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, what should we call it? What do we call this new bill the Republicans are rushing through to take away healthcare from millions of Americans? Is it TrumpCare? Is it RyanCare? It is important to remember that both Paul Ryan and President Trump are branding experts. The President put his name on a line of steaks. He put his name on a magazine, on hotels. Then, here is the Speaker of the House, who has worked pretty hard to be thought of, at least in this town, as a policy wonk and serious thinker, who has branded everything he has worked on from the Ryan budget to ``A Better Way.'' Yet neither leader of the Republican Party wants to own this thing. That is because TrumpCare is one of the worst pieces of legislation I have ever seen. The process has been a total mess, and this is despite the fact that the Republicans had 7 years to work on a plan. At first, they were thinking about doing this without getting a score from the Congressional Budget Office, the CBO. Then they realized that even their own Members--even their loyal soldiers--did not want to vote on something without knowing how much it would cost or how many people would lose healthcare. Now they are saying the score either does not matter or it is wrong except for the areas in which they like the score. They spent the last 48 hours trashing the CBO, when there is plenty of evidence that for the last 8 years, they referred to the CBO as an expert source when it fit their needs. Look, the legislative process requires hearings, expert testimony, and that is not a mere formality. That is how you get a decent product. For all of the complaints about the way the ACA was passed, they did have hearings; they had discussions. It took over a year. President Obama, himself, even went to the Republican retreat and personally engaged in policy. Moving this fast without having hearings is the kind of thing you do when naming a post office or doing some other noncontroversial measure, or it is the kind of thing you do for something that you don't want people to look at very closely because, with every moment that passes, this coalition frays, if it ever existed in the first place. Now you have criticism from literally the left, right, and center. That is, in part, because no one saw this coming. No one expected a bill that would look like this because during the campaign this administration promised not to cut Medicaid. It promised that everyone--every single American--would have health insurance, but here we are. If TrumpCare becomes law, 14 million people will lose their healthcare next year. Let me repeat that. In just 1 year, 14 million Americans will no longer have the health insurance they were promised. I want to talk about what that means, what will it mean if people no longer have healthcare. This week, the Washington Post featured the stories of people in a single county whose lives have changed for the better because of Medicaid. In McDowell County, WV, Medicaid has helped thousands of people get access to physical therapy and immunizations. It has allowed them to see counselors for mental health problems and opioid addiction. It has helped them to afford the medication they need instead of relying on free samples from clinics. These services do not just benefit the individuals, they benefit the whole community by making sure people are healthy enough so they can work and contribute to the economy. They allow us to save money by focusing on prevention instead of treatment. This is what is at stake. These are the services that will go away because TrumpCare is going to cut Medicaid by $880 billion. Here is another thing. TrumpCare is also going to impose an age tax that will allow insurance companies to charge older people more money for health insurance--a lot more. I want to be clear. We are not just talking about senior citizens here, we are talking about people who are pre-Medicare; in other words, anyone under the age of 65 but not exactly young. For example, a 64-year-old will be charged up to five times the amount a 21-year-old will be charged. Starting at age 25, the older you get, the more money you will get charged. That is why AARP has come out against this bill, because every year you get older they will charge you more. This is an age tax. This is a penalty for getting older. There is an important point to be made about process, and that is this: This is actually not a healthcare bill. That is not a political statement. That is not a rhetorical flourish. Here is what is going on. If this were a healthcare bill, it would be new legislation. In order to pass legislation, under the rules of the U.S. Senate, which were agreed upon by both parties over many years, you need 60 votes. The reason we are working this through reconciliation is, they have nowhere near 60 votes. So what can you do within the reconciliation process? They are basically stuck with dealing with taxes and subsidies because they only require 51 votes. That is all they can do. This is a tax vehicle. Then, the question becomes, Who is getting money, and who is getting charged more money? On that count, this tax bill is one of the biggest wealth transfers in American history. It is a transfer from working- class Americans to rich Americans. That is what this bill does. It takes money from the people who need help the most and gives it to the very wealthy. Here we are in 2017, just a few months out from an election in which income inequality was one of the driving issues on both sides of the aisle. What the Republicans in the House seem to take from that experience is that their mandate is to go in and reduce taxes for insurance executives who make more than $500,000 a year and for the investor class in order to cut Medicaid by $880 billion. It is like they were asleep all of last year or maybe they were never very serious about income inequality. We do not need another election to know this is not what the American people expect from the Congress. They expect bipartisan compromise. They expect results that will make their healthcare better. My own view is, we can work together on healthcare, but it requires three things: first, good faith; second, bipartisanship; third, legislative hearings. Frankly, we have seen none of these things because the process has been a mess. We need to have a conversation in the light of day and let the American people weigh in. What is the rush? There is no doubt there is plenty of room for improvement in the existing healthcare law, but TrumpCare makes it much worse. It will cause chaos in the American economy and in 24 million Americans' lives. That is a threat to the progress we have made over the last 7 years. It is a threat to one-sixth of the American economy. Most of all, it is a threat to at least 24 million Americans who stand to lose their healthcare. These threats are the reasons the Senate needs to come together and say: Slow down. Let's work together. Let's work on forming a bipartisan foundation. Let's have hearings. Most importantly, let's not impose this catastrophe in a hurry on the American people. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, last night the Republicans in the House revealed their plan to scrap the ACA and replace it with something much worse--TrumpCare. There are so many things that are wrong with this bill. A lot of us are still going through the 184 pages and all of its implications, so it is impossible to encapsulate all the difficulties in this legislation in one speech. I am going to highlight eight problems with this bill to start. First of all, this bill is a complicated and rushed mess. Despite the fact that they had 7 years to work on their own plan, the Republicans cobbled together a bill that makes no sense. In an effort to make everyone in their caucus happy, they have made no one in their caucus happy. That is why we have seen conservative groups--from AEI to AFP, the Heritage Foundation, the Koch brothers--come out and express opposition to the legislation. Second, this bill cuts Medicaid. They are going to use a phrase called block grants, but I want everyone to understand that is cutting Medicaid. That is a euphemism for cutting the resources for Medicaid. This cuts a program that helps more than 70 million Americans across the country get the healthcare they need. It means less care for pregnant moms, less care for families with loved ones in nursing homes. Nursing home benefits will be totally trashed, and all of these changes will reduce Medicaid to a level not seen before. By the way, Medicare doesn't escape the ax. It is also in trouble if we enact the House legislation. TrumpCare will actually move up the date of insolvency of the Medicare trust fund by 3 years, to the year 2025. That is not 20, 30 years from now when they talk about the Social Security trust fund. That is quite soon to have Medicare be insolvent, and they are accelerating the date in which Medicare becomes insolvent. Third, this bill hits the elderly with an age tax. Here is how the law currently works. It is basically a cap on the amount that an insurance company can charge a senior for healthcare. It says you cannot charge more than three times the amount you charge a young person for a senior citizen. It is capped at three times what you charge for young people. This would increase the cap to five times the cost. If a young person's health insurance costs $250, the maximum under the current law is $750. Now you are talking five times $250--$1,250 per month. This is an age tax. If there is any doubt about how difficult this is going to be for senior citizens, ask the AARP. They are a bipartisan, well-respected organization that works in every State. Seniors across the country need to understand what this age tax is. You will pay more for health insurance if the law passes as it is. Fourth, and this is a very important point. This is basically not a healthcare bill because if it were a healthcare bill, everybody knows it would require 60 votes. It would be enacting new legislation. This is a budget bill. All they can do, really, is cut taxes related to healthcare. This is a bill that cuts taxes for rich people. How does it finance it? First of all, it finances--probably a lot of it by borrowing. The other portion of it is by cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. TrumpCare has special tax cuts that only benefit the highest earning households and another one that will go to insurance company executives who make more than half a million dollars a year. You cannot make this stuff up. They are cutting taxes for insurance company executives who make more than half a million dollars each year, and they are financing it by cutting healthcare for the people we all represent. Fifth, this bill will blow up the debt and the deficit. The crazy thing is, we don't actually know how much our debt and deficit will increase because Republicans are in such a hurry to rush this through without a formal CBO analysis. We have no idea how much this is going to cost--probably trillions, but they haven't even asked for a CBO score. They don't want to know how much this is going to blow up the debt and the deficit because all of the fiscal hawks will be found to be hypocrites who have been railing about deficits for all of their career. Yet this might be the biggest budget-busting piece of legislation in many, many years, and they don't want to know how much it costs because they have made a promise. They are going to go ahead and fulfill that promise no matter how ridiculous it is. Sixth, this bill will trash mental health coverage. The ACA was a huge step forward for the mental health community because it required insurance companies to cover mental health and substance abuse disorders. We are in a moment when every State is struggling with an addiction crisis. What I don't know is why we would rip away these services when so many people are counting on it to break their addictions. Seventh, this bill will defund Planned Parenthood because they can't help themselves in the U.S. House of Representatives. Planned Parenthood is a provider that offers healthcare to millions of women across the country, but this bill will stop low-income women from getting critical health services like breast cancer screenings from local clinics. Oftentimes, this would happen in communities where women have nowhere else to turn. Many community health centers don't have the services women need or they have twice the wait times that a Planned Parenthood would have. For women waiting to find out if they have cancer, that is simply not an option. Finally, this bill is too partisan. I think we can all agree that our approach to healthcare could use some improvements, and I am more than ready to work with my Republican colleagues to make healthcare better. That is not just a rhetorical flourish. I have tried to back that up with my legislative actions. I have worked with Senator Hatch on legislation to increase access to high-quality care in hard-to-reach regions. I have worked with Senator Cassidy and many others on a bill to create a public health emergency fund. I have worked with Senators Wicker, Cochran, and Thune on a telehealth bill. We can work together on healthcare, but it requires three things: No. 1, good faith, and there is no good faith in this piece of legislation. No. 2, bipartisanship. This bill, I am quite sure, will get zero Democratic votes in the House or the Senate. No. 3, we need legislative hearings. We need to have a conversation in the light of day and let the American people weigh in. We need to figure out what it is that they are doing to the American healthcare system. If they are so proud of their plan, why no hearings? If they are so proud of their plan, why not get at least a score from the Congressional Budget Office? If they are so proud of their plan, why do they lack the confidence that any Democrat will support it? Look, we do have the opportunity to work together to improve healthcare, but this bill is basically a mess. It is worse than I thought. I think it is worse than a lot of people thought, especially given that they have been talking about this for 7 years. So one might think they would have had a really well-thought-through plan. This has all of the characteristics of something that was rushed out the door in about a 48-hour period. I hope my colleagues will join me in opposing this very bad piece of legislation and give us some space and time to do this right and to do this in a bipartisan fashion. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, yesterday the New York Times published a story about the nearly 100 Federal protections this administration has attacked. The article highlighted a few of the outcomes of these attacks. For example, telecommunication companies are no longer required to take reasonable measures to protect the Social Security numbers of their customers, and people with severe, disabling mental health issues are now able to buy guns--but do not worry because refugees from war-torn countries like Sudan won't be coming into our country anytime soon. Today, in about an hour, Republicans are going after yet another protection. This time, it is one that protects Americans who work for Federal contractors. Up until a few years ago, companies that cut corners and saved money by treating their employees badly held a competitive advantage over law-abiding companies in competing for Federal contracts, so President Obama put a policy in place to take away that advantage. In 2015, he put a new protection in place so that the companies that had histories of unsafe working conditions would have to report those histories when they applied for Federal contracts. The idea here is pretty simple: If you want to work for the Federal Government, you need to follow the law, and if you do not, the government has a right to know so that the companies that cut corners do not have a competitive advantage by being able to bid more cheaply over those who play by the rules. Republicans often claim to be in favor of leveling the playing field for businesses. After all, that was the rationale that was used last month when they voted so that coal companies were no longer responsible for cleaning up their own messes and oil companies could hide payments to foreign governments. Both of those actions were taken in the supposed spirit of caring about the ability of companies to compete. Business competition was placed above the rights of communities to clean air and clean water or the right of American consumers to know they are not supporting a dictator when they fill up at the fuel tank. But now, when it comes to safe workplaces and pay discrimination, suddenly, having companies compete on a level playing field is not the priority. This just does not make sense to me. This policy was good for workers, good for taxpayers, and good for companies that play by the rules. We should all agree that companies that have good safety and wage records should not be placed at a competitive disadvantage, but the Republicans are giving Federal contractors a green light for pay discrimination and unsafe working conditions. That is the only signal we send by taking away this policy from the previous administration. This is yet another example of the empty words of an administration that claims to care about empowering women in the workplace. Last week, the President signed two Executive orders that were designed to appear to promote women in the workplace, but when you look beyond the photo-op and the actual orders, they do not do a thing for women in the workplace. They do not put one Federal dollar toward advancing gender equality and gender equity. Now the Republicans are putting a bill on the floor and eventually on the President's desk that will make it easier for companies that discriminate against women in the workplace to get Federal dollars. If this administration and if this Congress really care about making sure women do not face bias and discrimination, if they really care about businesses being able to compete on a level playing field, then why attack this protection? I urge my colleagues to do the right thing and vote to keep the fair pay and safe workplaces protection in place. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, 20 is the number of bomb threats that were called into Jewish institutions in our communities across the country yesterday--in just 1 day. In Alabama, Delaware, Michigan, Maryland, Virginia, and in my home State of Hawaii, in my Temple Emanu-El, where I grew up and was bar mitzvahed. No one wants to be the parent who picks up the phone and finds out that they need to pick up their child from school because people are threatening violence--and all because of their faith. Since 2017 began, 100 bomb threats have been called into Jewish schools and Jewish community centers. It sounds like it is from another time, but this is what rising anti-Semitism looks like in our country. Granted, we knew weird stuff was happening: Pepe, David Dukes--this is not normal America. But now the threat of violence is real. It is coming through the phone lines of American schools every day, and it is loud and clear. This rising threat demands leadership. It demands that we regularly and quickly denounce anti-Semitism and do everything we can do to stop it from growing. But that is not what we have seen so far from this administration. Now, the baseline expectation of an unequivocal, quick and regular disavowal of rising anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim rhetoric from the leader of the free world is no longer being met. Instead, we have to extract it from the administration. We have to ask for it when it doesn't come. We have to ask when it is coming. What is even sadder is that this administration has avoided any opportunity--even the easy ones, even the most obvious ones--to stand against anti-Semitism. Just over a month ago, the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The White House put out a statement without a single mention of the 6 million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust. Here is the crazy thing: The first draft mentioned Jews. The State Department drafted the initial statement which mentioned Jews, like every Holocaust Remembrance Day statement before it did. Then it went to the White House where someone thought: Let's make edits. Let's remove mention of Jews from a statement about International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This was someone's decision. It was an intentional decision. Who would decide that, and why would that be done? Why remove the mention of Jews? It is like mentioning slavery and not mentioning African Americans. It is like mentioning internment and not mentioning Japanese Americans. When you are talking about genocide, it is not irrelevant to talk about who did it and to whom. It is a requirement. But the White House didn't mention Jews, and it didn't apologize when people were rightfully confused. Only now that violence has been unleashed, that Jewish cemeteries are being desecrated, that people's children are being threatened on a daily basis are we seeing the minimum from the White House to recognize the rise of anti-Semitic sentiments and actions. I am worried. Local communities have taken it upon themselves to lead the way and stand up together. This is what leadership looks like. It looks like Muslim Americans showing up to cemeteries to help to restore Jewish headstones. It looks like local police raising money and people taking time to hold a vigil in solidarity with their Jewish neighbors. There have been far too many bystanders to the increasing anti-Semitism across the country. It is long past time to break the silence and to make it utterly clear that the United States is not a place for hate. It is un-American to hate Jews or Muslims or strangers in our midst. That is not who we are or what we stand for. That is not the United States of America. This week, as Jewish communities are reviewing bomb threat guidance and looking at best practices for security, it is up to all of us to take action and to do everything we can to beat back rising anti- Semitism. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. SCHATZ. I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Well, I think----

Mr. SCHATZ. I want to make an observation that there are a couple of kinds of willful blindness. One is willful blindness about climate change in the first place, a desire not to hear the truth, a desire to put blinders on when it comes to these issues. I will note that not every time but almost every time we have a debate on climate, we have a nice complement of Democrats on this side and a totally empty Chamber on the other side. It is not that they don't know what is going on, it is that they know exactly what is going on, and they don't want to deal with it. They don't want to deal with it, and they are good people and patriotic people, but there is a reason to believe this willful blindness is not coincidental. I would just implore the Senate Republicans who respect the Senate, who understand our special role under the Constitution to give advice and consent on nominations for Cabinet positions, that this isn't some minor sub-Cabinet position. This isn't some matter of little import. I understand both sides employ tactics to delay action on the Senate floor. That is kind of part of the way this body works, right? The minority slows the majority down, and we try to come to some kind of consensus, sometimes a unanimous consent agreement or whatever it may be, to try to make this place work a little better, and it is maddeningly slow, but it forces bipartisanship, right? I understand the accusation that sometimes gets made that we are just trying to delay for delay's sake. At the beginning of this week--look, I ran for the Senate because of climate. That is how passionately I feel about this issue, but I understood how this thing was lining up, and I said: Look, let's fight the fight. There is no magic between 28 hours and 30 hours. There is no magic between 29 hours of talking about this and 26 hours of talking about this. I was prepared to fight the fight and move this week. I didn't want to employ extraordinary delay tactics. I was actually even arguing with some of my colleagues, with whom I agree so much on climate, about the sort of efficacy just delaying for another couple of hours, but we are not trying to delay another couple of hours for no particular reason. There are 3,000 emails that a judge in Oklahoma is compelling Scott Pruitt to provide to the public, and not 6 weeks from now or 6 months from now but 3 business days from now. On Tuesday morning, the public and, maybe in this instance even more importantly, the Members of the U.S. Senate, who are in a position to determine whether this is the right person to run the Environmental Protection Agency, are going to see the contents of these emails. Do you know what? It is probably nothing. These 3,000 emails that are correspondence between the Oklahoma attorney general, the head of the Republican Attorneys General Association, and a bunch of fossil fuel companies--this guy who has sued the EPA and tried to undermine the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act 17 times, this guy who refuses to recuse himself from running the EPA, from being both a plaintiff and a defendant, I am sure the 3,000 emails he has delayed releasing for 750 days--I am sure the 3,000 e-mails he has delayed releasing for 750 days and is only going to have to provide them to the public because a court is making him, I am sure there is nothing in them. But just in case, why don't we just find out what is in them? Because it seems to me that if they are awful, it would give pause to Republicans. I just don't get why the Republicans--I understand why people want to jam this through before maybe something bad happens on Tuesday, but if I were a rank-and-file Republican, I would be saying: This looks a little goofy. We don't normally vote on Fridays at 1 p.m., we normally vote on Thursdays at 2:15 so everybody can race off to the Reagan airport and go home. If it is 2:15, I can't get home until Friday, but most people can get home. We vote on Thursday afternoons, and in rare instances do we vote on Fridays--debt ceiling, continuing resolutions, big stuff. We have been moving on nominees kind of at a normal pace. Listen, it has been tough. We have a lot of late nights here. We thank the Senate staff for hanging in here with us. We apologize for the difficulty that you have to undertake to make the Senate work and for us to do our constitutional duties, but isn't it weird that we are just jamming this through on a Friday afternoon? If I were a rank-and-file Member, I would go to my leadership and say: Hey, this is getting a little weird. I don't want this thing to blow up when I am back home at a townhall. I would be happy to yield to the Senator from Oregon. There is no better climate champion than Jeff Merkley. It is probably a two-way tie with the junior Senator from Oregon and the Senator from Rhode Island. Before yielding to a question, thank you for your dedication on this issue for the people of Oregon and for the people of this country, but I am happy to yield for a question.

Mr. SCHATZ. You were asking about the willful blindness.

Mr. SCHATZ. Yes.