Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I have served as my State's attorney general. I have served as a U.S. attorney for Rhode Island. I used to lecture at the police training academy in Rhode Island. I know a little bit about police work, and I know bad police work when I see it. What we are seeing in Minnesota is a level of violence, a lack of deconfliction, and flatout unprofessionalism that is dangerous. Trust me, it is not just me. Let's start with Minneapolis's own police chief, who described ICE's behavior this way: It looks very untrained. It looks unprofessional. It looks very chaotic. He described it as ``poor tactics and really unconstitutional practices.'' He put some good context on it. He said: Minneapolis Police Department went the entire year last year, recovering 900 guns from the street, arresting hundreds and hundreds of violent offenders, and we didn't shoot anyone. This is the second American citizen that's been killed, this is the third shooting within three weeks. It is not just up in Minnesota. In Maine, a sheriff said that this is ``bush league policing.'' Another Minnesota sheriff said: I am seeing . . . people being stopped, questioned and harassed solely because of the color of their skin. A Philadelphia sheriff said that these agents are ``made up, fake, wanna-be law enforcement.'' A chief in St. Paul described ``traffic stops'' that are ``clearly outside the bounds of what federal agents are allowed to do.'' A former police chief said: Their tactics are unsound. I question their training, if any. All the way in Montana, a police chief said: We do not do business in that manner. . . . When you see those types of tactics being used, we don't use those. In Texas again, the former head of the Combined Law Enforcement Association said: Newly recruited, masked agents no doubt damage and destroy the reputations of our proud and professional officers. A law professor and former police officer described their conduct as ``egregiously deviating from professional norms of policing.'' So what we are hearing out of law enforcement professionals around the country is disgust with the lack of professionalism with which ICE and CBP are discharging their responsibilities. I will close by talking about deconfliction because that is probably the most dangerous mistake that law enforcement can make. That is how you get blue-on-blue violence. That is how things get dangerously out of hand. With respect to deconfliction, a sheriff in Maine talked about ``unmarked cars'' and masked individuals, ``men with guns in the yard'' frightening residents, and his office had no idea it was taking place. They hadn't disclosed to local police that they were going to do a weapons-out, armed raid in their jurisdiction. In Brooklyn Park, the chief said that his own officers were being pulled over, the deconfliction was so bad. He said: If it is happening to our officers, it pains me to think how many of our community members are falling victim to this every day. In Austin, TX, the chief described how they are not warned ahead of time by ICE when they are going around. That threatens to create dangerous misunderstandings between local and Federal law enforcement Agencies. We are short on time, so I am going to end there. But nobody in this body should believe that what is happening, what we are seeing with our own eyes on the streets of Minneapolis, is legitimate or professional law enforcement. It simply is not. It has gotten out of hand, and nobody knows it better than real cops. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, let me first thank Senator Kelly for coordinating this unfortunate commemoration of a truly disgraceful decision by the Republican appointees of the Supreme Court 16 years ago. This decision opened the floodgates of our politics to billions and billions of dollars in dark money, and those billions and billions in dark money have distorted our political process in ways that are obvious and evident to everybody who works in this building. Some are winners from that dark money spent, and some are losers from that dark money spending, but everybody sees it. Billionaire spending in our elections is up 160 times. That is 160 times more billionaire spending in our elections now that billionaires can pump money in by the millions. Just 100 families poured a recordbreaking $2.6 billion into Federal elections in 2024. I don't know how democracy survives in an environment in which 100 superwealthy families are dumping $2.6 billion in special interest spending, influence spending, into our elections. This is not a hypothetical problem. I care a lot about climate change, and I see what is happening to our coasts, particularly in Rhode Island. I was here before the Citizens United decision, when robust, meaningful, bipartisan climate legislation was constant here in the Senate. I can think of four major bipartisan bills here in the Senate. And I remember my friend John McCain running for President, carrying the Republican banner into that Presidential election with a completely solid and respectable climate platform. Well, right after Citizens United, all of that stopped. The barrage of fossil fuel dark money into our politics killed bipartisanship on climate change instantly. It is still a problem today. Just yesterday, I asked to move a resolution that declared that climate change is not a hoax, that climate science is sound science, and that research into the effects of climate change should continue, and Republicans objected to that simple resolution. The fossil fuel industry bought that obstruction of climate legislation for 16 years now with money. They poured $450 million into political influence spending during the 2024 cycle, and that is only the identifiable money. Then there is the dark money, and we don't know how big that number was. We are already seeing the climate problem cascade into a homeowners insurance crisis, cascade into a crisis of mortgage unavailability and ultimately home value losses. It is already happening in Florida, for instance. So this is real, with real consequences for regular Americans. There was a big flaw in the Citizens United decision. The Citizens United decision hung on two assertions of fact by that slim Republican majority that warped our politics for the billionaires. Those two false facts were that all of this new spending was going to be independent of political campaigns--that was never tested, never vetted, never litigated. That was a fact that was invented behind the curtains of the Supreme Court by those five Justices. History shows since then that had a real factfinding effort been undertaken, it would have been clear that this spending is not at all independent of political campaigns. But here is where it is indisputable. The Court also held--those five Judges--that all of this unlimited billions that they were letting loose into our politics would be transparent, that voters would know who was behind the money. Well, in 2024, $1.9 billion in money was spent in elections that we don't know who is behind. That is a $1.9 billion factual rebuke to the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. It simply isn't true. So that decision hangs on a false fact that was found by a Court that shouldn't even be doing factfinding and which for 16 years those five Justices have scrupulously refused to correct even as the falsity of the fact upon which their decision depended has been proven over and over and over again. I will close by pointing to the DISCLOSE Act--a bill that can remedy this by requiring contributions over 10 grand into a political race to be disclosed by the actual donor. No more hiding behind a 501(c)(3) that converts to a 501(c)(4) that sends it to a super Pac that sends it to the election. No, you go all the way back to the actual, real donor. We should pass that bill. Every time we brought it up, every Republican has voted to defend dark money, and every Democrat has voted to rid our politics of this corrupting scourge. Every time, every Republican, every Democrat. It is a clear divide, a clear difference between us. And the public is with us. The public is infuriated that big, secretive special interests can control our politics from behind the scenes with massive dark money contributions. Last point. If you can make an enormous dark money contribution, you can threaten or promise to make an enormous dark money contribution, and those threats and promises will never be seen. It is the core of political corruption to make decisions based on secret threats and promises about massive political spending. We have to get rid of this. The decision was ill-founded, factually wrong, and needs to be corrected. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here on the floor for the 36th speech in my ``Scheme'' series, calling attention to the rightwing scheme to capture our courts and justice system. It has morphed from stacking the Court with billionaire-selected Justices to now putting pressure on sitting judges to try to get them to do what the Trump political operation wants. It turns out that the rightwing interests don't always like it when the courts they worked so hard to capture just don't deliver. Last week, the Judiciary Committee's Federal Courts Subcommittee held a hearing on impeaching rogue judges, it was called. My Republican colleagues argue that Federal judges should be impeached and removed from office for ruling in ways that MAGA doesn't like. Over the past year, there is a backdrop to this, which is that Federal judges and their families--and their families--have been the victims of a campaign to smear and attack judges who rule against the Trump administration. It is pretty clear that many of these calls for impeachment are just a tactic in that intimidation campaign. There are some tells. Tell No. 1: It is rare for a Senator to call for a judge's impeachment because the Senator would be a juror, and it is hard to be an impartial juror later if you already called the defendant guilty. Tell No. 2: Impeachment isn't a remedy for judges getting decisions wrong. Appeal is that remedy, as the Chief Justice has clearly stated. Impeachment is a remedy for actual misconduct. Virtually everyone has agreed on that for almost 200 years. When Senators start saying the almost 200 years of law history is wrong, that is a pretty big hint they may have another agenda. Tell No. 3: If Republicans were serious about rooting out judicial misconduct, we probably would have gotten answers about Clarence Thomas paying his taxes. There is evidence that Justice Thomas may have broken criminal statutes. We know he failed to report on his financial disclosures more than a quarter of a million dollars in income from a forgiven loan, not to mention the undisclosed boondoggles of private jet and yacht travel. Well, that raises a very obvious question: If income wasn't declared on his judicial disclosure report, did he also not report it to tax authorities? I have asked that question. Thomas has refused to answer it. Whether, when, and by whom his taxes on that income were paid are all unanswered questions. None of my Republican colleagues seem interested in that misconduct even though ordinary people are regularly prosecuted for tax violations and false statements. Tell No. 4: My Republican colleagues don't seem at all interested in how their impeachment threats egg on more nefarious and dangerous threats against judges and their families. The campaign of threats under the shadow of which the Federal judiciary is now operating is unlike any time in memory. Also, there is significant evidence that this campaign is being orchestrated. Yet the Marshals Service and our MAGA DOJ have repeatedly refused to confirm that they would investigate for orchestration or conspiracy or enterprise. That is worth looking into. That might have been a good subject for the hearing, but that is not what it was about. Tell No. 5: This is a big one. One of the judges my Republican colleagues want to impeach--the prime target, in my view--is Chief Judge James Boasberg of the DC District Court. Few judges have been singled out more for MAGA attacks than Chief Judge Boasberg. What are his sins? Well, he sentenced January 6 rioters who President Trump unleashed on this building 5 years ago. MAGA world has since decided that no crimes were committed that day. That is new. At the time, Senator Cruz, who called the hearing to impeach Judge Boasberg, described those crimes as a ``violent terrorist attack on the Capitol.'' That was then. The campaign against Chief Judge Boasberg very much involves the MAGA DOJ. What are his sins there? Well, first, FBI Director Patel tried to scapegoat Chief Judge Boasberg as the person stopping Patel from being honest with the Judiciary Committee about his grand jury testimony in the Mar-a-Lago classified records case. I asked him what he told the grand jury. It is black letter law that a witness is allowed to disclose his own testimony to a grand jury, and Patel had testified before that grand jury. He did so only after he had asserted his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and was given immunity from prosecution. The obvious implication is that whatever Director Patel told that grand jury put him at risk of prosecution, and we wanted to know what crime Patel thinks he might have committed. It is kind of relevant when he is now the Director of the FBI. Director Patel lied to us in the committee that he couldn't describe his testimony based on a supposed court order from what he called the DC district chief judge. Guess who that is. Chief Judge Boasberg. Chief Judge Boasberg later exposed that lie in a related proceeding, saying that Patel could ``divulge the contents'' of his own testimony and ``nothing was preventing him from doing so before the committee.'' So he blew up Kash Patel's lie. That meant, when Patel came back, he had to invent a new lie to avoid answering that question. Second is another MAGA DOJ sin. When the MAGA DOJ wanted to illegally jet people out of the country in the dark of night to an El Salvadoran prison, Chief Judge Boasberg was on duty, and he ordered that stopped. This infuriated the MAGA DOJ. Then-Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove told DOJ lawyers that if courts stopped these deportations, they would need to be ready to tell those judges ``f you,'' using the full four-letter word. Chief Judge Boasberg became the target of that Bove ``f you.'' In that matter, considerable evidence of contempt of court by DOJ officials caused Chief Judge Boasberg to notice probable cause and schedule contempt proceedings. That, I think, is the heart of this whole messy situation. One of the subjects of that contempt proceeding was now-Judge Bove. As that contempt proceeding went forward, two Trump judges on the DC Circuit stepped in, and they blocked that contempt hearing. They blocked it using something called an administrative stay, which is the procedure that usually lasts for hours, days, or at most a week or 10 days. They blocked that contempt hearing using an administrative stay for 4 months. Guess what happened during that 4 months. Republicans hustled none other than Emil Bove onto the Third Circuit Court of Appeals with no factual record from any contempt proceeding for the committee to see. Bove's judiciary hearing was so important to MAGA that Bondi and Blanche, her Deputy, came over to the hearing to give the eyeball to Republicans on the committee. Later, the administrative stay was lifted, and the full DC Circuit cleared Chief Judge Boasberg to resume his contempt proceedings. Well, that decision came down on a Friday. On Monday, a handful of Republican Senators sent a letter to the DC Circuit chief judge seeking District Court Chief Judge Boasberg's suspension while Republicans thought about impeaching him. Cleared to proceed Friday; the letter for suspension drops Monday. The letter itself makes no sense. The judiciary just doesn't suspend judges because some random Members of Congress call for impeachment. But anything goes to stop the contempt proceeding into Trump's MAGA DOJ. Adding to this, the MAGA Attorney General filed a misconduct complaint against Chief Judge Boasberg based on a private comment he allegedly made at a private meeting of the Judicial Conference. That is an administrative body. That has nothing to do with the cases judges hear. The AG and Members of Congress are invited--I often attend--and its proceedings are private. So the AG's complaint was a major breach. The alleged offending comment was this: that Chief Judge Boasberg ``raised his colleagues' concerns that the administration would disregard rulings of Federal courts, leading to a constitutional crisis.'' If you don't see the ethics violation there, well, you are not alone. This so-called ethics complaint looks preposterous to this Senator. It looks like it is a strategic device to have something to complain about to block the contempt proceeding. It gets worse. In November, Trump's personal lawyer--now the MAGA Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche--went before the Federalist Society to urge what he called war--war--against Federal judges, particularly ones who are ``repeat players'' or ``stop an entire operation or an entire administrative policy.'' He did not say Chief Judge Boasberg's name yet, but it was clear who was in the zone of his war threat. But last week's Judiciary subcommittee hearing was not as subtle. The backdrop to last week's hearing was Republican Senators breaking norms and 200 years of history to call for impeaching judges because of those judges' judicial decisions. Those same Senators ignore proof of real judicial misconduct of not filing your disclosures correctly and perhaps not filing your taxes at all. They ignore completely the ongoing environment of attacks on the judiciary, which their comments obviously inflame. Then, of course, they are targeting a judge that the MAGA DOJ is hell-bent on putting out of business so that he can't investigate their contempt. That brings me to the final tell, which is that this impeachment bluster is really about propping up the MAGA DOJ campaign against Chief Judge Boasberg. Here is tell No. 6: Virtually none of what my Republican colleagues accuse Chief Judge Boasberg of is true. Take the letter that Senator Cruz sent to Speaker Johnson last week. According to that letter, Chief Judge Boasberg ``targeted'' Republican Senators by ``secretly authorizing and sealing'' Jack Smith's grand jury subpoenas for those Senators' phone records. Well, you don't have to be much of a lawyer to spot the issues here. First, judges don't authorize or seal grand jury subpoenas. Prosecutors issue those subpoenas on their own, and they file them under seal because that is the law. Chief Judge Boasberg didn't target those Senators either. People under investigation for trying to overturn the 2020 election, in a case involving an investigation of that criminal conspiracy, called Senators as a part of that conspiracy. That is how the Senators' names came up-- not because Jack Smith chose them. Jack Smith said it best: He ``did not choose those Members. President Trump did.'' And it gets better. Chief Judge Boasberg had no way of knowing that it was Senators on the other end of the toll records' request. A toll records' request only gives the phone number to the service provider so they can tag that phone number and then provide the requested toll records to the investigators. He would not have known whose records were in that subpoena because the DOJ's practice at the time was not to disclose that information. Some Republican Senators went so far as to falsely describe the subpoenas and the toll records' requests as wiretaps. Chairman Grassley himself has acknowledged this was not true. The requested data were toll records showing limited information like incoming and outgoing calls, not the contents of any calls or messages. People on the Judiciary Committee should know the difference between toll records and wiretaps. It is basic stuff. Republicans also say that Chief Judge Boasberg shouldn't have issued nondisclosure orders temporarily preventing the phone companies from telling the Senators about these subpoenas. These orders were justified by a finding that if the existence of the subpoenas got out, it would probably lead to evidence-tampering, witness intimidation, and interference with Smith's investigations. What Republican Senators say is that it is outrageous that Chief Judge Boasberg thinks Senators might interfere with an investigation. Well, that was not the problem. That is not what Chief Judge Boasberg said. What he and Jack Smith probably were worried about was not interference by Republican Senators. If you listen closely to Jack Smith's House testimony, it sounds like what he was really worried about was interference by Trump and his coconspirators. That is what makes sense. And if it became public that the Senators were the subject of that subpoena, the Trump machine would go to work on them. It is that Trump conspiracy that Smith was investigating, and that conspiracy already had a pattern and practice of intimidating witnesses, tampering with evidence, and interfering in investigations. Add to that the fact that the conspirators only called Republican Senators in the first place to try to pressure them to commit a crime. It is not a shocker that investigators were wary about even more pressure and interference. By the way, we could settle this question. We don't have to speculate on what the motivation was behind those nondisclosure orders. We could ask Jack Smith himself, who has actually requested to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. I am sure we would learn a lot from that. Ranking Member Durbin says they have offered to bring in Jack Smith multiple times, and the Republicans on the committee keep saying no. They don't want to hear the answer; they just want to propagate their supposition. If you go back to Senator Cruz's letter, he accuses Chief Judge Boasberg of violating a 2004 law protecting Senators' official phone records. Well, it is a little thing, but, you know, facts are important when you are lawyers and are talking about things like impeaching judges. We actually didn't pass the relevant language in 2004; we passed it in 2020 by amendment after, interestingly, the first Trump administration did the same thing to Members of Congress--took their records and didn't disclose. Now, that is a small error. The real point here is that Chief Judge Boasberg had no clue that these were Senators' records. It is hard to find fault when he doesn't have the information and when that was the standard practice of the Department of Justice at the time and when the Trump Department of Justice had done the same thing to Members of Congress before. So to make this whole thing look more nefarious, Republicans rewrote the law last year in that continuing resolution bill to make it look more like Chief Judge Boasberg did something wrong. In that bill, they retroactively made illegal his nondisclosure orders. They were perfectly legal at the time. They were standard operating practice both for the Department of Justice and the court at the time. He had no notice that these were Senators behind the phone numbers. And years later, here come Republican Senators in the CR bill they jammed through, and they throw in a provision that goes all the way back and makes that conduct now illegal. Why would you do that? Well, now it enables the rhetorical battle-- the narrative--to be ``Oh, Judge Boasberg issued these illegal orders'' and then leave out the bit that they were perfectly legal and standard operating procedure at the time. But if the purpose of this whole operation is to rev up the attack and threat machine, what I call the flying monkeys of the far right-- ``Fly, my pretties. Go harass that judge. Go harass that judge's daughter''--then calling the orders illegal adds impetus. By the way, it is not just me saying Republicans are being misleading about what took place here. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts debunked these conspiracy theories about Chief Judge Boasberg, long before last week's hearing, and Jack Smith effectively did the same thing through letters and his sworn testimony to the House. At last week's hearing, I entered into the record statements from respected impeachment experts from the American Bar Association and from a group of retired Federal judges, all saying the same thing: This is nonsense, and cut it out before someone gets hurt. We even heard from one of Justice Scalia's proteges, retired Fourth Circuit Judge Michael Luttig, who described one of the Republican witness's testimony at a hearing as ``contemptible.'' The fact that none of this deterred or discouraged my Republican colleagues should tell everyone listening that this is not going to stop. This is a pressure campaign, and they are desperate to stop the contempt investigation into the MAGA Department of Justice. You add all this together, and that is exactly what it starts to look like: a MAGA campaign, a coordinated strategy to bring pressure and threats to bear on a Federal judge--not arguments in court--outside pressure and threats, and to do so in an environment in which violent threats are prevalent, perhaps the worst environment of violent threats the Federal judiciary has ever seen and one in which, just to add additional poison into the equation, the MAGA DOJ repeatedly refuses to assure us that proper investigative policies will be followed about threats to Federal judges. If you have a scheme or a campaign to threaten Federal judges and you won't look beyond the utterer of the threat and you won't investigate orchestration, organization, coordination, conspiracy, enterprise--any of that--you are not doing your job. That is basic investigative procedure. And we are up to, I think, 20 times that we have asked the Marshals Service or the MAGA DOJ: Will you investigate behind the utterer for potential orchestration? It is an easy answer. It is like: Yes, of course we will. So when they won't answer that question, that is a big warning. What this is all about is that the MAGA DOJ wants to stop the contempt hearing, period. I hope that neither Chief Judge Boasberg nor any of the other judges who have been targeted by MAGA and its threatening internet flying monkeys are intimidated by this, but that doesn't make it any less dangerous. And I would sure hope that this body, the U.S. Senate, would be better than to play along with a scheme to amplify pressure and threats against sitting Federal judges--pressure and threats against sitting Federal judges. But here we are with MAGA Republicans leading the charge, obedient to an increasingly dangerous Executive. I have put this together. These are all the different vectors of pressure against the judge. First, there is that MAGA Bondi complaint that I talked about that I think is fake, strategic, pretextual, designed to give an excuse to criticize the judge who will be looking into the DOJ's contempt. The House has filed Articles of Impeachment to try to put pressure on him and to whip up the MAGA flying monkeys. The Senate just held the hearing that I spoke about. Two Trump judges blocked the contempt proceedings with a highly unusual administrative stay. It was only when that stay was lifted that, within days, Republicans sent the letter to the chief judge asking to have Judge Boasberg suspended. The Deputy Attorney General of the United States declared war on certain Federal judges using descriptors that look exactly like this judge. And we just found out that, in the appropriations bill, Republicans have tried to defund his office, the office of the chief judge of the DC District Court. And then, of course, you have got that stunt in the continuing resolution of declaring his perfectly legal conduct years ago retroactively illegal. That is eight separate vectors of pressure against one judge. That is not the way the Federal judicial system is supposed to operate, and it is particularly wrong in this environment of violent and dangerous threats. To be continued. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, the world is undeniably round; water undeniably freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit; and equally undeniably, the climate is changing, and the changes in the climate are human- caused by fossil fuel emissions. Fossil fuel emissions are the primary cause. These are facts, and they are demonstrated by sound science. Not only is climate change a demonstrated fact recognized by all sound science on the topic, but human beings have been aware of this scientific fact for over a century. The fossil fuel industry has worked to suppress that fact for nearly 60 years, but it is still a fact. One hundred thirty years ago, in 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius concluded that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities contributed to a global ``greenhouse effect'' driving global warming. That was 1896. In 1968, at a celebration of the hundred-year anniversary of the fossil fuel industry, the physicist Edward Teller warned that greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels cause a greenhouse effect and that increased use of fossil fuels would cause global warming and severe sea level rise. His audience, obviously, was fossil fuel executives at that event commemorating the 100 years of the fossil fuel industry. This chart is of the famous Keeling Curve, which shows the dramatic acceleration in CO2 in the atmosphere beginning around 1950. You can see it start up in 1850, but it really kicked off after 1950. This data, actually, from back here comes from scientists who collect core samples in glaciers, date the core samples, and can test the bubbles that are preserved in those ice core samples from ancient glaciers. I have actually been to the lab at Ohio State where a married couple of scientists had this immense freezer in which they had core after core after core of samples from glaciers, and very often, the glacier is now gone. This chart shows the rise in global average temperatures from 1860 to now. While it jumps up and down a lot seasonally, the red line shows the average. As you see the CO2 curve accelerating, you see the global average temperature also accelerating. Between 1968 and 2003, fossil fuel interests, including American Petroleum Institute, Exxon, and Shell, commissioned scientific reports on climate change to look into this, all of which--all of which-- concluded that climate change was happening, that greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion were the primary cause of climate change, and that the impacts of this change in our climate would be severe. The fossil fuel industry suppressed their own scientists' findings for decades, but in 2015, investigative journalists found and leaked the suppressed internal memos. These companies knew what their business was doing all along, and they chose to hide the evidence of their own scientists and do nothing. Not only did they know, but their own scientists' work was stunningly accurate. This is a chart from Exxon pulled from a 1982 Exxon memo. This line in black is the predicted rise, back when this was prepared, before 1982, in CO2 concentrations. They start at 1960 and work their way to 2100. This is what Exxon predicted for CO2 concentration increase, and this lower line is what Exxon predicted for temperature increase driven by the CO2 concentration increase. The blue line is what actually happened with respect to CO2 concentration. The red line is what actually happened with respect to temperature. Those Exxon scientists pretty well nailed it. I mean, that is very, very close, to have actual results track the Exxon predictions. But that didn't get out even though Exxon knew because the fossil fuel industry suppressed all of this. Today, NASA maintains that ``there is unequivocal evidence''-- unequivocal evidence--``that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate'' and that ``[h]uman activity is the principal cause'' of this warming. That is what NASA scientists say. NASA scientists are pretty good. We are driving remotely controlled vehicles around the surface of Mars that got sent there by NASA, driving around collecting data and sending images back to Earth from Mars. When you can pull that off, you are a pretty good scientist. This is what NASA said: ``unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming'' and that ``[h]uman activity is the principal cause.'' The United States has its own National Climate Assessments, which Congress actually mandated by law. They are the most comprehensive source for data on climate impacts in the United States. Five have been published since they were required by Congress--2000, 2009, 2014, 2018, and 2023. A sixth National Climate Assessment was due for 2028, but in 2025, the Trump administration fired all the scientists and researchers working on that project. They even shut down the website. Why, you may ask, is the Trump administration suppressing science, firing scientists and researchers? Why won't the Trump administration protect the American people from greenhouse gas emissions? Why are they even trying to repeal the finding that these greenhouse gases are pollutants? It is pretty simple: fossil fuel industry pressure from fossil fuel industry front groups. This is a graph I have used repeatedly on the floor before. It is put together by a scientist, Robert Brulle, who studies the science denial operation as a social and economic phenomenon. Each of these dots represents a group that propagates the fossil fuel industry's climate denial fraud campaign. As you can see, there are a lot of them. This is a big cloud of groups whose job is to fool the American public, propagate climate denial fraud about what is really going on, and in some cases actually work on the political side to put dark money into our politics to corrupt America's response to this known danger. This web of denial, of fraud, of corruption costs American lives, and it costs Americans money, too. By the way, voters are paying attention. A December poll found that 65 percent of American voters understand that climate change is increasing their cost of living. And we know that to be true. As chairman of the Budget Committee, I had hearing after hearing that demonstrated that. What we see across the country is climate change driving extreme weather, sea level rise, heat waves, catastrophic wildfires, and toxic pollution. That not only drives illness and death, but it is right now as we speak undermining the insurance, mortgage, and real estate markets in places like Florida. Those parts are already in disarray. And when you can't get insurance on your home because the climate risk is uninsurable, nobody can get a mortgage on your home either, which means that when you try to sell that home, unless you are a millionaire swapping McMansions--if you are a regular person who needs a buyer who can get a mortgage on your property to sell it, it means your property becomes hard to sell. It means its value decreases. And, in fact, in Florida you are seeing an insurance market that is in complete collapse, propped up by taxpayers to try to hold it together. You are seeing a mortgage market that is in disarray as people find they are unable to sell their properties. And Florida led the country last year in the decline in property values. It was the top State in property value decline. This is coming at us, and it is coming at us hard. In other speeches, I have given surveys of the multiple, multiple warnings--not from green groups, not from environmentalists, but from people who understand the financial system and see this threat that is bearing down on us. So fossil fuel's climate denial fraud is coming at American families' finances. It is real, and it is costing them. So I have a resolution, and the punch line is very simple: One, climate change caused by fossil fuel combustion is not a hoax. I hope we can go with NASA on that. I hope we can go with Exxon on that. I hope we can go with real, measured observation of weather on that. Second, the reality of human-caused, greenhouse-gas-driven climate change is sound science. That is essentially undisputed in the scientific community. There is a microscopic stable of people whose science usually means they show up here to testify for the fossil fuel industry to sow doubt. But once you get beyond that tiny stable of paid climate deniers, it is 99.9 percent. I mean, science is--that is as close to unanimous as science gets on this, and I urge that this body should reflect that. And, finally, the third, Congress should protect legislatively mandated climate research programs. Science is the headlights for society. Science predicts and tells us what is coming at us. You would be a fool to turn the headlights out on your car driving onto a dark road. We are fools if we turn off the science headlights of our government as we move into increasing climate danger. So, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Environment and Public Works be discharged from further consideration and the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 550; further, that the resolution be agreed to, that the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, let me just remind everyone who is listening what this resolution resolved--three simple points: One, climate change is not a hoax. Two, climate science is actually sound science. And, three, we shouldn't turn off our research headlights that tell us what is coming at us. That was all. All we had to agree on was basic facts. So when my friends on the other side can't agree on facts that are so basic as climate change is real, the science is sound, and we should keep our headlights on as we drive into this unprecedented new hazard, it is hard to see how we move on from there. I agree very much with my friend from Kansas that energy that is affordable, reliable, and clean is our common goal. And I will give an example because the developers of Revolution Wind have told me that our offshore wind facility is going to send power ashore at 9 cents per kilowatt hour into a grid whose average price is 18 cents. It is literally half the price to get power off Revolution Wind than it is to pay for the primarily natural-gas-fueled power that drives the New England grid. It is a 50-percent cost reduction; so it is affordable. Reliable? The wind blows like crazy out on the ocean; it is highly reliable. In fact, Iowa, which has the biggest wind component of its electric grid, has actually treated wind as reliable baseload energy because where one turbine might not be spinning, there are plenty of others that are. So the people who plan for making sure that the lights don't go out--technical people--actually treat wind as reliable baseload energy through formulas that that ISO has developed. And clean? Yes, it is clean. It burns no fossil fuel. And yet the Trump administration twice has tried to shut down that project--twice. Just yesterday, they got blown up in Federal court for the second time when they tried for the second time to shut down that project. After $5 billion had been invested in it, they wanted to shut it down. So we have the way to go forward, but the administration doesn't want to go forward. They want to sabotage a wind project that will bring power onto the grid at about half the current grid cost. Our attorney general in those proceedings proposed an affidavit and, in his pleadings, said that Revolution Wind would save hundreds of millions of dollars for New England customers. The Trump Cabinet is running around pretending that that is not true. They pretend that it is expensive. They lie. They had a chance to come into court, where it is a little harder to lie, and say: Oh, no, you are wrong. Your affidavit asserting hundreds of millions of dollars in savings when this comes online is wrong, and here is our case for why 9 cents is bigger than 18 cents or 9 cents isn't real--or whatever it is that they wanted to say. They didn't. They didn't pipe up at all because they couldn't, because it is not true, and every grid operator proves that by calling up clean energy first because it is less expensive. Again, these are technical people. They don't have a point to make. Their system calls the least expensive energy up first, and once you get through nukes and hydro, you are into solar, wind, and battery. And it is only once you are through all of that that you then get into the fossil fuel plants, because they are more expensive, and every grid operator can prove that to you in the way they actually operate our electric grids. They call up clean energy first because it is less expensive, period. So it is unfortunate that here we are with this web of denial controlling so much of what happens in this building--fossil fuel industry dark money slashing through this building--and we can't get agreement that climate change is not a hoax, that climate science is sound science, and that we shouldn't turn off our research headlights as we go into the future. Before I yield, let me just point out that the University of Kansas teaches climate science. The University of Kansas teaches climate science. It even teaches about this stuff. It has a course called ``Anti-Environmentalism and Climate Change Denial in America,'' in addition to a ``Climate and Climate Change'' course, a ``Climate Change and Hazards Planning'' course, and a ``Climate Science'' course. When your home State university is teaching the science of climate change, you ought to be able to agree that climate science is real and that climate change is not a hoax. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Might the Senator be willing to retain the floor for a moment to yield for a question?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. In Rhode Island, we have a grid. ISO New England it is called. It is through that grid that electrons get from powerplant to the grid and from the grid to people's homes, and it is run as a basically common utility. I assume Hawaii, which is geographically quite distinct, has its own grid. So on our grid, this Revolution Wind project, as I said, is going to come on at 9 cents per kilowatt hour into a market where the prevailing rate is 18 cents. So if President Trump and his minions at Interior and EPW and Energy can stop that plant, they are making Rhode Islanders, New Englanders, buy 18-cent power instead of 9-cent power. So that raises the price for everybody. By the way, for those of you who are listening, the ISO grid, like almost all the others--the price at any given minute on the grid for electricity is set by the highest cost plant that has to operate to meet that level of demand. So if you can get that 9-cent cost to be the highest cost, that is it for everybody, but if you got to go back to 18, that is also it for everybody. That plant just doesn't raise costs to pay itself back; it raises grid costs for every electron that is running at that same time. So what that produces is, sticking with the 9- and 18-cent example, the 18-cent cost comes out of ratepayers' pockets. They have to pay their electric bill at 18 cents. They could have paid only 9 cents; instead, they are going to pay 18. The difference is going to go to the fossil fuel industry, to the big donors of Trump. I call this a scam that Trump and his minions, for their big fossil fuel donors, are deliberately holding clean energy off the grid, which is cheaper, so that the grid can't go to it, has to go to higher and higher cost fossil fuel plants, so consumer costs go up. But that additional money that consumers have to pay goes to the fossil fuel industry, which gave him hundreds of millions of dollars to be elected, and this is payback for them. Only Trump is no fool. Why pay it back himself or ask his political supporters to pay it back when he can go to electric consumers and bury it in their bill and make consumers pay to send hundreds of millions of dollars to these big donors. So that is what we see in New England. On the Hawaii grid, how does this work also?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I move to proceed to Calendar No. 290, S.J. Res. 86.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, coal is America's dirtiest energy source. Coal pollution from powerplants befouls our air, pollutes our water, and leaches into our food. Coal pollution causes acid rain. Coal pollution causes severe health issues, even death. Between 1990 and 2020, pollution from coal-fired powerplants killed 460,000 Americans--23,000 deaths per year on average. Despite how massive that death toll is, the trend has been in a good direction. Coal plant-caused death rates have decreased in the last 15 years as more and more coal plants have either shut down in favor of cleaner and cheaper energy sources or--often in answer to Clean Air Act programs-- adopted broadly available pollution reduction technologies which significantly reduce but do not eliminate the health-harming emissions and pollution. One such Clean Air Act program, the Regional Haze Program, addresses haze and visibility impairment in national parks and wilderness areas. Unsurprisingly, coal plants are the Nation's most significant source of haze. The same coal pollutants that drive severe health issues and deaths nationwide, including particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and volatile organic compounds, also drive haze formation. Haze is a pollution marker. The Clean Air Act's regional haze provision requires States to reduce emissions from haze-causing sources through controls or retirements where necessary to make reasonable progress toward natural visibility conditions. The EPA provides guidance regulations that help States develop appropriate regional haze plans which are due every 10 to 15 years. The Clean Air Act presumes that additional controls or retirements will be necessary for reasonable progress. They are thus required each time new haze plans are due unless the State can demonstrate that no action would be the reasonable course. South Dakota took no action in its latest regional haze plan to address haze pollution over the long term. It made no updates to significantly out-of-date controls at its three major emitters--a coal plant, a cement plant, and a lime plant--and it failed to demonstrate that that inaction was reasonable. The Trump EPA approved the plan anyway. The resulting pollution will blow downwind toward Midwestern and Eastern States. The EPA's approval puts forward a reading of the Clean Air Act that is blatantly at odds with the text, the context, and the purpose of the act, and that encourages the spread of harm to the downwind States from these polluting plants. Well, there is something we can do about it here. In 1996, Congress enacted the Congressional Review Act to give Congress the opportunity to vote on administrative regulations. During the Biden administration, Republicans in the Senate forced 35 rollcall votes to try to kill rules that sought to protect consumers' public health and public lands--35 to 0. It was an astonishing record. Now that the Trump administration is in power, it has engaged at breakneck speed to tear down the protections of Americans' health and safety and our environment. I know it is an uphill struggle in our polluter-funded Congress and particularly with this polluter-controlled Trump administration, but I nevertheless urge support for this commonsense Congressional Review Act resolution and hope that we can make it a brighter day as well as a clearer day for the downwind States. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here to give, I guess, an explanation and update to my colleagues about the status of permitting reform. I think, as you know, the chair and ranking member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the chair and ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee were working on a permitting reform bill until very recently. I have, together with Senator Heinrich, declared a pause in that permitting reform process, and I want to explain that because the progress had actually been good. We were working toward what I think could have been a very meaningful, very effectual, very bipartisan permitting reform bill. There were fairly new ideas being developed in it--like requiring front-loaded stakeholder engagement so the whole rest of the process, as it goes forward, is accelerated; disciplining the despised-by-me interagency process mechanism that excuses so much executive branch delay and indecision. I was actually pretty pleased with the way the process was going. Off of Rhode Island, we are developing offshore wind. Our offshore wind project, Revolution Wind, had already weathered one stop work order which came out of the blue from the administration. This was a project then with about $4 billion of investment already expended and north of 80 percent complete--a lot of turbines fully complete out there. And that order was without any lawful basis. As a result, the order was challenged in court. And in court, the Federal judge said: You can put that project back to work. The stop work order from President Trump is invalid. The judge made that decision on September 22. The Trump administration had 60 days to appeal. It did not appeal. We got to November 21, the last appeal day, no notice of appeal was filed. The matter was settled; work could continue; and everybody was already back at work. Thirty days later, the 22nd of December, a new stop work order was dropped by the Trump administration with no explanation. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the stop work letter of December 22 be printed in the Record at the end of my remarks. So the first stop work attempt by the Trump administration had cited the protection of national security interests of the United States as one of its bases. And, obviously, that was deliberated in court. There were pleadings on that subject. The Trump administration lost. They did not appeal the order finding that they had lost, declaring that they had lost, so that was a settled question. This second letter goes back and says again, national security risks. It does not identify them. In comments made on FOX News, it has been said that radar interference is the risk. Radar interference was deliberated in the initial permits. Radar interference was deliberated in the stop work order proceedings where the Trump administration lost. So what this looks like is a vindictive attack outside the law and proper due process by the Trump administration. It is not the only mischief, and I am going to be joined here by Ranking Member Heinrich to talk about some of the more westerly tricks that the Trump administration has been up to to interfere with clean energy. But that second stop work order kind of tore it for me--because any negotiation that we would enter into, any good bill that would result from it, would then have to be implemented by this administration; and this administration has been found to have illegally stopped work on this project, did not appeal that finding, and then came up with a new stop work order 30 days later. If that is not vindictive harassment without legal basis, I don't know what is. It is in litigation right now. With any luck, it will be stopped again, and they can go back to work again. And--who knows--maybe there will be a third imaginary stop work order that drops. But in an environment like that, where the executive branch refuses its constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws, it doesn't make any sense for us to continue negotiations on a major bipartisan bill. I want to say, in particular, that Chair Capito has been helpful, thoughtful, a good partner. All the Environment and Public Works Committee Republicans have been helpful and thoughtful. There is literally zero blame for this to land on the other side of the aisle in the Senate. This is entirely a legislative versus executive problem of an executive branch--a rogue executive branch--that refuses to faithfully execute the laws, notwithstanding its constitutional duty. It is so bad that the three major miscreants in this process--Zeldin, Burgum, and Wright--have gone on a campaign of falsehood about the cost of offshore wind. Here are some of the things that they have been saying. Secretary Burgum said that ``intermittent, highly expensive wind is bad.'' ``Highly expensive,'' he called it. He then tweeted: Offshore wind is one of the most expensive . . . schemes ever pushed upon American taxpayers. He said: Offshore wind forces consumers and taxpayers to pay CONSIDERABLY more for electricity. He said that ``blue State offshore wind policies . . . lock in high prices.'' Zeldin criticized the economic impacts of wind. Wright said that ``wind and solar brings us . . . less reliable energy delivery and higher electric bills.'' So all three of them have falsely asserted that offshore wind will raise electric bills. In court proceedings, where you actually need to tell the truth--as opposed to in tweets and talk shows--the story that emerges is exactly the opposite. In the Rhode Island and Connecticut sworn complaint, we alleged that Revolution Wind, the project off our shores, ``will . . . yield substantial cost savings to the States' ratepayers.'' [S]avings to ratepayers-- the pleading continues-- are estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars over 20 years. The September complaint brought in the Federal court by Orsted-- again, a court filing--pled that long-term contract prices ``are expected to act as a successful hedge against rising electricity rates,'' projected to save ratepayers ``hundreds of millions of dollars.'' In January--just now--in the litigation about the second stop work order, an affidavit was filed that swore that Revolution Wind would be a new source of low marginal cost power in New England; that ``once operational, Revolution Wind alone will provide hundreds of millions of dollars each year in energy bill savings to New England.'' The ISO, the grid operator, specified that during a specific cold snap, from December 24, 2017, to January 8, 2018--what is that?--2 weeks, basically--had this offshore wind been online during that period, it would have ``lowered regional electricity production costs by $80-85 million'' over those 2 weeks, ``resulting in an $11-13 per megawatt-hour reduction'' in what the grid charged ratepayers. Revolution Wind has cleared in the New England capacity market, and if it were to fail, it would require increases in electricity rates in New England of hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Over and over again, when people who know what they are talking about have to say in court pleadings, where they have an obligation to tell the truth, what the cost effect of Revolution Wind will be, they talk about cost savings of hundreds of millions of dollars. And that is confirmed across the country by grid operators. You can go to any grid, and you can see pretty much the same thing. They call up power units by cost. They call up the least expensive power units first, for obvious reasons, and wind and solar tend to be the low marginal cost units. They are the ones that are called up first. So the allegations made in court of savings to ratepayers are backstopped by the actual economic practice of our electric grids. So back to Zeldin, Burgum, and Wright. If they are conspicuously and consistently failing to tell the truth about savings, specifically misleading the public, telling them fossil fuel is cheaper when it isn't, what does that tell you about their motives and their bias and inability to faithfully execute the laws? It tells me that there is really no point in passing a bipartisan bill, which would be a really good one, because we wouldn't get the benefit of the bill. They would just continue with illegal acts and false statements--anything to help fossil fuel. It is not just Revolution Wind. Dominion Wind is set to lower consumer power prices in Virginia, once it is operational, and it is, too, now under a stop work order. I want to resume. I want to get back to work. I want to do this permitting reform bill. In order to get there, I am going to need some help. The artificial intelligence folks, the crypto folks, the data system folks who need massive amounts of electrons, you all need to start showing up and letting people know that you actually want permitting reform, and you actually want an administrative and regulatory process in which electrons are treated fairly, irrespective of source, so you can get the power that you need. That is where we need to go. If you want permitting reform, don't come to me. I am not the problem. Don't come to Democrats in the Senate. We are eager to do permitting reform. Don't bother Chairman Capito and the Republicans. They are ready to go too. Leader Thune has been very supportive of our effort. The problem isn't in the Senate. The problem is in the White House and in Environment and Public Works, Energy, and Interior. They are simply not executing the laws fairly, and the bias and injustice and illegality they have already demonstrated have got to stop if we are going to go forward. It ain't just this bill that has to come through EPW and go through the Congress. There is also a highway bill coming. There is a water resources bill for the Army Corps bill. Are we really going to have to stop work on those big bipartisan bills because we can't trust the Trump administration to implement them according to law? Something has to give here, and nobody has done anything wrong in this building. All of the problems are in illegal, false, unfair, and biased enforcement of what should be faithful execution of the laws. That is where we are.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, today is a difficult day particularly for our Capitol Police officers. This is the fifth anniversary of the day when a violent mob attacked this building and attacked them. It did a lot of injury and a lot of harm to Capitol Police officers--in some cases, as they say in the law, death resulting. Today, pardoned criminals who participated in that riot are on the streets of Washington, and if they come back to this Capitol, our police officers are going to have to treat them professionally. And what support are they getting from all of us? In a better world, this would be a bipartisan showing of respect and gratitude for the police officers who suffered and fought that day to protect this building and an expression of bipartisan gratitude. But that is not where we are as a country right now. One of the symptoms of Trumpism--frankly, of authoritarianism generally--is the obligation to lie. You are not on the team, you are not in the club, you are not part of the movement if you are not willing to lie for it. So you are constantly tested with the obligation to lie--little ones and then big ones. It tests the loyalty and gradually erodes personal virtue of the person who is increasingly obliged to lie. So, instead of this being a bipartisan expression of gratitude and appreciation, our colleagues on the other side of the aisle seem to be away today, and it is left to us to remember and honor the brave law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol that day. The MAGA world has decided that no crimes were committed that day. Well, that is new. At the time, Senator Ted Cruz described those crimes as a ``violent terrorist attack on the Capitol.'' At the time, Senator John Cornyn said, ``Those who planned & participated in the violence that day should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.'' At that time, Senator Josh Hawley said that ``those who attacked police and broke the law must be prosecuted.'' Those are only a few of the expressions that we heard from our Republican colleagues at the time. Republican colleagues also once denounced pardoning rioters, particularly violent rioters. Vice President Vance and the President of the Senate said: If you committed violence on [January 6], obviously, you shouldn't be pardoned. Secretary Kristi Noem said: We can't have a blanket approach. I would say each one of those cases needs to be looked at specifically. Senator Hawley again: I'm against it for people who assaulted cops, threw stuff at cops, broke down doors, broke windows. Well, Trump came in, and he issued that blanket pardon virtually right away--nearly 1,600 rioters--and he commuted the sentence of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia. These were not great people. At least 33 of them have already been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for other crimes since that day. Four pardoned insurrectionists have already allegedly reoffended since receiving their pardons. One insurrectionist was charged with a felony for threatening to murder the House minority leader. Now some of them are so emboldened that they are demanding a reward for having been prosecuted for the crimes that they committed that day and convicted in a court of law. That is an injury to them, in their view. So, today, Senator Padilla and I have introduced two bills to make clear that no one who stormed the Capitol should get any kind of payment, even from this MAGA Department of Justice--no taxpayer-funded cash giveaways, which, by the way, echoes that we should not be giving taxpayer-funded cash giveaways to our colleagues because their names came up in the investigation of the crimes of that day because they were called by the instigators of the crimes of that day. So I urge my colleagues to support these bills. Let us not reward the violence that was done that day. Too many are trying to turn that day into a payday for themselves. It is beneath us, and I urge support for those two pieces of legislation. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am honored to join our senior Senator as he calls for a moment of silence to share in the sorrow of the families who lost their young college student children to this tragedy. I would only ask that all of us, including anyone listening, just hold off and give these families a little bit of grace and peace as they deal with this loss. They were expecting to see these kids for the Christmas holidays. There are other kids who are in the hospital--in some cases, in fairly critical condition. Those families are not going to be spending Christmas around the tree at home; they are going to be spending Christmas in a State away from home where their children are in a hospital room, trying to be there for them. So there is a good deal of suffering and a good deal of sorrow. I think it is important that people not add to that with a lot of unfounded opinion and speculation about what took place. Let the investigation proceed. We will know what we need to know in due time. In the meantime, please give these families grace as they go through their grief. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here for my, oh, I guess umpteenth ``Time to Wake Up'' speech. This one comes upon my return from Brazil, where I was the entirety of the United States of America governmental presence at the COP. That was it. Just me. Nobody else went. And not only did nobody else go-- this is not important to anybody really outside the Senate--but for my codel, my congressional delegation trip of one, the State Department, under President Trump, refused to facilitate my trip. I think this is the first time where the Senate, the legislative body, has been told by the Executive branch: We are not going to facilitate a codel because we don't like what you are doing. I don't think that has ever happened before, and whatever your views are on whatever issue, I would caution that this is a gate we need to close shut because if the Executive branch of government can start telling the Members of the Senate what codels they can and cannot go on with State Department support and facilitation, we have got a real problem on our hands. Here is my badge from the event, which the State Department refused to facilitate. So I was there as an observer of the Global Legislators Organization for a Balanced Environment, not the State Department. That is how we had to get around them. So that is kind of a first, not mattering much, except that it is yet another executive-legislative tradition blown up by the arrogance of the Trump administration, their insistence that everything has to be their way. But it is also a signal that this is how crazy they are on climate issues, how completely off base they are. So I went down to Brazil--because that is where the rest of the world was gathering--to discuss the climate crisis. In the facility where we were, the kind of main intersection where the two big aisleways crossed was occupied by China, at one of the key corners, with a huge delegation, a very big pavilion, lots of activity and crowding, and all of the different countries that were there seeing the leadership of China--our rival. No pavilion for the United States, nothing to be seen, nobody. Across the way, Saudis, not exactly the best friends of climate solutions. So that was the environment that I went down to, and what I wanted to do was convey four messages. Message one was: Donald Trump on climate does not represent the United States of America. He just doesn't. He represents the big donors who gathered at Mar-a-Lago, whom he asked for a billion dollars, and who gave him hundreds of millions of dollars in return for his promise to do whatever they wanted. It is that corrupt promise that explains Trump's behavior, not that he is representing the United States of America. I thought this cartoon made a pretty good image of what is going on in the Trump White House. And we know that he doesn't represent America because we can do things like test public opinion and polls. And I have a recent one here that asks about some of the sensible solutions to the climate change problem, to all the pollution spewing. Here is one: Carbon pollution limits on big companies. Obviously, Trump would do everything he possibly could to prevent carbon pollution limits because his big fossil fuel donors wouldn't like that, and he is in tow to them. So zero chance that Trump would support that. But how about the American people? Mr. President, 12 percent opposed, 72 percent support. There is a 60-point margin among the American public on putting a pollution limit, a carbon pollution limit on big companies--72 to 12. That is where the American people are, not in the pockets of Big Oil. Here is another one: Impose a fee on big polluters. It shouldn't be pollute for free. If you are polluting something, whether it is your neighbor's yard with your waste, your trash, throwing it over the fence or whether it is the river that you are dumping effluent into and ruining things for people downstream or whether it is our common atmosphere, if you pollute, you should pay for the cost of fixing it. Better still, you should pay enough that you don't pollute in the first place and the neighbor's yard isn't a wreck of your trash and the river isn't dirty downstream and the atmosphere is safe. Impose a fee on big polluters. Seventy-four percent of Americans liked that, 10 percent opposed. These are massive numbers in our line of work, in which we are always testing public opinion. And this is without much political pressure behind those ideas. This is just the American public in its natural state saying: Yes, by a better-than-60- point margin, we want to impose a fee on big polluters. We want carbon pollution limits on big companies. That is where America is. Trump is in the pockets of the big polluters. So that was message one. Message two was: We have got to put that price on carbon, the one that the American people want, because that is the only way we have remaining to climate safety. We have driven by all the other exits on the highway. We are now left with that. And that was my second point. We absolutely have to have what is called carbon pricing, a fee, a penalty, whatever you call it, for pollution. This is part of a review from work that the Potsdam Institute did. They looked at 1,200 climate scenarios that over the years have been presented to the IPCC, 1,200. Of those 1,200, there are 11 left--11 out of 1,200--11 left that put us on a pathway to climate safety to get us back below the 1.5 degrees centigrade safety margin--maybe safety margin. But that is a conventional one, so I will stick with it, even though it is not a guarantee. Every single one of them puts a price on carbon. No price on carbon, we fail. Other stuff that helps with climate, that may cause the airplane to crash higher up the mountain, but the only thing that gets the airplane safely across the mountain is putting a price on carbon. Twenty years ago, we probably had other alternatives. Now, we absolutely must put a price on carbon. And so I, when I met with the Europeans and the Brits and the Australians, said to them: You have our last lifeboat. Don't let Trump sink it for his fossil fuel donors. What is the last lifeboat? It is called the carbon border adjustment mechanism. It is a global price on carbon that comes from tariffs. It is already law in the European Union, and it is about to go into effect next year. Behind the European Union is the United Kingdom. Under a conservative government, the United Kingdom decided to join the CBAM. They are in the process of aligning their internal carbon prices, and they are in the process of figuring out how they are going to charge their own tariffs. So you have the EU economy, and then soon, I hope, the UK economy joining, sending a global price signal that, if you are putting in goods that are more carbon intensive than ours, we are going to charge you for that. You cannot pollute and export for free any longer. This is a version of the ``can't pollute for free'' rule. Pollute for free, by the way, is wrong--not just morally but as a matter of economics. You can go back to the most conservative economist, Milton Friedman, and he will say: Yes, if your product causes harm, if it pollutes, that is what economists call a negative externality. And the cost of that negative externality needs to be in the price of the product or else it is a subsidy, and it should be treated as a subsidy. The subsidy for fossil fuel, just in the United States, is $700 billion every year. That is how much harm it causes. That is the value to the industry of ``pollute for free'' as their business model. So the CBAM is beginning to put a price on pollution by causing a border tariff. To impose that price is really, really important. These are those 11 remaining scenarios. Every single one crosses over 1.5; every single one requires, probably, direct-air capture to get the excess carbon dioxide and other pollutants out of the atmosphere and then bring it back down to safety--assuming no tipping point in here makes it irrecoverable. So the way that I described it is that our last lifeboat to climate safety is the CBAM. It gets stronger if the UK joins. It gets stronger if the Australians join. They are looking at it as well. That makes it a sturdier lifeboat for all of us. But we have to do it. It is not a guarantee of climate safety. But sinking that lifeboat is a guarantee of failure for us, for the next generation of young people, for their children and their grandchildren. We are done if we don't protect and, ideally, expand the CBAM. So I urge all the countries participating in that: Stand by your guns. There is going to be a corrupt fossil fuel-driven attack on this. You can count on it. And be ready. Lock arms. Link up. Prepare yourself for the onslaught, and do not let yourself be cowed. Do not let yourself be stampeded. So that was point two. Point three was: We have trouble coming. I call it the great climate insurance collapse. It is widely warned of. It is on its way. As I went around the COP, I handed out this little folder wherever I could, which lists just some of the climate economic catastrophe warnings that are out there: [C]limate change could reduce the level of global GDP per capita by 10-20%. This is Fed Chair Powell. He is on my sheet right here: In 10 or 15 years, there are going to be regions of the country where you can't get a mortgage. Why is that? Because in those regions of the country you won't be able to get home insurance. And if you can't get home insurance on your property, if it has become uninsurable, no mortgage. So what he is really saying here is whole regions of the United States are going to become so climate risky that they are uninsurable and, therefore, unmortgageable, and that is why, in those regions of the country, you will not be able to get a mortgage. Think for a minute about what the economy looks like in an entire region of the country in which nobody can get a mortgage any longer. Where is this likely to hit first? I will tell you a region that is headed for this fast is Florida. In Florida, the insurance market is already trembling, propped up, perhaps even fake. And if it loses that insurance market and Florida is a region in which nobody can get a mortgage any longer, well, that may be fine for Palm Beach billionaires who are swapping mansions with their extra money, but for a working person who has to get a mortgage to afford a house or for a working person who has a house on which he or she is paying a mortgage and now they need to sell it and they can't find a buyer because the buyer can't get a mortgage to buy the house because the house can't get insurance--the property is uninsurable. That is how that cascade works. It goes from climate risk to uninsurability, to mortgage collapse, to property values collapse, to recession. That is what the chief economist for Freddie Mac predicted. This guy, Fed Chair Powell, is not green at all. He is lousy on climate, but he is good on finance, and he sees this coming. Freddie Mac is not a green organization. It is a mortgage company. So when its chief economist says we are headed for a 2008-style economic recession because there won't be mortgages because you can't get insurance so property values will fall so there will be that recession, you are hearing that from the finance community, not from environmentalists. We go on. The Economist magazine, in an article entitled ``The Next Housing Disaster''--there is its cover; it was about a year ago-- predicted $25 trillion as the size of the hit to the global real estate market from this climate risk to insurance meltdown, to no mortgages, to property values collapse cascade--$25 trillion. ``Climate change, in short,'' it said, ``could prompt the next global property collapse.'' The president of Aon, one of the biggest insurance companies in the country, testified before the Senate Budget Committee: Climate risk is a global, systemic risk. What does ``systemic'' mean? Climate change is a global, systemic risk. What does ``systemic'' mean? Systemic is the scariest word in the economic lexicon. Systemic means that when things go bad, it is not contained to the place where the things went bad. The 2008 recession was systemic, meaning that you didn't have to have a bad mortgage or you didn't have to be one of the financiers who crookedly packaged the bad mortgages to get clobbered. The damage was so deep in that part of the financial system that it cascaded out across the entire economy, and everybody got hurt. Car dealers, Realtors, small businesses, people who lost their jobs got hurt in 2008 because it was systemic. Now you have got the CEO of one of America's biggest insurance entities warning us about this systemic risk. Here is an even bigger insurance company, the biggest one in the world, Allianz, put one of its board members out to warn that if we get past the 1.5 degrees here and if you get up to 3 degrees, what happens at 3 degrees? Which, by the way, is very much what we are headed for right now. What happens at 3 degrees? Here is what he says: [T]he financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable. Same scenario: climate risk, insurance collapse, mortgage failure, property values crash. The Mortgage Bankers Association: [C]hronic physical risk associated with climate change may . . . exceed the capacity of insurance and government assistance to sustain some areas. Whole regions. By the way, the Allianz guy said the same thing about regions that Jay Powell did, that whole regions are becoming uninsurable. The Financial Stability Board is the board that looks at the world's banking system. They have put out a warning saying, ``buckle up'' to the world's banks because if the climate risk to insurance collapse, to mortgage market failure, to property value crash transpires, the banks' balance sheets collapses. Its collateral value is gone. Its loan-to- value ratio makes it insolvent. And now you have a bank crash laid over the underlying great climate insurance collapse. That is not from me. That is not from the League of Conservation Voters. That is not from the Sierra Club. That is from the international Financial Stability Board. So that was the second message: Look out. This is about to get deadly serious, and people at the top of the finance profession are warning about it. I will close with Bob Litterman. He was the chief risk management officer for Goldman Sachs, right? Goldman Sachs ain't green--except green with money. And he was their chief risk management officer. Here is what he told the Senate Budget Committee: A sudden revision of market perceptions about climate risk-- i.e., the market realizes that climate risk is out there and has not been priced adequately into financial documents-- could lead to a disorderly repricing of assets, which could in turn have cascading effects on portfolios and balance sheets and therefore systemic-- Systemic-- implications for financial stability. Like the Financial Stability Board said. So I pointed out that this risk was looming, and we need to pay attention to it. This isn't about polar bears any longer. This isn't about green jobs any longer. This is a serious warning about a potential collapse in not just the United States but the global financial system. Remember The Economist magazine said that $25 trillion hit was coming to global real estate markets. That is what this article said. So how do we prevent that? Well, one thing, as I said already, is you have to put a price on carbon. If it is free to pollute, you are going to get more polluting. There is no excuse for an industry polluting for free. There just isn't. It is morally wrong, economically wrong, environmentally wrong. It is wrong by the rules which your mom taught you--to clean up after your damn self. But when it is $700 billion every year of harm that you are getting away with for free, that gives you a big reason as an industry to try to fake and lie and pressure your way through it. Now, you don't want to be caught doing that by your own name. You don't want it to be ExxonMobil that is doing all of this in its own name, so you have set up a whole scheme. But for $700 billion a year, you can spend a lot of money on setting up your whole scheme. And sure enough, here is an image I have used on the Senate floor before. This is a web of all, not all, a significant number of the big front groups that the fossil fuel industry has propped up and funds to propagate its climate denial fraud operation--pretend that this isn't real, pretend that the scientists are just kidding or that they are making it up--and its dark money political corruption operation, which shovels billions of dollars into our politics to make sure that people obediently deny climate change in return for the money that keeps them in office. So my final point in Brazil was, if we want to win this, we not only have to get the policy right, we have to tell the story right. This is a story with a villain in it, just like a children's story that has a troll or a witch or an ogre or a dragon. You don't want to tell that story without the troll or the witch or the ogre or the dragon. First of all, it gets to be a really boring story, and second of all, it ain't the right story. What we have is a situation in which we are in this peril that I described. We are in this peril because the fossil fuel industry has propped up this whole array of phony front groups to spread climate disinformation, stuff that just isn't true. By the way, they don't care that it is not true. That is the point. So they don't stand corrected when somebody says ``Oh, that is not true''; they just dial up the volume and say it twice as much. It is not intended to be true. This is not a quest for truth; this is a barrage of noise and propaganda designed to cover the truth. On the money side, we are into multiple billions of dollars that are poured into this building from fossil fuel industry coffers through all these phony-baloney front groups. I make fun of their names. I made up one: Rhode Islanders for Peace and Puppies and Prosperity--with nothing but a mail drop behind it. But behind the mail drop, creepy billionaires are shoveling in the money so people will ignore this problem for just another year, just another 2 years, just long enough to make a few more billion dollars in profit. So that was my message. Trump ain't us on this. Trump is the mouthpiece of the fossil fuel industry. The American public hasn't gone anywhere on this. He has just gone off on a fossil fuel-funded excursion. If we don't protect the CBAM and put a price on carbon, there is no way out of this mess. We are totally toast, and we are going to see the looming edge of being totally toast coming through our insurance markets. It is already happening in Florida. Watch it. It is there. I did a poll in Texas. Ninety-two percent of Texans are concerned about their homeowners insurance. Everybody talks about affordability here. They are concerned about their homeowners insurance affordability. They are more concerned about that than healthcare. They are more concerned about that than groceries. This is a top-of-mind concern because of wildfires, flooding, hail exploding the Texas homeowners insurance market. Sixty-three percent say they are very concerned--very concerned. Sixty-six percent in oil patch Texas, in red Texas, in a State where zero effort has been made to connect the dots, understand that climate change links to extreme weather that is driving their homeowners insurance crisis--66 percent already get that. They are just being ignored because the fossil fuel industry can out-fog horn them with its propaganda and outspend them with its sluice gates open of dark money corrupting our politics. That takes us to the last point, which is, yes, there is a villain in the story, and we need to put a spotlight on that villain and make them own the harm they are so dishonestly creating. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise to speak on the CRA related to the Environmental Protection Agency, now better known as the ``Polluter Protection Agency,'' trying to unwind methane rules. So there are three things I would like to say about methane: We all know that it is a pollutant. We all know that it is dangerous. It is even explosive. And yet the fossil fuel industry insists on leaking it in enormous quantities. And for years, they have falsely reported to the EPA how much their leakage was, but it is a lot, and it makes a big difference, particularly on the climate side because methane is a super pollutant in the short run--in the first, say, 20, 25 years. So it is really important to stop leakage of this dangerous substance. And there is no value to the leakage. This is just laziness and sloppiness and bad corporate behavior. It is not like there is a methane leakage association that wants to see more methane in the atmosphere. It is just waste and sloppiness, bad corporate behavior. This body keeps rolling over to those folks. One of the first things that we did was to undo the methane fee so that the leakers didn't have to pay anything for their leakage. Now, we had agreed on that, working with the fossil fuel industry through Senator Manchin, who was their representative in these negotiations. And what we settled on was that only the worst polluters would be subject to the fee; only the ones who couldn't even meet their industry's standards, only they would have to pay. Second, the revenues from the fee would go back to the industry to pay for fixing the mess they were creating. And third, we front-loaded it so they got nearly a billion dollars upfront. What did they do? Took the money and called on their Republican friends here in the Senate to undo the fee. It was a complete bait-and- switch. Now we are here on changes to the methane rules and the effort by EPA to delay those changes. This adds the additional insult to being a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act. I tell my colleagues: If you continue to sanction these procedural violations of regulatory Agencies, don't think we are going to forget that when the shoe is on the other foot. This set of extensions of the methane rules was done regulatorily, without something called notice and opportunity to be heard--``notice and comment'' is the technical term under the APA. It is a basic provision of the APA that you have to go notice and comment. If you don't want to do notice and comment--as EPA did not in this case--you have got to show good cause. And what courts have said good cause is, is an emergency. There is no emergency here. Look at some of the things that EPA has done. They claim that the industry needed time to adopt technologies which had, in fact, already been widely adopted--flatout lie from EPA. They said that compliance deadlines were too close. Well, many of them actually had already been in effect. So that can't be the real reason. And then they delayed the Super Emitter Program for the worst methane leakers, but it had already been up and running for months. So there was nothing new happening. There was no emergency. So if you all--my colleagues on the Republican side--if this is the way you want regulatory Agencies to behave in a Democrat administration, keep this up because this is flatout rule-breaking by the EPA. The last thing is, it is kind of pointless because we are going to catch your leakers. You can give them anything you want. You can continue to roll back methane fees; you can continue to roll back methane rules, but we are going to catch the leakers who are telling you to do this stuff. We are going to catch them because satellite technology can now detect the plumes of methane that they emit, and they can really detect the big ones. They can source it down to a very narrow point of origin. UCLA just opened up a website where you can go and see a summary of the satellite data: what landfills, what oil facilities, what are the big leak points so the local communities can take action against the irresponsible members of the fossil fuel industry who are leaking enormous amounts of methane. So you may have clawed back the methane fee and bailed out the worst performers in the industry and you may have violated the APA to postpone these other rules, including rules against super emitters, but at the end of the day, you are not going to get away with the methane leakage. You are going to be caught. It is going to be visible on satellite. There is going to be every opportunity for naming and shaming and enforcement, and we are going to end up getting this right. So it would be better if you just didn't put us through this, if you behaved properly for the Senate, if you let the methane fees stand, and if you didn't allow EPA to break the rules to give polluters yet another break from this polluter-friendly EPA. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, in fond memory of Dame Jane Goodall, 1934-2025, Explorers Club Fellow, Honorary Member, and Explorers Club Medalist, by L. M. Levie: There's a tale explorers tell, of a girl with drive and dreams, Who was born in Hampstead, London in a home of modest means, With a small toy chimp named Jubilee clutched close against her heart, And a yearning for the wilderness, imprinted from the start. She would read of Doctor Dolittle and apes of Tarzan's land, While her mother, kind and gentle, held her daughter's reaching hand. Though she had no lofty pedigree from university, Jane set out upon a mission that would change humanity. Jane would save all of her wages, every shilling, pence and pound, And she booked a ship to Africa, to Kenya she was bound. In the camp of Louis Leakey, digging age-old skulls from earth, He found something in her manner, recognized her hidden worth. ``You shall study chimpanzees in the wilds of Gombe Stream, You shall live among the primates and fulfill your childhood dream.'' So at twenty-six she ventured to Tanzania's lake shore, Where no woman dared go solo, where no scholar went before. And at first the chimps would scatter, running fearful through the trees, But she sat there day and nighttime under sun and rain and breeze. `Til one ancient male named David with a beard of silver-gray, Took a nut from Jane's kind outstretched hand and gently squeezed to say: ``You are welcome here among us, you may watch us, you may learn.'' And upon this invitation, science took a mighty turn. Through the years at Gombe watching, Jane recorded every deed, How they shared their food and groomed with care--compassion was their creed, How they laughed and kissed and mourned their dead with grief upon their face, How they held the mirror to us, showing evolution's trace. But in nineteen-eighty-six she flew far above this wood, And she saw the devastation where the forest once had stood. She was no more mere observer, now she'd fight to save and teach, And she traveled `round the planet, bringing hope within her reach. On three hundred days of travel, every year for decades long, Speaking, begging, preaching, pleading, singing out her urgent song: ``Every person makes a difference, every action matters true, And the future of our planet, of all life, depends on you.'' On October first she left us, and she shed all mortal cares. Ninety-one years of devotion, of a life of answered prayers. Jane, who gave her life to nature, and gave voice to all things wild, Has returned unto the earth now, still a curious, loving child. So we weep for Jane this evening, though we know she'd ask us: ``Why? I have lived the life I dreamed of underneath the broadest sky.'' As we mourn for you, dear Jane, your great legacy burns bright, And the world's a kinder place because you brought us to the light. For in every child who plants a tree, in every soul who cares, In every word of hope and faith, we find you standing there. Rest now in peace, dear Jane Goodall, in earth you loved and knew, You showed us how to live with grace, with courage strong and true. And when the wind sings through the Gombe trees, chimps call at dawn, Remembering one who loved them-- Though she's gone, her work lives on.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I would have hoped that the basic operation of American democracy and particularly the basic integrity of America's elections would not be a topic that we would have to come to the Senate floor to worry about, but the character down the road in the Oval Office is making all sorts of threats to the cornerstone of America's democracy--our elections. I will mention three. First, he nonstop lies about rigged elections. He can't bear to face the fact that Joe Biden beat him by millions of votes fair and square, and so he invented a story of rigged elections. Well, as has repeatedly been shown, if any election has been rigged recently, it was Donald Trump's first election, where study after study, report after report showed that Russia had been messing around in that election, using covert influence operations to influence American voters and steer them towards their favorite--Donald Trump. But the lying about rigged elections is a bit of a warning sign because the other thing we have learned about Trump is that his accusations tend to be actual confessions. The bad stuff that he intends to do he announces by accusing others of doing the same thing. So when people notice the mischief that he is up to, he says: Well, everybody does it. That doesn't make it anything other than a lie. Then he has been out, bullying Republican States, to try to get him more seats in Congress by doing a midseason gerrymandering of their States. This succeeded, kind of, in Texas. When I say it succeeded ``kind of,'' it succeeded in the sense that they got the gerrymandered districts. But here is the rub: When you gerrymander more Republican districts into a State, you make the freeboard--the win ratio--for each of those districts a little bit less. And if yesterday was any message, Republicans need to worry about a wave election washing away Trump's poison and nonsense. In a wave election, those gerrymandered districts that you thought you had moved into the Republican column could get sunk in the wave. In particular, we have already seen from yesterday's results--more analysis will follow--that it looks like Latino voters, important in Texas, are abandoning Trump. So it may be that Texas's gerrymandering blows up in its face, and wouldn't that be a nice turnabout? Maybe that is what Republicans in Indiana were thinking when they refused to gerrymander their State. They might well be looking at Texas and saying: You know, voters in Texas might actually have cared more about electric bills, about their homeowners' insurance crisis, about their cost of living, and wanted Texan legislators to do something about that, instead of going off on a partisan gallivant to redistrict the State. And those voters might just hold those Republicans accountable for choosing as their priority to use gerrymandering so that politicians can choose their voters instead of paying attention to the voters who want help with costs, who want their homeowners' insurance problems solved, who are concerned about their electric utility bills, and who are sick to death about what is happening with grocery costs. The third avenue of attack on elections by Trump is that he is modeling government election interference in front of our faces right now. When you send the National Guard into American cities, when you deploy masked, plain-clothed, presumably ICE agents to yank people off the street and fling them into unmarked vans and disappear them, you are getting people used to images that Americans are not used to. You are inoculating Americans against that kind of abuse of both military and law enforcement capabilities so that, when it is election day and that kind of nonsense takes place around polling places to discourage voters, we have gotten used to it. So the lying--the constant lying--about rigged elections, the bullying--the constant bullying--to force State legislatures to gerrymander even though that is not what their voters want, and the constant modeling of government interference in elections--all of that is a signal that we have to be on our guard to protect our democracy. It is not just Trump. In doing this, Trump has allies. He has allies on the packed and captured Supreme Court--a Court that Republicans packed and captured specifically to help their big, creepy billionaire donors acquire more power in American democracy. And, boy, have we seen enough creepy billionaire power in American democracy: dark money--the secret, sneaky dark money floods that are poisoning our elections, that allow billionaires to channel multimillion-dollar contributions into races by hiding behind front groups and screens and super-PACs so that voters can't do their duty as citizens of figuring out who is telling them what because the loudest and noisiest and most prolific messages are coming from behind masked entities. It was one of the dirtiest deeds ever done to our democracy, and it was done by the Roberts Court: voter suppression, making sure that White legislatures could discourage Black and Latino voters by changing the rules for when you can vote and how you can vote. We passed a Voting Rights Act in the Congress to stop that kind of behavior, and this Supreme Court--the Roberts Court--has been diligently pulling out, piece by piece, those Voting Rights Act protections. When they do, what happens? Instantly, those southern legislatures go to work to make it harder and harder for minorities to vote. Hundreds of bills get filed. Third, when they were confronted with partisan gerrymandering-- distorting Americans' right to vote by letting politicians pick voters, instead of voters picking politicians--they said: Oh, well, that is all fine. We are not going to look into any of that. Courts are not allowed to look into whether gerrymandering is legal or illegal, constitutional or unconstitutional. Those three decisions of flooding our elections with corrupting dark money, letting State legislatures make it harder for certain people to vote whom they don't want voting, and gerrymandering districts against the will of the public--people hate gerrymandering--those three things have collectively done immense damage to our democracy, and those bad decisions are going to play out in this coming election. I will close with a point about all three of those cases. The Citizens United case that let filthy, unlimited dark money pollute our elections, the Shelby case that tore down an essential element of the Voting Rights Act, and the Rucho case that allowed uncontrolled, partisan gerrymandering--all three of them share a very important characteristic in common, and that is that they hang on a false fact. To get where the Court wanted to go, those Republican appointees had to make up a false fact that the decision hung on. In Citizens United, it was that all the unlimited money would be transparent. Well, we know that was false. Every billion dollars in dark money that falls into our elections proves that was false. In Shelby, it was that things have changed. You didn't need to worry about southern legislatures trying to keep Democratic voters from showing up. But you saw that that was false because all of those laws were immediately passed to suppress voters. And in the Rucho case, it was that courts can't figure out gerrymandering stuff; it is just too complicated. But, in fact, courts were figuring it out. It is not even that hard to figure out. The Court just made up, falsely, that this was too hard. When a court is making up false facts to get to an outcome that it wants, that is not a sign of great integrity in those proceedings. So we have a lot to worry about, and we have more to worry about after yesterday because last night showed that voters do not like what Trump and his Republican cohorts here in the House and the Senate are doing to our country. This was a small wave, and with any luck, it is building to a bigger wave. Instead of adjusting to popular opinion, what we know they are going to do is to try to use even more tools to corrupt democracy, corrupt elections, and defeat our ability to have the American people decide who they want to lead them at the polls. That is the predicament we are in, and it requires us to be on high alert. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, as I come to the floor, I reflect on how I have never understood what it is in the Republican mind that is so fixated on taking healthcare away from people. It really doesn't make sense. It may be some recessive political gene that goes back to when Republicans opposed Medicare, attacked it as socialized medicine, tried to make sure it never happened. But it really doesn't make sense. But it is active still, and Americans are looking at three waves of attack on their healthcare. The first wave is pulling their Affordable Care credits. That is a big deal for a lot of people. Twenty-four million Americans are going to be affected and are going to see their costs for healthcare likely double. In Rhode Island, my small State, tens of thousands of people are going to be similarly affected, with huge increases in their monthly costs for the same healthcare. And because so many of them aren't going to be able to afford that increase, we estimate that 13,000 Rhode Islanders will lose their coverage and have to go to emergency rooms and wait in line and drive up the ultimate cost of care by not getting treatment when it is needed. But it is not just the Affordable Care credits that are imperiled here. Right behind that is a half-trillion-dollar cut to Medicare-- Medicare. Some of us remember when President Biden gave the State of the Union and he had a bit of an exchange with Republicans in the House about Medicare. He said: You know, Republicans always are trying to cut Medicare. And they all jumped up out of their chairs yelling and screaming and said: No, no, no. We will never cut Medicare. We are not for that. You can't say we are for that. What did they do in the ``Beautiful for Billionaires Bill''? Cut Medicare. They did it in a tricky way because they don't want to own that they are Medicare cutters. You saw that behavior during Biden's State of the Union. They do not want to own cutting Medicare. They know people like and respect Medicare and rely on Medicare. But the ``Beautiful for Billionaires Bill,'' by virtue of adding over $4 trillion to our national debt, triggered another law, the sequestration law, that automatically imposes cuts on Medicare starting next year--next year. And it is a half trillion dollars in Medicare cuts. So that is backed up behind the Affordable Care credits being pulled away. And then, behind that, comes the trillion-dollar cut to Medicaid that was right on the face of the ``Beautiful for Billionaires Bill.'' So you add those three things up--you pull the Affordable Care credits from the families that rely on it, you whack Medicare by half a trillion dollars, you whack Medicaid by a trillion dollars--and you have delivered a devastating blow to the American people--such a devastating blow, by the way, that the healthcare providers at the receiving end of those trillions of dollars are likely to suffer to the point of having to potentially close. Nursing homes, hospitals, provider practices, family doctors--they are the ones where this money ultimately lands. And when you take that much money away from our healthcare sector, don't think it is going to be OK because it is not. So why do we stand and fight to protect the Affordable Care credits? Well, two reasons: one, because it is the first wave of this new Republican assault on Americans' healthcare--Affordable Care credits, then Medicare, then Medicaid. If we don't stand and fight now, with the Affordable Care credits being sent out now, the changes in the prices, then we are in no position to defend when the Medicare cuts come through--half a trillion dollars--and when the Medicaid cuts come through--a trillion dollars. And the second is we can have some confidence that our Republican colleagues, when they get over this fixation about taking away Americans' healthcare, will realize that a lot of the Americans whose healthcare they are taking away are their own constituents. In fact, all of the evidence is that these Affordable Care credits go more to Republican Senators' constituents than they do to ours, which is why Republican House Members running for reelection are writing letters saying: Let's fix the Affordable Care credits. Let's extend Affordable Care credits for 2 years. That is why Republicans in this body are saying: Yes, we know we need to negotiate to extend Affordable Care credits. We just don't want to do it right now. So we can have some confidence in this fight that Republicans' constituents are going to let them know how unwelcome pulling the Affordable Care credits is, and that is before you even get to half- trillion-dollar cuts to Medicare and trillion-dollar cuts to Medicaid. So this matters, and it matters to a lot of people. And it matters in Republican States. I just happened to pick Tennessee. Here is a little bit about what is going to happen in Tennessee. Tennessee families, thanks to Republicans not willing to negotiate with us, will see their premiums increase, on average, by 320 percent next year--320 percent. More than 600,000 Tennesseans rely on the State Affordable Care Marketplace, healthcare.gov, for their insurance. These families will pay, on average, $464 more for their health insurance. Here are some examples of how health insurance sticker shock is landing right now in Tennessee, as the notices go out for the next enrollment period. A 45-year-old in Tennessee making $62,000--driving their own truck, working their small farm, operating their small business--will see their average annual premium costs rise by $1,726. A 60-year-old couple making $82,000 will see their average annual premium costs rise by $19,329--a quarter of their $82,000 income, gone like that, because Republicans won't sit down and negotiate like grownups. A family of four making $126,000 will see their average annual premium costs rise by $9,087. This just isn't going to work, my friends. You are going to have to figure this out. Otherwise, around 210,000 Tennesseans will go uninsured. And, by the way, because the money flows through to the healthcare providers, providers in Tennessee will take the hit. They will lose an additional $1.3 billion in funding that supports healthcare in Tennessee--$1.3 billion--``billion'' with a ``b.'' So it is time to fix this. Over and over again, Senate Republicans have said: Yes, we are willing to negotiate. We just don't want to do it now. We want to do it later. So all of this pain, the damage the President is throwing on with his SNAP cuts, the damage Trump is throwing on by adding that he threatens to close American airspace--believe it or not, this is a President who will close American airspace before he will help Americans get healthcare coverage. Think about that just for a moment. Let that thought land: close American airspace rather than give Americans healthcare coverage. And the fight, the gravamen of this dispute right now, isn't over negotiating. It is over when to negotiate. Really? It is worth causing all this damage over when to negotiate? I would say you could negotiate right now and we could come to an agreement within a week that would put an end to the continuing resolution and we could go forward. There is one problem. I think President Trump doesn't want the shutdown to end. I think his creepy minion at the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, doesn't want the shutdown to end. They like the shutdown. They looked forward to the shutdown. They gave ``Gatsby'' parties at Mar-a-Lago during the shutdown. Everything about this shutdown thrills their dark hearts, and they couldn't care less about Americans' suffering. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, each November, we fall back into darkness very literally. If we pass my Sunshine Protection Act and make daylight saving time permanent, we would gain an hour of afternoon sunlight in the winter months for families to soak up after work and after school. This measure has been so bipartisan that it has previously passed this body by unanimous consent. Here is what President Trump said about it: The House and Senate should push hard for more Daylight at the end of a day. Very popular and, most importantly, no more changing of the clocks, a big inconvenience and, for our government, A VERY COSTLY EVENT!!! My cosponsor before Senator Scott came here was his predecessor from Florida, Senator Rubio, who is now our Secretary of State, who said that we should ``stop enduring the ridiculous and antiquated practice of switching our clocks back and forth. Let's . . . end the need to `fall back' and `spring forward' for good.'' I don't always agree with President Trump and with former-Senator, now-Secretary Rubio, but I sure do agree about this. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise here for the 302nd time to urge this somnolent, compromised body to wake up to the dangers of climate change--again, with my trusted and increasingly battered chart. This time, my focus is on the fossil fuels industry's corrupting influence over the Trump administration and what that means for Americans. When I stood before you for the 296th time back in January, I predicted that the fossil fuel looters and polluters would take over the Federal Government. I am saddened but not surprised that my grim forecast has already come true. It is only October, and already it is clear that the fossil fuel industry bought, paid for, and now straight up owns the Trump administration, and it is only going to get worse. For years, I warned that if we let fossil fuel money pour into our politics unchecked, that if we let dark money run rampant, and that if we let polluters sabotage science, then one day the government would cease to belong to ``we the people'' and instead belong to them, the polluters. Well, that day has arrived. Last month, I set out the fossil fuel industry's four phases of climate denial: Phase 1: Bury the evidence. Refuse to disclose what they knew, what their own scientists were telling them. Phase 2: Actively mislead the public when the evidence they had buried ultimately comes out. Phase 3: Flood the political zone with dark money to buttress the climate denial fraud, using unlimited funding--unleashed by Citizens United. Now we are in phase 4, where an increasingly desperate fossil fuel operation switches from defense and blockade to attack. Today, I will do a deep dive on phase 4--the corruption and weaponization of government phase--and how it is playing out across the corrupt Trump administration. Phase 4 is different. They are not just hiding or misleading or politically obstructing any longer. In phase 4, the fossil fuel industry fully corrupts the entire executive branch and uses the power of government to go after and crush its clean energy competition. Behind this plot are the creepy billionaires who run the industry, who are out to get even richer at the expense of the American people. Let me be blunt. The Trump administration does not work for you, the American people; it works for fossil fuel billionaires and their sprawling, dark money corruption machine, which--no coincidence--helped put Trump in office for a second time. Don't take my word about whom they work for. An official from the White House's own, new, so-called National Energy Dominance Council offered ``concierge, white glove service'' to help keep polluting coal plants open and mines in operation. That official, by the way, previously worked for Shell Oil and Valero Energy. Every Agency, every decision, every policy of this corrupt administration is in the service of its fossil fuel donors and patrons. Fossil fuel's looters and polluters are running the U.S. Government for their own benefit, from the inside. President Trump, EPA Administrator Zeldin, Energy Secretary Wright, Interior Secretary Burgum--the whole lot of them are bought and paid for. So settle in, and I will walk you through it from the offer and acceptance, to the return on fossil fuel's political investment, to the costs to the American people. Let's start with the moment of sale. It was April 2024, early April. Candidate Trump was desperate. His criminal trial would begin in 4 days, and his best shot at staying out of jail was winning the Presidency. But the unpopular politician's unpopular policies just weren't moving the needle. There was one thing left to do. It was time to make a deal. Cornered and starved for cash, Trump invited the fossil fuel donor elite to Mar- a-Lago. Sensing an opportunity, into those faux-gilt halls strolled the oil barons, the gas tycoons, the petrochemical magnates, the pipeline moguls. If you have struck oil or gas in America, you likely received an invitation. By the way, they were a little desperate themselves because their business model was failing against the relentless pressure of cheaper, cleaner, more popular renewable energy. There at his club, Candidate Trump delivered his offer. It was not subtle--no think tank jargon or super PAC euphemisms, no speaking in code. He looked out at those assembled fossil fuel billionaires and made a simple pitch: Give me $1 billion, and I will do anything and everything you want. The fossil fuel billionaires were only too happy to take that deal. Harold Hamm, the fracking kingpin, opened his checkbook. Jeffery Hildebrand, the Texas oilman, poured in millions. Kelcy Warren, a pipeline magnate, joined. Other familiar players, like George Bishop, Tim Dunn, and the Wilks brothers--they all lined up. The fossil fuel donor elite understood the corrupt bargain: Invest just $1 billion and maybe not all of that $1 billion. They are at hundreds of millions. We are not sure. But let's say it was $1 billion that ended up coming through--$1 billion to preserve the annual $700- plus billion subsidy that fossil fuel's free-to-pollute business model relies on; $1 billion once for $700 billion a year. On top of that, they could reap untold added billions in new tax subsidies, pollution deregulation, protection from legal accountability for misdeeds, and even a government-backed war they could run against their feared clean energy competition. This was not just a fundraiser. This was no boisterous campaign rally. This was a deal--a $1 billion, quid pro quo deal. This corrupt deal marked a turning point in American history. Before, fossil fuels influenced using political dark money and dark money threats and promises. They lied, using a decades-long campaign of denial, deception, and doublespeak to hide the harmful effects of their products. Those two operations--the climate denial fraud operation and the dark money corruption operation--together had blocked any meaningful, bipartisan climate legislation. They killed that dead the instant Citizens United gave them that power. The 2024 elections gave the fossil fuel barons full control. Under the Trump regime, the U.S. Government has acted exactly as you would expect a corrupted government to act--every Agency captured, climate and energy laws and regulations rewritten, all the inconvenient science ignored, silenced, or worse--erased completely. Say goodbye to government for ``we the people'' and hello to government for them, the polluters. The entire Trump administration works for its fossil fuel donors. On January 20, 2025--day one in office--President Trump issued industry-drafted Executive orders designed to kneecap fossil fuel's clean energy competition and prop up fossil fuel. One Executive order even wrote wind energy and solar energy out of the definition of ``energy.'' These Executive orders are now implemented by Federal Agencies that are in the hands of the stooges of the big polluters. Let's start with the Environmental Protection Agency. There is so much rot over there, it is hard to know where to begin, so I will start with personnel. Atop the Agency is Lee Zeldin. You may know him as the erstwhile Congressman from New York or as the failed gubernatorial candidate, but did you know of his role as the errand boy for billionaire Trump donor and oil executive Tim Dunn? Until January, Zeldin had a cushy role at the America First Policy Institute--a pro-Trump, so-called think tank founded by oilman Dunn. AFPI is hell-bent on increasing fossil fuel production, reducing fossil fuel regulation, and protecting the free- to-pollute fossil fuel business model. Dunn was thrilled to have his boy Zeldin slide slimily into the EPA. Then there is EPA Deputy Administrator David Fotouhi and head of the Office of Air and Radiation Aaron Szabo, who, before joining the EPA, spent years defending polluting industries in court or making polluters' pitches to us in Congress. Steven Cook, Principal Deputy Assistant in the EPA's Office of Land and Emergency Management, recently represented the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers in its legal challenge to an EPA cleanup rule. Now he is the regulator he just fought in court. Nancy Beck, Trump's EPA chemical safety adviser, used to help run the chemical manufacturers' main trade association, the American Chemistry Council. And Sean Donahue? Well, he is the EPA's top lawyer even though he has never taken a deposition, tried a case to verdict, argued a motion, or authored and signed a legal pleading. But his partner was Deputy Director of Personnel at the White House, and fossil fuel deregulation depends on usefully incompetent lawyers. The foxes are literally guarding the EPA henhouse. Once the pride of American environmental stewardship, the EPA is now turned inside out. Instead of writing rules to protect the public from pollution, it is writing rules to protect polluters from public accountability. The EPA's most striking betrayal to date was its move to repeal the endangerment finding--the scientific and legal cornerstone that acknowledged greenhouse gases are a threat to public health and welfare. Without that finding, EPA would have no authority or obligation to regulate climate pollution, which is precisely the whole point. This is not about science; this is not about law; this is about doing the bidding of the polluting fossil fuel industry, which doesn't want to be regulated and which must pollute for free to survive--never mind the enormous cost and harm that dumps onto American families. To justify its proposed repeal of the endangerment finding, EPA leaned on a junk Department of Energy so-called climate report--a cooked-up document so baseless that more than 85 real climate scientists issued a comprehensive rebuttal of it as ``fundamentally flawed,'' ``biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking.'' The American Meteorological Society condemned it as misleading and dangerous. Of course, the so-called climate report was not science; it was propaganda, fossil fuel propaganda. With 99 percent consensus in peer- reviewed scientific literature that fossil fuel emissions are dangerously changing our climate, you would be hard-pressed to find five climate scientists who would downplay or deny climate change. Trump's corrupt Department of Energy found all five. They weren't hard to find, though, because they all worked for fossil fuel front groups. They were chosen precisely because they would deny established science. Get a load of this crew: Dr. Roy Spencer, previously a visiting fellow at the climate denialist Heritage Foundation, funded--no surprise--by ExxonMobil, DonorsTrust, the Koch Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation--all fossil fuel companies or dark money outfits pushing fossil fuel's pollute-for-free agenda; Dr. John Christy, linked to conservative front group Competitive Enterprise Institute, funded with dark money from the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, the Charles Koch Institute, DonorsTrust, the Heritage Foundation, Marathon Petroleum, and Murray Energy; Dr. Judith Curry, who charges $400 per hour for consulting services to petroleum companies, electric utilities, and natural gas energy traders--a frequent face also here in Congress spewing fossil fuel- funded propaganda in committee hearings; Dr. Steven Koonin, formerly at British Petroleum, now a fellow at the Hoover Institute--a conservative-leaning research organization funded by ExxonMobil, DonorsTrust, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation; finally, Dr. Ross McKitrick of the Cato Institute, funded by Charles Koch, DonorsTrust, ExxonMobil, Murray Energy, and the Scaife Family Foundations, and he is also a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, funded by the Charles G. Koch Foundation, ExxonMobil, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. If you are sensing a pattern, you should be. Everyone knew the report was nonsense, but it gave the polluters a figleaf behind which EPA could try to deregulate fossil fuel pollution. No surprise, the group of climate deniers was disbanded before they had to answer to the public under the Administrative Procedure Act for their junk report. Trump's corrupt EPA is also repealing methane standards, undoing auto emissions rules, abandoning air pollution safeguards, scrapping limits on toxic emissions, cutting protections against pollution from coal plants like mercury and carbon dioxide, even clawing back billions in appropriated funding for clean energy. Hell, EPA literally provided polluters with a special email address to get exemptions from air toxics rules--concierge service indeed. Trump's EPA had to really bend the rules to roll back State safeguards, like California's Clean Air Act waiver created a half century ago in recognition of California's then-immense air pollution challenges and its early leadership in improving air quality. Waivers allow California and other States, like Rhode Island, that follow California's lead to set tougher pollution standards for cars and trucks sold inside their borders. But tougher pollution standards mean selling less gasoline, and so they went at the California waiver. There was a trick here. Trump's EPA submitted California's waivers to Congress as so-called final rules, which they weren't and which had never been done before. But it made them vulnerable to undoing by simple Senate majority here under the Congressional Review Act--a trick, by the way, suggested by fossil fuel industry lawyers in the Polluter Page of the Wall Street Journal. GAO and the Senate Parliamentarian rejected the effort to falsely label the waivers as ``rules,'' so our fossil fuel-funded Republican friends went nuclear, overruled the Senate Parliamentarian, and killed the State waivers--a sour joke from a party that in other circumstances claims to be all about States' rights, States' ability to self-govern, and cooperative federalism.'' Thanks to the corrupt billion-dollar deal, the Environmental Protection Agency is now clearly the ``Polluter Protection Agency,'' bought and paid for. Goodbye, again, to ``we the people''; hello to them, the polluters. Let's talk about the Trump Justice Department, perhaps better called ``Oil, Gas, and Coal, LLP.'' You can't understand the corruption at EPA without understanding how Trump weaponized the Justice Department to become the fossil fuel industry's taxpayer-funded law firm. One example: From the get-go, EPA Administrator Zeldin was hell-bent on clawing back more than $20 billion in clean energy grants Congress had appropriated. But he had a problem: There was no legal basis to do so. Enter Trump's corrupted DOJ, which tried to cook up a fake criminal investigation to provide a pretext to freeze the funds. Zeldin echoed the theme with multiple phony and likely defamatory allegations of criminal and fraudulent behavior by grant recipients, who, by the way, included among them nefarious organizations like Habitat for Humanity. Next problem: The evidence was so weak that the Chief of the DC U.S. Attorney's Office Criminal Division resigned rather than authorize the fake criminal investigation, and no other career attorney in the whole office would sign on. So Trump's since-fired interim U.S. attorney personally submitted a warrant application with no career cosigner. And guess what. He got shot down by the magistrate judge for lack of probable cause. Any Federal prosecutor can tell you how unusual and how embarrassing that is. Desperate, Trump's DOJ tried to shop the same failed investigation to other U.S. Attorney's Offices, hoping somebody--anybody--would pursue the failed warrant. In case that wasn't enough, meanwhile, in another courtroom, back in the same DC courthouse, Department of Justice lawyers in a civil matter were denying that they alleged fraud in the use of those funds. What a mess. Seeking warrants without proof, prompting career officials to resign, making fake public assertions of criminality, failing in court, making inconsistent legal arguments in the same courthouse--all of that to claw back money duly appropriated by Congress and properly obligated to grantees, all to help grow the clean energy sector and reduce air pollution? None of that is normal DOJ. This is weaponized DOJ. Just last month, DOJ's fossil fuel's law firm went to Federal court in New York to strike down a State law requiring the largest fossil fuel polluters to pay into a fund to redress New York's climate damages for infrastructure, adaptation, for disaster recovery. DOJ--the U.S. Department of Justice--went to court to argue the polluters' case, that the law was an unconstitutional overreach that Federal courts should rein in. The Justice Department of the United States, paid for by U.S. taxpayers, used its resources to give a taxpayer freebie to the likes of ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell, and Koch Industries--companies with plentiful armies of lawyers of their own. Trump's corrupted DOJ also sued Vermont to strike down a similar State law and even sued Hawaii and Michigan to stop those States from suing fossil fuel companies before the States' complaints had even hit the docket. This is not normal DOJ; this is weaponized DOJ. Why is DOJ acting so strangely? As a former prosecutor, I am telling you, this makes no sense, unless you follow the money. After the billion-dollar quid pro quo deal, DOJ has become the polluters' taxpayer-funded law firm. Goodbye to ``we the people'' as the DOJ client; hello to the new client, them the polluters. Third, is Trump's Department of Energy. It is run by Chris Wright, the former CEO of an oil and gas services company, handpicked to lead DOE by--guess who--oil billionaire Harold Hamm, who organized the Mar- a-Lago billion-dollar-deal donor dinner. DOE should be advancing clean energy, supporting energy innovation, and funding the energy technologies of tomorrow, as Congress has authorized it to do. Instead, this Department of Energy has become a fossil fuel industry lackey. You have got to recognize, in looking at what is going on over there, that Trump's Executive orders, supposedly to unleash American energy, are written in code. It is not a complicated code. In the code, the word ``energy'' is code for ``fossil fuel.'' Understand that, and the rest becomes obvious. Look at the behavior. The Department of Energy cut clean energy grants for low-carbon technologies and for reducing emissions. Department of Energy slashed funding for solar energy by 87 percent and wind energy by 78 percent. The Department of Energy created a $625 million bailout fund for expensive, polluting, coal-fired powerplants. During the current shutdown, Trumpsters are piling on for fossil fuel polluters, so far scrapping $7.56 billion in clean energy grants, all of them--I am sure, by coincidence--in 16 States where Kamala Harris won the Presidential election. (Mr. HUSTED assumed the Chair.) All of this will raise costs for people. DOE knows how grids work. They know that suppressing clean energy means that the grid has to call up expensive, polluting fossil fuel plants--plants that might otherwise be idle because they are too expensive to run. They know that this moves billions from utility customers' pockets to the pockets of the fossil fuel industry. This is not a glitch. This is the goal. Oh, and don't forget that it was DOE that cooked up the junk science report and teed up EPA to ditch its duty to regulate fossil fuel emissions. Thanks to the billion- dollar deal, Trump's corrupted Department of Energy is, by its own coded definition, not the Department of Energy; it is the ``Department of Fossil Fuel.'' Again, good-bye to ``we the people''; hello to ``them the polluters.'' Next is the Department of the Interior, once a steward of America's public lands and waters. The billion-dollar deal turned it into a leasing agent for fossil fuel. Trump's Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, another Cabinet member selected by Big Oil's Harold Hamm, is busy as he tries to crush offshore wind, expanding offshore drilling, opening vast stretches of the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska's Cook Inlet to his oil and gas industry clientele. Onshore, he is handing out leases across the West. Never mind the effects these projects will have on the climate, on water resources, or on nearby communities. Trump's Interior is even lowering royalty fees and environmental standards to make sure drillers get maximum profit at minimum responsibility. Lowering royalty fees, which are already lower than what most private landowners charge, obviously takes money directly from taxpayers and hands it to oil and gas barons--looting and polluting. At the same time, Trump is out to assassinate clean, reliable wind energy. In New York, Interior halted work on a fully permitted, under- construction 810-megawatt offshore wind farm on justifications so dubious they are almost entirely redacted out of FOIA'd documents. Off Rhode Island and Connecticut, someone at Moscow Central told Interior to slap a stop work order on Revolution Wind, when it was nearly finished. Get this: Government lawyers had to go into court and make arguments exactly opposite to arguments they had made defending the same project, in the same courthouse, just weeks before. No surprise: The fake stop work order cratered in court, but those corrupt shenanigans cost the project at least $60 million. Here, it is not just blue States. Out west in Idaho, Interior reversed approval of Lava Ridge, a 1,000-megawatt wind project that suddenly had ``legal deficiencies.'' Why would the Federal Government sabotage clean energy projects on their way to completion? Follow the money. It goes to fossil fuel donors. Every electron from clean energy that gets delayed is an electron that gas and coal barons get to burn fossil fuel to sell. And since wind and solar energy are actually cheaper, your utility bills go up. It is the direct transfer of cash from American families to fossil fuel companies and their billionaire owners. Interior has even started to auction off wildlife refuges, treasured places that should be sanctuaries for threatened species. Oil and gas companies are now invited to bid on land set aside for conservation. National parks face budget cuts, lost protections, and industrial projects right at their borders. Trump's corrupt Interior is no longer about preserving these landscapes for future generations but about what can be extracted from them now by big donors. The public loses cherished lands and protections that took decades to establish, all for a short-term fossil fuel payday. Interior ignores Tribal consultation, pressing forward with drilling projects on ancestral lands without meaningful dialogue or consent. Tribal governments and Native communities--just obstacles to be brushed aside, rather than sovereign partners with legal rights. This behavior echoes a long, shameful history of disregard for indigenous voices when fossil fuel profits are at stake. This is no all-of-the-above energy strategy, as the administration claims. It is a fossil-fuel-first strategy that kneecaps clean power while supercharging oil and gas. The Interior Department is now basically the auctioneer for oil and gas leases. Public lands are no longer treasures for the people. They are commodities for the polluters. So, again, good-bye government for ``we the people''; hello government for ``them, the polluters.'' Last, we have the State Department. Under visionary leaders like John Kerry, the State Department once led America's global engagement on climate, helping secure the landmark Paris Agreement and accomplishing impressive and enormous international oceans protections from the climate threat. Now, with Trump calling the shots and Marco Rubio dutifully implementing his whims, the United States has exited the Paris Agreement and impedes cooperation on climate action. Just last week, using unprecedented tactics, the Trump administration bullied the International Maritime Organization into delaying a carbon-based levy for shipping emissions. Just so you can put this in context, shipping is responsible for more global carbon pollution than all but five countries and is completely unregulated. Shipping emissions degrade air quality around ports like Los Angeles, meaning millions of people breathe dirty air. There are clean alternatives to maritime fossil fuels. The technologies are ready, and the shipping industry wanted to make this transition. Plus, there is almost no cost to consumers. There is almost no American ship involved. But the Trump administration wouldn't have it because every ship that runs on green ammonia or some other pollution-free fuel means one fewer ship that runs on bunker oil or LNG, and that means less money into the pockets of Trump's fossil fuel donors. Plus, it was a threat. It was a threat to the free-to-pollute business model that fossil fuel wrongfully depends on. So we will find out more about this, but with truly unprecedented tactics, the corrupt Trumpsters went full Al Capone--or maybe it should be called ``Oil Capone''--to crush it. I should add that when I said, ``Last, we have the State Department,'' that wasn't completely accurate because Trump has put the whole of government in the service of his fossil fuel donors, not just the Cabinet Agencies. I will just give one example: the Army Corps of Engineers. The Army Corps has a long and proud history, with a primary role to build and maintain flood control and safety infrastructure--levees, seawalls, and the like. The Army Corps also has a role in permitting energy projects. Last month, it announced that it would prioritize projects that are ``energy dense''--``energy dense''--in other words, those that generate a large amount of power on a relatively small footprint of land. ``Energy dense'' is a made-up thing. It is a fake concept, reverse- engineered from the result that they want to achieve through it to favor supposedly energy-dense fossil fuel projects over wind and solar farms that are more spread out--except it is fake. Energy density, if it were real, would count the spread of pollution from fossil fuel plants, like soot particulates that can travel hundreds of miles or greenhouse gases causing global harm. If it were real, it would count the huge supply footprint these fossil fuel plants require to run, the mining and drilling for coal and oil and gas and all the related environmental destruction--the trucks, railroads, and pipelines spewing and leaking that deliver the fuels. In real life, the wind and sunshine that power renewable powerplants have no footprint at all. The real-life footprint of fossil plants, it is far larger than renewable plants. Yet in fake, corrupted Trump world, fossil fuel plants will get their permits expedited, while the corrupt Trump administration stalls renewable facilities over made-up energy density. Seriously, does ``energy density'' sound like a policy based in reason, or is it based on campaign cash? So that is a quick tour of the fossil fuel industry's deep corruption of the Trump administration, of its oily tentacles sliding slimily into Federal Agencies that should be working for the American people. But this is also a story about who picks up the bill, who pays when government is corrupted. Spoiler alert: It is you, the regular, hard-working American public. It is bad enough that the billion-dollar deal allowed our government to be bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry. Add on that every favor and freebee given to the fossil fuel industry costs the American people. Let's start with disaster costs. Extreme natural disasters cost Americans between $99 billion and $126 billion in the first half of this year alone. NOAA's database of billion-dollar disasters shows the line going up and up and up--storm after storm, flood after flood, fire after fire. So the Trump administration wants to end that database, as if silencing the burglar alarm will make the burglary end. Each disaster means billions in Federal aid, billions in rebuilding costs, billions in uncompensated harm to Americans, billions that taxpayers and homeowners have to pay or suffer because polluters pollute for free. Increasing disaster costs bring something along with them: increasing homeowners insurance problems--problems both in affordability and availability. Premiums are soaring far faster than the rate of inflation. In Florida, the average premium is $14,000 per year and climbing; in Louisiana, already $11,000 per year. Insurance companies are leaving or abandoning customers, with nonrenewals to homeowners doubling or worse in many States over the last 6 years. If Americans can't get homeowners insurance, then their property can't get a mortgage, and that spells trouble for property values in climate-exposed communities across the country. About 6 months ago, Fed Chair Jay Powell testified in the Senate that within 10 to 15 years, there would be whole regions of the United States where mortgages were no longer available. That is not coming from a green group; that is coming from the Fed. And it hits home. Families dropped from coverage are left in uninsurable homes that they might have worked a lifetime to buy whose values plummet when mortgages can't be had. This is all fine fun and games if you are a Palm Beach billionaire selling your mansion all cash to another billionaire, but in real life, it is devastating for hard-working people--say a tradesperson living near Orlando, trying to sell their family's biggest single investment. They bought that home with a mortgage. They need to sell it to someone who can get a mortgage. If they are going to get their price with no mortgage, the price crashes. This is a cascade. It starts with fossil fuel emissions, which amp up climate risk, creating an insurance crisis, making properties unmortgageable, crashing homeowners' property values, and cascading into full-on economic rescission. The warnings of this abound, and if fossil fuel weren't so powerful in this building, they would be listened to. Your premiums go up or your coverage disappears and your home value plummets. And what does the Trump administration have to say about this? Well, they are not listening to you. They are lying to you because they are so deep in the pockets of the polluters who caused it all. Energy bills. Energy bills are getting out of hand. Several things drive this. First, we subsidize fossil fuel, locking in fossil dependence, so consumers get roasted whenever the international oil cartel jacks up global commodity prices, which we see them do all the time. Second, U.S. consumers pay more when the fossil fuel industry decides to export oil and gas for higher prices overseas. There is less domestic supply because it got exported, and when there is less domestic supply, that predictability raises prices. The Trump administration forcing utilities to run aging and expensive coal and gas plants that were slated for retirement will likely add $3 billion per year to your electricity bills--$3 billion. But your added cost is fossil fuel's added revenue. You are the one getting cheated. The biggest hit will come from Trump sabotaging clean energy technologies--technologies that already produce electricity at lower cost. Here is how it works: When less expensive clean energy can't get on the grid, expensive, polluting fossil fuel plants that would otherwise be idle as too expensive to run get called up instead. Those more expensive plants then set the price for the grid, and your costs go up. The trick is that the fossil interests that own and fuel those cost- setting plants get an enormous payday. With clean energy on the grid, their revenue can drop to zero because that plant is too expensive to run. But you back out the cheaper clean energy or you don't let new clean energy on the grid, and suddenly, that plant roars back to polluting life, and the money flows to the plant owner, and the money flows to the fossil fuel dealers that bring the fuel to the plant. It is a direct transfer from ratepayers' pockets to fossil fuel barons, and they are hoping you won't figure that out, that you will blame it on the electric utility and not notice how the grid is being gamed by fossil fuel. Working families and small businesses are getting stuck paying the bill for a system that has been rigged by the Trump administration for Big Oil's benefit. Climate brings health dangers, and those health dangers are real. Fossil fuel production and combustion release toxins--benzene, hydrogen sulfide, particulate matter, to name just a few--and they have an effect. Children near fossil fuel-fired powerplants and oil and gas wells suffer higher rates of asthma. Nearby communities experience higher rates of cancer, heart disease, and neurological damage. Air pollution just from fossil fuel production and combustion costs the average American about $2,500 in extra healthcare expenses. Even if you don't suffer from heart or respiratory disease, you still pay more, as health insurance companies spread around their customer base those added costs. Nationwide, that added cost is around $820 billion annually. That is the cost of fossil fuel. It is a cost of fossil fuel that fossil fuel doesn't pay even though economics says externalities like this should be in the price of the product. But that is the pollute- for-free business model. The industry externalizes their pollution costs, even in the hundreds of billions of dollars, onto families, onto hospitals, onto taxpayers, onto you. You pay for the mess they won't clean up. Of course, given the control of this building, fossil fuel companies benefit from enormous tax breaks and loopholes. This lost tax money means lost school funding, lost infrastructure funding, lost healthcare dollars. Real people lose real benefits. Just for one example, the corporate welfare polluters get just from direct fossil fuel subsidies could provide 3 million families with SNAP benefits, food for their kids and families. The billion-dollar deal at Mar-a-Lago takes tax money straight from regular American taxpayers and hands it to billionaire oil barons. Last, let's consider lost opportunity. Because of fossil fuel corruption here at home, the industries of the future are now developing more overseas, abroad. The jobs of the future are being created abroad. The technologies of the future are being developed abroad. Here in the United States, fossil fuel is diligently out to destroy these opportunities, and the jobs and the future that comes with them, to protect its dying business model that cheats in the market while making our air smoggier and our water dirtier--polluting for free. China races ahead in renewable energy, electric vehicles, and clean technology as America is dragged further and further behind by fossil fuel political interference. That dirty deal day at Mar-a-Lago was a turning point. Donald Trump put our government up for sale, and the looters and polluters wrote the checks. And now every Agency, every policy, every decision reflects their ownership. EPA is their protector. DOJ is their law firm. The Department of Energy is their henchman. Interior is their leasing agent. The State Department is their industry diplomat, their ``Oil Capone.'' The repeal of clean energy programs Trump got in his ``Beautiful for Billionaires Bill'' is expected to cost the U.S. economy $1.1 trillion by 2035--in a decade, $1.1 trillion lost to the U.S. economy. That is a loss to all of us. Meanwhile, fossil fuel CEOs rake in as much as $40 million a year. Their companies make $30 billion a year, and the industry sponges up government subsidies of over $700 billion a year. That $700 billion is the bill the American people foot every year in more disasters, higher insurance premiums, higher electricity and fuel costs, worse family health, lost good jobs, and a dwindling economic future. With less clean energy, there will be more emissions, and with more emissions, there will be more disasters, pushing us toward the great climate insurance collapse. Everywhere are warnings from insurers, from economists, from bankers, from regulators, from ``The Big Short'' guy who predicted the great recession, from The Economist magazine, even from climate-shy Fed Chair Jay Powell. Warnings abound. Warnings are everywhere of climate economic disaster ahead. Is it too late to wake up? I hope not. Though, for sure, our pathway to climate safety is narrowing. If we are going to solve the climate danger, we are going to have to take on the democracy danger. We do not have to accept the United States of America turning into a petrostate. We can still act. We can pass the DISCLOSE Act to expose the dark money that enables fossil fuel corruption. We can call out and spotlight the climate denial fraud operation that has for so long deceived the American people. We can and must end the fossil fuel industry's corrupt, pollute-for-free business model--a model that violates the laws of economics as well as morality and decency. Why should polluter costs fall on taxpayers? It is simple; they shouldn't. Democracy also should not be for sale--not to fossil fuel billionaires, not to Exxon, not to Chevron, not to Koch Industries, not to the American Petroleum Institute, not to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, nor to the National Association of Manufacturers, for damn sure not to DonorsTrust or to Leonard Leo. For a whole lot of reasons, with our climate safety right up at the top of the list, we have got to end the corruption. We have got to spotlight the dark money front groups and the armada of special interest organizations spreading fraud. Democracy needs to belong to the people--not to the highest bidder. When people understand what was done to them by fraud and corruption and dark money, there will be a mighty reckoning, and it cannot come too soon. So I conclude, once again, as I have in 301 of these speeches, now for the 302nd time: Time to wake up. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise today to honor the life of my friend Peter Simone, a longtime North Providence Councilman. One of the best things about politics is the people you get to meet, and one of the best people I got to meet was my friend Peter Simone. Peter passed away this week and is survived by his dear wife Irene, his two daughters Helene and Annmarie, his beloved grandson Matthew, and many wonderful friends. Peter was born in Providence and was a proud graduate of LaSalle Academy, where he met Irene at a LaSalle dance. He moved to North Providence and took a job at the Monet Jewelry factory, where he worked as an industrial engineer until his retirement. In 1976, Peter threw his hat into the ring in politics and won a seat on the North Providence Democratic Town Committee, before running successfully for the North Providence Town Council in 1982. He served as a councilman from District 1 for 22 years, distinguishing himself as a tireless advocate for his community. In a town known for lively rough-and-tumble politics, Peter was a true gentleman who served in public office for all the right reasons. Peter stepped back from the council in 2004 to spend more time with his beloved family before taking on a new role overseeing the student page program for the Rhode Island Senate, where he mentored the next generation of Rhode Island's leaders, including his grandson Matthew. Peter was one of the very first people who supported my political career, taking me in when I was just finding my way. You always remember the people willing to take a risk and lend you their credibility, early on, when the outcome is not a sure bet, and I will always remember him. Peter Simone was a sweet and fine man, a political veteran of the old school, and a foxhole friend, and I will miss him dearly.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I just want to supplement the distinguished chairman's remarks with one observation for the benefit of all of my colleagues, and that is that, not long ago, when circuit court nominees were brought forward, they had cleared the Senate blue- slip process because each circuit court seat was associated with a State, except for DC. But, normally, a DC Circuit Court seat was associated with a State, and the Senators from that State had the ability to recommend a nominee to the President. The Republicans on the Judiciary Committee undid that--what we call the blue-slip rule--for circuit courts. So Senators lost that power. When we were in the majority, when President Biden was there, there were strident objections when we applied the same standard to circuit court nominees that the Republicans had applied when they broke the blue slip. With this nomination, we are taking it the next step further. Now, not only are the Senators from the home State not consulted, but in this case, the candidate has almost no relationship with Delaware, the State with which this seat is associated. She has a summer house there. She has never had a driver's license. She has never had a fishing license. She has never been an income taxpayer. She has never been registered to vote. She has never been a member of the bar. She only recently joined the Third Circuit bar. She is being airdropped into this seat. So just be aware that, in the future, when the shoe is on the other foot and people here would like to make sure that their home State is honored and recognized as being the State with which a circuit court seat is associated, that may very well not happen any longer. And we will look back to this minute as the minute that destroyed that tradition. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here on the floor today to talk about President Trump's completely fake energy emergency, which is nothing more than a pretext to move money from the pockets of Americans to his big fossil fuel mega donors. You may remember that he had a meeting with big fossil fuel donors and asked for a billion dollars in campaign money in return for giving them whatever they want. Well, I don't know that he got a billion, but he got hundreds of millions, and, sure enough, he is giving them everything they want. But the side effect of the fossil fuel industry having ownership and control over the Trump administration and all of its policies and decisions is that people's electricity rates are going to go up. They are already going up, and they are going to go up more. This graph shows how voters are feeling about electricity prices, and it says most voters are feeling some pain from electricity prices. This is already. It is going to get worse. Already, 26 percent of Americans say it has a lot of impact on their lives; 31 percent say a decent amount of impact on their lives; another 30, a little bit. Only 9 percent say: None at all. It is cool. Electric prices are good with me. So that is a pretty big hit. Even among Republicans, 25 percent say it hits them a lot, 29 percent say it hits them a decent amount, and 32 percent say it hits them a little bit. Only 11 percent say: None at all. Electric prices are cool. So electric prices are going up, and they are going up big time, and they are going up for deliberate reasons. The one deliberate reason has to do with the AI, crypto, tech bros data centers problem. As you know, the data center crypto people gave a lot of money to Donald Trump. They are big political donors. They are getting pretty much everything they want from this administration. In return, they are making the Trump family hugely rich in crypto billions. But in the meantime, they are driving people's electric prices up. They are doing so this way. This is an interesting graph. This shows places where electric bills are going down. Blue means the prices are going down. And what is measured here is how far away you are from a data center. So here is 0 to about 25 miles away from a data center. So if you live between 0 and 25 miles from a data center, if you are in the range of the electric utility that has to serve that data center when it drops in with its huge electric load, with its huge water demand, with all the traffic and pollution and everything else that it means, you see very, very little in the way of cost decreases. In fact, if you compare it to places that are farther and farther away--this is about 225 miles away from a data center--you can see that the electric prices going down happens much more the farther away you are from a data center. This shows the opposite. This shows the places where electric prices are soaring--the price increases. And it is the same deal. This is how far away you are from a data center. If you are from 0 to 25 miles away, compare that to this. The comparison between your electricity price increases, if you are near a data center, versus your electricity price decreases, if you are near a data center, couldn't be more clear. This is me, with a gold marker, marking off the difference. That is not in the original graph, but it focuses your attention on how, when you are near a data center, you are less likely to have low electric prices. You can see how low it is compared to the further away you get. But if you are near a data center--the nearer you are to a data center, the higher your electric prices go. And if you are really near one, if you are in this block here, within 25 miles, your electric prices are skyrocketing, and that is not a mistake. That is being done on purpose because the Trump administration won't make these big donors who are in crypto world and data center world bring their own clean energy or provide their own clean water, for that matter, to the grid. So what they do is they arrive, they dump a huge amount of demand into the existing grid, and that means that new and more expensive units have to come online. As those new and more expensive units have to come online, the price goes up and up and up because in almost every grid, it is the most expensive unit running at any minute that sets the price for the entire grid in that minute. So if you can drive up demand, you drive up these huge, inefficient, polluting, expensive, powerplants and the price goes through the roof. That is precisely why you are seeing this huge increase in costs when you are near a data center, and it is almost impossible to find a decrease in costs if you are near a data center. So problem 1, energy emergency 1, caused by the Trump administration to pay off its big crypto donors is this: It is the data center bomb falling on regular electric utility ratepayers who suddenly watch their bills skyrocket. Here is the other bomb. This is the plot in the Trump administration for the sake of their big fossil fuel donors to try to hamper and hinder and injure clean energy. They have the big lie, which is to say clean energy is more expensive; it is clean energy that is driving costs on the grid. Oh my gosh, expensive clean energy--wrong. That just isn't true. That is a complete fabrication. This graph shows the Texas grid. This is an illustration of how that plays out. Texas has a unique grid. It is unique to Texas. It doesn't interact with the other grids the way most of the grids do. They have interconnections, and they can interact with each other. Texas is isolated. That is why that big freeze in Texas shut down all the power and caused people to freeze. That took place because that grid was unified, and they couldn't call in power from elsewhere. This graph does two things. It takes a look at 1 month, August back in 2018, and it looks at what power costs at different levels of demand on the grid. So in 2018, if you had 40 units of gigawatts of demand, then you were paying about 20 cents per megawatt hour. It stayed about the same until demand got bigger. If you get up to 50 megawatts, 60 megawatts, then it starts to spike here, and it hits $75 per megawatt hour once it approaches 70 gigawatts of load. So what is important here is the comparison. In 2018, these were the prices in August for that increment of load during August. This, the yellow graph, is 2024, 6 years later. What happened to the Texas grid between 2018 and 2024? What happened to the Texas grid between 2018 and 2024 is that huge amounts of clean energy came onto the grid. In fact, last year, 95 percent of the new power coming on the U.S. grid was clean energy. It was solar, it was wind, and it was battery--95 percent. Between 2018 and 2024, you see this move in the Texas grid. And look at what happens. Pick, let's say, 60 megawatts of load at a given moment in August of 2024. You paid 20 bucks per megawatt hour for the exact same circumstance. Six years earlier, you would have paid 35, maybe 40 bucks--20 bucks, twice as much, basically. The reason the cost went down from 2018 to 2024 was new, inexpensive, clean energy coming on the grid. Why is it inexpensive? It is inexpensive because wind is free. It is inexpensive because solar is free. Once you have built the infrastructure to capture the solar rays, once you have built the infrastructure to capture the wind flowing by, God made those resources free. For a fossil fuel plant, you still have to build it, but once you have built it, you have to bring in the fossil fuel, pipe in the fossil fuel, burn the fossil fuel. It is expensive. And so almost always, the unit that is setting the price on the grid for electricity is a fossil fuel unit because they are the most expensive ones. So they set the price for the whole grid. You can see the difference. Let's go to--let's call this 68 megawatts of load, just comparing these two points. Back in 2018, that would have been a $75 per-megawatt-hour cost--75 bucks, and yet here, it is $25. It is a third the cost on the Texas grid because all that clean energy came on. And you have to get way out here before the price spikes when those polluting, expensive, fossil fuel plants have to come on at 80- plus megawatts of load to even begin to match the prices from 6 years earlier. Clean wind and solar power save consumers money. So when the Trump administration says it is going to inhibit, hinder, injure clean energy development, that is backing this back out of the grid. Now it starts to look more like 2018. If you are buying electricity at this level of grid load, you are paying three times as much--three times as much. And this is deliberate. You don't think the Trump people don't understand this? They know perfectly well. And here is the deal. The extra two-thirds of your cost here that comes out of your pocket if you are in Texas is because the clean energy isn't there lowering the cost. That comes out of your pocket. Where does it go? Where does it go? I will tell you where it goes. It goes to the fossil fuel units that had to get called up to meet that amount of load. The most expensive units on the grid have to be called up to meet that load, and they drive the price up. If you are a fossil fuel billionaire and you own a bunch of polluting powerplants, sometimes, particularly with clean energy around, they are sitting idle. They are not being called up. They are too expensive to be called up because clean energy is in there beating them. So if you own those plants, you want to go and talk to the Trump administration and say: Hey, knock that clean energy out of the grid. I want my polluting, expensive plant to run again because that is money in my pocket. And if you are selling that plant to fossil fuel, you go to the Trump administration and you say: Hey, clobber those clean energy guys. I gave you good money. Clobber those clean energy guys and now I get to sell all that fossil fuel to burn to run those expensive plants. So the people that make a bundle out of knocking down clean energy are the fossil fuel people who cut that deal for hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump's campaign in return for him clobbering their rivals by making it difficult to develop clean energy projects. And what they don't want you to know is that this is on purpose and this is for fossil fuel. They don't want you to know how this works. They don't want you to know about how the most expensive units get called up as demand grows-- that when you take out the clean energy, even more expensive units get called up; that those are the polluting fossil fuel units that tend to set the price. It is a massive transfer of money from the pockets of ratepayers, whose electric utility rates go up, to the fossil fuel industry in return for all the political money they gave Donald Trump. That is the deal. It is a huge transfer of wealth from ratepayers to big fossil fuel donors. What they are hoping is that you won't know this. They are hoping you will blame it on the electric utility that sends you the bill. They are hoping that you won't notice that behind that soaring electric utility bill is manipulation of the grid to knock out clean energy, to drive up prices. And if that is not bad enough, what you then find out is that the climate consequences of all that fossil fuel pollution start coming home to roost, as well. We did some work on this in the Budget Committee. I will use three quick slides. These are places where nonrenewal rates for homeowners insurance are increasing. What is the nonrenewal rate, you may ask, for homeowners insurance? That is how often the insurance company says to you, their longtime customers: Hey, thanks for being my longtime customer, but you are fired now. I don't want your property. I can't insure it. There is too much climate risk. If you looked at where it is really spiking, where did you get? Florida--Florida, because they have huge risks from flooding, sea level rise, hurricanes, and storms. Their whole insurance market is melting down. Where else? Out West, where wildfires are making properties uninsurable. I tell you what, if you know somebody in Florida, ask them about their home insurance. Just do that for me. If you know somebody who lives in Florida, ask them about their home insurance. You will hear an earful from them. It is not just getting shot down; it is also that insurance rates are going up. Again, look where--along these coastal areas, along these wildfire-prone areas. What the Trump administration is doing to reward its big fossil fuel megadonors isn't just to transfer money from your pockets to the big donors through electric utility rates. It is not just to transfer money from your pockets to their big crypto donors by letting them irresponsibly dump their demand on the grid. They are also breaking down the home insurance market so that not only are the insurers saying to people, ``I can't insurance you any longer; your climate risk is too great,'' but they are also saying, ``Wow, if I am going to insure you, we have to really raise our rates.'' These are premium increases--100 percent, 200 percent, 300 percent-- that you can find in these areas. In Florida, the average homeowners insurance is $14,000. If you go to Miami-Dade, it is $21,000 for homeowners insurance. If you go to Louisiana here, it is $11,000. You have got people who try to buy a home in these places. They get the deal together, and they get the mortgage together. They show the Realtor that they can make the nut on the mortgage. Then they try to get insurance to close the deal, and they can't get insurance, and the deal falls apart. There are young families who can't buy homes because of the skyrocketing prices or because the insurers won't insure them because it is too dangerous. And guess what that does. Where does that land? That lands in home values declining. This is not just me saying this. The chief economist for Freddie Mac--the huge mortgage company--predicts that climate risk makes homeowners insurance unavailable. When you can't get homeowners insurance, what can you also not get on your property? You can't get a mortgage. If you are a Palm Beach billionaire who is swapping mansions with other billionaires, great, you can pay cash. But for regular families who have bought their homes with a mortgage, when they need to sell them, they need to find somebody who can buy them with a mortgage 9 times out of 10, maybe 99 times out of 100. So when you can't get a mortgage, what happens to that piece of property? When the property is uninsurable and unmortgageable, its value goes down. That is why the chief economist for Freddie Mac, the mortgage company, predicted the cascade from climate risk to uninsurability, to no mortgages, to what he called a coastal property values crash that could lead to a recession like in 2008. I remember 2008. It was ugly. I do not want to go there again. But here you see places in which home values are predicted to change--along the coast here, where there is all the coastal risk; and here, where there is big wildfire risk. And guess what. If you look at the graph, it goes from no change--that is the tan; that is most of it--all the way to--how about that one? You can't read it; so I will tell you what it says: minus 100 percent--a total wipeout of your home's value because it is uninsurable and unmortgageable. That is the future we are looking at. This is the energy emergency. This is the real energy emergency, and it is an energy emergency that is caused by fossil fuel pollution. The immediate circumstance also comes through the electric utility bills, as you put less and less clean energy into the grid and make more and more expensive fossil fuels, set the price, and at the same time, you are selling out to the crypto guys. You let them come in and irresponsibly dump their demand on your grid, and supply and demand show that prices spike. So if you want to know what the real emergency is, the real emergency is that the Trump administration has sold out to the crypto industry; it has sold out to the fossil fuel industry. It denies climate change; it pretends it is a hoax. Literally, the President has said that in, like, words. And that climate change problem is destroying home insurance markets, mortgage markets, and property values. And it has already begun. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, well, we are headed into a miserable situation. It is a miserable situation for all of the Federal employees around the globe who are going to be put into shutdown mode. It is a miserable situation for our country, as the rest of the world looks at us as the gang that can't get its act together and pass simple funding bills for the government. It is an extraordinarily frustrating moment to be here now. There are very few people for whom this is not a miserable prospect, but there are a few of them, and one of them is OMB Director Russell Vought, who is a strange character who has spent his life in the care and feeding of the fossil fuel industry and big polluters and who takes a perverse joy from destroying American government from the inside. So there will be misery ahead for most normal people, not counting the weird ones who like inflicting pain and doing damage for the benefit of a bunch of creepy, rightwing billionaires who have propped them up their whole lives. The reason we are here is really two-fold. One, as they have shown during the Trump regime, Republicans really don't want to govern; they want to rule. They don't want to talk to Democrats even where they need our votes. Here, they need our votes. Yet what have we been offered to get those votes? Nothing--not even discussions. The President only met with the Democratic leaders just yesterday, and he didn't seem to be aware of what was at stake here for the Americans who are about to lose a huge healthcare benefit. They just go wildly forward. We have seen it over and over again here on the Senate floor. How many times in just the few months that we have been here in this administration have Republicans done the thing that they were furious we even talked about doing to overrule the Parliamentarian and change the rules to make things easier for themselves rather than negotiate with us? My count is four already-- four--and we are only 9 months in. They don't want to govern. They don't want to talk to us. They want to rule. They want to dictate to us. At the same time, the other reason we are here is that there is this strange Republican fixation with taking healthcare away from people. I do not understand it. There are lots of Republican constituents who really depend on Medicaid, who really feel great that they are on Medicare, who really have their family budgets made possible by the credits from the Affordable Care Act. It is not like Democrats get the benefit of this; everybody gets the benefit of this. Yet what have we been put through just in these months? A trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid. A trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid. Already, hospitals and nursing homes and doctors' practices are reeling at what those cuts mean for their financial viability. Medicare--Medicare--half a trillion dollars in cuts hidden in the bill in a tricky way so that the cuts come through sequestration and nobody has to own them. They can do a Pontius Pilate hand-wash of the cuts. Well, no. We saw what you did. You own it. It is a half-trillion- dollar cut to Medicare. And why you want to do that, I cannot imagine, but that is what you did. Now we have these cuts to people receiving help paying for their healthcare under the Affordable Care Act. It is going to be about 40,000 Rhode Islanders. These aren't people who have loads of money. Their premiums are going to, on average, double or better. I mentioned a retired mental health counselor yesterday. She is going to have $477 in added expenses every single month because of this. And it all starts now. It all starts happening now. So when we are told, why are we forcing the issue now? it is because now is when the issue is upon us. When we are told, why don't we negotiate later? my question is: Why aren't we negotiating now? Why would we believe when we are told that you will negotiate later on this when you won't negotiate now on this? Now when you need our votes, you won't negotiate on something. You say you will negotiate later. Why does that make any sense? Why is that even remotely credible? The harm starts now; the negotiations should start now. Frankly, what Democrats are asking for is something you ought to be doing anyway just to help your own constituents. This shouldn't be hard at all. We should not be here having this conversation. This should have been resolved already--except that the Republican majority wants to rule, not govern, and they have this strange fixation with taking away healthcare even from their own constituents. Over and over again, we have seen it. We have seen it with the repeated overruling of the Parliamentarian. We have seen it with the ``Beautiful for Billionaires Bill'' that got rammed through with a simple majority. We have seen it with the change in the rules to allow 100 nominees to go through at a time under advice and consent. We have seen it with clean air standards that help everyone being repealed. Over and over and over again, the Republicans take the path that allows them to rule, not to govern; that allows them to ignore the minority party even when they need our votes, even when what we are asking for is in their constituents' interests, even when what we are asking for is something that their constituents want. Even then, we are up against this blockade. So I hope Republicans come to their senses. I hope the President realizes what he is doing and that we can put an end to this shutdown as quickly as possible. But let me make this absolutely clear: This is a shutdown that lands entirely at the feet of the Republican Party that controls the Senate, that controls the House, that controls the Presidency, that won't negotiate with Democrats even when it needs our votes, and that has an unhealthy fixation with taking away healthcare from their fellow Americans. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, one of the things I have had the most trouble understanding in the time that I have been in the Senate has been Republicans' bizarre fascination with attacking healthcare systems, with taking healthcare coverage away from Americans. It came to a boil in the ``Beautiful for Billionaires'' bill--which cut about a trillion dollars out of Medicaid--and, in a hidden fashion through sequester, cut about half a trillion dollars out of Medicare and then attacks the Affordable Care Act, which so many Americans rely on to be able to afford their health insurance. I represent Rhode Island. Rhode Island is probably going to lose up to $5 billion in Federal Medicaid funding. The Medicare cuts would be probably about half of that. And the Affordable Care Act is going to hit about 40,000 Rhode Islanders who will see their insurance premiums explode. And that is going to happen soon. This is a healthcare crisis that Republicans have created, and we would like to try to protect the American public in all of this. These are not going to be small increases in people's bills. We are talking about an 85-percent increase in already expensive health insurance premiums, as much as $1,200 a year for a middle-class family. Let me give you just an example of what this looks like in real life. I have a constituent named Carla. Carla is 60 years old. She is retired. She was a mental health counselor, which is noble work but doesn't make you rich. She gets $60,000 in annual income, mostly from her 401(k). She doesn't yet qualify for Medicare, so she got insurance from the Rhode Island State health insurance marketplace. She has a family history of heart disease. She has hypertension. When the tax credits under the Affordable Care Act expire at the end of the year, Carla's monthly premium will go from $427 a month to $904 a month. That is more than double. That is a $477 per month increase to the expenses of a woman whose total income is only $60,000 a year. We ought to be able to solve this. All we are asking for is serious negotiations to address the Republican healthcare crisis or, I guess, if they refuse, the Republican government shutdown. It is very much up to Republicans where we go from here. All the reports are that the meeting between the President and congressional leaders went badly; no progress was made at all. It is really up to the Republicans. Will they really choose to shut down the U.S. Government just to indulge their bizarre fascination with taking healthcare away from Americans? Aren't we better than that? I yield the floor.