Chris Van Hollen

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, just very briefly in response, I think everyone knows what is going on here. This is a very simple proposal. If you want to participate in President Trump's deferral, you can continue to participate in the deferral program. But if you are in the Armed Forces or are a Federal employee and you are being required to do that right now and you don't want to, we should let them opt out. That is all this is about, and I am really surprised that our Republican colleagues would block members of our Armed Forces and Federal employees from making a simple choice which they believe is in their best interest. So I am disappointed with the objection and will continue to pursue this. Thank you.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, just to respond to the Senator from Montana, I think he well knows that it has been over 6 months since the House of Representatives passed the first Heroes Act with comprehensive COVID-19 relief. They have also passed an updated ``Heroes 2 Act,'' but we never even had a vote here in the U.S. Senate on that provision. We have been blocked from having that vote by the Republican leader. I don't know where my colleague stands on the bipartisan framework that was just released. That is something that I can support and pursue, but listening to the Senate majority leader, he has been pouring cold water on it. And, by the way, the measure that the Senator from Montana mentioned that we should pass right now for coronavirus relief, that doesn't have a payroll tax holiday. It doesn't do what the Senator just said he wants to do. It doesn't say anything about that. So if the Senator or others want to introduce legislation to have a payroll tax holiday for those who have been enrolled in this program for the last 4 months, go ahead. But why would you allow another day to pass requiring members of our Armed Forces who don't want to participate to participate to participate or requiring Federal employees who are out there providing public services to participate? That is all this does. This doesn't preclude anything the Senator talked about doing. All it does is to say: Right now, for those people who are calling who don't want to be enrolled in this program, let them out. Let them out. And what the Senator from Montana is saying is: No, I want to continue to hold them hostage to pass a proposal that isn't even in the majority leader's own bill. And that is what people get sick and tired about around this country. So let's just pass this. This is a simple, straightforward bill. I welcome debate on the bipartisan proposal that has been put forward by a number of Republican Senators and a number of Democratic Senators, but don't try and mix this up into that larger debate. This is very simple. It just says to a member of the Army, the Navy or any of the services who doesn't want to be forced to participate in this right now that they don't have to. That is what this says, and by opposing this, you are saying that you want to prolong the requirement that they participate in a program that they don't want to be a part of

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I am on the floor today to discuss a question of fundamental fairness to members of our Armed Forces and to Federal employees. I think we all may recall a few months ago when President Trump ordered the Department of the Treasury to establish a system to push businesses, companies, and employers around the country to defer the collection of employees' payroll taxes. Those are the taxes that go to Social Security and Medicare. The key word here is ``defer'' because this is really a shell game. Any moneys that businesses do not pay into Social Security and Medicare now are going to have to be paid by those Federal employees right after the holidays, starting in January. And many employees around the country were at first confused. They thought they were getting a payroll tax holiday, but that is not the case. The reality is, whatever they didn't pay in the form of payroll taxes now and in the past couple months they would be required to pay back right after those holidays. And when businesses looked at this and when workers and employees around the country looked at this, they overwhelmingly rejected it. They said they didn't want to participate. Here is what UPS said about this proposal: ``We recognize that for some, it may have been helpful to have more money in their paychecks in 2020, yet not all employees have professional tax planning needed to prepare effectively for the added obligation they would face in 2021.'' So even though this payroll tax deferral proposal got a burst of attention, it turned out to be meaningless for most workers around the country. Most private sector employers didn't participate, and their employees and workers didn't want them to participate. Unfortunately, the one big exception to this has been members of our Armed Forces, the folks who every day stand guard to protect our country, and Federal employees who do the Nation's business with respect to important services they provide. And as the private sector has rejected this, we have heard from thousands of Federal employees who say: We don't want to participate either. We have heard from members of the Armed Forces that say: We don't want to be used as guinea pigs and be required to participate. So I want to be really clear that if we don't correct this, the damage will continue to be done, and these members of our Armed Forces and Federal employees will be forced to pay even more back after the holidays. Now, I wrote to Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and to OMB Director Vought about this back in September, September 8, just as the deferral was starting, and we were joined in that letter by 22 Senators--Senators from both sides of the aisle. We had a simple bipartisan request. It was: Make this payroll tax deferral optional, make it voluntary. If Federal employees and members of our Armed Forces want to participate in this proposal, fine. Let them do it, but don't force, don't require, don't coerce members of our military and Federal employees to participate. And we didn't get a response to that letter to Secretary Mnuchin and CBO Director Vought. So I asked Secretary Mnuchin about this issue at a Senate Banking Committee hearing on September 24. I said: Mr. Secretary, why shouldn't we make this voluntary? Why should you require members of our Armed Forces and Federal employees to participate in the program if they don't want to? And his response was: Yeah, it would be ``reasonable'' for the payroll tax to be voluntary ``if people don't want to participate. Sounds like common sense.'' Well, we expected some followup from the Secretary of Treasury. Nothing. So we sent a followup letter--again, a bipartisan letter. Nothing. So now it is December, and the Trump administration is still forcing members of our Armed Forces and Federal employees who don't want to participate in this now-forced deferral program--they want to continue to force them to do it. So we introduced a bipartisan piece of legislation called the Protecting Employees from Surprise Taxes Act. It is pretty straightforward. It says: If a Federal employee or member of the armed services wants to participate, let them participate. If they want to opt out, let them opt out of it. I want to stress that the Federal workers we have heard from and the organizations and unions that represent Federal workers strongly support this measure. And why not? It is hard to argue that we shouldn't let the folks who are standing guard to protect us make a choice about whether they want to participate in this program. Also, just to remind our colleagues--maybe they haven't kept track of this--the Senate chose not to participate. The Senate chose not to participate in this program, whether on a mandatory or a voluntary basis. The House of Representatives chose not to participate in this program. So it is going to be interesting to hear the Senators say that they want to require members of our Armed Forces and Federal employees to enroll in a program that this Senate decided was not good for members of the Senate staff and the House of Representatives decided was not good for House staff. Yet, if we don't support this proposal, this is simply passing the bipartisan legislation I mentioned to give our members of the Armed Forces and Federal employees that choice. If we don't pass this, we are going to require them to continue to participate in a program they don't like. So, Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Finance Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. 4810 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration. I further ask that the bill be read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, November 15, 2020, will mark the 25th World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims, commemorating the millions of people killed and injured on the world's roads. It is also a day to thank emergency responders for their role in saving lives; to reflect on the impact of road traffic deaths and injuries on families and communities; and to draw attention to the need for improved legislation, awareness, infrastructure, and technology to save more families from the tragedy of losing a loved one. More than 1 million people die from road crashes every year, and tens of millions are seriously injured. Road traffic crashes are the No. 1 killer of young people aged 15-29 and the eighth leading cause of death among all people worldwide. Rochelle Sobel, President of the Association for Safe International Road Travel, highlighted the gravity of this issue and the imperative to fix it: ``Every 27 seconds, somewhere in the world, a person dies in a road crash.'' On the 25th anniversary of World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims, it is important to remember the history and recommit to the goals of this day. It was initiated in 1995 as the European Day of Remembrance and quickly spread around the globe to countries in Africa, South America, and Asia. In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 60/2, recognizing November 15 as the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims. Since that time, the observance of this day has continued to spread to a growing number of countries on every continent. This year, the stated goals of World Day of Remembrance 2020 include remembering all people killed and seriously injured on the roads, acknowledging the crucial work of the emergency services, advocating for better support to road traffic victims and their families, and promoting evidence-based actions to prevent and eventually stop further road traffic deaths and injuries. Indeed, the day has become an important moment to focus international attention on this preventable epidemic and as an advocacy tool in global efforts to reduce road casualties. As a result of the growing awareness and global call to action that World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims has generated, in September 2020, the United Nations passed a resolution declaring the years 2021 to 2030 a new Decade of Action for Road Safety. The declaration affirms the UN's commitment to work vigorously to implement a new, ambitious agenda to halve road crash deaths by 2030. Additionally, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3.6 calls on governments and their stakeholders, including NGOs and private citizens, to address the personal, medical, and financial burdens associated with road traffic deaths and injuries. The devastation of losing a child, parent, sibling, partner, friend, caregiver, or caretaker; the struggle of having to care for a permanently disabled loved one, these are incalculable. Road traffic crashes are preventable, and so we owe it to our communities to work together so that the hopes and dreams of our loved ones are not shattered on the roads of the United States and the world. We must all take action to prevent these avoidable tragedies and save lives.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, yesterday, we came together as a country--not as Republicans, not as Democrats or Independents, but as Americans--to recognize the service and sacrifice of our veterans, men and women who served in uniform to protect our country and to defend our democracy. The ongoing attacks that President Trump has launched on our democracy are an insult to those who have sacrificed so much to defend, and so too is the complicity of so many Republican Senators right here in this body, who through their silence or active incitement are spreading Donald Trump's absurd false narrative that he won the election. Each of us--each of us in this body--has sworn an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, to stand up for our democracy, and to support the peaceful transfer of power established there. My colleagues, it is time for every Senator to do your sworn duty and stand up for the Constitution and for our democracy. Make no mistake, on January 20, Joe Biden will be sworn in as the next President of the United States and Kamala Harris will be sworn in as the next Vice President of the United States. But that does not mean that what Donald Trump is doing now is harmless. That does not mean that the silence or active complicity of so many Republican Senators is harmless. It is downright dangerous to the health of our democracy and to our national security interests. We have enough challenges protecting our democracy from foreign enemies and foreign adversaries who seek every day to undermine faith and confidence in democratic institutions here in the United States and in other democracies around the world. The last thing we need is for people to attack that confidence from within the United States. This is doing harm in the short term and the long term to our national security, putting us at risk. In the short term, we are seeing a very dangerous purge of top national security officials at the Defense Department and other places. These are officials with whom I have many policy differences, but they are competent managers and qualified individuals. And what you are seeing this President do in the death throes of his administration is purging those qualified individuals and replacing them with people whose only credential is loyalty to President Trump, and replacing competent, qualified individuals with political lackeys. That is dangerous at any time. It is especially dangerous to mess around with the top leadership of our national security agencies during a transition to power. That is what the 9/11 Commission told us. Yet what you are seeing President Trump do is play with matches when it comes to our national security and to put personal political peeves above the national security interests of the United States. In addition to purging individuals from some of our top national security agencies, the President is prohibiting the government of the United States, which belongs to the people of the United States, from providing daily intelligence briefings and other intelligence briefings to the incoming President, President-Elect Joe Biden. Now, we all know that President Trump has been notorious for not being interested in those intelligence briefings, but I think that for all of us who know Joe Biden from the time he served as Senator and Vice President, we know he takes these things seriously and he takes threats that might be learned through those intelligence briefings seriously. To deny the next President of the United States access to those briefings, which is part of the tradition and part of the rules that we developed to ensure steady transfer and making sure the next President has the information needed on day one, that is outright grossly negligent when it comes to our national security. It is time for our Senate Republican colleagues to be speaking out loudly about that. That, of course, is part of the consequence of the fact that the General Services Administration has been unwilling to provide the traditional funds to support the peaceful transfer of power. This is another gross abuse of the government, which belongs to the people of the United States, not to Donald Trump. In addition, you have the Secretary of State, Secretary Pompeo, instructing the Department of State not to pass along messages from foreign leaders to the next President of the United States, President- Elect Joe Biden. This is, again, another gross abuse of power. And, of course, Secretary Pompeo undermined this faith in our transition of democracy himself when he talked about the fact that we are transitioning to the second Trump term. This is the person--this is the individual--who is supposed to represent the United States of America overseas, the person who is supposed to stand up for our democracy, and yet, here, at home he is undermining faith in that democracy. And who does that give any comfort to? Our adversaries and enemies abroad, people who want our democracy to fail. I don't know if our Republican colleagues have noticed who has congratulated the President-Elect Joe Biden and who has not among foreign leaders. Well, our democratic allies around the world have congratulated the next President of the United States, Joe Biden. The United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada--the leaders of democratic governments and countries have all acknowledged that our democracy is working and that they are recognizing the next President of the United States. Who has refused, so far, to congratulate the next President of the United States, Joe Biden? Vladimir Putin, President Xi, and the leader of North Korea. What President Trump is doing and what our Republican colleagues are doing by their silence is aiding and abetting these authoritarian leaders. These guys are smiling. If you are an authoritarian leader, you want nothing more than to see democracy fail--to see that model fail. These are leaders who often have their own sort of election facades, where they pretend to have a free and fair election, and then it turns out to be 90 percent for them. They are smiling at what is happening here. So I hope our Republican Senate colleagues are looking at the company they are keeping among foreign leaders who are watching us, because the leaders of our democratic friends and allied countries have all recognized the outcome of this election, and it is the leaders of Russia, China, North Korea, and others who have not. That is the company that is being kept by so many Republican Senators today. And that is going to do ongoing damage to our ability around the world, as the world's oldest democracy, to stand up for the interests of liberty, freedom, and democracy. I fear that that is not even the most damaging thing that has happened as a result of this fraud that is being perpetrated on the American people. The biggest danger is undermining the confidence of the American people themselves, or large numbers of the American people, in the outcome of this election, seeding this false narrative that somehow Donald Trump was actually the winner and that Joe Biden was somehow an illegitimate President-to-be. If you look at the recent polling in the last 48 hours, what you find is that 70 percent of Republicans believe this was not a clear and fair election. That is two times as many as before the election, and that is when Donald Trump was telling everybody that, if he lost, it meant the election was rigged. Are we really, through our silence or sometimes encouragement, going to seed the idea that because Donald Trump lost the election it was rigged? All you have to look at is the frivolous claims being made in courts around the United States and the reaction to those claims by judges, appointed by Democrats and Republicans alike, to realize what a charade this is. Joe Biden, as a candidate, has said he wants to bring the country together. He and Kamala Harris want to find a way to bring us together to find common ground. And he is looking for the opportunity to work on both sides of the aisle here in the U.S. Senate and in the House of Representatives to address urgent matters before our country. So I ask my Republican Senate colleagues: How are you going to take the extended hand of Joe Biden when you are telling so many of your constituents back at home that this is an illegitimate election? How are you going to do that? What we have seen in the aftermath of this election is scary because we saw so many times over the last 4 years that our Republican Senate colleagues refused to stand up to the abuse of power of this administration, things that if the Obama administration ever thought of doing, they would be out there every day crying foul and abuse of power. But everybody enabled that conduct. And now, after the election, when Joe Biden was already 5 million votes ahead in the national vote and winning the electoral college, you would think this is a moment for everybody to come together to give the next President of the United States a chance. I think the scary thing of what this shows is that the Republican Party has become the party of Donald Trump. I just urge my colleagues to think about the consequences of feeding into this fraud that Donald Trump was actually the one who was elected, because what you will be saying there to the 72 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump is that he is, in fact, the rightful President, and he will therefore also continue to call the shots within the Republican Party. He is doing that now, even after he has lost an election. So I just urge my colleagues to think about what they are doing each day that goes by that reinforces this false and fraudulent claim--how it is harming our democracy, how it is harming our national security, how it is going to impede Joe Biden's ability to reach out to our Republican colleagues. It is not because he doesn't want to--he does--but because you will have undermined your ability to do it by telling tens and millions of Americans that somehow this was an illegitimate election. I ask, I implore my colleagues to think more about this as every hour goes by, because every hour that this lie continues and persists is another hour that you are harming the health of our democracy and our country. Thank you. I yield back.

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

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, earlier this year we lost one of our Senate alumnae--a constituent and a personal friend--Ellen Michelle Bloom. She was a devoted mother and wife, who dedicated her career to public service and advocating for consumers. While she was not a household name, her 40-year career has benefited the lives of millions of Americans. Ellen began her extraordinary career while a student at the University of Maryland, interning for Senator John Tunney before joining the staff of a newly elected Senator, Howard Metzenbaum. Her first job was in the mailroom, answering constituent mail, learning about the concerns of Ohioans and figuring out how to navigate the bureaucracy. Over the ensuing 18 years on Senator Metzenbaum's staff, Ellen rose through the ranks, at a time when female aides were a distinct minority, to become his legislative director and an expert in consumer protection. As her many friends and colleagues have written in the months since her passing at age 65, Ellen was not interested in attention; she was only interested in results. A long-time friend and colleague wrote of Ellen, ``It's amazing how much you can get done when you don't care who gets the credit.'' That was Ellen. From provisions in the 1984 Cable Act mandating Equal Employment Opportunity standards, to promoting children's television legislation, to regulations requiring lavatories on commuter airplanes, to warning labels on large buckets designed to protect small children from drowning, Ellen's work was far-reaching. She advocated for the use of car seats and bicycle helmets and was among a small group who sought to bridge the ``digital divide'' long before it became a popular phrase. She believed in equality and fairness and sought ways to incorporate these principles into public policy. When Senator Metzenbaum retired, Ellen was recruited to join the Clinton administration, first at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, then as the Commerce Department's Deputy Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs, and lastly as Deputy Chief of Staff for Commerce Secretary William Daley, where her responsibilities included the 2000 Census. Following her public service career, Ellen joined the Washington staff of Consumer Reports. As Director of Federal Policy and head of the D.C. office, she led the organization's advocacy in support of the Affordable Care Act, fought for stricter vehicle emission standards, promoted expanded consumer product labeling, and worked on many other issues that protected the safety and health of American consumers. At a time when so many question the ability of the government and public advocacy to improve the quality of life for our citizens, Ellen's work stands as an antidote to cynicism. She recognized that the work of democracy is hard but always had faith that we could make progress. Her legacy of good works is a testament to that conviction and an inspiration for all. She was also an example of how to face adversity with courage and fortitude. While her professional accomplishments were many, her greatest pride was her family: her husband David Bushnell and their children Michael and Jenna Bushnell, her many nieces and nephews, her brother and sister-in-law, her cousins spread across the country. Her life was too short--way too--short; but it was full of love and rich in the ways that gave it depth, joy, and consequence. We were lucky to have such a dedicated and passionate public servant. I was fortunate to count Ellen as a dear friend. She made our country a better, safer place. She may be gone, but her many accomplishments live on and will continue to protect and benefit Americans for generations to come. We need many more Ellen Blooms, but she was one of a kind.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I want to start by thanking my friend and colleague, the Senator from Pennsylvania, for talking this evening about what is at stake for so many of his constituents with this Supreme Court nomination and the very real possibility that the Affordable Care Act will be struck down and what that means to so many of his constituents. I do think this is a moment where we need to reflect and take stock of where we are as a country on many fronts. We are in the middle of a global pandemic. We just saw the highest single day of new reported cases on Friday. Millions of Americans are unemployed and worried about how they are going to pay their rent and how they are going to pay for their medications. We are here at a time when a Republican-led lawsuit to strike down the Affordable Care Act, supported by President Trump and his Department of Justice, is scheduled for a fateful hearing in the Supreme Court on November 10--1 week after the upcoming election. We are here in the wake of the killings of Black men, like George Floyd, and Black women, like Breonna Taylor, which sent throngs of protesters into the streets across the country to rightly demand greater police accountability and racial justice. We gather here as wildfires in the West and hurricanes in the South demonstrate with deadly and destructive voracity the accelerating and dangerous consequences of climate change. We meet as voters are filling out mail-in ballots as early as they can to make sure that the Postal Service, which this administration has deliberately slowed down, can get their ballots delivered on time so that they can be counted and as voters stand in long lines, with their masks, 6 feet apart, to cast their ballots in the early vote. At this moment, this country is facing all these pressing issues, but as I come here this evening or early this morning, we are not considering solutions to any of those critical and urgent issues, not a single one. Instead, we are blowing up the precedent that the Senate Republican leader and other Republican Senators themselves established 4 years ago and considering a Supreme Court nominee closer in time to the Presidential election than ever before in American history, as millions of Americans have already have already cast their ballots. We are blowing up this Republican Senate established precedent and racing toward a nomination that will turn the clock back, take us backwards on all of those pressing issues that I just outlined. But sadly, I suppose none of us should be surprised that we are focused here on another judicial nomination at the expense of focusing on legislation to advance and address the interests of the American people on so many front-burner pressing issues. Indeed, as I reflect on the last months and years, just about the only thing this Republican Senate has done is pass nominations. Week after week, we ignore our job as legislators in favor of an agenda of rubberstamping, blindly supporting whatever nominee this President puts forward. In many cases, it hasn't even mattered if a judicial nomination is qualified, if they have even tried a case. Our Republican Senate colleagues have abandoned any principles they claim to hold with respect to our Judiciary Committee When President Obama was in office, those Republican Senators who were here in this Chamber erected a wall of opposition to scores of his nominees, refused to even consider many of them. They outright rejected President Obama's efforts to fill seats on the DC Circuit, the court just below the Supreme Court. Republican Senators at the time claimed that it wasn't necessary to fill those vacancies. They rejected qualified nominees up and down the bench, denying simple consideration and withholding blue slips. It was a deliberate effort to stonewall President Obama's judicial nominees. In fact, they rejected a highly-qualified nominee for the very seat Judge Amy Coney Barrett currently holds. President Obama nominated Myra Selby for the Seventh Circuit in January of 2016. She had served on the Indiana Supreme Court and would have been the first African-American and first woman from Indiana on that circuit. Senate Republicans--what did they do? Didn't even give her a hearing. Then, 1 month later, February 2016, Justice Scalia passes away. President Obama nominates Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, a good and very fair judge who had been confirmed to the DC Circuit by a Republican-controlled Senate by a vote of 76 to 23. What did Senate Republicans do? They refused to consider the nomination. They said, February--February of 2016, February of that election--was simply too close to a Presidential election to fill the slot. The American people should have a voice, they said. Let the people choose a President this year and then that President, whomever that may be, make the nomination to the Supreme Court. Not only did Senate Republicans oppose Merrick Garland, they refused to meet with him. They refused to hold a hearing. This is February 2016. The American people should have a voice. It is a Presidential election year, they said, 8 months--8 months--before that November 2016 election was just too close. And yet, here we are today, 4 years later, 8 days--not 8 months, 8 days--from the beginning of the last day of this Presidential election, November 3. Over 50 million ballots are already cast, and suddenly, there is nothing more important than rushing to fill the Supreme Court vacancy--not responding to a global pandemic. And we just learned from a very reputable Columbia University study that had this administration acted and followed the advice of healthcare experts, we could have saved at least 130,000 American lives--up to 220,000 American lives. But here we are, taking no more meaningful action, not giving a lifeline to people who are out of work, through no fault of their own; not closing the digital divide so children who can't go to school because of COVID can access their classes; not reforming our justice and policing system to make sure that everyone, no matter the color of their skin, is protected and treated equally; not securing our elections against foreign attacks and interference. Just a few days ago, I was right here on the Senate floor, asking this Senate to take up what had been a bipartisan piece of legislation called the DETER Act. I introduced it years ago with Senator Rubio, after we learned of the Russian interference in 2016. We wanted to make sure that we send a clear message in advance of the 2020 election that if we catch the Russians or any other adversaries interfering in our election, this time, there will be a swift and certain price to pay. Just earlier this past week, we got not surprising news from the DNI that, yes, what we have known all along, the Russians are interfering, other adversaries are interfering, and yet we couldn't even take up the bipartisan bill to send a clear message to Putin and others because the Trump administration continues to oppose it and the Senate Republican leader continues to bury it here in U.S. Senate. No response to global pandemic of meaningful note at this point, nothing to do on justice and policing, nothing to secure our elections. No, the top priority has been to jettison the precedent that our Republican colleagues themselves established under President Obama 4 years ago and rush to confirm a Supreme Court Justice. Why? Why this 180-degree turnaround? After all, it is not as if our Senate Republican colleagues have always been so worried about an eight-person Supreme Court. They kept the Supreme Court to eight Justices for a year--for a full year--when they refused to consider Merrick Garland's nomination. Some of our Senate Republican colleagues praised the idea of only having eight Justices on the Supreme Court forever if Hillary Clinton had won the Presidency in 2016. So what is different this time around? Well, as we have been hearing on the floor of the Senate and from the President himself, there are a number of irresistible opportunities--at least irresistible for our President and the Republican colleagues-- things they have been trying to do for years and have not succeeded yet in doing. First, they can pack the Court--pack the Court with increasingly ideological and rightwing Justices to align the very top Court--the Supreme Court--with the increasingly ideological rightwing judiciary they have been creating over years, first by stonewalling and blocking President Obama's nominees and then fast-tracking them for President Trump's nominees. Second, they can achieve another goal that they have been striving for, for a decade: overturning the Affordable Care Act. Ten years ago-- I was a Member of the House of Representatives at the time--Republicans did everything--I mean, everything they could--to block passage of the Affordable Care Act to stop ObamaCare. We heard outright lies about it. They said it was going to cause massive job loss. They said that the government would be picking your doctor. They said a government panel would decide whether your grandparents lived or died. They called them death panels. None of it was true. None of it has come true. The first part of the Affordable Care Act was signed into law on March 23, 2010. On that very day, House Republicans filed a bill to repeal it outright. Also, on that same day, the first Republican lawsuits were filed against it. That two-pronged approach--trying to undo it legislatively and trying to undo it through the courts-- continued for the next decade, dozens of votes in the House of Representatives and the Senate to attempt to repeal the law and dozens of Republican attorneys general and special interests filing lawsuits to challenge it in the courts. They failed. They failed in the Congress. And so far, they have failed in the courts. In the courts, in 2012, the Roberts Court upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act in a 5-to-4 decision in one of the very first cases that had been filed against the law. It wasn't a complete victory for the Affordable Care Act. It did make Medicaid expansion optional. And a number of Republican-held States refused to implement that unless and until voters demanded it at the ballots. But that Supreme Court decision did uphold the central tenets of the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court upheld the ACA again in a 6-to-3 decision in 2015. But that hasn't stopped the Republican Party's quest to eliminate it entirely. Just look at the 2016 Republican Party platform where they continued the attack with three strategies. First, President Trump: ``With the unanimous support of Congressional Republicans, will sign its repeal.'' Second, while working to legislatively repeal it, the President would use his administrative authority to undermine, weaken, and sabotage it. Third, the President would appoint Justices to reverse past decisions, including the Affordable Care Act decisions made by the Supreme Court. That was the three-pronged plan. Well, they ran into problems with the first part of the plan because despite President Trump's campaign promise to convene a special session of Congress to ``immediately repeal and replace ObamaCare very, very quickly''--despite that pledge--our Republican colleagues soon realized they had no replacement plan. They promised that they could repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something much, much better and less expensive, but there was no real plan. There was no ``there'' there, and the idea they offered to the American people was to trade healthcare for millions of Americans for tax breaks for the very rich. Tens of millions of Americans would have lost access to affordable healthcare. People with preexisting conditions would have lost protections, deductibles, and copays would have gotten more expensive. Insurance companies would have been able to get tax breaks on the bonuses they gave to their CEOs. That is what was in the Republican replacement plan--giving tax breaks to companies for the bonuses they pay to their CEOs. Not surprisingly, they couldn't sell it to the American people, and I think we all recall here, in 2017, it dramatically failed by one vote in the U.S. Senate. Every Democratic Senator voting against destroying the Affordable Care Act, three Republicans joining us, including, of course, Senator McCain giving it a big thumbs down. Republicans have been a little more successful trying to sabotage the law through the Trump administration's Executive authorities by scaling back outreach for enrollment plans. What does that mean? That means don't tell the public about what opportunities they have to get healthcare coverage in the Affordable Care Act. We just won't provide as much public information so people won't know about it, and then they won't be able to sign up for it; also, by ending cost-sharing in an attempt to destabilize the healthcare exchanges and allowing more junk health plans that don't offer critical benefits or protections, the kind of plans we used to see when people thought that they had coverage, and then, when they really needed it, they suddenly discovered, no, in the fine print, it just wasn't there. But despite these efforts by the administration, the law has survived. All their efforts to slash it with 100 cuts, it continues to provide affordable coverage to millions of Americans, and, in many States, including mine in Maryland, they have taken efforts to try to protect the Affordable Care Act from the Trump administration's attacks. But on November 10, when the Supreme Court hears that Affordable Care Act case, all of that could change. They could decide, after upholding it on two separate occasions, that now they have got another Supreme Court Justice, we are going to strike it down. And make no mistake, Donald Trump wants this law overturned. I mean, no one should be under any illusions about that. You can take it from the word of the brief--the legal brief filed by the Solicitor General of the United States on behalf of the Trump administration. It is the country's lawyer before the Supreme Court. He filed a case and said that the entire law ``must fall.'' The entire law must fall. Not one piece of it or another piece, the entire law must fall. That is the position of the Trump administration. You can listen to President Trump back in May of this year. We are in the middle of a pandemic, when he said: ``We want to terminate healthcare under ObamaCare.'' You can listen to him just this week on ``60 Minutes.'' It aired tonight, and he tweeted out to make sure everyone could see it just in case they missed the show. President Trump said of the Supreme Court's ACA case: ``I hope that they end it--it'll be so good if they end it.'' That is President Trump. It will be so good if they--the Supreme Court--end the Affordable Care Act. That has been his plan from the Supreme Court from the start. In 2015, when he was running, he said: ``If I win the presidency, my judicial appointments will do the right thing unlike Bush's appointee John Roberts on ObamaCare.'' Candidate Trump hasn't changed his tune. And he has found his nominee in Amy Coney Barrett, who has publicly criticized past Supreme Court decisions on the Affordable Care Act. She is President Trump's torpedo aimed at fulfilling his pledge to destroy the Affordable Care Act. She criticized the decision in NFIB v. Sebelius, saying that Chief Justice Roberts' argument ``pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond it plausible meaning to save the statute.'' She applauded the dissent in King v. Burwell, saying that they had ``the better of the legal argument.'' So it is no wonder that Republican Senators who tried unsuccessfully to defeat the Affordable Care Act legislatively in 2017 are now rushing to appoint her before that case is heard 1 week after the election. The stakes could not be higher for the American people. I want everybody to think back to the days before we had the Affordable Care Act. Back then, if you had a preexisting health condition, companies could deny you coverage outright. If you didn't have the coverage, you might otherwise be offered it at a price that you couldn't possibly afford--outrageously expensive. Instead of denying it outright, we will offer you that coverage, but you have got a preexisting health condition, so we are going to charge you something that you can't possibly afford and so you can't buy it. If you did have coverage and then developed a health issue, you would be locked into your current plan no matter how high the costs arose, unable to shop around because of what had become a preexisting condition. It is called job lock. You have to stay in a job even if you have a better opportunity or you want to pursue your dreams because you now have a preexisting health condition and you can't get coverage elsewhere. One Marylander, Angela, wrote to me about her daughter Rachel, who was diagnosed with epilepsy when she was in 8th grade. She had to take expensive medications, which she can afford thanks to the Affordable Care Act. Here is what Rachel's mother wrote: She now has a lifetime preexisting condition. If she were to be kicked off her healthcare, I imagine she would be bankrupted having to pay full costs of the medications that help her be a productive member of society. Rachel is a teacher, and her mother Angela says: ``It is because of ObamaCare that she is able to be where she is today.'' Another constituent, Megan, wrote to me that she turned 26 on the Thursday that the Senate Republicans on the Judiciary Committee reported out the Barrett nomination. She turned 26 just last Thursday. She has asthma. She pays $60 a month for her medications. And here is what she wrote to me: If I lost my job or my insurance. . . . I would have to make a choice between my medicine or paying the electric bill on time. And she ended her note to me with the following: For my 26th birthday, my only wish is that the Affordable Care Act not be overturned. There are so many people like me, Americans with preexisting conditions, that depend on this crucial legislation that provides necessary protection and guarantees that they will stay covered no matter what. That is what Megan wrote. And before the Affordable Care Act, women could be charged more just because they were women. Being a woman was a preexisting condition that allowed insurance companies to charge more. It is also true that before the Affordable Care Act, if you had a catastrophic accident or a long- term health issue, you would hit a coverage gap and be bankrupted by millions of dollars in hospital bills. There were no annual caps and no lifetime caps. Sometimes that meant that people wouldn't go to the hospital or see a doctor because they didn't want to face unending, uncapped bills. That is what would have happened to another constituent of mine, Robin, if she did not have the Affordable Care Act. She wrote: I am 64. So she is not yet 65, so she is not covered by Medicare. I am 64, took a tumble at home. My older son urged me to go to the emergency room due to my family health history. I was kept in the hospital due to a low thyroid level and almost non-existent potassium level among other problems. I would not have recovered if I did not have [the] ACA. I would not have health insurance and I know I could not pay a hospital bill, so I would not go to the emergency room. I would have died. [The Affordable Care Act] saved my life. Before the Affordable Care Act, if you were a recent college graduate but you hadn't found a job with health insurance yet, you couldn't stay automatically on your parents' health insurance policy. You were on your own, out of luck, young people thinking they are invincible until they are not. Insurance companies could deny coverage to them, and now they can't. I heard from one Marylander who worries about his son's future if this particular provision is taken away. He wrote to me: If the ACA is overturned and we lose the coverage for my son on my policy, this would be a disaster for my son and for my family. . . . I would hate to see him have to drop out of school just to find a job to cover health insurance--this would destroy his future. And we don't have-- He continued to write-- the extra $5,000 or so a year lying around that would be required for him to have a policy under our current provider that would cover his preexisting conditions. My son could be one of the millions to lose health insurance if the Republicans have their way. This provision of the Affordable Care Act has been lifesaving for Pamela's family. She wrote: This year, my 23-year-old daughter was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. Stage 3 breast cancer. Thanks to the [Affordable Care Act] she is still on our insurance. Even with our insurance, she will be in debt for a very long time. Without it she would be dead. I have not heard a single Republican guarantee this will be in any bill they propose. It is also a fact that before the Affordable Care Act, you had to pay for annual checkups and preventive coverage like breast cancer screenings. It is also a fact that if you want to quit your job to start a small business, you had to figure out how you would pay for an expensive health plan, which might not provide very good coverage on the individual market. Another Marylander, who had a lump in her breast that was treated as a preexisting condition even after it disappeared, decided she had to limit her employment options to those with decent health insurance before the ACA was enacted. She wrote: This experience steered me to work only for employers large enough to offer stable, subsidized healthcare insurance. . . . The downside has been the golden handcuffs. It is important to have universal decent healthcare coverage to encourage small businesses, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs. Kathleen from Maryland decided to leave an office job to find something that suited her better, but the job she took in the restaurant industry didn't offer any medical coverage. She wrote: I developed adult-onset asthma, more than once resorting to the ERs or Urgent Care. I searched everywhere I knew for medical insurance but was refused, either because I was just an individual and/or because I now had a ``pre-existing condition.'' Knowing nothing about asthma treatment, and unable to cover medical bills entirely on my own, I was chronically ill, and more than once almost died. She had to rely on friends and family for help, and after 10 years without insurance, she finally found a job with coverage. Kathleen wrote: We ALL need medical coverage, ALL the time, no matter your employment status. The Affordable Care Act dramatically expanded Medicaid in many States--those that opted to participate--providing subsidies for low- income Americans to find affordable plans and gave small business tax credits for providing health insurance for their employees. It also closed the prescription drug doughnut hole for seniors on Medicare. A lot of people forget, seniors on Medicare benefited from the Affordable Care Act and continue to benefit. That is part of the law that the Trump administration is trying to overturn in its entirety. These are seniors who have faced a big coverage gap from the initial spending threshold, and on the other side of the doughnut hole, catastrophic spending--a big doughnut hole. In 2016, the most recent years where we have complete data, close to 5 million seniors on Medicare received an average of over $1,000 in Part D prescription discounts because the doughnut hole was closed. Another 46 million seniors are on Part D Medicare today. If any of them all of a sudden develop a condition that requires high drug costs, any of those 46 million Americans could fall into that doughnut hole, costing them as much as $3,000 more per year. Now, the Affordable Care Act isn't a perfect law, but it did set a key standard for essential health benefits, cut the rate of uninsured Americans, and started improving healthcare outcomes for Americans. And, right now, while we are in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is more important than ever. The United States has had over 8.6 million COVID-19 cases, a number that we see grow by the day. For patients who require hospitalization, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports that the average stay can cost more than $20,000 a person and rise to closer to $90,000 if the patient requires a ventilator. So what would happen to those Americans if they are once again subjected to a lifetime out-of-pocket limit on their insurance coverage where they are not protected against huge expenditures? We are all glad that when President Trump got COVID, he got world- class care. It is a good thing. We are glad he got airlifted to Walter Reed in Maryland. It is a great national military medical facility. We are glad he had a team of doctors devoted to his case. We are glad he got access to cutting-edge drugs. He won't have to pay for that coverage. But that is not the kind of treatment every other American gets, and it is offensive for the President to relish his first-class treatment while denying his fellow Americans simple protections, as he would, by calling for the destruction of the Affordable Care Act. Speaking of COVID-19 and the impact of preexisting conditions, we are seeing many COVID-19 patients who have long-term health effects. They call them the ``long-haulers.'' The CDC noted last month that COVID-19 can have an impact on the heart, including heart damage that can lead to long-term symptoms like shortness of breath, chest pain, and heart palpitations. An article this month in the Harvard Medical School Health Blog notes that COVID can damage the brain, causing cognitive effects comparable to those who have suffered traumatic brain injury. So while Senate Republicans have refused to take meaningful action to confront the next step of COVID-19 relief, including refusing to pass a strong testing and tracing plan to halt the spread of the virus as proposed in the Heroes Act--both 1 and 2--from the House of Representatives, they are pushing for a nominee to take the Affordable Care Act away from the American people who have gotten sick, and now up to 8.6 million of them have a preexisting condition due to COVID-19. But they will no longer be protected from that preexisting condition if the Affordable Care Act goes away. This isn't crying wolf. I want to remind everybody again, the Solicitor General of the United States, acting on behalf of the President of the United States, wrote in his brief supporting the case for the Affordable Care Act that the entire law--the entire law, coverage for preexisting conditions, closing the Medicare doughnut hole, and ending lifetime limits for care--``must fall.'' All of it ``must fall.'' We know President Trump has no plan to replace it. He has had plenty of time to present one. For years, he kept telling us: It is going to be a matter of weeks. Four years after his inauguration: It is going to be a matter of weeks. Two years ago: It is a matter of weeks. Three years ago: It is a matter of weeks. He was asked about it in the last debate. He said don't worry. He is going to come up with ``a brand new, beautiful health [plan].'' Women's health, in particular, is in jeopardy with this nomination. Not only do women stand to lose the Affordable Care Act protections against discrimination--because before that, as I said, just being a woman was a preexisting condition that would and could cost you more-- they will no longer have access to the guarantee of precancer screenings for breast cancer and other screenings. But it is also a fact that President Trump and Republicans have long sought to deny them reproductive health freedom. That brings us to another longtime priority of President Trump and Senate Republicans--putting a Justice on the Supreme Court who will provide a majority to strike down a woman's right to reproductive choice in accordance with the Roe v. Wade decision. The Roe v. Wade decision was 7 to 2 in the Supreme Court. It was founded on the right to privacy, that a woman's healthcare choice was her own, without interference from the State, in accordance with the Roe v. Wade framework. Before Roe v. Wade, when abortion was illegal in most States, unsafe abortions caused one-sixth of all pregnancy-related deaths. Many low- income women jeopardized their lives with self-induced procedures. Now, women have safe options, both to obtain abortions and also, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, no-cost contraception that is used both to plan families and manage a variety of health conditions. Women can make decisions about their own bodies, in consultation with their doctors, that are best for their health and the well-being of their families. The vast majority of Americans support comprehensive healthcare, including a woman's right to reproductive choice under Roe v. Wade, but there has been a long fight chipping away at this protection, this care, with the ultimate goal of overturning Roe v. Wade altogether. Overturning that case has been one of President Trump's litmus tests for this Supreme Court nominee and his other picks. Like the Affordable Care Act, it is not like he has been subtle about this. In a Presidential debate in 2016, he was asked if he wanted the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. He said: Well, if we put another two or perhaps three justices on, that's really what's going to be--that will happen. And that will happen automatically, in my opinion, because I am putting pro-life judges on the court. There it is. This would be President Trump's third Supreme Court nominee--the magic number he talked about for overturning Roe v. Wade and a woman's protected right to choose under the Constitution of the United States. This comes on top of the more than 60 judges with anti- choice records whom he has already nominated and the Senate has confirmed to the lower courts. More States are passing laws to drastically limit or effectively ban abortion in order to set up cases to challenge Roe v. Wade in the courts, to set up those cases to take to the Supreme Court. Again, as with his intention to overturn the Affordable Care Act, President Trump has found the perfect nominee to overturn Roe v. Wade in Judge Barrett. We don't have to rely on the President's words alone or on all the anti-choice groups who have vigorously lobbied for her appointment and who have said that she ``believes that Roe v. Wade is something that can be reversed.'' That is what all the advocacy groups supporting her nomination are saying. One of our Republican Senate colleagues said he absolutely will never vote for a Justice who has not shown that they believe Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided and has told us that Judge Barrett ``certainly would meet that standard.'' Just as we can see Judge Barrett's opposition to the Affordable Care Act in her own record, we can see her opposition to Roe v. Wade in her own record. She signed on to an advertisement calling Roe v. Wade ``an exercise of raw judicial power'' that advocated for ending ``the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade.'' That is what she said. She signed another advertisement criticizing Roe v. Wade when she was a member of Notre Dame's University Faculty for Life, an anti-choice group. She has said that Roe v. Wade is not settled precedent. Indeed, at her hearing in the Senate, she questioned the principle that the Constitution protects certain fundamental rights from government interference on privacy grounds, saying that there is a debate about how far that can go--a debate that is generally waged by those looking to overturn Roe v. Wade and Obergefell, the case that allows for gay marriage. She would not even concede--and this is very telling--she would not even concede in her hearing that the decision in Griswold v. Connecticut was settled law. Griswold v. Connecticut is the case that protects access to contraceptives. There was a Connecticut law on the books that prohibited any person from using contraception, and the Court invalidated that law in a 7-to-2 decision on the grounds that it violated marital privacy. I want our colleagues to think about this. This is a State law that said that adults could not use contraception, and she would not say that is settled law under the Constitution of the United States. She would not even concede that in vitro fertilization, which has helped many women start their families, was constitutional and could not be made illegal. It is clear from President Trump's stated intentions from the words of anti-choice groups, the promise of our own colleagues, and from Judge Barrett's own words that her nomination is the culmination of a decades-long effort to overturn a woman's right to choose. We also see that with respect to the decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. On that day in 2015, the Supreme Court showed us what it could be--a body that would ensure, rather than restrict, the rights of Americans. In a 5-to-4 decision, it told LGBTQ Americans that the love they had for each other and their wish to declare that love in marriage was their right, as it has been for straight couples for the whole history of our Nation. Five years later, the American people support this decision at record-high levels. But that was a 5-to-4 decision, and we are now facing a fundamental shift in the balance of the Court, and we have seen time and again this President attack laws designed to protect people against discrimination based on sexual orientation. We also see this not just from the administration but, again, through Judge Barrett's own words and actions. She received an honorarium to teach at a program run by the Alliance Defending Freedom, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has categorized as a hate group for its efforts to prohibit same-sex marriage and recriminalize homosexuality, and she called the experience ``a wonderful one.'' She has referred to sexual orientation as a ``sexual preference,'' which are the buzz words used by those who want to overturn LGBTQ rights on the grounds that this is not a question of ``immutable characteristic'' but simply someone's chosen preference. There are a number of cases coming to the Supreme Court that deal with the issue of discrimination against foster families headed by same-sex couples. One will arrive at the Court on November 4, the day after the election--another reason you see this nomination being rushed. If you look through the issues I outlined at the start--from racial justice and police accountability, to other questions on the ability to access healthcare--you will find time and again in Judge Barrett's record telltale signs and clear signs--flashing warning signs--that she wants to turn back the clock. We see that with respect to criminal justice reform, where she dissented in a case on whether a defendant who had been convicted but not yet sentenced when the First Step Act was enacted by this Congress and signed by the President--as to whether the new sentencing requirements of that law would apply. Fortunately, the Seventh Circuit ruled 9 to 3 that the First Step Act applied to the defendant. Judge Barrett was one of the three dissenting votes who adopted a cramped interpretation of the law devoid of any mercy. There are other cases relating to the rights of those who have been injured, including a pregnant teenager who was repeatedly sexually assaulted by a prison guard, where Judge Barrett found that the prison guard could not be held liable under his employment with the prison system. If you read through that case and the horrifying facts, I think you come away very troubled with the fact that she had such a cramped reading of the law. On a question that is not a legal matter but a matter of fact-- climate change--we would have thought that the question that was put to her was quite easy. Judge Barrett admitted that the coronavirus was infectious. Why? Because that is what the medical experts say. But when she was asked about climate change--again, not a tricky, legal question--she refused to say what the overwhelming scientific consensus is--that climate change is real. We see it, as I said, with the forest fires. We see it with the hurricanes. We see it in my State of Maryland, just in the city of Annapolis, the home of the Naval Academy. We see flooding at our docks that is wreaking havoc on local businesses. Time and again, when Judge Barrett was given an opportunity to answer basic fact questions or pretty straightforward legal questions in the Judiciary Committee, she ducked them entirely, but we have her record to indicate where she stands. On the issue of voter protection and voting rights, we also find another troubling pattern in Judge Barrett's record. This is especially important when you think about the fact that she is filling the seat of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who wrote that very powerful dissent in the 5-to-4 decision in Shelby v. Eric Holder that took a big bite out of the Voting Rights Act. If you look at the statements by Judge Barrett, she distinguishes between what she calls individual rights, like the Second Amendment rights, versus what she calls a civic right, the right to vote--putting the right to vote in a lesser protected category than what she defines as individual rights. In fact, Judge Barrett wrote: ``As a right that was exercised for the benefit of the community (like voting and jury service), rather than for the benefit of the individual . . . it belonged only to virtuous citizens.'' ``Only to virtuous citizens''--that is what Judge Barrett wrote about the right to vote. The right to vote, as we all know, is fundamental to our democracy. Our dear colleague John Lewis, who recently passed away and was nearly beaten to death for fighting for that right to vote, said many times: The vote is precious. It is almost sacred. It is the most powerful, non-violent tool we have in a democracy. That right to vote should not be relegated to some kind of secondary status, as Judge Barrett's writings indicate she would do. So if you look at all the challenges that we face as a country-- dealing with the pandemic, dealing with issues of police accountability and racial justice, dealing with climate change, dealing with protecting voting rights--all these pressing issues that we should be focused on here in the U.S. Senate, we are not. Instead, we are rushing through this illegitimate process to put a Justice on the Supreme Court who in each of these areas--each of these areas where we should be focusing on attention--is actually going to take us backward. So I urge the Senate--I can see the march that is going day after day toward the vote tomorrow, but I urge this Senate to reconsider the path that it is on. This has been a very shameful episode--watching the complete flip- flop from 2016, rushing to put on a Justice whom the President wants and who Senate Republicans, I think, believe will act to overturn the Affordable Care Act, take away a woman's right to choose, and be part of an ideological majority that will strip away important rights from the American people. I will end by just pointing out that public surveys right now show the American people are not fooled by this process. They don't like what they see. They want us to be focused on dealing with COVID-19. They want us to pass a robust, comprehensive emergency response package. That is what the American people are calling for. Instead, this Senate has embarked on this charade of a process. There will be a verdict on all of this by the American people in a matter of 8 days, and I believe there will be a reckoning on the actions the Senate is taking and the actions the Senate has refused to take in addressing the urgent issues that are really facing the country. I yield the floor.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, every day we see more Americans dying from COVID-19 and more Americans contracting this virus. As of today, we have hit the awful mark of over 220,000 Americans dead from COVID- 19, the highest death level in the entire world, and, with that, we are also experiencing the economic fallout and pain that has come with it. It did not have to be this way. President Trump knew about this deadly virus early on, and he could have and should have acted. But even at this moment, there are things that this U.S. Senate can be doing to both stop the spread of the virus and ease the economic pain. We could be taking up and voting on the legislation that passed the House of Representatives called the Heroes Act, which is a comprehensive emergency relief package for the American people--both addressing testing and contact tracing and other issues to stop the spread of the virus and providing essential economic relief to American families, workers, and businesses that are struggling from the fallout. But we haven't even had a chance to vote on that bill here in the U.S. Senate. The Heroes Act was passed by the House more than 5 months ago, and then, recently, the House passed a revised version called Heroes 2.0. We tried to get a vote on that just this past Tuesday here in the U.S. Senate. It was blocked by the Republican leader, Senator McConnell, and here we have 12 days to go until the election. Instead of focusing on that relief, we are trying to rush through and use an illegitimate process to put another Justice on the Court. But there is something else that we should also be doing now instead of rushing a Justice on the Court, in addition to the Heroes Act, and that is defending the integrity of our democratic process and the integrity of our elections. That is what brings me to the floor today because we have, of course, a few days to go--12 days, to be exact--to get to the election. Yet it has been years--not just 1 year, not just 2 years, not just 3 years-- years when some of us have been pushing to enact legislation here to defend against foreign interference in our elections--Russian interference, which we have known about since 2016, and interference from other adversaries. So, yesterday, we heard from the Director of National Intelligence that there are foreign actors interfering in our elections and attempting to disrupt our process--Russia and Iran. Well, the question for the U.S. Senate is not the issue of whether we were going to have foreign interference. The question for the U.S. Senate is, Why did we sit back and do nothing about it for 3 years--for 3 years? Senator Rubio and I introduced a bipartisan bill. It is called the DETER Act, which is very straightforward. It says that if we catch Russia and Putin interfering in our elections again, there will be automatic, swift sanctions, so if you are Vladimir Putin and you are thinking about interfering in our elections, you will know there will be a certain price to pay. Right now, it is cost-free to the Russians and cost-free to other adversaries. Our bill called for the executive branch to put together a plan to respond and establish upfront penalties not just for Russian interference but for interference from any adversary. That is the way you deter interference in the first place. You can't stop interference if there is no cost to be borne by the adversary seeking to disrupt your process. That is pretty simple. We have used the idea and concept of deterrence in many other cases to try to keep the peace. Yet, here we are, talking about safeguarding our democracy by putting in place a very simple mechanism to say to anyone who wants to undermine faith in the democratic process or support a particular candidate--as Russia did in 2016 and as they have worked to do over the last couple of years in favor of President Trump--to put in place a process where they know if they get caught, they will be punished, and I don't mean punishing a few oligarchs. I am not talking about punishing a few bureaucrats who may be responsible for actually doing the disruption, but creating penalties on the Russian economy--the banking sector, the energy sector--because we all know that you don't have Russian bureaucrats and intelligence officials interfere in our elections without the green light from the very top, and that is true of other adversaries who seek to interfere in our elections. So the real question is, Why do we continue to see stonewalling on this simple legislation? Why does the Trump administration continue to oppose it? And why doesn't the Senate do its job as an independent body, supposedly, to protect the integrity of our elections? Here is what President Trump said just a few years ago in Helsinki when he was side by side with President Putin. President Trump said: My people came to me--Dan Coats came to me and some others--they said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it's not Russia. I will say this: I don't see any reason why it would be. . . . I have confidence in both parties. Then he went on to say: I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today. This was years ago, yet we hear from our intelligence officials that Russia is still interfering. We heard that just yesterday and that other adversaries are interfering. But the Trump administration didn't want to do a damn thing about it, and, unfortunately, this body has been complicit in doing nothing-- doing nothing--to seriously protect the integrity of our elections. We have to keep asking ourselves the question why we would leave ourselves defenseless. The only thing you can keep going back to are these continuing statements by President Trump talking about how he respects his friendship with Vladimir Putin and President Trump's actions time and again favoring the Russian position. We have a last-minute opportunity here. There are 12 days to go before our election. Let us, finally, in light of the information we got yesterday and the information we have gotten on a monthly basis, let us, as the U.S. Senate, at least say today: If we catch you, Russia, if we catch you, Iran, we don't care who you are, if you are an adversary interfering in our elections, there will be a price to pay. That was a bipartisan idea more than 2 years ago. We still get a lot of lipservice in favor of it here on a bipartisan basis. But when it comes to actually doing something about it and holding a vote, time and again we are denied that opportunity. What is interesting is when this issue came up just last year as part of the national defense authorization bill, we had a motion on this floor to instruct the conferees from the House and the Senate that as part of the Defense authorization bill, we thought it was important to also protect our democracy from interference. We said that you should include a provision like the DETER Act. But as soon as that got behind closed doors, there was a furious effort by the Republican Senate leader and the Trump administration to prevent that from happening. I had numerous conversations with my colleague from the House side, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and it was opposed by the administration and opposed by the Republican Senate. So here we are. Nobody should be surprised by what we heard yesterday. The surprise for the American people has got to be: Why the hell didn't we do anything about this for 3 years? We brought everybody together after 2016. I remember we lined up all the intelligence officials, including recent appointees by President Trump, and they all told us what had happened in 2016. Everybody said we are going to work really hard to stop it from happening in 2020. Yet one thing that we could do to make it clear upfront that there would be a price to pay, we have not done. Shame on the U.S. Senate for not moving forward. There are 12 days left. The clock is ticking. Let's finally take action so at least our adversaries will know that there will be a price to pay if they continue in these final 12 days to try to interfere in our election process. Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be discharged from further consideration of S. 1060, the DETER Act, and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration. I further ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed, and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I will be very brief in response. This is a bipartisan bill. It has bipartisan cosponsorship. We have been working for 3 years. We have made changes. And the proof that everything we are doing right now is not working is the fact that we just had the DNI say we continue to have Russian interference and other interference in our election. That is why we have to do something.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I thank my colleague for the comments, but to suggest that this is a fight over the schedule and not an effort to protect our elections from what we know is an ongoing and continuing imminent threat, I believe, misses the point entirely. He mentioned that this is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. I would suggest that the Senate has already taken this because we voted unanimously last year, as part of the Defense authorization bill, to adopt this provision as part of our national defense to defend our democracy. Every single Senator voted--or no one came forward to object at that time. Yet here we are 12 days out from election, no action taken. We get this report yesterday about foreign interference, and nobody should say: Oh, we are shocked there is foreign interference in our election going on. The shocking thing is we haven't done enough. I appreciate him listing some of the actions the administration took about particular Russian individuals, oligarchs, but as you know, and as we know, the DETER Act is not aimed at just punishing particular bureaucrats and apparatchiks who are obeying the orders of President Putin. The whole idea is to deter President Putin by making him understand that he and his country will pay a price if they interfere by sanctions on the banking sector and on the all-important energy sector in Russia. In order to stop interference, we need to do two things: We need to harden our systems at home. My colleague mentioned some of the actions that have been taken to do that. I will remind my colleagues that Democrats put forward the proposal for more resources for State and local governments to harden those defenses, and it was only after a big fight and lots of opposition from the Republican leader here in the Senate that we were able to get those funds. Additional funds have been sitting in the Heroes Act which passed the House 5 months ago and yet nothing. In the proposal put forward the other day by the Republican leader, there was no more money to harden our defenses. But hardening our defenses is not enough. What you want to do is prevent the attacks in the first place, prevent the interference in the first place. And so long as that is cost-free to Vladimir Putin or any other adversary, they are going to go for it. They have got nothing to lose. They have got everything to gain by sowing more unrest and lack of confidence here. So the way to deal with that is the DETER Act. And the Senate agreed, at least with that unanimous vote a little while ago, and then nothing happened. Yet, we got report after report from our intelligence community that--no surprise--we have this ongoing interference. The Senator mentioned all these actions the Trump administration has taken. Obviously, Vladimir Putin didn't get the message. He didn't get the message. Taking pinprick actions after the fact isn't going to scare off Vladimir Putin or any of our adversaries. The only way to get them to focus and stop interfering is to say now, up front, that if you cross this wire, if you trip this threshold and interfere in our elections in certain substantial ways, it is going to hurt--not just somebody in the bowels of your bureaucracy or one intelligence officer or five or ten, but it is going to hurt, and you are going to feel the pain in your country. So I must say I remain incredibly disappointed that, even at this late hour, we are unwilling, as a body, to take this very important action, just as we have been unwilling to act on the Heroes Act, both the first version and the second version. I think, as my colleagues know, the Democratic leader has proposed that we adjourn subject to being called back for the purpose of acting on a bipartisan agreement, which we would all like to see, on a COVID- 19 response bill but something which the Republican Senate leader has said he is unwilling to pursue, even the contours of an agreement that have been discussed between Speaker Pelosi and the administration. The majority leader continues to block that, and we continue to see today blocking a measure to protect our democracy with 12 days to go before November 3. So, again, I think we are going to rue the day that we weren't clear, up front, that the United States is going to stand up and protect its democratic process. I yield the floor.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Madam President, last Friday, our country lost a trailblazer for equality, a moral giant, and a lover of justice--the great Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, affectionately known as RBG. While physically small, she had a towering impact on American jurisprudence. While the volume of her voice was not high, her words carried farther and had a greater impact than the louder voices that were often around her. She famously observed that many of the laws on the books that pretended to put women on a pedestal actually put them in cages, and then she proceeded to bring cases to strike down those discriminatory walls. She transformed America's legal landscape, especially in the area of gender equality, and that was before she was even appointed and confirmed to the Supreme Court. On the Supreme Court, with intelligence and persuasion, she was often able to bring others to her point of view, and when she couldn't, she could write a stinging dissent, which she viewed as a conversation with the future. She had optimism in our Nation's pursuit of justice--that her dissents would be vindicated in time, and I dare say that they already have in so many cases, including her dissent in the voting rights case with the reprehensible 2013 decision where, on a 5-to-4 vote, the Supreme Court took a bite out of the Voting Rights Act. She predicted that as soon as that happened, many of the States that had been subject to the preclearance provisions would begin to put up barriers to voting, and that is exactly what happened. Speaking of the future, her deathbed wish communicated to her granddaughter--her most fervent wish--was that she not be replaced until a new President is installed, whoever that President may be. She died last Friday on Rosh Hashanah. It was a moment when the country needed to come together to celebrate her life and honor her legacy, and that is what so many people did around the country. We saw an outpouring of support from coast to coast, north to south, east to west. We saw large crowds gathering at the Supreme Court. But here in the U.S. Senate, the majority leader didn't have the decency to even provide a respectful pause, a respectful timeout to honor that legacy. Just over 1 hour after her death was announced, he put out a statement announcing his power play--a statement saying that President Trump's nominee, whoever it may be to replace her, would get a vote. The majority leader rushed to do that despite taking the opposite position in March of 2016 when Justice Scalia passed away and President Obama nominated Merrick Garland. The majority leader rushed to commit to that vote on President Trump's nominee even though, in the middle of this COVID-19 pandemic, we have not even had a chance to vote here in the Senate on the Heroes Act, which passed the House of Representatives over 4 months ago, providing emergency comprehensive relief to families and workers and small and medium-sized businesses that are hurting from this pandemic. We haven't had a vote on that in 4 months. Yet, within 1 hour of Justice Ginsburg's death, the Republican leader announced: ``We will have a vote'' on President Trump's Supreme Court nominee. Our country just reached the grim total of 200,000 Americans dead from COVID-19. More Americans have died from COVID-19 than in any other country on the planet, and a big share of those dead are the direct result of President Trump's calculated indifference--what he describes as ``downplaying'' the threat. Well, downplaying a known threat led to inaction, and inaction led to thousands more Americans dying than would have been the case. That inaction has led to far more economic pain and fallout from COVID-19 than had to be the case. We wouldn't have all of these schools closed right now if the President had taken more rapid action and if we had comprehensive universal and rapid testing. But here we are because Trump wanted to ``downplay'' the threat. The President has opposed the Heroes Act, which passed the House of Representatives, and there is still no vote here in the Senate on that important legislation to help a country in need--so no vote on that. But, my goodness, they just couldn't wait to announce, within 1 hour of the Justice's passing away, that this Senate would vote on Trump's Supreme Court nomination. That is despite what Majority Leader McConnell said in 2016. When Justice Scalia passed away and President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to fill the seat, you heard Senator McConnell and many Republicans say: Can't do it. We are in the middle of an election year. In fact, the majority leader went so far as to instruct his Republican Members not even to meet with Merrick Garland. They didn't even have a hearing for Merrick Garland. The majority leader and so many Republican Senators said: Oh, we can't do that because primary voting has begun in this 2016 Presidential election year. Primary voting has begun. It is underway. It is important to let the American people weigh in on the Presidential election and then allow whoever wins that Presidential election to make their nomination to the Supreme Court. That is what we heard from Senator McConnell and so many of our Republican Senate colleagues back in 2016--that democracy required that the people's will be heard in the Presidential election year. Well, it turns out that all of that was just a pure political ploy; that we are going to see one set of rules for Democratic Presidents like Barack Obama and another set of rules from the Republican majority for Republican Presidents like Donald Trump. The dishonesty and rank hypocrisy is obscene, and the American people, regardless of party, see it for what it is. But as bad as the hypocrisy and the dishonesty is, this is about even more than that. In fact, it is about much more than that. It is about the future direction of our country and the direction of justice in our Nation. It is about whether we have a Supreme Court that truly stands for equal justice under law, as Justice Ginsburg did. It is about whether we will protect women's rights, as Justice Ginsburg did throughout her career before and after being on the Supreme Court. We know where President Trump stands on that. We know he was asked during his Presidential campaign on national television about a woman's right to reproductive freedom. He said that women who would choose to have an abortion should be punished--should be punished. And he has said that he will appoint a Justice who will make sure that is what happens. That is what he said. We are going to see a Justice who wants to strike down workers' rights and protections, and we are going to see a Justice who wants to destroy the Affordable Care Act. The Affordable Care Act provides important protections to the American people during ordinary times. It is especially important now, as we face this COVID-19 pandemic. We know it has been the goal of President Trump and Republicans for years to destroy and overturn the Affordable Care Act. After all, I think many of us remember being right here on the Senate floor in the summer of 2017. The Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, and a majority of Republicans in the House at that time had passed a law to overturn the Affordable Care Act. President Trump was itching to sign it. But here in the Senate, we defeated that effort by one vote--one vote in the U.S. Senate. Why did that happen at the time? A lot of people thought it was a forgone conclusion that this Republican majority Senate would vote to strike down the Affordable Care Act. It is because the American people rose up and said: Hell no. People with diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and other preexisting health conditions, and so many other Americans said: Do you know what? This isn't a partisan issue. It is not a partisan issue if I have cancer or diabetes or asthma or other preexisting conditions. Don't take it away. Guess what. COVID-19 is not a partisan disease either. It will strike people, of course, regardless of political party. So the American people got to the phones, got to social media, occupied people's offices, and they said: Hell no. And by one vote, we protected the Affordable Care Act here in the U.S. Senate That should have been the end of the story, but it wasn't because what Republicans could not do through the democratic process here in the U.S. Senate, they decided to take to the courts. President Trump and his Attorney General Barr are in court right now, trying to do there what they could not succeed in doing here in the U.S. Senate-- trying to destroy and overturn the Affordable Care Act. Guess when the Supreme Court hearing on that Affordable Care Act case is scheduled to take place: November 10--November 10, 1 week--1 week-- after the November 3 election. So we see the power play here: Jam through a Supreme Court nominee. Put them on the Court in time for that hearing so they can hear the case and be part of overturning it. Make no mistake, President Trump has pledged to appoint a Supreme Court Justice who will knock down the Affordable Care Act. We don't know who it is going to be, but we know it is going to be somebody who the President believes will strike down the Affordable Care Act. How do we know that? Here is what Candidate Trump said: ``If I win the presidency, my judicial appointments will do the right thing unlike Bush's appointee John Roberts on ObamaCare.'' That is Candidate Trump in June of 2015. Here is what Candidate Trump said on another occasion: I'm disappointed in [Justice] Roberts because he gave us ObamaCare. He had two chances to end ObamaCare. He could have ended it by every single measure and he didn't do it, so [it is] disappointing. He says this on numerous occasions--numerous occasions. He also tweeted out that in 2012, he supported--this is 2012 when now-Senator Romney was running for President. Donald Trump tweeted out then: I am 100 percent supporting Mitt Romney's position that we need a Justice on the Court to strike down ObamaCare. So nobody should be playing any games. The President has told us he is going to nominate somebody to strike down the Affordable Care Act. That hearing is scheduled 1 week after the November 3 election. All of those issues are at stake right now. It appears that we have enough Republican Senators who have said that we will proceed to consider the nomination. They have abandoned the position that Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, and so many Senators took in 2016 with Barack Obama--President Obama--when they refused to provide a hearing. So we are going to proceed. But let's remember the President has pledged that he will nominate somebody who will get rid of the Affordable Care Act and who will strike down a woman's right to choose. That is what the President has said. Just as the American people began to get to the phones and on social media and to contact their Senators in the summer of 2017 when healthcare was at risk, when the Affordable Care Act was at risk, we need to make sure that the word gets out again. Back in 2017, we stopped that from happening by one vote in the U.S. Senate because the American people understood what was at stake. Here we are now, in a global pandemic. Instead of focusing on the pain the American people are feeling at the moment, instead of allowing us to vote on the Heroes Act, we have this Republican majority trying to power through a Supreme Court nominee to strike down the Affordable Care Act, to do through the courts what they were unsuccessful doing here on the Senate floor in the summer of 2017. Let's recognize the consequences of this abuse of power and the impact and harm it will do to the American people. Let's take the advice and dying wish of Justice Ginsburg: Allow the American people to speak on November 3 and then allow whoever is sworn in on inauguration day in January to put forward a nominee to be considered by the U.S. Senate. Thank you. I yield the floor.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I rise to pay tribute to an extraordinary constituent, Dr. Rolf H. Eppinger, who passed away on August 14, 2020. Dr. Eppinger's outstanding work has saved the lives of many Americans and will save many more in the years to come. Dr. Eppinger had a distinguished 34-year career with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, NHTSA. There, he performed and led fundamental biomechanics research that resulted in the development of crash test dummies, the interpretation of their measurements, the advancement of the prevention of crash injuries, and the reduction of the severity of crash injuries. His work has helped save hundreds of thousands of lives and many more injuries worldwide. NHTSA has estimated that in the United States, as of 2017, more than 50,000 lives have been saved by airbags, 374,000 by safety belts, and 11,000 by child restraints. Many times more serious injuries were prevented or ameliorated. The work of Dr. Eppinger and his team formed the basis for the New Car Assessment Programs now in use worldwide. Over the course of his career, Dr. Eppinger published more than 120 technical papers dealing with automotive safety and was the holder of two U.S. patents. In addition, he enjoyed sailboat racing and was an accomplished watercolorist, pen and ink artist, woodworker, boat builder, and general handyman. Dr. Eppinger is remembered for his rigorous scientific medical and engineering research, integrity, decency, and humility. I ask my colleagues to join me in sending our gratitude for Dr. Eppinger's outstanding contributions and our deepest condolences to his wife Karen, his children Justin and Dwight, his daughter-in-law Kelly, and his grandchildren Alice and Hugo.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I am pleased to join my colleagues Senator Menendez and Senator Durbin in urging the U.S. Senate to do the right thing and grant protected status to Venezuelans in this country. At this moment, I thank them for their continued leadership on this issue and for making sure we have immigration policies that live up to what this country has always stood for. As my colleagues have pointed out, Venezuela is suffering a dire humanitarian crisis under the dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro. Its economy has collapsed, and its medical system is in free fall. They are governing through a reign of terror. Even before COVID-19 struck, Venezuelans were facing shortages of food, of water, of gasoline, and other lifesaving items. The pandemic has taken a very bad situation and made it much worse--in fact, desperate. An estimated two-thirds of physicians in Venezuela lack access to basic sanitary equipment, like gloves, masks, soap, or goggles, and only 25 percent of the doctors have reliable running water in their hospitals and clinics. On top of this desperate economic situation, you have the political tyranny and terror that has been imposed by the Maduro regime. In fact, as my colleagues pointed out just this morning, U.N. investigators found that Venezuelan security forces and allied groups have committed systemic human rights violations, including killings and torture, amounting to crimes against humanity. Reasonable grounds exist to believe that President Maduro and his Interior and Defense Ministers ordered or contributed to these crimes against humanity, which are documented in the U.N. report. The U.N. factfinding mission has said that other national jurisdictions and the International Criminal Court should consider prosecutions. So you have a desperate situation. President Trump claims to support the people of Venezuela who are facing this tyranny and this desperation. In fact, as Senator Durbin said, he has on numerous occasions said he was sympathetic and that he wanted to help. Here is what he said last year: ``To the Venezuelans trapped in this nightmare, please know that all of America is behind you.'' That is what President Trump said. Yet he has refused to use his authority to take action to grant Venezuelans here in the United States that temporary protected status. He wants to send them back to what he describes as a nightmare--a nightmare that is getting worse by the day as documented by the U.N. report. He wants to send them back to a place where the U.N. has just implicated the government in crimes against humanity. Because the President refuses to do what he says--refuses to actually take action to help--the House has passed legislation to grant Venezuelans TPS. My colleagues Senator Menendez and Senator Durbin have introduced that legislation here in the Senate, and I am proud to cosponsor it. Yet, as we are saying here today, the fastest thing to do is to just take up the House bill and pass it. So it is incredibly disturbing that our Republican colleagues would get up and block a vote on that action on the very day when the government in question, the Government of Venezuela, has been found to have committed crimes against humanity. The majority in this Senate says: Well, don't worry about that. If you are here in the United States, we are going to insist that you go back home. We are going to insist that you put yourself and your family back this danger. That is what our Senate Republican colleagues are saying by blocking the vote on this House TPS measure. They are forcing innocent people to go home to what the President himself described as a nightmare. As my colleagues have said and as we know, this is part of an inhumane, anti-immigration agenda from this administration--from the Muslim ban, to ending DACA, to the termination of TPS for many other populations. This President has separated families and instilled fear in our communities. Senator Menendez referenced the Ninth Circuit Court's decision from earlier this week, the decision of its upholding, on a 2-to-1 vote, the President's decision to rescind TPS protections for over 400,000 individuals who are here, working in our communities, living here legally with their families. Many of them have been here for over 20 years. As he said, 130,000 of them are on our frontlines as essential workers. More than 10,000 of them are medical professionals who put themselves at risk to help others throughout our communities and our country. These are individuals who are our neighbors and small business men and women, and they are contributing to our communities and to our country. The President has said he wants to deport them--400,000 people--despite this hour of peril both here and even more so in the countries to which they would be required to return. That is why we have to pass the SECURE Act--to provide stability and security to those who are on TPS. That is why we have to pass the American Dream and Promise Act that the House passed last year. That is why we need to grant TPS to Venezuela, so, as my colleagues say, this country can do what Presidents from both political parties have done in the past and Members of the House and Senate from both political parties have done in the past, which is to live up to the idea that we are a place of refuge for those who are facing political persecution at home. I don't know how you can more clearly define ``political persecution'' on this day than a finding by the United Nations that the Government of Venezuela is committing crimes against humanity, against the people of Venezuela. Yet, that is the day that, once again, we saw our Republican colleagues block this legislation that would allow our country to live up to our tradition of doing the right thing. As Senator Menendez said, I look forward to joining him as we continue to press this issue. I guess the only good news is that it seems to be getting a little harder for the other side--our Republican colleagues--to find somebody who wants to come here in the light of day and object to it. I hope that in the coming days, that number will be zero and we can actually pass this important piece of legislation. I yield the floor.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I thank you. I want to thank the minority leader--the Democratic leader, Mr. Schumer--for his remarks. There are not many of us around here in the Senate today. It is pretty quiet. If you walk through the halls, there is virtually nobody around. That is what it was like last Thursday afternoon. That is what it was like here in the Senate on Friday and again on Saturday and again on Sunday. Here we are again on Monday, and this Senate is virtually a ghost town--a few people here, but for the most part, everybody was sent home by the majority leader, by Senator McConnell. He told Senators: Go home until further notice. Go home. We are going to put the Senate on standby. No need to be here doing the people's business. Well, the coronavirus is not on standby. The coronavirus is very much alive and well and spreading throughout the country--more severely in some parts than others but spreading throughout the country--and with it has come the spread of economic pain and economic harm. So COVID-19 is not on standby, and neither is the economic pain and fallout that it has caused. But here in the U.S. Senate, the Republican leader, the majority leader, has said: Go home and be on standby. That is not leadership at any time. It is certainly not the kind of leadership that the American people need and should expect during a global pandemic and recession- era unemployment levels. So why did the majority leader tell people to just go home and be on standby? It is because he wanted the Trump administration to negotiate an agreement. Last I checked, the U.S. Senate was a separate branch of government with its own responsibilities. Yet we have the Republican leader, who runs the U.S. Senate from the floor, telling people to go home and be on standby because he wants the President of the United States, the Trump administration, to negotiate an agreement and then come back to us. In other words, the Republican leader wants to contract out his responsibilities and the responsibilities of the U.S. Senate to the executive branch. If you look at the U.S. Constitution, there are three separate branches of government. Yet the Republican leader has decided to give his proxy to the President of the United States, to the executive branch, rather than stay here in the U.S. Senate and do our work. Now, why is that? Why is it that the majority leader has decided to contract out his responsibilities and those of the Senate to the executive branch of government? Well, we don't have to guess because Mr. McConnell has told us. He told PBS NewsHour: ``About 20 of my Members think that we have already done enough.'' Let me read that again. This is from the Republican leader: ``About 20 of my Members think that we have already done enough.'' He is obviously referring to Republican Members of the Senate caucus. These are Members of the Senate Republican caucus. They think all is well; we have done enough; we don't need to do any more to expand access to testing, don't need to expand access to personal protective equipment, don't need to do anything to help our schools. We have done enough. We don't need to do anything more on unemployment insurance, where the additional $600 a week has expired. Senator McConnell said that 20 of his Members thought they have already done enough. The eviction moratorium is coming to an end, both nationally and in many States, but 20 Members of the Senate Republican caucus, their leader says they have done enough. Here is what Senator Lindsey Graham said on FOX: ``I think, if Mitch can get one-half of the conference, that would be quite an accomplishment''--referring to the Republican conference. So Senator Graham of South Carolina is saying that if Mitch McConnell--if Mr. McConnell, the Republican leader, can get half the Members of the Republican Senate caucus to do anything, that would be quite an accomplishment. I want all of us to think about what that means. What it means is that many of our colleagues are happy to have packed up and gone home and that we are not doing anything because they don't think we need to be doing anything. That is really why we are not here. That is also why you saw the Trump administration emissaries, Secretary Mnuchin and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, walk away from the negotiating table. They understood that, if they reached what was truly a compromise, a principal compromise, Senator Graham said that half the Republican caucus would oppose it because they would oppose anything. So that is why you had the Trump administration walk away from the negotiating table and refuse to come to a sensible agreement. What did we get instead? Because they walked away from an agreement, we had the President of the United States throw together a press conference at his golf club in New Jersey. He put the American flags up at his golf club, put out a podium with the Presidential seal, invited club members to witness the signing of an Executive order and some memos. Here is the really sad truth about the matter: It was mostly show rather than real substance. It was something that we would come to expect from somebody who is really good at reality TV but somebody who did not understand the painful realities being experienced by Americans throughout this country during this health pandemic and the economic pandemic. I say that because, if you begin to look at what the President actually signed, it is both inadequate and also unworkable in almost all its parts. Let's put aside for now the question of whether or not the President had the legal authority to do what he did because, clearly, in some parts of his Executive order and his memos, he does not have the constitutional authority to do that. We have heard that from some of the Senate Republican Members already. But let's set that aside and just see whether it will actually deliver meaningful relief to Americans or whether it is more like the degree that was given to folks who attended so-called Trump University, which turned out to be a fraud and is now shuttered. Let's take a look at what the President did. First, with respect to extending the $600 a week of unemployment insurance benefits--and let's remember the starting point for this is that neither the President of the United States, Donald Trump, nor the Republican Senate want to extend the $600-a-week unemployment compensation. They say it is too much for Americans who are out of work, through no fault of their own, because of this pandemic and even though there are poor people looking for work right now in America for every job that is available. I hear from constituents every day--I read some of their stories last Thursday on the floor of the Senate--people who badly want to get back to work, but their former job is gone, and there is no new job to replace it, and they need that additional $600 a week to make ends meet. In fact, I want to read to the Senate some additional letters I received from constituents on this point: Please act to extend the $600-a-week unemployment enhancement. I am requesting it both in my name and on behalf of my wife. We both lost our jobs. And the additional $600 is significantly helping keep us afloat and purchase the needs of life. My job was supposed to restart in late June, but the owner has pushed it back to November, December, to be determined. My wife was put on furlough and told the company hoped to bring everybody back but has heard nothing yet. Without the additional $600, a time will come in the next few months when we will be unable to pay our bills. Here is a note I received from another constituent: Respectfully, Senator Chris Van Hollen, I would like to write to you about the $600 unemployment. I understand that the other party is fighting you all the way. This is painful because I am a diabetic, and, at this point, because that benefit was taken away, I have to choose between paying my bills or my insulin. I applied sometime in June, since I was thinking I would be back to work. Gone are my savings to pay rent, car loan, insurance, and other bills. From this week on, because of losing the $600, I will have to stop paying bills so I can pay for my insulin. I never thought that I would be in a situation like this in America, where if you work hard, pay your taxes--to be able to have a roof over your head, health insurance, and human dignity. I, like I am sure many of my colleagues, have received hundreds-- hundreds of notes like that from our constituents, people who will not be able to make ends meet without the additional $600 a week, but the President doesn't want to continue that, nor do Senate Republicans. And so what did the President say up in New Jersey? He came up with this plan that, unfortunately, will not deliver. Essentially, what he said was: Take the funds that were provided in the CARES Act to the States--the U.S. Congress provided about $150 billion to States to help during the early stages of this pandemic, both to help purchase things like PPE and also to address the economic fallout. I should remind my colleagues that Senator McConnell was dead against that, even in the earlier version. If you go back and look at the debate in the Record, you will find that he was dead set against providing any funds to State and local governments. That was the result of a compromise that he succeeded in pushing in those negotiations. But in these most recent negotiations--these most recent negotiations--both the White House and, again, Senator McConnell and Senate Republicans took the position of no funds for State and local governments. I remember a few months back when asked, the Republican leader, Senator McConnell, said: Let them go bankrupt. Let them go bankrupt. Well, there is a productive solution. He may have walked those comments back a little bit, but he did not walk back his opposition to any funds for State and local governments. What did the President say in New Jersey the other day? OK, States, take the earlier emergency funds that Congress provided and use those as a 25-percent match to the 300 Federal dollars so we can provide $400 per week in additional employment insurance. Here is the problem with that. We provided that $150 billion emergency assistance to the States because of the emergencies they were facing then and continue to face because they are facing both increased costs with respect to helping frontline healthcare providers and hospitals and providing them with personal protective equipment The Federal Government has been pretty much AWOL when it comes to testing. The President said to the States, you-all set up testing regimes. And so they are using some of those funds we provided for that. They are using those funds to try to open schools safely or help provide distance learning when schools can't be open safely. Many of the States--especially those hardest hit--have already allocated the great majority, if not all, of those funds. And now the President is saying: Oh, well, use those funds that we provided to you earlier for this other purpose. No. 1, those States and other areas have already allocated most of those funds. I noticed that if you look at the Treasury tables, the data they released, it was for the end of June, and that money was already spent--not today. The money was already allocated. So, first of all, for many States, that money is already spoken for, but let's say in some cases there is some money left over. What is the President of the United States saying? He is saying he wants to take from one American to give to another one. The President wants to pit these needs against one another. He wants to rob constituent Peter to pay constituent Paul. Those moneys went to the States. Those moneys went to States to pay for real needs. OK, Governor; OK, State legislature, you are going to have to fire that emergency responder who will now both be out of a job and unable to provide emergency assistance so that you can give a $100 match to help somebody who has lost their job a little bit more. That is what the President is saying to those States that do have something leftover. We don't even know how much that is. If you think about it, that is not how a country should be responding in the middle of a pandemic. Governors, you have to hurt that person to help that one. That is what the plan of the President of the United States says, and that is when it is working the way he wants it. That is if it works as advertised. From the President's perspective, best case scenario, when this plan is working, he is asking Governors to take from one set of constituents of Americans who are hurting badly, could lose a job--they need the PPE; they need testing; they need to open the schools, but take it from over there, and put it over here. That is what the President is saying. That is assuming it works at all, whether that money is available and whether there is a way you can actually do all of this through what is a pretty cumbersome administrative process. I don't know if any of my colleagues saw the Sunday shows in realtime or reruns or read about them, but here is what Larry Kudlow was asked on the CNN ``Morning Show'' by Dana Bash, simple question: Have you checked with the States? How many of the 50 States and DC and other territories say that they are going to be able to pony up $100 a week per unemployed citizen? Larry Kudlow: Good question. Good question. We will probably find that out today or tomorrow as we make our canvas. If there wasn't another sign that what happened in New Jersey was a total show, this tells it all. They laid out a plan asking States that have run out of money, but if they have some money, to rob Peter to pay Paul, but they didn't even ask the States if it was doable. They didn't even ask the States if it was doable. That is a reflection of this entire plan. Let's look at what the President said about the second piece--payroll tax deferral. A lot of Americans might have heard that and thought: I am an employee. I am working, and now the portion of my check that is withheld for payroll taxes--like Social Security--I am not going to have to pay that anymore, and that will be money in my pocket. That is not what it did. What it did was say to these people who are working--by the way, as we all know, deducting payroll taxes from paychecks doesn't help the 30 million who don't have a job. They are not getting a paycheck. They have nothing to deduct something from. People who are working and thought this was going to be extra money that they can pocket forever, that is not the case. What the President was saying is that we will withhold those payroll taxes from your paychecks through the end of the year, but it is going to come due and owing. These are people who are working. These are people who have their jobs. Maybe they want to defer that for a little while or not, but at the end of the day, they are going to have to pay it back to Uncle Sam. Here is the other problem. Employers are the ones who are legally responsible for the delivery of those payroll taxes, not just for the employer but for the employee as well. They are going to have to take the risk that if one of their employees doesn't want their Social Security taxes paid--in other words, they want them withheld-- ultimately, they will be paid back. But what we are hearing from lots of employers is they can't guarantee that. First of all, what if that employee leaves? How am I going to repay that portion of the payroll taxes? Here is another example of something that may have sounded good to some people when they heard it, but it really is a shell game in the first instance and, in many ways, a sham. By the way, whether it is a deferral or if it is ultimately forgiven--that would require an act of Congress--then, the Social Security system takes a hit. Then the Social Security system takes a hit unless you refund it, but that is not in the President's plan. The President's memo doesn't talk about refunding it if, in fact, it were ever forgiven, which he can't do either. Let's look at the eviction moratorium. That is a real mirage. I urge my colleagues just to read the Executive order. The Executive order tells Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control to ``consider'' whether an extended eviction moratorium is reasonably necessary to protect the public health. He is asking two Federal agencies to consider a question he posed to them. I imagine a lot of people who may have watched the President with the American flags up in his country club thought: Wow, the President just said that no one can get evicted. That is not what he said at all. It was a sham. He said HHS and CDC should ``consider'' whether an extended eviction moratorium is reasonably necessary to protect the public health. Then he asked HUD and Treasury to look around in their bank accounts to see if they have money to help people who might be evicted. Do you know the way to help people who may be evicted? First of all, don't let them be evicted in the first place, and help them and the landlords by passing the rental assistance provision that is in the Heroes Act that passed the House. Whether you look at the unemployment insurance provision or the payroll tax provision or the so-called eviction moratorium provision, this really is show and not substance. I am only talking about what the President put into the plan, not everything that got left out-- everything that got left out that is in the Heroes Act: helping people go back to schools safely; helping to expand realtime testing so that we can open our economy and schools safely; food assistance for those who are struggling; rental assistance; money for State and local government, whose needs have only risen dramatically since the last down payment that Congress passed in the CARES Act. Now the President is saying that we want you to go poach that fund and hurt people by taking things away from them in order to help other Americans. Those are some of the things that were totally left out of here. I have often heard, when talking about State and local governments, that the President tweets all the time that this is just a question of blue States wanting to be bailed out for bad economic decisions or bad budget problems they had and that red States are just doing great. Anybody who looks at the State financial affairs knows that is not true. Take a look at my State of Maryland. Most people would consider us a blue State. We have the AAA bond rating. The last I checked, the State of Kentucky was a single A bond rating. This isn't a question of whether we want to help States that somehow had difficult financial situations before the coronavirus hit. The reality is that right now this is not a red State or blue State issue. This is an American issue. We all know that the virus has spread throughout the country. Nobody can totally escape it. It doesn't matter whether you are a red State or a blue State. This is a red, white, and blue moment, and we need to treat it as a national effort, not a State by State effort but one also where the Federal Government plays a very important role and is not AWOL in the middle of a pandemic, and not playing politics in the middle of a pandemic. Listen to the healthcare experts about whether or not to wear a mask instead of making that a political statement that puts people at greater risk who follow the President's political advice rather than the healthcare advice of the healthcare experts. I hope we will get back to the negotiating table. But to do that, the President has to be serious about reaching a conclusion, and he is going to need help from the Republican leader, Senator McConnell, and from that more than half of the Senate Republican conference that both Senator McConnell and Senator Graham say do not want to do anything at all. Let me clarify that. The Republican leader said 20 Members don't want to do anything at all, and it was Senator Graham who said about half. If that is the case, our country is in even bigger trouble than we might have thought because there is a failure to recognize the immediacy of the need and the depth of the problem that we face. Let's get back to the negotiating table. I remember some of the President's top priorities when he first presented his plan. He wanted that tax break for three-martini lunches for business executives--no food assistance for needy families but yes to tax breaks for three-martini lunches. That is what the President said. I think we were all surprised to see he wanted $1.6 billion or $1.7 billion to build a new FBI headquarters at its current site, rather than follow through with the original plan, which was to move that headquarters to a suburban campus for security needs and to consolidate. But I guess if you rebuild it at its current site, there really is no risk that someone will buy that land and end up building a hotel that competes with the nearby Trump hotel. That was part of the President's set of priorities in the middle of an emergency. American people need to understand that. Let's get back to the negotiating table. What the President did was show and not substance. We need to work together in order to do something meaningful. Don't walk away. Come on back and let's work. And, finally, when I say come on back--again, I will end where I started. It is awfully quiet around here. We are in the middle of a pandemic. The virus hasn't taken a vacation. The virus hasn't taken any time off. The economic harm isn't taking a vacation or any time off. Yet here we are in the Senate, all quiet. Talks break down with the administration. We are a separate branch of government under the Constitution of the United States. Let's get back here and do our job for the American people. I yield the floor.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, here we are--another Thursday afternoon in the Senate. It is pretty quiet around here. It is amazing how quickly this place gets quiet when the Senate majority leader, the Republican leader, Senator McConnell, tells people: We don't have any more work to do today. By the way, we don't have any more work to do tomorrow, Friday. By the way, don't worry about Saturday or Sunday. Monday, you know, I will be here, says the Majority leader, but the Senate doesn't need to be here doing its work--maybe not Tuesday or Wednesday either. I want to thank the Senator from Michigan, Ms. Stabenow, for being down here, standing up for working men and women and families and small businesses because, for them, it is not business as usual. It is not business as usual for all the folks who are out of work. Thirty million Americans are on unemployment insurance, but here in the Senate, for the Senate majority leader, it is business as usual. Take a day off. Take the weekend off. Be on standby next week. Maybe we will start doing something real. I can tell you the coronavirus is not on standby. The coronavirus is not taking a day off or 2 days off. It is continuing to spread in many parts of the country. We don't have enough testing equipment. We are not able to test people quickly. It takes people days and days and days and, in some cases, weeks to get their results. We hear the President of the United States saying he wants to open up the economy and open up schools. We all want to open up the economy. We all want our children back in school, for classrooms are the best place for learning. But do you know what? You can't just wish for that to happen, just like you can't wish for the coronavirus to go away, and that makes it go away. You need to do real work. You need the testing equipment so that we can test people in realtime and make sure that we prevent further outbreaks. We don't want bonfires to turn into brush fires to turn into prairie fires. You need to catch the virus and contain it. You can't do that if you don't have testing equipment. So the virus is not taking a day off or 2 or 3 or a week, and we shouldn't either. This Senate needs to do its job. We are in the middle of a pandemic. This is not a normal August. This should not be business as usual, and as Senator Stabenow said, we should not be here, at this moment, with important protections having already expired. This Senate sat by and did nothing while the protections against evictions expired. The eviction moratorium that was protecting millions of Americans-- gone. The extra $600 a week in unemployment--gone. Yet here we are with the majority leader saying: Take Friday off. Take Saturday off. Business as usual. Well, that is a difficult thing to tell families and workers and small businesses around the country, and it cannot be business as usual. The House of Representatives passed the Heroes Act more than 2\1/2\ months ago. It realized that after we passed the CARES Act in a bipartisan way, important protections were going to expire, and it acted. The House made sure it passed legislation to extend the enhanced unemployment of $600 a week. It passed legislation to extend the eviction moratorium. It provided additional food assistance for our kids. It provided important funds for rental assistance, which not only helps tenants stay in their apartments and homes but provides the payments to the landlords so the landlords can make the payments to the people they owe money to and on up the economic food chain. The House did all of that, and what did the Senate do for 2\1/2\ months? Nothing. Nothing. It is like a train is heading right for you, and you stand in the middle of the tracks until it hits you when any commonsense person would do what the House of Representatives did, which was to take action to make sure that we didn't cross these deadlines and cause unnecessary harm to millions of American families, workers, and small businesses. That is what the Senate has done. Now, even after we are into those deadlines--we have crossed those deadlines--what does the majority leader here, the Republican leader, say? Take tomorrow off. Take the weekend off. Take Monday off. In fact, the Senate may not come in for a while. I mean, we will come in, but there will be no voting, no real business. Let me tell you what I am hearing from my constituents, because I know it is not different from what other Members are hearing from theirs. Here is a letter I received from a single mom. I live . . . with my 15-year-old son as a single mother. I am asking for your help in voting to extend the $600 Federal unemployment benefit. I understand a lot of politicians do not want this extended due to the thought that the benefit is too great and will prevent Marylanders from wanting to return back to work, in that they make more money from staying at home off of the State/government this way. Now, we all know, if your job calls you back during this time and you choose not to return, your benefits are going to be cut off anyway. As for me, I am losing thousands of dollars each month being out of work and am barely scraping by as it is now with the extra $600. I desperately WANT TO RETURN to work and make my regular salary, which is more. I am very thankful for the extra $600 a week and have no idea how I would have survived without it during this time. I have zero other means to any money or credit. I have been able to pay my rent, feed my son, and pay some bills. I have deferred my car payment until August and am behind on car insurance. I am desperately asking for your help and the help of the government to extend this extra $600 a week benefit for a little while longer. Not to sound ungrateful, but an extra $100 or $200 per week is just not enough to help pay rent and other bills. Cutting this benefit abruptly will cause such economic hardship and devastation to so many Americans. This is a single mother, with a 15-year-old son, who is pleading with the U.S. Senate to do its job. And what does the majority leader say to Senators? Take tomorrow off. Take Saturday off. Take Sunday off. Take Monday off. I want to read another letter I received on this subject. Here is what my constituent wrote: I am emailing in hopes of asking for your support to extend the $600 Federal assistance in addition to unemployment. While I realize that the country has to spend more and more during this pandemic, many of us are learning our temporary layoffs are now permanent (I received the call yesterday) and our industries are still completely shut down. I have always worked in the hotel industry and have no further education or experience than that. The hospitality industry is the hardest hit during this pandemic. While I search multiple times a day for jobs, they simply are not open because the industry has not yet recovered. In fact, our industry is downsizing immensely I am a single mother to one 5-year-old boy who will start kindergarten in the fall. We do not receive any financial assistance through the State, such as housing assistance or child support. Maryland unemployment of $430 per week will not even cover the rent costs, and we will quickly be evicted with no options for housing. I am not looking to make more money than I was at my job. That is not possible. I grossed $75,000 in 2019, but I am looking to be able to pay my rent and bills and part-time childcare because it is in the best interest of my son to have social interaction and education during the pandemic even if I am not working. Please--I beg you--please support the extension of the $600 per week benefit. Now, I have heard a lot of Senators on this floor over weeks and months talk about how we just cannot extend $600 a week. Yet we hear from these moms and parents who are pleading for that help so that they can simply pay their bills and get by. Even with that, they are not able to pay all of their bills. The Republican leader says to the U.S. Senate: Take a day off. Take 2 days off. Next week, I will be in, says the majority leader, but I don't need for the Senate to be in, doing its work. What are we all here for? We should be here 24/7, working around the clock together to resolve these issues. We have a lot of multi, multi, multimillionaires in this U.S. Senate, and it is really rich for all of us to be telling families out there that the extra $600 per week is too much. That is just too much. These are individuals who want to go back to work. I just read to you a letter from someone who works in the hospitality industry. That is her experience. That is what she knows. I don't know if our Republican colleagues have checked recently, but the unemployment rate is around 15 percent. There are a lot of people out there who are looking for work who can't find it. They can't find it because we are in the middle of a pandemic, and that has caused a lot of small businesses and others to shut down in order to make sure that we stop the spread of the virus. These are people who want to get back to work. They want nothing better than that. They want their children back in school. All of us do. Yet we have a failed, botched Federal response, starting with the White House--starting with the President, who has made this a political issue when it has to be a health issue. It has made the problem a lot worse, and we all know it. We all know that this pandemic is lasting longer in the United States and has killed more people in the United States because of a totally failed response right from the top, and we should not be complicit in that. We should do our job. We have the majority leader, the Republican leader. What is he saying? He is not even part of the negotiations, right? He says: You know, I am in my Republican caucus lunches, and, reportedly, only half of the Republican Senators want to do anything. I don't know if that is true or not, but that is what Republican Senators are saying on national television. That is what we are hearing from the Republican caucus. So, if that is not true, it would be great to hear all of the Republican Senators come down to the floor and talk about what they are willing to do, not what they are not willing to do. Because there are not the votes there, the majority leader has contracted out his negotiation authority to the White House, and he has told the Senate to go home. Let's just start doing our job here in the U.S. Senate. Nobody should be contracting out his job and his vote and his negotiating authority to the White House. This is the U.S. Senate. I don't know what people ran for if they just want to say: Oh, I can't deal with this because my caucus doesn't support any response. Go talk to the White House. In the meantime in the Senate, take Friday off. Take Saturday off. Take Sunday off. Maybe take Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday off, too. That is a hell of a message to send to the American people in the middle of a pandemic during which so many people are hurting. I will end with this. Instead of the majority leader's coming down to the floor today and telling everybody to go away, we should stay here. We should stay here, and we should do our job. Doing our job means coming together with the next round of emergency legislation to slow down and then stop the spread of the virus and help the millions of Americans who are in tremendous economic pain right now. This is not business as usual. The Senate needs to do its job. Let's stay here and get it done. I yield the floor.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I support the referral for a committee hearing of the nominations of Frank Dunlevy, Christopher Bancroft Burnham, and John M. Barger to be Members of the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Madam President, I thank my colleague from New Hampshire, Senator Hassan, for the important points she made about what is happening in New Hampshire. In listening to her, I think each of us could say that that holds true for our State. Certainly, what she says holds true in my State of Maryland. In Maryland, we are just weeks away from the opening day of school. In other parts of the country, schools have already reopened. I think all of us can remember back to when we were going back to school during our K-12 years. We had a mix of excitement and anxiety. And those of us who are parents with children shared the excitement and anxiety of our children as they went off to school. This year, we are facing a sense of emotions and realities that none of us has ever experienced before. I think all of us agree that we would like all students to be able to return to actual classrooms as soon as safely possible. I hope we would all also agree that we want to make sure that in returning, we don't put at risk those children, students, teachers, or others in the school community. We all agree that in-classroom instruction provides the best learning environment for students, but we should also agree that students should not be returning to classrooms if it will put them at greater risk to their lives or their health or the health or lives of their teachers or others in the school community. We know that in order to reopen schools safely, we have to do two things: We have to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in those communities where it still exists and is still spreading, and we need much more rapid testing capacity so that we can quickly detect and isolate somebody who has COVID-19. We need to be able to quickly detect an outbreak of COVID in a school, whether that be a student or a teacher, so we can make sure that others do not get infected In so many places, such as the majority of major school systems in my State of Maryland, the reason they have not been able to plan to reopen the classrooms on opening day is that the spread continues in so many areas, and we don't have rapid, comprehensive testing. That is the result of a failed and botched policy at the highest levels--the fact that this administration, this President, has not put in place a comprehensive national strategy to slow and then stop the spread. Even today, you have to wait days and days and days to get the results of a test. That dramatically reduces the usefulness of that test when it comes to identifying an outbreak, doing all of the following up to figure out who else has been in contact with that person, and preventing the spread. That is why so many schools, including so many in the State of Maryland, will not be able to return to their classroom's opening day. It is not because they don't want to--of course, they want to--but because they don't want to put students, teachers, and the community at risk. That is the reality we are facing at the moment. In order to ensure that our kids, our students, get an education beginning on the first day of school, we need to dramatically scale up our ability to provide distance learning to those students. It is simple common sense that distance learning for our students requires two things to happen: No. 1, teachers need to have the necessary equipment and training to connect via the internet to their students; No. 2, students need to be able to connect to the internet so they can receive the lessons from their teachers. That is simple logic, and that is common sense. In our country, right now, we have a major problem, a major gap, a major inequity, and that is that millions of students, as we prepare to begin the first day of school, don't have access to the internet. That means they will be cut off from that form of distance learning, and that is unacceptable, given the fact that that is the approach we have to take at least for some period of time in many schools around the country. I think we should agree--and I hope we agree--that every child in our country, regardless of his or her ZIP Code or their family's income, should receive a high-quality, top-notch education that allows each of those students to achieve their full potential. They can't even connect to the internet if they can't even connect to their teachers. That, obviously, can't happen. In many ways, what we have seen from the coronavirus is, unfortunately, not anything new. It is the magnification of deep, systemic inequities that existed in our country before the outbreak of the pandemic and have been amplified since then--inequities in our healthcare system, inequities in various social systems, and, certainly, inequities in our social system. Those inequities have put students--many students--at an increased disadvantage, primarily students from lower income families and neighborhoods and, especially, students of color. Before the pandemic, we used to refer to this distance learning gap for students as the ``homework gap.'' What do we mean by the homework gap? Well, when I was at school and we were given a homework assignment, we pretty much needed our textbooks, and we needed our pens and paper. But now the overwhelming majority of homework assignments given by teachers require access to the internet to do your assignment and to do your research. Before the pandemic, we had millions of American students who couldn't access the internet for the purposes of doing their homework, and that was a serious problem. We called that the homework gap. But now what we call the homework gap has become a full-blown learning gap. It is not just a question of not being able to access the internet to do our homework assignment; these millions of students can't access the internet at all for their learning. This is not an isolated, small problem, and it is not just relegated to certain parts of the country. It is everywhere. In urban communities, 21 percent of students do not have access to adequate internet. In suburban areas, it is 25 percent. In rural areas, it is 37 percent. There are three reasons for this lack of access. One is lack of access to a device, a computer device. Obviously, you need to have a device to get on the internet. Here is a letter I received when schools had to shut down earlier this spring as a result of the pandemic. I received a letter from an 11-year-old Marylander who shared that his family has one computer, which he needs to share with his sister, who is in fourth grade, while his mom, who is a single parent, has to work full time using that same computer. He said that his family hadn't gotten any other help with additional electronics and that his mom, who ``is the most supportive and strongest mom . . . can only do so much.'' That is just one example of a student who doesn't have access to a device. What is another reason you can't connect? Well, if you don't have an internet connection either because you don't have a hotspot for your cell signal or you are not otherwise connected through a wire, then you obviously can't get the signal. So we need to make sure that we have more hotspot devices available for more students and do our best to build out the infrastructure to reach those who cannot be reached by hotspots. That is a second reason: You just can't connect to the internet and get the signal. A third reason is that in some places, internet access is available, but it is unaffordable. It just costs too much. We should not have any situation where a student, during this pandemic, can't get on the internet because his or her family cannot afford to pay for it. Just to give you an idea of the magnitude of this problem, in the spring, 50 million K-12 students were trying to access the internet from home for their lessons. But 15 to 16 million of those students either did not have access to high-speed broadband or they did not have a device. Nine million of them lacked both access to high-speed internet and did not have a device. This is not a small problem, and it is not an isolated problem. It is a problem we need to address now, since schools are opening in a few weeks in Maryland and schools have already opened in parts of the country. Here is a note I received from an elementary schoolteacher--someone who has been in the classroom for over 20 years--during the spring when they were trying to get their students connected: Like thousands of my colleagues, I rose to the occasion in transitioning to distance learning and engaging with all of my students who had access to devices. What was disheartening was the students whose faces I did not see--a high number of which were my African American students. This does hit communities of color disproportionately, but it does hit students in every geographic area in every part of each one of our States. To give you an example of the disparity based on race and ethnicity, you have 18 percent of White students who lack access to the internet, 26 percent of Latinx students, 30 percent of Black students, and 35 percent of Native American students. I hear some people say: Well, we are going to do distance learning, so that is not so expensive. Why do we need to provide schools with additional help during this period of time? The reality is, transitioning to a viable distance learning system that helps every one of our students costs money. In fact, it is an average of $500 per student. In Maryland, schools are already struggling to try to connect their students, trying to purchase these devices, trying to make sure that they sign up families who qualify for the Lifeline service, but we are falling short, and they need help. That is the students. We also have learned that 400,000 teachers are currently unable to connect to the internet because they lack connections. School superintendents have reported to us stories of teachers who are going to the school parking lots to access the school hotspots to do their teaching and provide their lessons. So we have to act urgently to address this issue. This should not be a political matter. There should not be a debate about the need to make sure every student can get classroom instruction via distance learning during this pandemic. That is just for starters. We also have schools who have to make sure that they provide education to the special ed students. We need to make sure that students who receive nutrition and lunches continue to be able to receive those, and we need to make sure that community schools, which in many of our States provide essential wraparound services, have the resources that they need. So let me just end by listing the key steps that we need to include in this next emergency package that we have been working hard to do. One are the resources to close this distance learning gap, including the Emergency Education Connections Act which I, along with Senator Markey and many others, have introduced. We need $4 billion to make those connections. I see Senator Cortez Masto on the floor, and I want to thank her for her leadership here, as well as Senator Blumenthal and Senator Reed. Two, we need to provide $12 billion for additional help for the IDEA program for special ed. Three, we need to make sure that we continue the flexibility for school lunch programs and increase the SNAP benefit by 15 percent. Four, we need to provide the $175 billion to help all of our K-12 schools, including our community schools. I will end with this. Childcare facilities are really feeling stretched and going under. If we want to have a safe and calibrated reopening, we need to make sure that those childcare centers remain open to parents so that they are able to go back to work--as they are allowed to safely--and make sure that their kids are well cared for. We have got a lot of work to do. We have been trying to have these discussions for over 2\1/2\ months, since the House passed the Heroes Act. This is long overdue. We hope these negotiations will conclude quickly because many of the protections that are in place right now are expiring. As we do that, let's make sure that our kids, who are going back to school in a matter of weeks in my State of Maryland--that all of them can connect to the internet so all of them can learn. It is simply unacceptable that millions of American kids are going to be going back to school, just like we all remember doing at one point in time, but they are not able to go in the classroom, and their only way to learn is by connecting to their teachers via the internet. We need to solve that problem and do it now. With that, Madam President, I yield the floor to the next Senator who is going to speak on this issue.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I rise to speak on the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2021. The National Defense Authorization Act provides crucial resources for our Armed Forces and our national defense, including a pay increase for our men and women in uniform. I am glad that the Senate was able to come together on a bipartisan basis to pass this legislation to support our servicemembers, strengthen our national security, and invest in critical projects in my home State of Maryland. While there are parts of this legislation that I do not support and will seek to change in conference, I believe that, on balance, this bill serves our national interest. In particular, I am pleased that this NDAA grants expanded acquisition authority for U.S. Cyber Command, headquartered at Fort Meade. I echo the comments of the Armed Services Committee in its report, which finds that Cyber Command's expanded mission and responsible use of its acquisition authority justify the removal of the constraints imposed by the FY16 NDAA. I appreciate that my colleagues on the Senate Armed Services Committee adopted Senator Warren's amendment directing the Pentagon to begin the process of renaming military bases named for Confederate soldiers. No American military installations should be named in honor of those who led the fight against the union to defend slavery. I also want to note my gratitude to Chairman Inhofe and Ranking Member Reed and their staffs for working with me to include relief for the family of Lieutenant Richard W. Collins III. Lt. Collins' tragic death was made even more painful for his family through the challenges they faced in receiving the proper benefits and recognition for their son. Nothing will ever fill the void of their loss, but I am hopeful that this provision brings the Collins family some peace of mind. Additionally, it is worth highlighting for the record that the House NDAA included a provision extending the review period of the World War I valor medals review authorized by section 584 of last year's NDAA. The Valor Medals Review Task Force has worked tirelessly to identify the service records of World War I veterans who may have been passed over for the Medal of Honor on the basis of race or ethnicity. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has limited their access to research materials and necessitated an extension for them to complete their work. I encourage the conferees to retain the House's provision granting this extension. While I am pleased with many of the provisions included in this bill and voted for its passage, I do have significant reservations. I am deeply disappointed that this bill authorizes full funding for the President's misguided and wasteful nuclear weapons programs while taking no action to preserve the New START treaty, the last standing agreement capping U.S. and Russian nuclear forces. For more than half a century, successive administrations have linked arms control with nuclear modernization efforts as a way of promoting stable deterrence and heading off an unconstrained arms race. Failure to extend New START will unravel this linkage, freeing Russia of limits on its nuclear arsenal and sparking a costly, destabilizing arms buildup. I also strongly oppose the authorization of funds to prepare for an explosive underground nuclear test, an act that would prompt our nuclear-armed adversaries to conduct their own tests and would undermine longstanding arms control and nonproliferation objectives. I applaud the House's passage of an amendment to bar nuclear testing in its NDAA, and I urge my colleagues to uphold this prohibition in conference negotiations. I also believe that this bill fails to tackle the long-term budget challenges facing our country, which is why I was disappointed that the Senate rejected Senator Sanders' amendment to reduce defense spending by 10 percent and invest that money into healthcare, education, and poverty reduction in communities with a poverty rate of 25 percent or more. In the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, a pandemic that has taken the lives of more than 150,000 of our fellow Americans and shows no signs of slowing down, and the impending crises of homelessness and joblessness that we face if the Congress fails to provide relief, we simply cannot afford to continue this level of investment in defense at the expense of other critical national priorities. I regret that the Senate was not given an opportunity to vote on my amendment, cosponsored by 13 other Senators, prohibiting the use of U.S. security assistance to support the unilateral annexation of all or parts of the West Bank. The security assistance which the United States provides to Israel is an important element of the relationship between our two countries and one that I strongly support. As I explained in my floor statement at the time of its introduction, the amendment would not have reduced U.S. security assistance to Israel by a single penny. It would simply have ensured that no U.S. security assistance could be used for the purpose of unilaterally annexing territory in the West Bank. Furthermore, nothing in this amendment would have prohibited Israel from using U.S.-financed missile defense systems such as Iron Dome to defend against attacks in any territories that could be unilaterally annexed by the Israeli Government. Likewise, I am troubled that the majority leader would not permit a vote on Senators Wyden and Merkley's amendment to end the President's unconstitutional attacks on Americans exercising their First Amendment rights in Portland. Portland is not the first city to experience these tactics; President Trump sent unidentified Federal police onto the streets of our Nation's Capital to threaten peaceful protesters. Now, he is threatening to send them to other American cities, including Baltimore. We must require Federal agents to wear visible identification and ban them from making arrests or detentions using unmarked vehicles. The Senate's failure to act quickly to respond to the President's unconstitutional behavior is shameful. Finally, Majority Leader McConnell, at the behest of the Trump administration, once again blocked the inclusion the bipartisan DETER Act, which I introduced with Senator Rubio, to deter future Russian interference in U.S. Federal elections. The DETER Act sends a clear message to Russian President Putin or any other foreign adversary: If you attack American elections, you will face severe consequences. Leader McConnell blocked this measure from the last NDAA, even though the Senate had unanimously passed a resolution instructing the conferees to support its inclusion. The decision of the Trump administration, working through Senator McConnell, to continue to block the DETER Act effectively green-lights Russian interference in future U.S. elections. It is a gift to Russian President Vladimir Putin and a subversion of the clear desire expressed by both Chambers of Congress to hold Russia accountable for future interference. It reinforces Putin's belief that the costs of attacking our democracy are low and the rewards are great. I will continue fighting for the passage of the DETER Act. The Presidential election is less than 4 months away, and we must make clear to Putin that Russia will pay a steep price if they interfere in another election. While I am opposed to some of the provisions in this bill and disappointed by the omission of others, I believe that, on balance, the NDAA will strengthen our national security and advance other important national priorities. For that reason, I voted in support of final passage.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I opposed the confirmation of Derek Kan to be Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Mr. Kan's tenure at OMB and his responses to questions from the Senate Budget Committee raise serious concerns about a lack of transparency and a failure of leadership in responding to the coronavirus pandemic. While Mr. Kan was the Executive Associate Director at OMB, the agency illegally withheld security assistance for Ukraine in furtherance of President Trump's corrupt scheme to pressure Ukraine to interfere on President Trump's behalf in the 2020 election. On August 12, 2019, OMB General Counsel Mark Paoletta sent an email to Mr. Kan and other top OMB officials regarding concerns from the Department of Defense about this withholding, an email that made headlines when it was revealed publicly. While I specifically asked Mr. Kan about this email in written questions prior to the hearing, Mr. Kan claimed during the hearing that he was not familiar with the email in question. The Government Accountability Office found that OMB violated the Impoundment Control Act by withholding security assistance from Ukraine, and GAO also stated that OMB's stonewalling of their inquiry had ``constitutional significance'' due to the undermining of legislative branch oversight. Mr. Kan, like OMB Director Russell Vought during his confirmation hearing, refused to even provide a reason for why OMB did not turn over any documents in response to GAO's request for documents to substantiate OMB's claim that a policy process was the reason for withholding aid to Ukraine. In response to my questions following the hearing, Mr. Kan referred the matter to the office of OMB General Counsel Mark Paoletta, the same official whose response to GAO's inquiry failed to turn over any such documents in the first place. I am also concerned about Mr. Kan's leadership as a member of the President's Coronavirus Task Force. On February 5, 2020, Mr. Kan told Senators that the Trump administration did not need additional resources to address the coronavirus, which contributed to the deadly lack of preparation as the pandemic spread in the United States. During his confirmation hearing, Mr. Kan would not say whether he agreed with President Trump about reducing testing for coronavirus or whether President Trump was setting a good example by holding large indoor rallies at which masks were not required. For those reasons, I voted against Mr. Kan's confirmation to be Deputy Director at OMB.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I voted in support of S. Amdt. 1788, which would reduce defense spending by 10 percent and invest that money into healthcare, education, and poverty reduction in communities with a poverty rate of 25 percent or more. To govern is to choose, and as we face unprecedented challenges at home, this defense budget is out of step with the values, priorities, and needs of the American people. The unchecked growth in the defense budget is unsustainable, and the Trump administration has exacerbated these challenges. We have a duty to ensure the readiness of our forces, and I have supported efforts to rebuild our Armed Forces after years of costly overseas engagements. But massive spending increases without clear strategic direction do not make us safer. We need to be thoughtful about our spending choices, recognizing that every dollar spent on defense is a dollar not spent on healthcare, education, workforce training, and other critical areas of need. The National Defense Authorization Act as it is currently written would spend $740.5 billion on defense. This represents 53 percent of total Federal discretionary spending and exceeds the defense budgets of the next 11 nations combined, including our allies in Australia, South Korea, Germany, Japan, France, and the United Kingdom. It is more than twice the combined defense expenditures of China and Russia. Topline defense spending has risen by more than $100 billion since President Trump took office; after the $74 billion cut proposed in this amendment, defense spending would still be above the fiscal year 2017 level. Some of my colleagues have expressed unease about the across-the- board nature of these cuts, and I agree that a targeted approach is preferable. But I have seen the consequences of delaying difficult decisions and believe we can no longer wait to have difficult conversations about our defense budget. In addition, the National Defense Authorization Act is not an appropriations bill, and this amendment simply reduces the total amount of money authorized to be spent on defense in the upcoming fiscal year. The Appropriations Committee, on which I serve, will still have the task of making thoughtful, targeted reductions in areas of lower priority, while preserving funding for high-priority items. I encourage my colleagues to confront these challenges for the good of our country and make adjustments as needed during conference negotiations with the House while remaining under the cap set by this amendment. I am glad that this amendment protects salaries and healthcare from cuts, and would have preferred that it go further in making targeted cuts in order to reduce the impact elsewhere in the defense budget. In particular, we should have taken this opportunity to scale back our country's trillion-dollar nuclear modernization efforts. Modernizing our nuclear weapons in a manner that makes them easier to use in more scenarios while abrogating our treaty responsibilities and doing nothing to bring Russia back to the nuclear negotiating table is a recipe for disaster. However, my concerns with the particulars of this amendment do not change the plain fact that our national defense budget has grown out of control. In the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, a pandemic that has taken the lives of more than 143,000 of our fellow Americans and shows no signs of slowing down, and the impending crises of homelessness and joblessness that we face if the Congress fails to provide relief, we simply cannot afford to continue this level of overinvestment in defense at the expense of other critical national priorities. For that reason, I supported this amendment.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I oppose the confirmation of Russell Vought to be Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Mr. Vought's tenure as Acting Director of OMB has been characterized by mismanagement, political corruption, and lawbreaking. He is unfit to lead OMB. Mr. Vought played an active role in President Trump's corrupt scheme to pressure Ukraine to interfere on President Trump's behalf in the 2020 election. In furtherance of that scheme, OMB illegally withheld security assistance for Ukraine under Mr. Vought's leadership, which violated the Impoundment Control Act according to the independent and nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. GAO even stated that OMB's stonewalling of their inquiry had ``constitutional significance'' due to the undermining of legislative branch oversight. During his confirmation hearing, Mr. Vought could not even explain why OMB stonewalled GAO's inquiry by refusing to turn over relevant documents requested by GAO and then failed to provide a reason for withholding these documents in response to my questions following the hearing. Mr. Vought is among those responsible for the Trump administration's disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic. OMB dragged its feet on requesting urgently needed resources to respond to the pandemic, which led to deadly shortages of key supplies. Due to insufficient guidance from OMB and the Office of Personnel Management, Federal agencies are moving forward with haphazard plans to bring teleworking employees back into offices in ways that needlessly risk spreading COVID-19 among Federal workers, their families, and surrounding communities. OMB is responsible for preparing the President's budget, and Mr. Vought has advanced budgets that would pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations by slashing support for healthcare, education, and nutrition assistance. The Trump administration would have been even less prepared for COVID-19 if Congress enacted the cuts in these budgets to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mr. Vought personally called for cutting the CDC budget as recently as March 10, 2020, when the pandemic was sweeping the country. At that time, Mr. Vought insisted that he would not send a budget amendment to reverse these cuts. The administration was forced by circumstances to submit such a budget amendment shortly thereafter. The Senate should not reward this record of failure and lawbreaking by confirming Mr. Vought's nomination.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I voted against the motion to table Senator Paul's amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act not because I support his amendment as written, but because I believe this Senate has a responsibility to fully debate the question of our policy, strategy and plans for Afghanistan. Tabling an amendment cuts off all debate on this important matter. We should not be ducking these decisions. We should confront our policy directly, take stock of where we are, and set a responsible course for the future. I strongly support ending the war in Afghanistan and the responsible withdrawal of our men and women in uniform. However, I believe that mandating the total unconditional withdrawal on a 1-year timeline will result in the further destabilization of an already volatile region. Unconditional withdrawal divorced from a diplomatic process to achieve political reconciliation between the warring parties will make it harder to achieve a peaceful outcome that serves our national security interests. Despite my disagreement with much of the substance of the Paul amendment, the Senate should deliberate on these matters, not run away from the discussion. The decision to table the Paul amendment prevented the Senate from performing this essential function.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I want to salute my friend and colleague, the Senator from Pennsylvania, Mr. Toomey, for his remarks and for his leadership on this very vital issue of standing up for the rights and freedom of people in Hong Kong and, as he said, sending a signal to others around the world who would seek to stamp out human rights and political freedom. When Senator Toomey and I saw that the Chinese Communist Party was taking its more recent steps to crack down on freedom in Hong Kong, we introduced the Hong Kong Autonomy Act. That act just passed the U.S. Senate unanimously last week and was sent to the House of Representatives. This is a very fast turnaround from either of the Chambers in the U.S. Congress. I want to thank Speaker Pelosi and her Republican partner and all the Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives for coming together so quickly on this legislation. The legislation before us made a technical fix to the bill that Senator Toomey and I introduced in which this Senate passed out last week a technical fix to comply with the constitutional requirements as to where a bill that might generate revenue begins. With that technical fix, Speaker Pelosi and the Republican leadership sent it right back. Why did they send it right back so quickly? Because this is an urgent moment. In fact, our timing could not be more critical. On Tuesday, President Xi imposed a national security law on Hong Kong by fiat. It was only after the law was passed that Beijing unveiled its provisions. Even Hong Kong's Chief Executive and President Xi loyalist, Carrie Lam, said she hadn't been allowed to see a draft before the law's passage. As Senator Toomey indicated, this law is written broadly enough that it will criminalize speech and peaceful assembly. Anybody who publishes anti-Beijing viewpoints could be punished by life in prison. Saying anything seen to be undermining the ruling Communist Party's authority would be a violation. This is consistent with mainland China's approach, which has virtually eliminated independent journalism and severely restricted NGOs. Here are some highlights of the law that was just passed--I should say, imposed. It now mandates that the Hong Kong Government undertake ``national security education'' in school, social organizations, and media outlets. The law mandates that anyone entering public office in Hong Kong swear allegiance to Beijing. What is more, the law applies to anyone, anywhere. It can even apply to offenses committed outside the region by a person who is not a permanent resident of the region. That means a U.S. citizen penning an editorial that argues for sanctions against China could technically fall afoul of the new law for ``inciting hatred'' against Beijing. Legal experts believe this is even broader than the Chinese criminal law applied in mainland China. Senator Toomey said, despite this--despite this threat, despite passage of a law that would punish people for up to life imprisonment for expressing their views, thousands of protesters took to the streets yesterday and staged the largest rally in Hong Kong this year. Hundreds of Hong Kong police officers moved in swiftly to quash dissent and implement the law. Police fired tear gas, pepper spray, and water cannons to disperse the protesters. The police then issued a statement that noted some protesters were chanting ``Hong Kong independence, the only way out.'' The statement said such slogans are ``suspected to be inciting or abetting others to commit secession'' and may violate the new law. The United States must stand with the people of Hong Kong. That is what this bill says. This bill says we stand with the people of Hong Kong. As Senator Toomey indicated, it would impose mandatory sanctions on individuals in firms who violate China's obligations to the people of Hong Kong under the joint declaration and the basic law--rights of freedom of speech and equality before the law, freedom of association, and the right from arbitrary or unlawful arrest, detention, and imprisonment. It goes beyond that to impose mandatory sanctions on banks that do business with individuals who are complicit in undermining these freedoms and the rights of the people of Hong Kong. I am glad we acted quickly. As you can see, the Government of China is moving by the day to squash the rights and freedoms of the people of Hong Kong. We need to move with urgency to send a statement that we stand with the people of Hong Kong. In a moment, I am going to be joining my colleague, Senator Toomey, in asking for unanimous consent. Before I turn it back over to him, let me just say, assuming we get that--and it looks like we will--I hope President Trump will sign this immediately--immediately. As a country, Republicans and Democrats together need to send a strong signal that we will not stand for the actions of Beijing, undermining their own agreements--agreements under international law, which they are bound to, and we will not stand still in silence and do nothing while they crack down on freedom in Hong Kong. I yield to Senator Toomey from Pennsylvania.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

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