Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, notwithstanding the distinguished majority leader's accusations of mendacity and hypocrisy and misrepresentation, the facts at heart here are quite simple: The waiver at issue is not a rule and was never a rule. Thirty years of precedent and practice at EPA and in this body prove that. So what the GAO did here was not unprecedented. What was unprecedented was for the House to send over a document claiming falsely, according to the Parliamentarian, that the waiver is, in fact, a rule under the CRA. And to blame the GAO or the Parliamentarian for that is to mistake the referee for the player who committed the foul. The foul here is pretending that a waiver is a rule, and both the GAO and the Parliamentarian independently blew the whistle on that foul. Those are the facts.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise today to congratulate Colonel Ron Barnes on his retirement after serving 20 years as commanding officer of the Pawtuxet Rangers. The Pawtuxet Rangers are among the oldest existing chartered commands in the United States and the most active of Rhode Island's historic militia groups. The Rangers were chartered in 1774 by the Colony of Rhode Island to protect what was then the thriving seaport of Pawtuxet in the wake of the Gaspee Affair. The Colonists' first strike against England took place in 1772 on Narragansett Bay with the burning of the Royal Navy's loathed revenue cutter, the HMS Gaspee. Each year, the spirited Gaspee Days Parade takes place in Pawtuxet Village to commemorate this important historic event and Rhode Island's great contribution to the American Revolution. And Colonel Barnes has become a beloved feature of the celebration. Colonel Barnes marched in his first Gaspee Days Parade as a student at Cranston East High School. In 1987, he formally enlisted with the Pawtucket Rangers. He started as a drummer and went on to hold positions of artillery officer and executive officer before serving as commander. Colonel Barnes was bestowed the high honor of serving as the grand marshal of the 250th Gaspee Days Parade, the first event of the Nation's semiquincentennial celebrations. Some years ago, Colonel Barnes gave me a challenge coin which I have always made sure to carry with me on any occasion on which I might see him. I thank him for keeping this very special part of Rhode Island's history alive and thriving for future generations. He has done a wonderful job leading the Rangers and I wish him, his wife Sandra-- known affectionately as ``The General''--and his sons Joshua, Zachary, and Alexander all the best. Godspeed, my friend.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, today, the Senate has done something unprecedented. Our actions and the ones that will follow from the procedural steps taken here today, over the next day or so, will change the Clean Air Act, will change the Congressional Review Act, will change the rules of the Senate, and will do so by overruling the Parliamentarian and breaking the filibuster. In effect, going nuclear. The Republicans can say what they like about this, but the fact of the matter is that the Parliamentarian ruled that the Congressional Review Act does not permit what we are doing. And she did so on the basis of advice from the Government Accountability Office, which was given that role by the Senate, given that role in a bipartisan agreement years ago. So we are de facto legislating here, amending the operation of the Clean Air Act to remove a statutory waiver for the State of California, amending the Congressional Review Act, so it is no longer the narrow provision only about rules with a short timeframe that the Senator from West Virginia described. That may have been what the Congressional Review Act was like until today, but after today, none of that is true any longer because of this action. It did not have to come to this. It did not have to come to this. There were many ways around the procedural shortcut of going nuclear, where a majority of the Senate shoves its view on the minority, without consideration, without cloture, without 60 votes, without negotiation, just rolling the minority in order to get what they want done. That ought to be a last recourse for a desperate majority, but instead it was the first recourse because this is the easy way to do what the fossil fuel industry wants. Now, one way to do this would have been to go and amend the Clean Air Act and amend the Congressional Review Act through regular order, the way the laws were created, through bicameralism, with both Houses passing the bill and the President signing it. They have been amended over and over again. We know how to amend those laws. That is what we call in the Senate regular order. But regular order would have required compromise, would have required effort, would have required working with Democrats, and the fossil fuel industry didn't want to put up with any of that. They wanted the Republican Party to jam this through, and that is what happened. So regular legislative order--not interested, not going to do it. That was one way. The second way would have been to go to EPA and have them follow an administrative process, which they had already started in the first Trump administration, to review the three predicates for the waiver administratively. Now, the problem is that would have taken a certain amount of administrative effort out of EPA, and it also would have required EPA to meet the basic standards for Agency action, that the Agency action be rationally based and not arbitrary and capricious. If they made a decision that had no rational basis and was arbitrary and capricious, then it could be challenged in court and knocked down. So rather than allow the Agency to go through that administrative process, subject to those very standard requirements of not being arbitrary and capricious and having a rational basis, they came here where it can be as arbitrary and capricious as you please, where it can have no rational basis as long as you have got the votes and are willing to roll the minority. So that is the second avenue that Republicans could have followed here, that the fossil fuel industry could have followed here, but simply didn't want to. The third avenue that they could have undertaken was to go talk to California. This is California's waiver. Last I heard, California had a Governor. Last I heard, the United States has a President. They could talk. They could invite the fossil fuel industry into the room. They could invite the auto industry into the room. They could invite environmental groups and health groups into the room. They could say: Look, we want to have some consideration here. Let's negotiate. But they didn't want to do that because they had this quick and dirty, sneaky maneuver that they could pull off so they didn't have to negotiate, they didn't have to legislate, and they didn't have to use regulatory process. All those rules were available, and yet this was the shortcut that was chosen. Now, we have repeatedly heard it said--in fact, it was recently said just now on the floor--that President Biden claimed that what was being done with the California waiver was not a rule, claimed that it was not a rule. Do you know why the Biden administration claimed it was not a rule? For the simple reason that it was not a rule. It did not go through the APA rulemaking process, and it had a history. And I have got a summary of that history right here. The EPA started granting waivers to California under this Clean Air Act process in 1968. The first waiver was granted on July 11, 1968. And this summary of the waivers that have either been granted or amended or modified over the years, 131 times. The score on whether the California clean air rule is treated by EPA as a waiver or a rule, it is 131 to 0. It is nearly 50 years of constant practice undisputed. Under President Nixon, 15 times a Republican EPA granted the waivers. Under President Reagan, 33 times a Republican EPA granted the waivers. Under President George H. W. Bush, nine times a Republican EPA granted the waivers. Under George W. Bush, 15 times a Republican President granted the waivers. A waiver for half a century has never once been treated as a rule. So it really ought to come as no surprise to anybody that the Biden administration did not treat it as a rule. The Reagan administration didn't treat it as a rule. Neither Bush administrations treated it as a rule. No Republican administration since the passage of the Clean Air Act has treated these California waivers as a rule. It just isn't so. So it is pretty clear that with this history of waivers, there was a real problem. And that is why when EPA pretended for the first time that this was a rule, the Government Accountability Office, which didn't inject itself into this, which didn't butt in to try to interfere with us, which was tasked with giving advice on this by the Senate--we gave them this job, and now we are accusing them of butting in and interfering with our process? We gave them this job so they did it. It has been said that what GAO did was unprecedented in making this decision that it is actually a waiver and not a rule. Yes, it is unprecedented. It is unprecedented in the same way that a referee blowing a whistle on an unprecedented foul is doing something unprecedented. But it is not the fault of the referee that their whistleblowing is unprecedented, it is the fault of the player committing the foul that has never been committed before, and the foul is to treat the waiver as a rule. So it was easy for GAO to say: This ain't a rule. This is a waiver. It is not allowed under the Congressional Review Act. Not allowed. But the GAO is just advisory; they don't make any decisions for us. The rules of the Senate are actually the Parliamentarian, and that is where the going nuclear happened because we went in with the California delegation staff and the EPW staff and the Republicans, and we argued in front of the Parliamentarian. GAO wasn't even in the room. We filed our pleadings. We made our arguments. The arguments went back and forth. The Parliamentarian asked questions. At the end, there was a decision, and, in my view, it was a slam-dunk decision because the score going in was 131 to 0. Mr. President, 131 times these waivers have been granted. Never once was it even argued that they were a rule, let alone decided that they were a rule. It was only when GAO and the Parliamentarian made the obvious decision that what the EPA did in this case was wrong that then the fossil fuel industry decided that Republicans had to go nuclear, and that is why we are where we are. There is statutory text in the Clean Air Act that gives California its waiver. We had testimony from Administrator Reilly earlier today. He was the EPA Administrator at the time this happened. And he understands full well how valuable it was to have a second set of eyes on this process. The California process is so popular that a dozen other States follow it, and it is in the law. The way we should work around here is if there is something in the law you don't like, you amend the law. You don't run it falsely through the Congressional Review Act, treat it as a rule when it is not, overrule the Parliamentarian when she says it is not, and pretend you haven't broken the rules around here. We have broken the rules around here. The other rule we broke was the Congressional Review Act itself, which says--I am reading from the text of the law: In the Senate-- Which is where we are-- when a committee is discharged from further consideration of a joint resolution-- Which means it has come to the floor, it is out of the committee, which is procedurally where we are-- all points of order against the joint resolution are waived. That is part of expediting the process; part of the deal with it being a very narrow process for only regulations and only in a short time window. We just heard the person sitting in that chair before this Presiding Officer say that under the rule just created we are now going forward. We just created a new rule through this parliamentary process, and it is that rule that violates this law because now we have a point of order, even though the law says that all points of order are waived. Why did we go through this? As has been said, the Congressional Review Act is kind of an odd thing. Usually, an Agency goes through a rulemaking process under the Administrative Procedures Act. And if they got it wrong, an aggrieved party can go to court and say that was a bad regulation; it was arbitrary and capricious; it is not a rational basis; you didn't follow the APA properly; your findings are demonstrably false; there isn't support for the rule; the way you have written it violates the actual law involved. There are a whole array of challenges that you can make in court, but we wanted something more than that. We wanted to have a political intervention narrowed just to rules, just to that short time period window that the Congressional Review Act provides. That was the idea. And the two concerns were what we described in our argument to the Parliamentarian as oversubmission and undersubmission. I will read from our presentation. There are two ways in which the Executive branch could try to defeat congressional intent with respect to the scope of the Congressional Review Act. The first would pose an undersubmission problem. In this scenario, an Agency might purposely refrain from submitting an action to Congress, even when the withheld action meets the definition of a rule under the CRA. Right? So there is a rule. It is actually amenable to Congressional Review Act under the CRA, but they don't submit. They just don't because they don't want to subject it to that process. They thought they could sneak around it would be the notion. To protect against this type of abuse, it became congressional practice to ask the GAO for an opinion as to whether the withheld action is, nonetheless, a rule and to treat a positive GAO determination as a trigger for the CRA process. So if an executive Agency tries to cheat on exposing itself to the CRA process by not submitting the rule, a Member of Congress can go to the GAO and say: Hey, what is up with this? Isn't this a rule? And if GAO says it is a rule, then it is deemed submitted, and the CRA process begins. That solves the under submission process. We continued in the argument: The second way an Agency could work to defeat Congressional intent in crafting the CRA would be this situation, the incident situation, where an Agency submits actions, which clearly do not meet the definition of a rule under the CRA. This would pose an over submission problem. The three CRA submissions at stake here illustrate well the slippery slope that could ensue. Not only would treating them as rules override two GAO analyses and broaden the scope of CRA coverage in an unprecedented way, but the waivers are already in effect, and one was issued so long ago as to violate any reasonable reading of the time bounds in the CRA. To accept these three submissions as rules would be to reject the principle that the privileged procedure in the CRA should be closely examined and strictly limited. Agencies could submit any final action, going back to the enactment of the CRA in 1996--including adjudications, leasing contracts, grant awards, and licensing decisions--and magically convert those actions into timely rules that could be disapproved under the CRA's privileged procedures. This would nullify the reasonable bounds that Congress itself set in the text of the CRA, in the statutory law. Without strict limits--truly absent any meaningful limits--the statute would be fully weaponized, threatening to destabilize decades of Agency action and highjack the Senate floor for the foreseeable future, which is precisely the can of worms that the majority has just opened with this overruling of the Parliamentarian, this establishment of a new rule. Now, the other problem with this is that it provides a way to evade court review. Court review is usually how you check the action of the executive branch when they are up to no good. But very often, they are doing perfectly reasonable things, but a special interest doesn't like it. So they have the right to go to court too. But when they go to court, first of all, there is a record of the proceeding, and the court is bound to that record. Second of all, there is law involved. There is both the Administrative Procedure Act, and there is the substantive law that is the subject of the regulation. Then you have to deal with evidence. The court reviews evidence. Then there has to be a rational decision by the court. And the court is, what we know of, as a neutral and disinterested magistrate. Those are pretty essential due process determinations. For the Congressional Review Act, none of that. The only thing is the politics and the votes. You have got the politics behind you, and you got the votes. Anything is fair game. And that is the danger of what was done today. What we have just done is open up the Congressional Review Act from that little 6-month period--60-day period; I am sorry--all the way back to when the CRA was passed, 30 years. Licenses, leases, Executive actions that have had a decade or more of reliance could simply be brought forward, dumped into the Federal Register, sent over here as a submission, magically become a new rule because of this loophole we just built, and then the majority of the Senate, with a compliant House, can just shove it right out the door without following regular order, without ever going to court, without following bicameralism, and present with the constitutional requirements. I will conclude with two things. First, please don't call this unprecedented when you are talking about GAO saying that this was not a rule. Please don't call it unprecedented when the Parliamentarian said: This was not a rule. This actually is illegal for you to do. The only thing unprecedented about what GAO said and what the Parliamentarian said was the fact that this rule breaking by EPA, that is what was unprecedented. Again, 131 waiver determinations over half a century always, always, always treated as waivers--always--a score of 131 to 0. But the Trump administration, flacking for fossil fuel, decides that all of that is wrong, that this actually is a waiver, even though there was no APA rulemaking, even though none of the steps that lead to a regulation under the Congressional Review Act were undertaken. They just filed it in the Federal Register and sent it over as a submission. You could do anything that way. File it in the Federal Register, send it over as a submission, and--boom--it is over here to be kicked around as a political football, without due process, without bicameralism, without regular order--none of it. That is what was unprecedented. And the only reason that the GAO's decision was unprecedented was because nobody had the nerve or the foolishness to do something so stupid before. So they called them out for it for the first time because nobody had ever done such a thing before. But because of the politics, that just got shoved through here. Because of the power of the fossil fuel industry, that just got shoved through here. This is part of a campaign of the Trump administration to pretend that climate change isn't real, to ignore the immediate threats that are looming over us of climate change--looming over us--and to serve the interest of the fossil fuel industry. You remember the President saying, ``Give me a billion dollars, and I will give you everything you want,'' to the fossil fuel executives? Well, he didn't get the full billion dollars, but he got a lot of money. He got north of a 100 million, and now, sure enough, he has given them everything he wants. And this is one of the payments--this breaking of the Senate rules, this overruling of the Parliamentarian, this going nuclear, this pretending that something that was never a rule, and is clearly not a rule by any reasonable reading of what APA rulemaking is, is suddenly now magically a rule. All of that is being done as just a political errand for the fossil fuel industry, and it is wrong. I see that the two Senators from California are here. The hour is getting later and later. So I will not review at this moment my presentation earlier today, where I went through the multiple warnings of the systemic economic collapse that is coming at us, based on a fairly simple proposition, which is that climate risk is making weather and risk unpredictable. And when you can't predict weather risk, you can't predict the insurability of a piece of property. The original concern was about coastal risk--flooding, hurricanes, rainstorms, damage to coastal properties. Now wildfire is just as dangerous. And when you can't predict it, you can't insure it. And we are right now, in the United States, in the middle of an insurance crisis. Go ask around Florida how property insurance is going. It is a full-blown meltdown. And when you can't get insurance any longer, you can't get a mortgage on a property any longer. And when property doesn't carry a mortgage any longer, when you can't get a mortgage on that piece of real estate, then your buyer pool collapses. You are left with only cash buyers. And what happens then is that the property value crashes. And that is the prediction: climate risk to insurance collapse, to mortgage unavailability, to property value crash, to economic collapse--recession. And it is coming from all over--all over. And we won't listen to those warnings whether they come from insurance CEOs, from Freddie Mac, from international banking safety reviews, from international economic magazines, from the chief risk officer of Goldman Sachs, from the head of the Bank of England. I mean, you can just go on and on. The warnings are piling, piling, piling up. And as Ernest Hemingway said about going broke, ``it happens gradually, and then all at once.'' And we are deep into ``gradually'' on this climate risk mess, and pretty soon we are going to get hit with ``all at once.'' And then all this foolishness done on this floor in the service of the fossil fuel industry, which has the world's biggest conflict of interest and a history of lying and of dark-money political influence, is going to look pretty damned bad. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I join the ranking member of the Rules Committee with a parliamentary inquiry of my own.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, is it true that unless a piece of legislation is privileged under a rule or a statutory provision or is the subject of a unanimous consent agreement, motions to proceed to that legislation are generally fully debatable?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. That is correct. And for those of you following this at home, ``fully debatable'' means 60 votes are required to end debate, which Republicans do not have. Parliamentary Inquiry Mr. President, I have a further parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Is it commonplace for Senate offices and for whichever Senator is presiding over the Senate to consult with the Parliamentarian to determine whether and in what manner expedited procedures apply under a host of statutes, including the War Powers Act, the National Emergencies Act, the Congressional Budget Act, and the Congressional Review Act?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Again, for those of you following this at home, that means that this is the commonplace way in which the Senate operates and when it becomes the Parliamentarian's call on a matter and not anyone else's call. So in the Congressional Review Act matter before us, here is what happened: Both sides drafted written memoranda to the Parliamentarian. Both sides presented oral arguments to the Parliamentarian. The Parliamentarian asked questions of both sides, and the Parliamentarian, our neutral referee, reached a decision. That all took place here in the Senate--actually, over there in the L.B.J. Room. The GAO was not even in the room when the arguments were made. And that decision, the decision of the Parliamentarian, is what is now at hand in what is about to happen here in the Senate. And with that, let me note the presence on the floor of the Democratic leader and yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, let me start with just a quick overview of the Congressional Review Act which brings us here to the floor today. Under the American legal system, administrative Agencies can make rules, and there is a very robust process for doing so. The Agency often gives a notice of proposed rulemaking so the world will know what they are considering doing and then solicit comment from affected stakeholders, the public, a wide variety of people. So you start with an Agency that seeks to make a rule. They have to follow the processes of the Administrative Procedures Act, which is a very careful statute, well-policed by the courts, with a very robust precedent around that. And at the end of the day, the Agency creates a rule, and they adopt the rule. Now, you could always appeal that rule to a court, but what Congress decided many years ago was that in that situation where an Agency had gone through the APA process and had promulgated a rule, that there would also be a congressional review of that rule, not just a court. And the filing of the rule here in Congress triggers a period of review in which Senators or Members of the House can call up the Congressional Review Act and seek to disapprove the rule. So this whole thing was originally designed and--for all the decades since the Congressional Review Act was first passed--has always been to address Agency rulemaking under the Administrative Procedures Act. Well, the fossil fuel industry pretty much runs the Republican Party here in Washington. And for a long time, it has objected to California having clean air standards that many States, including my State, voluntarily follow because it is good for the health of our people to have clean air; it is good to have less smokestack emissions, less exhaust emissions. But it means less gas sales for the fossil fuel industry. Efficient cars may mean lower costs for consumers, but those lower costs for consumers are lower sales for the fossil fuel industry. So the majority here has decided to jump outside that tradition that it takes a rule developed by an Agency to kick off the Congressional Review Act. In this case, again, for decades, pursuant to a statute, California has had the right to set emissions standards, and it was never done by rule; it was always done by an Executive action--in this case, called a waiver. And what is now being done is a real violence to that distinct and clear process. This breaks the Congressional Review Act in at least three ways: First, it breaks the time limits of the Congressional Review Act. Again, in the ordinary course, a rulemaking goes through its ordinary process under the APA; and when it is done, it then comes here to the Senate, and we have got a short period of time in which to make a determination whether to try to disapprove it or not. Under the proposal that is threatened here, you will be able to take any Executive decision in decades and simply by dropping it into the Federal Register, making that submission, and sending it to Congress, let the majority party say: OK, we are going to overrule that. Not a rulemaking, nothing done under the Administrative Procedures Act, just an Executive decision. So the window back in time outside of the ordinary 60 days is the first thing that they broke. The second thing that they break is that it has to be a rule. Like I said, pretty much any Executive action could be plowed through the process that is being created here. And so however settled the reliance on a particular permit or a particular license or a particular Executive decision from years ago, it is all up for grabs under this. And the third, of course--other than breaking open the time horizon of the Congressional Review Act and breaking open the subject matter horizon of the Congressional Review Act--is to clear out the police of the Congressional Review Act, and that is the Parliamentarian, who made what, in my view, was not a difficult decision, to say: This is not a rule, never was a rule. Year after year, administration after administration, Congress after Congress, California has used this waiver, and it was never a rule. And now, the Parliamentarian's plain, clear, obvious decision that this was not and is not and never was a rule is what they are planning to overturn. So you are breaking open the time horizon; you are breaking open the subject matter boundary; and you are knocking out the neutral police officer who is supposed to keep us living by the rules. This does not end well. By the way, I have heard it said that the argument from the other side is going to be they are not overruling the Parliamentarian; they are overruling the Government Accountability Office. Well, if that is what they wanted to do, there are ways to do that. If the Government Accountability Office says that the law says a certain thing and we disagree, we can go back and change that law. We can amend it so that it is clear what it is that we want the law to say and correct the GAO decision that way. We can pass a joint resolution that does the same thing. We could even pass a simple Senate resolution. But guess what. All of those things are fully debatable. And as I said earlier, ``fully debatable'' means what? It means 60 votes to end debate, meaning that the minority party gets a vote, gets consideration. They don't want that. They want to ram this thing through for their fossil fuel donors. Period. End of story. They don't care what they break. But, please, don't pretend that you are overruling GAO. My team, along with Senator Padilla's team, was in the L.B.J. Room making those arguments to the Parliamentarian. There was robust debate. We filed briefs. Questions were asked. The whole thing was a very vigorous contest, and she ruled--and she ruled. And GAO was not even in the room. That stage was long since passed. The reason we are here is to overrule the Parliamentarian. The reason for overruling the Parliamentarian is to get a simple majority to get around this. There are other ways this could have been done too. EPA didn't have to do it this way. EPA could have gone through the Administrative Procedures Act and done a proper rulemaking. We could have amended the Clean Air Act and had a proper debate about this on the Senate floor. EPA would have followed regular Administrative Procedures Act order. The debate about the Clean Air Act would have followed regular Senate order. But no. Or the fossil fuel industry could have gone to California and said: Hey, things have changed a little bit. We would like to figure out a way to work with you. You change your rule. They are the real principal party here; Rhode Island follows the California standard. They could have gone and negotiated with the sovereign State of California instead of coming here to just roll the State using a sneaky parliamentary maneuver and choosing to go nuclear to do that. So this is not a great day in the history of the Senate. We are opening up a Pandora's box of multiple abuses, and let me just point out that there actually are a lot of legitimate CRA, Congressional Review Act, targets out there--many dozens of decisions that have been made in this Congress that lend themselves to a proper use of the Congressional Review Act. And, guess what, it takes 30 signatures to bring one of those up. The minority can do that. So if the majority wants to start playing CRA games, well, even under existing CRAs, where we don't need a 51-vote majority, we can start bringing up CRAs of our own, expedite them to the floor, have vote after vote after vote after vote after vote. There are ways in which we can respond. I intend to work with my leadership to make sure what the best way is but don't think that this nuclear option gets deployed here, gets deployed for the fossil fuel industry, gets deployed against a sovereign State, and gets deployed to make air dirtier and water dirtier, and we just walk away as if nothing happened. That is not what will follow. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I join my senior Senator today to honor our friend Dominick Ruggerio, who was both president and the dean of the Rhode Island Senate. President Ruggerio, who passed away last month, was affectionately known as ``Donny.'' He leaves behind his children Amanda and Charles and four beloved grandchildren. Donny was a graduate of two great Rhode Island institutions--La Salle Academy and Providence College. At La Salle, Senator Reed was his schoolmate and teammate on the football team. After finishing college, Donny served as a policy aide for former Lieutenant Governor Tom DiLuglio, who was a Rhode Island classic in his own right. Donny went on to spend many years with Laborers' Local Union 271, serving in multiple leadership roles. Donny's career in public service continued when he was elected to the Rhode Island House of Representatives, in 1981, where he stayed for a few years until making the jump to the Rhode Island Senate, in 1984, where then-State Senator Jack Reed was again his teammate in the State senate. The senate was Donny's home. For over four decades, he was the champion for the residents of District 4, which includes parts of North Providence and Providence. After holding several leadership positions in the senate, he was elected by his peers to serve as Rhode Island's senate president in 2017. His legacy at the statehouse will be defined by his decades of forceful advocacy for working people and his practical, highly effective style of legislating. He never forgot his background as a laborer and never stopped working to create opportunities for working men and women. To that end, he fought for a higher minimum wage and for specific projects that would create union, family-supporting jobs. He also led the charge to eliminate lead pipes, making our tap water safer to drink for Rhode Islanders. Among his many accomplishments was his work to address the State's opioid crisis. He created a fund to support statewide opioid treatment, recovery, prevention, and education programs and shaped a law to ensure that filling a prescription for lifesaving anti-overdose medication would not create a barrier for Rhode Islanders getting life insurance. I am grateful, in particular, for Donny's leadership on climate. He sponsored legislation that put Rhode Island on a path to 100 percent renewable energy by 2033. When that legislation was signed into law, it was the most aggressive statewide energy standard anywhere in the country. Donny was beloved by his lifelong North Providence community, and he was always a pleasure to work with. In a profession that is not always gentlemanly, he was always a gentleman. He took pride in the senate being a place where people had, as he would say, always been able to disagree without being disagreeable. So I thank Senate President Ruggerio for his dedicated and successful service to our State. I offer my condolences to his family. We will miss him. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise to oppose the nomination of Sean Donahue of Florida to serve as General Counsel of the Environmental Protection Agency. Mr. Donahue may be the most unfit nominee ever for any Federal Agency general counsel. As I said in my remarks in committee, this guy would have trouble getting an entry-level legal position in any one of our offices, yet here we are. The Constitution provides the Senate with advice and consent power. This power should carry some meaning. ``Advice and consent'' should not be empty words, a rubber stamp. The Senate confirmation vote on Mr. Donahue that is moments away shows how little we care to live up to that constitutional responsibility. This is a truly preposterous nominee. The EPA general counsel is the chief legal advisor to EPA on environmental laws, including Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, the Superfund Act, and others; on the Agency's development and implementation of regulations under its various statutes; and on litigation strategy with DOJ in court challenges to Agency actions. The general counsel oversees nearly 200 lawyers and 300 total staff. Mr. Donahue has no experience qualifying him to do any of these things. He has never tried a case to verdict, never taken a deposition, never signed a pleading, never argued a motion. He has never personally litigated any case, let alone Federal cases implicating our Nation's most important environmental office. What has he done? Mr. Donahue practiced law for a year and a half at a small firm in Buffalo that fired him for his version of being ``overloaded with work.'' He was not even a member of the New York bar, however, and he then failed the DC bar on his first attempt. He claims, in New York, to have supervised six to eight individuals, which seems a stretch for someone not even a member of the bar. And there is no evidence--whatever minimal and unsuccessful legal experience Mr. Donahue had--that any work he may have done bore at all on the laws and regulations applicable to EPA. The previous seven Senate-confirmed EPA general counsels were pretty impressive: Counsel Prieto, two decades in Federal service, including as general counsel at both the Department of Agriculture and DOJ's Energy and Natural Resources Division; Counsel Leopold, 14 years as an environmental lawyer and general counsel of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection; Counsel Garbow, 21 years practicing environmental law in the public and private sectors, including at the EPA and DOJ; Counsel Fulton, 22 years of leadership roles at EPA, following 8 years at DOJ's Environment and Natural Resources Division; Counsel Martella, court of appeals law clerk, 7 years with the Natural Resources Section of DOJ, Acting EPA general counsel; Counsel Klee, law firm for 9 years, chief counsel to the Senate Environment Public Works Committee for 5 years, and senior counselor to the Secretary of the Interior; Counsel Fabricant, 2 years in private practice and 5 years as private counsel, then chief counsel to then-New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman. This guy? A year and a half, fired, then in- house counsel at a solar company, tried no cases ever. So why him? Well, I suspect part of it is that he will be so grateful that he will do whatever he is told. We have actually seen this already, even before his confirmation. He testified that the Trump administration's current assault on congressionally authorized, appropriated, and obligated funding was legal, never mind multiple Federal district court orders to the contrary. I would love to see him take that argument into those courts that had already found those orders illegal. Second, and perhaps more telling, who cares at EPA if their counsel has neither experience nor knowledge? They are going to be overseen by the fossil fuel industry anyway. He will be told what to do by fossil fuel polluter lawyers. So all he will have to do is put what they want on EPA letterhead and file it. Oh, yeah, and the nepo thing. His significant other is the Deputy Director of Presidential Personnel, a role with purview over every political appointment, including his. Mr. President, this is a pretty bleak low point in Senate nominations' history. This is the last chance to pull back from the brink of confirming, likely, the most flagrantly unqualified person ever for an Agency general counsel position. I urge my colleagues to vote no. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, as the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, it is my understanding that there is a pretty longstanding tradition at the EPW that we get the background check before someone comes to the vote, as my distinguished friend from Wyoming has said. I actually voted for this nominee, and I have every confidence that she will do a good job, but I don't believe that the background check is available. If I am mistaken about that, then we can review this some other time. But as far as I know, we do not have this nominee's background check. That is a matter that I think needs to be taken up with the FBI. You all run the FBI these days. If there is a delay getting this background check completed, that delay should be addressed at the FBI, where the delay has been caused, rather than breaking a committee precedent. So I object.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I am actually happy to yield to Senator Schiff from the California delegation. OK. He is happy with me going, so I will go.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, first, both of my colleagues from California are here, and I want to thank them for coming to the floor today to talk about this important matter in which Republicans want to appease their donors, and they want to break basically two Senate rules in order to get there--not just one, but two. The underlying matter here is about a law, the Clean Air Act, which falls in the jurisdiction of the Environment and Public Works Committee. So that is why I am here. A different law, the Congressional Review Act, creates a fast-track procedure in the Senate to disapprove Agency rules. For the most part, that Congressional Review Act, the CRA, is focused on rules during a short period immediately after they are made final and before they go into effect. We get a window where we can disapprove a rule from Congress. As soon as an Agency finalizes the rule, it submits the rule to the Government Accountability Office and to both Houses of Congress. That starts a 60-day review clock. That CRA also provides a lookback period where a Congress can reach back into the final 60 days of a previous Congress and review rules from a prior administration. The waivers go way back before the CRA period. Generally, there is no question what constitutes a rule under the CRA. There are different acts that the government can do. There are decisions; there are rules; there are laws. A rule is a specific thing under the CRA. Sometimes there are problems. Sometimes Agencies don't submit actions to Congress that have typically been deemed rules, and sometimes, as here, they submit as rules actions that have never previously been considered rules. GAO polices whether the submitted action was, in fact, a rule. That is the law. That is a GAO legal responsibility. GAO has weighed in about 60 times in the history of the Congressional Review Act. When GAO determined that the action involved was a rule, the action was then deemed submitted and the review clock started. When GAO determined the action was not a rule, that was the end of it. Congress stood down. No one--no one--moved a CRA resolution of disapproval following a negative finding by the GAO. Never. Which brings us to this first oddity. In 2023, Members asked GAO whether an EPA Clean Air Act waiver decision for California was a Federal rule for purposes of the CRA. GAO said, no, correctly, because it wasn't. Like every other time, that settled that. And GAO's ``no'' comported with the text of the CRA and the waiver provision originally in the Clean Air Act that created the California exception and 50 years of Agency precedent treating waivers as decisions, a different type of adjudication which the Administrator Procedure Act distinguishes from rules. EPA itself, across multiple administrations, Republican and Democrat, never, never called waivers rules under the CRA, not even under the first Trump administration. Then, in February, after much lobbying by the oil industry, the Trump EPA submitted notices of three waiver decisions, one from more than 2 years ago, far beyond that 60-day lookback period. Upon a request from the three of us, the two Senators from California and myself as ranking member, GAO confirmed its previous 2023 opinion not long ago--this is not ancient history--and found that notwithstanding EPA's politically motivated submissions to try to get into that CRA window, the California waivers simply are not rules. So the CRA does not apply. GAO pointed out to EPA that the waiver notices, on their face, indicate that they are decisions rather than rules. But that wasn't enough, so we had to go to the Parliamentarian, who heard arguments and debate from both sides, and the Parliamentarian affirmed GAO's decision. I will offer the opinion that it was not even a close call because the unblemished record has always been that this is not a rule over decades. The Parliamentarian ruled that Clean Air Act waivers do not qualify for expedited consideration under the Congressional Review Act. Every other time the Senate has reached this point, every other time, Members have respected the decision of the Parliamentarian and that ended the matter. Not this time. This time, a faction in the Republican Party wants to overturn decades of precedent, ignore the GAO and the Parliamentarian, who are the lawful guardians of this process, and steamroll forward in violation of the plain text of the Congressional Review Act by deploying the nuclear option. Once there is precedent that anything an Agency does can be considered a rule, the time and scope limits of the Congressional Review Act have no meaning. Any Agency action ever could be swallowed up in the new Congressional Review Act definition. Think about how the Trump administration might abuse this. At least one Member of this body previously asked GAO if FDA's decision to allow pharmacies to dispense mifepristone qualified as a rule for the purposes of the CRA. GAO said no, and it ended there. If we overrule GAO and the Parliamentarian on the waivers, nothing stops the Trump FDA from submitting the decision as a rule and Members from introducing a disapproval resolution and proceeding through this new loophole. Everyone knows by now that President Trump has a beef with a whole host of media outlets, some of which are licensed by the Federal Communications Commission. What is to stop the FCC from submitting, say, CBS's license as a rule? And Members from introducing a disapproval resolution? Is this really the path we want the Senate to go down? A future Democratic administration could submit every oil and gas lease issued since 1996 as a rule and pursue disapproval of them under the Congressional Review Act. Colleagues, we have already given away too many article I powers to the executive branch, do we really want to give the executive branch this power to submit anything and everything as a rule and allow Members to hijack the floor with CRA resolutions? That would be a new way for this Senate to work. Then there is the question of overruling the Parliamentarian, the nuclear option. The import of overruling the Parliamentarian extends way beyond Congressional Review Act resolutions. Once you have overruled the Parliamentarian on a legislative matter, there is no going back. All bets are off. Any future majority would have precedent to overrule the Parliamentarian on any legislative matter. There is no cabining such a decision. It is tantamount to eliminating the filibuster. Once ``you give a mouse a cookie,'' it never ends. Pretend all you want that these waivers are exceptional or that any precedent overruling the Parliamentarian would be limited. That is not the way it works. Soon, some Members will think their thing is exceptional and push to use this precedent, and on and on it will go, if you give the mouse the cookie. You would be upending 50 years of treating preemption waivers as Agency decisions and not rules, 30 years of deferring to the GAO and the Parliamentarian on what constitutes a rule for purposes of the Congressional Review Act, and centuries of Senate precedent and procedure--all that while there is actually another path. In 2019, the first Trump EPA used the administrative process, the Administrative Procedures Act, to withdraw a previously granted Clean Air Act waiver that permitted California to set car standards. So I ask my Republican colleagues: Is this worth it? Is it worth going nuclear in the Senate to accomplish something that the EPA could try to accomplish under the Administrative Procedures Act on its own? Is it worth going nuclear, knowing full well the Pandora's box this will open? I will close with the advice my colleague from California shared from the majority leader, the senior Senator from South Dakota. He said earlier this year that overruling the Parliamentarian would be--and I quote him--``totally akin to killing the filibuster. We can't go there. People need to understand that.'' So, please, do understand that, and don't go there. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I come to the Senate floor today for the 298th time in my ``Time to Wake Up'' speech series to once again call attention to the looming climate calamity. I went last week to the Our Ocean Conference--a conference founded by the United States of America and dedicated to protecting our oceans before the damage to them and ultimately to us becomes irrecoverable. It was the 10th such conference, which made it a bit of a benchmark. I was the entirety of the U.S. delegation. You are looking at it--100 percent of the entire U.S. delegation. Ordinarily, many executive branch officials come. In this case, not one executive branch official attended from the United States. And of course not. This administration is nothing more than hirelings of the fossil fuel industry, and the conference, of course, addressed the harm that fossil fuel emissions are doing in the oceans and the harm that petrochemical plastics are doing in the oceans. Fossil fuel emissions are heating up the oceans in zettajoules. It is a massive number. The joule, as you probably know, is the unit measure for heat energy. ``Zetta'' means it has 21 zeroes behind it. In more commonly articulated big numbers, it is a billion trillion joules. It looks something like this: 14 zettajoules of heat going into the oceans every single year. To give a more practical definition, the entire energy production of the human species across the entire planet Earth amounts to one-half of a zettajoule of energy--everything. All the energy sources of humankind produce one-half of a zettajoule of energy every year. That is how much our species relies on. The price to all of us of the fossil fuel component of that half- zettajoule is that those 14 zettajoules get pushed into the ocean, get absorbed by the ocean, every single year. The heating of the oceans from fossil fuel pollution is more than 30 times the energy used that causes the heating. It is not a part of it; it is multiple of it, magnified by the greenhouse effect. It is not that fossil fuel creates some excess heat and some of that goes into the oceans; the fossil fuel creates changes in the Earth's physical environment that magnify the heat retention of the planet, the so-called greenhouse effect. So for the component of the half zettajoule of human energy use that comprises the entire species' energy, 14 zettajoules of heat go into the ocean. Put another way, if you imagine the heat energy given off by the nuclear bomb explosion over Hiroshima, multiply that by seven. Seven Hiroshima nuclear detonations' worth of excess heat is what fossil fuel emissions are driving into our oceans every single second--every single second. Every second, seven Hiroshimas' worth of heat. In the 10 minutes that it takes me to give this speech, the oceans will absorb 4,000 Hiroshima detonations' worth of heat. That is why seawater off the Florida Keys hit jacuzzi temperatures. That is why measuring devices along our coasts show a foot of sea level rise already. That is why fish species are moving about and fisheries are collapsing. That is why the world's coral reefs are bleaching out--over 80 percent of the world's reefs hit in the last ocean heating surge caused by fossil fuel. The physical disruption of the ocean with this massive injection of multiple Hiroshimas-per-second of excess physical heat is matched by a chemical effect--acidification. The excess carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere by fossil fuel pollution interacts with the surface of the ocean, covering 70 percent of our planet--so a lot of surface to interact--and it causes the seawater chemically to acidify. I actually did an experiment here at my desk, blowing the carbon dioxide in my breath through an aquarium bubbler into my water glass. And, sure enough, pH strips showed that the water in the glass acidified, measurably, just from my breath. Acidification in the ocean degrades structures that are made up of calcium. It injures coral reefs, worsening the problems of pollution and warming. We are headed for a world of dead reefs at this rate. It makes life harder for shelled creatures, particularly in their larval stages, to grow. There are many of them, but one species measurably hit is the pteropod. Who cares about the humble pteropod, you may ask. Well, you might, and your kids likely will because it is an important part of the oceanic food web. Crash the pteropod, and a lot of other species fall. A trawl survey a few years ago off the Pacific Northwest found that most of the pteropod caught in the trawl survey showed what the scientists called severe shell damage--severe shell damage. Pteropods don't survive well in acidified oceans. That much severe shell damage in a foundational species is a bad harbinger of things to come, and it is just one of many harms from fossil fuel emissions acidifying the world's oceans. Then we get to the other petrochemical problem, plastics. The ocean is awash with marine plastic waste. Unlike natural substances that biodegrade into basic elements that return into the cycle of life that other beings can consume, plastics are manmade. Unlike natural substances, they break down eventually into microplastic and even nanoplastic particles that have no use to anything. Ocean plastic waste is a menace. Large ocean plastic waste ends up in the bellies of whales, indigestibly, killing them. Ghost gear made of plastic goes about its lethal business with no fisherman ever retrieving the catch, just killing, killing, killing. Pretty much every sea bird consumes plastic, lodging in its belly, starving its young of real food. You can walk midway island and see the cadavers of dead young birds with stomachs full of indigestible plastic unwittingly fed to them by their parents. Small creatures consume tiny plastic particles. Bigger creatures consume the small creatures. We consume the bigger creatures. And now we find plastic particles in mothers' breast milk, in human brain tissue samples, even in rain drops over Colorado. Unless we change direction, there will soon be more plastic by weight in the world's oceans than the weight of living fish in the world's oceans. The plastics and fossil fuel industry may chortle about their profits, but none of this is good for humans. These industries are damaging the natural systems of the planet, the natural systems to which we have adapted as a species, the natural systems that make Earth so beautifully and abundantly livable. And there comes a reckoning. As Pope Francis said, you slap Mother Nature, she will slap you back. Regrettably, the plastics and fossil fuel industries are also damaging the political systems of the planet, corrupting government so as to disable our ability to remedy their pollution. The question of the moment that people should be asking is why are so many politicians lying to us about climate change? The answer, of course, is money. Fossil fuel money floods our political system, pours into it, much of it secretly. Politicians, whose home State universities teach about climate change, lie about climate change. How is that possible? It is not like there is some unfathomable mystery about how climate change works that eludes human understanding. No, it is known. There is a counterforce at work against knowledge. Fossil fuel money and political pressure is that counterforce. That force--that malign, corrupt, political operation of the fossil fuel industry--has now become dangerous. If you delay treatment of a disease, things get worse and a treatable disease can become lethal. If you delay dealing with termites in your house, things get worse, and it is no longer a repair but a teardown. The fossil fuel political operation, for very selfish reasons, has delayed the remedies that would have given us a broad pathway to climate safety, and it is now getting dangerous. The control of our government by this political operation is right now complete. Neither House of Congress will do anything right now to avert the looming danger. After asking for $1 billion from the fossil fuel industry and getting massive donations, our madman President says there is no danger--a supposedly educated man calling our climate perils a ``hoax.'' His executive officials are all in tow to the fossil fuel industry, doing exactly as they are told--puppets on a fossil fuel string. They even put Justices on the Supreme Court to ignore the facts about climate danger. Here is their problem, which is our problem as well: Politics responds to money, but nature, she can't be bought. She couldn't care less. Nature will keep administering the consequences dictated by natural laws, by laws of physics and chemistry, and biology. I flew home from the Our Ocean Conference, thanks to our understanding of those natural laws when you honor those laws, aerodynamics and metallurgy, and make flying from Seoul, Korea, to Dulles airport outside Washington, DC, possible. Dishonoring those laws is foolhardy and dangerous. Dishonoring those laws for money is reprehensible and dangerous. A corrupted U.S. Government, a polluted planet, and trillions-- literally trillions--of dollars in economic harm is headed our way fast, well and completely predicted, all from the bad behavior of a greedy and amoral industry that knows no bounds--not of decency, not of honesty, and certainly, not of protection for our planet. If taking that fight on is not a fight worth having, I don't know what is. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. In yet another of many attempts to unravel protections for human health and the environment, and in their endless quest to accommodate the country's biggest polluters, Republicans in the Senate are seeking congressional disapproval for EPA's final rule setting national emissions standards for hazardous air pollutants for rubber tire manufacturing. A little history here. Since the 1970s, the Clean Air Act has required EPA to set emission standards for facilities that are major sources of hazardous air pollution. For over 50 years, these standards have allowed us to expand our industry and grow our economy while also making major improvements in air quality for the American people. Yet some toxic pollution remains unregulated, even at regulated facilities. And so, in 2020, the DC Circuit, the Federal court, directed EPA to regulate all unregulated hazardous air pollution from major sources. In response, EPA finalized long-overdue protections for the rubber processing stage of tire manufacturing. Before then, this process was entirely unregulated by the Federal Government. But faced with new emissions data showing that rubber processing releases large quantities of hazardous air pollutants, EPA was obliged under the Clean Air Act to act. The rule is expected to significantly reduce toxic air pollution, nominally a goal of this administration. Pollutants include heavy metal like mercury, organic chemicals, and particulate matter--the little stuff that floats in the air, and this gets into people's lungs. These pollutants, even in low doses, can cause significant harm to human health. Children, babies, and developing fetuses are at particular risk, vulnerable to the effects of these pollutants. So this rule protects the communities which house these rubber processing facilities, communities like Des Moines, IA; Topeka, KS; Social Circle, GA; Anderson, SC; and Findlay, OH. People living in those communities will be protected by this rule from an increased risk of cancer, heart disease, respiratory disease, and even cognitive impairments. This is dangerous pollution. So make no mistake, this resolution to undo the clean air rule would deny clean air protections to the American people, with particular harm to American children whose lungs and brains, still developing, are most vulnerable to the effects of these pollutants. My Republican colleagues have argued that the energy needed for the pollution controls will increase carbon emissions. Well, two things on that. First, it just ain't true. EPA found that secondary air impacts are minimal and do not outweigh the health benefits from reduced toxic pollution. It is also a bit laughable that my Republican colleagues now purport to care about carbon pollution after every single step they have taken in this arena has been to make carbon pollution worse, to help their big donors from the fossil fuel industry, and to lead us ever more rapidly into the climate crisis with its insurance meltdown component that is now so widely predicted--predicted even by the Chairman of the Federal Reserve here in the Senate Banking Committee, saying that in 10 to 15 years there will be whole regions of the United States where you can't get a mortgage anymore. Why can't you get a mortgage anymore there? Because the insurance has made it untenable. The insurance is untenable because the climate risk is both much worse and more unpredictable. So what is widely predicted, including recently by a board member of the biggest insurance company on the planet, is that uncertainty and added risk in the natural systems caused by fossil fuel pollution makes insurance--particularly property insurance--untenable, which makes mortgages unavailable, which crashes housing prices, and that is predicted to lead to a 2008-style economic meltdown to the entire economy. You may not want to hear this, but it is widely--widely--predicted by expert sources, many under a fiduciary obligation to get this right, unlike the fossil fuel industry which lies with impunity. Anyway, given the record of this body and this administration on this issue, the idea that there is a sincere concern about carbon emissions happening on the other side of this aisle verges on the preposterous. The full story here is that the economic effects of this rule are minimal. EPA found during its rulemaking process that facility owners affected by this rule will incur less than 1 percent of their revenue in compliance costs--1 percent. That is too much, obviously, for our friends on the other side. The rule even offers flexible compliance options that could further reduce the burden if a company were to make an honest effort to come into compliance with air rules that protect the safety of their own communities. In any event, that minimal 1 percent or less financial burden ought to be outweighed by the substantial public health costs that Americans will face if Congress and the Trump administration continue their mad quest to eliminate clean air protections. More doctors' appointments and emergency room visits, more inhalers and prescriptions, more lost school and workdays--that will be the cost of passing this resolution. I urge all of my colleagues to protect the health of Americans and vote no on this misguided resolution. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I am pleased to supplement the remarks of our distinguished leader with respect to Social Security. Rhode Island has I believe the largest participation per capita in Social Security in the country. Social Security is what brought American seniors out of poverty and into a distinguished and fair retirement, and it really matters that we defend it and that Social Security remain unbroken. The threat is pretty clear. The President keeps talking about imaginary fraud. Why would you talk about imagery fraud in a system unless you have some motive? It wasn't just him. Elon Musk talked relentlessly about fraud in the Social Security system. The Secretary of Commerce went a mile out of his lane to add a shot at Social Security being riddled with fraud. Then the President went to the other end of the building there, stood at the rostrum of the House, and lied to the American people, flat-out lied to the American people about Social Security fraud. He let Elon Musk call it a Ponzi scheme as well. This is a battering ram of misinformation and disinformation, and it doesn't happen without a motive. The motive here is to degrade public confidence in Social Security. At the same time, you sent what I call your little ``Muskrats''--you sent your ``Muskrats'' into Social Security to disrupt its operations. So you have the rhetorical attack happening over here, and then you begin to have Social Security fail because you broke it and get what has been referred to as an interruption of benefits--an interruption of benefits. Then you also have your private equity people and your tech bros over there so that when the interruption of benefits happens, they can come in and swoop to the rescue of the problem that the administration caused, and next thing you know, what have you got? Privatized Social Security, with private equity guys and tech bros running the show because thousands of the employees who know how to run the Social Security Administration have been forced out. That is the concern, and it is a very real concern. I want to give Mr. Bisignano good marks for saying that he is not going there. He said that he will not privatize the Agency--will not. He said that under his leadership, the Social Security Administration will remain a government Agency and remain an Agency that is run for the benefit of the American people and benefit recipients. Now, the problem is, I find nominees' statements hard to believe up against the power of that pressure from the White House and from Musk and from the Secretary of Commerce and from whoever else is trying to accomplish the Republican extremist goal for decades of getting rid of Social Security. So I was a ``no'' vote in committee. I am going to be a ``no'' vote out here. I hope very much that I am wrong, but I also hoped very much that Secretary Rubio would stand up for Ukraine and that he would be an anchor, as Secretary of State, to defend Ukraine against the predatory, brutal, criminal war crimes of Vladimir Putin. But what we have seen instead has been the ``Putinization'' of our strategy to Ukraine, and the Secretary of State has been entirely complicit in it, from all the signs that I see. So when you have somebody who says one thing and, in the case of Secretary Rubio, who actually lived it--he was actually an ardent advocate for defending Ukraine. Then you get into Trump zone, and suddenly all your principles disappear, all your commitments disappear, and you just become a tool of the Trump political operation. I have seen that too often, so I am going to vote no. We need, as a Senate, to send a clear message that Social Security is inviolable; that it is a promise amongst us all, as Americans, to protect our seniors, to protect ourselves when we get to that age; and that no one will be allowed to break it. And one of the things I am going to ask is to make sure that we go into Social Security's databases and make sure that those ``Muskrats,'' when they went in there, didn't do any permanent damage, didn't set off mines to go off later, and didn't leave backdoors for the information to be exfiltrated out to private sector folks for whom it is as good as gold. I will say one last thing, and that is Mr. Bisignano said he would work with me on the benefits cliffs, where you are fine with full benefits, and then one little thing happens, you miss one little mark, and there is a complete crash. There is a better way to deal with it. Benefit cliff smoothing is a technical thing. He promised to work with me. I intend to hold him to that promise. My friend Mr. Cornyn, the Senator from Texas, has been patiently waiting. So I yield the floor to him.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, let me thank our Democratic leader for that very kind intro. I will confess that I come to the Senate floor today with a pretty heavy heart. The effort that we are engaged in right now is going to be extremely damaging to our country. We are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid that are part of the plan here. And we are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid that are coming on top of this tariff madness emanating from the White House that was already estimated to cost families north of $3,000 a year in added costs for the same stuff--average $3,000 per year, per family. And that was before the retaliatory tariffs came back, so that is kind of the baseline. Trump campaigned on lowering costs and the first thing he has done is to raise costs by thousands and thousands of dollars for American families. On top of that, their pensions and 401(k)s got slaughtered. I think it is about $3 trillion in value was lost because of this maniacal tariff effort that gives nobody any confidence about which way we are going to go. Set aside how bad the tariffs are--like the lesson the last time we tried this back in the Depression era--isn't it obvious enough that tariffs harm the economy unless they are precise and intelligent and purposeful and focused, which these are, by definition, not. But just the uncertainty, just the fact that every day it is a different tariff, it is another number. It is such a ham-handed ``Gong Show'' over at the White House that the White House website and the White House press conference put out different numbers for the same companies. This whole thing is like being run by the Keystone Cops, but they are playing with economic dynamite. And between what is about to happen to Medicaid, which supports so many folks: mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles in nursing homes; that supports so many folks: spouses, sisters when they give birth; that supports so many folks: family members who are in addiction recovery and are getting support from programs in Medicaid--when you kick out elderly family members from nursing homes, you are doing a real blow to a family on top of the $3,000-plus, on top of the hammered 401(k) or pension. So this is a very, very grim time for American families economically, and there is no sense or logic behind it. There is big talk, but it is really economic nonsense that is happening around us right now. Into this comes--like that is not bad enough--a complete disavowal, a completely hypocritical repudiation of things that Republicans have claimed to believe in for a long, long time. And what we are seeing in this budget reconciliation process is massive lies exposed. The first one is that Republicans care about the debt and the deficit. Let me tell a few stories about my time as chairman of the Budget Committee. As chairman of the Budget Committee, I paid a lot of attention to what climate change portends for the American economy. And the reason I did that is because there is some pretty damned serious and very dire warnings that are out there and that come from some pretty darned serious people--not Green New Dealers but really significant people, often ones who have a fiduciary duty to get this right. They can't be like the fossil fuel industry and lie at an industrial scale about climate change because they have a fiduciary duty to tell the truth and get it right. And in particular, that is the insurance industry. I will show you. Last April, The Economist magazine cover article: ``The next housing disaster.'' The next housing disaster is what they predicted to be a $25 trillion hit to the global real estate asset class. Why? Because of climate risk because if you can't get insurance on a property, you can never again get a mortgage on that property. And when most Americans still buy their property with a mortgage--it is fine if you are one of Trump's billionaires and you swap properties around paying cash--but if you are like most Americans and need a mortgage to buy your property or if you are like most homeowners and you want to sell your property, you need to find somebody who can buy it with a mortgage. Well, if your property won't support a mortgage any longer because your property is too dangerous to insure, here is what the chief economist from Freddie Mac said about that. He said that you have an insurance crisis in homeowner's property insurance, which we are already seeing in Florida. This is not a prediction in the future, this is a now thing. We are in the early stages of this. It is happening. Earnest Hemingway was asked: ``How did you go bankrupt?'' He said: Gradually, and then all at once. We are into gradually already, and we don't know when ``all at once'' will happen. But when it is $25 trillion out of the world's largest asset class, that is a massive economic hit to our economy, so the insurance crashes. Right behind that comes the mortgage crash. Right behind that comes the property values crash because no mortgages. And that leads to another recession, according to the chief economist of Freddie Mac, the American mortgage giant. And he made that prediction of insurance crash to mortgage crash, to property values crash, to national economic crash based just on the risk to coastal properties. You see here how they use the ocean tearing away at the underpinnings of the real estate. He was looking at coastal property risks. He was talking about a coastal property values crash. Well, guess what. Coastal risk now has an evil sibling that is just as bad and may be worse, which is wildfire risk. Look at what happened to L.A. Look at how wildfire seasons have become year-round in parts of the West. Look how wildfire area has expanded beyond traditional wildfire risk areas. Between coastal risk and wildfire risk, our insurance markets are taking a beating, and that is the cascade into economic recession. A third of our debt comes from economic hits to our economy--COVID and 2008. So if we are going to be serious about the deficit and about debts, we have to be serious about the major risks to the economy. So The Economist is one of these warnings. But just to show how serious this is, I want to go through a couple of others. Allianz. Allianz is one of the biggest insurance companies in the world. And one of its board members just wrote an article saying climate change, if we don't fix it soon, is going to be the end of the insurance industry business model. And that is going to cascade into other parts of the economy where insurance is essential to support the other industry. Well, mortgages is an obvious one. But there are others because throughout the financial system, there are deals that are held together because of insurance policies. So he predicted--the headline was really extreme--the headline was ``End of Capitalism.'' I don't know if that is true, but you can sure as heck expect a very significant economic wipeout as the insurance markets collapse in the face of unpredictable risk. So that was Allianz. Jay Powell, Chairman of the Fed, wants nothing to do with climate. He doesn't want to talk about it. He is not green one bit. But he testified about 3 weeks ago in the Senate Banking Committee that in 10 to 15 years, there will be whole regions of the country where you can't get a mortgage any longer. There is that cascade--no insurance, no mortgage, property value crash, recession. The Fed Chair is confirming that domino. In 10 to 15 years we will fall. The mortgage bankers--my God, talk about a group that is not green. The mortgage bankers have written a report called ``The Impact of Climate Change on Housing and Housing Finance.'' Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the executive summary of that report be printed in the Record at the end of my remarks. You have The Economist magazine, which is not green at all, a very conservative, international publication. You have Allianz, one of the insurance giants of the world. You have the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. You have the Mortgage Bankers Association. What else have we got? Well, the Financial Stability Board. The Financial Stability Board is the board that warns the World Banking system of risks to the World Banking system that it has to prepare for. What did they just warn the World Banking system? Better get ready for this risk--better get ready for this risk for two reasons, actually. One is when the insurance crash wipes out mortgages, it wipes out a huge revenue part of the banking system. The second is, after you lost all that revenue because mortgages aren't available in whole regions of the country any longer, then you have the problem that banks are solvent or not, in large part, dependent on what is called their loan- to-value ratio. Their value depends on the value of the properties against which they hold the mortgages. If the value of a property crashes because it no longer can support a mortgage and can't be sold to anybody except somebody who can pay cash or because the carrying costs of the property insurance have gotten so great if it goes from $4,000 to $5,000 a year to $16,000 to $20,000 a year, that crashes the value of that property. And when that property value goes down, the bank has to keep track of that. And when they go underwater on a loan, when the amount that they have loaned out becomes less than the value of the property, and when that is happening across the board, particularly for regional banks in a region where you can't get mortgages any longer and property values have crashed, you have a serious banking solvency problem. And that is what the Financial Stability Board reports. I would commend that report to anybody who can put up with complicated economic terminology. It is not a fun read. But it is pretty telling when the body responsible for economic stability in the world's banking system is putting out these warnings. So you have The Economist, you have Allianz, you have Chairman Powell, you have the mortgage bankers, you have the Financial Stability Board. I mentioned already Freddie Mac's chief economist who explained how this cascade works. More recently, another group called First Street just stood up, and they showed what is going to happen in specific areas where property values are going to crash; where premiums are going to soar--property values down by as much as 100 percent, total wipeout--and premiums quadrupling in places. And then Deloitte comes along, the corporate consulting firm--not green at all--and they warn that if we screw up on climate, if we continue to screw up on climate versus if we get it right, the swing 50 years out from now will be $220 trillion in world GDP. So I spent a lot of time talking about this in the Budget Committee. Did my Republican friends want to hear about it? No. Why not? Because that party is funded by the fossil fuel industry and can't bear a serious discussion about climate; can't bear looking at the lies that the fossil fuel industry dispenses in industrial levels. They have a whole apparatus of fraud--front groups with funny names that constantly put out false information; people who pretend to be scientists and cook up fake science that comes not out of labs and research but out of Madison Avenue propaganda firms. So what they said to me over and over again was: Why are you talking about climate? That doesn't have anything to do with the budget. You need to be talking about deficits. You need to be talking about debt. They are all about how our children are going to have their futures imperiled by deficits and debt. Well, they are going to have their futures imperiled by climate change is what all pretty much anybody who is sensate still is showing. But, oh my gosh, how much talk I had to listen to, how much self- serving, self-aggrandizing talk I had to listen to about how we really, really had to deal with our debt and deficit problem. Well, look at what they are up to now. The Senate budget that the Republicans are pushing blows the deficit through the roof by 2035-- doubles it, our national debt. I said the deficit, I meant our national debt. We are talking here about $60 trillion in debt. Where was ``we want to raise it to $60 trillion in debt'' when I was getting all these lectures in the Budget Committee from all my Republican friends about how the most important thing was our national debt? The House budget resolution is no better. It is just as bad--$30 trillion goes to $56 trillion. And if you look at some of the numbers here, we got a letter--I ask unanimous consent to have the letter printed at the end of my remarks. It comes from the Joint Committee on Taxation. It is their job to review these things. It begins: Dear Senator Whitehouse, Senator Wyden, Mr. Neal and Mr. Boyle: This letter is in response to your request for revenue estimates to extend permanently the individual tax provisions-- Et cetera. We asked: What is it really going to cost for the Republicans to do this stuff? Well, here at the bitter end, you actually get to the numbers. The numbers are the total of the tax provisions just over 10 years. Just to like here goes up $4.6 trillion. And then because you have to borrow money to fund that additional $4.6 trillion, the Republicans want to add to our debt. The actual number settles out at $5.5 trillion. And $5.5 trillion is added to our national debt after all of those lectures--after all of those lectures--I got about how you couldn't pay any attention to climate change while their pockets are stuffed with fossil fuel money, metaphorically. Instead, we get really focused on the deficit, and the first chance they have to focus on the deficit and the debt, what are they doing? It is up $5.5 trillion--trillion with a ``t.'' If you throw in the new tax breaks on top of the 5.5 that we asked about, it goes to $7 trillion--$7 trillion. The Senate Republicans--here is where it gets really sick because they are cheating the budget process. They get to the lie that this won't cost money by cheating. They are planning to simply ignore what the Congressional Budget Office said and ignore what the Joint Committee on Taxation calculated. They are planning to dodge the Parliamentarian and just make up numbers on their own and ignore what the statute says contrary to five decades of law and practice. The budget law, for instance, includes a section telling CBO how to count tax cuts. They ignore that section. They just make up their own numbers. You don't need to be a budget expert to figure out that $7 trillion in tax cuts is going to worsen the budget. It is going to worsen the debt. In fact, we kept bringing in witnesses to talk about the debt and the deficit, and the Republicans could never produce a witness who said that tax cuts paid for themselves. Scott Hodge from the conservative Tax Foundation, who was a witness, called to the Budget Committee by the Republicans, said that the Tax Foundation modeled every iteration of what became the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which is the Trump tax scam 1.0, and that at no time did their model ever predict that it would pay for itself. The model does not estimate that virtually any tax cut will pay for itself. That is the kind of myth that has been created. So it is really frustrating to hear colleagues who lectured me and lectured me and lectured me, as their excuse to ignore the very plain climate economic risk we are facing, about how we really had to deal with the debt, and then when they have the chance, what they are doing is they are blowing it through the roof, and to do that, they are going to hack away at Medicaid. At the end of the day, most of this goes to the very rich. The original thought was that, at $4 trillion, it was $2 trillion-plus just going to a very small group of extremely rich people and very big corporations. Our Tax Code is riddled with corruption. We could raise a lot of money and actually fix the deficit by pulling out the corruption. But the big businesses would squeal and scream because they don't like paying taxes, and for a long time, they haven't had to. In what some of my colleagues seem to think are the good old days-- that is the 1950s, the good old days in America when men were men and life was good--corporations contributed 30 percent of America's revenue. Corporations contributed 30 percent of America's revenue. Look at what has happened to it year after year after their lobbyists have come here and after they have written checks to Republican super PACs after they have worked this building. They are down to about--under 10 percent. They have been down as low as 6 percent. By the way, it is not because corporations got smaller and poorer in that time. They are bigger than ever. The fossil fuel industry alone made the biggest profits in corporate history by gouging American consumers after international prices went up post Putin's invasion of Ukraine. There is plenty we could do to solve the debt problem, but--oh, my God--the flagrancy of the lie about concern about the deficit is pretty stunning. The other thing that they have said--and I will close with this. The other thing that they have said is: Oh, we have to defend the filibuster at all costs. Oh, we can't do the nuclear option. Oh, the only time we possibly ever use the nuclear option is when the Democrats did it first. So they did a nuclear option to put their people on the Supreme Court and blamed it on Harry Reid because he had done the same thing for the DC Circuit after they had put up a firewall around the DC Circuit. But since then, it has been: We will never, never, never, never, never, never blow up the filibuster. We will never use the nuclear option. Well, here is where we are with the Parliamentarian right now: They have done an end run around getting a determination on whether this stunt that they are pulling by pretending that these tax cuts don't have any economic effect and don't add to the debt will get reviewed by the Parliamentarian. I will tell you one thing: There have probably been documents brought to the Senate floor before that contained a lie, but I can't think of one that has been brought to the Senate floor that both contained a lie and that lie's own rebuttal in the same document. The lie is that all of these tax cuts for billionaires and big corporations won't add to the debt. That is imaginary. That is fake. That is not economically possible, but they say it. Then, in the same document, they lift the debt limit by $5 trillion. If these tax breaks don't have any cost and don't add to the debt, why do they need to raise the debt limit by $5 trillion? The problem is, it is very hard to go to the Parliamentarian's Office and say: This is legit because, at the same time, I am lying that it is free and adding $5 trillion in debt limit because it obviously isn't free. When you are dealing with the debt limit, you are dealing with banks and the Treasury and people who can't participate in the Senate hothouse lie that this doesn't cost $5 trillion, and so you have these two things side by side in the same bill--the lie and its own rebuttal baked right in. How do you get that by the Parliamentarian? It is very hard to do, so they skip. But the problem is that sooner or later, there will be a parliamentary ruling. Maybe they hope that they have so much steam built up that the Parliamentarian will just roll over or maybe this whole thing just blows up and the Parliamentarian says: No, you can't do that. You have a lie and its own rebuttal in the exact same document. You can't pretend this is a true thing. Therefore, it is not compliant with the budget laws for all of the reasons I mentioned earlier: out of compliance with the CBO; out of compliance with Joint Committee on Taxation; out of compliance with proper reporting--all of it. So what does that mean? That means that at some point, the time will come when the Parliamentarian says ``nope'' and blows the whistle. They think that that is going to happen already, which is why they are doing the end run. When the day comes and it actually happens, that is when they will have to go to the nuclear option because otherwise this all will have been in vain. So we are on a path to the nuclear option. Pretty much everything Republicans have claimed to stand for is destroyed in this process--the hypocrisy alert about the deficit and the debt--and now they are raising it by huge numbers. When you have to put real numbers in the document, you simply deny them even though the debt numbers prove the lie. When there are budget rules that we have honored for decades, they are going to ignore them, just blow it through. There is the end run around the Parliamentarian, folks. Then, at the end, they go nuclear after saying: We would never, never, never, never, never, never do that. This whole thing is such a con and such a shame and will cause so much damage to families dependent on Medicaid--all so they can give billions of dollars in tax breaks to big corporations and to billionaires, who don't need it. In fact, their share of Federal revenue has gone down from like over 30 percent to below 10 percent. They have just walked away from their responsibilities to help fund America. They left that on the backs of regular taxpayers. And it is not enough for them to be under 10 percent; they want more. They want to get that down to--what?--5 percent? 4 percent? nothing and be complete freeloaders? This thing is an embarrassment. I will say I rest my case, but when you actually look at their debt limit numbers, maybe I should say they rest my case.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Would the Senator care to engage in a brief colloquy? I ask unanimous consent that we be allowed to do so.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I was here for your point about mental health and addiction recovery care. As you will recall, you and I and others worked together to get the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act passed. That was a very bipartisan effort because the scourge of the opioid epidemic fell across all Americans. It was one of my happier and prouder moments when that bill actually got passed and then when the Appropriations Committee came behind the CARA bill and put funding in. But the bulk of the programs that we put together in CARA--bipartisan programs--were funded through Medicare, Medicaid. That is how you get reimbursement for those programs. So doesn't it seem peculiar that our colleagues on the other side who were so instrumental in pushing through that Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act to help their constituents at home and who at the time showed so much sensitivity to the needs of people going through addiction recovery, through all of the stages--from initial detox to in-house treatment, to sober living, and on to medication-assisted treatment sometimes, and then recovery support--all of that seemed to bind us together. What on Earth could be the madness that inspires them to tear all that down now, when they built it within the last decade with us?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. And if the Senator would yield on that very point.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. There is a doctrine or a principle that is kind of a tedious economic term, ``marginal utility of money.'' What it means, in very plain terms, is that if you make $60,000 a year, your last thousand dollars of income is a big deal to you. That thousand dollars makes an enormous difference in the quality of your life. You take that same thousand dollars, and you give it to somebody who is making $60 billion a year, and they don't even know it is there.