Peter Welch

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Madam President, I want the Senator from Idaho, the esteemed chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, to know that when it comes to condemning Hamas for what it did on October 7, for what it has done to the Palestinians in Gaza on an ongoing basis, I join you in condemning Hamas. And this resolution does not get into the question of fault. It gets into the question of suffering. It gets into the question of the suffering of innocent people who, at times, have been victimized by Hamas but whose families are hungry, who are starving. And the point of this resolution is to say: Let's help them avoid starvation by supporting the delivery of the food and the medicine and the baby formula that they need. This, in no way, is going to solve the conflict. That is a point the Senator made, and he has got a point to be made. But if we do all we can to facilitate the delivery of aid, it means that we are doing all we can to ease the suffering of innocent families who have been victimized. My view is that we should do all we can to alleviate the suffering, especially for these infants, these children, these women, and peace- loving Palestinians who want nothing more than to live in peace in their neighborhood. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Madam President, it is good to see you and be with you. Madam President, American families are struggling with the cost of living, and one of the biggest challenges they face is the incredibly high cost of prescription drugs. Last week, President Trump signed a new Executive order that tries to implement international reference pricing on prescription drugs for Americans. At his press conference, President Trump called out pharmaceutical companies for ``price gouging,'' which he described as a ``great American rip off.'' I agree with President Trump. Prescription drugs are too expensive in America, and we are getting ripped off. There is no reason that pharmaceutical companies should charge American patients more than they charge people in other countries. These excessive price-gouging practices have forced many Americans to pay four times, five times, even six times for the same lifesaving medications as folks in other countries pay. There is absolutely no justification for that. Now, in the last Congress, the Inflation Reduction Act was a significant step toward combating Big Pharma's price gouging and lowering prices for American patients. That act allowed Medicare the ability to negotiate drug prices for the first time ever. By the way, that is something that all other countries do. They protect their citizens from price gouging. That bill meant 20,000 Vermonters who take one or more of the first 10 drugs selected by Medicare for negotiation will see lower prices starting in 2026. That can't come soon enough. Over 27,000 Vermonters will save an average of 600 bucks annually thanks to the $2,000 annual out-of-pocket cost cap that began in January of 2025. The Inflation Reduction Act will save senior Vermonters on Medicare a total of more than $21 million on prescription drugs. But when you are the multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry, you have a lot of tricks up your sleeve to thwart any policy that cuts into your profits. One of Big Pharma's favorite refrains is that reference pricing--where we pay essentially the same as everybody else pays, not five times more--will put a strain on research and innovation. That is false. The fact of the matter is that over two decades, the world's largest biopharmaceutical companies have spent way more on advertising and way more on administrative costs--including, by the way, multimillion- dollar CEO pay packages--than they have spent on research and development. By the way, what they do spend on research and development is subsidized by taxpayers. So while pharma is doing these maneuvers to keep prices up, real people are hurting. On average, Americans spend over $1,400 on prescription drugs every year. That is the highest per capita spending in the world, and it is one of the reasons why healthcare costs are so high--by the way, not just with the cost for Medicaid and Medicare but for employers who care about their employees and are fighting against ever-increasing insurance premiums that make that almost out of reach or make them make a decision between increasing pay, which workers want and workers need, and maintaining healthcare benefits that workers want and workers need. And there is a part of this that I think is really sad and particularly cruel on the part of pharma. They have this incredible pricing power that comes, in part, because of the patent that they are granted. It comes, in part, because there is a market that is created through taxpayers with Medicare and Medicaid; but it is exploited because what pharma knows is what you and I know: If a member of your family, if your partner, a person you love is in need of a medication, you will do whatever it takes. You will get a second mortgage if you have a home. You will postpone getting a car that you need. You will go into your retirement savings. Whatever it takes. So this predatory practice of taking advantage of the love one American has for another to exploit on the pricing side is, in my view, quite outrageous. But the cruelty of the situation is that you can have folks in Vermont, just miles from the border in Canada, where right over across the border, folks are paying five times less than what we pay on the Vermont side of the border. And I have heard from so many folks--and I will bet you have heard similar stories--who have told me the story of dealing with, in this case, type 1 diabetes, and they are trying to get their mental health back in a better place. The medication they were put on at the beginning of the year was helping, but the cost more than tripled, suddenly, and they can't afford to pay 800 bucks a month. And they are worried about a relapse. And that story isn't unique. Every day, folks in Vermont and in red and blue States across the country are paying more for their drugs than the same folks are paying for in other countries. And, by the way, one of the things that I find so compelling about this is we agree, both sides of the aisle, that costs for Americans are too high. We agree, both sides of the aisle, that folks need healthcare. And we do agree, most of us, that the pharma prices are way too high. So this is something, in my view, we can and should do together. The Inflation Reduction Act has reined in pharma's abusive tactics-- but only minimally--by forcing them to the table for the first time. That is good, but we need to do more. Trump's Executive order is implying the ``poke it with a stick'' strategy, announcing a new policy and waiting to see what happens. His new Executive order will face the same practical challenges this time around as it did in Trump's first administration from pharmaceutical companies looking to obscure the pricing margins. They tell us how tough times are, even as on the phone calls with Wall Street analysts, they are saying how wonderful times are. And we have to face up to that in order, as Congress, to support a lower price approach, which includes negotiation and includes reference pricing. Patients across the country who can't afford these drugs need it now. They need them now, not in 10 years. And the American people, they do want action in lowering prescription drug prices. And for the life of every person I talk to in Vermont, and I am sure this is true with the folks you talk to in Florida, they just can't understand why we have to pay five times more than folks in other countries. And they particularly can't understand it when our taxpayers have provided much of the funding for research that went into the creation of these drugs in the first place. I am very proud to join with my colleague from Missouri Senator Hawley in introducing bipartisan legislation that will offer relief for millions of patients by prohibiting pharmaceutical companies from selling drugs here in the United States at higher prices than the international average. Very basic, very fair. Our bill will put an end to Big Pharma's practice of forcing Americans to pay the highest prices in the world for medications. The bottom line is that President Trump has issued an Executive order that I support. My hope is that he is going to follow through because we are in the need of leadership from the President of the United States and the influence he has in Congress to get us and both sides of this Capitol to get international reference pricing and to make more progress on price negotiation, all for the goal of making lifesaving medications more accessible to folks on Medicare, folks on Medicaid, to folks who have private insurance, and also to bring down the costs for our employers who are facing relentless upward spikes in healthcare premiums. So I will extend the same challenge to President Trump that he extended to the pharmaceutical companies. Let's get real, as President Trump put it in his inimitable way, don't get cute about avoiding the responsibility we have to bring down prescription drug prices. So I call on my colleagues and I call on President Trump to follow words with actions. We have got to follow through on this debate. We know how to do it, to bring down Big Pharma's prices and stand up to their greed and support the Hawley-Welch bill to ensure that no one in America ever faces an impossible choice between paying for prescriptions that they need or putting food on the table or paying the rent or fixing a broken-down car. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, President Trump has been in office for 113 days. On nearly every one of those days, he has announced another very dangerous attack on the Constitution and on our system of justice. The recent shocking news that the administration plans to deport migrants to Libya--a country that is in chaos, where the prisons are a version of hell--is just a recent example. I hate to say this, but it is true. It is not just what the Trump administration does; it is the cavalier cruelty by which the administration does it. That cruelty is described in heart-wrenching detail by the Washington Post in a recent article entitled ``Trump's 48-hour scramble to fly migrants to a Salvadoran prison.'' The article describes the Trump administration officials who, in their rush to deport a million migrants, have knowingly and flagrantly trampled on the rights of people who are in this country legally--in this country legally. The Post reviewed court records and conducted interviews of more than 50 men who are believed to be held at the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, in El Salvador. The Post found: [D]espite the administration's claims, many of the immigrants sent to El Salvador had entered the United States legally and were actively complying with U.S. immigration rules. The review by the Post also found: At least two of the men imprisoned in El Salvador had been approved-- Approved-- by the State Department to resettle as refugees in the United States after [very] extensive vetting by federal law enforcement authorities. . . . At least four had protections against removal through temporary protected status . . . granted to those fleeing Venezuela's humanitarian crisis. . . . Others had been active members of Venezuela's opposition and had open asylum claims. In other words, these were folks who were friends of freedom. Suddenly, without producing any credible evidence, they are now called ``terrorists''--no new evidence. Prisoners at CECOT--they are abandoned, they are lost, and they are forgotten. They have no access to family or lawyers, no semblance of due process to prove their innocence, and no idea when they will be released, if they will ever be released. According to the Post article, Secretary of State Rubio told Bukele that the migrant prisoners would remain there for a year ``or until a determination concerning their long-term disposition is made.'' No end in sight. It is a very chilling statement. The Secretary of State, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the White House Press Secretary repeatedly referred to these migrants as ``the worst of the worst'' terrorists and criminals. These are folks who were here legally, following the rules. Multiple investigations have determined that many of the migrants sent to CECOT in El Salvador literally have never been charged, let alone convicted of anything. The administration's own lawyers have acknowledged this. According to the Washington Post report, U.S. officials have refused to provide the names of those who were sent to CECOT. So our government has picked up people, spirited them away to El Salvador, and won't even disclose the identity of the people who were arrested and deported. The Washington Post asked three El Salvadoran officials for the identities of deportees who were sent there but received absolutely no response. That is why lawyers and journalists have described CECOT as a Kafkaesque dungeon. Once someone is led in chains through those iron gates, he is as good as disappeared forever. One person the Trump administration disappeared to El Salvador was Andry Hernandez. He is a 31-year-old makeup artist. He left Venezuela to escape persecution, partly because of his sexual orientation, for which he was persecuted, and his political views, for which he was persecuted. Andry opposed the Maduro regime. He did not cross the border illegally. He went to Mexico. He obtained an appointment--according to the rules--for an asylum interview. He had an interview, and he was found to have a credible fear of persecution. So he did everything right. Now we see photographs of Andry in CECOT, and they are gut- wrenching. He cries for his mother as guards slap him and forcibly shave his head. He yells out: I'm not a gang member. I'm gay. I'm a stylist. The photos also show our government's alleged evidence for sending Andry to CECOT: tattoos of crowns, which are a symbol of a religious festival for Three Kings Day and have nothing to do with any gang- related activity. The Trump administration officials have openly praised El Salvador's President Bukele for receiving these migrants. He is a man who proudly calls himself a dictator--and he is. His rubberstamp legislature and the judiciary caved in to him and allowed him to circumvent their own constitution and run for a second term. Then he imposed a state of emergency, empowering him to arrest and imprison anyone without charge--indefinitely. The Trump administration officials have no qualms about paying millions of dollars to President Bukele to jail these migrants, who include folks who were here in this country legally. The Washington Post article describes the Trump administration scrambling to arrest hundreds of people like Andry, often at their places of employment. And President Trump is then having them secretly and quickly often deported to El Salvador before the courts can even provide a hearing. Amid these rampant violations of fundamental due process, the administration continues to just dis the Federal courts. And according to a Justice Department spokesperson, ``Activist judges do not have jurisdiction to seize control of the President's authority to conduct foreign policy, remove dangerous illegal aliens from our country, and keep Americans safe.'' This has nothing to do with that. It has to do with the rule of law and the role of the judiciary in our frame of government. Multiple judges, by the way, appointed by Republicans and Democrats, including President Trump, have ruled against the administration's efforts to forcibly deport people without any hearing whatsoever. And, by the way, how does forcibly disappearing somebody like Andry Hernandez Romero make us more safe? Just last week, a Federal judge appointed by President Trump blocked the administration from summarily removing migrants in South Texas under a bogus assertion of the application of the Alien Enemies Act. This should not be happening in this country, and it shouldn't be happening in El Salvador. It should not happen in Libya. It should not happen anywhere. Laws matter. Due process matters. Justice matters. How we treat other human beings says more about us than it says about them. It was Nelson Mandela who said: No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but the lowest ones. The Trump administration has made a clear decision to disrespect our laws, to disregard the rights of citizens and individuals who are entitled to due process, and to do it in a way that is cruel and disrespectful of the United States and its commitment to freedom and the rule of law. Our Supreme Court has ruled that all people, including migrants, are entitled to due process, to an opportunity to rebut allegations against them before being deported. The Trump administration attack is not just on the rights of these individuals, but it really goes to the core of principles and practices established in law that are the foundation of our democracy. And it threatens, therefore, the rights and privileges of all American citizens. I stand here on behalf of Vermonters who are appalled by this action. I stand here as a Member of the U.S. Senate who believes it is my responsibility, in the face of these Trump actions, to stand up for the rights of people to have a hearing, to have a right to be brought before a magistrate or a judge, and not be deported without any due process whatsoever. This is important to our commitment as Members of the U.S. Senate to preserve the traditions of the Constitution, the rule of law, and the rights of individuals and the freedom that has been the blessing of our liberty since the founding of our country. (The remarks of Mr. Welch pertaining to the introduction of S. Res. 224 are printed in today's Record under ``Submitted Resolutions.'')

Mr. WELCH. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I want to speak about a very uncomfortable but very real tragedy that is unfolding before our very eyes, and that, of course, is starvation in Gaza. It is a tragedy that is totally foreseeable and is totally preventable. Today, the families and children of Gaza--today, right now--are facing starvation, and this is following a monthslong complete denial of the delivery of food and aid within the borders of Gaza. For more than 2 months, Israeli forces have stopped thousands of tons of food and water and medicine and formula and shelter and other humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza. The results of that siege have been and are unbearable for the families there. Babies and children are starving to death right now-- right now--in Gaza. I have behind me the picture of an infant girl in Gaza who starved to death this past week. Her parents could not get the lactose-free formula that she needed to keep her alive. That formula was on one side of the Gaza gate; that starving child was on the other. There was never even an effort to just hand that formula to keep that young girl alive, over the fence or to open the gate. I want to honor this beautiful infant girl today by sharing her name, and I ask all of us to remember it. Her name is Jinan Iskafi. And to Jinan's parents, on behalf of the U.S. Senate, I would like to say that we--all of us--offer our wholehearted condolences for your unspeakable loss. I know the Presiding Officer and I know my colleagues on both sides of the aisle are horrified about this suffering and this death of innocent infants. We all agree on this. Babies and children should not starve to death. We are united in our opposition to such unnecessary death and suffering, and I believe all of us do not accept that Jinan's death is a ``cost of war,'' a reality of war that can't be avoided. Jinan's death was totally avoidable. It was totally preventable. It has been over 2 months since the Israeli Government has been using its power to withhold food, medicine, lifesaving cancer treatments, dialysis systems, formula, and more from starving and suffering families across Gaza. Half a million Palestinians in Gaza are facing starvation, and that number is rising. The IPC report that was released 1 year ago offered a similarly dire warning. Yet here we are today. And, really, there is no end in sight. More than 70,000 children and more than 17,000 mothers need urgent treatment for acute malnutrition, urgent treatment to prevent starvation. All the while, these trucks that are filled with food and medicine, much of that aid provided by the United States and our allies, are right there across the border. This situation that folks face in Gaza is unprecedented in contemporary conflict. We cannot have or sanction a government's intentional policy of starvation. Nearly 30,000 babies and children have been killed in Gaza--faces seared into the traumatized hearts of their mothers, their brothers, their uncles. But even today, even more than that number are severely malnourished; even more than that number are facing famine conditions. Jinan--that name means paradise. Think of the hope of the parents when they named their beautiful child ``paradise.'' It is up to all of us to do all we can to make this the last picture of a baby boy or girl who starves to death in Gaza. And, today, I am offering a resolution with my colleagues that makes a simple point. It notes simply that children are starving to death. They are starving to death as we are here comfortably debating what we think are important issues. And it must be the effort of all of us to do all we can to bring this siege and this war to an immediate end. I would like to thank my colleagues that joined me today in offering this call for humanity: Senators Bennet, Booker, Duckworth, Durbin, Hirono, Kaine, King, Heinrich, Hickenlooper, Kim, Klobuchar, Markey, Merkley, Murphy, Murray, Sanders, Schatz, Shaheen, Slotkin, Smith, Van Hollen, Warner, Warnock, Warren, and Wyden. Mr. President, I want to conclude my remarks tonight by sharing one more time the name of this infant girl, and I ask my colleagues to please look at her face, recognize her humanity, and recognize her name: Jinan Iskafi.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I want to support everything that my colleague, the ranking member of the Finance Committee, just said about these tariffs. I want to make two points about the tariffs--one, the tariffs themselves, and then second, the congressional failure to assert its own authority on policies that it has the constitutional responsibility for when our failure results in economic pain and insecurity for the American people. First of all, the tariffs. When the history of this decision is written, President Trump's imposition of these wild and reckless tariffs is going to be seen as one of the greatest economic blunders in a century. It is that bad. What is happening in Vermont is happening in every State across this country. First of all, these tariffs are a tax. Second, they are paid for by consumers, by manufacturers, and by producers. Third, it is having a negative impact on trade and on our economy already. Today's information about the gross domestic product shrinkage is evidence in and of itself. In Vermont, Trump's tariffs are estimated to cost Vermont households more than $1 billion. More than 18,000 Vermonters work in industries that are targeted by retaliatory tariffs, but virtually every Vermonter is going to be impacted by increased costs--inflation--as a result of the tariffs. As an example, food, fuel, energy--all of these things are going to be impacted and really affect people in their day-to-day and month-to- month budgets. We get a lot of our electricity, a lot of our home heating fuel, and a lot of our petroleum from Canada, especially in the northern part of our State. Those costs are going to be increased, especially with the expected retaliatory tariffs that are imposed on us by countries subject to the arbitrary action of President Trump. Farmers are really hit hard. Most of our farmers in Vermont import their fertilizer from Canada. There is about a 25-percent increase that they are going to be paying. And these are farmers, as the Presiding Officer knows, that operate on the thinnest of margins in the most uncertain of activities, subject to weather and price fluctuations and so many other things that make our farmers courageous entrepreneurs. But why add 25 percent to the cost of fertilizer when that input cost is already so high? It is mind-boggling to think that this is a voluntary action by the President. Canada, by the way, happens to be our biggest trading partner, and 34 States have Canada as their major trading partner. In these tariffs--in Canada, we are a 2.1 billion import partner with Canada--20 percent tariff. China--a lot of input from China that our manufacturers use--54 percent tariff, plus who knows how many more tariffs depending on the day and how President Trump feels when he wakes up. Trinidad and Tobago: 81 million, 10 percent tariff. Germany: 75 million. Mexico: 77 million. Very frustratingly for all of us, the sweeping global tariff order unnecessarily increases prices and taxes on countries that have trade surpluses with America. I recently heard from a Vermonter who imports coffee and has a niche business that has become extremely successful. The tariffs on Colombia have resulted in this: A container that cost $700 last month--that container now costs $13,000. How do you deal with that? A hit to the margin is--no business can absorb that. Vermont is also home to one of two businesses in the world that produce these unique snow globes, and they have been in business for 25 years. It is a modest business, but it is one that was created by a Vermont entrepreneur, and it has been really successful. They are going to have to close their doors at the end of the summer with these increased tariffs, basically, on China. A second point that I think is relevant to these tariffs is the arbitrariness of their implementation and the arbitrariness of how and who is affected. We have a situation where we supposedly have these tariffs on China. Apple Computer, quite understandably, was upset. It was going to increase the cost of iPhones. Well, no problem. Tim Cook was at the inauguration, sitting on the throne of honor, and he had the telephone number, made the call, and the tariffs on iPhones vanished. You know that snow globe manufacturer that I mentioned from Vermont? She does not have Howard Lutnick's phone number. She does not have Scott Bessent's phone number. She does not have President Trump's phone number. She is out of luck. So now, with these tariffs and the way they are being implemented without any congressional engagement whatsoever, we are turning our economy from one where it is based on a good product, really good service, where you compete in the marketplace and if your product is better and your service is better, you succeed, to an economy that is more based on access. Do you know Lutnick? Do you know Bessent? Do you know the President? Oh, and by the way, if you contributed a couple million dollars to the inauguration, you probably do know them and they give out the phone number. That is absolutely outrageous. People work hard. They produce a good product. They give good service. Shouldn't they be entitled to the reward for the labor that they have done; whereas, what we are seeing now is that if you are connected, you can be rewarded regardless of how good your product is or how lousy your service is. That is offensive-- and should be--to every single one of us here, and that is absolutely what is happening in the White House. Another thing is there is a casual disregard for how hard it is for everyday families in the Presiding Officer's State and mine and in the ranking member's State to pay the bills because inflation has been here. Instead of arguing about who is at fault for that, let's solve the problem, not aggravate the problem. And these tariffs aggravate the problem. There is absolutely no denying that. This is just the wrong thing at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. Another element of this is, what is the purpose of these tariffs? President Trump won't give a clear answer. It is to make us rich. They will pay; we won't. It is to bring manufacturing back here. Or it is to punish folks that he deems unworthy. It depends on the day, and it depends on who is asking. So there is no coherent rationale connected to the imposition of this enormous economic pain and cost increase that is being imposed on American businesses and American consumers. The other question here that is profoundly important for this institution--every single one of us is proud to be a Member of the U.S. Senate, and I think our pride is about our pride in the Constitution as citizens where, under the Constitution, this Congress plays a role as a coequal branch of government. And I think every single one of us here is wary of the accumulation of excessive power in any one person or in any one institution. Congress has steadily over the years been ceding much of its responsibility and authority to the executive branch. There is no authority greater than the power to tax, and that is why, in the Constitution, the power to impose tariffs resides in the House of Representatives and the Senate. And shouldn't it be that way? Because in the imposition of the tax, there has to be a decision that--in asking our citizens, who we represent, to turn over hard-earned money to the government, we have to be able to justify the purpose for which those funds are being expended. By allowing the President to take over, in effect, the taxing authority that occurs when the tariff is imposed, we have ceded that responsibility to him or that authority to him, and we have abandoned our responsibility to look our constituents in the eye if and when we say a tax should be imposed. None of us like to do that, but a government has to collect revenues for the common good. We have delegated that authority to the President, and it is wrong of us to do that. So we can have different views about whether there should be a tariff or what the rate should be, but we have a collective responsibility to do everything we can to maintain the constitutional structure of three independent branches of government, each a counterweight to the other. That is not just an abstract concept; that is the wisdom that has served us well for well over 200 years, that those checks and balances give all our citizens an opportunity to have a seat at the table when major decisions about their lives and their futures are being made. So that is why this decision that we are about to make is not just about the tariffs. It is not just about, in my view, how recklessly they are being applied and imposed. It is not just about how they infect our economy with corruption, where it is who you know rather than how hard you work that is going to get you ahead. It is about the basic structure of our constitutional order, and every single one of us has the responsibility to protect that because that is not about us. It is not about who we represent. It is about how our country can operate with a democratic system where every single person, through their representatives, has a seat at the table. So I urge all of us to take a look at what our constitutional responsibility is. Whether we agree or not on so many different issues of vital concern to the future of this country, we each have a responsibility to act in a way that protects the constitutional system. That means that we exercise authority over tariffs; we don't give that away to an executive branch decision. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, first of all, I want to thank the senior Senator from California not just for his leadership on protecting the voting rights of all citizens in this country but for his work as the California Secretary of State, where he gained a nationwide reputation for running free and fair elections. Senator Padilla, thank you so much for your work there, and thank you so much for your leadership here. I want to stand here in solidarity with my colleagues to push back, oppose, denounce President Trump's March 25 Executive order, which claims to preserve the integrity of U.S. elections. It does no such thing. And, by the way, the idea that the President, who spent years denying the outcome of the election he lost gives him absolutely no credibility when he is speaking about his commitment to free and fair elections. Like my colleagues--all of us--I am committed to safeguarding the security of our elections and working with anyone and everyone in the Chamber to advance that objective. All of us revere the right of citizens to make the decision about who their leaders are. Unfortunately, many of our colleagues in the House, Republicans in the House, have fought to gut the election security grants our States depend on. I say that--usually, these are not partisan issues on voting, but it is turning into that. And we are seeing a one-sided, one-party approach, particularly out of the House, that goes to the heart of our electoral process and the right of each of our citizens to make their decision and their vote be the one that counts. At the same time, despite the political violence at home and rising tensions abroad, the Trump administration has taken an ax to CISA. As we know, that is the Agency that works to curb emerging cyber security threats. And that threat, those threats, are a threat to the election integrity that is so essential to the well-being of our democracy. The Executive order makes an assumption that noncitizen voting is a problem. The assertion that noncitizens are voting is alarming. Fortunately, it is not true. Also, Federal law already bars noncitizens from voting in congressional and Presidential elections. So this is not a question of whether there is some backdoor effort on the part of one party to allow noncitizens to vote. It can't be done. It is illegal now. This Executive order would not change that. Study after study has also shown that the rate of noncitizen voting is incredibly small, almost too small to measure--roughly 0.0001 percent, according to a reliable estimate. Obviously, that error is so small that it is hard to measure and would not have any material impact on our elections. If you don't believe me, ask folks over at the libertarian Cato Institute, a very conservative organization. They have labeled President Trump's claims about noncitizen voting as ``bogus''--their word, not mine. The order of the President also raises significant constitutional issues. The Constitution entrusts our States--and in the case of certain core rules of conduct, Congress--with the authority to regulate elections, not the Executive. The Executive order President Trump has signed flips that framework and purports to vest the President with expansive new powers that he does not have--not just him but any chief executive. It attempts to enact through Executive fiat what the Trump administration seemingly believes it cannot achieve through the legislative process, through an act of Congress; namely, Senate consideration of the SAVE Act, many provisions of which are contained in the President's Executive order. I ask my colleagues to join me in focusing our attention on the very real problems that confront our Nation and are pushing back against the Trump administration's usurpation of the Senate's constitutional prerogatives. President Trump is attacking the right to vote with respect to dismantling of the Department of Justice organization of attorneys who are being punished for their efforts to protect that right to a vote. That organization within the Justice Department is being actively dismantled. And the President has currently used the Department of Justice as a tool to enact his--my view--very extreme policy positions, and that includes the Civil Rights Division at the Department whose mission includes protecting the right to vote. According to press reports, all career supervisors in the voting rights section have been reassigned to other positions completely outside their areas of expertise. In other words, it is about destroying the Civil Rights Division. The Assistant Attorney General, Harmeet Dhillon, surely, at the direction of the White House, is punishing career attorneys. This is outrageous. Also, reportedly, political appointees at the Department of Justice have ordered the dismissal of all active cases and the closing of all active investigations by this section. Our Civil Rights Division within the Department of Justice has a revered history for standing up for the rights of all citizens and their constitutional rights to be enforced and protected, and that brazen attack on the Civil Rights Division will leave it totally unable--as the President, apparently, prefers--to defend the democratic right of our citizens to vote. I urge my colleagues to oppose the President's Executive order. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I totally support the comments of the minority whip. It is 100 days, and it is time to assess. Whatever you may say about President Trump and the stated goals, there is an obligation to act functionally to achieve those goals. Stating you want an outcome is a long way from implementing a plan and executing a plan to achieve it. And there is no plan. There is absolutely no plan. Let's talk first about DOGE. DOGE is about, supposedly, getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse. Now, there is not a single Member of this Congress who is in favor of waste, fraud, and abuse, but if you are going to do that, you look at a Department: What is its goal? How is it achieving it? Where is it coming up short? You do an assessment, and you do a plan. What DOGE did was essentially get the personnel list and then send out emails to every fifth or sixth person saying: You are fired because you did a lousy job. So it is not at all on the level. It is not at all on the level. And as a result, the real goal becomes revealed. It is not to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse. It is, say, to eliminate USAID. It is to eliminate the Department of Education. It is to eliminate the Social Security response team. That is what is going on. And the challenge for us--and this is bipartisan--is whether we, as an independent branch of government, want to look at what is before our very eyes and address it or simply ignore it. Let's take the other so-called plan that is going to make us rich, more revenue than we can ever deal with. And that, of course, is the tariffs. The tariffs are going to be seen by historians as the absolute worst economic blunder in the last 100 years. Whether you are a farmer in Vermont or in Utah or in the Dakotas, these tariffs are hammering you. Most of our farmers in the northern part of the country, we import our fertilizer and we import, in many cases, grain to feed our animals from Canada. This tariff is going to hammer farmers who are already contending with what farmers every year have to contend with: very tight margins, the will of the weather. This is having a real impact on them. In Vermont, we had roundtables with people from various industries and asked: How are these tariffs going to affect you? No. 1, what tariffs? What are they today? Supposedly they were 25 percent yesterday. Then they are suspended. Then they are back on. They apply to this part but not that part. No possibility of anybody making a plan in order to run their business. But across the board--and, by the way, these are folks who came in and are affected by the tariffs. They are not Republicans or Democrats or Independents; they are really folks just trying to make a living. And they may have their political preferences, but what they are talking about is the real-world impact of these crackpot tariffs that are on again and off again with the President. But some of the folks who spoke: Small business owner Jason Levinthal, founder of J Skis, said: This is essentially a tax on the consumer. Something the administration won't acknowledge itself. Mimi Buttenheim, President of Mad River Distillers: Tariffs radically affect our manufacturing arm by raising the price of raw materials. Jen Kimmich, cofounder of The Alchemist Brewery: We don't know how they're going to affect us, we just know they're going to affect us. John Lacy, CEO of Burton Snowboards, one of the global enterprises founded in Vermont by Jake Burton and Donna Carpenter: How can you navigate the playbook if you don't know what the rules of the [road] are? It is a fair question, and it is a question that the administration, President Trump, feels he has no obligation to answer. So this goes on and on. You have got the economic issues, the tariffs. You have the attack on the institutions. USAID is a good example, and it is a vulnerable target because there is a lot of misinformation about USAID. A lot of folks think it is about 25 percent of our budget. And I see we have the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee here who knows this better than anyone else. It is like 1 percent of our budget. It creates, first of all, the alleviation of enormous suffering among many people who are absolutely starving, among many people who need medicine, among many people who need water to help with agriculture, to be able to feed themselves. It is something that had bipartisan support in this Senate Chamber, with many of my Republican colleagues--your colleagues--leading the way for America to make a contribution as the greatest and most wealthy Nation in the world. That was just shut down, literally. Notices went out: You are fired. Notices went out: Your program is terminated. Notices went out: Turn the ship around and bring the food back. And the impact of this on these USAID workers who have dedicated their lives to being a representative of our country, doing something beneficial in other countries? They just got the termination notice that they haven't been doing a good job. Obviously, not on the level. But when I think about the cruelty of the way in which this was done; that in those warehouses where food is stored, the local population who is hired and paid to take the food from the warehouse and deliver it to where those starving children needed the food were fired. And we literally have food rotting in warehouses rather than nourishing families' children. The same is true with medicine. We won't deliver it. It is over there. It is where it is needed. It can be delivered. But the way in which the Trump administration, with Mr. Musk, is proceeding is to literally take that food away and take that medicine away rather than deliver it. So that is not at all on the level. There is not, here, an effort to deal with waste, fraud, and abuse. There is an effort here, essentially, to destroy these institutions that have served this country. And I just want to state very clearly that those of us who are appalled by this conduct are all in favor of looking at every program, from SNAP to the Pentagon: How can we do it better? How can we get more for less? How can we get the most out of the folks who are serving in those organizations? But that is not what is going on. Then there is the next step: the overreach of power; a lawless, in my view--absolutely lawless--abuse of Executive authority. You know, what business is it of Donald Trump what the hiring practices are of an individual private corporation or firm? It is the business to enforce the law, but it is not his business to be able to tell a law firm: We will take contracts away. It is not his business to be able to tell a law firm: Since you had somebody who represented the government in a case against Trump or some Trump person or ally, we are going to punish you and not allow you, in fact, into a court building or to get access to the secure information that is necessary to defend somebody who is in court. This is a complete overreach and extension by the President, essentially to impose his own will--not enforce the law--but to enforce his will as he arbitrarily wishes. What sense does it make that because of his vendetta about higher education, that instead of addressing those concerns and having discussions, he literally takes away billions of dollars of research that has gone not just to Harvard, our oldest institution, but the University of Alabama, the University of North Carolina where you have people who, to our benefit, have dedicated their lives to scientific research; that because the United States Government has provided support for research and development--we have had cures for terrible diseases--but if they don't do what Donald Trump says, he will take away grants that actually have legally been transferred to these academic institutions--destroying research--destroying research and development. It is this arbitrary use of power beyond enforcing the law but having the Trump vision of what he wants be the law. And this brings me to the point that the Minority Whip was making: You know, this is not just a question for each of us as a Member of the U.S. Senate to decide, When has the Executive overreached? It is about the obligation we have in both parties to uphold the constitutional system of checks and balances. As many people have said, James Madison made the clear point that absolute power is the biggest threat. And if it is in any single branch, it has the capacity to bring down the entire structure of democracy. Now why is that important? It is important not just because democracy is a form of government we are taught as young people to revere and to be proud of, that we have this oldest democracy in the world; it is because democracy is the tool by which the citizens in Utah and the citizens in Vermont who may have very different points of view on a whole number of important issues have that right to have a seat at the table to have a discussion about, How do you resolve these differences? And if we don't stand up for that, it means there is going to be a small circle of well-connected people around President Trump who make all those decisions and make it from the framework of what is best for them as opposed to what is best for all of us. That is the real threat here. That is happening. You know, the fact that the President won't acknowledge so many failures of just--for beginning the tariff policy, and what we are seeing in this economy that is now revolving around this question of tariffs and on whom will they be imposed--what you are seeing is that if you are Apple computer and you are at the inauguration, you can call up the Treasury Secretary, you can call up the President, and you can point out that these tariffs are going to have an enormously negative impact on Apple. But if you are a farmer in Vermont, if you are a snowboard manufacturer in Vermont and you don't have Secretary Bessent's telephone number on speed dial or the President's, you don't get to make that call, and you will have to live with that enormous impact on your cost structure and on what you have to charge customers and see your market evaporate. It is as though the President is transforming the economy we have had that has been based on competition--you succeed if you have the best product and the best service--into an economy that is based on access. Do you have the Treasury Secretary's telephone number so you can make your case? Do you have the President's number so you can make your case? And who knows what conditions the President imposes on whoever it is he is going to give the benefit of his capacity to make an exception for you or for your business. That is called corruption. And the worst thing that we can do is to inject, as a material factor in the way the economy works, a corruption that is based on your ability to get special treatment because you have made campaign contributions, because you have made certain other concessions, because you looked the other way. That is what is happening right now. You have got an administration that, in the name of waste, fraud, and abuse, is destroying institutions. You have got an administration that, based on an assertion that tariffs will make us rich, is causing inflation, causing enormous business uncertainty, and is, ultimately, going to lead us into a recession. You have got an administration that has now weaponized the Justice Department, the FCC, governmental entities where, yes, they have a very important responsibility to enforce the rules and regulations but where their targets are cherry-picked for political reasons. And that is very damaging to the long-term well-being of our country and our democracy. It is time for this Congress to make an assessment of our obligation to the citizens we represent. When is enough enough? When has the Executive gone too far? When is it that all of us should heed the pleas of the businesses, the enterprises in each of our States about this chaotic, very destructive tariff policy? When is it we will say ``no more'' to an Executive pushing his weight around with private law firms, private employers, with our universities, and telling them unless they do it his way, they will pay an enormous price in lost governmental funding or access to things that they need? Mr. President, in my view, 100 days of giving a lot of rope and a lot of license to the Executive is 100 days too many, but it is not too late for us, as Congress, to stand up for the separation of powers, the balance of powers, and the prerogatives of the United States Senate and the United States Congress. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, it has been 3\1/2\ years since August 30, 2021, when the last American forces withdrew from Afghanistan. The withdrawal was, by any objective measure, a total fiasco. However, the Biden administration does deserve some credit for evacuating at least 120,000 Afghans in those chaotic days after the Taliban overran Kabul. It was one of the largest--if not the largest-- humanitarian airlifts in history. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of Afghans and their families remain stranded in Afghanistan and other countries, especially Pakistan. Many of these people had worked for our government or participated in programs funded by the United States, in women's rights, in education, judicial and economic reform, in counternarcotics, and many other areas. These refugees worked with and for our government, our soldiers, our diplomats, and our intelligence officers. Some of these refugees have made it safely to the United States, thanks to the determined persistence of humanitarian organizations, including one in Vermont, the Vermont Afghan Alliance, and the outstanding work of Molly Gray and her staff. These organizations have advocated for refugees ceaselessly. They have not forgotten what those refugees did for our soldiers in Afghanistan. And these organizations have helped arrange for the practical needs that refugees face--housing, employment, and other social services--upon their arrival in the United States. I so appreciate the work of the Vermont Afghan Alliance and the many other refugee assistance organizations around the country, including in your State, Mr. President. They have been indispensable in helping us meet our obligation to support the Afghans who helped our soldiers. That is our obligation. But, ultimately, the resettlement is the responsibility of the Federal Government. In the end, the Biden administration did fall short in its promises to the Afghan refugee population. This population of refugees exists, I state again, because of their work with and for our government, for our soldiers, for our diplomats, and our intelligence officers. We have abandoned our partners in their time of need. One of the things, the screening process for these refugees became hopelessly bureaucratic, opaque, and fraught with inexplicable delays, including the processing of long-delayed special immigrant visas for Afghans who supported the U.S. mission. Many of them were interpreters. Congress failed by not providing the necessary funds and authority to streamline the resettlement process. And then, regrettably, in one of President Trump's first Executive orders, signed on January 20, he made the situation exponentially worse by suspending admission to the United States of Afghan refugees. And now Pakistan has threatened to deport them back to Afghanistan where many of them would face the risk of arrest and, literally, execution. Today, thousands of Afghan refugees are facing total abandonment by the U.S. Government, and this is despite the fact that they completed or they have nearly completed the laborious and time-consuming process of obtaining the necessary security and medical clearances for themselves and their families. I would like to share one example. For over a year, my office has tried to help an Afghan man, now in Vermont, who worked at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. This man is working to support fellow Afghans in finding employment for Afghans in Vermont. This man's father served as a Deputy Minister of Justice supporting U.S. rule of law projects. Since 2021, the father and his family have been hiding in a third country, knowing they would face arrest and persecution if they are deported back to Afghanistan. Then, in December 2024, after years of waiting, they were finally cleared to fly to the United States. He thought his father was coming home. The son had already signed the lease for an apartment and was paying the rent for this to happen. But since January 20, as a result of the President's order, the father and his family have remained in hiding, preparing for the worst as the son is continuing to pay rent on an apartment that was to be available for his father. You know, this is really shameful. These are folks who were there for us and our soldiers and our diplomats and our intelligence officers. And the situation for this family is typical of the situation for so many Afghan families who served us. I have long believed that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was a terrible mistake. Tracking down Osama Bin Laden and the other members of al-Qaida responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks was justifiable and was necessary. But spending literally hundreds of billions of dollars to try to transform a country of warring clans, led by corrupt and ruthless warlords with no history of democracy, was doomed to fail. Yet we did do that. And millions of Afghans believed in us, and they shared our vision for that country. And many of them served us, acting as interpreters for the U.S. military or faithfully serving our intelligence Agencies. And these men, some of whom now live in Vermont, risked their lives for us, something that our soldiers take very seriously and have expressed immense gratitude for. Thousands were rushed to the airport in the first frantic days of the evacuation. When they got there--and some who got out--they were told to leave their wives and their children behind and that their families would join them in the United States within 1 year. This is an obligation we have to those folks who, as a result of the collapse in Kabul, were in serious physical jeopardy. It now is 3\1/2\ years later, and I am not aware of a single evacuation or reunification of family members of these men. They are here or elsewhere, and their families are still in Afghanistan. These refugees, as I stated and will state again because it is the heart of the matter and the heart of the obligation, they worked with our government, they worked with our soldiers, our diplomats, and our intelligence officers, and we have abandoned our partners when they need us. Some are still waiting on the SIV processing, others on their green cards, and most on the broken promise of reunification. This is really shameful. These men continue to stand with the United States, working in our communities, paying taxes, and growing our economy. We owe it to them, the Afghans who made it here, and to our honor to bring their families to join them. Yet there are alarming reports that President Trump plans to ban admission to the United States for citizens of 11 countries, including Afghanistan--here is the part that is so terrifying--with no exception for Afghans and their families who qualify for the special immigrant visas or are awaiting evacuation. That is really unconscionable. Although the Taliban leadership issued a so-called general amnesty for former officials in the U.S.-backed government more than 3 years ago, the reality is that the U.N. has reported what we knew would happen--at least 200 killings of former Afghan officials and members of the Afghan Army who were trained and equipped by the United States. The Taliban, of course, has also reneged on its pledge to uphold the rights of women, including allowing girls to attend school. Today, the situation that faces Afghan women and girls is literally no better, regrettably, than under the Taliban before the U.S. occupation. The Trump administration's termination of USAID's assistance programs in more than 100 countries, including Afghanistan, without any meaningful review, has caused people everywhere to doubt that they can rely on the United States. We are putting our reputation in jeopardy. President Trump and Secretary Rubio provided, literally, no credible explanation and justification, in clear violation of Congress's intent, with the destruction of these USAID Programs. But by abandoning thousands of Afghans who do face persecution if forced to return, we reinforce those doubts. And by doing so, we encourage those who have long seen the United States as a world leader and as a partner to look for more reliable partners elsewhere. That is bad for our national security. President Trump's January 20 Executive order triggered a 90-day review of our Refugee Admissions Programs. In February, a Federal court did issue a nationwide preliminary injunction prohibiting the implementation of the order. But despite that, despite that court order, the Trump administration issued termination orders to refugee resettlement agencies in States around this country. Again, this is going to affect these folks who work for our government, our soldiers, our diplomats, and our intelligence officers. We owe them. There is no justification for us to abandon them. I am really concerned about the administration's, what I see as an increasingly brazen flaunting of court orders. I think all of us in Congress should condemn any deviation from abiding by court orders by the administration. I hope the administration's review of the refugee admissions is not another pretext review like we had supposedly of the USAID Programs. It cannot be an excuse to manufacture a false justification for abandoning the victims of our nation-building debacle. We have to take ownership of what it is we did. We have to meet our commitments to people who helped us in our efforts in Afghanistan. This must be an opportunity to expedite--expedite--the resettlement to the United States of these Afghan refugees who trusted in us and whose lives are very much at risk.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 1661 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. WELCH. The Social Services Block Grant was a program set up by President Reagan. It was a Republican proposal for funding social services, and it was embraced by Democrats. It is in danger of being killed. This is an anchor for communities across the Nation, especially if States continue to suffer significant budget shortfalls. It is flexible funding that allows local decision making about how best to meet the needs of citizens in need in your State and in mine. You can tailor the services to 18 different social service areas, but it is the backbone of Meals on Wheels, the backbone of Head Start, the backbone of Adult and Child Protective Services, and the Foster Care System. It has a huge impact on many people. We have to save it.

Mr. WELCH. It should not be put on the block to be a funding source for tax cuts for billionaires. I ask for a ``yea'' vote.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I am really delighted to be here with my colleagues Senator Klobuchar and Senator Warnock. I know it is an incredibly important issue for all of America. It is not a red State, blue State situation. It is about something that is near and dear to the heart of the Presiding Officer, the doctor from Kansas: That is healthcare. Healthcare is in jeopardy, particularly Medicaid. Medicaid is healthcare. It is healthcare for kids. It is healthcare for many low- income seniors. It is healthcare for 80 to 90 million Americans. It is healthcare for folks who must live in nursing homes. They are at that stage in life where what keeps them alive and allows their kids to visit are Medicaid paid-for nursing homes. In fact, in Vermont, two out of three of our seniors who are in nursing homes are there only because of Medicaid. So this is important to families, to kids, to seniors. It is part of our healthcare system. And what is of concern, I think, to all of us--and I really want to emphasize I think it is all of us, not the Democrats versus the Republicans--is wanting to have a healthcare system that is going to be there when people need it, that people are not denied access to healthcare because they are poor kids, that they are not denied access to nursing home care because they have run out of their lifesavings. We want to make certain that the healthcare needs of our children and our seniors, disabled children, disabled adults--we want to make sure those healthcare needs are met. We have to do that. It is the mark of a functioning and caring society. There is not anybody on either side of the aisle that doesn't want to do the best we can, not just for our kids but for the kids that live in our community; that want to do the best we can, not just for our parents but for all the parents that live in a community; that want to do the best for all folks who are disabled and need the special requirements that go along with life with a significant disability. But here is where there is a difference: The tax bill that is being proposed that will lower taxes is going to be paid for, in significant part, by drastic cuts to the Medicaid budget, maybe up to $800 billion. And in fact, in the House version of the reconciliation bill, the Energy and Commerce Committee, on which I served when I was in the House and has jurisdiction over Medicaid, was instructed in that resolution to come up with about $800 billion in savings. What is the purpose of those savings? It is not to lower the national debt. It is not to invest in research and development. It is not to provide universal affordable childcare for a family in medical need-- things that I think all of us absolutely need. It is to fund a tax cut. Literally, it is to fund a tax cut. So then the question becomes: tax cut for whom? We have millions of taxpayers in this country with all different incomes, and that includes everyone from folks who are making 7 or 8 bucks an hour to $15 an hour, to middle-class families maybe with two folks working--a firefighter maybe and a teacher--might be making $150,000, and they have a couple of kids, still trying at the end of each month to pay the bills, put aside a little money for college, put a little money aside, hopefully, for a 2-week vacation at some point. Or that tax cut can be designed so it goes to folks who have really been riding the wave of the financialization of the economy, folks who have become billionaires--God bless them--multinational corporations that have extremely strong balance sheets and really strong profits, companies that already saw a tax cut in the last tax bill that has exceeded what they even asked for. So the question that is really before this Congress has to be put in very concrete terms. It is not, Are you for a tax cut? It is not, Are you for Medicaid? Because probably every single one of us on both sides of the aisle would say yes to a tax cut, and we would say yes to Medicaid. But we have got to be candid with one another and with the American people that the tax cut that the majority is proposing, more than half of it is going to go to billionaires, multimillionaires, and to very, very profitable multinational corporations. In the design of the ``pay-for,'' $800 billion is going to be taken away from the healthcare that provides essential healthcare to kids and to seniors and to disabled people. So this is not really a question of, Are you for a tax cut? We all are. It is not really a question of, Are you for Medicaid? We all are. It is a question of the specific bill that is being proposed, which is a tax cut that is designed to lower taxes for very wealthy people who won't notice one way or the other at all whether they do or don't get yet another tax cut. They won't know it. It won't affect them. It won't in any way have an impact on how they live their life day-to-day. It won't have any impact on their ability to put money aside for their kids to go to college. It won't have any impact on their ability to put money in a trust fund so their children and their grandchildren can live with total economic security. It will have no impact on that. It will certainly have no impact on the improvement of our economy because that money won't be spent or saved rather than invested in the childcare that working families need. It won't be invested in the family leave that a parent needs when a spouse or a child becomes sick. It will have absolutely no impact on that. So the question for us is, Why would we design a bill that is going to give a tax cut to folks that don't need it--in some cases, haven't even asked for it. It is not going to be reinvested in the economy to improve the well-being of our society through education or childcare or family leave. But then we have the pretense that would be fiscally responsible and ``pay for'' the tax cut, but the way we are going to pay for the tax cut is taking away healthcare from people who desperately need it and can't afford it. That is what is up here. That is the question. It is not rhetoric. It is not about political principles. This is about day in and day out survival for many American families who have absolutely no capacity financially to take care of a parent who is now in a nursing home or a parent--parents of a disabled child whose only lifeline to be able to care for that child is Medicaid. Folks with a disabled child, as we know, it is an incredible challenge for them, and they meet it. It is amazing that a person, a family, they have the bad luck of having a disabled child, but they have the good heart that they can love that child as though it is the best child in the whole wide world. That is how they are. That is how Americans are. They accept what God gives them, and they love that child. But it makes a difference whether they can live their life if they have Medicaid that helps get that wheelchair, that may help them with a van so they can go out as a family. That is literally what we are talking about. This is real. This is consequential. This is not about polls and who is ahead and who is up and who is down. This is about a society, through the U.S. Senate, at this moment, that is making the decision that we are going to give tax cuts to people who don't need them, haven't asked for them, but whose political supporters here are demanding them on their behalf and give tax cuts to corporations that have had record profits at the expense of taking away the healthcare that families in your community and mine totally depend on. This is wrong. This is wrong. The most elemental thing that a family needs is some security if they have a child or they have an elderly parent. They are not going to leave them out on the street and kick them aside. That is what is being proposed in this bill. That is what is being proposed. I hope we come to our senses here, and we just start with the proposition that whatever it is we do, whatever tax policy we believe is in the best interest of the American people, we start with the commitment that however we implement that policy, it will do no harm to the children in your community and mine, to the folks in nursing homes in your community and mine. We will do no harm. That, Mr. President, is why it is so essential that we defeat this proposal.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Madam President, I fully support the resolution of Senator Kaine, and I want to make three points. No. 1, should Congress continue to abdicate its constitutional responsibility, ceding it to the Executive? No. 2, I want to talk about the total fantasy--fantasy world--that the Trump economic agenda is grounded in, if you can use the word ``grounded.'' And then, third, I want to talk about how these tariffs will be a dagger in the heart of the Vermont economy. First of all, the question for this institution is, Will we, as the U.S. Senate, accept the responsibility that each and every one of us as Senators has to stand up for the independent authority and responsibility of this institution? As we know, our Constitution was based on the proposition of real suspicion of the accumulation of power in any one entity. What was told to us in the Federalist Papers is what we know: If you have the concentration of power in any institution, that concentration of power leads inevitably to the abuse of power. The design of our Constitution was to have equal and independent branches. And what I am seeing is a lawless rampage on the part of the Executive being accommodated by an appeasing Congress, not standing up for its authority in many different areas, and then also an attack on the judiciary, as though the judges who disagree with an Executive position should be impeached. But our authority over the budget is being abdicated, as we saw in the CR. But another area of authority for the Congress is the tariff authority. A couple of decades ago, this Congress gave and delegated some authority to the President in a national emergency to impose tariffs. That authority was given with the expectation--and rightly so, in a mutually respectful civil society--that a President would use it for the intended purpose and with restrain, whether it was Republican or Democrat, and that national security had the connotation and implication of a military threat to our country, where there needed to be immediate Executive action to protect the citizens of this country. What President Trump has done is run roughshod over that, showing no restraint in using that delegation of authority, not for a national emergency but for whatever his latest policy ideas are and whatever leverage he wants to extract. We cannot allow that to happen and maintain the separation of powers. It is absolutely so fundamental to the long-term well-being of our country. So Senator Kaine is absolutely right. This is not a partisan question. It is an institutional question. Do we see our responsibility for maintaining that system of checks and balances? I do. That is the heart of this matter, and it is as important as even the outcome of what this tariff policy may be. Second, where does this tariff policy come from? It comes from the President who is claiming that it will be a new golden age if we impose these tariffs. By the way, these are astonishing tariffs: South Korea, 25 percent; Vietnam, 46 percent; Taiwan, 32 percent; Switzerland, 31 percent; Malaysia, 24 percent; Cambodia, 49 percent. Do we realistically think there will be no retaliation against America for these tariffs? We know there will be. Yet what the President seems to think--and this literally is a fantasy--is that the golden age of America was when we had the tariff policy that economic historians say caused the Depression, but he says, if we had had the tariff policy, then we wouldn't have had the Depression. There is literally no support for this. So the President has come up with this fiction, and what he is good at is sales. He says it over and over again. He cloaks it in an appealing objective: We want to have jobs back in America. And that is certainly something all of us share. But this fantasy he has--and it is a fantasy--that high tariffs are going to ``make us rich'' and be paid for by other countries instead of our consumers--just ask anybody who goes to Target or Walmart how that is going to work out for them. Ask anybody who is going to want to build a house or buy a house, where the prices are going to go up probably $25,000 in Vermont for a house. The third thing I want to talk about is very concretely in Vermont. This is devastating for us in Vermont. Our farmers get most of their fertilizer from Canada--a 25-percent increase. Our farmers are on the margin. They are operating on such a thin margin that a 25-percent increase raises the existential question of whether they stay in business. Our maple sugar producers get their equipment largely from Canada--a 25-percent increase in the expense of buying an evaporator. Vermont consumers and businesses--we in Vermont are along the northern border. I see my colleague from New Hampshire. It is the same for you. We get so much of our home heating fuel, so much of our gasoline to power our cars, and so much of our electricity from Canada, that at the end of that month, when you are juggling your checkbook and trying to make it balance, you are going to have a higher electric bill, and you are going to have a higher home heating bill. And every time you fill up, you are going to pay between 25 cents and 40 cents more a gallon because in northern Vermont, that is where our gasoline comes from. How is that going to serve anybody's interest? How is that going to help the people who are working hard every day to try to make ends meet? It is going to be devastating for them. And in addition to all that uncertainty, we have a responsibility to make, through policy, the lives of our folks in business, the lives of our farmers, the lives of our moms and dads easier, not harder. In this uncertainty that is the hallmark of the Trump approach and these higher costs that are absolutely legislated as a result of his policy or by Executive order, that is going to make life harder for all of the people that I represent in Vermont. Instead of just using my words, I want to use the words of a lot of Vermonters. When we got word of these tariffs going into effect, we had a couple of roundtables up in northern Vermont, in St. Albans and in Newport. Obviously, I wanted to hear from voters. Here is how they say it. And, by the way, this is not a partisan deal. This is somebody who is trying to run a business, somebody who is trying to pay their bills and support their family. It is a construction company, a vegetable farmer. Stoni Tomson: It feels like death by a thousand cuts. Vermont Foodbank, Jason Maring: We get some of our vegetables from the Quebec side of the border. If the 25-percent tariff was applied in full, it would be about a $130,000-$150,000 unbudgeted hit to our food procurement efforts. Catherine de Ronde of Agri-Mark: The ripple-effects that this could have on energy markets, and of course manufacturing, is very heavy. Matt Cook from PC Construction: I'm just concerned in general that it's going to further stagnate the ability for some of these much-needed construction projects to move forward. Denis Bourbeau of Bourbeau Custom Homes. They build about three or four homes a year--a good business in Northern Vermont: I can foresee the making homes unaffordable--which they already are. Another: We would be strongly affected by the tariffs in terms of the equipment costs for U.S. producers. . . . I'm very concerned about the possible effects of this. This is just another vivid example of that. Some of the hardest working people we have in Vermont are our loggers. They harvest logs and ship them up to Canada. And they will be paying a tariff when that log goes up. When it is milled and returned as lumber that can be used in home building, there will be a 25-percent tariff on that as that lumber returns. Who is going to pay for that--the home builder or the home buyer? That is what is going to happen. How in the world is this going to lead to the so-called golden age? The golden age is as much a fantasy as is the fantasy that tariffs were the visionary economic policy that will bring us to the promised land. These tariffs, No. 1, are the authority of Congress, if we exercise our authority. They are not the authority of the Executive, and Congress should stand up for itself and assert its authority and protect the constitutional promise of the separation of powers because we know that the concentration of power leads to the abuse of power. And, by the way, that is exactly what is happening right now. Secondly, let's not be deluded by a fantasy economic theory that is at the core of this. It just makes no sense. It has no credibility. It has no intellectual foundation. Who knows how President Trump came to believe in this so much that he asserts it? But, third, if we look at what is the impact on the people we represent--the people who build homes, the people who farm our fields, the people who tap maple syrup, the people who run health clinics, the people who run food banks--and we ask them: Hey, how is this going to affect you? Will it help? Will it hurt? And when every single one of those people we represent, who are doing the hard work, day in and day out, say: Peter, this is a disaster--and we are going to vote for it? No way. Thank you, Senator Kaine. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Madam President, will the Senator yield for a question.

Mr. WELCH. Thank you. Senator, I have been listening to many of your hours of speech. You are talking about immigration now, and I have another question about the immigration policy. You know, I think all of us understand that it is absolutely essential that our country secure its borders, and, from time to time, the country forgets that. But I think we have had this debate about immigration that has been going on for several years. I don't know if the Senator had an opportunity to address the opportunity we had in the Senate when, last year, there was a realization on the part of both the Republicans and Democrats that the only way we were going to get a secure border and a beneficial, sensible immigration policy was to work together. I know the Senator was watching that very carefully when we had the terrific work of Senator Lankford from Oklahoma, Senator Murphy from Connecticut, and Senator Sinema, of course, from Arizona. Despite the enormous political tension that surrounds the immigration issue, but for understandable reasons, the three of them worked very hard and came together for a tri-partisan proposal, in effect--Senator Sinema, of course, being the Independent, who always played a constructive role in trying to bring the parties together. What was included in that legislation was a major commitment--embraced by Senator Murphy on behalf of the Democrats--for border security. There was an acknowledgment that we have to control our borders. It is really that simple.

Mr. WELCH. But when you control your borders, you also have the opportunity to have an immigration policy that the Congress and the President think will benefit the American people. That benefits us, of course, if there is security at the border, but it also benefits us if we have legal immigration that is controlled by the American people. Of course, you know, I have noticed that Elon Musk, who is against immigration and is for everything that President Trump is for--he likes having very highly educated computer people who can help him go from very rich to even richer. So he carves out an exception for people who will be beneficial and helpful to him in his various enterprises. But, you know, we have got in Vermont a lot of dairy farms, and we have a tourist industry, and we have a really hard time filling those jobs. So legal immigration can really be helpful and constructive and beneficial to the people of the State of Vermont. I know, in talking to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, many of us in our States have tourist industries, and we have agricultural enterprises, just to mention two, where the reality is we don't have the number of people we need to fill those jobs. You know, it is not just a matter of paying more, because I do think we have to be very mindful that we want to do every single thing we can to help elevate the wages of American workers. And, by the way, this is a little bit of an aside. Why in the world haven't we raised the minimum wage? I mean, I know, Senator, you are for that, and I certainly am. But it astonishes me that we still have it at--what is it?--$7 or $7.50? I mean, it is unbelievable what the minimum wage is. A lot of States have raised it. Vermont certainly has. But we, on immigration, had the opportunity and the bill and the will to make enormous progress so that we would have an immigration policy that secured the border, had the validation of bipartisan majorities in the House and in the Senate, would have also addressed the issues about legal immigration that would help us strengthen our economy, and also would have included a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers--folks who were brought here by their parents when they were 4 or 5 or 6 years old and whose only country they know is the United States itself. You know, my understanding from talking to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle is that there is an enormous amount of respect for many of these Dreamers, many of whom have been heroes for us in the military. So this is not a Republican--in my view, it is not a Republican- Democratic situation. It is a desire on the part of almost everyone in this body to accommodate the reality of a child's being brought here by his parents, going to school, getting an education, serving his country--firefighters, marines, teachers--doing all these things that are really helpful to our country, and are here through absolutely no fault of their own. If we were to require them to be deported--and that is an effort that the current administration is making--you literally would be taking people who might be 30 or 40 years old now, who have families, and send them back to the country from which their parents brought them. And they don't even speak the language, and, you know, that obviously makes no sense. When I talk to Vermonters who have very, very strong views of having a strong border and I ask them about this situation, they think: Wait a minute. Well, that is different. You know, that is a person who lives here. That is like my neighbor. So I was so disappointed when we were on the cusp of being able to get this legislation passed when then-Candidate Trump, in his candid way, said, ``Kill it,'' and he was candid about why. It would ``give the Democrats a win.'' I never saw this as a win for Democrats. You know, I saw this as a win for America. The reality is that, when we have to do really hard things here--and we are not doing hard things these days, but when we are trying to do hard things that are really important for the American people--my experience is you really do have to get to a bipartisan place because, you know, we have lost elections, and we lost the last one, and that is on us. It is not on the voters. They made a decision. That is their right to do, and we have to learn, and we have to listen. But when we were listening and hearing loud and clear from the American people that we want a secure border and then we worked with our colleagues on the other side of the aisle to get a secure border, why in the world would the leader of the party kill it? Why? I mean, we know the reason. He thought it was good politics. But this is not about what is good partisan politics. It is about what is good policy that is going to help the American people. So among the many things you are focusing on, of course, is this question of immigration, and this is incredibly important. But I wanted to be clear that I, as one Member of the U.S. Senate, am absolutely all in for the immigration reform that we need. And that is a secure border. That is legal immigration as we determine the type of immigration that would be beneficial to the American people and sustainable, and it also includes a pathway to citizenship for these children who, in many cases, were brought here by their parents, who had no agency, no involvement whatsoever in the decision to come here, how they got here. Pardon me. For those of us who don't stay up all night, some of us use alarms to wake up. So pardon me for being here earlier than I thought I would be here. And you are here maybe later than you thought. But you know, it is such a privilege for you, and it is such a privilege for me. It is such a privilege for the other 98 citizens of this country who serve with us in the U.S. Senate that any chance we get--any chance we get--to do something that is helpful to the people we represent, don't we want to grab it? Don't we want to do it? And does it matter if our name lives in memory that we were here? It doesn't. What matters is what we do here and whether, when we leave, we can look back and have the satisfaction of knowing we gave it our best. There is enormous pressure on folks in this job from the crosscurrents of the political world that we live in. And all of us are fallible. All of us have plenty of opportunity to get it wrong, and we do. But what I have seen in the people I have admired on both sides of the aisle--and I think of Senator McCain, whom Senator Murphy worked with so much. There was a heart and soul to that man, and it was the heart and soul and his spirit that guided him. And when I think about immigration, and we are talking about how tough it is, he worked together with the so-called Gang of 8 to come up with a reform that this Senate passed years ago. I was in the House then, and I remember being so excited--so excited--when I heard that the Senate had actually come up with a proposal that just made sense. It wasn't perfect. What is? You know, Senate to Earth: What is perfect? We do the best we can, but that is about it. But do you know what? When I say ``that is about it,'' that is what life is. Do your best and then move on. By the way, that is one of the reasons why I think, Senator, the bipartisanship, which we don't have now at all, but it has to ultimately--we have to have enough humility to understand that neither side has the answers. And where we try in earnest to come up with the best solution we can at the moment, where we listen to each other, what happens is that if we didn't get it fully right--and we never will--we understand that we have an opportunity to fix it and make it better based on that experience. When there is just our way or the highway, there is no resolution and no progress. No. 1, you don't get the bill passed, as we saw with the immigration bill. Then, No. 2, if you get it passed, the other side just tries to tear it apart and repeal it as opposed to improve it. Every single one of us knows that the American people want progress. But when what we are talking about is something that is hard--and it truly is hard, the issue of immigration--we are talking about something that is hard politically, that spirit of wanting to get to a solution, that was what animated the work of Senator Lankford, Senator Murphy, and Senator Sinema. They wanted to get to a solution, even though they had significantly different points of view going in on what was the right outcome. But they wanted to get to a solution where they represented the points of view of the disparate views of our caucus, and they came up with a compromise that, by all accounts, would be such a better place for us to be now than what we are in: no progress. We haven't been able to act on that immigration bill since the Senate acted, with the leadership of Senator McCain and others. I was mentioning how excited I was. I was in the House at the time, and I was so excited that this bill came over. You know, Vermonters were asking me all the time: Peter, we have got to do something about our borders. We have got to do something to make sure our farmers don't fear having their farms raided and them not being able to milk their cows. It is that essential, right? And I am talking about a lot of pretty conservative people, politically, who politically sometimes agree with me, sometimes don't. But what was so exciting to me was that on the cusp of this coming to the House, I was thinking: I am going to have a chance to vote for secure immigration, securing our borders, a rational immigration plan, and I am going to be able to give fairness to the Dreamers. I was so excited about that. Then what happened is it was announced that the House would not even take up the bill. Why? It was the same reason that then-Candidate Trump proposed to his colleagues or to his party members in the Senate: Kill it. And why was that? Really, in all candor, it is the most cynical of all reasons. Sometimes people in politics prefer to have the issues that they can fight about rather than use the responsibility and opportunity they have to solve the problem. That is pretty much what happened with that. And here we are, and we are seeing it again. You know, there is another thing that is happening with the immigration policies of the current administration. There is a lot of cruelty, this part of it. Yes, we have to have a secure border. Yes, criminals who came here illegally should be deported. But should the consensus that we have about a secure border, about the legitimacy of deporting criminals who are here illegally be used to justify a wholesale roundup, where the people who are rounded up are almost randomly picked up on the basis of good information, but it is clear in this roundup, where so many people were flown to the jails in El Salvador, that the minimal amount of due process, which is inquiry into who is this person, where are they from, does this tattoo mean they are in a gang or is that a tattoo of Mom--are we a society where we don't provide that minimal inquiry that is called due process, that our country was founded on? It appears, in many cases, we haven't done that. Then, what we are seeing also is that a number of people are being rounded up who are here legally. They are here on a student visa, and they published an opinion in a school newspaper expressing their point of view about the suffering in the Middle East. This country, of course, is founded, among other things, on the First Amendment right to free speech. It is a pretty astonishing thing that people who express that, who are here legally, by the way--legally, legally, legally. I want to emphasize that--are suddenly confronted by people who are essentially bearing masks, put in handcuffs, taken away, and then put in a jail at some unknown place until some maybe days later when you find out where they are. How does that solve the border crisis? How does that protect the liberties that have been the hallmark of the United States of America since the Constitution? It is cruel to have a person who essentially ``disappears.'' That is the term I know Senator Murphy used once and, I think, unfortunately, accurately. We have a challenge. It is really not who wins this vote, who wins that vote. And it is not even who is in the majority and who is in the minority because this country only works and this Senate only works when whatever your political views are, you approach the problems that America has from the perspective of your obligation as a U.S. Senator to make progress, to make it better. I was in the State senate for 13 years. I am not going to say my life has been downhill since then, but what I so appreciated about the Vermont Senate--and I learned, working with other people, that ``bipartisan'' doesn't have a meaning almost now because it is like you have got to be on one side or the other. But I remember when I first went to the State senate, Senator Booker, I won an election that was an upset. So I was feeling pretty good about myself. When I got there, it was a majority in the Republican Party, and I was ready to cause trouble--not necessarily in the John Lewis good way. It might have been more of a Peter Welch ego way. I had a lot to learn. What every member who was showing up--and these two Republican Senators who were just really icons for me in my life, as it turns out, they and the Lieutenant Governor made decisions about who would be on what committees. And I really wanted to be on the Finance Committee, but that is not a committee you get on when you just show up and you have won an election and you are acting like you are more important than you are. They put me on the Finance Committee, and I said: I am doomed. The reason is, I know I had to cooperate. They had been so good to me and so generous. They gave me a seat at the table. It was such a thrill for me to be able to actually sit at the table with these people whom I held in such high regard and who knew so much more than me. But they invited me in. They didn't push me aside just because I had different points views and was from a different party. A few years later, I became Senate president, so I had a lot to do with who was on what committees. And I remembered I started then the process that we still do in Vermont, and I appointed a number of Republicans to chair committees. I was in the Senate a second time with the now-Governor of Vermont, Phil Scott, and he became the chair of the Institutions Committee. That is a big deal in Vermont. When I tell folks we did that in Vermont, where sometimes you would appoint somebody who is from the other party, they want me to have a mental status exam around here. You know, you just don't that kind of thing. What I do know and what I do see is that there are a lot of people here who do have that--I will call it the Murphy-Lankford-Sinema attitude: Let's solve the problem. Let's make progress. Let's find a way where we can move ahead. You are talking about immigration, which because we have been going around and around on this for so long without making progress, it is almost creating this cul-de-sac or this sinkhole where people think it is pointless; why even talk about it; why try to solve it. It can't be done. But we know it can be done because we are the people here, 100 of us, that actually have the ability to do it. And I would say we have the responsibility to do it because it is a serious issue that faces the American people, and they are entitled to the safety of a secure border. The Dreamers are entitled to some justice and respect for the commitment they have made to be fully participating citizens here in the United States. So I just applaud the efforts of my colleagues who, despite all of the outside noise, do want to make some progress. When we don't make progress, we descend into a bad place. You know, yes, deport a criminal. Our people are entitled to safety. People are not entitled to come here illegally, and people who are illegally here certainly are not entitled to commit any crimes. But when we go round and round and just use the challenge of immigration reform as a political cudgel, we end up going into some pretty dark places. And that is where we are heading now, where a person gets rounded up who is legally here because the administration doesn't like the opinion they expressed. It is not that their opinion was necessarily subversive. It is not even wrong; it is debatable. You and I would have an opportunity to debate, you know, what should be our policy in the Middle East, what should be our policy on immigration. But the administration decides: That speech, I don't like. Arrest that person. Disappear that person. And then we get into debates that are really not about making progress but mutual recrimination. So I am just very delighted that you are focusing a good part of your effort here on the vital question of immigration. I do hope--I haven't been watching everything, but if it is OK, I just want to direct your attention to these tariffs that are happening a little bit. I know you are going to have an opportunity to talk about a fair number of things; you already have. But I have never seen anything so dumb and reckless as these tariffs on Canada. We have a library in Newport, VT--Derby Line, actually--the Haskell Free Library. And half of it is in Vermont, and half of it is in Canada. Is that cool or what? Canadians come in what I call the backdoor but they call the front door, and we come in the front door which they call the backdoor, and we read books together. We have had this library for decades. We had a roundtable up on the Canada-Vermont border, and the Member of Parliament from Stanstead, which is the town next to Newport, Madam Bibeau, was with us. And we were with some folks who ran businesses on the Vermont side and on the Canadian side and some of whom had operations on both sides. Most of these were family businesses; some were very large, some were small. They ranged from, like, farmers on the Vermont side, who got a lot of their fertilizer from Canada. And that is true, by the way, all across the northern border. It can be Minnesota. It can be Idaho. So many of our farmers all along the Canadian border have cross-relationships with Canada. They get their fertilizer. It is going to cost 25 percent more. We all know how hard our farmers work. Nobody works harder. The margins of what they make are tiny. And you add a 25-percent tariff, and these people are just--they don't know what is going to happen. Our maple syrup makers, back and forth. We get a lot of syrup from Canada and blend it and make it into products with Vermont syrup. Canada is the biggest producer of the second best maple syrup in the world. Vermont is the biggest producer of the best maple syrup in the world--in the United States. But the equipment that our sugar makers use is largely manufactured in Canada. A 25-percent tariff on that, that is going to hammer the Vermont maple producers. Again, they operate on a small margin. A lot of these farms, as you know, and the sugar producers--or, we have got a family company up there, a second generation, that makes high-quality furniture--these are family businesses, and they have tight margins. They are competing. They are really working hard. The Northeast Kingdom is really a pretty low-income part of Vermont, with wonderful, incredibly hard-working people who are very proud of where they live and who they are and who their neighbors are. They are asking really tough questions about how they can make it and whether they can stay in business. And this is not the same as immigration, but there is an element here that is the same as immigration. Shouldn't any policy that we pursue start with the premise that we will do no harm? So it might be a policy the Presiding Officer is advocating. And I know when the Presiding Officer served in your previous job, you would be wanting to make certain that what you did, did no harm. In fact, you would be insisting that it did some good. And my question with the tariffs is whether the administration is starting out from the premise that I think all of us should start with: Yeah, we may have an idea. We hope it might work. But we have to make sure it does no harm.

Mr. WELCH. That is a long question, and I am waiting for a long answer.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Madam President, I rise today to recognize Duncan McDougall, who stepped down as the executive director of the Children's Literacy Foundation after 25 years leading the nonprofit organization that he founded. Duncan started CLiF in his garage in Waterbury Center, VT, in 1998. His mission was to inspire a love of reading and writing among underserved, at-risk, rural children in Vermont and New Hampshire. A graduate of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, Duncan combined his business experience as a management consultant with his vision to help under-resourced children to make CLiF self-sustaining within its first year of operations. CLiF is proud to be an entirely community- supported organization, through the private donations of more than 600 donors each year and receives no State or Federal funds. Before starting CLiF, Duncan spent 6 months visiting local communities, talking to people about his idea, and getting their feedback. One of the first board members was a woman who had served as a superintendent in a very small rural school district in northern New Hampshire. Her insights into how CLiF could broaden their impact and what the kids really needed were key. Initially, CLiF considered accepting donations of used children's books to distribute. The former superintendent rejected that idea because the children they were dealing with come from underserved families and always got hand-me- downs. New books would be exciting for these children. She was right. From the beginning, the board members worked as a genuine team with a hands-on approach. In addition to board meetings, they sorted books, and helped deliver them to rural public libraries; they remained on site, giving presentations and reading from the donated books, as well as engaging the librarians to become part of the process. Through encouragement and guidance from CLiF, public libraries worked with their local schools, something that was new to many of those communities; everyone benefited. When CLiF showed up at a library or community center, the whole town knew about it. Duncan, after dealing with librarians in these small communities, realized how isolated they were. So he came up with the idea of CLiF hosting a rural librarian's conference that CLiF underwrote; the only cost to the librarians was transportation. Suddenly, these librarians had a community--a real community--to share ideas and support. And that is what CLiF is now: a community-building organization that uses books for kids as a common denominator. In the early days Duncan would load up his car with donated new books and drive to sites all over Vermont and New Hampshire with free books for children. Since those first days, CLiF has served over 375,000 children in 430 communities and has distributed more than $10 million in new books. Today, CLiF's community partners offer more than 1,000 literacy events per year in public elementary schools, libraries, preschools, afterschool programs, community centers, low-income housing sites, and correctional facilities, among others. CLiF is a living example of Duncan's belief that change should happen from the ground up. I congratulate Duncan McDougall on a job well done.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Thank you, Senator Wyden. Mr. President, when I talk to Vermonters, as I am sure when you talk to Tennesseeans, everyday, hard-working people at the end of the month are struggling to pay their bills. It is expensive. And people are working really hard, but the cost of things is going up. Taxes are eating into their paychecks, and they don't understand how it is they can work so hard--many families, it is two people working--and they still can't pay their bills. There is a suspicion among a lot of folks I talk to that there is something wrong, and it is kind of a rigged situation. What we are talking about today proves that the suspicion that Vermonters have about things being rigged, they are right. The second point I want to make at the outset is this issue, this specific example, provides such clarity that some of the worst things that cause the most suffering and the most economic insecurity are totally legal--totally wrong, by the way, but legal. What did we find out with the Wyden report? We found that a major U.S. pharmaceutical company was able to make sales of $20 billion of its product in 2019 and report zero income--zero in profits here in this country. What that ultimately means is that what Pfizer paid for taxes-- despite this extraordinary profit, they paid less than the mailroom clerk pays in Social Security. They paid less than the pharmacist at the drugstore who dispenses the prescriptions. They paid less than the delivery drivers who may have brought these prescriptions to a person's home. They paid less than the employees of Pfizer, whether it was a lab technician or a clerk or anyone at that company. So Vermonters asked me: Wait a minute. How is this $20 billion in sales, extraordinarily profitable company--yet under the legal use of the Tax Code, they are able to report zero? Well, this is where, as much as I condemn Pfizer for manipulating and taking advantage of these legal loopholes, I say the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Congress bears enormous responsibility for allowing this legal loophole to be used. Pfizer and every profitable company should pay their fair share of taxes. That is all we are talking about. So when Vermonters, at the end of the month, are trying to look at how they are going to pay their bills if their checkbook balance won't cover it, and they think the system is rigged, they are right. One of the ways for us to unrig it is to attack this legal use of the Tax Code that was passed by this Congress. Now, this is worse than just the Tax Code because other provisions have made Pfizer so profitable courtesy of the taxpayer. One of their major drugs, Eliquis, $791 million of taxpayer money was used in the research and development of it. Pfizer has that, been immensely profitable, and by the way, it is a good drug. It helps with strokes, but it is a wicked price. So here in the United States, if you are buying that drug, that costs $7,100. In Canada, it is 900 bucks. In Japan, it is $940; the United Kingdom, $760; in France, $650. So Vermonters ask me: Wait a minute. Our taxpayer dollars went into helping Pfizer develop that drug, $791 million, and we have to pay six, seven, eight times here in the United States than Pfizer sells it in other countries that are our peers? They think that is wrong, and so do I. Then you think about the protection that this Congress gives to intellectual property, and rightly so, where that pricing power that goes along with getting a patent is so abused in this country that it inflicts enormous economic hardship on individuals who have to buy it directly, on taxpayers who fund it through Medicare and Medicaid, and on our employers who really care about their employees and they want to provide employer-sponsored healthcare, but those premiums keep going up and up and up because of the pharma prices, and it means the raises are flat. That is not right. Then you have the fact that for pharma, we have created, as we should, publicly financed healthcare--Medicare, Medicaid--and employer- sponsored. So you have a situation for the pharmaceutical industry, and we are talking specifically now about Pfizer, where they get a guaranteed market: Medicare, Medicaid, employer-sponsored. They get a patent and then abuse the pricing power that goes along with it and stick it to Americans, despite the fact that American taxpayers funded so much of the basic research that went into developing this product they put out on the market. Then they end up with a tax code, courtesy of the U.S. Congress, that allows them to do what no corner drugstore could ever do; basically say that the sales they made weren't really made at the corner in Burlington, VT, they were made at the corner in Singapore. Oh, and by the way, Pfizer worked out a deal with Singapore to get preferential tax treatment. And when they were asked, What was that agreement, they had a nondisclosure agreement with Singapore to conceal from legitimate investigation about their tax liability, what that deal was. So this is really shocking. But if any of us wonder why everyday folks who are showing up to do their job in all of their places of employment in your State and mine and then at the end of the month, despite all their hard work, are having trouble paying their utility bill and they just wonder, Is this system rigged, they are right. Exhibit A is what has been exposed in this report by the Senate Finance Committee and Senator Wyden.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I want to thank my colleagues. You know, this issue of the environment is being completely--completely--ignored. Worse than that, the problems we have in our environment are being intensified by what the Trump administration is doing. You know the EPA mission is clear. It is about protecting human health and the environment. EPA regulations are intended, in some cases, to prevent mercury--that is what I am talking about-- contaminating our drinking water. They protect us--some of those regulations--from toxic gases, soot, and ash polluting out of the air. They keep lead out of our drinking water and asbestos out of our homes, and they do help fight climate change and prevent premature deaths caused by pollution. Now, there is a mantra in the Trump administration that regulations are bad--bad. There is not a single Member of this Senate--and that includes every single Democrat--who is not willing to make the most efficient regulations we can have to do the job that needs to be done to protect the health and safety. If there are regulations that need to be looked at, they need to be revised, they need to be reformed, let's do it. But the idea that the Federal Government would turn a blind eye to active pollution that is produced because it results in profit to the polluters is something not a single Member of this body should ever tolerate--ever, ever, ever. What you are seeing from the administration is that the repeal of these regulations is not about improving them; it is about giving license to the polluters. You know, Mr. President, shouldn't the polluter pay for the pollution that a polluter causes? Should large corporations have free rein to pollute our air and water, contaminating the environment, threatening the health and welfare of our kids? The Trump administration is trying to decimate the Agency that has protected us and the environment since the 1970s. Let me just emphasize: It is not their intention to reform it or to improve it. It is to, basically, destroy it. That is why the President has fired the members of EPA's Scientific Advisory Board and Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee. Get rid of the scientists is the answer they present as a way of getting rid of pollution. It doesn't work that way. So as I said, I have absolutely not only no problem, but I am completely--completely--committed to doing anything I can to make regulations to be practical and effective. I am absolutely, adamantly opposed to giving polluters a free rein to make profit at the expense of the health and welfare of the people that I represent and that we all represent. Nowhere is the Trump administration more clear than their attempt to rescind the endangerment finding, which affirms that greenhouse gases pose a threat to the health and welfare of the American people. That was a finding based on science You know, it is one thing if you don't like the finding. It is another thing to deny that the finding has a solid basis in fact and science. You can pretend climate change doesn't exist. You can pretend dirty air doesn't exist. You can pretend dangerous water doesn't exist. You won't be able to breathe it or drink it for too long without finding out that you are wrong. But when you are the President and you have a responsibility to the health and welfare of the American people, that is not a luxury you are entitled to take. Firing the EPA scientists on the SAB and on the CASAC, that won't change the facts. You can fire the scientists, but you can't change the facts. But it is the preference of the administration to want to blatantly ignore those facts so they can follow through on the President's campaign promise and make it easier for the polluters to pollute. Mr. President, I oppose--and oppose firmly--the Trump administration's attempts to weaken the EPA. I will always support making it more efficient, more effective, but the mission that the EPA has--an organization started during the Nixon administration--is to protect the health and welfare of the American people. And we can never step back from our commitment to do that. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, as you know, in 1791, our Nation's Founders had the boldness to ratify the First Amendment to the Constitution. At the time, it was an extremely radical concept--protecting our fundamental individual freedoms to religion, to speech, to assembly, to the right to petition the government, and to have a free press that would operate without fear or government censorship. The First Amendment deeply reflects our new Nation's view that we can have a society where individuals can freely voice their views, participate in civic life, and hold our political leaders accountable. These five guaranteed liberties are part of what makes us a free and democratic society. I believe that all of the Members of the U.S. Senate share the commitment to the First Amendment, but there are extreme divisions among us about what that means. Let me explain where I do believe right now there is a significant assault on the First Amendment. President Trump has sought to silence or to punish journalists who report negatively on him. This is not about a President because Democratic Presidents and Republican Presidents have been critical of journalists, but he is taking it to an entirely unprecedented level-- banning the Associated Press from parts of the White House press pool because they don't use his own personal preferred name for the Gulf of Mexico. He is controlling the viewpoint of the Associated Press, and they are not relenting. In a speech at the Department of Justice, President Trump said that the press that reports on him negatively should be, and this was his word, ``illegal.'' At the FCC, the Chairman has opened investigations into press organizations that it doesn't like--PBS and NPR. That is not an investigation that was opened on the basis of a determination by the full Commission--in fact, two members have been fired--but on the political preferences of the Trump administration. Of course, we have had lawsuits against the press when the President did not like a report of a poll that was printed in a newspaper in Iowa. I am very concerned about attacks on the freedom of speech. We have had Executive orders that target law firms because the President did not like some members of that law firm and who they represented. The President has issued Executive orders punishing firms that represent his political opponents and who, in his opinion, were involved in litigation against him when he was a private citizen. This is not actually an assault based upon an investigation; it is an attack that is based upon the personal annoyance of the President himself. We are seeing the Trump administration arresting students who are in the country legally. They are here legally, and they are arrested not because they committed a crime but because they took a viewpoint that the President disagreed with. We have even seen the censoring of words that the administration doesn't like, and there is a whole list of words that cannot be used. Of course, one of the incredibly petty examples that shows how extreme this is and how wanton it is was removing references to the Enola Gay from Department of Defense websites because they included the word ``gay.'' This is a very important inflection point in our democracy. The First Amendment is being challenged by the Executive, who is unravelling the protections that have been absolute through thick and thin. We all, in this Chamber, have to stand up for the First Amendment. And we can have disagreements on the speech that we agree with and we disagree with vehemently; but our obligation, as a separate branch of government, as Members of the U.S. Senate, is to defend the rights of people to have free speech, whether they agree with our political position or they don't. So all of us must defend to our core the constitutional rights so essential to the well-being of our democracy: the freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition government, and, of course, the freedom of the press. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I want to speak about the reckless tariffs that the Trump administration, Donald Trump, is inflicting on the American consumer, the American worker, American businesses--especially with respect to Canada. Canada is Vermont's largest trading partner. We are not alone. Thirty-four States count Canada as its largest trading partner. We regard Canada as an independent friend, not as a prospective 51st State. And the reason we have that view toward Canada is because of the incredibly constructive and positive relationships we have had with that wonderful country for years. But with respect to these tariffs, last year, trade with Canada accounted for 35 percent of Vermont exports and 67 percent of our imports and 56 percent of our total trade. One in four businesses in Vermont relies on trade with Canada. Vermont's economy is almost entirely made up of small businesses. They operate on the tightest of margins. Ninety-nine percent of Vermont's businesses, 76,878, are considered small. They support 60 percent of Vermont employees, that is 156,000, and these businesses cannot--they cannot--afford to absorb a 25-percent hike on imports from our largest trading partner. Take maple syrup, for example. Vermont produces 51 percent of the maple syrup consumed in the United States. And by the way, these are small farmers or small land owners. For farmers, it supplements their income in a very difficult margin business when they are having a dairy operation as well. But Vermont's maple syrup industry expects millions of dollars in losses if the tariffs go through. And that may surprise some, but Vermont imports $408 million in maple products, primarily maple syrup, from Canada, and we reprocess it and sell it. The four largest maple syrup equipment manufacturers are located in Canada. Tariffs will make it far more expensive for our Vermont sugar producers, maple sugar producers, to buy that equipment. This is an industry that has grown almost 500 percent in production over the past 20 years, and we are about to let all of that growth go down the drain with these reckless tariffs. Vermont's maple syrup producers are also concerned that the loss in market share will result in people turning to other products instead of Vermont's liquid gold, with customers possibly turning to far inferior but more affordable products like corn syrup or agave if the price of syrup is too high. These tariffs will also smash our farmers. Vermont farmers rely on organic grains and seeds and fertilizers that are imported from Canada. In that respect, all of our States on the northern tier are especially connected to potash and grains from Canada. And Trump's tariffs will raise prices on fertilizers, grains, and seeds, on lumber products, and machinery equipment from Canada that Vermont farmers rely on. And, understandably, Canada--as are other countries that are subject to the Trump tariffs--is imposing retaliatory tariffs on the United States, and that includes, of course, Vermont. That is going to make our sales much more difficult. Nearly half of the farmers polled in February said U.S. agricultural tariffs would result in the decrease in exports. And, of course, we saw that that happened big time in the first Trump administration, particularly hammering our Midwest grain and soybean farmers. Those markets have not come back. The markets now are for Argentina and Brazil. What is the point of our own government doing something that so hurts our farmers for no benefit for the United States? This was a bad deal for our farmers during the first Trump administration. And a USDA study from 2022 found that retaliatory tariffs led to a significant reduction in U.S. agricultural exports to the retaliating partners. The study found that export losses from 2018 to 2019 amounted to more than $27 billion. And if you remember what happened then is, Trump wanted to get right with the farmers so he took away their market, $27 billion in sales, and then went to the taxpayer to make up the difference for those farmers. Every farmer I know, they would rather be selling what they grow rather than getting a government Trump subsidy. The tariffs are also going to hurt consumers. There is no question about that. Grocery prices will be up. The price of eggs is up 19 percent from the end of the year and could climb to 41 percent this year. Meanwhile, the President is reposting articles on social media telling people to shut up--shut up about the price of eggs. Did he talk about anything else during his campaign? His tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China would directly cost the typical U.S. household over $1,200 in purchasing power. And people in Vermont--and I know in your State, Mr. President--they are struggling at the end of the month to make that checkbook balance. They can't afford that $1,200 hit. And some economists are estimating it could be an increase as much as 3,900 for the average American household. Jobs and homes, the trade war could cost 400,000 good-paying, blue- collar jobs. The trade war will increase the cost of a home. You know, in Vermont we have a wood products industry. We export timber to Canada. It is milled in Canada, reimported to the United States, to Vermont, to help us build homes. A 25-percent increase on that imported lumber is going to go straight to the cost of an already unaffordable home. What sense does that make? Trump's tariffs will raise gas prices for us in Vermont 25 to 40 cents a gallon. We get a lot of our petroleum products from Canada. It is going to cost more in home heating fuel, and that is a tough expense for Vermonters. And it is going to cost more in electricity. We, for years, imported electricity from Hydro-Quebec and other sources of power in Canada. So folks who have high electric bills, they are going to get higher; who are paying more than they can afford for gas, they are going to pay more; and that home heating bill is going to hammer them once again--all for no constructive, positive reason. You know, there is another aspect to this. It is not just the tariffs in our argument about the policy and the bizarre assertion that the Trump administration is making that these tariffs will make us rich, everybody knows--except, apparently, President Trump--that the people who pay the tariffs are the people who buy the products. You have a Canadian product that you have to, as a manufacturer, pay a tariff. That has to be added onto the price of the product--let's say to the sugarmaker, that farmer who is paying it. There is a price on electricity, a tariff. The consumer is going to pay that. We all know that. But aside from that, it is so chaotic, so disorganized, so hit-or- miss, so random in the rollout of these tariffs: on again, off again, on again, 25 percent, 50 percent, 10 percent. It is like the President wakes up and throws something at a dart board, and that is the new policy for the day. You cannot have an orderly expectation for your business. You cannot have the confidence that a consumer needs who is trying to really pay close attention to how she is spending the family budget with chaos. You can't do it, and you don't need it. So why in the world is the President doing it? He seems to think chaos is a good policy. You know what we saw--and we are seeing--and it is getting worse and it is not going to stop. The stock market had its worst week in 6 months. What does Donald Trump say? The stock markets are literally crashing. There was no reason for this, all self-inflicted. He said that in 2022. He is right today. It is all self-inflicted. The last 72 hours we have seen a wild ride. And Trump is ready to send the United States into a recession in order to implement his disastrous economic agenda, and that boastful confidence that he always asserts: Everything is going to work out. It is going to be beautiful. He is saying: A recession, who knows, we may have to pay that as a price. Well, you know what. We don't have to pay that as a price for foolish policies that only hurt us and hurt our allies. Nearly half of all U.S. imports, more than $1.3 trillion, come from Canada, China, and Mexico. And it is estimated that Trump's tariffs could reduce overall U.S. imports by 15 percent as well as increase prices. And Trump's last attempt at a trade war was passed on entirely to U.S. importers and consumers, leading to a loss of 245,000 U.S. jobs and higher consumer prices. And I note that the unemployment rate ticked up last week. Trump's stated goal is using tariffs to achieve unrelated goals of curbing fentanyl--we all want to do that--and illegal immigration. We all want a secure border. But the southern border has about 1,000 times the amount of fentanyl that comes through the miniscule amount on the northern border. So what the President has is this indiscriminate policy where he is using--I would say abusing--the delegation of national security powers by this Congress decades ago, when it was expected that they would be used for a real national security military threat, to meet his whims to negotiate this way and that on whatever strikes his fancy that particular day. And I also note that in the House bill that has been sent over here, the continuing resolution, the House has included a provision that can only be described as outrageous and cowardly. It said--the House stripped itself of the authority to vote on these tariffs that have been invoked by Trump's emergency authority. How can a legislative body do that, literally vote to say we can't vote on whether we believe that these tariffs have any merit or are going to be good or bad for the people we represent? The House did that, and that is in the CR. We have got a long history with tariffs. And we saw in the 1930s, the Smoot-Hawley tariffs led to a trade war, led to a depression, hurt jobs, hurt consumers. It is really, really stupid. This is going to hurt Vermont. I call on all of us to speak out against these tariffs that are going to hurt us in every State of this United States of America. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, thank you, and I thank my colleagues, Republicans and Democrats, for coming to the floor today in support of our continued support for Ukraine. I was heartened to hear today that President Zelenskyy is on board with the U.S. ceasefire proposal. That is good news. It does highlight that President Zelenskyy has shown time and again that he is always willing to negotiate for peace. Putin has always been the aggressor. And that is why I believe we must stand with Ukraine. You know, the question before us today--whether we will continue to stand with Ukraine--has immense implications for the security of the United States, of our European allies, and of world peace. These are critical questions to get right: Should the United States stand by our 80-year-old security commitments in Europe? Should the United States stand behind the rules-based order established in the aftermath of the catastrophic World War II or should we abandon those rules despite the fact that they have served our national security interests for so long? Those are the questions. You know, in the aftermath of the horrors of World War II, in which more than 80 million people died, the United States did establish alliances and security commitments in Europe and determined that this was the way to avoid a World War III--investments in NATO, Armed Forces in Europe, and European democracy and economic prosperity. We did not want to repeat what happened after World War I, where none of this was done, and it created the conditions for a Second World War. Perhaps most importantly, America asserted that it would defend a Europe so borders are not changed by force, where nations cannot invade weaker neighbors with impunity. Was that effort worth it in these past 80 years? Yes. Since some are now suggesting otherwise, I would like to mention a few of the reasons why the post-World War II order in Europe, led by the United States and enacted by a treaty in this U.S. Senate, was a success in keeping the peace. No conflict. Europe has avoided a major war for 80 years. The end of the U.S.S.R. Europe weathered the storm of the breakup of the Soviet Union, ushering in new countries committed to democratic values of freedom and democracy. Yugoslavia. Europe and NATO weathered the conflict and breakup of the former Yugoslavia, demonstrating unprecedented EU-NATO cooperation and commitments in the Balkans to Western democratic values. Our European allies have always been there for us, including in the aftermath of 9/11. Economic values. Our commitments also ushered in the fall of communism and a vibrant European Union that is peaceful and democratic--a club that the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and now Ukraine want into. It is a testament to the success of the painstaking efforts that Republican and Democratic administrations and Republican majority and Democratic majority of the U.S. Senate adhere to. But these commitments to European security, to NATO, and to protecting territorial integrity weren't only good in the past. To say that these alliances and commitments are tired or worn out says that we are tired, that we are worn out of peace and tired of maintaining peace for our citizens here in the United States. That is a fatigue we can never succumb to--ever. Those values are needed today to protect Ukraine in Europe and the United States from a rampant, unlawful, invasive Russia. You know, since the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, along with the rest of Eastern Europe and the Balkan States, has moved rapidly to reorient its politics and policies towards the European Union, toward democracy, toward freedom. It was, in fact, Ukraine's pursuit of a closer relationship with the EU that Putin the autocrat used as an excuse to interfere in Ukraine's internal affairs. The invasion of Ukraine also demonstrated the resilience of America's security relationships with Europe and NATO. Never has the European Command of the U.S. Armed Forces--designed and built to defend Western Europe against a Soviet invasion--been called upon to coordinate the actual defense of European sovereign borders from an invasion from the east. Today, that is a reality. Europe also--very much our partner--saw the threat and rose to the occasion. In part--and I want to acknowledge President Trump's insistence on this--European countries have begun to increase their defense spending, as they should and as they must. They have done so, and they have stepped up by providing materiel, as we have--advanced missiles, drones, and other military technology--for Ukraine. In fact, as a percentage of the gross domestic product, Europe has given more to Ukraine in support and weapons than the United States. We are doing it together. We cannot take for granted that we have had this peace in Europe for 80 years. We cannot take for granted that we did that. It was the result of that sustained commitment of Members of this body on both sides of the aisle and of Presidents of both parties. Our duty is to keep that alliance united at this stressful time. If Ukraine fails, we should not assume that European security and our alliances there will survive. World War II ended 80 years ago. We have to keep it 80 more. The Senators that ratified the establishment of NATO and our American-European commitments to peace and security on the European continent--they understood that our European alliances are critical to our own security. They would be rightly proud of their success story-- of 80 years of peace, of democracy, of freedom in Europe--but they would be horrified at the threat that Putin now poses to Europe, threatening everything that we and those who came before us have worked for. Ukraine's integration with the rest of Europe, their own right to self-determination, Ukraine's battlefield courage, and Ukraine's political commitment to democracy and freedom validate the 80 years of America's commitment to creating structures that can enforce and protect peace. Turning away from Ukraine now when it needs us most could mean the end of that 80-year success story. We must stand by Ukraine and against that unlawful invasion by Mr. Putin. We must stand by our European allies. And we must reaffirm our continued dedication to the work of those who served here before us to build the alliances and to sustain the alliances that have preserved the peace in Europe. Their future and ours depend on it. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I was absent from the Senate on March 3, 2025. Had I been present for rollcall vote No. 99 on the nomination of Linda McMahon, of Connecticut, to be Secretary of Education, I would have voted no. As Secretary, Mrs. McMahon will be a rubberstamp on President Trump's agenda to dismantle the Department of Education. President Trump has even said that he hopes that Mrs. McMahon ``puts herself out of a job.'' The Department of Education is responsible for distributing funds to K-12 schools and administering Pell grants, the Federal Student Loan Program, and programs that help support students with disabilities. Already, the Trump administration has cut funding contracts within the Department that support data collection, learning tools, and programs to increase test scores. Mrs. McMahon does not have the experience required to support the more than 62 million students in their elementary to postsecondary education across the country. Mrs. McMahon has no experience teaching or working in a school. Her experience does not lend her the tools the Secretary of Education needs to address the complex needs of our Nation's students, who are struggling with rising mental health issues. I do not have confidence that, under Mrs. McMahon's leadership, the Department of Education will continue to perform its core duties and support students across the country, in all stages of their education.