Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I have 11 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. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, as we go over the wonderful things that Build Back Better offers--including tax benefits for families with children, support for home care and childcare for family members, lower prescription drug costs--I want to focus on a particular area, which is the addiction crisis, which grinds on in Rhode Island. I think every Member of this body knows a family who has been touched by this crisis. I remember visiting the small town of Burrillville, RI, a close-knit community. People know one another there. On January 1, 2015, no one would have known that half a dozen people would die in Burrillville of drug overdoses in the next 3 months. That went through that community just in a heartbreaking wave, and it remains burdened by addiction and overdose. We have made a lot of gains since then. The CARA bill that Senator Portman and I did, CARA 2.0, which was baked into the SUPPORT Act, shifted the way we think about addiction so we don't see it as a moral failing. We recognize its medical nature. We recognize, frankly, the noble nature of the path to recovery that people have to walk. We invested in prevention and education and treatment. But still there is a massive gap that remains between the needs of families who have a member who is facing addiction and the care and support that we give them, and Build Back Better makes some really important steps for those families--first, for new mothers in recovery. A new mom has a lot going on: caring for a newborn, coping with a potential substance abuse complication for that newborn, and caring for herself in her often deadly battle with addiction. Build Back Better would grow the workforce specializing in that care for moms. The Medicaid Reentry Act, which I did with Senator Baldwin, is also in the mix to provide Medicaid coverage to people as they get out of jail and prison. We showed in Rhode Island that these programs dramatically reduce overdoses and deaths in the weeks following release from incarceration. Steady access to care through Medicaid will save lives. There is a boost to the Minority Fellowship Program because it is demonstrable that a more diverse workforce produces better outcomes for patients and families. Finally, the peer recovery coach is a personal favorite of mine. We are pioneering this in Rhode Island. These are people who have walked the path of addiction and recovery, and they can relate to people who are struggling in a way that you and I might not be able to. Their role, after an overdose or in a crisis, to get people onto the path of recovery is wonderfully important. All of the other things we are doing will actually create more stable lives. When events happen that knock people off of the path of recovery, having a stable life actually allows for a better shot at recovery and work around relapse. So there is a lot to love in Build Back Better, and I want people to know that we did not forget those folks who are struggling with addiction or walking the noble path of recovery. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I want to talk a moment about my REDUCE Act, which is the act to reduce plastic pollution, of which we have a lot. Humans have created 8 billion tons of plastic, and it is all over the place. It is in our water. It is in our rivers. It is in our food. The Presiding Officer is from Colorado. As he knows, there was a study done that tested the rain falling in Colorado that showed that there were microplastics in the raindrops in Colorado. So we have a plastics problem, and this is a bill whose intention is to solve that plastics problem. I want to have you think about three numbers while I am making this speech: 2 percent, 10 percent, and 2050; 2 percent, 10 percent, and 2050. What is 2 percent? Two percent is how much recycled plastic the plastics industry uses in single-use, disposable, throwaway plastic. We had a hearing in the Environment and Public Works Committee, led by Chairman Carper. We had witnesses in who were experts. They said it is actually less than 2 percent. So the plastics industry is comfortable with a business model in which they are only using recycled plastic for less than 2 percent of their production of single-use, disposable stuff. They will then say: Well, yeah, but we don't need to worry about that because then it goes into the recycling bin. Well, first of all, that is not much help if you are only going to use 2 percent recycled plastic in your plastic manufacturing and then 98 percent is all new fossil fuel-based plastic. But here we get to the second number, 10 percent. When you put plastic in that blue bin and send it out to be recycled, less than 10 percent of that plastic actually gets recycled. Some people have said 6 percent. Some people have said 8 percent. Some people have said 9 percent. But pretty much everybody agrees that less than 10 percent of what you put in the recycling bin to recycle ever gets recycled. And the plastics industry is cool with that too. The plastics industry is cool with 2 percent recycling content in their throughput, in their supply, and they are comfortable with 90 percent or more of your recycled plastics sent out in the blue bins never being recycled. This brings me to the third number, 2050. Twenty-fifty is the year which, on present trends, will produce the following state of affairs: There will be more waste plastic floating in the Earth's oceans by mass than there will be living fish. That is the trajectory we are on with an industry that is totally content to use only 2 percent recycled plastic in its production and to have the recycling system recycle less than 10 percent of the plastic that goes in. That is where we end up by 2050. And if we are content in this room to confer on our children and grandchildren a world in which there is more waste plastic floating around than there is living fish, then shame on us. This is a trajectory we have to change, and my bill will change it. But, of course, the plastic industry doesn't love this. They are happy with using only 2 percent recycled plastic in their production. They are happy with less than 10 percent of recycled plastic in the blue bin ever getting recycled. They don't seem to give a red hot damn about the trajectory we are on with where we are going to be with waste plastic in the oceans. But they obviously care a lot about the bill because if you lived in Washington, DC, and you got the Washington Post on Wednesday, September 22, you got this little gem tucked in your newspaper on the front. It is a very glossy, multicolored handout, and it says: Stop the plastic tax. Keep everyday goods affordable. And then it shows a whole bunch of everyday goods: a bicycle helmet, reusable plastic containers that you use in your refrigerator to put stuff away when you are putting it back in the fridge, sneakers, a plastic child's toy, and a baby diaper. Not one of those things is covered by our plastics tax--not one of them--not personal hygiene products like a diaper and not multiuse products like a child's toy or a sneaker or a bicycle helmet or the plastic containers that you store stuff in in your refrigerator. If you flip it over, they go at it even further. There is a child's baby seat. There is solar paneling. There is a toothbrush. There is a cellphone. And there is a little package of tomatoes in Saran wrap in one of those foam Styrofoam containers. The one thing on this whole page that this plastics pollution fee would touch is that disposable bit of foam. And if you would rather have that in the ocean instead of being recycled, fine; vote against this bill. But if you would like to see that kind of junk get properly disposed of, you need to support the act. So why do you think the industry got this so wrong? Bicycle helmets, children's toys, car seats, toothbrushes? Do you think they actually didn't know what was in the bill or is it possible that they are just lying about the bill? And what conclusion do you draw when an industry is lying about a piece of legislation? The conclusion that I draw is that they know they would lose if they argued on the truth, and so they lie. And they spent a lot of money on this. This is, you know, glossy. This is multicolor. We in politics, we send out mailers. This is not inexpensive. You put this onto every Washington Post--that is a big deal. They flooded the DC metropolitan area with this glossy pack of lies. So let's just take a quick look at some of the stuff that they have been saying. Their myth is that the REDUCE Act affects all plastic products. No. Read the bill. It is a fee on single-use plastics that targets the fossil fuel companies that make the fossil fuel feedstock for those single-use disposable plastic products. All you have to do is read the bill to see that. I don't know how we could make that any clearer. We specifically exempt anything other than single-use disposable plastics. Further, if it is a single-use disposable plastic that is used in healthcare, that is used in hospitals, in patient treatments, we understand that; we exempt that too. It is the plastic spoons and the straws and the wrapping and the foam containers and all the rest of that junk that you can walk down any beach in America and see; that is the junk we are trying to see gets properly recycled by charging a fee on the people who are throwing this stuff out into the environment and not recycling it--or at least 98 percent not recycling it. Here is the other myth: The REDUCE Act disadvantages U.S. businesses; we will fail in international competition if we do this. Not true. If you are importing plastic, you have to pay just the same way as if you used U.S.-made plastic. This is a fee on plastic that touches the U.S. economy if it is going to be single-use disposable, and we are going to need to think about recycling it. It applies to any company doing business in the United States and imports from foreign companies. So that is another made-up myth. And the last one, which is really--maybe it is designed to annoy me, but it is that the fee on plastics to encourage recycling would actually harm our climate; that this is an anti-climate piece of legislation. The fact of the matter is that by the middle of the century, plastics will account for about a quarter of global oil consumption. This is what the fossil fuel industry is banking on for its future as we start driving electric cars that are nicer than internal combustion cars and cheaper and easier to maintain. By 2030, greenhouse gas emissions from new plastics production will reach 1.3 billion tons--1.3 billion tons--which is equivalent to running 300 coal-fired powerplants. That doesn't sound to me much like sustainability. This REDUCE Act is a fair and sensible and effective response to plastic pollution that is filling up our oceans, our rivers, and even our raindrops. The costs will be paid by the fossil fuel industry where the profit is made. And by the way, when they try to push that cost down to consumers, good luck, ExxonMobil, telling Coca-Cola: We are raising our prices to you. Coca-Cola and all of its beverage companies have got pretty significant market clout, and they might just say: Not so fast, pal; you eat that cost. This is your mess; you clean it up. Anyway, it is a good discussion to have because 2 percent of the plastics stream being recycled, 10 percent or less of plastic in the blue bins ever actually being recycled, and an ocean that has equal parts waste plastic and fish in it by 2050 is not acceptable. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I return to the Senate floor to again discuss the scheme to capture our Supreme Court; in this case, it will be through the lens of how recent Justices got on the Court. And I will choose Brett Kavanaugh. I think we all remember the famous list--the Federalist Society list--that Donald Trump promised to follow in Supreme Court appointments. The first interesting thing about Brett Kavanaugh is that he was not on the list of candidates that Donald Trump had offered up-- this list that bought peace between house of Trump and house of Koch. Trump had promised he would appoint off that scheme-approved Federalist Society list. He didn't, and yet no one complained. That is a telltale right there. There was no complaining because Brett Kavanaugh knew this terrain. He knew the central operative at the heart of this scheme, Leonard Leo. He had worked on judicial nominations in the Bush White House with Leonard Leo, who coordinated big donors' support for judicial nominees. I have described before a judge who bemoaned to me what he called his colleagues auditioning--auditioning for higher office, auditioning for the Supreme Court. ``Auditioning'' was a telltale word that stuck with me. You don't audition without someone to audition to. Well, Kavanaugh knew the guy at the center of the scheme, and he knew that the donor turnstile to the Supreme Court was run out of the Federalist Society. So Kavanaugh not only auditioned with Leo; he auditioned at the Federalist Society. And no one auditioned harder than Brett Kavanaugh. As a circuit judge, he campaigned through 27 Federalist Society events. I think he set the record for auditioning at Federalist Society events. He knew who, and he knew where. And he also knew what the big donors wanted. So he made sure his circuit-court opinions signaled his chops. On abortion, Garza v. Hargan, OK to force a teenager to wait indefinitely for an abortion as the clock ran; check. On guns, Heller v. District of Columbia, a dissent in the follow-up case to the Supreme Court Heller decision--in his case, one even more extreme than Scalia; check. For polluters, PHH v. CFPB, waving the Federalist Society's unitary executive banner, even saying that regulatory agencies are a significant threat--I am quoting him here, regulatory agencies, the things that protect us from pollution and cheaters, are a ``significant threat to individual liberty,'' if you are a polluter; check. And most important to this dark money scheme, EMILY's List v. FEC, where he said the front groups ``are constitutionally entitled to raise and spend unlimited money in support of candidates for elected office'' because it is ``implausible that contributions to independent expenditure political committees are corrupting.'' Yeah, how could that possibly be corrupting? Check. So this is behavior. In nature, when you see behavior, you can draw conclusions. When you see, for instance, a vulture wheeling, you can expect something dead below. It is not always true; the vulture may just be wheeling in an updraft eddy. But when you get a number of vultures wheeling, it is pretty reliable that there is something dead below. And when so many judges start auditioning for advancement that their behavior acquires a name from other judges, you can be pretty sure there is an audience for their auditioning. And Kavanaugh knew that audience. His relationship with Leonard Leo, his hustling of Federalist Society events, his insider knowledge of the Republican selection process and the big donors, and his ardent display of his wares in all the ways big donors would want, was a winning combination. So Leonard Leo hand-walked him around the Trump Federalist Society list and straight to the top of the judicial selection pile, and no one with a hand in the Trump-Koch deal that spawned the Federalist Society list voiced an objection. Kavanaugh had auditioned his way around the list, and the scheme could not have been happier with the outcome. All of that behavior is telling. There is a scheme, and Kavanaugh knew how to play it. Now that the scheme had its man, they would fight for him. They did not know how hard the fight would be, until Dr. Christine Blasey Ford came forward with a tale of youthful sexual assault by Kavanaugh and a drunken buddy. But even before that, there were telltales of the pressure to get Kavanaugh onto the Court. Thousands of pages of records from his White House days were withheld; blank pages stamped ``Constitutional Privilege'' were presented to us on the committee. They couldn't even bring themselves to call it ``executive privilege,'' the claim was so far-fetched. ``Constitutional Privilege'' was an invented phrase, but they knew no Republican would object. The pressure was on. The play had been signaled. The money behind the scheme was the money behind the Republican Party, so Democrats could complain, but the Republican wall would hold. All our objections and requests would be overruled. Another example of signaling from nature, you can tell a lot about the wind by looking at the water, as sailors know. You don't have to feel it; you can understand the wind by looking at the water. Little wavelets show where gusts of wind can be found on a still day. The water darkens where there are stronger puffs on windy days. As the wind grows, the waves grow bigger, and then whitecaps form. And as the wind strengthens more, wind lines appear--Langmuir circulation, the scientists call it--aligned with the wind's direction. And in a full gale, spindrift, foam from the tops of the waves--spindrift blows off the wave tops. In the same way that you can tell a lot about the pressure of the wind by looking at the behavior of the water, you can tell a lot about the pressure of the scheme by looking at the behavior of the Republicans--particularly in the gale-force controversy over Dr. Blasey Ford's testimony. By all rights, in any normal world, Kavanaugh would have been withdrawn. The fact that he wasn't is a telling signal of pressures afoot. Allegations of sexual violence motivate domestic violence and victims groups, groups which Senators do not ordinarily choose to cross. Is one judge worth that? Why not just pick another? Yet they went forward--another telling signal of the pressure. Senators usually prize their chance to question Supreme Court nominees, yet Republicans gave that up to a female prosecutor sent to disarm Dr. Blasey Ford's testimony--yet another signal. Of course that didn't work. The witness's testimony was clear and credible. The female prosecutor was sent packing. Republican Senators were left in the touchy position of having to disbelieve Dr. Blasey Ford without any basis for disbelieving her. Yet only one Republican Senator buckled--another signal. Senator Flake demanded some investigation, and here, the gale force pressure kicked in. This could not go on. Kavanaugh was too great a prize. The FBI was pressured to do a fake investigation. That is a fire alarm of a signal. We saw many signs of things awry. For a while, early on, the FBI became impervious to information. To put it mildly, that is not the FBI's customary disposition. An FBI that suddenly becomes impervious to information is quite a signal. The FBI was told which few witnesses could be interviewed. The interviews were cursory and terse. Other witnesses who came forward were ignored or turned away. Even when Dr. Blasey Ford and other witnesses were trolled by the ``flying monkeys'' of the far right so venomously that Dr. Blasey Ford had to stop teaching, had to leave her home, had to hide herself under the protection of a security detail, witnesses still tried to come forward. So ultimately, under pressure, the FBI announced a tip line for witnesses to contact, but the tip line was a fake. The FBI has procedures for things, and it has tip line procedures. The FBI did not follow its tip line procedures. It appears the FBI did not follow up on any of the tips that came in on the Kavanaugh tip line. Instead, the FBI routed the Kavanaugh-related tips to the White House Counsel's Office for a decent burial. We on the committee were ultimately allowed, in a classified setting--classified setting--2 hours of what you could call speed dating with documents to look through pile after pile of documents--no notes allowed, no photos allowed, no copies allowed. One of those piles, though, was tip line results, so we know that tips came in. The FBI admits thousands of tips came in. None were followed up. FBI statements at the time said they were following standard procedure. What they meant by that, which they later admitted, is that in background investigations, they are agents of the White House and under White House political direction, so their regular procedures did not apply. The standard procedure they said they were following was the procedure of not following the standard procedures, if you can get around that verbal somersault. What the FBI did not say is that, aside from standard investigative procedures they did not follow, there are also standard FBI procedures for background investigations. The FBI is a procedure-bound institution. We are still digging and we are going to keep digging, but it looks like they didn't follow those background investigation procedures either. For apparently the first and only time in a background investigation, I believe an FBI ``investigation'' was put under the operational control of the White House so that the White House could craft, with the FBI, the appearance of an FBI investigation without any real investigating. The kind of pressure it takes to do that is intense. That is gale force. That is the spindrift flying. It takes a gale of pressure to have the FBI violate so many of its own procedures, to meekly go along with the White House's abuse of the FBI's longstanding reputation for thoroughness and integrity. That is the kind of gale- force pressure the scheme can mount. The scheme had to have its prize. Republicans even turned their guns on polite, honorable, bipartisan Dianne Feinstein. She was accused of a corrupt plot to sandbag Kavanaugh. Senator Feinstein is not capable of such a thing, and everyone knows it, so this attack on her was yet another signal. There was a new narrative to impose. Kavanaugh becomes the victim, wicked Democrats become the wrongdoers, Dr. Blasey Ford and her testimony get swept aside, and, in a well-whipped stampede of partisan tribal anger and grievance, Kavanaugh sweeps onto the Court. Another signal that I am still seeing now is the effort of rightwing media to cover this all up. After Senator Coons and I pressed the FBI on this bogus investigation, the National Review and other rightwing outlets immediately published articles to tidy things up. Their main source seems to be a former Republican Judiciary staffer who tweeted and then deleted ``Unfazed and determined. We will confirm Judge Kavanaugh'' just a few days after the Blasey Ford investigation came to light, before this so-called investigation was concluded. The coverup article suggests three things: First, hey, we had a chance to read all of the over 4,500 tips the FBI received; second, there was a 400- or a 600---it varies depending on the article--page FBI report assessing the tips and exonerating Kavanaugh that was circulated to all Senators, and all we had to do was read it; and third, that had there been anything wrongful or incriminating or derogatory that was found, it could have been referred for further investigation. Let's look at those three claims. First, this ``open access'' to those documents was the 2-hour window I was talking about where we could go in and speed-date with raw FBI documents in piles and interview reports--again, no notes, no copies, no pictures; just piles of documents in a room we had to walk through and clear out of--and if we wanted, we could return to review the documents when votes on cloture and confirmation were ongoing. I am not making that up. The supposed report, this 400- or 600- or whatever page report, is actually a 28-page document compiled by Republican Senate Judiciary Committee staff, not the FBI, with hundreds of pages of attachments to thicken it up. Those 28 pages are pure political whitewash that cast aside the credible claims offered to the FBI for further investigation but altogether ignored. Saying that this Republican committee report-- so-called--was available to Senate Democrats is like saying we should have turned on FOX News for the lowdown on these tips--not actually. As to the idea that we could have referred anything suspicious for further examination, I really don't know what these rightwing outlets are talking about. If they meant the FBI, that is not true. The FBI and the White House had agreed that the investigation was over as far as they were concerned. If they mean the Senate Judiciary Committee, that is as laughable as the 28-page whitewash. One last signal here. The FBI continues to dodge questions about this investigation. It was over 2 years ago that Senator Coons and I asked simple, direct questions about the tip line. Only this summer did we receive the first smidgeon of a response. The response deflected us to an MOU between the White House and the FBI, which, when we dug around and found it, which we had to do ourselves, proved not to substantiate what we were being told. So we repeated our questions and repeated our questions, and last week, Director Wray appeared in Senate Judiciary and promised answers in 2 weeks. We will see. As a prosecutor, I know those cases where you can't go forward, for a victim, with charges. There could be innumerable reasons, but sometimes you just can't. In those unfortunate cases, it can matter a great deal to the victim that she at least got an honest and thorough investigation of her claim. Dr. Blasey Ford was denied even that. The FBI sacrificed her to the gale-force political pressure applied by the scheme to get this well-auditioned nominee into place. And let's get real. You don't apply gale-force political pressure for judges who are just going to call balls and strikes. Four hundred million dollars--$400 million--has been spent in dark money on this Court-capture scheme. For $400 million, you don't want balls and strikes. You want judges who will throw the game for you. You want what you paid for--a captured Court. And if you look at its track record, that is this Court. It is the Court that dark money built, and it is delivering. To be continued. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, a short word on dark money. When the Republican justices on the Supreme Court opened the floodgates of unlimited money in the disgraceful Citizens United decision, that suddenly made something new very important, and that was to hide who you are when you are spending the money. If the biggest check you can write is $5,000, there is no great premium in hiding who you are. When you can write a $5 million check to back a candidate, suddenly hiding who you are becomes extremely valuable and salient. So, suddenly, this became very real. But those Justices who had opened the door to unlimited money, when they made that decision, in order to justify that decision, they had to say that the spending had to be transparent. Otherwise, the Citizens United decision would not have worked in the constitutional scheme. They had to say that. But for the next decade, what did they do about it? Case after case came before them where the dark money problem was raised. We rode through a billion dollars in dark money being spent in our elections. This was on the front page of the newspaper. This was being done in plain view. And what did the Republican Justices on the Supreme Court do to enforce their own stated requirement of transparency? Not one thing. And so we have had a decade of corruption of government by billionaire interests who can hide who they are and operate through an enormous phalanx of phony front groups whom they have stood up. And if you want to know how real this is, look at what we have had to do in the reconciliation measure to address climate change--because when I got here, there were Republicans willing to address climate change. We had bill after bill in the Senate that were bipartisan and serious and sincere. That stopped dead in January of 2010. When Citizens United was decided, the dark money spigots opened, and the fossil fuel industry behind them enforced compliance across the entire Republican Party. If you crossed the fossil fuel industry on climate change, if you are Bob Inglis, you were out, you were done. If you lined up with them and did what they said, in came tens of millions of dollars in dark money to support you. It was a devil's bargain, and it cost us a lost decade on climate change. And now we have to go forward, sadly, in a partisan way to solve this problem. That is the pressure of dark money in our politics. It is behind the capture of the Supreme Court. It is behind voter suppression. This is demonstrable stuff, and we have got to put an end to it. And it is a tragedy and a disgrace that we can't go to cleaning up the dark money mess. My Republican colleagues and their dark money groups are actually at the point now where they are accusing us of taking dark money. They are accusing Democrats of being the dark money party. Well, we just settled that question tonight. Democrats want to clean it up. They want to protect it. It is as simple as that. That is all you need to know. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, just yesterday, the world's scientists offered an unequivocal warning to us about the condition of our planet. Every single one of us has a home State university that teaches climate science, and if we ask them, they will confirm that warning; and yet we relentlessly subsidize the fossil fuel industry, which floats already on a $600 billion annual subsidy in this country, according to the International Monetary Fund. Enough is enough. Our grid operators almost everywhere do a good job with reliability, and we have just added billions of dollars to improve grid reliability. There is no reason whatsoever to put another thumb on the scales for this already heavily subsidized industry when most of these blackouts and brownouts are driven by extreme weather caused by the climate change from their pollution. I urge a ``no'' vote.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 107, S. 1917.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I am delighted to follow my distinguished chairman on the Finance Committee as he gives assurances about our important work on climate change. The majority leader has announced that the final vote on the bipartisan infrastructure package will be tomorrow at 11 a.m., and we will then roll into the rather ignominious spectacle of the Senate known as vote-arama. What vote-arama does, however, it allows us to go to budget reconciliation, which allows us to pass measures with a simple majority. We should do that bearing in mind what just came out--the latest IPCC report on climate change. It is getting increasingly dire. The IPCC report uses words like ``unequivocal,'' ``unprecedented,'' ``irreversible.'' Unequivocal is the link between fossil fuel pollution and the climate damage we are doing to our oceans and atmosphere--unequivocal. Unprecedented. We talk about unprecedented around here if it hasn't happened in a decade. They talk about unprecedented across many centuries or many thousands of years. We are undoing the basic operating systems of our planet as humankind has come to know them. Irreversible means, for some of this, there is no going back. We were warned and warned and warned. We ignored it and ignored it and ignored it, and now we are in it. We can make it less bad, but parts are irreversible. As one United Nations spokesman said, this is red alert for humanity. It doesn't take the IPCC or the U.N. or the universities in our home States or our environmental community to tell us this. All we have to do is look around. Look at the wildfires that are tearing through the West. Senator Padilla was here earlier today talking about what is going on in California. Here is a report from California, from the head of the Plumas National Forest, its supervisor: We are seeing truly frightening fire behavior, I don't know how to overstate that. We have a lot of veteran firefighters who have served for 20, 30 years and have never seen behavior like this, especially day after day, and the conditions we're in. So we really are in unchartered territory around some of these extreme, large fires and the behavior we're seeing. That is the report from the front of the wildfires. But we are not just in unchartered territory with wildfires; we are in unchartered territory with respect to flooding. Here is what we are predicting in Rhode Island. Right now, this is the northern part of my State. Everything you see here that is a bright-blue color, that is land right now. People live there. People have businesses there. People have recreation there. There are things that people do that are part of their lives there, and it all disappears under current predictions of sea level rise. It disappears This is a place called Warwick Neck. It becomes Warwick Neck Island. This is a place called Poppasquash Point. It becomes two little islands off of Bristol, and Bristol becomes its own island. Barrington gains sort of the Barrington Great Salt Lake in the middle of it, and now you have an island along what is now Barrington's southern coast. We stop being Rhode Island, and we become the Rhode Island Archipelago. That is a big change, and if I can stop it, I am going to. Drought. You have seen the pictures of the western lakes at alltime lows, and the dependence of those Western States on water is acute. The hurricane cycle we are already in has warnings about how serious the coming hurricane season is going to be. If you step down to God's creatures, you have manatees that are dying in unprecedented numbers in Florida. Off the northwest coast, in the Pacific Ocean, you have the humble tetrapod, a tiny, small oceanic snail that just happens to be a big part of the bottom of the ocean food chain. Half of the tetrapods sampled have severe shell damage because of ocean acidification, which is happening because the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide, and it turns acidic when it happens. I have proven that little experiment from this desk early in the morning once. Our Atlantic fisheries are all in flux, all moving. Our Connecticut and Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts lobster fisheries pretty much collapsed. Species that farmers didn't used to see are now turning up in our waters. There were these horrible stories about the heat that Chairman Wyden spoke about. Small birds get so disoriented in the heat as fledglings that they jump out of their nests to get away and then, of course, become prey and incapable of getting back to their nests on the ground. And birds generally and insect populations generally are crashing. We think about this very often in terms of looking back at what we have been through, and we are told over and over again and we know from our own experience that this past year has been the worst in the last 10 years or the last 20 years across all of these measures. But I want you to think about this. Yes, it has been the worst year in the last 10 or 20 years, but here is what else we know and here is what the IPCC report warns us: It is the best year of the next 10 or 20. This is getting worse, period--end of story. We can slow down it getting worse, and we can slowly turn it around, but the disasters we are seeing now are child's play compared to what is coming. So action is now necessary, and thankfully, our timing is such that we have a reconciliation measure starting tomorrow that gives us the tools to take action. We have to do this now, and unfortunately, we have to do this alone. There are three sad facts about our predicament. One is, we can't count on Republicans. If we lose the House next year, as people are predicting, to gerrymandered States, we are done getting serious about climate because we know perfectly well that since the Citizens United decision, no Republican has gotten on a serious climate bill in the Senate--not one. It used to be bipartisan. John McCain ran for President on a climate plan that was very good. There were three or four different serious climate bills kicking around before Citizens United. But then Citizens United came. Unlimited money came. The fossil fuel industry used unlimited money, and they shut down the Republican Party on climate. They said: We are tolerating no dissent any longer. You are all going to line up and do as you are told. If you don't do what you are told, we will do what we did to Bob Inglis--take him out in a primary. And if you do as you are told, we will send boatloads of dark money to throw into elections through super PACs. You have a party that is hip deep in fossil fuel money and has a decade--a lost decade--in which it would do nothing serious about climate. So, unfortunately, and to the great sorrow of my friend John Warner, who passed away recently, and John McCain and others who worked hard before this when the Republican Party was less dependent on fossil fuel money, unfortunately, we have to do it alone. We can't count on the fossil fuel industry to mend its ways. They have been at a decade of lying. They built this, an entire web of phony-baloney front groups all paid for with fossil fuel money--in the hundreds of millions, billions of dollars--to put out fake science, to hide who they are behind the dark money, behind these front groups. They ran an enormous corrupt scheme to fool Americans and block progress here in this building so that they could keep polluting. And now we are supposed to count on them? No way. They still haven't come clean about their years of funding denial, and they won't come clean. Guess why. Because they are still at it. Their CEOs will say one thing at a press conference, but this machine of disinformation and obstruction--this machine is still funded, and it is still rolling. So you can't count on the fossil fuel industry to change its ways. Third, unfortunately--and I really hate to say this--you can't count on corporate America. They are full of great statements. CEOs go to the business roundtables, and they go to the Climate Leadership Council, and they go to C2ES. They join series and talk about their support for climate and how it is urgent and how they support carbon pricing. But when it comes to the levers of power here in this building, forget about it. They have built the most powerful lobbying and electioneering apparatus in our country's history. Trade association after trade association, business group after business group--not one has been switched on to do anything about climate. By the way, when it is a CEO giving a press conference in New York, but that trade association is saying nothing or ``Don't do it,'' guess who people listen to here in Washington. They listen to that trade association. They know what greenwashing is, and they know when corporate America is serious. At this moment, no major trade association is taking any interest in climate action. The chamber of commerce--nothing. They are embroiled in a long conversation with members of theirs who are fed up with their climate denial, but they have done nothing. The National Association of Manufacturers--also nothing. They were recently the two worst climate obstructers in America. Have they changed their direction? No. Now they are just climate obstruction light, climate obstruction 2.0. Look at API, the American Petroleum Institute. This one is pretty funny. They come out and they say they support carbon pricing. They are going to support putting a cost on pollution, on greenhouse gas. And then we come out of the Budget Committee and we announce, as Leader Schumer did, that we are going to actually price methane, another greenhouse gas--an even more potent greenhouse gas and actually kind of a dangerous one--so, uh-oh, suddenly it looks real. Somebody might actually price methane. And what did API to? Came out against it. Now, you tell me how you can be for pricing a milder greenhouse gas in order to help address climate change but against pricing an even more toxic chemical to help solve climate change. It makes no sense. The only way you can reconcile those two things is with the statement of the Exxon lobbyists that the only reason the industry is talking about carbon pricing is because it doesn't think it is going to happen. It is another fake. It is another scheme. It is another denial and obstruction--in this case, probably 5.0. The American Bankers Association. You read from central banks around the country warnings about the economic crash that is going to happen if we don't get ahead of the climate problem. Those are the central banks' warnings, but what did the American Bankers Association have to say to us? Nothing. Insurance companies are screaming about the risks that they are facing now from worse hurricanes, worse flooding, worse droughts, worse wildfires; claims going up, difficulty anticipating what risks are, and hard-to-price insurance. Yet where is the American Insurance Association? Silent. Freddie Mac has warned us that there is going to be a coastal property values crash as those sea levels rise and, as you can predict, that that home is going to be literally under water in the 30-year mortgage period, not just figuratively under water--so no mortgage, no insurance, no market; hence, our property values crash. And where is the Realtors Association? Where are the American Home Builders? Silent. The American Beverage Association. Oh, Coke and Pepsi talk a really big game. What is the American Beverage Association doing on this? Nothing. And all those big barons out in Silicon Valley are represented by a group called TechNet. A year ago, they didn't even mention climate change in their lobbying materials. They didn't even mention clean or renewable energy, and they have clean and renewable energy companies in their membership. So we cannot count on corporate America to take climate change seriously here, where a solution is needed. So this is on us. And I will tell you, we intend to--I intend to--meet the moment. And there are those out there who will grouse and complain. And to you, I say: Too damned bad. You have had years to help, and you did nothing or worse. So you have lost your right to complain. But under pressure of the facts and the realities of what is going on around us, under pressure of the warnings about this being irreversible, unequivocal, and unprecedented, we are going to act. We are going to act. And I don't want to hear your complaining because you had a decade to come in and try to do something about this and you shirked your responsibilities for a decade, you funded trade associations that were doing nothing, you funded these creepy front groups that were attacking us on climate change. So you lost your right to complain. And in the next 6 or 7 or 8 weeks, as we go through building this reconciliation instruction, we aren't just going to address climate change, we are not just going to do more than has ever been done before; we are going to get on a safe pathway for this country and for the planet. Because I will tell you, ``more than we have ever done before on climate'' is a pathetically low bar because, for a decade, thanks to the fossil fuel industry and its web of denial and its control over the Republican Party, we have done nothing on climate. So we have got a lot of catching up to do. Reconciliation gives us the chance to do it. I pray to God that we meet the moment. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, these speeches on the scheme by dark money interests to seize control of the Supreme Court are designed to describe it in all its repulsive intricacy. My last speech discussed an operation in this scheme within the Federalist Society. This speech will take you literally down the hall from the Federalist Society to something called the Judicial Crisis Network, or JCN. They share the same purpose, the same hallway, and likely the same controlling donors. Remember David Koch's disastrous bid for Vice President on the Libertarian Party ticket that showed how unappetizing his rightwing extremism was to normal people. And remember the Lewis Powell playbook, which advised: Strength lies in organization . . . and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations. No one corporation or wealthy individual needs to, as Powell said, ``get too far out in front and . . . make itself too visible a target.'' Let intermediaries do that work. Corporate interests like Big Tobacco and the fossil fuel industry have, for a long time, used coordinated webs of national front groups in their plots to fend off accountability for the dangers of tobacco and carbon emissions. These front group webs grew and multiplied and specialized, all while concealing their true interests and funders. They got more numerous, and they also got smarter and more strategic over time, polishing up front group names, like the not-too-subtle Tobacco Institute, to names like the more wholesome-sounding Heartland Institute. It is quite a web. They created science groups to counter real scientific research on public health and climate change with fake science; think tanks to churn out white papers and hire sound bite- friendly fake experts; legal organizations to challenge and delay government regulation of harmful products; academic hothouses in which to grow donor-friendly, rightwing judicial philosophies; identity- laundering screens to hide the true donors and controllers and their interests; and political attack groups to pressure elected officials. People who study this have reported these groups numbering in multiple dozens, and their backers play the front groups like keys on a piano. Apply this method to the scheme to capture the Court, and you see that the dark money donors needed more than just the nominations turnstile that they ran out of the Federalist Society. They also needed a bare-knuckle political brawler. One night in early 2005, at an upscale Italian dinner, with special guest Justice Antonin Scalia, major donor and corporate lawyer Ann Corkery, California real estate tycoon Robin Arkley, and Federalist Society executive vice president Leonard Leo got together and celebrated George W. Bush's second term. The political importance of the Supreme Court would have been on everyone's mind there as it was the five Republicans on the Supreme Court who gave George W. Bush his first term. According to reporting by OpenSecrets and the Daily Beast, this dinner linked to the creation of a 501(c)(4) dark money group, then called the Judicial Confirmation Network. By the end of that year, this group would spend money--lots of money, lots of big donor money--and they would spend it anonymously, first to boost John Roberts as Chief Justice and then Samuel Alito as Associate Justice, cementing rightwing corporate control over the Court and shifting its decisions further in big donors' favor. There are a few things to note about the Judicial Confirmation Network's early days: One, it began work fast. Just months after starting, JCN ads hit the air in support of Bush nominees. Two, it had lots of money. Beginning in 2008, Ann Corkery took control of something called the Wellspring Committee--a dark money, identity-laundering group, seeded with funding from Charles and David Kochs' donor network. Thereafter, Wellspring funneled seven- or eight- figure dark money donations to JCN every year--millions of anonymous dollars. Three, they brought on a lawyer with heavy rightwing chops to run the place. Wendy Long, a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, became chief counsel and mouthpiece. Thus, in just a few months, JCN appeared and became a polished, powerful, anonymized campaigner for the big donor scheme to take over the Court. And then came the election of Barack Obama, and JCN had to go from offense for nominees to defense against nominees. That ``C'' in JCN, for ``confirmation,'' no longer made much sense, and the scheme now faced a crisis--the crisis for it of a President nominating judges who had not been screened by them, judges whose fealty to the corporate rightwing could not be confirmed, judges who might even rule against the rightwing donors' agenda. So they quickly rebranded JCN as the Judicial Crisis Network, but even in the Obama years, the Republican 5- to-4 majority on the captured Court delivered big things for JCN and its secretive backers. In the administration's first term, the Roberts Court handed down Citizens United and other decisions opening donor pipelines to 501(c)(4) groups like JCN. This caused the tsunami of slime we saw in our politics, and corporations and rightwing donors rushed to the feast. Anonymous money flooded in. Annual donations laundered through Wellspring to JCN rose from millions of dollars to many millions of dollars. JCN even expanded the scheme to seek to influence State supreme courts and State attorney general seats. The scheme was flourishing. Then, on a 2016 all-expenses-paid trip for Justice Scalia to a luxury hunting ranch in Texas, the Justice died, leaving a Supreme Court vacancy, with the better part of a year left before the Presidential election. Now there really was a crisis. The big donors suddenly faced the prospect of a Democratic President appointing Scalia's replacement, shifting the balance of the Court 5 to 4 against them, taking away their precious majority, undoing the scheme. So the donors swung into action. Within days, Mitch McConnell quickly pledged to hold the seat open, and within days, Republican Senators uniformly lined up behind that decision--a decision very possibly explained by the overlay between dark money donors to the scheme and dark money donors to Republican Senate political operations. History will have to judge the extent of that overlay. In any event, dark money funding of JCN hit escape velocity during this period. According to tax records obtained by OpenSecrets and others, JCN received big donations in fiscal year 2015 to 2016. One single anonymous donation alone totaled $17.9 million. Wellspring separately channeled $23.5 million in dark money to JCN in 2016, then another $14.8 million the next year. When Wellspring dissolved in 2018, big slugs of dark money continued to flow through other conduits. JCN received four separate, individual, anonymous donations, each of $15 million or more following Justice Scalia's death. We cannot say for sure because the donors hide behind the dark money screen, but these donations, over $60 million in all, could well have all come from the same donor. And one wonders, what are the odds that someone willing to spend $60 million anonymously to influence the makeup of the Supreme Court is someone who has business before the Court? Pretty high, I would say, but dark money scheming keeps this information secret. How did JCN spend all this money? Attack. Leonard Leo's Federalist Society operation had handed Trump a list of approved nominees. JCN spending poured into TV ads, pressuring Senators, and to media blitzes to sell the Federalist Society list. The group spent $7 million to attack Merrick Garland; $10 million to boost Neil Gorsuch; $10 million or more to prop up Brett Kavanaugh's deeply troubled nomination with its--now we know--fake FBI tip line; and $10 million in under 2 months to support Amy Coney Barrett. On its own, this anonymous $37 million barrage smells terrible, but it is only part of the Judicial Crisis Network operation. JCN has a corporate twin, the Judicial Education Project, each group backing up the actions and finances of the other. Let me walk you through this setup because it is a capsule summary of how political scheming is accomplished in our corrupted dark money era. First, you pair a 501(c)(3) and a 501(c)(4). The Judicial Crisis Network was chartered as a 501(c)(4) social welfare group, the Judicial Education Project as its allied 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Under a perverse reading of the law, the 501(c)(4) organization is allowed to operate as a dark money political attack group. We see this arrangement commonly now in the clandestine world of dark money politics. In fact, a recent Supreme Court case about dark money was brought by a group called Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which was the 501(c)(3) associated with Americans for Prosperity, which is the Koch brothers' 501(c)(4) that spent millions of dollars to help Amy Coney Barrett get her seat, and yet she didn't recuse herself from the case involving the 501(c)(3). So, second, you operate the two as one unit: Judicial Crisis Network and Judicial Education Project are connected by staff, by dollars, and by location. According to the most recent tax records, long-serving JCN staffer Carrie Severino is also the sole and principal officer of--you guessed it--the Judicial Education Project. Severino is not listed on JCN's tax forms, but she serves as its public-facing ``chief counsel and policy director.'' JCN and JEP tax records both list the same address in Washington, DC, which, by the way, is right down the hall from the Federalist Society at the same address, and both groups share day-to- day staff. There is a doctrine in the law called piercing the corporate veil. In this case, the corporate veil between these two is a web of holes. What is the next thing you do? You soak up dark money together. It is hard to know much about these two groups' dark money funding-- that is why they keep it dark--but we know the Wellspring Committee has funded both groups. Both have also paid money to something called BH Group, which is a mysterious LLC that Leonard Leo once disclosed as his employer, that made a $1 million mystery donation to Trump's inaugural. It seems to do no other business. They used the 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) status precisely because it lets them hide their donors and controllers. And the last thing is that you get to play shell games with your name. A couple of years ago, those two organizations formally changed their legal names in Virginia. Now, follow this for a minute. Judicial Crisis Network changed its name, and it became the Concord Fund. Judicial Education Project changed its name, and it became the 85 Fund. The Concord Fund then registered its old name, Judicial Crisis Network, as what is called a fictitious name, a kind of corporate alias under Virginia law, and continued to operate as the Judicial Crisis Network. Here is the Virginia law that allows them to do that: A fictitious name is a name that a person (individual or business entity) uses instead of the person's true name, usually in the course of transacting or offering to transact business. It also registered the name ``Honest Elections Project Action'' as an additional fictitious name to carry out a new voter suppression project. The 85 Fund likewise registered its old name, the ``Judicial Education Project,'' as a fictitious name, and it separately registered as the ``Honest Elections Project'' as an additional fictitious name. It gets even better than this because, as I said before, when the Washington Post exposed the $250 million scheme that Leonard Leo was at the center of to pack and control the Supreme Court, to capture it like a captured agency, he wasn't much use any longer. He was like a blown agent in a covert operation. He had to go someplace. Where did he hop to? He hopped from the Federalist Society to the Honest Elections Project so he could get to work on the Presiding Officer's favorite cause, voter suppression. Same guy, same corporate network, new name, and new purpose: voter suppression. As if this weren't enough, both of these groups have now filed new fictitious names. This is to help them wade into the rightwing fuss over what the rightwing likes to call critical race theory. So the Concord Fund has now added the fictitious name ``Free to Learn Action,'' and the 85 Fund has now added the fictitious name ``Free to Learn.'' Again, you see the pairing of the 501(c)(3) and the 501(c)(4) as part of the basic structure for dark money political influence operations. By the way, the same person filled out all these forms for both organizations and is listed with various titles on each. So now we have one group that calls itself the Concord Fund that operates simultaneously as the Judicial Crisis Network, the Honest Elections Project Action, and the Free to Learn Action, and we have a sister organization, the 85 Fund, that operates simultaneously as the Judicial Education Project, the Honest Elections Project, and Free to Learn--all with overlapping staff, locations, and funding. By the way, when you are the funder of these groups, you are their controller. Now, imagine this level of complexity multiplied many times over, because that is what the Washington Post disclosed. And I borrow a photograph from their video of their investigation. That Washington Post expose on the covert court-capture operation exposed the Judicial Crisis Network as one part, just one part of a massive--there it is, Judicial Crisis Network--one part of a massive web of groups, a web of groups that took in over $250 million in dark money between 2014 and 2017. This effort to capture the Supreme Court? They are not kidding around. Spending $250 million in dark money is a serious investment that demands a serious return. And guess what. Expert testimony before my Senate Courts Subcommittee has since raised that number to $400 million through 2018. Through all these allied and coordinated front groups--the keys on the dark money piano that the big donors can play in chords and singly as they wish--dark money donors can, from hiding, covertly channel tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in anonymized money toward the scheme's court-capture goals. Colleagues, this is a scheme akin in complexity and trade craft to an intelligence agency covert operation--only this one is not being run by one country against another; this one is being run in and against our own country by a handful of creepy billionaires and their foundations, trying to impose their self-serving ideology on the rest of us through our least democratic branch--the branch that doesn't care if normal people hate this stuff because they are in robes for life. That is our Federal courts, and particularly, it is our Supreme Court. The big dark money donors have pretty well pulled it off, too, following Lewis Powell's old admonition to use ``strength . . . in organization'' and ``united action'' of all of this complexity. They have just made it all clandestine, which is why I am going to keep digging. To be continued. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I would like to ask unanimous consent to speak as if in morning business for, let's say, 22 minutes.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise today to recognize a constituent and friend, Roger Begin. Roger serves as the Honorary Consul of France in Providence. In September, the French Government will award him the Legion of Honor, the country's highest order of merit, for his long and distinguished career in public service. I congratulate Roger on earning this recognition and thank him for his many contributions to civic life in Rhode Island. As the Honorary Consul of France, Roger is a liaison to the French Government and helps Rhode Islanders with passports, immigration, and other government business. Roger previously had a lengthy and productive career in public service. A son of Woonsocket and graduate of CCRI and Bryant University, he was elected to the Rhode Island House of Representatives at the age of 19. After serving several terms, he went on to win election as Rhode Island's general treasurer and then Lieutenant Governor. I served as legal counsel to Governor Bruce Sundlun during tumultuous years of crisis and reform, while Roger was Lieutenant Governor. Serving in government in times of crisis is a bonding experience. Outside of his time in government, Roger has served on the boards of many mission-driven organizations in our community. From the Meeting Street School, to the Rhode Island Historical Society, to the Rhode Island Hospital Association, there is hardly a comer of the State that has not been made better by Roger's energy and contributions. Roger also enjoyed a successful business career in the financial sector. He is truly a man of many parts. And he is a gregarious, cheerful good person on top of it all. I wish Roger all the best as he accepts the French Legion of Honor and look forward to celebrating with him next month.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, with the permission of both sides, may I ask unanimous consent that the vote scheduled to start in 3 minutes start now?

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, as I give the closing remarks, I want to alert everyone listening that, at the conclusion of the closing, Senator Inhofe will hold the floor for his remarks, and his remarks will be regarding our common friend, Senator Enzi.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 1002 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 323, submitted earlier today.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I was going to say ``reserving the right to object,'' but I won't go there. I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be discharged from further consideration and the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 317.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I know of no further debate. The bill was ordered to be engrossed for a third reading and was read the third time.