Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE.--you are now inconveniencing our other colleague Senator Cantwell.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I yielded Senator Cantwell's time in order to convenience you, and I am interested in how long you are going to speak because--

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Would the Senator yield for a procedural question?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, to accommodate the distinguished Senator from Wisconsin, I will move the unanimous consent now and then the Ranking Member of the Commerce Committee will speak. 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. 551; further, 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 am here with regard to a unanimous consent resolution. I have tried one before to pursue a simple truth that climate change is real. Earlier this year, I came to the floor and asked my colleagues if they could all agree on that simple scientific fact. Sadly, given the nature of this body, they could not. So we are going to break it down into smaller bits because the reality of climate change is made up of many, many simple truths; and I hope that by breaking it down piece by piece, I can find areas where my colleagues will agree. Today's simple truth: Sea levels are rising. Can we agree on that? The resolution specifically says: ``recognizing that sea levels are rising at accelerated rates due to human-caused climate change.'' As global air temperatures rise, obviously, so do the temperatures of the oceans. Here is a graph showing the increase in ocean heat content. It is measured in zettajoules. ``Zettajoules'' is a very big number. ``Zetta'' means it has 18 zeroes. It is a billion trillions or a trillion billions, depending on which way you want to go about it. To put it at a more practical scale, the entire production of energy by the human species on all of planet Earth adds up to one half of a zettajoule. The price we pay for the fossil fuel component of that half zettajoule of energy is an ocean whose temperature is increasing by around 15 zettajoules a year. It is a 30-times magnifier because of the effect of fossil fuel emissions. And as ocean heat content grows, seawater expands. The physical nature of seawater is to expand as it warms. And it also melts nearby glaciers, and both result in higher sea levels. Combined, glacier melt and thermal expansion of water cause global sea levels to rise, and the rates are accelerating over time. Here is the curve of global sea level rise. It is one of the most unambiguous indicators of what emissions are doing on our Earth to our natural systems. Sea level rise has been going at accelerated rates since about 1863, which lines up right with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution when greenhouse gas emissions began to rise as we burned coal, natural gas, and oil. Depending on the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions, sea level rise in the United States could range between 2 and over 7 feet by the end of this century. That is a particularly dangerous proposition when you consider that 3.7 million Americans in the contiguous United States live on land less than 3.3 feet above high tide. And it doesn't come up like the bathtub; it comes up and is still subject to tide and storm, so it can be driven ashore at far higher levels than 2 feet or over 7 feet. Most of the impact will be in Florida, Louisiana, California, New York, and New Jersey. My home State of Rhode Island and my colleague Senator Markey's home State of Massachusetts will share that unfortunate experience. Sea level rise isn't just evidence of a change in climate; it has real consequences. Thirty percent of people living in the United States live in coastal areas which puts them at risk from rising seas, increased flooding, shoreline erosion, and storm hazards. And it is not just people at risk. Mr. President, $10 trillion in goods and services are produced in coastal areas of the United States. Rising sea level will not only cause what we call increased sunny day flooding, like when there is no rain to cause flooding; it is just tide and sea level rise, but it will also increase the amount of flooding from storms and from storm surges, and that will cost lives and money. Indeed, it is already disrupting insurance, mortgage, and real estate markets. I have spoken elsewhere about the meltdown in Florida in those markets. Florida was recently described as the biggest loser for real estate values of all the 50 States, and it relates back to this cascade from climate risk to insurance being unavailable or too expensive to afford, to mortgages being compromised, to property values taking a hit. There is some lessons we should learn from what has already happened. Mr. President, $8.1 billion of the $62 billion ascribed to Hurricane Sandy connects back to the rise in sea levels. Could have saved $8 billion were the sea level rise not happening. Everywhere, high water levels that were once rare--1-in-100-year events are becoming 1-in-10- or 1-in-5-year events. Up to 13 million Americans will face displacement from sea level rise by 2100. That is assuming that all goes smoothly, but all doesn't always go smoothly. There are tipping points in life. My favorite example is a rowboat. If you put more and more weight in the rowboat, the water goes up and up the side of the boat. And there is not much change as the water goes up and up the side of the boat. But then you hit a tipping point where the water flows over the gunwale and into the boat. That is a big tipping point difference because suddenly it is not just more and more of the hull down in the water; it is the whole boat catastrophically falling, flooding, sinking to the bottom of the lake or the sea. So tipping points are to watch for. Most ice is found in polar regions with as little as 1.5-degrees celsius of warming. The Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets could be destabilized. That would be a major tipping point. Our Earth has already warmed 1.2 degrees celsius. So getting to 1.5 is not far away. And Greenland, for instance, is warming four times faster than the global average. So that puts us at the risk of the polar ice tipping point very soon. Sea levels are expected to rise by 20 to 25 feet. Not 2 feet to 7.2 feet; 20 to 25 feet if the Greenland ice sheet melts and an additional 10 to 17 feet if the West Antarctic ice sheet melts. The disintegration of either ice sheet would render major cities uninhabitable and completely destroy America's coastal communities. So here is the simple truth: sea level rise is real. It is happening. Fossil fuel-caused climate change is accelerating its effects. Indeed, it is already disrupting American lives, pocketbooks, and families. Mr. President, I will yield to Senator Markey from Massachusetts and return to make the actual unanimous consent request.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am speaking in advance of my colleague from Colorado Senator Bennet's effort to seek redress in this body for a wave of pollution that is being unleashed in his State and neighboring States as well. One of the things about our failed Environmental Protection Agency right now is that one State can't regulate pollution that comes to it from another State. And yet the good neighbor policy that somebody has to be able to say ``Hey, wait a minute; you can't pollute my State from another State'' is one that EPA has just walked away from. In this case, the problem is a coal facility in Colorado. And just start with coal. It is really indisputable that coal is America's dirtiest, deadliest, and most expensive energy source. It is a dying industry for market reasons. It can't compete because it is dirty, deadly, and expensive. And yet, since taking office, President Trump has worked desperately to keep coal on life support, perhaps because the coal industry paid $3.5 million in 2024 to help him get elected, and Trump is a man who understands a quid pro quo. The Trump administration has taken every possible action to benefit the coal industry; never mind our health. Remember, it is the deadliest of energy sources. And never mind our bank accounts. Remember, it is the most expensive of energy sources. He even rolled back health-protecting standards for mercury and toxic emissions from coal plants. Mercury is pretty seriously, deadly stuff; and he rolled back those standards. He exempted one-third of all coal plants nationwide from toxic pollution standards. Who loses? Anybody exposed to the toxic pollution they emit. Who wins? Trump's big donors. He even directed the Secretary of Energy to issue orders under the Federal Power Act to force coal plants to stay online, driving up consumer costs against the wishes of the utilities and even the plants' owners. But they still had to buy and burn coal. So there is somebody out there who is going to make money off that. And now Trump has perverted the Clean Air Act to trample on States' rights to protect their own citizens. Coal plants are the Nation's most significant source of haze. The same coal pollutants that drive health issues and deaths nationwide drive haze formations. Under the Clean Air Act's Regional Haze Program, States establish plans to reduce haze-causing pollution. States may choose to include coal plant retirements in their plans. Often, that is consistent with the utility and the plant owner's wishes, as an old plant ends its useful life. When the EPA approves these plans, the retirements then become enforceable. In 2022, Colorado submitted a regional haze plan to the EPA that included coal plant retirements that Colorado utilities had independently and voluntarily planned for. ``They do better with cheaper, cleaner renewable energy'' is the simple answer. In January of this year, the EPA turned around and disapproved Colorado's plan, making the argument that Colorado's plan, voluntarily entered into with these utilities, could represent a ``taking'' under the Constitution. So we have here a really flagrant abuse of Federal authority: Make it more difficult for Colorado to protect its own citizens from toxic pollution and to provide affordable energy. And the resulting pollution won't just endanger Coloradans. This is a national issue because the haze blows, with prevailing winds, toward eastern States. My State of Rhode Island, for instance, has occasions when we have bad air days. And if you are driving into work in the morning and you are listening to the talk radio, they will say: Today is a bad air day. Children should stay home. Elderly people and people with breathing difficulties should not go out. It looks like a beautiful summer day. Kids will want to be in the yard, but it is a bad air day. And so that health warning gets issued by the State of Rhode Island. And there is nothing the State of Rhode Island can do about it. If every car in our State was an EV, if everything ran off of clean electricity, we would still be out of compliance because we are a downwind State. And huge powerplants that push their pollution up into the sky, far enough that prevailing winds carries it out of their State and onto ours, they are the ones that are to blame, and there is nothing we can do about it. So I am very sympathetic to concerns that the EPA has a particularly important job when neighboring States are polluting one another and can't reach a regulatory solution because it is out of State, and that is exactly the predicament that we are creating here today. When Congress enacted the Congressional Review Act in 1996 to give Congress the opportunity to vote on regulations, well, that is why we are here today. We have a chance to undo this, and I hope we will because everybody here has a good chance of being a downwind State. Even California is often a downwind State from China. So you have got to be able to have protections from upwind pollution, and this would strip that. So the Trump administration's effort here--at breakneck speed--to tear down protections of Americans' health, safety, and environment we have a chance to claw back. Congressional Review Act resolutions like this one can help hold the administration to account. I will conclude by saying I just left the EPW hearing with EPA Administrator Zeldin. The point that I made in that hearing was that we are now headed into an election cycle in which the American people are desperately concerned about the cost of stuff. Stuff costs too much, and the Trump administration is ignoring the problem, if not making it worse. Those are basically the two buckets. They are either ignoring it completely or they are deliberately making it worse. With respect to electricity costs, the Trump administration is deliberately making it worse. They are raising costs for consumers on purpose. How are they doing it, and why are they doing it? Well, the ``how'' is that they are keeping inexpensive clean energy off the grid. We just went through this in Rhode Island. Our Revolution Wind offshore power facility was stalled by illegal orders of the Trump administration not once but twice, and the result was that power was delayed from coming ashore. Well, Revolution Wind has a contract to sell power onto the grid. That contract specifies a price. The price is 9 cents--9 cents. ISO New England--our grid operator--can do fairly easy math to show what the average grid price is for electricity. And guess what. It is 18 cents. So this 9-cent power was stalled going into an 18-cent grid. Because it is 9-cent power, what would it have done? It would have been called up first by the grid because every grid calls up the least expensive power first. So that 9-cent power would have been flowing into the grid. It would have been filling up demand, and that would have meant that some dirty fossil fuel-polluting units would not have been called up. They were too expensive to run. So, when they push all that clean energy off the grid and buy time for the dirty, polluting fossil fuel plants--that is money directly to the fossil fuel industry--two things happen: One, costs go up for all consumers because those new, more expensive plants called online raise the price for everybody. So electricity bills go up. They are driven up on purpose by the delay of clean energy getting onto the grid. Where do those billions of dollars in extra costs that are extracted from American consumers go? Guess where--to the owners of those fossil fuel plants that are in the margin, the ones that get run because the clean energy has been kept off of the grid. It is a ginormous money pump out of the pockets of ordinary American ratepayers and into the pockets of the fossil fuel billionaires who put so much money into getting Trump elected. That is being done on purpose. Electricity costs are being driven up on purpose. Don't tell me that the Department of Energy or the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of the Interior, for that matter, don't understand how the grid works. They have people who know exactly how the generation stack works. They know exactly that the least expensive units get run first and that the least expensive units displace the more expensive units, which is good for consumers, until the heavy hand of a fossil fuel-influenced government steps in and tries to prevent consumers from getting low-cost clean energy. Then the hole that that leaves that would have been filled by clean energy--you have got to go fill that hole by going up the stack to more and more expensive units, and virtually every time, that more expensive unit is a fossil fuel unit. So, like I said, what the Trump administration has created on purpose is a ginormous money pump to extract billions of dollars from regular consumers who would otherwise be enjoying the benefit of low-cost clean power, and they have done it as a reward for Trump's big fossil fuel donors, the ones who threw hundreds of millions of dollars at his campaign and who are now reaping a multiple-times reward with that investment. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the 5:30 scheduled vote begin immediately.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, people following the Senate floor will know that hundreds of times I have come to the floor with my trusty, increasingly beat up ``Time to Wake Up'' poster to describe the various manners in which the fossil fuel industry has corruptly obstructed our ability to solve the problem of climate change that is caused by fossil fuel emissions. They might also remember that I have come to the floor dozens of times to give my ``Scheme'' series of speeches about the corrupt manner in which the Supreme Court has been captured and put into the service of a gang of rightwing billionaires who tend to be fossil fuel billionaires. In this speech, the ``Time to Wake Up'' series and the ``Scheme'' series converge. I don't know quite how to describe it, but maybe it is ``Time to Scheme Up'' because, for sure, that is what has been done in this country by the fossil fuel industry to blockade our efforts to solve the pollution hazard that they have created for our people--a pollution hazard that is now real and immediate in our economy. Look no further than the State of Florida, where climate risk has thrashed the home insurance markets to the point where the home insurance market collapse has cascaded into mortgage markets, which has, in turn, cascaded into real estate values--property values. Last year, Florida led the country in lost property values. This year, there was an article in Newsweek just a few days ago about how 6 to 8 percent losses are predicted in Florida real estate values because of that cascade. Property is very hard to sell if you can't get a mortgage on it, and it is impossible to get a mortgage on it if you can't get insurance on it. And even if you can get insurance, if the insurance costs $14- or $15- or $20- or $30,000 a year, you add all that up, and it comes off the value of the home, which is why you are seeing people unsuccessfully trying to sell homes in Florida for hundreds of thousands of dollars or more less than they paid for it. So this is on its way. It is coming right now. I am just going to continue to dig into how it is that we got here because how we got here involves a lot of mischief, a lot of real problems. One of those problems came to light just recently in the form of a number of memos from within the Supreme Court from the Justices to each other that were released or leaked--somehow came to the New York Times--that describe how it was that the captured Court put an end to the Clean Power Plan of the Obama administration before it even came to life. Before even a court decision had been made about the merits of the rule, five Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices stepped in and killed that rule in the crib before it could have any real effect. Charles Pierce has written a pretty good summary of that New York Times article. He said: The New York Times published a trove of personal memos from the members of the Supreme Court outlining the court's promiscuous use of the so-called shadow docket. It has become the carefully constructed conservative majority's favorite work-around to kill policies it doesn't like and support causes that it and its corporate patrons do. What appears to have happened here is that the shadow docket was born in the crib-killing of the Clean Power Plan. This is quoting the New York Times story: By a 5 to 4 vote along partisan lines, the order halted President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan, his signature environmental policy. They acted before any other court had addressed the plan's lawfulness. Not a Court of final impression, a Court of first impression--the first one to look at it. That is not the way it ordinarily works. The decision consisted of only legal boilerplate, without a word of reasoning. That is similar to the way the shadow docket has been working--before briefing, before argument--a decision without legal reasoning provided. It continues about the Chief Justice: Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., has cultivated a reputation for care and caution. [These] papers reveal a different side of him. At a critical moment for the country and the court, the papers show, he acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama's plan to address the global climate crisis. I will get into this a little bit further as I continue through my remarks, but the basic summary is that the Court concluded that without stopping the EPA's rule before it went into effect, before any court had actually considered it, that would cause irreparable harm to the fossil fuel industry--specifically, mentioning that private industry will suffer irreparable harm--this, at a stage in the proceedings, where the question of whether that harm even existed had still not been properly litigated. So I go back a ways on this. In 2015, in one of my ``Time to Wake Up'' speeches, I said: The Supreme Court has handed the polluters a heavy cudgel with its misguided Citizens United decision, allowing big corporations to spend--or more important, threaten to spend-- unlimited amounts of undisclosed money in our elections. More than anyone, polluters use that leverage to demand obedience to their denial script. Another one, 2017: The Supreme Court's Republican appointees got in the habit of doing what they were told by the forces that appointed them (which include the fossil fuel industry, which asked for the Citizens United decision), and in a fateful combination of obedience and political ignorance, they wrecked our politics. A year later, I described how: Republican strategists are expanding their grip to the Supreme Court, building there a reliable Republican majority. I warned that we mustn't try to replicate that apparatus. We must expose it. And when we expose one part of the apparatus, we expose all because it is the same crew behind packing the courts and denying climate change and running the dark money machine. In January of 2010, I said: The five Republicans on the Supreme Court gave the fossil fuel industry the Citizens United decision. I said: In January 2010, the five Republicans on the Supreme Court gave the fossil fuel industry the Citizens United decision; the industry instantly turned its new political weaponry on the Republican Party; and bipartisanship on climate change was stamped out by fossil-fuel threats. This integration between the fossil fuel industry and the Supreme Court and the dark money power that the fossil fuel industry has used to crush climate action in Congress is something that has been apparent for some time. In 2020, I added: Citizens United unleashed toxic doses of money, and unprecedented doses of virulent dark money, into our political atmosphere. [Once] democracy is poisoned, stunned by secret fossil fuel money and threats, [it fails] to listen to plain warnings. In 2022, I called this ``the Court that dark money built.'' In 2022, I said: [I]t is probably more accurate to say that we now have the Court that dark fossil fuel money built. So it comes as little surprise that these memos from within the Court should reveal that linkage between the Republican-appointed Justices and the fossil fuel industry. And, of course, it should come as no surprise that the roots of this shadow docket that has been used so politically by the Republican majority on the Court--the roots are found in an act of service to the fossil fuel industry billionaires who captured the Court. If you look at the scheme to maintain the fossil fuel industry's free-to-pollute business model where they get away with polluting as much as they like with no cost or consequence, you have to look at the Supreme Court facilitating this. Citizens United, of course, signaled the end of climate legislation because the unlimited dark money that the fossil fuel industry could use to shut down climate action in this body was successful. Unlimited fossil fuel dark money was brought to bear on Congress, and our ability to solve this problem collapsed. Look before the Citizens United decision. Look back to 2007, 2008, 2009. My first years here, there was robust negotiation on major climate legislation--four different strategies here in the Senate; three major bills, bipartisan bills; and a Presidential candidate in John McCain who ran on a perfectly legitimate climate platform. All of that dead--dead--the day the Citizens United decision came down and the fossil fuel industry pounced with its new dark money power. But it is not enough to stop legislation. If you want to protect your free-to-pollute business model, you also have to stop regulation, and that is where this Clean Power Plan decision came in. That is where the subsequent major questions doctrine came in. That work by the Supreme Court signaled the end of climate regulation as the Supreme Court intruded into a decades-long regulatory process and rebooted it to protect against regulation that would limit the free-to-pollute business model of the fossil fuel industry. As I have said in other speeches, that major questions doctrine did not pop from the heads of the Supreme Court Justices in that decision. It was cooked up in fossil fuel-funded doctrine factories, massaged, maneuvered into conferences, propagated by the Federalist Society, called up at conferences. It was groomed and grown so that the Supreme Court could pick it up in a decision, which, of course, they did. So if you shut down climate legislation and you shut down climate regulation, what is left is climate litigation--that people harmed by all this damage, by all this pollution, usually have a right to bring a lawsuit. And sure enough, lawsuits are emerging. So the next project of the Court is to attack climate litigation, and sure enough, the fossil fuel industry is all over that Court, asking for it to shut down the prospect of climate litigation. And guess what. That little rascal Leonard Leo, who was the fixer, the implementer of the Court capture scheme, who worked with Trump's counsel, McGahn, to get the three Supreme Court Justices Trump supposedly appointed--separate argument: I think they were actually selected by the Koch brothers' political operation, and Trump was the chump at the end of the deal who signed off on it. But Leonard Leo and his billionaires were the ones who put that whole scheme together. They put the whole concept of a Federalist Society list together and the completely untrustworthy President Trump being obliged to say publicly that he would pick off that Koch brothers' list. They called it the Federalist Society list because calling it a fossil fuel billionaires list wouldn't sell so well. And then they ended up with these Justices. The guy in the middle of all of that was this little fixer, Leonard Leo. Guess what Leonard Leo is doing now. He has an array of maybe 25 front groups that he orchestrates. Some of them are actual corporate entities. Some of them are what are called fictitious names for his corporate entities. So you have a front group, which has a fictitious name, that you operate through. Why you need to do that is a little hard to say, but if you are up to no good, I suppose you want as much camouflage as possible. What Leonard Leo and his front groups are all over right now is trying to shut down climate litigation, to make it a clean trifecta so that one industry is free to pollute as much as it wants with no legislation, no regulation, and no litigation that can stop it. Again, it goes without saying that pollution is not something that should be allowed. It is certainly not something that should be allowed for free. But money will buy you a lot, and the fossil fuel-funded phony flotillas of front group amici who come into the Court to tell it what to do--and have, I would say, a 100-percent winning record before the Court--are starting to gather around shutting down climate litigation as well as regulation and legislation. In other words, a captured Court is delivering the goods for the billionaires who captured it. So let's go through these different memoranda as they came out. The first is from Chief Justice John Roberts dated February 5, 2016. He is responding to emergency applications seeking to have the EPA's Clean Power Plan stayed. On the very first page, he communicates to the other Justices: Absent a stay, the Clean Power Plan will cause (and is causing) substantial and irreversible reordering of the domestic power sector. That is a factfinding. It is a factfinding made without any court having found that fact. It is a factfinding by a Court that is not supposed to engage in factfinding in the first place. It is a disputed fact in the case before the case is even litigated. Yet here is the Chief Justice of the United States going with the factual argument of one of the parties even before arguments related to an emergency stay. He has to admit to his colleagues that ``the rule does not require emissions reductions until 2022.'' It is dated 2016. Six years later, it might require emissions reductions. But then, February 5, 2016, he says that ``its impact is being felt now.'' He is taking the side of one party on a contested fact and saying that the impact of that contested fact, as he sees it, is actually being felt now, 6 years ahead of when anything has to happen. He says that ``the applicants indicate''--again, an assertion by a party--the applicants untested, unchallenged--``applicants indicate that they are currently in the process of committing time and resources to compliance.'' That is the reason to shut down the Clean Power Plan? He says that ``the impact of the rule will reduce coal production for power sector use by 2.0 percent.'' Over a 2-percent reduction, he jumps completely out of his lane, makes factfinding, and shuts down the regulation before it has even been considered by the lower courts. Then he says that the ``harm . . . is irreversible.'' Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have the Chief Justice memorandum printed in the Record at the end of my remarks. That memorandum was responded to rather quickly by Justice Breyer, who noted: First, it is unusual for this Court to issue a stay of an agency's order during the time that the Court of Appeals is considering its lawfulness. It is a live legal dispute in the court of appeals, and the Supreme Court is jumping in to stay it? That was not just unusual; it was unprecedented. As Justice Breyer points out, ``it is difficult at this point to say that the absence of a stay will cause irreparable harm.'' Even among the Justices, that is a contested fact, and yet the Chief Justice is willing to rely on his view of that contested fact even though it is supposedly not a factfinding body in the first instance. As I mentioned a moment ago and as Justice Breyer points out, ``the order does not require any company to take action for six years.'' So it was hardly an emergency. Finally, he pointed out that ``all of the applicants'' were ``free to renew their applications for a stay'' once the DC court of appeals had done its work and come right back to the Court and get the stay then rather than to jump ahead of the circuit court of appeals. And it notes that the circuit court of appeals has agreed to proceed on an expedited basis. Well, it didn't take long for the Chief to respond to that. He wrote right back saying that ``private industry will suffer irreparable harm from a rule that is--in my view--highly unlikely to survive.'' So now he is not only making factfindings that are contested even within his Court and that he shouldn't be making in the first place, but he is also predicting the legal conclusion of how this is going to end up in his Court. He says that the ``Court will not issue a decision until 2018 at the earliest''--still 4 years before that date--``long after the real-world impacts of the rule would have been felt in the absence of a stay.'' Again, more and more factfinding. He says there will be ``on-going, cumulative, and irreversible harms that private parties are incurring each day.'' Again, that is a contested fact, but he is willing to say that as if it were an actuality and not a point in contention. Justice Kagan comes back to him to say: As far as I can tell, it would be unprecedented for us to second-guess the D.C. Circuit's decision that a stay is not warranted, without the benefit of full briefing or a prior judicial decision. She calls this a ``drastic and unusual remedy'' and points out that this fact that Chief Justice Roberts has so readily lurched to--the applicants' assertion--``is both entirely speculative and highly doubtful.'' So now you have another Justice challenging the fact that the Chief Justice offers as Gospel. She says: It is implausible that such a minor emissions reduction-- Two-percent reduction in coal-- to be achieved six years hence will require substantial and irrevocable commitments of resources in the coming months. Then in comes Justice Sotomayor. I agree with Steve's [Breyer] proposal and Elena's [Kagan] supplement to that proposal. As Elena notes, it would be unprecedented for us to grant a stay before any court has reviewed this complicated and complex case. She says: [N]o applicant has identified a single real plant-- An actual, real facility-- as opposed to a hypothetical ``model plant''--that is in immediate danger of closure absent a stay. She challenges the costs that have been discussed by the Chief Justice, and she points out that ``an emergency stay on limited briefing before the D.C. Circuit will hear argument on this regulation in just four months.'' Just wait 4 months and get the proper order--circuit court of appeals, then Supreme Court. Faced with that, in chimes Justice Alito, brought onto the Court with Leonard Leo at the White House helping make the selections. He concludes saying: A failure to stay this rule threatens to render our ability to provide meaningful judicial review--and by extension, our institutional legitimacy--a nullity. Instead of robust judicial review, our opinion will be a mere postscript. Remember, this is a rule that won't have effect for 6 years, where there will be a proper appellate court decision below in 4 months, and all of that is intolerable to Justice Alito, a product of the ``billionaires/Leonard Leo'' court-packing operation. And the closer is Justice Anthony Kennedy, who writes an unusually brief decision, compared to all the others, or a memorandum, compared to the others, simply concluding: ``[F]airness to the parties counsels that we should grant [the stay] now,'' and ``I agree with the recommendation of the Chief.'' That gave the Chief the votes. They granted the stay, and the Clean Power Plan died. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the remaining memoranda that I referred to be printed in the Record at the end of my remarks in the sequence in which I described them. Mr. President, what is the backdrop to all of this? The backdrop to all of this is the massive amount of harm that is caused by fossil fuel emissions. The pollution is really astounding. The International Monetary Fund most recently assessed the cost of fossil fuel pollution and of its free-to-pollute business model in the United States of America at $770 billion in 1 year--$770 billion in benefit to the fossil fuel industry, a form of subsidy, from being allowed to pollute for free and not being obliged to clean up its mess. They are allowed to cause $770 billion worth of harm to Americans for zero dollars. When you are allowed to cause $770 billion worth of harm to ordinary Americans for zero dollars, you have a massive motive to corrupt. You have a massive motive to apply political influence. You have a massive motive to take advantage of the dark money that you pressed the Supreme Court to allow and authorize, and bring that to bear on Congress to make sure that your $770 billion annual pollute-for-free subsidy is protected. What did you note about my discussion about the Court's conversation on harm? What you should have noted is that 100 percent of the Court's conversation on harm was on harm to the polluters. It was the only harm that the Chief Justice mentioned or considered. The entire argument about staying the Clean Power Plan hinged on analysis of harm that only looked at the harm to the polluter. There was no mention of climate change. There was no mention of the harm of emissions. There was no discussion of the health damage from climate change and what it is doing now and could be projected back then to do to insurance markets; what it was causing in sea level rise; what the ancillary pollution of fossil fuel that isn't climate change pollution but is lead, mercury, SOX, NOX, particulate matters, is doing. They literally turned a blind eye to fossil fuel pollution measured at $770 billion worth of harm, most recently--total blind eye to it-- and focused only on the harm that would be done to the fossil fuel industry from having to comply with clean power rules. Other studies have shown that the amount of money spent on the operation to capture the Court--a short word on Court capture, it goes back to the well-acknowledged notions of Agency capture or regulatory capture in the bad old days. Mining interests would make sure that all their friends were appointed to the mining safety commission so they could know the mining safety commission would always give them the answer that they wanted. That is Agency capture. In the bad old days, railroad barons would make sure that all their friends and lackeys were appointed to the railroad rates commission so they could be sure that all the railroad rates that were set were advantageous to them and that they could make sure that they got the rates that they wanted. That was called Agency capture. It is a renowned phenomenon. It is written about constantly in administrative law. There is a whole field of economics that studies it. What happened here is that Agency capture or regulatory capture was brought to bear on the Supreme Court, and it has now turned into, in essence, a captive body that does this bidding. The number that I am referring to is the amount that was spent on that Court-capture operation. People who do really good research have dug into this, and at this point--more research will make the number bigger certainly. But at this point, it looks like about $600 million-- million with an ``m''--was spent on the Court-capture operation. Now, that is a lot of money. But it is not a lot of money if you are defending a $770 billion annual subsidy that lets you pollute for free when you shouldn't be allowed to do that and nobody else is allowed to do that. Protecting that $700 billion for $600 million is probably the most lucrative investment the fossil fuel industry has ever made. And if you pile up the years since the Clean Power Plan was stopped-- that was in 2016. Now, it is 2026--so 10 years. That subsidy number has grown over the years as the International Monetary Fund has done a more and more detailed and better job of figuring out all the added harms, as harms are piling up. So if you look at 10 years, it is not $7.7 trillion. It is probably a number closer to $6 trillion. But think about that. What the Supreme Court did in this one decision, by breaking all of its own rules and looking only at the fossil fuel industry's harm, is to set loose $6 trillion worth of harm over the next 10 years that all of us have had to pay for in health, in harm, in lost property values, in increased insurance, in a myriad of different ways--$6 trillion, call it, over those 10 years. That makes $600 million to capture the Court that made that decision an amazing payback, but a really, really dangerous payback for the American public. I will conclude by saying that whether you look at this as an aspect of the scheme to capture the Court or whether you look at it as an aspect of the endless fossil fuel pollution that is causing us to need to wake up before it is too late--either way you look at it--the rot runs deep around fossil fuel, and it seems to have infected the Court right over there.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise today to honor my constituent Phou Vongkhamdy, my favorite Lao cowboy. Phou is the former USDA NRCS State Conservationist for Rhode Island. Since moving to Rhode Island in 2009 and joining the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Phou has become a cornerstone of the northeast agricultural community. His journey, from his beginnings as a student intern to over 15 years leading the State's conservation efforts, is a testament to his dedication to the land and the people who steward it. His leadership and knowledge have led the service to bring exemplary conservation practices to many farmers, forest landowners, cities and towns across the State. A respected leader, Phou has aggressively worked to maximize the effectiveness of the service and, in doing so, has always given 110 percent to everything he works on. While others would often say something could not be done, Phou always strove to find a way to say yes. He made NRCS in Rhode Island the little engine that could. His commitment is defined by his inclusive approach to conservation, ensuring that the benefits of soil health, water quality, and sustainable forestry are accessible to all. A tenacious public servant, he has actively built the capacity of the conservation districts by developing cooperative agreements with associations. His signature hands-on approach ensured swift and effective collaboration. Under his leadership, the service has seen a substantial increase in utilization of its most popular programs, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program and the Conservation Stewardship Program. These programs are particularly useful for specialty crop growers and forest land managers, who represent the vast majority of Rhode Island agriculture. Phou has also been an indispensable partner in our mission to protect Rhode Island's natural beauty and strengthen our communities against the growing threats of climate change. Together, we secured critical investments for our State, most notably the landmark $48.5 million Federal project to prevent flooding along the Pocasset River, a transformation that will protect families in Cranston and Johnston for generations to come. From our early days restoring migratory fish passages on the Pawtuxet River to his steady leadership in the wake of the historic 2010 floods, Phou has consistently turned Federal resources into real-world results. His dedication as State conservationist preserved thousands of acres of our farmland and wetlands and ensured that the Ocean State remains resilient and vibrant for all who call it home. I thank and applaud Phou for his work, his devotion, and his friendship. Under his guidance, Rhode Island has seen transformative growth in climate-smart agriculture and farmland protection, securing a more resilient future for the Ocean State.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here for the 305th time with my increasingly weathered and battered ``Time to Wake Up'' chart to warn this Chamber about a corrupt danger to our country--a danger powered by fossil fuel industry money, orchestrated by dark money front groups, and now executed at the highest levels of a corrupted executive branch. In previous speeches, I described the four phases of climate denial. Phase 1 was bury the evidence. The fossil fuel industry scientists told them what the science was. They ignored it, and they buried it. Phase 2 was lie about the evidence, pretend it wasn't true, as the rest of the scientific establishment came on board with what their scientists had already told them. Phase 3 was flood our politics with dark money to protect fossil fuel's pollute-for-free business model. After Citizens United, out poured the money. Now we have entered into phase 4, the most dangerous phase yet-- weaponizing the government itself to attack clean energy, protect polluters, and steamroll lawful government process. Today's speech is about a lie. We are now so deep in phase 4 that heads of executive Agencies feel entitled to lie to Congress if it helps carry out President Trump's fossil fuel-captured agenda. Notice what distinguishes phase 4. Phase 1 involved buried evidence kept secret. Phase 2 involved lies filtered through think tank reports with plausible deniability for the fossil fuel interests behind the front groups. Phase 3 flooded politics with dark money through anonymous front groups--all hidden. But phase 4, using the government itself to execute the polluters' agenda--against the law, against Congress, and against the courts--that must be done out loud, under oath, before judges, and before this body, in plain view. In phase 4, the lying becomes official, brazen, on the record. There once was a time when lying to Congress mattered; when swearing an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth meant exactly that; when if someone lied to Congress, even Members of the liar's own party would hold them to account. Unfortunately, those days are gone. But truth should still matter. So this evening, I present to you the story of Lyin' Lee Zeldin. I will show you what happened when EPA Administrator Zeldin came before two congressional committees in May of last year. Our review of thousands of pages of sworn court filings, internal EPA emails, and other communications and documents produced under the Freedom of Information Act proves it. Let me walk you through the sorry saga. At the beginning of his term, Trump, following the Project 2025 blueprint, instructed Agencies to cut off funding that his fossil fuel donors didn't like. Remember, Candidate Trump had promised Big Oil a massive return on their investment if they donate $1 billion to get him elected. Well, fossil fuel companies indeed donated massively--hundreds of millions, maybe even the full billion--and Trump dutifully provided the payback in innumerable policies benefiting fossil fuel and kneecapping fossil fuel's clean energy competitors. The heavy hand of government was put to work for fossil fuel. As soon as Zeldin arrived at EPA, he diligently obeyed President Trump by freezing and then terminating as many as 781 grants with awards totaling over $1.7 billion. These grants were congressionally appropriated and obligated to the grantees to fund projects in clean energy, coastal resilience, lead pipe removal, and improving air quality for children. EPA's own inspector general found, after reviewing one of the grant programs that had awarded $1.5 billion in canceled funds, that the Biden EPA had done so in a fair, transparent, and legally compliant way. There simply was no excuse to claw back this money except that the fossil fuel donors wanted it done. You won't be shocked to learn that it is actually illegal for the executive branch to unilaterally roll back appropriated and obligated congressional grants. So it prompted a swath of lawsuits against the EPA. From Washington, DC, to Rhode Island, from Maryland to South Carolina, from Biden judge to Trump judge alike, Federal courts over and over reached the same conclusion: The grant freezes and terminations were likely illegal, and the grant money should go to the recipients. One Federal court ruled that EPA had to conduct individualized grant- by-grant reviews and could only cancel grants based on specific findings related to the unique characteristics of a particular grant. It is a pretty simple rule grounded in separation of powers. The executive branch cannot veto congressionally appropriated and obligated funds outside the veto process, particularly not based on big donors' political resentments. That is the law. To cancel a grant, EPA must review each grant itself, its terms, its conditions, its obligations and have a specific reason for doing so. Note here the difference between individually reviewing grants versus reviewing entire grant programs under which may fall dozens or even hundreds of individual grants. The review can't be grant program by grant program; it has to be individual grant by individual grant. In response to court orders, EPA made a huge production of documents. After sifting through the ``thousands of documents'' EPA offered up, the court found this: Not one document showed any individualized review. The court said it went through thousands of documents and looked at them and said: Not one document showed any individualized review. There was no grant-by-grant analysis, nothing that met the legal individualized review standards. Instead, what the court found was illegal targeting based on the grant containing general terms that the big donors didn't like, like ``climate,'' like ``greenhouse gas emissions,'' like ``environmental justice.'' Entire grant programs were canceled en masse. Internal emails said ``cancel them all.'' It was the opposite of what the law requires. In short, the court found, after extensive review, that Administrator Zeldin did not follow the law. Administrator Zeldin then made an astonishing move. That same day, May 20, 2025, that the court rejected the EPA's claims as ``hard to believe,'' Zeldin walked into a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing and repeated the same discredited story he had tried to sell the court, plus an added new twist. He claimed that he personally conducted the individualized review of what he called ``every single grant'' before he canceled them. The court, based on the actual evidence from those thousands of EPA documents, had not bought that story, but Zeldin figured that a Republican-controlled congressional subcommittee just might. The very next day Zeldin came to our Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and--under oath--told me the same false story; that he had personally reviewed every grant, this time adding that his deputy also individually reviewed every single grant. The problem with all of this? The evidence shows that the opposite is true. Remember what the court found after reviewing those thousands of pages EPA had produced: Not one document showed any individualized review. But wait, there is more. That deputy that Zeldin claimed also reviewed every single grant individually? He filed a sworn declaration to that same court averring only that he had conducted a review of grant programs. Remember the difference between grant programs which contain dozens of potential grants and the individual grants. All he would say under oath is that he had reviewed grant programs, not individual grants. Under oath in court, the deputy in charge of coordinating the grant review would only swear his name to a declaration about a review of programs, not of individual grants. Other circumstantial evidence also cuts against Zeldin. We looked at detailed EPA calendars obtained by FOIA requests showing that the Administrator held five meetings with EPA staff related to grants. Total time across all five meetings: 2 hours and 45 minutes. His calendar showed no entries for other personal time to review grants. So do the math: 2 hours 45 minutes to review 781 grants individually. That is about 13 seconds per grant. That math ain't ``mathing,'' as they say. And then look at what eventually happened within the five grant programs at issue. Every single grant in every single program was canceled except one outlier, a government-to-government grant, the only one to a single State. All the rest, swept clean. Another tell here was Zeldin's behavior in our committee: his madcap yelling, accusing, fist-banging. It is Trump administration standard operating procedure to yell and shout and accuse when they can't answer a legitimate question. We have seen that play run over and over and over. So all the evidence points plainly in one direction: Zeldin didn't follow the law, and he lied about following the law. Why? Why lie about that? Well, here is why: Trump demands two things from his Cabinet; one, fawning flattery; and two, slavish implementation of his political instructions. Zeldin admitting that he messed up the grant cancellation process would batter EPA's chances in litigation. He would be guilty of failure to execute on Trump's big donors' political agenda. He would have to face the White House's ire. So Administrator Zeldin became Lyin' Lee, desperate to keep Trump's illegal plans alive to carry out the political purge of clean energy grants, all to satisfy that audience of one by rewarding Trump's thuggish fossil fuel Kingmakers. This kind of gangster and ``Gong Show'' absurdity, this kind of brazenness, shows what happens when fossil fuel private interests own the executive branch of the U.S. Government. Follow the money. This is phase four. This is what it looks like when government is captured by polluters and put to their service. Zeldin's testimony was no inadvertent statement; it was a calculated stratagem to lie and try to shout his way out of the pickle he was in. Let's be clear who is hurt here, what the real costs are. Lying to a court is bad. Lying to Congress is bad. Lying to frustrate judicial review is bad. Lying to thwart Congress' constitutional power of the purse is bad. All of that is bad. But behind all of that were real people trying to earn a living on the other end of those grants that Zeldin lied about and canceled. Those grants funded tangible projects that would cut people's energy costs, protect people from natural disaster, create real jobs for real people. It was real stuff. Here is some of the real stuff the illegal grant cancellations held up: In North Carolina, residents were relying on a nearly $20 million grant to replace residential water service lines to get dangerous lead out of their drinking water. Other lead drinking projects were canceled in Indiana, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Another one, Kipnuk, AK, lost a nearly $20 million grant to stabilize its riverbank. Those consequences were real and immediate. In October of 2025, the remnants of Typhoon Halong swept through, flooded the river, leveled the town, killed 1 person, and displaced over 1,500 people. A climate specialist at the University of Alaska had noted a pattern. Three devastating ex-typhoon storms hit Western Alaska in 4 years. Zeldin's canceled grant did not just fail to prevent a predictable flood; it may actually have contributed to the permanent erasure of a Native community's home. Just last week, Kipnuk Tribal members voted to relocate away from their flooded ancestral village. The Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe was planning to use nearly $20 million to create a Tribal resilience hub that would have provided essential services during emergencies. Anybody who has had to evacuate in an emergency knows how important that is-- gone. Texas A&M University would have received $14 million to install wastewater treatment systems throughout 17 counties in Alabama that had inadequate plumbing capacity where residents suffer from preventable conditions like hookworm, but I guess that was too woke for Lyin' Lee. A $500,000 grant for the Childhood Lead Action Project--a project launched in 2018 to reduce lead exposure in children--gone. The list goes on, but the mass cancellations share the same characteristic. Zeldin and his merry band of DOGE boys killed off grant programs based on ideas and phrases they didn't like and wanted to cancel: ``environmental justice,'' ``DEI,'' ``climate change.'' None of this was based on the required individualized review he pretended to have done. That is the Zeldin lie under oath, the Zeldin lie that is sanctionable, but it is not his big lie. His big lie is Zeldin repealing EPA's 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding, the bedrock scientific and legal determination that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. He boasted it was the ``single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.'' What he did not say is this: EPA's own scientists disagreed. The National Academy of Science had just reaffirmed the Endangerment Finding, saying it ``was accurate, had stood the test of time, and is now reinforced by even stronger evidence.'' So EPA, having trouble challenging that science, argued that the Clean Air Act does not authorize EPA to regulate greenhouse gases at all, which was an argument the Supreme Court had already rejected back in 2009 in Massachusetts v. EPA. The science has not changed. The law has not changed. The fossil fuel industry's complete infiltration of our government is what changed. Lying to Congress about grant reviews is serious, but lying about science, that is big. Even bigger and even more consequential for the American people is the enormous lie which Zeldin, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright spout constantly. The enormous lie is that clean energy is more expensive than dirty polluting energy; the fact of the matter is that it is not. And the easiest way to prove that it is not is to look at what is called the generation stack of the electric grid. As we all turn on lights and air-conditioners and electric appliances, powerplants get called up to provide the power to meet the demand. For obvious reasons, grid operators call up the lowest cost power first. Here is what that looks like for two of our electric grids: ERCOT covers Texas; PJM runs westward from the Mid-Atlantic to the Midwest. This shows the order in which, in real life, they actually call up their powerplants, least expensive first. And guess what? Solar and wind and hydro come before coal and gas. Same here, solar, wind, and hydro come before coal and gas. In real life, based on real prices actually bid into the electric grid, that is how they stack up. Solar, wind, and other renewables come first because they are less expensive. So it is indisputable that Burgum, Zeldin, and Wright are lying. Here is another proof point. This time series compares costs on the Texas grid ERCOT at various levels of demand in 2018 and in 2024. This line shows the demand cost curve of ERCOT in 2018. This line shows the same information for the same grid in 2024 after a huge clean energy surge went onto the Texas grid--17.6 gigawatts of new clean energy joined the grid. Look here at the high point in 2018 when demand peaked at about 68 gigawatts. What was the price point? Mr. President, $75 per megawatt hour. You hit that exact same level of demand 6 years later with all of that new clean energy on the grid and the price had fallen by two- thirds. It is now $25 per megawatt hour--$75 before the clean energy surge, $25 after. In real life, in real time, Texas saw clean energy press prices down. It is a before-and-after look at how clean energy reduces prices of electricity. With power costs down when clean energy goes up, this is more evidence that Zeldin, Burgum, and Wright are lying. Here is another example: Australia. Australia is loading up on clean energy. They are loading up on residential, solar, and other clean energy arrays. And that allows them now to have their grid propose 3 hours of scheduled free electricity every day. Three hours a day, no matter who you are. If you are using electricity, you plug in, you run your dryer, you run your washing machine, and for those 3 hours you know, that is free electricity. It is free electricity from Australia's abundant clean power strategy. Literally, clean power so cheap it makes electricity free. One last data point on costs. The court filings of the state attorneys general fighting the illegal Trump stop work orders against offshore wind farms off Rhode Island and Connecticut. Here is what our States asserted about Revolution Wind in court where lying is sanctionable. Once operational, Revolution Wind alone will provide hundreds of millions of dollars each year in energy bill savings to New England. Hundreds of millions of dollars each year in energy bill savings to New England. The ISO New England's grid operator wrote that had offshore wind been online, it would have saved regional production costs by $80 to $85 million over a 2-week cold snap in 2017 to 2018, resulting in $11 to $13 per megawatt hour, less costs in what the grid charged ratepayers. Zeldin, Burgum, and Wright could have come into that courtroom and offered their evidence to the contrary, filed affidavits asserting the cost savings of fossil fuel. It was a great opportunity for them to make that case in court that they were spouting on FOX News and on X. Well, guess what? In the forum where lies are subject to court sanction, they had nothing to say. The Trump administration's attack on clean energy may reward Trump's big polluter donors, but people, people who already face the Trump affordability crisis, they see their costs go up when clean energy is kept off the grid. When the Big Oil cartel hikes prices, families pay the cost. When volatile natural gas prices spike, families pay the cost. When cheaper clean energy is blocked from the grid, families pay the cost. In this case, Texas families, had it not been for that clean energy, would have paid an additional $50 per megawatt hour. In this Trump clean energy scam, money goes from regular people's pockets, from customers' pockets, straight to Trump's big fossil fuel donors, in billions. In billions. It is the biggest payback for political support that I can remember. Banning clean energy, it hurts homeowners and renters. And as climate disasters surge, insurance markets falter. They are already staggering in Texas and Florida. The Economist magazine has warned of a potential $25 trillion collapse in global real estate value as properties become uninsurable and unmortgageable, and in some cases, even unlivable. The chief economist at the mortgage giant Freddie Mac predicted a cascade. Climate risk makes regions uninsurable, which makes properties there unmortgageable, which crashes property values, which all collapses in a 2008-style economic recession. Canceling clean energy investments to help out big polluter donors accelerates that dangerous trajectory until property values crash. Clean energy is where the jobs are. Over 400,000 had been created since 2020, with a faster growth rate than the rest of the energy sector. Fossil-fueled sabotage of this sector means fewer of those jobs in America, more in China, and a shrinking economic future for American workers. And, yes, attacking clean energy means more emissions, more disasters, more billion-dollar storms, more hits to communities like Kipnuk. NOAA shows that Americans suffered over $100 billion per year in disaster costs in each of the past 5 years, half a trillion dollars. And that cost gets worse. And that harm cascades, from the families struggling with a soaring property insurance bill, to the worker whose clean energy job never materializes, to the taxpayer footing the bill for ever more costly disasters. These are the real consequences of government by falsehood. When truth is denied, when science is ignored, when courts are defied, the public ends up bearing the cost. And that cost grows every day that the polluters' evil machinery is left to run unchecked. Zeldin lying about his review of grant programs is obviously a lesser matter than the wholesale lies designed to mislead the public and prop up the failing and polluting fossil fuel industry. But those lies to Congress were under oath--under oath--and that ought to matter. There is no exception to the duty to tell the truth for lies that benefit Trump's big fossil fuel donors. For years, fossil fuel interests believed that they could pollute for free, deceive the public, buy elections with dark money, and do it all without consequence. They have bought and paid for this administration and now use operatives like Zeldin to run the Federal Government from the inside. The brazenness of executive branch officials on the polluter payroll is there for everyone to see. Zeldin's own EPA colleagues are saying so too. Over 1,200 EPA employees, career scientists, lawyers, and enforcement staff have signed a public letter to Zeldin laying out their concerns that he has spread misinformation through official EPA channels; that he has promoted a culture of fear among his own staff; and that he has redirected the Agency's mission from its legal mission to protect public health to the service of big polluters. Separately, a watchdog organization has sued the EPA in Federal court after the Agency failed to produce any documentation backing up a Zeldin claim made in front of the President at a Cabinet meeting that EPA employees were absent or were ``ghost workers.'' Zeldin doesn't just lie to Congress, he lies about his own people at the EPA. Accountability is coming. The courts are waking up. The public is waking up. Even some in the business community are waking up to the looming peril. And President Trump is losing steam, losing cases, losing credibility, losing his popularity, losing the illusion of invincibility that cowed so many into silence. It is long past time for Republicans to discover their oaths of office, to stand up for the Constitution and for Congress as an institution, and to defend our American constituents from Trump and his gangster government. One place to start is with a really simple rule for our witnesses: You do not lie. So for that reason today, I am calling on Lee Zeldin to go. It is bad enough that he has weaponized the EPA to do the bidding of the giant fossil fuel and chemical corporations that donated to Trump's campaign. But if he can't be relied on to tell the simple truth to Congress, to answer simple questions honestly, how could anybody in this body believe him? Or is the new rule that lying is OK if it is done for big polluters? Late last year, Moms Clean Air Force and their 1.6 million members called on Zeldin to resign. Earlier this week, a coalition of over 160 organizations, led by the Climate Action Campaign and Moms Clean Air Force, demanded that Zeldin resign or be fired. Moms Across America and many others in the Make America Healthy Again movement are fed up with Zeldin flip-flopping on toxic regulations and failing to respect the core mission of EPA to keep Americans healthy and safe. People across America on both the left and the right are waking up to the dangers of Lyin' Lee Zeldin running a corrupted EPA. It is time for us here in the Senate to do the same. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, there is no objection on our side. Through many trials, toils, and snares, we have come together at this moment, and we are delighted to proceed.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here to speak about the so-called SAVE America Act, which I think probably would be better described as the ``Steal the Next Election Act'' because of the purpose that this bill has to throw the election and to throw political influence in America to the Republicans. You can imagine why they would want to engage in special weapons and tactics to try to win the 2026 election when you see the political disaster that they are enmeshed in: the mess that the Trump administration has made of the economy, the stench of corruption pervading the administration, a war that is running up gasoline prices and has no end in sight and no evident plan. Wherever you look, you see a party in complete disarray with Americans angry, frustrated, and befuddled by the nonsense, and an election coming. So, of course, they want to change things at the ballot box. Now, where would you go to test that proposition, that the purpose of this bill is to throw elections to the Republicans? Who might have a view on this that we should listen to? Oh, right. The President of the United States, the one who has caused the Republicans the political catastrophe that they have looming from the disastrous second term that he has inflicted on this country. ``Republicans have to win this one,'' he said. Get this bill passed is what he is talking about. ``Republicans have to win this one. We'll never lose a race for 50 years.'' That is how much the President thinks this bill will tank American elections in favor of him and his billionaire donors who already have way too much influence in our politics. He is talking about us here, Democrats, ``we know.'' ``They know if we get this''--if Republicans get this bill--``they probably won't win an election for 50 years, maybe longer.'' This is the President of the United States, the head of the Republican Party, the person most responsible for the mess that Americans are rejecting, and he is being pretty candid about what the purpose of this bill is; it is to throw the election. It is to politically interfere with the coming election so that the Republican Party, and, more importantly, the billionaire backers who are pulling the strings and giving it its direction don't lose, don't see split government, don't see compromise, don't see Congress in the people's hands again. ``Republicans have to win this one,'' he said. ``We'll never lose a race for 50 years.'' And this isn't about political influence with comments like that, from the head of the Republican Party? You may think he is thinking about some dim and distant future perhaps, that this effort on the floor of the Senate right now to throw the election to the Republican Party isn't immediate. Whoops. There he goes. ``It will guarantee the midterms.'' The guy says the quiet part out loud. I will give him that. He tells Republicans: You are going to win the midterms at levels that you can't even believe. How would you win the midterms at levels that you can't even believe? Well, you probably can't believe that you would win the midterms based on current polling as Americans reject the wars, the spending, the waste, the corruption, the cost increases. You can't even believe it, unless you get this bill--unless you are going to get this bill--and then you are going to win every election for a long time. It is a conceded point by the head of the Republican Party--Donald Trump--the one who has caused this year of disaster, this year of change and disaster--that the whole purpose of the exercise we are going through is to lock in Republican control--more wars, higher costs, worse corruption--by making elections unwinnable for Democrats for 50 years by guaranteeing Republicans the midterms. So let's not pretend there is some high-and-mighty, civic-minded motivation for this. That is just a screen. Behind the screen, Trump can't help himself. He admitted what this is all about: It will guarantee the midterms. You are going to win the midterms at levels that you can't even believe, and you are going to win every election for a long time. We'll never lose a race [for] 50 years. We will ``never lose a race [for] 50 years.'' We will have so fixed voting in this country--not enough with the gerrymandering, not enough with the dark money--we now have to fix elections so that Republicans will never lose a race for 50 years. He has admitted it. He has admitted it. And how do they do that? Well, until recently, Director of Homeland Security former Secretary Noem said: We just want to make sure that the ``right people'' are voting. The ``right people.'' Gee, who might that be? And so this whole scheme gets cooked up, marketed falsely as some civic safe voting proposition, when what it really is, is a scheme to influence elections so that the creepy billionaires behind the Republican Party can continue to control the decisions that get made in this town. That is what this is about, plain and simple. My friends will say: Oh, this is just a voter ID bill. Everybody loves voter ID. You will hear 80-20 more than you can imagine. Oh, voter ID. Just voter ID. People should have to bring their ID when they vote. Well, we did that in Rhode Island. It was a bit of a pain. You can imagine an individual person--let's say an 80-year-old woman--widow-- living alone, living in, say, a senior high rise in Providence or in Pawtucket. She is not traveling. If she had a passport, it has lapsed. She is not driving. She hasn't had a car in 5 years. Her community is largely in that high rise and people who come to help and help bring her groceries. She has a Social Security card because she is on Social Security, but the Social Security card isn't a photo ID. So when you bring in voter ID, you have now dumped on that lady a new hassle. She has been voting her whole life. She has been voting for 60- plus years, and now suddenly they have a problem with her voting--even when she comes downstairs to the voting machines that get set up in the senior center lobby to make it easier for seniors to vote, and everybody in the building knows her; but no ID, no vote. So, in Rhode Island, we went through the hassle of helping people who needed an ID--who for perfectly legitimate reasons didn't have one--get an ID. It was unnecessary. We had essentially zero voter fraud, but we did it and we put in the work and it worked out fine. So let's not pretend this is just a voter ID law. This points its attack at voter registration. If you move, you have to reregister to vote. If you are young and are registering to vote for the first time, that is where you run into the obstacles designed to prevent certain people--people who aren't the ``right people''--from being able to vote. That is where you run into the problem. And worse than that, they are trying to take the voter information that we entrust to our secretary of state and to our elections board. They are trying to get the private information of voters in our voter rolls and put it into a national website controlled by, oh, the Department of Homeland Security, the ones who are running ICE around in neighborhoods, the one who ran their agents through the Rhode Island courthouse and threatened a judge with smashing his car windows when he tried to vouch for his high school intern whom the ICE agents wrongly thought was a 30-year-old person they were looking for. We are going to trust the entire country's worth of voter information to that operation? Look at what just happened in Fulton County. In Fulton County, a Trump U.S. attorney from Missouri sent the FBI in Georgia into the election headquarters to seize all of the voter data that they had. I have separately explained what a completely fouled-up operation that was and how the way in which they did that search warrant left enormous holes for any defendant, who was later charged based on evidence obtained in that search warrant, to run a truck through that prosecution. They violated really basic rules that prosecutors follow--prosecution 101--rookie, dumb errors. And that leads to only one of two conclusions: One is they are idiots. They are incompetent. They have no idea what they are doing. And there is some sense around that because the local U.S. attorney in Georgia wanted no part of this mess. It was being directed by Washington through Missouri into Georgia. The FBI special agent in charge in Georgia didn't seem to like it much. He got run out of his job--presumably for objecting to this nonsense. But there is a worse theory than that this was a completely incompetent screw up of a search warrant execution, and that is: They didn't mind leaving all these holes for a future defendant--somebody charged on the basis of that evidence--to exploit. They didn't mind opening these unnecessary vulnerabilities in a case for a defendant who might later be charged to exploit because they never thought there would be a defendant. The point wasn't to do a criminal prosecution or even a criminal investigation; the point was to use the search warrant process falsely in order to get their hands on a massive amount of voter data in a swing State. That is being litigated right now, and we will find out. But that is the kind of effort by this administration to use the Federal Government to seize private voter data. That would be exactly consistent with why we need to worry about DHS, which only wants the ``right people'' to vote, getting a massive amount of personal voter data. In Rhode Island, our Secretary of State is fighting that right now because he understands that Rhode Islanders want their voter data to be private, to be safe, and not to be part of some massive political election interference operation run using ICE, using the FBI, using DHS, and using this voter information to hand out to political operatives, to make sure that a weaponized Federal Government is not used to try to throw the election. It is no small thing to have the Department of Homeland Security want data on every voting American. In recent years, Republican heads would have exploded about that idea. It used to be a party that cared about voter privacy; that in the contest between an individual and the government, tried to take the side of the individual. But now that their billionaires control the government--flip. Now they are on the side of the government, and they want your data. It is so bad that it seems they have even had one of their little ``Musk rats''--the ``doggy boys''--running around in government. Remember that operation when Musk was the President's close adviser, and there were DOGE people? Turns out, there may even have been your Social Security data taken. We will find out more about that. So this is no small thing. And if you want to know what the motive is, just ask the people who are running this. We just want to make sure the ``right people'' vote. ``We'll never lose a race [for] 50 years'' if you pass this bill. ``It will guarantee the midterms.'' You are going to win the midterms at levels you can't even believe and you are going to ``win every election for a long time.'' That is putting the fix in. That is using the power of government to put the fix in to fix the elections, to choose who runs the government. That is about as un-American as it gets. So why is it that they are so afraid about the midterms? What is it that makes them have to put in place mechanisms--from voter ID to registration restrictions to data control--that will give them the tools to guarantee the midterms? Why not run on the record? Because the record stinks--that is why--and voters know it. This is where President Trump's approval rating has gone. He is down 15 percent. He is down more than 25 percent since when he came in. That is a crash in confidence. And I believe this ended before this Iran-- what did he call it?--``excursion'' that has driven up gas prices by about a dollar a gallon already, with no end in sight. So they are looking at an election disaster, and for a really good reason. Here are Trump's job approval ratings. His disapprovals have been going up and up and up to nearly 60. His approval has been going down and down and down to below 40. There is a more than 20-point swing between his disapproval and his approval. That is a politically lethal place to be. That is a signal that you have made such a mess of your unified control of government that voters want something different, want something new, want a change, are sick of the nonsense. And when you are looking at that and you are looking just a few months down at November--man, time to make sure you change the law so that we can make sure the right people--the right people--are voting. Let's take a look at a few examples of why it is that Trump's disapproval is more than 20 points above his approval. Why is it that they are in such trouble politically? Why is it that these approval ratings have dropped 15 points and 25 from before net zero? This is a real problem. And we are not the only ones looking at this data. The billionaires who run the Republican Party these days--the billionaires who tell Trump what to do and boss him around and give him big gifts and super deals for his family and his cronies and his friends--they are watching it too. They have never had it so good right now. They can basically secretly, quietly run the U.S. Government through the Republican Party. What a deal. Poor men wannabe rich. Rich men wanna be King. And they get to be King from the shadows, with dark money and influence and a Republican Party that hops to their tune. So they are not happy either. That is why they need emergency measures that will guarantee the midterms. That is what we are involved in today--trying to make sure elections are fair, trying to make sure everybody has a shot to vote, trying to make sure--for real--this is an election that reflects what the American people get to choose. Why are these numbers so terrible for Trump and Republicans? Because things aren't so great for the American people right now. The annual cost of residential electricity is up in almost every State in the last year. In some cases, it is up a lot--$278, $210, $123, $159, $171 up in Maine. People understand that their electric bills are going up, and if they are paying attention--if they are paying attention--they understand that their electricity bills are going up because Trump and his administration are deliberately pushing clean energy away from the grid. They are deliberately keeping cheap, clean energy off the grid so that, for any given level of demand, the grid has to go where if it doesn't have the cheap, clean energy? It has to go to the polluting fossil fuel plants. Those plants set the grid price when they are called up, and when they set the grid price, they are more expensive than clean energy, so everybody's costs go up. All that excess money--the billions of dollars that get sucked out of consumers' pockets, out of ratepayers' pockets when they have to pay the higher prices of fossil fuel compared to the lower prices of clean energy--that whole delta of billions of dollars flows where? Right to Trump's billionaire fossil fuel donors, to the ones that he went to in Mar-a-Lago and said: Give me a billion dollars, and I will give you everything you want. I need your money to win this race. And what did they do? They coughed up hundreds of millions of dollars. Did they get to the billion? We don't know because so much of the money is so dark. But we know they got hundreds of millions to Trump. Now he is paying them back by stopping and slowing down clean energy, which would lower costs for people, and instead he drives the cost up. That is why so much of this is happening. I will give you an example. The Trump administration has messed around twice with the offshore wind farm off of Rhode Island called Revolution Wind. Out of the clear, blue sky, for no cause, they dropped a stop work order on the project, stopping it dead when it was about 80-plus percent complete. Well, that caused them a little problem because the Trump administration had been in court defending that very project against fossil fuel front groups who were suing it to slow down its arrival on the grid. So the lawyers--the regular, normal Federal lawyers who were in there defending this, defending their permit--suddenly had to pull a 180 about the same project, in the same courtroom, and suddenly say ``Oh, no. That project we have been defending until this minute is suddenly now all bad'' because of this ridiculous stop work order. Well, the judge didn't take long to throw out that stop work order because it was illegal and even preposterous, and the Trump administration then let the appeal period expire. So there is no longer a time to appeal it. So it is like: OK, that is done. Back to work, everybody. Sure enough, they went back to work. What happened 30 days later, 2 days before Christmas, without notice? Men and women going out to work on these projects were told: Nope. New stop work order. Sorry about your Christmas. Not sure when you will ever come back to work. Too bad you were relying on all those nice wages. You are done now. Well, fortunately for the project, that second stop work order crashed and burned in court just as badly as the first illegal stop work order had. My point is they went to enormous, illegal effort to slow down that project. Why? Because, by contract, Revolution Wind is going to bring 9-cent kilowatt hours to our Rhode Island grid. Nine-cent kilowatt hours is what they sell for by contract. And how much does it cost on our grid, on average? Eighteen cents. Revolution Wind was going to bring 350,000 homes' worth of low-cost, 9-cent clean power onto our grid, so they wanted to stop it because then, without that clean, inexpensive power, the grid would have to go up, up, up what they call the generation stack, calling up more and more different units to burn gas and oil and make electricity. And all that extra money gets moved from customers' pockets to Trump's big donors, his big fossil fuel donors. It is a scheme. It is on purpose. These people may not know it yet, but by November, I hope they will learn that the reason their electric rates went up was on purpose--on purpose--so that Trump and his cronies could pay off his big fossil fuel donors with all that extra revenue from their delay and their blocking of cheaper, cleaner energy--in the billions. In the billions. Of course, it is not just electricity where people know that they have an administration that is not looking out for them but is looking out for the big corporations, the big polluters, the big donors. You probably can't read this, so I will read it. ``My cost of living has increased'': 80 to 16. ``My grocery costs have gone up'': 79 to 17. ``My utility costs like electricity have gone up'': 69 to 22. These are huge numbers that match the dissatisfaction I showed already with where Trump is--more than 20 points in the hole with voters and going the wrong way, approval rating collapsing before the whole Iran mess has kicked into voters' budgets. It is a real mess. Our electricity prices, look where they are going--up, up, up, up, up, for the exact reason I said: because the Trump administration is blocking clean, cheap energy to force the grid to have to spend more and more money on Trump's big fossil fuel donors. When a really big clean energy plant comes onto the grid, the grid moves to it because it is the cheapest. They pull the cheapest power first to meet demand. So when a big wind farm comes on, when a big solar array comes on, that means there is a fossil fuel plant somewhere at the top of that generation stack that doesn't get to run anymore, and the owners of that fossil fuel plant don't get paid for running it, and the fossil fuel dealers who fuel that plant don't get paid. So they have a vested interest in blocking clean energy, and they are doing it because basically they have infiltrated and occupy the Trump administration. Just look at the appointees and look at the behavior, and all of it drives costs up. Electricity prices are surging in the United States, and what people are going to understand by November is that those electric prices are surging on purpose. Ratepayers are being dragooned into a scheme to pay back Trump's big donors with their money. Costs of housing: up, 69 to 21. Healthcare costs: up, 61 to 26. Medicaid has been cut. People already know that. Half of the Americans already understand that Medicaid has been cut even though the cuts were postponed until after the election. Wait until they actually land in people's pocketbooks. Social Security and Medicare have been cut: 42 to 40. That is where all that is. But check all of these: cost of living, grocery, utility, housing, healthcare--60 to 80 versus 26 to 16. The American people know what is going on, they know what is being done to them, and they know who has done it. So that is why they have just got to make sure only the right people are voting. We did some work on another big cost area for Americans when I was the chairman of the Budget Committee. One of the biggest expenditures that a family has is home insurance on their home. It is very expensive, and it is going dramatically up. In some cases, not only are the premiums going dramatically up, but the insurance companies are finding that they can't insure the property any longer; it is too risky. So the poor owner gets a notice of nonrenewal--that is what it is called. You have been a loyal customer for 15, 20 years, you have made your premium payments on time every time, and the company sends a letter to you in the mail, comes through your mailslot: Sorry. Sorry. We can't insure you any longer. You are going have to find a new insurance company. This creates a huge hassle in the life of that family, which almost always ends up with a more expensive policy or one with a lot less coverage. This is happening all over the country, and it is happening because of climate risk. It is happening because along our coasts, the rising sea levels, the warmer oceans, the worse storms, the bigger hurricanes that come ashore are making it impossible for insurers to provide insurance to homeowners. It is also happening out West, although out West, it is not coastal storms and flooding that are making people's homes uninsurable; it is wildfire. Whether it is wildfire or whether it is coastal flooding, the cascade is the same; the dominoes that fall are the same. First is you have the climate risk. And why do we have the climate risk? We have the climate risk because the fossil industry, which is now running the Trump administration, has spent billions of dollars and decades in Congress making sure we let them pollute for free. And they have won. They have succeeded. It is still free to pollute carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. We have never put a price on carbon emissions. Nothing else is free to pollute. Nothing should be free to pollute. You don't get to dump chemicals in a river and get away with it just because the river carries it away. So this homeowners insurance problem is a massive, massive cost problem for homeowners across the country. Here in Florida--you can see how acute the problem is down in Florida. In Florida, I think we are at $14,000 average homeowners insurance for a standard $400,000 policy, and it is predicted, depending on the county you are in, to double, triple, or quadruple. What does it do to the value of your home when a $14,000 home insurance cost doubles or triples? What if you now have a $40,000 instead of a $14,000 annual carrying cost to own your home? Its value crashes. That is the cascade. You go from climate risk; to uninsurability; to, oops, now I can't get a mortgage on this property because if you can't insure a property, no one will issue a mortgage on it, to its value crashing, to a recession. Those warnings are all over the place--and not from Save The Whales, not from the League of Conservation Voters, not from the Sierra Club, but from the former risk manager of Goldman Sachs, from the former head of the Bank of England, from the international Financial Stability Board, from the former Chief Economist of Freddie Mac. The warnings are legion. Here is another cost that families are more and more dealing with. This is the rate of nonrenewal increase, where the insurance company says: Sorry, your property is now uninsurable--at least by our standards. Here are nonrenewal rates by State. Again, you see the coastal States hit pretty hard, but there is also wildfire coming in. This was the work of my Budget Committee. Then some other groups followed up and did some more detailed work. This is where home insurance premiums are changing. They are already up. What this did was to look forward, not to say ``OK, they are up; they have doubled in the last few years'' but ``Where are they going to go? Where do we predict they will go?'' The prediction here is that insurance premiums are going to climb as much as 300 percent in the 30- year period of a mortgage holder buying right now. What does he have to look forward to? Well, if you are down here and you are already paying 14,000 bucks a year--it is even more in Miami--and it is going to go up 300 percent, it is going to quadruple, these are people who have a real cost problem now, and they have a real cost problem coming, and behind that comes a real home values problem. If you are a Palm Beach billionaire and you want to swap mansions, that is fine. You can do that. You don't even need a mortgage; you just pay with cash. But if you are living north of Tampa in a development and you bought your house with a mortgage and you want to sell it, the person you want to sell it to is going to need a mortgage. If your property is now unmortgageable because it is uninsurable, there goes your market of buyers. We talked to people in Florida when we did this investigation who literally cannot sell their home at any price. It is not fancy enough for a billionaire, and it is not mortgageable and insurable for a normal person. They are just stuck. They are just stuck. Here, what the map shows is where they expect to see changes in home value, again, in the next 30 years, in the period of a mortgage entered into at the time, and they are looking at changes in value, dropped 20, 40, 60, 80, and even 100 percent--a total wipeout of home value--based on that home insurance, mortgage, property values cascade because we won't take care of the climate danger that everybody in their right mind knows exists. The fossil fuel industry has a big reckoning coming from that mess, and they do not want to be responsive to voters. They want the White House and the House and the Senate controlled by a party that they control. They want this election to keep Republicans in power so that they are not held to account for the fraudulent climate denial, for the dark money corruption, and for the looming catastrophe in home insurance rates. And the way they do that is making sure with this bill that ``we just make sure only the right people are voting.'' So the stakes are very high right now. I will close, because I think I have the floor only for another few minutes, by talking just briefly about Kansas. Why would a Rhode Islander want to talk about Kansas? I will tell you why. Because they tried this in Kansas. They had a similar law in Kansas, and it went to court, and the court threw it out as unconstitutional. The SAVE America Act resembles a law in Kansas that was decided to be unconstitutional. There are some other interesting things the court found. Across 19 years, the proponents of that law could only show 67 noncitizens registering to vote or even attempting to register to vote. Over 19 years, 67 people. If you look just at the Presidential elections in that period, Kansans voted in this number: 5.5 million votes cast. So those 67 people are 0.0012 percent of voters. For the pretext of trying to deal with those 67 attempts, the effect was to keep 31,000 legitimate Kansas voters from voting--31,000 kept from voting to solve a problem of 67 that didn't even exist because most of them were only attempts. So this is a solution to a nonproblem. The solution that it provides is to the problem of Trump and Republicans having made such a hash of things that they are now in a 20-plus point hole. So the billionaires who run the Republican Party and, through the Republican Party, run this body, run the House, run the Oval Office, make all the decisions for their own benefit--this is their clawing hand coming out of what seems like election disaster ahead to try to just grab back the power they are losing because their Republican Party has made such a hash of things. That is what this bill is. It is the dead zombie hand of the billionaires who are seeing the exact same approval rating as Trump taking the Republicans into a crash of an election and trying to solve that problem by guaranteeing the midterms by making sure that just the right people vote. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. No.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, it was the spring of 2019. Public and media interest in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report into Russia's election interference operation reached a fever pitch. There had been a steady drip, drip, drip of reporting on the Trump team's cozy and peculiar relationship with Russia since his surprise election victory in 2016. Ahead of the Mueller report's release, Trump's Attorney General, Bill Barr, issued a letter to Congress, purporting to summarize the report's findings. The letter declared that Russia and the Trump campaign did not collude to steal the election. The press, ravenous for any news of the long-anticipated Mueller report's conclusion, largely accepted Attorney General Barr's narrow, carefully worded conclusion and, not yet having access to the full report, blasted the Attorney General's summary around the world. Trump himself declared--all caps: ``NO COLLUSION!'' He said he had been cleared of the Russia ``hoax,'' a term he reserves only to describe things that are true, like climate change. Frustrated, Mueller wrote to Barr that the Attorney General's letter ``did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance'' of the investigation. But by the time the dense, voluminous Mueller report was issued, the month after Barr's letter, his message had been obscured. The Mueller report actually concluded that the Trump campaign knew of and welcomed Russian interference and expected to benefit from it. That conclusion was later echoed and reinforced by an investigation led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio's Senate Intelligence Committee, a bipartisan report. But Barr's scheme had largely worked. Many in the media and in the Democratic Party seemed to internalize that the Russia speculation had perhaps gotten out of hand and that perhaps we had been wrong to believe there was a troubling connection between Trump and Russia after all. But were we? Let's take a look at a sampling of what Trump has done for Russia just lately, and usually at the expense of American interests. There are many, but here is a ``top 10.'' One, after Trump and Vice President Vance theatrically chastised the heroic Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in front of TV cameras in the Oval Office, last year, Trump paused our weapons shipments to Ukraine. Two, in July, during the worst Russian bombing campaign of the war to that point, Trump paused an already funded weapons shipment for Ukraine, including the Patriot interceptors that protect civilians from Putin's savage attacks. Three, that same month, Trump's Treasury Department stopped imposing new sanctions and closing sanctions loopholes, effectively allowing dummy corporations to send funds, chips, and military equipment to Russia. Four, leaked phone calls show that White House envoy Steve Witkoff and Putin envoy Kirill Dmitriev have worked together closely behind the scenes on a peace deal favorable to Russia. Five, last summer, Trump rolled out the Presidential red carpet for the Russian dictator on American soil, with a summit in Alaska that yielded, unsurprisingly, no gains toward ending the war in Ukraine. Six, Trump's Vice President traveled to the Munich Security Conference, last year, to parrot Russia's anti-Western talking points, pushed by rightwing groups that Putin has long funded and used to create political strife in Europe. Seven, Trump installed Russia apologist Tulsi Gabbard as his Director of National Intelligence, much to the glee of Russian state media. Eight, upon the confirmation of Trump's Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Department of Justice shuttered its anti-kleptocracy work that had successfully targeted Putin's Russian oligarchs. Nine, late last year, Trump unveiled a new so-called National Security Strategy, which abandoned traditional alliances in Europe and favored a transactional foreign policy that the Kremlin praised as ``largely consistent'' with Moscow's vision and desires. And, 10, the Trump administration is even paving the way for Russia's return to global sports competition, ending its isolation in those arenas, in the wake of the hostile Ukraine invasion and state-backed systemic doping programs in Russia. That is a ``top 10,'' but the list goes on. If Trump were purposefully doing Russia's bidding, it is hard to see what he would be doing differently. The United States is the most powerful nation in the world. Russia is a weak, corrupt regime. My old friend Senator John McCain used to say that Russia is a gas station, run by gangsters, with an army. It doesn't make sense that the President of the United States, who insists--insists--on being dominant in essentially every relationship, is so submissive to one person. And that one person is Russia's dictator Vladimir Putin. So what is it about Trump and Russia? And could it have any connection with Trump's close friendship with the deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein? Much about Epstein remains unknown. But the survivors who have come forward and the millions of emails released through the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act have shed some light on the operation of the late financier's global pedophile ring, and, over and over, it touches Russia. When recently asked by a reporter about the Epstein files, Trump said in part: It's just a Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. Again, ``hoax''--the word he uses for when something is true. But the most telling part is that Trump's mind, asked about Epstein, immediately went to Russia--``Russia, Russia, Russia.'' I should start by pointing out that Epstein's ties to foreign intelligence may never be fully known. It is a murky world. He had links to officials in the U.S., Russian, and Israeli Governments, and many others. But it is worth looking at those ties to Russia, a nation so hostile to the United States. Epstein's career began in the mid-1970s at the prestigious Dalton School in New York City, where, despite dropping out of college, 21- year-old Jeffrey Epstein was given a position teaching high school mathematics to the children of some of New York's wealthiest families. Perhaps of note, the outgoing headmaster at the time of Epstein's hire was Donald Barr, the father of future Attorney General Bill Barr and a former intelligence officer during World War II. The elder Barr was known for making unconventional hires at Dalton. After a couple of years, Epstein was able to leverage the elite connections he made at Dalton to a job at Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns, where he rose quickly through the company. However, after getting caught fabricating his resume, using the company credit card on expensive gifts for his girlfriend, and, ultimately, providing privileged stock information to a girlfriend, among other unscrupulous behaviors, Epstein called it quits and started his own financial firm. Those early scams were just the start. Shortly thereafter, Epstein fell in with a wealthy man named Douglas Leese, a British defense contractor with connections in the arms industry and the British Government. During this period, Epstein would tell people he was a ``bounty hunter'' who tracked down hidden money. According to Steven Hoffenberg, a former business mentor of Epstein's who went to prison for a massive Ponzi scheme that he later said Epstein had designed, Leese introduced Epstein to Robert Maxwell. Ghislaine Maxwell, who became Epstein's girlfriend and sex- trafficking accomplice after her father's death, was Robert Maxwell's favorite daughter, and he involved her deeply in his work. An opportunist in pursuit of wealth, the Czechoslovak-born Robert Maxwell had complex, shifting ties to British, Soviet, and Israeli intelligence. Initially bankrolled by MI6, he accepted secret payments from the KGB through his Soviet-friendly publishing company and was the rare individual who traversed both sides of the Iron Curtain. In 1992, the British newspaper the Sunday Express wrote that a secret document, signed by the head of the KGB months before Maxwell's death at sea, showed that Maxwell was a political and intelligence asset for the Soviet Union. The newspaper claimed that the document indicated Soviet leadership had instructed the KGB to protect Maxwell's reputation and business activities. Maxwell's UK foreign office file, released more than a decade after his death, described him as ``a thoroughly bad character and almost certainly financed by Russia.'' Journalist Vicky Ward wrote the following in Rolling Stone Magazine in 2021. She said: Hoffenberg told me that Epstein had said he'd worked on several projects with Robert Maxwell, including solving Maxwell's ``debt'' issues. The word ``debt'' is in quotes. (Maxwell died in 1991, under very strange circumstances, apparently having fallen off his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, in the middle of the night and it was discovered in the aftermath that he'd stolen 100s of millions of dollars from the pensions of his employees.) The story continued: Epstein had also told Hoffenberg that via Maxwell and Leese he was involved in something that Hoffenberg described as ``national security issues,'' which he says involved ``blackmail, influence trading, trading information at a level that is very serious and dangerous.'' The story concluded: Four separate sources told me--on the record--that Epstein's dealings in the arms world in the 1980s had led him to work for multiple governments, including the Israelis. Epstein's strategies for making money and working intelligence contacts seem to have some similarities to Robert Maxwell's. For the record, Epstein, a profligate liar, once told Ward that he never met Robert Maxwell or Leese. At some point in the 1980s, Epstein struck up a friendship with a fellow brash New York businessman by the name of Donald Trump. Author Michael Wolff has said of Trump and Epstein: They shared everything. They shared their airplanes. They shared women between them. They shared constantly business and financial advice. There are many photos of the two men together on the New York and Palm Beach party circuits throughout the 1990s. Trump, now famously said in 2002: I've known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. Alan Dershowitz told the New York Times in 2019 that ``in those days, if you didn't know Trump and you didn't know Epstein, you were a nobody.'' Dershowitz is the well-known lawyer who served both on Epstein's defense team when he was charged with having sex with minors back in 2006 and on Trump's impeachment defense team in 2020. The President of Trump's Atlantic City Trump Plaza Hotel in the late 1980s said he saw Trump and Epstein together so frequently that he believed Epstein was Trump's ``best friend.'' That same man described an incident where Trump brought Epstein and a 19-year-old girl to the casino gaming floor. Epstein once took a model to Trump Tower, where she says Trump groped her while laughing with Epstein. She remarked that it seemed like ``a twisted game'' between the two men. One survivor says Epstein summoned her to his offices late one night. Trump soon arrived. And according to the New York Times, ``[she] recalled feeling scared as Mr. Trump stared at her bare legs. Then Mr. Epstein entered the room, and she recalled him saying to Mr. Trump: `No, no. She's not here for you.''' After the men left the room, she said she overheard Trump commenting that he thought she was 16 years old. In 1992, Trump hosted a ``calendar girls competition'' at Mar-a-Lago for dozens of young women. The event organizer was appalled to learn that Trump and Epstein would be the only men present--a private showing. During Maxwell's trial, one of Epstein's victims said he took her to meet Trump at Mar-a-Lago when she was 14. Maxwell recruited 16-year-old Virginia Giuffre from the spa at Mar-a- Lago. Giuffre was abused by Epstein and trafficked to other men in Epstein's orbit. Trump said in 2025: I think [Giuffre] worked at the spa. He stole her. ``He'' being Epstein. In 1997, the UK tabloid, the Daily Mirror, formerly owned by Robert Maxwell, claimed that Trump was dating a 20-year-old British model and Ghislaine Maxwell had introduced them at a party. The tabloid notes: [Trump] met [the model] at a party in Manhattan. Several American millionaires already had their eyes on [the model]. But she was there with Robert Maxwell's daughter Ghislaine, who has introduced several of her attractive friends to the property developer, [Trump]. According to the Mirror: After their meeting, Trump flew Madam Maxwell and the model south to the sunshine state, where they enjoyed a happy weekend together. When they returned to New York, [the model] was installed in one of Donald's many apartments there. In an interview with BBC ``Newsnight,'' the model stated: Ghislaine Maxwell did introduce me to him-- That is Trump-- and she introduced me to him with a clear message of my being with him in the same way that she had trafficked me and brought me to Jeffrey Epstein. She also said: I can only speak for myself, and this is in no way to negate any other experience that anyone else might have had with him, but, at no time did President Trump behave with any impropriety with me. The same woman accused Epstein of sexually abusing her when she was a teenager in a 2019 interview with NBC. From NBC: The abuse . . . spanned several years and locales. In addition to the estate on his private island, [she] said Epstein preyed on her at his homes in New York and Paris. According to Craig Unger's book ``American Kompromat'': Trump was often the center of Maxwell's attention, and women who entered Trump's orbit sometimes ended up being associated with both Trump and Epstein, spending part of their time living in a Trump Tower condo and part in Florida, at Mar-a-Lago or one of Epstein's homes. Among them was a Russian model and beauty-pageant contestant . . . whose journey from the world of beauty pageants and modeling to Trump's Mar-a-Lago and Epstein's island retreat is highly suggestive in terms of how Epstein and his associates began manipulating young women. The story continues: In the early '90s, before coming to the United States, [the woman] had placed well in a number of beauty pageants--coming in second in Miss Russia 1993 and winning the 1994 Miss Baltic Sea title that year. In 1995, she left Moscow, spent six weeks learning English in St. Petersburg-- That is St. Petersburg, FL, not Russia-- and was profiled in the Tampa Tribune as ``reigning Miss Russia.'' And before long, she met Donald Trump. Notwithstanding the fact that Trump was still married to his second wife, Marla Maples, [the woman] moved into a 30th- floor condo in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. There, according to an item in the New York Post, her lavish accommodations were taken care of ``courtesy of an unidentified sugar daddy.'' [S]he spent time with both Trump and Epstein. Flight logs released by a federal judge in New York in 2019 showed that in February 1999, [the woman], then 27, flew on board Epstein's Gulfstream, the so-called Lolita Express, with Maxwell and Prince Andrew, from Epstein's Little St. James (a.k.a. ``Pedophile Island'') back to Florida. Trump has tried to distance himself from his former friend, the monstrous pedophile who is believed to have abused at least a thousand women and girls. It is worth taking a look at how the friendship between Trump and Epstein allegedly soured. There are varying accounts as to whether Trump ever banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago over his recruitment of spa workers from the resort. But we know the falling out was at least, in part, related to a bidding war between Trump and Epstein over a Palm Beach mansion in 2004. Trump won and purchased the property for $41.3 million. Just 4 years later and after modest renovations, Trump sold the mansion to billionaire Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million. At the time, it was reported to be the most expensive residential property sale in U.S. history, pretty stellar investment for Mr. Trump. The oligarch, for his part, after paying the $95 million, never even moved in. That brings us back to Russia. Epstein claimed to have given at least some insight on Trump to the Russians. Epstein met on many occasions with Vitaly Churkin, Russia's representative to the United Nations from 2006 until Churkin's death in 2017. Epstein wrote in an email: Churkin was great. He understood trump after our conversations. it is not complex. he must be seen to get something its that simple. Epstein wrote in 2018 to Thorbjorn Jagland, a former Prime Minister of Norway, who was then head of the Council of Europe: I think you might suggest to putin, that lavrov, can get insight on talking to me. That appears to be a reference to Sergey Lavrov, Russian's Minister of Foreign Affairs. The email was sent prior to the Helsinki summit between Trump and Putin. In another email to Jagland, Epstein wrote that he wanted to help Putin and Russia ``reinvent the financial system.'' A 2017 FBI report based on a confidential human source claims that Epstein was ``President Vladimir Putin's wealth manager.'' Epstein tried several times to meet with Putin, often via Jagland, although it is unclear if any such meeting took place. But Putin is named almost 1,000 times in the latest tranche of Epstein file documents, and there are almost 10,000 references in the documents to Moscow. Epstein roped many Russian and Eastern European girls and women into his trafficking operation. The New York Magazine profile of Epstein published all the way back in 2002 reads: Indeed, at a party at Maxwell's house, her friends say, one is just as apt to see Russian ladies of the night as one is to see Prince Andrew. In Ward's 2003 profile of Epstein, a guest described a ``cocktail party thrown by Maxwell that Prince Andrew attended, which was filled, she says, with young Russian models.'' In a 2010 email, Epstein suggested a young woman as a dinner companion to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince, assuring him that she was ``Russian, beautiful and trustworthy.'' The Daily Beast recently reported on an alleged classified U.S. intelligence document claiming that ``Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor . . . was drawn into Moscow's orbit thanks to his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, which the Kremlin allegedly used as a route into the British establishment.'' In another 2010 email to a person whose name has been redacted, Epstein wrote: Tomorrow I'm organising a dinner for some new Russian girls. . . . [S]ee you at 10. He received an email from a redacted sender in 2012 that read: I have 2 Russian girls for you to meet, one 21, another 24. A message left for Epstein by one of his employees in 2005 claims French model scout Jean-Luc Brunel had found a ``teacher'' who could give Epstein ``free lessons.'' He has a teacher for you to teach how to speak Russian. She is two times eight years old. Not blonde. ``Two times eight years old.'' According to ``American Kompromat''; In addition to whatever legitimate careers Brunel may have fostered, as a ``model scout,'' he also allegedly hired ``scouters'' to identify, procure, and transport underage girls, many 15 years of age and under, hire them to give ``massages'' and traffic them. Brunel was found hanged in his French jail cell in 2022 after being arrested on rape and sex trafficking charges. Bill Gates appears. He has said he had affairs with two Russian women, which Epstein later discovered. Somewhere along the way, Epstein struck up a relationship with Sergei Belyakov, Russia's former Deputy Minister of Economic Development and a graduate of the FSB, Russia's intelligence academy. Epstein introduced him to contacts like Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who would go on to give $10 million to the super PAC that helped elect now-Vice President JD Vance to the Senate in 2022. In 2015, Epstein warned Belyakov that ``a Russian girl from Moscow . . . is attempting to blackmail a group of powerful businessmen in New York.'' It was, Epstein said, ``bad for business for everyone involved.'' Belyakov responded back with information about the woman who he said worked in the ``sex and escort'' business. The FSB academy graduate said he would meet with someone who knows her. The following year, Belyakov told Epstein he had a new position at the Russian Direct Investment Fund, the Russian sovereign wealth fund, headed by current Putin envoy Kirill Dmitriev--the same guy who was caught in those friendly leaked phone calls with Steve Witkoff that I mentioned earlier. Masha Drokova, a former spokesperson for Nashi, the pro-Kremlin youth movement, was in regular touch with Epstein in the last couple of years before his death in prison. She was ostensibly helping Epstein with his public relations. According to the Washington Post, she was ``the subject of the 2011 documentary `Putin's Kiss,' whose title refers to a widely publicized award ceremony in which she received a medal from Putin and spontaneously kissed him on the cheek.'' In a 2017 email, Drokova asked Epstein to connect her with ``adequate Russian oligarchs.'' The Post reported in 2022 that her fundraising pitches highlighted her ties to wealthy Russians, although Drokova denied writing those emails and said she did not receive Russian funding. Epstein advised Drokova as she launched her Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and she introduced Epstein to the contacts she had made in the tech world. In one email interaction in 2017, Drokova, after claiming to meet billionaire Jeff Bezos, tells Epstein she is ``trying to understand what she is not understanding about him.'' Epstein writes back that Bezos is ``smart, fun, and visionary. He is a very nice person. Probalty [sic] the best in the valley among the Bs.'' The files also indicate Epstein had dealings with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire who the Treasury Department identified as a money launderer for Vladimir Putin. Deripaska also cultivated a friendship with Peter Mandelson, a senior figure in Britain's Labour Party. Mandelson tried to use Deripaska's contacts to acquire a last-minute Russian visa for Epstein in 2010. Correspondence also shows Epstein's assistant trying to set up a meeting for Epstein and Deripaska in Moscow or Paris. There is also audio of Epstein advising then-Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak to have dinner with Putin to line up work after he leaves government. There is at least one itinerary for a lengthy trip across Russia and photos of Epstein and Ghislaine in what is believed to be Russia, including with people who appear to be Russian soldiers. Umar Dzhabrailov, a former Russian senator who committed suicide in recent days, described Maxwell as ``a soulmate.'' Epstein had a series of Russian visas between 2011 and his death in 2019. Epstein's crimes left a long money trail, and that trail winds back to Russia. Ranking member of the Finance Committee Ron Wyden has doggedly sought the truth about Epstein's transactions with Russian banks and Eastern European entities. One suspicious activity report filed by JPMorgan Chase after Epstein's death shows that between 2003 and 2019, Epstein conducted 4,725 wire transactions totaling over $1 billion. And that is just one bank. Epstein used multiple banks. According to JPMorgan Chase, the wire activity was flagged for the suspicious activity report for being ``consistent with . . . alleged sex trafficking of minors'' and for involving ``the high risk jurisdiction of the Russian Federation.'' CNN notes that two accounts included in the suspicious activity report were linked to now-sanctioned Russian banks Alfa-Bank and Sberbank. Also named in the suspicious activity reports were Maxwell, associated entities like Brunel's MC2 Model Management, and various women and girls. Let's go back to the journalist Vicky Ward: [S]ources, who range from former arms dealers to former spies--and also Hoffenberg--suggest that Epstein, who lacked any sort of moral compass, decided to . . . compromise influential people by recording them doing things they wouldn't want made public. . . . And once he got out of jail, in the last 10 years of his life, Epstein bragged to various people, including journalists, that he was advising a whole assortment of foreign leaders who included Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Zayed, Mohammed Bin Salman, various African dictators, Israel, the British--and, of course, the Americans. He also told several of the same people that he was making a fortune out of arms, drugs, and diamonds. I am still reading the same quote: He was known in the intelligence world as a ``hyper- fixer,'' somebody who can go between different cultures and networks.'' Epstein was, of course, known for his parties, which he insisted on hosting in his various mansions where he could completely control the environment. Many of Epstein's victims have said they believe they were recorded. Virginia Giuffre wrote in her posthumous memoir that Epstein had a ``huge library of videotapes'' and a room in his New York home where monitors displayed real-time surveillance footage from his properties. ``He explicitly talked about using me and what I'd been forced to do with certain men as a form of blackmail, so these men would owe him favors,'' she wrote. Another survivor said Epstein once walked her through his mansion pointing out pinhole-sized cameras. He boasted that they were in every room. According to Epstein's emails, in 2014, he directed a staffer to procure hidden cameras, which were installed in tissue boxes. The New York Times obtained photos of the interior of Epstein's New York mansion, which show a camera installed near the ceiling of the master bedroom and another along the molding of an adjoining room. The Times also spotted cameras near a suite of bathrooms on the same floor as Epstein's bedroom. When police searched his Palm Beach home in 2005, they ``located two covert (hidden) cameras.'' Both cameras were located inside clocks--one by a desk and the other in a garage. It is worth noting that Epstein often seemed to get tipped off in advance as to when the Palm Beach police would be dropping by. Epstein is said to have once told an ex-girlfriend: I collect people. I own people. I can damage people. The disgraced financier Hoffenberg allegedly claimed to the National Enquirer in a final account before his death that ``wherever Epstein was entertaining, he [and Ghislaine] were taping.'' That report was only released last summer, as Hoffenberg had asked the Enquirer not to publish his comments until 3 years after his death. According to the Daily Beast, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Alex Acosta, is once said to have claimed Epstein ``belonged to intelligence'' and that the decision to let him off easy in 2008 was made above his ``pay grade.'' The Prime Minister of Poland, a country that has extensive experience with Russian intelligence operations, has opened an investigation into potential links between Epstein and Russian intelligence. Prime Minister Tusk said: More and more leads, more and more information, and more and more commentary in the global press all relate to the suspicion that this unprecedented paedophilia scandal was co- organised by Russian intelligence services. According to alleged anonymous intelligence sources published in the British tabloid the Daily Mail last month, some believe: Jeffrey Epstein was running ``the world's largest honey trap operation'' on behalf of the KGB when he procured women for his network of associates. I want to stress that we don't have answers here. Epstein was an inveterate liar and criminal who often sought to exaggerate his own power and influence, and the Epstein files need to be viewed through that lens. He could have been working with an intelligence agency or several intelligence agencies. He could have just been what the Russians call a useful idiot. We may never know. What we do know is that a significant number of powerful men--our current President, some of his Cabinet Secretaries, tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and others--were very mixed up with Epstein at different times, and Epstein seems to have been very mixed up with Russia. We also know that there is a coverup afoot at the Department of Justice. The MAGA Department of Justice is trying to shield Trump from something in the Epstein files. We know that documents in the files about President Trump that should be released have not been released. The missing files--first discovered by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger--are alleged to detail claims by an Epstein accuser who said she was also sexually assaulted by President Trump when she was a young teenager. One of the great forces that Washington runs on is normalcy bias. It is often in the interest of the bureaucratic establishment to look skeptically toward outlandish or extreme stories because, in most cases, the truth is more ordinary than what may first appear. What I have done here today is lay out the facts, as documented by the many brave survivors who have come forward at great personal risk, as well as the many journalists who have tried and continue to try to get to the truth. As a lawyer, I know that you can prove cases with circumstantial evidence. You don't always need the smoking gun. Here, we have links with Russia, girls from Russia, money from Russia, people from Russia, deals and transactions with Russia, contacts with people with Russian intelligence, news reports exploring contacts with Russia, and an official investigation from the Government of Poland into an Epstein- Russia connection. Sometimes, with a little imagination, you have the chance to see what is right in front of your face. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that this document, which is a bibliography of all of the sources that I quoted from in this speech, be printed in the Record and appended at the conclusion of my remarks.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask that the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Here in this Temple of Mammon, we only seem to care about what we can monetize. So as Budget chair, I drilled hard into how climate change is coming at American family finances. Some of it comes at families through grocery costs as climate disruptions disrupt agriculture. Some of it comes through construction costs as climate disruptions disrupt lumber markets and supply chains. Some of it comes through outdoor sports industries--hunting, fishing and scuba and skiing--as climate disruptions disrupt the natural environments that they need. The first biggest shock will come through insurance markets as climate risks make real estate uninsurable. This disruption kicks off a cascade: Climate risk collapses insurance markets; insurance collapse cascades into mortgage markets; mortgage collapse cascades into property value losses; and the combination of insurance cost, mortgage collapse, and home value losses thrashes the entire economy. Don't believe me. Believe the chief economist of the mortgage giant Freddie Mac who said exactly this. He said it would be as bad as the 2008 recession based only on coastal flood risk. And, of course, now we have wildfire risk as well. And by the way, investor David Burt, who predicted that 2008 recession, is now making bets predicting this one. In a joint editorial, Senator Sheehy and I warned of a ``torpedo to the hull'' of our economy from extreme weather, whether floods or wildfires, triggering exactly this cascade. As the climate danger looms closer, more and more studies are monetizing that danger. Mammon Hall may have to wake up. Let's go through some of the recent reporting. First off, this isn't later. This is now. On home insurance, look no further than Florida's teetering home insurance market where average premiums now have soared to over $14,000 or look westward from there where 92 percent of Texans now are worried about homeowners insurance costs. The insurance peril comes as no surprise because insurance, to quote First Street, ``directly prices expected loss.'' First Street describes how insurance is often the first transmission channel for climate risk into markets through premium increases, tighter terms, higher deductibles, nonrenewals, and I would add mandates like homeowners having to build a new roof on their home to get insurance coverage. It matters what insurance companies think about this because those insurance companies have both a fiduciary duty and a financial incentive to predict well to make that an accurate transmission channel of climate risk into markets. And they are predicting storm clouds ahead, and they are battening down. Other reports show climate change is already reducing Americans' wealth and income. One study estimated that incomes in the United States are already lower by around 12 percent since 2000 from where they would have been if fossil fuel emissions were not causing climate disruptions. That 12-percent estimated income reduction was a midpoint in an estimated range between 2-percent income reduction and 22-percent income reduction. That study, by the way, looked at general temperature effects, not at the costs of specific extreme weather effects like hurricanes, sea level rise, or wildfires. So the actual number is obviously worse. As to those uncounted extreme weather effects, First Street reports that natural disaster damages have risen more than tenfold since the 1980s and now cost the global economy over $200 billion per year. NOAA's 5-year average of billion-dollar disasters in the period from 1980 to 2024 averaged nine of them per year; 1980 to 2024 averaged 9 billion-dollar disasters per year. From 2020 to 2024, that segment, the average has soared to 23 per year. Another report notes that the greatest impact of climate change is from ``the frequency, magnitude, and duration of extreme events.'' So if you start with 12-percent income reduction and then you add in the greatest impact of climate change on top of that from extreme events, well, it is not just obviously worse; it is obviously a lot worse counting those extreme weather effects. The study notes that climate change has altered weather in all recent years and all places. It is everywhere, not just where storms hit or wildfires burn. So that is now. That is what is already here. What are we in for? A 2024 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that each added degree centigrade of warming results in a 12-percent reduction of GDP. Extrapolate that out, and the numbers get huge. The World Meteorological Organization estimates that the global cost of failing on climate, of letting the polluters continue to run roughshod over policy, is as much as $1,200 trillion by the end of the century--$1,200 trillion. Another study has monetized ocean damages. Rhode Island is The Ocean State. My wife is a marine scientist. I tend to pay attention to ocean things. But we do tend to overlook ocean damage. It is worth looking out for the oceans, though, because 90 percent of the excess heat caused by fossil fuel emissions and 30 percent of the excess carbon dioxide from those fossil fuel emissions have all been absorbed by the oceans--90 percent of the excess heat, 30 percent of the carbon dioxide, all absorbed by the oceans. Without that ocean effect, fossil fuel emissions would likely have already made planet Earth unlivable for humankind. When you account for ocean impacts, when you monetize those ocean impacts, it nearly doubles the social cost of carbon to humankind. The effects come through higher ocean temperatures, reduced ability of the ocean to hold oxygen, acidification of the ocean, increased severity of extreme weather events, and accelerated sea level rise. Specific dangers to God's creation include mass mortalities of organisms, large- scale bleaching of coral reefs, and the loss of sea grass beds and kelp forests. Putting numbers to all of that gave this: Market use damages are the largest in absolute terms, totaling global annual losses of . . . $1.66 trillion in 2100, followed by damages in non-use values amounting to . . . $224 billion, and non-market use values adding up to $182 billion in annual losses. That sums to over $2 trillion a year, and it is for sure an undercount. Again, there is a lot here that is not yet included in ocean social cost of carbon calculations, damages that the EPA acknowledges as important but has not yet included in social cost of carbon calculations. It includes some pretty prominent impacts like on fisheries and mariculture and tourism and recreation and, of course, aesthetic values. That is a pretty big suite of harms. At the end of the day, the oceans damage report prices 2020's ``blue social cost of carbon'' at $48 in harm per ton of CO2 emissions. By 2030, 4 years from now, it is up from $48 per ton to $72 per ton. The trajectory is not good. Remember that these numbers are an attempt to monetize a looming natural systems disaster. As another report pointed out, some of the benefits that our natural systems provide to humankind ``are not substitutable, meaning they must be protected as they cannot be replaced by technology when they are gone.'' Irreplaceability is one danger; irreversible acceleration is another. Some of the harms fossil fuel emissions cause hit tipping points that kick off ``a cascade of accelerating and unmanageable damage''--``a cascade of accelerating and unmanageable damage'' leading to dramatic worsening for humankind in a worsening trajectory of damage. Tipping points can have a profound effect on markets. Markets are built around expectations, and one of the main expectations around which they are built is the expected lifetime of assets. Well, as of today, the central case estimate for sea level rise is around 3 feet by 2100--not good for homes or businesses that lie around or below 3 feet above sea level, not great for homes or businesses that are within range of ocean storms swamping ashore above the 3 feet of sea level rise, but manageable with respect to considerable amounts of real estate. Now, imagine that tomorrow we learn that we have permanently destabilized the Greenland ice sheet or the aptly named ``doomsday glaciers'' in West Antarctica. Suddenly, the expected sea level rise by the end of the century doubles or more, and we know that we are eventually in for between 12 and 36 feet of sea level rise. Market expectations around the valuations of trillions of dollars of real estate will suddenly change, provoking massive value destruction that will cascade through markets. It will make 2008 look like child's play. On a more immediate scale, that is what is happening in insurance markets right now, as homeowners along the gulf coast in Florida and in wildfire country out West are finding out that the property that they thought had a certain value is not worth so much any longer. If they can afford insurance, but it has doubled or tripled, then the present value of that heightened insurance cost over the time that they hold the property suppresses the property's value. Their property values go down. Florida led the country in property value reduction last year--I think as a result of this. If you can't get insurance at all, then you have trouble getting a mortgage on your property, which means, if you are not selling to a hedge fund or a billionaire, you have to mark your property down; you have to sell it for cheap because there simply isn't a mortgage available for it. Jay Powell, who is useless on climate but knows a little bit about mortgages and markets and the economy, has predicted that whole regions of the United States will shortly be unmortgageable. And, of course, when insurance gets out of control and mortgages become unavailable and property values crash, that cascades into very a significant and painful recession. What else do we know? We know that our estimates of the worst kinds of damage that fossil fuel emissions are causing humankind have been wrong. They have been too low. I quote: The severity and frequency of extreme events are unprecedented and beyond model projections. It is worse than we thought, and it is going to get worse faster than we thought. Remember that, just by its nature, monetizing the human harm caused by fossil fuel emissions disrupting our climate and natural systems is an almost disgraceful undercount of the actual damage to what one writer called our ``planetary solvency.'' As another author wrote: While the social costs--understood as costs to people--of untrammeled pollution are colossal, the ecological costs, those borne by nonhuman entities, are almost too vast to grasp. When you monetize things, you blind yourself to those costs that are almost too vast to grasp because looking at them through the lens of money blinds you to them. There are losses, massive losses--and I quote again here--that ``appear only in [nature], almost never in a form that capital can see.'' That is the defect of trying to monetize the harm we are causing to the natural systems that sustain us. Monetization, by definition, fails to acknowledge most of the harm and the danger. It fails to acknowledge most of the harm and danger to our species, and it fails by a mile to acknowledge the harm and danger to the rest of God's creation. Even so blinkered, the numbers are colossal, and the threat looms. All this has caused the World Economic Forum to elevate ``ecosystem collapse as a mid- to high-level global risk.'' Other studies advance the concept of planetary insolvency. Others warn about our continued fossil fuel pollution: If left unchecked, ``then mass mortality, involuntary mass migration, severe economic contraction, and conflict become more likely.'' Heading into a world of more mass mortality, more involuntary mass migration, more severe economic contraction, and more conflict, it is worth paying a little more attention. Existing modeling practices understate economic impacts, and further, as one study pointed out, at the extreme, they ``do not recognize the risk of ruin.'' They presume that this damage will fall into a predictable center-case scenario. But there are outer-case scenarios-- nontrivial ones, real ones--that create the risk of human ruin. Researchers have not only looked at the costs of climate change; they have also studied the economic benefits of eliminating carbon pollution. An OECD--Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development--study suggests that the most advanced economies on our planet would enjoy an increase of 60 percent in GDP by 2050--those societies, 60 percent richer by 2050--from getting climate right. And they suggest that lower-income countries would enjoy an increase of 124 percent in GDP--more than doubling their wealth--from getting climate right. So this is a two-sided equation: Continue to fail and ignore it and these warnings of economic calamity become our future. Be responsible and get it right and greater wealth and prosperity become our future. A third of global GDP lost in this century if the climate crisis and the polluters causing it are allowed to run unchecked is a pretty dire scenario to subject the people we represent to. Anyway, back to Mammon Hall. Here we are, where none of this discussion is taking place, where these risks and dangers are simply treated as if they don't exist because of a different monetization--the monetization of our politics defending a $700 billion annual subsidy, powered by unlimited dark money spending. The fossil fuel industry and its vast array of front groups have used the power of money in politics to strangle this discussion. In our new American petrostate, the power of petromoney and our corrupted petropolitics have turned this supposedly greatest deliberative body into a tomb of silence about this danger, a mortuary of democracy. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.