Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the cloture motion on Executive Calendar No. 718 be withdrawn and that following disposition of the Young nomination, the Senate resume legislative session and proceed to the consideration of Calendar No. 305, S.J. Res. 37, with Senator Paul or his designee in control of 30 minutes and the majority leader in control of the remaining time until 5:30 p.m., and that at 5:30 p.m., all remaining time on the joint resolution be yielded back, the joint resolution be read a third time, and the Senate vote on passage of the joint resolution without intervening action or debate.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I yield the floor for a, I hope, happy event to my colleague Senator Rubio.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I am happy to bring the voice of the Ocean State to the floor today as an original cosponsor of Senator Rubio's bill to make daylight saving time permanent. I hope very much that we can actually agree to this on the floor today and hope for similar action in the House. Pretty much everybody in Rhode Island experiences the same thing on that unhappy day in early November. It is usually the 6th or the 7th, when suddenly an hour of your day, an hour of your daylight, disappears and dusk comes an hour earlier. And it is a sad time. People are unhappy. It does darken our lives in a very literal sense. And by the time you get from November, when we fall back, to the shortest day of the year in December, the 21st, I think it is, we have sunset in Rhode Island at 4:15--4:15. That means everybody is driving home, if they work regular 9-to-5 hours--they are driving home in the pitch dark, and there is no real need for it. So let's make it 5:15 instead. Now, granted, there are people who are up between 6:30 and 7:30 in the morning who will lose their hour of daylight, but there are a lot fewer people up and about between 6:30 and 7:30 in the morning than there are between 4:15 and 5:15 in the afternoon. And particularly in that afternoon hour, that is when kids have come home from school, and you would like to have them run around outside a little bit more. That is when people are doing errands, and it would be nice if there were some daylight for that. So I am eager to be rid of ``fall back,'' and this would give us a chance for Americans all across the country to be rid of ``fall back'' and make daylight saving time permanent and to add a little sunlight into most people's lives. With that, I will recognize the distinguished chairman of our Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Let me make it clear to anybody who is watching that they just saw this measure pass. We have just passed the bill to end the return to daylight saving time--to make daylight saving time permanent. I yield the floor. With that, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise again to discuss the scheme that has captured and now controls America's Supreme Court. If you have been following this series of speeches, you know that we have gone over the Powell memo and the plan it laid out for the corporate rightwing. We have gone over the technique of Agency capture, regulatory capture, that has been applied to the Supreme Court. We have gone over the turnstile, that big anonymous rightwing donor setup within the Federalist Society to approve Republican nominees and the dark money front groups that sped those nominees through Senate confirmation. And we have discussed how the big rightwing donor interests influence Justices while they are on the Bench, through fast lanes for dark money litigation and flotillas--flotillas--of dark money amici curiae, front group amici. Well, if you set up a machine like that, you will pretty soon see Justices auditioning for the role. To understand the origins of this auditioning, you need to start with a little bit of history. It is 1990, and President George H. W. Bush needs to fill a vacancy left by the legendary Justice William Brennan. President Bush appoints a recent First Circuit nominee named David Souter, who had spent most of his career in New Hampshire State government. At the time, Republicans thought Souter's short time on the Federal bench was an asset. Without a long paper trail, there was less chance that Souter's nomination would go down in flames, like Robert Bork's had. But Souter wasn't the conservative the rightwing hoped for. Indeed, he could be down-right moderate. In their disappointment, they adopted a new mantra: ``No More Souters.'' When rumors got around that George W. Bush might nominate his White House Counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to the Court, he was not seen as rightwing enough, and the scheme panicked and the mantra became ``Al Gonzales is Spanish for `David Souter.' '' John Paul Stevens was another rightwing disappointment. So ``No More Souters'' as a mantra was joined by ``No More Stevenses.'' With these disappointments, the rightwing donors and their Federalist Society accolades vowed to better groom and vet future candidates, scouring Republican nominees' records for maximum adherence to scheme orthodoxy. Well, once that process was up and operating, the response was predictable. Ambitious rightwing lawyers aspiring to the Federal Bench aren't dumb. They will follow the path that guides them to their goal. So the maximum adherence auditioning began. I have described the circuit court judge who observed his colleagues taking cases and issuing rulings that seemed to have the clear intent of sending a signal. They strained to write decisions that were dressed to impress. They were, in his word, ``auditioning''--auditioning for the Federalist Society gatekeepers. So how exactly does this auditioning work? There is a recipe: One, you have got to understand what matters to the big donors: guns, unbridled campaign spending, corporate political power, shrinking the so-called administrative state, and rightwing social issues. Two, fly solo. It can actually help if you go it alone. Write opinions so extreme that they stand out and donors take notice. And, three, of course, where you can, deliver the goods. If a case allows you to score a win for a big donor interest, take it. Three Justices who knew this recipe well were the trio nominated by Donald Trump. As a circuit court judge, Neil Gorsuch became a darling of the rightwing donor elites for his commitment to dismantling this so-called administrative state. To do that, he deployed radical legal theories cooked up and propagated in the scheme's legal theory hothouse, where they developed schemes, kind of reverse-engineering them to give victories in cases. In one instance, Gorsuch even wrote two opinions for the same case: one, the majority opinion that his colleagues joined; and the other, an out-there solo opinion displaying his scheme bona fides. Gorsuch also displayed his fervor for what he called religious freedom, which usually translates to dismantling the separation between church and State, which is another scheme favorite. Justice Amy Coney Barrett knew how to audition too. In one case, Barrett's Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals declined to hear a challenge to an Indiana law on women's right to choose. Barrett bucked the majority to stakeout an eyebrow-raising position on the right, joining a dissent aimed directly at Supreme Court abortion precedent. On guns, Judge Barrett authored an opinion in a Second Amendment case called Kanter v. Barr that would have given a felon back his gun because his felony wasn't violent. Constitutional scholars' jaws hit the floor at that one. Adam Winkler, a Second Amendment expert at UCLA Law School, told the New Yorker that the opinion was ``Amy Coney Barrett's audition tape for the Supreme Court.'' And it was her audition tape because her ``view of the Second Amendment [was] outside of the mainstream'' and ``would appeal . . . to the Federalist Society.'' Of course, the biggest auditioner of all was Brett Kavanaugh. On the DC Circuit, Kavanaugh did so much auditioning it is hard to know where to begin. He issued opinions on abortion, on guns, on the administrative state, on campaign finance, and more. He was not concerned with building consensus. He wanted to make a point. Here is Washington Post editor Ruth Marcus in her book on Kavanaugh: His more liberal appeals court colleagues found him affable but unyielding. He would engage but rarely, if ever, change his mind, [and he] displayed a propensity for filing separate concurrences and dissents, actions that some colleagues took as judicial grandstanding and, more to the point, an effort to position himself for a Supreme Court seat. Auditioning--in fact, Kavanaugh dissented more each year on the bench than any of his DC Circuit colleagues, whether Republican or Democratic appointees. Kavanaugh made clear that he would be on the team if on the Court. Kavanaugh pumped up the ``major questions'' doctrine--one of the hothouse legal theories pushed by the far right. It says that courts should ignore an Agency's authority to solve a problem if the court thinks the problem is too big. Big regulated companies love having regulatory Agencies hobbled. So this was catnip for scheme donors. The majority in that case panned Kavanaugh's ``major questions'' idea, which hadn't even been raised by the parties, but Kavanaugh wasn't out to win votes from his colleagues, and he wasn't out to do justice in that case. He was firing an auditioning flare for scheme operatives and donors to see from miles around. Like Barrett, Kavanaugh did his own publicity. He spoke at 52--count them, 52--Federalist Society events over his career. You almost couldn't keep him out. And he wasn't the only one seeking an audience with the Federalist Society donor elite. After Trump's election, 9 of the 21 people on Trump's short list spoke at a 3-day Federalist Society panel dedicated to remembering Justice Scalia, and almost all the others were hanging out, mingling in the crowd. It was a judicial beauty pageant, with some real beauties. Kavanaugh had a little problem. He wasn't on Trump's first list of potential Supreme Court picks, and he wasn't on the second list either. But all that eager auditioning got him onto the third list, and the rest is history. I am not alone in noting all this auditioning. Here is how one writer for Slate paraphrased former U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner about scheme auditioning: [C]onservative judges auditioning for SCOTUS-- Supreme Court of the United States-- go all out proving their Federalist Society bona fides: Gorsuch used his judicial opinions on the appeals court to advertise himself as an enemy of the administrative state and a diehard proponent of religious freedom; Kavanaugh flaunted his support of the unitary executive and hostility to reproductive rights to earn a spot on President Donald Trump's short list; Amy Coney Barrett brandished her Second Amendment maximalism. As the Slate writers note: The conservative legal movement rewards this kind of flagrantly ideological auditioning. Republicans demand evidence that their justices will aggressively overturn precedent and laws that conflict with their political goals. As I said earlier, ``no more Souters,'' ``no more Stevenses.'' That is the auditioning by these sitting Justices. I will close my remarks with an example of what happens when you haven't auditioned for the scheme. When Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement, George W. Bush wanted to replace her with his friend and loyal White House Counsel, Harriet Miers. Miers was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. She had served Bush and his inner circle faithfully. But she wasn't a Federalist Society insider. She didn't have a record of auditioning for the big donors behind the Federalist Society's turnstile. She couldn't soothe those rightwing donors that she was ``no Souter,'' ``no Stevens.'' Her sin wasn't anything in particular; she just wasn't part of the club. As Supreme Court scholar Amanda Hollis-Brusky put it: The message Leonard [Leo] and others had sent was: If you want to rise through the ranks, we need to know you. And that's what they were all saying about Miers--``We don't know her. She is not one of us.'' Leonard Leo, by the way, is sort of the spider at the center of the web of donor interests that drive the turnstile at the Federalist Society during Republican Presidencies. We are now embarking on the confirmation process of someone who has not auditioned to donor elites for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. No dark money machine guided her selection. That is refreshing. Still, the auditioning continues on the right for the next time a Republican President holds office. Scheme donors expect standout candidates who wear their commitment to their donor welfare on their sleeves. Watch closely for more. To be continued. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate be in a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each, and that I be recognized for up to 20 minutes.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I have nine requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders. Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate:

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, let me thank Senator Thune for his remarks. I would simply add that I hope we can all keep in our hearts the prospect that the Ukrainians might actually win this thing, given the success they have already seen, as long as they get adequate support from us and the world community.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here for a rather different reason. It is to call on this Chamber yet again to wake up to the urgent threat of climate change. I wish I was done with these ``Time to Wake Up'' speeches. Frankly, I wish I had never had to deliver a single one. I wish Congress had dealt with this threat--for instance, back when another Senator from Rhode Island, Republican John Chafee, held hearings on the looming challenge of carbon dioxide pollution. I wish we had dealt with it when the House, under Speaker Pelosi, passed the Waxman-Markey climate change bill, only for Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Barack Obama to kill it in a Democratic Senate with a filibuster-proof majority. I wish the Citizens United decision hadn't allowed the fossil fuel industry to capture the Republican Party and kill the bipartisanship on climate that existed before that decision in this Chamber. In my church growing up, there was a prayer about things we have left undone that we ought to have done. In that spirit, here is a graphic on carbon emissions we prepared in conjunction with the Biden White House that charts out where we are on this problem. Green, this line here, is carbon emissions business as usual if we keep kowtowing to the fossil fuel industry here and don't take serious climate action. Orange, this line, with quite significant emissions savings, is the Finance Committee's climate tax package. That is the effect just of that climate tax package if it comes into law. Down here is a clean electricity standard. If you could put into law a national U.S. clean electricity standard, you could reduce emissions to this gray line. If you were to combine the two, if you were to combine the Finance Committee tax package and the clean electricity standard, you push emissions down to this yellow line. Look at the blue line. This upper blue line is the carbon savings from a modest price on carbon, one that we have discussed and negotiated with the White House--$15 per ton in 2023, rising to $70 per ton in 2032. Look at how powerful the emissions effect is of that single intervention. Now, this lowest one that reduces emissions the most, this is the safety pathway. This dark blue emissions line is all of those policies together. That is what they add up to. That is what we could be doing. We could be creating a pathway to safety. As these emissions results show, a carbon price is the key policy to hit the 50-percent emissions reduction target we have and to get on a pathway to safety. Well, that is not happening right now. So, while fossil fuel-funded Republicans block legislative action on climate, what could be done through executive action? Regulation. It is not a substitute for ambitious legislation, but it can make a big difference. The EPA has more or less restored Obama-era fuel economy and greenhouse gas emission standards for cars and light trucks. It has a proposal to regulate methane leakage from oil and gas facilities. It restored an Obama-era rule limiting mercury and other toxic air pollutants from coal-fired powerplants. That is all good, but it is a return to the pre-Trump polluter status quo, not progress--not new progress. Here is what EPA could still do: Start with regulations for big, easily identified sources of greenhouse gases, not just coal-fired powerplants but point sources, including in the industrial sector, which generates more than one-fifth of total greenhouse gas emissions. We need a multipronged regulatory approach targeting all major classes of point sources. We need stronger rules for mercury, coal ash, soot, and other pollutants. Public health demands this, and it is even more urgent in light of climate change. EPA can update the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule and tighten National Ambient Air Quality Standards. We need greenhouse gas emission standards for heavy-duty vehicles and for aviation. Focusing just on light-duty vehicles won't cut it. Over at the Office of Management and Budget, they could finish an updated social cost of carbon and issue guidance requiring its use throughout--throughout--Agency decisionmaking. This is a big one. The social cost of carbon calculates the long-term damage from carbon pollution, and it should figure in permitting, leasing, grant-making, investments, international development assistance, trade agreements, and procurement. A Trump judge--likely installed on the Federal Bench using fossil fuel dark money--just blocked the Obama-era social cost of carbon. While that is litigated, the administration is correctly pausing leases, permits, and other actions for greenhouse gas emitters. At the Department of Interior, stop doling out leases to big polluters. The President promised to end new fossil fuel leases on public lands and waters, so pause them while the social cost of carbon is litigated, and review them all to make sure that taxpayers are paid royalties that reflect the actual cost of fossil fuel production and combustion. At the Department of Energy, update energy efficiency standards for light bulbs, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, and all the electric appliances and products we use every day. There is low-hanging fruit there. I hear many of these rules are nearly ready but are held up in bureaucratic delay. Get a move on. The Department of Energy should also, along with the EPA and the Department of Agriculture, update the renewable fuel standards to ensure that renewable fuels actually generate considerable emissions reductions. Here is another simple one: Federal procurement. Update Federal acquisition regulations so Agencies price in the cost of emissions when they are buying products. Do that, and maybe we wouldn't wind up purchasing Postal Service delivery trucks with internal combustion engines no more efficient than their decades-old predecessors. Heck, we might even end up with clean, high-performing electric postal trucks. There is more to this regulatory list, but let me leave it there. With legislation and regulation ought to come litigation. There are States, cities, counties across the country that have filed lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry based on local harm suffered as a result of climate change, and there is precedent for those at the Federal level. In 1999, the Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit against Big Tobacco and its front groups, charging that they ``engaged in and executed--and continue to engage in and execute--a massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public.'' That is the language in the Department of Justice's complaint. Well, it went to trial, and a few years later, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler agreed. She found that the tobacco industry had ``coordinated significant aspects of their public relations, scientific, legal, and marketing activity in furtherance of a shared objective--to . . . maximize industry profits by preserving and expanding the market for cigarettes through a scheme to deceive the public.'' That is the language in the decision, ``a scheme to deceive.'' So here is a useful exercise: Pop out the word ``cigarettes'' in that decision, and drop in ``fossil fuel.'' Judge Kessler's finding in the tobacco case describes exactly what the fossil fuel industry has perpetrated: ``coordinated significant aspects of their public relations, scientific, legal, and marketing activity in furtherance of a shared objective--to . . . maximize industry profits by preserving and expanding the market for fossil fuels through a scheme to deceive the public.'' Nothing--nothing--prevents the Department of Justice from at least investigating whether to follow its own successful blueprint; yet nothing has been done. Progress will be easier on climate if we take on the fossil fuel- funded front groups that are armed to the teeth with dark money political weaponry. With proper countermeasures like exposure, we can help achieve victory on climate by exposing the rightwing, dark money groups fomenting and funding climate obstruction very likely as part of a scheme to deceive the public. I will end with an example from a book I read recently about a ship that went down. In September 1857, the S.S. Central America, which was known as the ``Ship of Gold,'' set sail from California to New York City with nearly 600 passengers and crew and 30,000 pounds of gold from the California Gold Rush. A few hundred miles off the Carolina coast, a hurricane hit the S.S. Central America. In the teeth of the gales, the passengers and crew did everything they could. Stewards and waiters and other staff were taken off their regular duties to fight the storm, to fight the flooding. Passengers were put into service to save the stricken ship. Heavy cargo was thrown overboard. In fact, divers are, right now, down, recovering the gold that was thrown overboard to save the ship. The ship itself--its doors and panels--were broken up to help block the sea out or were thrown overboard to lighten the stricken ship. At the end-- at the end--passengers and crew were side by side, deep in the hold, shoulder deep in water, desperately pumping to save the ship. The lesson here: The passengers and crew did everything they could, but at each step, they started too late. They ultimately took all the necessary measures, but each one--each one--they took too late, and the ship sank. I fear that that is the analogy for our present predicament. Indolence in the face of known danger is a particularly stupid form of cowardice. It is made worse here by a fossil fuel industry that pays people to block our efforts to save the ship. For the steamship the S.S. Central America, there was another boat that stood by in the storm to help rescue passengers, and out of the 600 men and women on that ship, a few dozen were saved. Us? We have no other planet standing by. This is our chance for this ship of ours, and it is time to wake up. It is time to take self-rescue seriously by every available means--and fast. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I have 7 requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders. Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate:

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, as I rise today, kleptocracy is on the march in Europe, showing how unchecked corruption leads to evil. Vladimir Putin's corrupt regime fabricated a pretext to invade and subjugate the sovereign and peaceful nation of Ukraine. Putin's attack helps divert the Russian people from his festering corruption and misrule, as jailed Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny put it. America and our allies are meting out stiff sanctions; and my colleagues and I here in Congress are working on additional measures to deliver punishing financial blows to Putin and his corrupt oligarchs. But we must consider how we arrived at this moment. Putin has, for decades, deployed corruption and kleptocracy to strengthen his grip on Russia's government and to project power and influence throughout the region. In the process, he decimated Russia's free press, attacked--physically and economically--all political opposition, and grew his own personal fortune to what is thought to be the largest in the world. I say ``thought to be'' because Putin's wealth is hidden behind shell corporations and nestled in tax havens, far from the view of the people he robs and oppresses. And along the way, he cultivated--through favors, force, or fortunes--a group of oligarchs who serve him. It is important to understand that Putin isn't special. We have plenty of kleptocrats around the globe. Putin just happens to be in charge of a big and oil-rich country with a military at his command, a gangster with an army running a gas station, as Senator McCain used to say. America is engaged in a growing clash of civilizations against this brand of corrupt leadership. Democracy and the free market are on one side; kleptocracy and corruption are on the other. And we will prevail in this clash by pursuing one powerful value of rule of law society: transparency. Kleptocrats and criminals seek the protection of our rule of law and our secure financial system to stow their illicit money, but they need anonymity. They need to hide it. That is why so much anonymously owned luxury real estate sits empty in America, in some places actually driving up local housing costs for normal people. And that is why shell corporations in American States multiply. The Pandora Papers last year revealed webs of American shell corporations and trusts hiding dirty assets. It revealed professionals--lawyers, accounts, and real estate agents--aiding and abetting the hiding of those dirty assets. Shining the light of transparency on kleptocrats' money is a potent countermeasure to their power. Late in 2020, Congress passed the most important anti-money laundering reform law in two decades: the Corporate Transparency Act. It was very bipartisan. Senators Grassley, Graham, Wyden, Rubio, Brown, Crapo, Warner, Cotton, and I all spent years getting that bill done. Our aim was to arm law enforcement with knowledge of the ``beneficial owner''-- the real person--who is behind American shell corporations. Now, the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, FinCEN, is implementing our beneficial ownership provisions. And the new rule promises to be a strong countermeasure. It requires anyone who exerts substantial control directly or indirectly over a legal entity to identify themselves as the beneficial owner. That is what we wanted. It is clear enough so that companies know what they have to do, while minimizing the risk that bad actors can evade disclosure. And its timelines for reporting and updating beneficial ownership information are fair, providing law enforcement and national security officials timely information without imposing unreasonable turnarounds for legitimate companies. The beneficial ownership rule also avoided a trap. Some had urged FinCEN to add exceptions to the reporting requirements on top of the ones Congress included in the bill. Well, we worked hard to come up with the right list of excepted entities. It is encouraging to see FinCEN stand firm and avoid watering down the rule with new unjustified exceptions. FinCEN is also working on a review of Bank Secrecy Act regulations with an eye toward a new ``anti-money laundering and counterterror financing'' framework. This review offers a chance to take on some big challenges. We need to make sure American professionals aren't aiding and abetting kleptocrats. Investing in hedge funds, luxury real estate, high-priced art, expensive cars, mega yachts all requires help from professionals, and those professionals aren't bound to ``anti-money laundering and counterterror financing'' safeguards like our banks are. Private investment funds are worth about $11 trillion. You can hide a lot of mischief in $11 trillion. An FBI intelligence bulletin leaked in 2020 warned that ``threat actors'' used those funds to launder their money into rule-of-law financial systems. That is a vulnerability we need to close. This aiding and abetting problem, giving aid and comfort to our enemies, extends to professional services from lawyers, accountants, company and trust formation agents, even PR firms. But on this front, FinCEN's hands are tied. Congress will need to step in to clean that up. Kleptocrats and criminals constantly change the methods they use to hide their money. Trade-based money laundering, for instance, allows bad actors to trade everything from vegetables to washing machines as a way to move their money around internationally. We need better coordination among key agencies involved in overseeing trade and better information on suspicious financial and trade activity that is shared more efficiently among various Federal authorities. Real estate is a massive target for money launderers. In August of last year, the watchdog group Global Financial Integrity released a report showing over $2.3 billion laundered through American real estate over the previous half decade. As Global Financial Integrity would tell you, this is just what they could identify. The real number is probably far higher. The good news there is we have a countermeasure that works well. In 2016, FinCEN started the ``geographic targeting order'' program, which requires title insurers to report to FinCEN beneficial ownership information of shell companies that stash money in high-priced real estate. That program started in New York and Miami, then expanded to a dozen jurisdictions nationwide. The Congressional Research Service has reviewed it and said these targeting orders work. Now, FinCEN is proposing a rule to make these orders permanent and expand coverage across the United States. It looks like FinCEN will deliver that improvement. And if it does, that is a big win, particularly if that rule lines up with our beneficial ownership rule and if it extends to cover commercial, as well as residential real estate. In Congress, we should pass legislation to help FinCEN address professional aiders and abettors. There is bipartisan legislation in the House, the ENABLERS Act, which I hope to introduce here in the Senate. I have also introduced bipartisan legislation to make it a crime for foreign officials to demand bribes from Americans. At the moment, it is only a crime to pay bribes. And we should pay close attention to others in the dark economy, like drug traffickers and terrorists. I am working on legislation to target money laundering related to the illicit narcotics trade. Indeed, we had a hearing on it today. Finally, we need to work together with the international community. When U.S. defenses are strengthened, kleptocrats will direct their dirty money to some other willing sanctuary. So it matters that the Biden administration has announced a transatlantic, interagency task force to help crack down on ill-gotten assets stowed in the West by Russian oligarchs and their families, their mistresses, their stooges, whomever. This is exactly the right approach. We must work with friends abroad to close off hidey-holes for oligarchs, bolster the rule of law, expand judicial transparency, and increase access to justice in struggling jurisdictions. I met recently with a Member of the Ukrainian Parliament who said a phrase--that we were talking about actually during the Munich Security Conference codel--which was: It is not enough to freeze the oligarch's assets; we need to seize the oligarch's assets. We can do so even theatrically, and to take a camera through the preposterous and grotesque wealth and show the people of Russia what was stolen from them would be as significant a public relations victory as when Ukrainians went through their oligarch's mansion and showed everything from gold toilet seats to private petting zoos. Kleptocrats, like Putin and his oligarchs, can be defeated. A little sunlight will vanquish them. Free societies and the rule of law can win the long battle we face against kleptocracy and corruption. This is a national security matter, not just a question of doing good. This is a national security matter, and these are the tools--the ones I have described, the tools of transparency--that will secure our victory. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here again today to discuss the scheme by big Republican donor interests to capture and control our Supreme Court. Today, I am going to put a little spotlight on ongoing scheme operations. As we all know, Justice Stephen Breyer will retire at the end of this Supreme Court term. As the Biden administration selects a nominee, the scheme is shifting gears to attack her even before she has been named. A dark money front group called the Judicial Crisis Network has already announced a multimillion-dollar ad blitz against Justice Breyer's unnamed replacement, and its first ad is already up. The ad's premise is that leftwing dark money is poised to capture our Supreme Court. I am not making that up. Think of a squid. When a squid senses danger, it squirts a jet of ink into the water. The squid ink creates confusion and distracts predators, and the squid sneaks off. This new ad from the Judicial Crisis Network is squid ink. Let's start with just a quick review of the facts. Rightwing donor interests captured our Supreme Court under Donald Trump. They did it with dark money. They used the front group Judicial Crisis Network to launder off identities of big rightwing contributors. The deidentified contributions funded political campaign ads against Merrick Garland and for Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. Those are the facts. The road onto the Supreme Court for those three Justices was paved with dark money. By the way, the checks were big. Four of the checks to Judicial Crisis Network were for $15 million or more. That is a big check. Because we don't know who those donors are or who that donor is--it could all be one donor--we don't know what business they had before the Court or why it was so worth it to them or him to spend $60 million to influence the makeup of the Court. This new Judicial Crisis Network ad--the squid ink ad--is designed to confuse those rather conspicuous facts. They can hide who funded them, but they can't hide what they did; so, squid ink--distraction, misdirection. Their accusations of dark money corruption are a projection of the very scheme they themselves hatched and executed. As I have discussed previously in these speeches, this is a classic propaganda technique: You accuse your adversary of what you yourself have been doing. Yes, it is maddening to have a phony front group use dark money to capture and corrupt our Supreme Court and turn it into the Court that dark money built. It is devilish, Vladimir Putin-style propaganda for that phony front group to then accuse others of exactly what it did--a false mirror of its own behavior. By the way, that Judicial Crisis Network ad accusing a not-yet-chosen Supreme Court nominee of being a dark money stooge? Paid for with dark money. You can't make this stuff up. Let's look at the Judicial Crisis Network. Start with the fact that ``Judicial Crisis Network'' does not exist. It is, legally speaking, a fiction. Who knew, right--an entity selling fiction that is itself a fiction. ``Judicial Crisis Network'' is actually a ``fictitious name''--that is a term under Virginia incorporation law--a fictitious name, one of several filed by an organization, a completely different organization, called the Concord Fund. It gets even more tangled, as dark money schemes tend to be--they are a lot like a covert operation--so let's keep digging. The Judicial Crisis Network actually used to exist. It was once the 501(c)(4) twin of a 501(c)(3) called the Judicial Education Project. That is the state of the art these days for dark money political mischief, a twinned 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4). Tax records list the same address for both entities--conveniently an address which happens to be just right down the hall, on the same floor, in the same building, as the Federalist Society. This twinned organization trick allows donors to shift money in and out of different shady operations with zero disclosure, and it even gives donors a tax deduction to the 501(c)(3). You could pierce that corporate veil pretty easily. All this schemery hides the donors behind the operation. It fools members of the press who don't bother to figure it out, and it helps dark money operatives like Leonard Leo, the central organizer of the scheme--the operative for the big dark money donors--to hide their hands and shuffle money secretly around. Leonard Leo, you will recall, ran the donor turnstile at the Federalist Society that picked Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. Then, at the tail end of the Trump administration, with no more Supreme Court appointments likely, Leo scuttled off to a new venture: CRC Advisors. CRC Advisors was designed, as Axios reported, to ``funnel big money and expertise across the conservative movement.'' As an aside, CRC Advisors has an affiliate called CRC Strategies, which, among other things, brought us the infamous swift boat campaign against John Kerry--classy bunch. Along with the inception of CRC Advisors, Judicial Crisis Network was quietly renamed the ``Concord Fund,'' and the Judicial Education Project was quietly renamed the ``85 Fund.'' These became twin 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(3) political mischief operations. Concord, as a 501(c)(4), would handle attack ads and PR. The 85 Fund, the 501(c)(3), would help mask Concord's operations and donors and provide tax deductibility. So that was the original setup, the renaming. Then these newly named groups loaded up with all these fictitious names. They filed under Virginia law for permission to operate under fictitious names, and these are the fictitious names they registered to use. First, Concord took its old name--its old name--and reregistered it as this new fictitious name. And so did 85 Fund, taking its old name, Judicial Education Project, and registering it as a fictitious name. Go figure why that was necessary. Then they stood up new voter suppression projects under other fictitious names: Honest Elections Project Action and Honest Elections Project. Those two front groups--fictitious name front groups--are part of the dark money armada, along with Heritage Action and others, through which big rightwing donors orchestrated the anti-voting laws that have spread like a virus through Republican State legislatures. That didn't just happen. That was done. And as a Heritage Action employee admitted in a leaked video, they did it, quietly, through sentinels. Concord also added another fictitious name, Free to Learn Action, and 85 Fund created the twin Free to Learn. These fronts are presumably to whip up the rightwing about so-called critical race theory when the big donors want. Gobs of money pours into this propaganda machine. The 85 Fund's last tax filing shows $65 million in revenues, including one $48.5 million donation from a single, anonymous donor. If it is the same single, anonymous donor that contributed the over $15 million contributions to the Judicial Crisis Network before, that would put one donor over $100 million into this Court-capture scheme--and all that money for an organization with only one employee who draws a salary of over $100,000 per year. So no surprise, then, that the 85 Fund channels lots of money back to the CRC mother ship. Its last tax filing shows over $12 million paid to Leo's CRC Advisors for so-called consulting/advertising services, and it distributed over $34 million to other unnamed groups, presumably in other areas of the scheme, in a big dark money shuffle. We are still waiting for Concord Fund records for the most recent tax year, but the previous year's filing proves the Axios reporting is spot on. Concord's top independent contractor is CRC Advisors, paid over $4.2 million for consulting services. It is out of this pea-and-shell game switcheroo that the dark money Judicial Crisis Network ad emerges. I have noticed recently--in fact, as recently as our last Judiciary Committee markup--that Republicans are currently reverting, often, to the same dark money line of attack as the Judicial Crisis Network. As we watch Republican Senators attack Democrat dark money, let's remember a few things. First, Republicans created, protected, and defended--and defend to this day--dark money. Republicans block our efforts to get rid of dark money. Republicans came first to the dark money game with billions of dark money dollars. Then, when we began to play by their rules--the rules they made, the rules they defend--they complained. I guess they hope that we will unilaterally disarm so they can pound us with dark money just as they did for years after their Republican Justices in Citizens United let the big money flow. Well, unilateral disarmament isn't going to happen, but that is not the only reason for the squid ink. The falsehood of this ad serves to damn us all in the eyes of the public. The rightwing scheme reckons that Americans, frustrated and cynical about a slimy, dark money battle purportedly involving both sides, will tune out and turn away from what Justice Sotomayor has called the ``stench'' of partisanship emerging at the Supreme Court. All this misdirection--squid ink--can then distract from their captured Court's record for the big scheme's donors. The ``Roberts Five'' have a pattern now, a pattern of 80--80--partisan 5-to-4 decisions, all benefiting easily identified Republican donor interests--an 80-to-0 record. It is a heck of a pattern. And now they have a new rightwing, dark money supermajority to amp it up even further. It is no wonder polling shows that Americans believe the six-Justice Republican majority is motivated mainly by politics and that the Court's approval rating just hit an alltime low. So a little distraction is in order. Cue the squid ink. Meanwhile, the Senate minority leader is reportedly urging his caucus to keep a low profile on Biden's nominee. I get it. When you have got your burglars inside merrily ransacking a house, the last thing you want is a noisy ruckus out on the front lawn. One liberal Justice exchanged for another isn't worth a fuss when the loot is being shoveled out the window to your gang. If there was any honest concern about dark money on the Republican side, there is a really, really easy way to show it: support legislation to clean it up; put an end to it. I have a bill, the DISCLOSE Act. It will end dark money in our politics and in our judiciary. Every single Senate Democrat has voted in favor of this DISCLOSE Act. Even the liberal groups that Judicial Crisis Network complains about are backing that bill. So, my Republican friends, support it, pass the law, end the slimy, political, dark money era we now live in. They could do that, but I will make you a bet that they won't. Dark money power is too important a weapon for rightwing donors to abandon. So, instead, Republicans in this Chamber filibuster that legislation--filibuster it--and dark money continues to corrupt our politics. Brace yourselves, folks. Squid ink will flow in the weeks and months ahead. For the dark money forces squirting out the squid ink, the aim is defense, defense of their mighty prize: the Court that dark money built and that dances to their dark money tune. To be continued. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that upon disposition of the Bush nomination, the Senate vote on confirmation of the Coffey nomination.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I have 12 requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders. Pursuant to Rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate:

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am not very happy to be back with my trusty and somewhat battered ``Time to Wake Up'' poster. Almost exactly a year ago, I delivered what I hoped would be my last ``Time to Wake Up'' speech and took the poster off the floor. Things looked good then. The conditions for climate progress were in place. Voters had elected a Democratic President and Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress. So the malicious grip of the fossil fuel industry on the Republican Party was no longer a stopper. President Biden ran on a fact-based, uncorrupted climate agenda, and many in our congressional majorities campaigned on climate action. We had reconciliation to work with, and work began on a serious climate bill. Actually, after I stopped these speeches, the Smithsonian asked me if they could have this old poster. It is the most used poster in Senate history, it turns out. And I came pretty close to turning it over to them, but something made me hesitate. And, well, here it is back again. We just aren't making progress, not by the only measurement that matters: greenhouse gas emissions. We are 1 year in--with no bill, no carbon regulation, and no litigation--and look at the climate havoc. Scientists reported that global temperatures registered between 1.1 and 1.2 Celsius above average in 2021. That is among the hottest years ever observed by human beings, and it is dangerously close to our safety ceiling of 1.5 degrees Celsius. And we are here despite 2021 being a La Nina year, when cold Pacific water usually cools global temperatures. The last 7 years are the 7 hottest years in recorded history. Republicans may mock and disparage this, but they are paid agents of the polluters causing this. And they are wrong. In past speeches, I have described how our oceans absorb a massive amount of the heat that is trapped by greenhouse gas pollution. It is the heat equivalent of multiple Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs being set off in the ocean every second--multiple Hiroshima-sized nuclear devices' worth of heat per second that we are adding to the ocean. In the last three decades, our oceans warmed eight times faster than preceding decades. And it is so massive that it has its own measurement term: the zettajoule. The top 2,000 feet of ocean absorbed a record 227 excess zettajoules of energy in 2021. So what is a zettajoule? Well, a half zettajoule--a half zettajoule-- is the total annual energy consumption of the planet. That little line right down there represents a half zettajoule--the total energy consumption of planet Earth, all humans. And here is the heat that that loaded into the oceans because of the amplification of greenhouse gases--227, one-half--so about 500 times as much heat going into the oceans as our entire energy heat spend as a species. And ocean temperatures are, of course, now the hottest ever recorded. The excess heat means dying coral reefs and lost fisheries with acidified seas. It means higher sea levels, as heated water expands; and more severe storms, as heated waters supercharge storm systems, including the sort of thunderstorm complexes that spawned Midwestern tornadoes in December. Republicans may mock and disparage this, but remember: They are paid agents of the polluters causing this. And they are wrong. This costs lives and dollars. The United States suffered 20 separate billion-dollar weather disasters in 2021--almost 700 deaths and $100 billion of damage. The year before, we had hit $22 billion disasters: tropical cyclones, coastal floods, western wildfires. The most spectacular fire didn't actually even make it on to this list because it ripped through more than a thousand homes and businesses in suburban Denver in December. That fire didn't even make it onto this top disasters list. The Pacific Northwest heat wave of June 2021 smashed all records. A town in normally temperate British Columbia saw 116-degree temperatures, beating the previous Canadian national record by 3 degrees. The next day, the thermometer hit 118 degrees; the day after that, 121 degrees. And the day after that, a wildfire burned the town to the ground. In Washington and Oregon, temperatures shot off the charts. These graphs show maximum daily temperatures in Seattle and Portland. The dots on these charts that form this gray band represent every daily maximum temperature reading over the last 42 years--over 15,000 data points. The red dots here and here reflect for Seattle and for Portland those days--way beyond the norms. These temperatures aren't just uncomfortable. They are lethal. Research shows more than 600 excess deaths during the June heat wave in Washington and Oregon. Those 600 people aren't even counted in that storm death toll I mentioned before. So why aren't we doing anything about it? Two primary reasons: fossil fuel obstruction and corporate indifference. To be blunt, the fossil fuel industry controls the Republican Party the way a ventriloquist controls a painted wooden dummy, and the rest of corporate America lets them get away with it. The fossil fuel obstruction isn't new. They have been at it for decades. Dozens of colleagues have joined me here on the Senate floor, exposing the web of climate denial the industry wove to perpetrate their obstruction. The fossil fuel industry is still at it. They have just changed it up a bit. They can't debate the science anymore, and they can't argue against the urgency, but they can still write checks. They can fund phony front groups and fill Republican campaign coffers. And though they can't sell climate denial, they can buy climate delay. They can hire the biggest PR and advertising firms around--like Edelman, IPG, WPP--to pollute our minds with slippery greenwashing, like they pollute our skies and oceans with their carbon emissions. Here is an example of this stuff in action. Type ``fossil fuels'' into Google, and this is the slick, phony paid-for result you get--a fossil fuel giant saying it is ``already a willing and able player in the energy transition, read more.'' The Guardian and watchdog group InfluenceMap exposed how fossil fuel PR companies cook up these ads designed to look like Google search results. ``Don't do anything, we've got this'' is their Big Lie message of these ads. The watchdogs call this ``endemic greenwashing.'' The industry doesn't just lie and pay politicians; fossil fuel companies also use trade associations and dark money front groups to whip up opposition to climate legislation. Coal-heavy electric utilities and their dark money cohort mobilized against the Clean Electricity Performance Plan that would have helped decarbonize the power grid. Republicans did their bidding. The American Petroleum Institute and other fossil fuel industry groups fight paying a price on methane emissions from their oil and gas facilities. They want to pollute for free, knowing full well the harm. Republicans do their bidding. The CEO of that 800-pound, climate-obstructing gorilla, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the group would ``do everything [it] can to prevent'' Build Back Better and its climate provisions from becoming law. Republicans do their bidding. These groups spent millions on political ads. They unleashed a deluge of lobbying and campaign contributions. They are almost certainly behind big super PAC spending. They pull out all the stops. And against them in corporate America to push back against the polluters stands who? No one. Corporate CEOs talk a big game about decarbonizing their supply chains and transitioning to renewables, and they wield enormous influence in Washington when they want to, but here in this building, where the legislative rubber hits the road, corporate America has been totally, utterly, completely MIA on climate. One set of lobbyists even told my staff that once the corporate tax stuff they cared about got squared away in Build Back Better and was taken off the table, they didn't want to ``rock the boat'' by supporting climate provisions, even though they are provisions the company publicly claims to support. Not one corporate trade group is lifting a finger here in this building on climate--not the banks, despite their own warnings of an economic crash; not the insurance companies, despite the huge checks they write for climate disasters; not Big Tech; not Big Pharma; not anyone. The fossil fuel industry has its choke chain around the Republican Party so tight that industry folks have told me they are scared to press for climate measures, that they might be punished by Republicans working for the fossil fuel industry--punished on the tax and deregulatory and business stuff they really care about. So they are not here. They just aren't. The frustrating thing is that there actually is a way to get to a safe place, to get to where we can hold warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. The key policy is a border-adjustable price on carbon. To get to safety, we need to do more than just that, but there is no pathway to safety without that. It is the necessary but not sufficient safety measure. Take a look at this chart. This was prepared in conjunction with the White House and the leader's office. A lot of eyeballs have looked at this. The green line here is business as usual. We do nothing, and carbon emissions do mostly nothing. This next line down, the orange line, represents our emissions trajectory if we pass the Finance Committee's clean energy tax credit package. That gets us to here. The gray line right below it, the third one down here, is if we could pass a clean electricity standard. The yellow one here is the emissions trajectory if we do both of those things, both the tax credit package and a clean electricity standard. This one--light blue--is a carbon price alone. By the way, it is a modest carbon price that starts at only $15 per ton in 2023 and increases to $70 per ton in 2032 and doesn't cover unleaded gasoline at all. The dark blue line here, the safest line, is all those policies together. To get to safety, we must deploy all of these policies. The more policies you have, the deeper the emissions reductions, the better the chance of safety. But the center pole in the climate policy tent is a carbon price. Pricing carbon reaches every corner of the economy, which will be all-important when the power sector has switched to zero-carbon generation and we need to remedy other polluting sectors. A carbon price fuels innovation. Suddenly, every carbon-reduction strategy has a revenue proposition--no more government-chosen winners and losers. A carbon price raises investment. Growing a low-carbon economy will take trillions in job-producing investment, maybe about $575 billion a year from now until 2050. Carbon pricing sends an investment market signal and produces revenues to support those billions of dollars in private job-creating investment. A carbon price is exportable through a border adjust that will keep China and others from cheating. Last, a carbon price helps to unravel what the International Monetary Fund says is a $660 billion annual subsidy propping up fossil fuels in the United States. Do you want to know why the fossil fuel industry can so easily corrupt American politics? That is your answer. That is 660 billion answers. A $660 billion subsidy every year is one hell of a motive. Once your policies are assembled surrounding the carbon price, you then need a battle plan and the leadership to carry it out. We cannot win legislative victory without setting the conditions for victory. We are up against a fossil fuel armada of dishonest PR campaigns, phony front groups, co-opted trade associations, fake science, and political dark money. We cannot overcome the corrupting forces of the fossil fuel industry without sound countermeasures. Step one is what I am doing here--call out the dark money mischief of the fossil fuel industry. It is a compelling story, actually, and people--voters--don't like being lied to, especially not by big, corrupt, polluting interests. They have been lied to for decades, and they need to know that. If we all exposed the fossil fuel industry pattern of deception the way we years ago exposed as fraud the tobacco industry's pattern of deception, that would open up real political space for the kind of legislative progress the times demand. Over in the House, Representatives Maloney and Khanna are on the case. They are investigating. Hearings are underway. Let's support and amplify them. Next, stop the flow of polluter dark money into our politics. In politics, money corrupts, and dark money corrupts absolutely. Next, rally the rest of corporate America to the banner. If they are too chicken to go first and face the risk of Republican punishment on the stuff they really care about, join together. They can't punish everyone. Corporate America is actually rich enough, if it wanted to, to buy the damned fossil fuel industry, fire the crooks and the PR firms, shut off the money to the front groups and the trade associations, and clean up the industry from the inside. But corporate America not only doesn't do that, it does nothing here in Congress. However we go, we have to get going. Either we act now or we pollute our way to oblivion. Either we summon a serious response or we ``meh'' our way to catastrophe. Either we enact a serious effective climate bill or we lose our chance at a safe climate pathway. I will promise you, that will earn the merited disgust of future generations. We have a moment here to measure up to. We are failing catastrophically, and we are failing for the worst and smallest and most dishonorable of reasons. So when we reignite work on a real climate bill, when we are starting to see real administration climate progress, I will see about sending this battered poster over to the Smithsonian, but if we don't, I will be back here again and again and again to call this Chamber to wake up. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. No. My question was, simply, how long the Senator was going to proceed, given that the schedule for my remarks was at 1:35. So no further questions. I apologize for interrupting. I was just trying to sort out the timing.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. That was the question--how soon that might be, given that we have a 2:15 vote coming up.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, this past weekend is our annual reminder as a country of the courage, suffering, sacrifice, passion, love, and energy that so many of our fellow Americans put into protecting our democracy. When in a democracy, one group of citizens can deliberately, purposefully make it more difficult for another group of citizens to vote, they have put a dagger into that democracy. We cannot let that happen. I am here today to focus, in particular, on one voting right that we have in this country, and that voting right is, when you are voting, to know what the hell is going on around you in that election, to know who is saying what, to know who the players are around you. If we are supposed to sit here, as Americans, and just act like indolent consumers, passive in this democracy, that is not the way it is supposed to work. Citizenship is an office, and that office has duties, and the duties include being informed of what is going on around you. And what is stopping American citizens from knowing what is going on around them is the cascade, the torrent, the Nile River of dark money that has begun to flow into our democracy since Citizens United. It wasn't enough that the Republican Members of the Court let unlimited money flow. They then had to refuse to react when that unlimited dark money went underground, when it went dark, when it became anonymous. They have had chance after chance to fix it and they refuse and we are left with this mess. It matters that citizens know who is talking in a democracy. In my circuit, the First Circuit Court of Appeals--where Jack Reed and I have the honor, occasionally, to recommend nominees to the President--there is a judge who I believe is the dean of the First Circuit Court of Appeals named Bruce Selya. He is a Rhode Islander. He was a Reagan appointee. He is a Republican. He is a very distinguished judge. And he has said: It is crucial that the electorate can understand who is speaking and, thus, to give proper weight to different speakers and messages when deciding how to vote. That crucial right is denied to Americans wholesale because of an unprecedented dark money campaign of interference in our democracy. You see it whenever it is election season. You are watching a television show and suddenly your TV screen is occupied by an advertisement that tells you that somebody is a bum, that somebody is no good, that somebody is terrible, that smears them. And at the end it says, ``This advertisement was brought to you by Americans for peace and puppies and prosperity,'' some completely imaginary group that was cooked up just to launch those advertisements, and whatever filth those advertisements contain is then disappeared with the end of that front group. It is the political equivalent of toilet paper. You flush it when you are done with the filth, and whoever is behind it keeps their hands clean. So we now have a tsunami of slime--as one writer put it--flowing through our country, and it is denying our citizens the most fundamental right they have when they vote, which is to know who the actors are and who is doing what to whom. Well, in this bill is the DISCLOSE Act that would fix that. If you spend more than 10 grand in an election, you have to report it. And I don't care how many shell corporations and donors trusts and phony 501(c)(4)s you line up to blockade your identity, our bill will get through it. It superdrills through however many screens you put up, and the American public will, at last, once again, know who is really talking to them in their elections. Dark money takes away voters' rights to know who is talking to them and what is going on in their democracy. It is a fundamental right. And, unfortunately, it doesn't end there because the other rights that my colleagues have so eloquently talked about--to get to the ballot, to be treated fairly at the ballot, to not be harassed on the way to the ballot, to be able to get a ballot mailed to you--the Republican efforts around the country to attack those rights, to suppress votes those ways, do you know how that is being done? It is being done with dark money. We know it because they have been caught. It is not a matter of debate or dispute. When these enterprises are set up to deprive--what Reverend Warnock calls ``some people''--some people of their right to vote, and when the laws are done so that that is accomplished against, particularly, African-American voters with what one court called ``surgical precision,'' that is not happening at random. It is happening because enormous amounts of anonymous money are flowing into groups to make it happen. And I will close with two examples. One is called Heritage Action, which is--the current state of the art on this is you set up a phony 501(c)(3) and a phony 501(c)(4), and they are a pair. And the money to the 501(c)(3) is deductible, and the political dirty work is done by the 501(c)(4). And Heritage Foundation, which we have all heard about, is the 501(c)(3), and Heritage Action is its 501(c)(4). And Heritage Action was recorded talking to its secret donors. And the person who was making the presentation to the secret donors in April of 2021 said: We worked quietly with the . . . legislature. We got the best practices to them. We helped draft the bills. We made sure activists were calling the state legislators, getting support, showing up at their public hearings, giving testimony. In some cases, we actually [drafted the bills] for them or we have a sentinel-- Think about that word for a minute, a ``sentinel''-- on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe. She said: And we did this with ``little fanfare. Honestly, nobody even noticed. My team looked at each other and we're like, `It can't be that easy.''' Well, the DISCLOSE Act will stop it from being that easy to have an out-of-state, dark money campaign take a State legislature and get them to pass voter suppression laws without the State legislatures even knowing who is behind them. And that is on tape. I am not making this up. The other one that is always worth looking at are our friends at the Honest Elections Project, which actually doesn't exist. What exists is something called the 85 Fund. And the 85 Fund is allowed, under Virginia law, Senator Kaine, to have a fictitious name and to operate as if it were operating under its fictitious name. And it has several, one is the Judicial Crisis Network, which we all know helped stock the Court with rightwing judges, but another one is the Honest Elections Project. The Honest Elections Project and the Honest Election Project Action are the pair that work on this. Money has poured into this effort, and the Honest Elections Project has been smack in the middle of it. In 2012, 77 percent of its money came through donors' trusts, which is a great identity-laundering device for rightwing dark money; in 2013, 96 percent; in 2014, 88 percent; in 2015, 84 percent; in 2016, 82.6 percent; in 2017, 93 percent; in 2018, 88.8 percent; and in 2020, the year that the Honest Elections Project waged dark money voter suppression, the 85 Fund received over $45 million, identity laundered through donors' trusts. And much of that money came from one single $19 million contribution. Somebody wrote a $19 million check to suppress votes. Folks, if we don't get to the bottom of this, we are going to have a real problem on our hands. And when we get to the bottom of this, the American public will be with us because they hate this stuff. You can be a Bernie Bro or you can be a Tea Partier and you can disagree on everything, and you agree that big dark money corruption has no place in American democracy. This is the issue where Senator McConnell's political minions met with the Koch brothers' political minions, and they did whatever ``minioning'' they do together. And their conversation got out to Jane Mayer, who wrote about it, and this was the issue that they said to each other: We can't dirty this up. No matter how hard we try to put a good spin on this, voters hate dark money corruption. Our voters hate it just as much as their voters. So this is our chance to fix this to take out the dark money behind the voter suppression effort in all these States. This isn't happening, folks. It is being done. And we have got to pay attention to who is doing it. And when we do, we will restore that fundamental voting right of all Americans to know who is talking to them in their elections--to have ours be a democracy without masks, without subterfuge, and without dark money. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Thank you for using us as a unit of measure.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Gladly.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Thank you, Leader. Much appreciated.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, with my distinguished colleague from Utah here, I would just--before I get to my remarks--suggest that there may be an exception to his rule that when a piece of legislation is only sponsored by Members of one party it can't be serious legislation; and, in my view, that would include climate legislation, where it has been extremely hard to get Republicans to cosponsor any serious climate bill. And I think that has nothing to do with the seriousness of the legislation and everything to do with the influence of the fossil fuel industry. But that said, Mr. President, I am here to speak for the 11th time in my series discussing the scheme through which a bunch of big, anonymous donors captured our Supreme Court. Today, I am going to talk about the Biden Supreme Court commission, which could have done a useful, even authoritative investigation of the scheme and all its terrible effects at the Court but which, regrettably, ended up as an exercise in ineffectual time-killing. I have laid out the scheme in detail in earlier speeches in this series. In a nutshell, there is a very well-studied phenomenon of regulatory capture, sometimes called agency capture, through which big industries try to capture and control the regulatory agencies that are supposed to be policing them. Well, in the same way, big, rightwing donor interests set out to capture the Supreme Court. And they did it. It worked. Now, the Court's 6-to-3, big-donor-chosen supermajority is delivering massive wins for those donor interests, and the American people can smell what Justice Sotomayor aptly characterized as the ``stench'' of a captured Court. The problems of the Court are real, and they demand action. Enter the Court commission. Charged with thinking through solutions to the Court's many problems, the commission was perfectly positioned to report on the scheme and offer a blueprint for restoring the Court. But its final findings, released last month, offered instead what I have called faculty-lounge pabulum. Sure, yes, they gestured toward the need for a code of ethics for the Justices, which makes sense because Supreme Court Justices have the lowest ethics standard of any top Federal official. But pointing that out is a little bit like pointing out a flat tire on a totaled car. Consider the facts the commission ignored: A private, partisan, anonymously funded organization--the Federalist Society--handpicked the last three Supreme Court Justices. President Trump and his White House counsel admitted they had ``in-sourced''--their word--the Federalist Society to the White House to choose their nominees. Senator Hatch, our former colleague, former chairman of the Judiciary, was asked if this role was outsourced to the Federalist Society, and he said, ``Damn right.'' No other democracy in the world has had such a ridiculous system for selecting Judges. That is bad. It gets worse. Anonymous donations helped rightwing front groups mount a $400 million push to capture and control the Court with zero transparency into who gave the money or-- more importantly--what matters they had before the Court whose Justices they were installing. That is disgraceful. And trust me, nobody spends $400 million without a motive. There is more. Orchestrated flotillas of amici curiae, so-called friends of the court, funded by dark money, instruct the Court which way to rule, and they score virtually perfect success with the Republican appointees whom dark money ushered onto the Court. The Court has even allowed peculiar fast lanes for dark money groups to speed cases to the Court for Justices to decide favored, politically helpful cases. In some cases, the Justices even invited the case to be rushed to the Court. And this mess culminates in a notable, troubling statistical record. The Roberts Court delivered more than 80--80--partisan 5-to-4 decisions benefiting big Republican donor interests. The record in that category of decisions was 80 to 0, and that is before the Court's new 6-3, donor-chosen supermajority. That is a lot for the Commission to leave out. The Commissioners can't claim they did not have fair notice. Several of us wrote to the Commission to point out the scheme's telltale footprints. The Commission even received testimony about another pernicious issue: the Court's reliance on fake facts supplied by dark money amici curiae, especially in politically important cases for the rightwing donors like Shelby County and Citizens United. Somehow, none of this made it into the Commission's discussion. Ducking all these facts was no small feat. As the Presiding Officer knows, one of the first exercises that law professors give their first- year law students is called issue spotting. You get a case, and you are asked to go through it and list all the potential issues it raises, spot the issues. Well, these issues all sat in plain view before the Commission. Yet the Commission flunked the rudimentary law school test of issue spotting. Now, part of the problem was conflict of interest. Many members of this Commission argue before the Court and need its good will for their bread and butter. Others are law professors eager to plant their students in prestigious Supreme Court clerkships. For many members, rocking the boat could have unhappy consequences. Clearly, though, some Commission members tried and failed to get these issues considered. Two members--retired Federal Judge Nancy Gertner from the Presiding Officer's home State and Harvard Law School's Laurence Tribe--had an op-ed ready for print the day the report was released. They called for a serious overhaul of the Court due to what they called ``the dubious legitimacy of the way some Justices were appointed,'' due to that stench of bipartisanship Justice Sotomayor has observed, and due to what they called the ``anti- egalitarian direction'' of the Court's political decisions on voting rights and dark money.'' Judge Gertner and Professor Tribe wrote: Though fellow commissioners and others have voiced concern about the impact that a report implicitly criticizing the Supreme Court might have on judicial independence and thus judicial legitimacy, we do not share that concern. Far worse are the dangers that flow from ignoring the court's real problems--of pretending conditions have not changed; of insisting improper efforts to manipulate the court's membership have not taken place; of looking the other way when the court seeks to undo decades of precedent relied on by half the population to shape their lives just because, given the new majority, it has the votes. Judge Gertner and Professor Tribe rightly warned that we can't afford more decisions like Shelby County and Citizens United, which would put the Court on what they called a ``one-way trip from a defective but still hopeful democracy toward a system in which the few corruptly govern the many, something between autocracy and oligarchy.'' Think about that. People distinguished enough to be appointed to this Commission by the President feel that this Court is on a one-way trip from America being a defective but still hopeful democracy toward a system in which the few corruptly govern the many. They concluded by saying this: Instead of serving as a guardrail against going over that cliff, our Supreme Court has become an all-too-willing accomplice-- Accomplice-- in that disaster. All of that was kept out of the report. The fact is evident that dark money political forces had a controlling and anonymous role in the makeup of the present Court. You can't dispute that. It is not surprising that the donor interests who accomplished that should want their due. As I said, you don't spend $400 million on this scheme for nothing. Just a few days before the Commission unveiled the final draft of its report and right after oral arguments in the big abortion cases that are pending before the Court, there was a telling incident. FOX News host Laura Ingraham lost her cool, and she said on plain television the quiet part out loud. Here is what she said: We have six Republican appointees on this court, after all the money that has been raised, the Federalist Society, all these big fat cat dinners--I'm sorry, I'm pissed about this-- Excuse me for that language, but it is a direct quote-- if this court with six justices cannot do the right thing here . . . then I think it's time to do what Robert Bork said we should do, which is to circumscribe the jurisdiction of this court and if they want to blow it up, then that's the way to change things finally. Let's deconstruct that little outburst for a second. First, it basically admits to the scheme: ``all the money that has been raised''--that is the $400 million I talked about; ``the Federalist Society''--that is the big donor-controlled turnstile for rightwing advancement to the Supreme Court; and ``all these big fat cat dinners''--wow. I would love to know more about that. We do know that Justices have taken undisclosed vacations in the company of people with interests before the Court, so what is a little ``big fat cat dinner'' among friends, huh? Second, that little outburst is a flat-out threat to the Court: Decide the big abortion cases the way we want, the six of you, or we ``circumscribe the jurisdiction of this court''; ``blow it up''; ``change things finally.'' There is a particularly thin-skinned Federalist Society Justice who has been giving speeches condemning an imaginary threat I supposedly made to ``bully'' the Court in a brief maybe read by a couple of hundred people. It didn't actually happen that way, but never mind. Like I said, he is particularly thin-skinned. But now here comes this plain threat: ``circumscribe the jurisdiction of this court''; ``blow it up''; ``change things finally'' if we don't get the outcome we deserve after all of our money spent through the Federalist Society. So I am waiting to see what reaction from this Justice there is when this real threat comes, but from the rightwing FOX News channel. The FOX News outburst was particularly rash and indiscreet, but the Republican Justices get marching orders like this all the time at the fat-cat dinners, on junkets with the rightwing donor class, and from the orchestrated flotillas of dark money amici curiae that encircle the Court for big cases launched by the big donors. The Justices are constantly reminded of who propelled them to the Court and what they are supposed to deliver. And the truth is, the record reveals, the statistics make plain the Republican Justices do deliver over and over and over again--more than 80 partisan wins for scheme donors in those 5-to-4--and now we can expect 6-to-3--partisan decisions. So the Biden Court Commission missed its moment. It ducked all of this. So on we must go through the stench of partisan capture of the Court, and on I will go exposing the scheme that did it. To be continued. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.