Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank my colleagues for their colloquy. I see the Senator from South Carolina, whose time we are intruding on, has come to the floor. We yield to Senator Scott.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, as my colleagues know, since 1996, the Congressional Review Act, 5 U.S.C. 801-808, has provided an important tool for Congress to provide a check on certain Agency rules. Pursuant to the statute, the Government Accountability Office polices whether an Agency action is or is not a rule for purposes of the Congressional Review Act. Under that authority, in 2023, GAO decided that certain Environmental Protection Agency actions under the Clean Air Act relating to California's emission control standards were not a rule for purposes of the Congressional Review Act. Late last month, the Trump administration Environmental Protection Agency submitted three Biden administration actions as rules under the Congressional Review Act. These actions once again related to California's emission control standards. Along with my colleagues from California, Senators Padilla and Schiff, I wrote the GAO to confirm whether or not these three actions were rules for purposes of the Congressional Review Act. On Thursday came GAO's response. They are not. Referring back to its 2023 decision, GAO concluded that ``our prior analysis and conclusion in B-334309 that the Advanced Clean Car Program Waiver Notice was not a rule for purposes of CRA because it was an order under APA would apply to the three notices at issue here.'' To help complete the Senate's record of this matter, I ask unanimous consent that the text of GAO's letter be printed in the Record.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise today to mark the centennial of the Probation Act, which was signed into law on March 4, 1925. The law allowed Federal judges to include probation as part of a person's sentence, leading to the creation of the Federal probation system that we rely on today. The probation and pretrial services system have become a backbone of the Federal judiciary and the Federal criminal justice system. Over the past 100 years, the Federal probation system has grown to employ around 7,600 personnel who work behind the scenes to assist judges and those involved in the criminal justice system. Through comprehensive investigations and reports, these officers and staff prepare judicial officers to make evidence-based decisions tailored to facts of every case. They also provide essential support and supervision to people returning home from prison, helping to rebuild lives while improving community safety. At home in Rhode Island, our Federal probation staff is at the heart of two successful programs to put people on path out of the criminal justice system for good. The HOPE Court--Helping Offenders Prepare for reEntry--launched in 2014, is a reentry court program that helps high risk and high needs individuals returning home from prison overcome challenges like substance use disorder that might lead them to reoffend. In 2021, Rhode Island created the Deferred Sentencing Program to offer a creative treatment and supervision program in place of incarceration to effectively address offender behavior, rehabilitation, and the safety of the community. Through both of these programs, probation officers and staff work with stakeholders to connect people with community services and resources that set them up for success. This week, Federal probation officers from across the country, including my home State of Rhode Island, gathered in our Nation's Capital to celebrate the progress made over the past hundred years and look ahead to its future. I extend my sincere gratitude to our Federal probation workers for dutifully protecting the communities they serve and for their commitment to promoting the fair administration of justice. As we mark this important anniversary, let us reaffirm our commitment to a criminal justice system that is fair, effective, and rehabilitative.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I want to thank our chairman for bringing us together on the Senate floor today to reaffirm a proposition that really ought not to be in any doubt, and that is the proposition that when a court has ruled on a matter, the executive and legislative branches are bound to follow the law. As the chairman said, you may choose to appeal or you may choose to obey or, if you have a hugely principled objection, you may choose to resign, but you don't get to simply disobey court orders that you don't like. Now, thankfully, a number of our Republican colleagues are on record supporting that simple proposition. The majority leader, Senator Thune, said: The courts obviously are . . . the branch of our government that calls balls and strikes and referees and I think that they've got an important role to play. I mean we have three branches of our government in this country, coequal and independent branches, and the judiciary is the one that resolves some of the differences that often occur between executive and legislative branches. Chairman Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, added: We've got a system of checks and balances, and that's what I see working. I learned in eighth grade civics about checks and balances, and I just expect the process to work its way out. Senator Hawley said: You may think that's not the right ruling, but you know, they're still the law. And Senator Kennedy said: I don't agree with all the rulings. It's often the case that I'll disagree with an opinion that a court issues, but I don't attack. I don't attack, and I don't intend to attack the legitimacy of the Federal judiciary. He, as the chairman said, advised the witnesses before: Don't ever, ever take the position that you are not going to follow a court order. So from all of that, you would think that things were fine and that this was a wasted exercise of time here on the Senate floor. But, unfortunately, it is not because at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House is constantly attacking the rule of law from all angles. And this administration is teetering on full-blown defiance of court rulings. Vice President Vance posted that ``Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.'' That is an invitation to violate court orders if the executive takes the position that its own view of what its legitimate power is, is what controls. One Senate Republican went so far as to call court orders that the administration lost a ``coup.'' Well, if there is any coup going on, it is the executive branch coup taking place in our country right now, not a court-ordered coup. The Department of Justice, which should know better--including the Solicitor General who should for sure know better--refused to say that they will always follow a court order, and many colleagues actually defended them. And then outside of the immediate danger of refusing to obey a court order is the attack on the integrity and safety of the judiciary. We have seen this in Rhode Island. A judge in Rhode Island--very respected judge, very well-known throughout our State, very well-regarded, very experienced--made the determination that the freeze order of the Trump administration was unconstitutional, which, in my view, is not even a close call. That was an easy, easy answer. Rather than respond, they dropped--what I call--the flying monkeys on him. Elon Musk maintains on X a cohort of extremists and oddballs who he can launch by targeting an individual to go and attack and harass that individual and their family. He did precisely that to this judge to the point where the judge's daughter was actually doxed by one of these extremist followers of Musk. It ought to be self-evident the judge's orders are to be followed. It ought to be self-evident if you don't like a judge's order, you don't threaten the judge or his daughter; instead, you appeal it. And the third tactic that they are using is what I call the fog bank tactic. So the order is the freeze is unconstitutional. OMB, you have to let the money go. And then people who have money coming to them properly obligated, properly appropriated try to call up and say: OK. The order says you can't hold it back. When is it coming? What do they get? No clear answers--the fog bank. The executive officials retreat behind refusal to answer emails, refusal to answer phone calls, vague answers that give no response. Sometimes even happy indications that: Don't worry. Hang out there. I am sure that we can work this out. And even in some cases: Yes, you will have access to these funds. And no matter what the answer is from the fog bank, it doesn't change the fact that the money just doesn't go. It reminds me of old bad movies of the Soviet Union where the KGB guy in the corner makes all the decisions and the nominal chief of the agency says: Oh, yes, of course we are going to do this. But unless the KGB guy signs off, the money doesn't go. In this case, it isn't the KGB guy; it is the little muskrats who are in these Departments trying to foul up the lawful flow of properly appropriated and obligated funds. That is a slo-mo contempt of these court orders. And as courts and plaintiffs dig in, I think we are going to find more and more evidence of the deliberate contumacious nature of that fog bank strategy. I yield the floor, thanking, again, our chairman for his leadership on this issue.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, first, let me thank Senator Blumenthal for this effort. It really matters. Even if it fails, it matters to our veterans to know that we tried, to know that we did not leave them out there at the mercy of Elon Musk and his little muskrats that have been running around through all of our government Agencies breaking Agencies, violating court orders, prowling through your data-- Americans, prowling through your data--and, of course, firing veterans. No President has fired more veterans than Donald Trump just in his first few weeks in office, and what it is doing to the VA and to services for veterans is deeply wrong and deeply unfortunate. In Rhode Island, we have our Providence VA health center, which is a first-class operation. Our veterans love it. It is well run. It has all sorts of new services and facilities that Senator Reed and I have worked to make sure got to the hospital. Also, it has nearly 2,500 employees. It is a big operation. We also have the Providence VA benefits office, which is such a good benefits office that if a program is being rolled out and not working someplace, they call in the Providence benefits office to try to get it working. If they are about to roll out a new program and they want to beta test it, they go to the Providence benefits office because they are good at what they do. I can't think of anything that makes them more proud than the customers they serve. They love the folks they work for. So to go through this group and slash and burn without the least logic or care from, like, these little tech bro muskrat types who have never served, have no idea what they are doing, but are just taking delight in moving fast and breaking things, to use the tech bro talk-- well, that is fine if you are a tech bro and you are playing around with equipment, but when you are dealing with our veterans and you are dealing with people's lives, running around fast, not knowing what you are doing, and breaking stuff sounds more like Thing One and Thing Two from ``The Cat in the Hat.'' This is not the responsible way veterans should be treated. I will mention just two while I am here. There is a Rhode Islander who works for our Veterans Crisis Line. It is the hotline that veterans can call in to when they are having an acute crisis of some kind, perhaps even feeling suicidal. This is not easy work. When that phone goes, you have to be on, and you have to be expert. You have to understand how to support the people who are calling in. You have to understand how to get them to the services they need. It is a life-and-death matter. This individual was fired and then rehired a few days later--or at least told they were reinstated just a few days later. But with all the scrambling going on at the VA, the VA has not reissued work credentials, and they still do not have a return-to-work date for the improper firing that never should have happened and then was rescinded but now doesn't have a proper end to the termination. It is administrative malpractice, it is stupid, and it is wrong. We have another Rhode Islander who worked at the local vet center who was also abruptly and unjustifiably terminated. As I said, it really means a lot to these people to be working for veterans. They really put their hearts into it, and they really want to do a very good job. They actually get rated on whether or not they are, in fact, doing a good job. This individual received outstanding performance ratings. It wasn't just that they threw their heart and soul into their work, their peers reviewed them and their supervisors reviewed them and said that they were outstanding performers at their work. So a letter comes to them saying that they were terminated due to poor performance. Among other things, that was a lie because they weren't poor performers. They were excellent performers. When you lie to people who are working for veterans just so you can fire them, that is a pretty loathsome way to go about serving veterans, and it is certainly a loathsome way to treat the people who dedicate their lives to taking care of veterans. If you want to go find the people who have poor performance and fire them, go find the people who have poor performance and fire them, but don't just randomly accuse high performers of poor performance, lie to them about their performance, and fire them. It is a really offensive state of affairs. It means now that vet center calls are being routed out to Colorado in a different time zone. Rhode Island--a little bit like Connecticut-- is a small State. Connecticut is a little bigger. We have our own character, we have our own nature, and we have our own, often, way of speaking. And it matters, when you pick up the phone to call the vet center, that you are not talking to somebody several time zones away in Colorado, particularly not because the phone isn't being answered because a high-performing worker was lied to about their performance and wrongly fired. There is really no excuse for that. I want to say to the folks at the Providence benefits office: Thank you. God bless you. We admire and respect what you do. We recognize that the entire VA organization has treated you as particularly expert and able, and the work you do to make sure our vets get the benefits they are due is first class. Thank you for what you do. We are grateful. And I apologize that this President and this whatever he is and his little muskrats are doing this kind of damage to the institution you so proudly serve. To the folks at the Providence VA hospital: God bless you, and thank you. You do great work. I deal with veterans all the time. Our veterans love our hospital. They are proud of our hospital. They think it is well run. They think they are well treated. The services are good. You can even get rides there. There is good parking. I mean, this hospital runs the way you would want a veterans hospital to run. So keep those little muskrats out of Rhode Island. Don't damage the services to our veterans. I hope that, as the chairman said, we can come together and fix this, but it is hard to hear about how we should come together when nobody came together from ``Muskland,'' and those little muskrats didn't check in with anybody before they went in to break stuff at these Agencies. It is a little late for togetherness when there has been none in terms of defending the work that these wonderful people do. 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. Mr. President, I am here today in opposition to the measure that we are about to vote on, which would undo a rule that regulates the release of methane into the atmosphere. Let's just start with the most basic simple proposition that methane is dangerous, it is poisonous, it is explosive. And for those reasons alone, it is something that the fossil fuel industry should not be leaking. The fossil fuel industry should be responsible about taking care of its leaks of a gas that is dangerous, poisonous, and explosive. But in addition to that immediate danger, methane is also a really, really potent greenhouse gas. If you look at the effect over a 20-year period, methane in the atmosphere is 80 times--8-0--times more dangerous than carbon dioxide. So we talk all the time about carbon emissions, carbon limits, carbon pollution. Methane is actually 80 times more dangerous. So there are two reasons why the fossil fuel industry should not be leaking large amounts of methane. First, it is dangerous, poisonous, and explosive. And, second, it is an 80 times worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. So how much methane is industry leaking, and why did we do this measure in the first place? Well, industry told the EPA for years that it was leaking about 8 million tons--8 million tons--of methane, which all by itself is a pretty big number, but it turned out that the industry was not telling the EPA the truth. It turns out that once independent sources got a chance to spot methane leaks using, for instance, satellites--this is a satellite image of a methane plume that is being released from a leak site--when they could find that--and satellites can now do that so we are beginning to know how much methane is actually being leaked and particularly when you backstop the satellite information with information from aircraft where the readings can be more sensitive than from a satellite--it turns out that what they were actually leaking was more like 32 million tons. They were only disclosing a quarter of what they were leaking, and even that 8 million that they disclosed was a pretty bad number. When you go to 32 million tons, that is a great deal of leakage of a gas that is dangerous, poisonous, explosive, and 80 times more powerful a greenhouse gas over a 20-year period than carbon dioxide. Now, you would think that, as an attribute of basic human decency, these companies that are leaking methane would go and clean it up. It is the decent thing to do, but they didn't, obviously. They didn't even disclose truthfully and accurately what they were leaking. So, when we were confronted with a 32-million-ton annual leak of poisonous, dangerous, explosive methane, and its greenhouse effects on top of that, we tried to do something about it. So what did we do? Well, we did two things: a little bit of carrot, a little bit of stick. The carrot was $1.5 billion--1.5 billion taxpayer dollars--in flatout corporate welfare to the leaking oil and gas companies so that they could use taxpayer money to clean up the mess they were making to deal with the pipes and the valves and the wells that they weren't properly maintaining and that were leaking, it turned out, 32 million tons of methane. Now, one could argue that that was a pretty poor use of taxpayer money; that a basic tenet of corporate responsibility should be: You clean up your own mess. You take care of your own equipment. That is a basic tenet of human responsibility. I don't know why it shouldn't be a basic tenet of corporate responsibility, but the measurement of 32 million tons of leakage shows that, obviously, those companies were not meeting that basic corporate tenet of responsibility. So along comes the $1.5 billion of free taxpayer money--corporate welfare--to polluters and leakers for taxpayers to pay them to clean up the problem that they were causing. I didn't love that, to tell you the truth, but it came with an incentive as well, and the incentive was, if you are still leaking methane after a certain period and if you are still leaking methane above a certain level--you had to be a big leaker yourself. It had to be a big leak, like 300 tons per leak, and you had to be in the worst sector of the oil and gas industry. If those things were true--if you had big leaks and you were a big leaker and you were in the worst performing sector of your industry--then you would be assessed a fee for the leakage, which would be an incentive, in addition to the free $1.5 billion the industry got to go out there and fix the darned pipes and valves and wells and stop the leaking. What we are doing today is saying to this industry: You can keep the $1.5 billion. We gave you that whether you used it to clean up or not. I don't know that. I don't think the jury is back on that, but they did get the $1.5 billion. But the part where you have to pay if you are still polluting, after all of this, beyond industry standards--that is what we are stripping out today. This Congressional Review Act measure specifically helps the segment of the oil and gas industry that is not even meeting oil and gas industry standards for controlling leaks. I think it is a pretty reasonable test to impose on industry leakers that they at least meet their own industry standard for leaking. This isn't some arbitrary standard that government has imposed. This isn't something that came out of the Green New Deal. This is the industry's own standard for responsibility about leaks, and you pay this fee if you don't meet your own industry standard for taking care of your equipment properly and avoiding leaks of a dangerous, explosive, poisonous greenhouse gas 80 times more dangerous than carbon dioxide. So that is where we are, and that is where we are at today. Today's vote only protects those worst industry performers who have not cleaned up their act and met their own industry standards. If there were ever an undeserving group for Congress's solicitude, that is the group. They are not even meeting their own industry standards. They are comfortable with dangerous levels of leakage beyond what even their own industry recommends as a standard, and on they go. This is just a little bit of a piece with the recent designation by the Trump administration of what ``energy'' is. The Trump administration just put out a definition of ``energy'' that doesn't include solar or wind. Most of what came online and is slated to come online in 2025 has been solar and wind. It is the booming part of our energy economy. It is where the growth is and the jobs are and the innovation is. It is also a leading energy source in red States. If you look at who is best on solar and who is best on wind, you see States like Texas; you see Iowa; you see Wyoming. They have considerable investments in solar and wind, but the Trump administration won't even call solar and wind energy. So we are in this bizarre circumstance in which the fossil fuel industry, which drives so much behavior in this body after $100 million spent on the Trump campaign that we know of--probably hundreds of millions more secretly--has gained two big things: one, a completely false definition of ``solar energy'' and ``wind energy'' as not being energy despite the fact that it is fully operational, producing electrons, and was the largest source of new additions to the grid for 2025, and they just decree: This is not energy. Why the fossil fuel industry would want that is a pretty strong signal of how low that industry will go in using its power over Congress. They will basically press the Trump administration to claim that solar energy and wind energy aren't even energy. It is a spectacularly foolish and false proposition, but bending the knee to the wishes of the fossil fuel industry appears to have no limits. This vote is the second expression of that subservience to fossil fuel because of all the things that you could do, of all the things that would help grow America's energy markets, of all the things you could do to help take care of people who live near energy facilities or people who are being subjected to harm from climate change--of all the things you could do, probably the worst one would be to take the worst performers at leaking, which shouldn't happen in the first place, who leak so badly they don't even meet their own industry standards, who for years have been falsely saying that they leaked only a quarter of what they have actually been leaking, and they are the people whom we are going to come to the rescue of. They had two choices here so that they didn't have to pay the fee for being among the worst leakers and not meeting their own industry standards. One is, clean up your darned equipment. Fix your pipes. Fix your valves. Fix your wells. Stop the leaking or at least reduce it to your own industry standard. If you do that, you don't pay this fee--or come to Congress. Use your power, the force of your dark money, of your influence, of your super PACs, of your political control, and get that requirement removed so that you can continue to leak, continue to leak methane--a dangerous, explosive, and poisonous substance--into your communities, continue to add this far more dangerous greenhouse gas to the atmosphere, and continue to meet no reasonable standard of corporate responsibility for taking care of your own gear and quitting the leaking. And you know what they chose; they chose to come here and get a free pass--a hall pass from Republicans in Congress, a hall pass from the Trump administration--so that they can continue to leak to their hearts content, never mind their culpability of not meeting their own industry standards, never mind the harm that it causes. This is an industry that lives off a pollute-for-free business model. If this industry were not allowed to pollute for free--if it had to compete, head-to-head, with hydro, geothermal, solar, wind, without the free right to pollute--we would have a very different energy mix, and they know that. So they insist on protecting their right to pollute for free, but of all the little quadrants of the industry whose pollution- for-free we should be coming to the floor to defend, those worst leakers who aren't taking care of their own equipment even to industry standards are at the bottom of any reasonable person's priority list, and yet they are the ones we are here to serve today. The backdrop to this is, of course, ``climate change,'' a term that the fossil fuel industry has so ingratiated itself with the Trump administration that it is able to excise the term--a language attack-- excise the term from official documents, a little bit like saying that ``energy'' is everything except solar and wind. That is obviously false--provably false, in fact, and a preposterous assertion--but when serving the fossil fuel industry, that is the stuff they make you do, and here you go with saying that climate change isn't real when Exxon scientists talked about its being real 30 years ago. We are driving down a path of polluter-funded falsehood that ends in very dangerous places. We have a pretty good idea of where it ends because scientists have been telling us where this goes for decades now, scientists in our major universities. I do not believe that there is a single State university, a State university with the name of the State in its name-- University of Rhode Island, for instance. I don't think there is a single State university in this country that does not teach climate change. That is how well-established climate change is as a factual proposition, and what it is going to do has been known for a long, long time. The predictions are astonishingly accurate. Here in the Senate, we heard all those predictions. The first hearing on those warnings was actually by Republican Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island in his role then as chairman of the Environmental Public Works Committee. He had a senior scientist from NASA, John Hanson, come over and describe what the science was, what we knew about what was going on. So there is a long, clear, indisputable scientific record warning us of what is coming--preview of coming attractions. But then it came here, and, here, the fossil fuel industry butted in with enormous political force, turbocharged after the Citizens United decision allowed that industry to spend unlimited amounts of money. And in the enforcement--or nonenforcement--of that decision, allowed that industry to spend those unlimited amounts of money secretly from behind front groups and through Super PACs and from other devices where the public was denied the knowledge of who was trying to influence them. The basic right of citizenship is to know who is doing what to whom on the field of politics American citizens are supposed to police with their votes. That knowledge was denied them, and that flood of industry pressure came into this Chamber. And before you knew it, climate change was suddenly a partisan issue. If you wanted to be a Republican, you had to deny climate change. It was pretty much as simple as that. Ask Bob Inglis from the House of Representatives what happened if you tried to break that grip of the fossil fuel industry on the House leadership, the fossil fuel industry grip on the House leadership on the Republican side. So the science was right all along. We failed at the politics because of improper fossil fuel industry influence, probably the most maligned and large-scale political influence campaign in American history. We yielded to it. We allowed ourselves to not heed the warnings and take the steps that would have put us on a pathway to safety. Now, having heard the scientific warnings, having failed at taking appropriate safety steps, we are now entering the third era, the era of consequences, when the stuff starts to hit the fan. And the warnings are coming from all over. Just about 2 weeks ago, the chair of the Federal Reserve testified to the Senate Banking Committee that in 10 to 15 years, it will be impossible to get a mortgage in entire regions of the country. How does that relate to climate change? That relates to climate change because climate change is creating changes in weather patterns that make it impossible for the insurance industry to predict risk. That is why insurance rates are quadruple the national average in Florida, which is first and worst into this insurance crisis because of its storm and flooding risk, because it is on the path of so many hurricanes, because the Gulf of Mexico is warming so fast that it is powering worse storms, more heavily ladened storms, with rain onto Florida's coasts. And when you can't get insurance on your home, and you go to sell it, you have got a problem because the buyer can't get a mortgage if your home is uninsurable. What the chief economists of Freddie Mac warned, the mortgage giant, is that the climate risk creates an insurance crisis, which rolls over into a mortgage crisis, which drives down property values so badly that it creates a 2008-style national economic crisis. Those aren't the only warnings. Reinsurers look at this climate mess as a business proposition. The insurance industry has to get the future right in order to do its business, and it knows that what the fossil fuel industry is saying about what is going to happen in the future is a whole pack of lies. So they are raising their rates. The reinsurance companies are looking and saying, wow, this is getting way more dangerous. We are not going to reinsure without getting a lot more money. Reinsurance rates have more than doubled since 2017. They were up as much as 40 percent in 2023 alone in some markets. So it is not just the voice of the Fed; it is not just the voice of the chief economists of Freddie Mac; it is the reinsurance industry. Go below the reinsurance industry to the insurance industry and look at the first and worst place, Florida. All the major insurers are out-- pulled the plug. Gone. Done. Pop-up insurers have come to fill the gap. Twelve to fifteen of them have gone bankrupt already. And when they go bankrupt, they don't pay claims, and Floridians are left stuck behind an insurer that was not solvent. Florida has had to stand up its own homeowners insurance company, which now has a huge share of the market and an even bigger share of the risk because they have allowed the other insurers to come in and cherry-pick out the lowest risk properties. So Florida is carrying a liability right now on homeowner's insurance that is greater than its entire State debt. If you want to look at the solvency of a State, look at what Florida's risk is for its property insurance companies, citizens' property insurance, and its backup fund that comes in when the pop-up insurance companies go bust and somebody else has to come in and pay the claims. The insurance industry, which has to look accurately at the future is also telling us this is deadly, deadly serious. There is an international Financial Stability Board whose job is to look at the world banking industry, the world banking sector, and warn of risks to the banking sector. They just put out a comprehensive report on the danger that climate change poses to the banking sector. It comes in a couple of ways. One is the one I just described. When banks can't issue mortgages, they lose a huge revenue proposition. So they get hurt in the ``insurance to mortgage to market value to economic crash'' cascade. But, also, as those values fall--let's say you went from carrying a $4,000 carrying cost for your property insurance to a $20,000 carrying cost. The present value of $20,000 every year into the future as long as you are going to own that home, diminishes the value of that home. It doesn't just diminish it for you and for the next buyer, it diminishes it for the bank that holds your mortgage. It is really important to banks that they have enough collateral to back their loan. Their loan-to-value ratio is what helps determine their solvency. So the International Financial Stability Board is warning banks around the world: Look out. The climate crisis is coming at you and for your solvency. This was, perhaps, said best by The Economist magazine in April, which led with a cover article warning of the next housing disaster and saying that ``the severe weather brought about by greenhouse-gas emissions is shaking the foundations of the world's most important asset class''--real estate. The number that they put to that risk that is shaking the foundations of the world's largest asset class is $25 trillion. A $25 trillion hit to the world's largest asset class. In the United States, a new report by First Street, which is a technical firm that looks at flooding risk for a whole variety of corporate clients but also publishes as well--they just published a report that climate change could erase $1.4 trillion in real estate value by 2055--i.e., in the 30-year mortgage period--a $1.4 trillion hit to real estate values here in the United States. While $25 trillion dollars was The Economist's global number; First Street's is $1.4 trillion here in the United States. Trillions are big, big numbers. And when it is hitting people in their most prized and valuable family asset--their homes--it is a very, very dangerous proposition. Here is what The Economist said: The impending bill-- For climate harms-- is so huge, in fact, it will have grim implications not just for personal prosperity-- i.e., the homeowner-- but also for the financial system. Hence the report from the International Financial Stability Board about the need to shore up the international financial system. Here is how it goes down, they say: If the size of the risk suddenly sinks in, and borrowers and lenders alike realize the collateral underpinning so many transactions is not worth as much as they thought, a wave of repricing will reverberate through financial markets. Punch line: Climate change, in short, could prompt the next global property crash. Instead of dealing with this--even as Americans are already seeing their property insurance prices rise and double, are getting more and more nonrenewal notices to get them off the company--what are we doing? We are helping out the absolutely worst offenders at climate leakage. Here is Deloitte. I will close with this. Deloitte is a corporate consultancy. This is not Green New Deal. This is a corporate consultancy: If we allow climate change to go unchecked, it will ravage our global economy. For the United States, the damages to 2070-- Which was their prediction date-- are projected to reach $14.5 trillion, a lifetime loss of nearly $70,000 for each working American. And we are not even talking about that seriously. We are here, instead, to let off the hook that segment of the oil and gas industry that is the worst polluters, that doesn't even meet their own industry standards, and that can get away from the fee that we will be voting down now by simply meeting industry standards. This is a shameful moment for the Senate. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here to join my colleagues in objecting to President Trump's fake energy emergency, which is part of the Trump continuing strategy to hurt families and help billionaires-- in this case, the fossil fuel billionaires who put at least $100 million into getting him elected, probably a good deal more because so much of the money was dark money. We don't know. But there is every reason to believe it was multiple hundreds of millions of dollars spent to get him elected and it is payback time for the big donors. Tough bounce to the families whose bills are going to go up as a result. How are families bills going to go up? For starters, renewables are less expensive than fossil fuel. When you add them to the mix, the grid runs on a cue, and it takes the cheapest sources and puts them in the line. And as you demand more and more electricity, you finally get to the more expensive energy sources. And inexpensive renewables coming in drives out the expensive fossil fuel from the top, and it lowers energy costs overall. So when you stop doing that, the most expensive plants have to come back online, and that will raise utility bills but, most importantly to Trump, profits for fossil fuel billionaires. We make ourselves, with this, more vulnerable to the OPEC fossil fuel cartel, the oil and gas cartel. They raise prices by manipulating international markets. The American oil and gas companies follow up. Even if they don't need to make that much money, they will follow the OPEC prices. As a result, they have declared the biggest profits in the history of humankind at the expense of American families both at the fuel pump and at home on their electric bills. It doesn't matter to this administration. It is a win for the fossil fuel billionaires who paid good money to get this administration in, and families will be hurt to help the fossil fuel billionaires. Another one is LNG export. What happens in the natural gas market when you take our natural gas, liquefy it, and send it offshore someplace else? It doesn't go into the pipelines here in America. It pinches the supply available to Americans, which raises prices for Americans, unless you want to repeal the economic laws of supply and demand. So over and over and over again, these pro-fossil fuel, mega donor policies hurt American families, raise families' electric utility bills, and provide huge benefits back to the big donors who spent good money to get him into office. Who gets hit the most when you attack solar and attack wind power? Well, here are the top solar States by installed capacity. Start with California. Obviously, it is the fifth biggest economy in the world, but the next four are Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona. There are a lot of red voters in those States who are going to pay the price for this bad policy. Look over to wind. The top State is Texas, the next is Iowa, the next is Oklahoma, and the next is Kansas. Again, red States will pay the price for this donor-oriented policy. The Trump administration doesn't even concede that solar and wind power are energy. When they use the word ``energy,'' they only mean fossil and nuclear. They have literally defined solar and wind out of the energy mix by a process of vocabulary magic. So we are headed for a bad place, and consumers are going to pay--all to make big fossil fuel barons even richer than they are. The shame here is that there actually is an emergency out there. There actually is an energy emergency out there, and the energy emergency is happening because fossil fuel emissions are changing the weather and the natural systems of the Earth so that the risk of weather disasters, whether it is wildfire or flooding, is getting so bad that property insurers can't keep up. So we are having a crisis in property insurance markets that is fully developed in Florida, and California is not far behind. What the chief economist for our mortgage giant, Freddie Mac, has warned of is that the property insurance crisis morphs into a mortgage crisis because if you can't get property insurance on a property, guess what else you can't get on a property--you can't get a mortgage on it. And the mortgage crisis devolves into a property values crash because if you can't find buyers because nobody can get a mortgage on that property, your property's value just collapsed. Then that morphs into a nationwide economic crash on the scale of 2008. That is what they said just about coastal property values. Now we have the wildfire risk coming along side by side--the evil sibling. So is there an emergency? Yes. It is coming on, and it is coming on soon enough that the Fed Chair, in testimony just over a week ago here in the Senate, said: After a decade goes by, there will be regions of the United States of America where you can't even get a mortgage any longer. What is that going to do to property values and people's homes? By the way, if that is the case for 10 years out, markets are going to start to move sooner. So this is a problem that is on us now. We have a real emergency coming. It is going to clobber us economically. Our friends on the Republican side don't want to listen to us because of all the fossil fuel money that goes into their party. The President doesn't want to listen to it because he got paid so many hundreds of millions of dollars in political funds to get himself elected. But nature's rules can't be repealed by man. This is coming on. We ought to be prepared for it. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, today is a sad and discouraging--even disgraceful--day here in the Senate. The vote that we have just taken signals the utter and complete subservience of the Trump administration and the Republican Party to the polluters of the fossil fuel industry. To the extent that there is any justification for fossil fuel pollution, leaks from pipes and valves and wells that aren't properly maintained by fossil fuel companies are probably the most shameless form of pollution, and yet that is precisely what this vote that we have just taken protects and even encourages. Let's start, for a moment, with why methane matters. We are well into a climate crisis. We have been warned about it for decades. The scientists, God bless them, actually got it right. Even Exxon's scientists got it right. And, on the basis of all that science, it then fell to us here in this building, in Congress, to react prudently and sensibly and steer our course away from the worst dangers that the scientists had so well and accurately predicted. Of course, we did not. We did not for the worst of all possible reasons, which was improper influence from the fossil fuel industry itself, which was supercharged by the Citizens United decision that allowed the industry to flood unlimited amounts of money into politics and, worse, unlimited amounts of money into politics secretly through front groups and various anonymizing screens so that citizens and the public were deprived of knowing who it was who was actually in their living rooms, on their televisions, telling them lies about climate change. Front groups with phony names like Heartland Institute and Americans for Prosperity shielded the fact that this was a self-interested industry, using political clout of the worst kind to protect its right to pollute for free. Nobody should have the right to pollute for free, but this entitled industry fought to corrupt this body in order to protect its pollute-for-free business model. Amidst all the pollution that this industry emits, carbon dioxide is the gas that is most discussed. We talk about carbon content. We talk about carbon dioxide limits. We talk about carbon emissions, but methane--methane--actually, is even more dangerous in the short term than carbon dioxide. These gases go up into the atmosphere, where they have what is called a greenhouse effect. They trap more heat, which warms up the planet. Over a 20-year period, methane is more than 80 times more dangerous than carbon dioxide. A lot is going to go wrong in the next 20 years during which this methane will have that 80-times effect compared to carbon dioxide. Methane is explosive; it is poisonous; it is a pollutant. What this bill tried to do was to get the fossil fuel industry--get these big companies--to clean up the methane that they were just leaking into the atmosphere, making a complete mess in really giant plumes. We have been able, recently, to detect these plumes from above, from satellites even. So here is just one satellite image--this is on Google Earth--of one methane plume, and we are allowing immense amounts of methane into the atmosphere. The fossil fuel industry, for years, told the EPA that they were releasing 8 million tons of methane per year. Well, 8 million tons of methane per year, when you consider that it is 80 times as bad as carbon dioxide--that gets you to a pretty big number of carbon dioxide equivalent and a pretty big danger to our national well-being, but it wasn't 8 million tons. The industry did not tell the truth to the EPA. As it turned out, when the Environmental Defense Fund actually put up a satellite to measure this and then flew airplanes over the plume to get even more distinct clarity out of the signals--it turns out that the fossil fuel industry was leaking 32 million tons of methane into the atmosphere--leaking. This is pipes that they didn't maintain, valves that they didn't maintain, wells that they didn't properly close--leaking. Ordinarily, just to be a good citizen, just to be a decent individual, if you were making a big mess that affected other people, you would stop it; you would clean it up; you might even apologize for the mess that you had made. Not the fossil fuel industry. But we needed to solve the problem of 32 million tons of methane being leaked by this industry every year. They sure weren't going to do it on their own. They wouldn't even tell the EPA the truth about how much they were emitting. This is natural gas that if it weren't being leaked out into the atmosphere would have gone on through those pipes to an end user. They could have actually sold it. This is an industry that was so lazy and so sloppy and so cheap that it wouldn't even maintain its own equipment to prevent it from leaking and spilling out. Something had to be done, so we worked with the Presiding Officer's predecessor, who was an ardent advocate for the fossil fuel industry, to get a measure into the Inflation Reduction Act that would deal with the problem of 32 million tons of methane negligently leaked by the fossil fuel industry into the atmosphere because they couldn't be bothered to clean up their own mess and maintain properly their own equipment. And what did we come up with? We came up with a pretty fair deal for the industry. The industry was going to get a handout, a government handout, of $1.5 billion to spend in going out and cleaning up the pipes and the valves and the wells that they darned well should have been cleaning up on their own already. It should not take a government handout. It should not take corporate welfare to this industry to have them maintain their facilities safely and properly and responsibly. But, to solve the problem, we agreed. OK. You have been polluting like crazy for decades. You have been lying about how much you have been polluting. You have been negligent about maintaining your own equipment so that this leakage does not happen, and for that, we are going to reward you with 1.5 billion taxpayer dollars for you to do the work you should have been doing anyway. That was not that welcomed as you can imagine for me and, say, for taxpayers on Rhode Island, who were on the receiving end of so much of this. What we got in return for that $1.5 billion government handout of corporate welfare to this industry was a provision that, if they kept leaking, when they kept leaking, they would pay a reasonable fee to give them an incentive to knock off the leaking. When I say a reasonable fee, let's start with the proposition that they shouldn't have been leaking in the first place. The fee, first of all, would only apply to major leaks--300 tons and more. It would only apply to companies that were below the methane leak standards set by their own industry trade group. So it actually allowed these companies to keep leaking for free as long as they were being as responsible as their own industry trade group said they should be. So this fee would be limited to those companies whose corporate behavior was so bad that it didn't even meet the standards of their own industry trade group, and they could get out of paying the fee by simply using that $1.5 billion or money of their own to go and clean up their equipment and maintain their plants enough that they met the standard of their own friendly industry trade group. That is what was accomplished in the Inflation Reduction Act--$1.5 billion into the pockets of polluters to encourage them to clean up their mess in return for which they would agree, if they kept at it and were doing worse than their own trade association recommended, then they would have to pay a fee to give them an incentive to knock it off, which by the way, is Econ 101. This is not Republican versus Democrat. This is not conservative versus liberal. This is Econ 101. Even Milton Friedman, the legendary conservative economist, acknowledged that if you are polluting, whether it is dumping sewage in a river or methane in the air, you need to pay the cost of that harm. Economists have fancy words for it. They call it negative externalities. But everybody who understands that you clean up your own mess understands the morality of that proposition. Good morals here is also good economics. And why is it important to do that? It is important to do that because, otherwise, you are giving a market participant a subsidy. Imagine the two factories side by side on the river. One is dumping all of its waste into the river. The other is paying good money to make sure that its waste is disposed of, instead of dumped into the river. You don't want that to happen. So you put the cost of the negative externality--the waste being thrown into the river--back onto that company, and now you have fair market competition again. Otherwise, you have a subsidy to the polluter dumping their waste in the river, and that is not good economics. That is not market economics. Very often, our friends on the other side of the aisle talk about the importance of market economics: Let the market have its way. Yes, until it is the big polluters--until it is the big polluters-- and then it is pollute for free. It is subsidize them by giving them the uneconomic, immoral, and unhealthy right to pollute for free. That is where this deal settled: a billion and a half to the industry into its pockets and free corporate welfare to do what it should have been doing all along, to clean up its mess. And in return, if you are below your own industry standards, you have got to pay a fee. That is what was undone today. That is what this vote was all about. This vote was all about saying: We don't care if you are the worst performers in this industry. We don't care if you are the most irresponsible performers in this industry. We don't care if you are emitting way above your own trade group's industry standards. Because you are the fossil fuel industry, you get special privilege. You don't have to maintain your equipment. Let the methane roar. Rip it out into the atmosphere. Have at it. We don't care. Oh, and, by the way, thanks for all the money you put into our pockets along the way, into our political funds. That is where we are right now. This was a really, really despicable act by the fossil fuel industry to have this done here today. We have been at this for a while. We have known about climate change for a long time. We have known what methane and carbon dioxide and other polluting gases did when they got up into the atmosphere. We are seeing it happen around us. I will mention particularly what is happening in the oceans because the oceans are a pretty darn honest witness, a pretty darn honest bellwether of the harms of climate change. If you care about the oceans, if you know anything about them, you will know that the oceans are warming. You will notice that fisheries are changing. Fish that used to be available to local fishermen are no longer there. They have had to move as the oceans warmed. You will notice that coral reefs are dying off, which are the nurseries of the ocean, which is where so many of the fish that we then later take into our diets are born and nurtured or come for food and sustenance. You would know that, as the oceans are warming, they rise because heat expands water, and that along our shores, you see that rise. Here is what is happening in my home State. This is what we are looking at. All of this blue area here--all of that--all of that is land. All of that is land, where people have homes, where people have businesses, where people have investments. And with sea level rising, this is the prediction for what is going to be under water. This is the prediction of what we are going to lose, how the map of my State is going to have to be redrawn so that the fossil fuel industry can keep polluting for free. There is a real cost to this in real people's lives. This is our historic Providence City Hall. This is an image of what is going to happen. It is going to be like Venice. You will be able to come up to the front steps of it in a boat. That is going to be really expensive, really damaging. Here is Barrington, RI. It is kind of a bedroom community. It serves as the residence for a lot of people who work over in Providence. It has a lot of beautiful homes there. But look at what happens when the seas rise. It is like hollowed. You don't build a dike around it. It is under water. That is a massive public works project, a massive engineering project, a massive risk. And it is one that is brought on by fossil fuel pollution, by the fossil industry's insistence that it has to pollute for free, and by the harm that that causes in the oceans. Let me give you a scale on the kind of heat that is going into the oceans, because you have to measure it by something called a zettajoule. If you know anything about science or even engineering, you know what a joule is. It is the unit of measurement of heat energy. A zettajoule is that unit of heat energy with 21 zeroes behind it--21 zeroes behind it. A million has six zeroes behind it. This is 21 zeroes behind it. It is a massive, enormous number. To put human scale on how massive and enormous that number is, the entire production of energy by the human species on the planet Earth every year is only one-half of a zettajoule. Everything that we run-- the cars, the motors, the furnaces, the boilers, all of it, from India to China, Africa to the United States, the whole globe around--all of our energy production consumption adds up to one-half of a zettajoule. And for the price of the fossil fuel component of that half zettajoule that we all live on, we are dumping 14 zettajoules of heat into the ocean every year. It is a 30-to-1 ratio. The emissions from fossil fuels into the atmosphere actually magnify the direct heat from the energy consumption. So if you want to know why the oceans are warming, 14 zettajoules of heat, nearly 30 times the entire energy production of the planet Earth, is going into the oceans. And that does not bode well for us. With all this evidence out there that the scientists saw, the fossil fuel barons started getting a little nervous. They liked a pollute-for- free business model. In fact, they probably realized that they couldn't compete with clean energy unless they had a pollute-for-free business model. They knew they needed to get to work to protect their pollute-for- free business model. So they began to set up a comprehensive, covert political operation to protect that pollute-for-free business model. It actually began with the tobacco industry's front groups. When it became clear how bad tobacco was for smokers' health, how bad it was for people getting secondary smoke, the tobacco industry went into action, and they set up a whole array of phony tobacco-funded front groups that could pretend they were grassroots movements. They could pretend they were science groups. They ran a complicated operation to fend off Congress from doing something about the health costs and consequences of tobacco smoking. Then along came the U.S. Department of Justice, in a better day, when it was willing to take on hard things, and it brought a lawsuit against the tobacco industry, asserting that that whole array of tobacco industry front groups was a vehicle for propagating fraud; that the message that tobacco was not dangerous was wrong, was false, was flatout fraudulent, and that the tobacco industry knew it. The case went to trial here in the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, and the Department of Justice won a thumping victory in a decision that ran a little over a thousand pages. God bless that trial judge who put so much work into listening to all of the evidence and put together such a powerful and voluminous record of the fraud of the tobacco industry, so that when it was appealed up to the circuit court of appeals, it was a slam-dunk win for the Department of Justice in the appeal. When they tried to get it overturned at the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court said: Oh, no--no, no, no, no. So the decision stood. The decision was this. It was actually fairly simple for the thousand pages. The effect was fairly simple, almost biblically simple. It said to the tobacco industry: Thou shalt lie no more. And, by the way, you have to go back and clean up and straighten out the lying you already did. But the real punch was ``thou shalt lie no more.'' So if the tobacco industry couldn't lie anymore about its product, then this whole array of front groups that the tobacco industry had set up was out of business. What are you going to do if you are a paid liar for an industry to try to protect it from Congress? Well, guess what. Along came the fossil fuel industry looking at a very similar problem: The dangers of its product and the danger that Congress would actually do something to mitigate the dangers of that product. And, of course, the tobacco industry lying apparatus had a lot of experience in how to look real, how to put up fake science that pretended to be real, how to use Madison Avenue sloganeering to convince people of things that weren't true, how to pretend to be grassroots when it was actually funded by Big Industry. So the fossil fuel industry picked all that up right away, but, of course, that wasn't enough so they actually expanded on that. Academic researchers who have looked at the fossil fuel industry's climate denial operation have tagged as many as 100 different front groups, all operating ``coordinatedly,'' like a bunch of disinformation keys on the same disinformation piano. When one got badly burned for being too phony, well, you would retire that one, and you would pop up a new one with a new phony-baloney name. For a long time, they were featuring heroic characters like George C. Marshall and Founding Fathers when they were doing their naming. But it was a massive, massive, massive political operation to deny the reality of the harm associated with the industry's product--exactly like the tobacco industry, although amped up on steroids. But it wasn't enough just to put the fraudulent information out there pretending, for instance, that climate change was a hoax. Even their own scientists knew it wasn't a hoax. But admitting that it was real, revealing what their own scientists had told them would mean that Congress would come and behave responsibly, put a price perhaps on the pollution, make them obey not only moral commands but economic rules. And that would have put them at a disadvantage. So, instead, they chose to lie and to lie and to lie and to lie. They also chose to come here and spend money in politics--immense amounts of money in politics. As I said, that all got supercharged by the Citizens United decision. The Citizens United decision said: If you are a big industry, the limits are off. You can spend as much as you want. Go for it. And in the way in which the Supreme Court administered that decision, they also allowed the unlimited money to be spent secretly from behind masks, through front groups, so that the citizens of this country who are supposed to police our political battles and make informed judgments about our political battles were denied the most basic information about who was wearing whose jersey, who is on whose team, who is telling me this stuff. I make fun that the groups had names like Rhode Islanders for Peace and Puppies and Prosperity, but if you went to look at the phony front group with a ridiculous name like that, you would find that it was located in a post office box or that it shared space with another organization and didn't have any real employees--or that it was one of a nest of related front groups that all shared common space and employees and would change their names like moving the masks place to place to keep up the pretense that this was real. And the money poured in. The money poured in. And it allowed the industry to be able to go to party leaders and say: If you will get your party members to shut up about climate change, to shut up about the danger of our product, to turn off the voices of, for instance, Republicans like Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island, who hosted the first hearing into the dangers of climate change--shut them up--if you will shut them up and if you will line up behind us, we can give you unlimited amounts of money. We can give you all the money you could possibly need to win races, and we can hide that it is us. This money can come through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It can come through something called Americans for Prosperity. It can come through something called the Heartland Institute. It can come through, in some cases, multiple hops, like Russian nesting dolls, to hide who was the original donor from the fossil fuel industry. All of that apparatus, all of that scheme emerged after Citizens United. Our political system is now rotten with fossil fuel money. We have things like super PACs that didn't even used to exist, but they are useful because you can put $100 million into a super PAC and send it into a particular race and just blow up the adversary. And because the super PAC only has to report the immediate donor, you just launder your money through a corporate entity so the name of the fake group is described as the name of the donor, and the real donor--whether it is Marathon Petroleum or Exxon oil or whoever it is--is not available to the public. We, as citizens, are deprived of that most basic piece of information. So all that money poured in, and sure enough, Republican interest in doing something about climate change evaporated. Bob Inglis was the House Member who had the temerity to insist on continuing to work on climate change. Blasted out of his seat in a primary despite a near- 100-percent conservative voting record. The signal was clear: If you are in with us, we will take care of you. If you are not, you are out. You are out of the party, even. So this covert scheme has been operating for a long, long time with lots of shifting front groups. It must cost--it is hard to tell because it is dark money; it is hidden. Some of it, you would repeat it, if you ran it through five different front groups, so it is hard to know what the real number is. But it is in the billions. It is in the billions. And why does it make sense to spend that kind of money to meddle improperly in politics and prevent Congress from meeting its responsibilities to the American public? Why is it worth spending billions to do that? It is worth spending billions to do that because it saves you hundreds of billions. The International Monetary Fund is not a green group. It is an economic group. It pays economists to study stuff. And the International Monetary Fund has studied how much harm the fossil fuel industry does to America with this negative externalities subsidy. There are actually two subsidies. There are the direct subsidies, where Congress appropriates money to the fossil fuel industry, like the $1.5 billion we gave them to encourage them to clean up the mess that they are making or like tax advantages so that they don't have to pay proper taxes like other companies. But the big one--the big one--is the pollute-for-free business model, not justified by economics, not justified by morality, not justified by prudent concern over the safety of the planet. So how much is that negative externality according to the International Monetary Fund? At last count, $700 billion per year--$700 billion per year. So let's just say you are an industry that gets a government subsidy in the form of a pollute-for-free business model of $700 billion a year. How much is it worth spending to control Congress and fix the politics so that you can protect that subsidy? Well, let's just say, for purposes of argument, that they spent $7 billion a year on influence, on lobbyists, on campaign contributions, on super PACs, on dark money, on supporting the whole apparatus of lies and fake science. Let's just say that that all adds up to $7 billion a year. That means you are making a 100-to-1 return on your investment every single year. That makes the political operation of the fossil fuel industry its most profitable division. They don't make 100 to 1 out of oil. They don't make 100 to 1 out of gas. They don't make 100 to 1 out of coal. But they make 100 to 1 out of politics if they are spending $7 billion a year in political influence. So why are these big numbers spent? Why is it sensible, from their point of view, to maintain this entire armada of phony front groups? This is the biggest political influence operation in history, and, boy, is it worth it. What a return on investment you get. And they have used a whole variety of groups to do it. They have like popup groups that show up for the minute. They have got ones that are completely under their control, like American Petroleum Institute. But that is a little obvious. It has the word ``petroleum'' right in the name. So they run a lot of money, say, through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or the National Association of Manufacturers, who don't report their donors, so you don't see. U.S. Chamber of Commerce seems like such a nice group. I have chambers of commerce all around Rhode Island. I love our chambers of commerce. They do a wonderful job. But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been a virulent enemy to any serious climate legislation. Why? It is hard to know because they won't report. I asked them, repeatedly: How much money do you get from fossil fuel every year? How much money have you gotten from fossil fuel since the Citizens United decision? They won't say. It is a secret. It is a secret. But it allows the fossil fuel industry to appear politically without having to show their hand. Well, now, with President Trump in office, sloshed into office on a wave of $100 million minimum in fossil fuel money, the industry is triumphant, and this vote that we just took is this body's tribute to that industry. We don't care if this is you leaking. We don't care if this is you not maintaining your property. We don't care if this is dangerous. We don't care if you are being irresponsible. We don't care if we already gave you $1.5 billion to clean up your mess. We don't care about any of that. We don't care that the only people who have to pay this fee are the ones who are polluting above what their own industry recommends as a pollution level. We don't care about any of that. You are the fossil fuel industry, and you shall have whatever you want from us, whatever the cost. There is a problem, though. There is a problem, which is that fossil fuel influence can mess with laws in Congress and does, but fossil fuel influence can't mess with the laws of nature. Fossil fuel influence can't mess, frankly, with the laws of economics. So where are we right now? We have been through that era when the scientists were giving their warnings, the academic scientists from the great universities, the industry science from Exxon and even from the American Petroleum Institute, scientists in America, scientists overseas, powerful scientific consensus about what was going to happen. Go back and read what Exxon scientists warned about what was going to happen. We are living it right now. They were right. They knew. Exxon knew. The scientists knew. So that was the era, and the scientists got it right. They did their jobs. Then we did not do our job under the pressure of all of that fossil fuel influence, all those hundreds of millions or billions or whatever was spent to protect the $700 billion annual subsidy on which this industry floats. So now here we are. We are in a new era in this climate story, and the new era in the climate story is the era of consequences, the things that were warned of that are now coming true because we failed in our responsibilities as a Congress. The first place the campaign of fraud and disinformation and political pressure by the fossil fuel industry is crashing into is the insurance industry. The fossil fuel industry is compromising our future with all of these added emissions, including the methane leaks that were given a green light today. The fossil fuel industry is compromising our future by pretending that these climate warnings aren't real. But the insurance industry has to look at a real future. It can't lie about the future to protect its present profits. It has to predict the future accurately in order to price its product. You can't insure against a risk that you can't actuarially predict. So insurance companies get pretty expert at knowing how often there is likely to be a storm, how often there is likely to be a drought, how often there is likely to be wildfires, how often there is likely to be flooding, and they get that way because it is their fiduciary obligation to their owners to get it right, to do their very best to honestly get the predictions right. What is the insurance industry doing right now? They are looking into this fossil fuel future, and they are saying: Whoa, we don't know what to do. We can't insure that. These emissions are making our natural systems--the weather--so weird and so unpredictable that we are starting to have to change the way we do business. So what are they doing? Well, Florida is probably the epicenter for all of this. It has coasts all around it. It is in the pathway of hurricanes that come from the Atlantic or through the gulf. It is smack in the climate danger zone. What is happening in Florida? Well, the big insurers are clearing out. They have looked at this market, they have looked at consumers they have served for decades in many cases, and they said: We can't figure this out any longer. These dangers are too hard to anticipate. We can't price this risk. We are out of here. So little pop-up insurers have emerged that Floridians now have to deal with, and the prices have gone through the roof. Homeowners' insurance prices in Florida are four times the national average. In Miami-Dade County, the average property insurance bill is $17,000 a year. In our inquiries through the Budget Committee, we over and over again heard of people whose rates have doubled and even quadrupled. Even then, insurers are still pulling out. Insurers are going bust when storms come. Florida has had to step in and back up its own insurance company--it is called Citizens Property Insurance--because there simply isn't enough interest from the insurance industry to provide enough coverage for Floridians without this entity, which has grown to be enormous. The liability of Citizens Property Insurance is more than the entire debt of the State of Florida. This is a big financial anchor hanging on Florida, waiting for disaster to strike. So this is getting real. After the era of science came the era of influence, and now it is the era of consequences. It is not just me talking about this. Here is April's Economist magazine. You can't see it; I have a larger version of it that I can show you. There it is: ``The next housing disaster.'' What The Economist magazine is predicting in this front-page article is a dramatic shock to the global real estate industry. They are talking about a potential $25 trillion hit to the global real estate industry. How does this relate to the insurance problem that caused Florida to have to set up Citizens Property Insurance, that caused rates to quadruple, that caused all of these major insurers to have to bail, that caused people to have to count for their home insurance on little pop-up startups that keep going bust, going bust, going bust? It is this: When you can't get property insurance on your home, you can't get a mortgage on your home, which means that if you ever want to sell your home, you can't get a buyer. The only buyers left for you, for your home, are people who don't need a mortgage, people who can pay cash. Well, if you are a Palm Beach billionaire, you don't care because some other Palm Beach billionaire has all the money in the world to buy your multimillion-dollar mansion for cash. You are done. It is fine. It doesn't affect the Palm Beach millionaire world. But let's say you are a plumber living in a development outside of Orlando, and the way you afforded your house was with a mortgage. Now your home, your castle, when it comes time to sell it, won't get a mortgage. There is not going to be a billionaire who wants that. So property values crash. That is the cascade, like dominoes: boom goes the insurance industry, boom goes the mortgage industry, boom go the property values, and then out into the economy goes the harm. This isn't just Senator Whitehouse talking. This is The Economist magazine. This is the chief economist of the mortgage giant Freddie Mac. This is the chairman of the Federal Reserve telling us just recently that whole regions of the United States in 10 to 15 years won't be able to have mortgages--a whole region without mortgages. What happens to property values in that region? If he is saying that in 10 to 15 years, that is going to happen, what are investors going to start doing as they are planning for that future? Markets aren't going to wait until the region suddenly says: No more mortgages here. Markets are going to start to take action. Property values are going to start to decline because investors are going to be able to look forward and say: Well, if we can't get a mortgage on that property in 10 years, that property is not going to be very valuable right now. It cascades into--we even had a hearing in the Budget Committee about how it cascades into the municipal bond market, and there was a terrific article just today confirming our warnings from the Senate Budget Committee about how this cascades to the municipal bond market, because what happens when all those property values go down? The tax revenues of the municipality go down. If that has happened at a time when climate risk is going up and expenditures to maintain and protect infrastructure are going up, you are in a terrible situation for your bondholders because you have less money to pay your bondholders and more expenses. So the municipal bond markets are starting to take action. They are starting to look at this as a real problem. This is real stuff. The international organization that gives the international banking world warnings about what is coming just did a report on this very situation. The Financial Stability Board, it is called. And its report is titled ``Assessment of Climate-Related Vulnerabilities,'' 16 January 2025. And its warnings are that the banking system is imperiled, because, frankly, if you can't write mortgages in whole regions of the country, particularly if you are a regional bank, then that line of business for you is shot. Or if you are a bank whose ratings, whose safety for all the depositors depends on a loan-to-value ratio, that is sort of the coin of the realm for the solvency of banks, if your loan portfolio has collateral from the homes on which you wrote mortgages and the value of that collateral has dropped because of this insurance problem, you can move pretty quickly from being a solvent bank to being an insolvent bank that regulators have to move in and shore up or take over. And the warnings are serious enough that the Financial Stability Board is warning banks all around the world: Get ready. This trouble is coming. And it is. So that is the context for this embarrassing display that we saw today in the Senate. Whatever you want for the fossil fuel industry, even if it is the right to leak and pollute and maintain your equipment worse than your own industry recommends, we have got your back. Leak away. Pollute away. What could possibly go wrong? Well, here is what could possibly go wrong: The natural systems that are being disrupted by these emissions control the weather, and the weather produces climate risk, and the insurance industry has to look forward accurately because it owes that duty to its shareholders. And they look forward and say: Whoops, we are out of here. And then the cascade begins from insurance to mortgage to property values to a general economic crash, expected by the economists to be $25 trillion globally. It is really pretty stunning. So let me go through some of my charts here. Here is a chart that looks at the scenarios for the future with respect to how carbon emissions and methane emissions will endanger our safety. This is derived from all the peer-reviewed scenarios that were provided over the years to the IPCC, the international climate tracking body. They looked at about 1,200 of them. Of those 1,200 various climate scenarios, there are 11 left--11 out of 1,200 that allow us to get to a pathway to climate safety. Only 11. They all have two characteristics: They overshoot first, so you need to have carbon capture and, specifically, direct air capture to get us back on the pathway to safety. It is not enough to stop the polluting, you actually have to extract the excess carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Trump just demolished all the offices at the Department of Energy that support carbon capture, which is a little weird because the fossil fuel industry has depended on carbon capture for rhetorical support of its continued pollution. The argument, roughly, is: Don't worry about us continuing to pollute because carbon capture is going to come along and save the day. Of course, that rhetoric is not backed up by investment, because over and over again they refuse to actually build carbon capture equipment. It is a talking point, not a real solution that they will put any investment behind. And when regulators try to say, well, think about carbon capture; that will reduce the pollution here of this carbon pollutant. They say oh, no, no, no, that is not a serious technology; we can't do it. It is a serious technology when we are trying to continue polluting, use this as our rhetorical excuse to keep polluting; but if you actually want us to apply it, oh, no, that is a different thing. We are not going to talk about that. So here they all are. They all overshoot--this one just by a little-- so you need that direct air capture. And the other thing that they all need, they all need a price on carbon. They all need for it to stop being free to pollute. It is now mandatory, if we are going to get on a pathway to climate safety, that there be a price on pollution. The free-to-pollute business model that the fossil fuel industry defends so virulently is a pathway to disaster. We have to put a price on greenhouse gas emissions or fail. And today was the little canary in the coal mine for how responsible we will be about putting a price on carbon. Because today, we blew up a price on methane, an even more dangerous greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, under circumstances in which we had literally paid the industry a billion and a half dollars as a bounty to clean up its own act and then limited the penalty, the methane fee, to only those companies that couldn't meet even their own industry standards. And you can bet that the industry standards are pretty generous to the industry. Nobody develops standards that are terrible for their own industry. This was their self-imposed industry standards, and only the ones that couldn't meet their own industry standards would pay the penalty. And we just stripped that away. The methane fee is headed for gone. So if that is the canary in the coal mine of where this body is going to be now that we have to put a price on carbon or condemn our children and our grandchildren to worsening climate disaster and worsening economic disaster, what a signal we just sent. What a shameful, disgraceful signal we just sent. Here is some of the stuff that is coming our way. Let me start with some of the work that we did in the Budget Committee. We went out and we dug out from the insurance industry information about their nonrenewal rates. What is a nonrenewal rate? Well, a nonrenewal is when there you are, the customer of the insurance company, and it comes time of the year when they renew your policy, send you the new bill, all of that. But this time, even if you have been a good client, paying your premiums regularly for 15, 20 years, maybe, what comes in the mailbox isn't the updated contract and the new bill for you to pay. Nope; it is a notice saying: You are fired as our client. We are not going to have you as a customer anymore. How many businesses want to tell a loyal customer go away? This is not ordinary business behavior. It is driven because they can't figure out the risk of your property any longer. So they nonrenew you. They don't want your check any longer. They don't want you as a customer any longer, because your property is now so unpredictably dangerous to them that they just walk away. And where is it happening? Well, guess what? Florida is at the epicenter. Louisiana is at the epicenter. California, because of wildfires, is at the epicenter. It spreads all across, mostly heavily, coastal areas. But wildfire is catching up--don't worry. And then this measures the rate of increase. It is not just a question of how many nonrenewals, it is how many more each year, how much is the insurance company increasing its shedding of customers. So you see it popping up even here in Montana. From Florida to Montana, it is spread all over. And after we did this research, folks came in behind us and did some more detailed research. So we start with this one first. This took our research and the insurance information that we used, and it also projected climate risk forward. And by the way, there is a lot of this happening. This isn't just like people making this stuff up. There are entire firms that are predicting climate risk for insurance companies, for banks. This is a booming and expert area because people need to know. They need to get it right for investment purposes. So this is how climate change may cause rising insurance rates over the next 30 years. If you go to, let's say, Miami down here or just east of Phoenix here, you see that the color gets really dark. Here, along the North Florida east coast, the shade gets really dark. And you can't read this on the TV, on the screen, but I will tell you that means a 300-percent increase over the next 30 years. So let's go back to what I said earlier about Miami-Dade. The average of the property insurance premium is $17,000. When you are increasing by 300 percent, you are quadrupling. So four times $17,000, that is $68,000 every year average from Miami-Dade County, if this comes true. Now, to get just a little bit mathematically here and wonky, if you look at the present value of a $68,000 charge every single year out into the future, you get a big number, and that number comes right off the value of your property. If your home is for sale, and let's say it is a $500,000 home, and somebody comes and they will say, well, that is a $500,000 home, I will pay you $500,000 for it. That makes perfect sense. And then you say, ah, yes, but--but there is this other little consideration, which is that when you buy that home, you are also buying into a huge--let's for purposes of argument say $20,000--annual charge. (Mr. HUSTED assumed the Chair.) Well, if you are offered that deal, here is a home worth $500,000. Will you pay $500,000 for it? Sure, I will. Here is a home worth $500,000, but it comes with an annual $20,000 cost that you have to carry. Are you going to pay $500,000 for that? Of course, you are not because you are going to bake into the value what the present value is of those $20,000 payments you are going to have make year after year after year just to keep your home insured. So property values crash when home insurance premiums spike. And as you see, it is the wildfire and coastal areas that are hardest hit across red and blue States alike. And when those premiums increase and the housing prices fall, here is where home values may decline because of climate change. How far are we looking forward? We are looking forward 30 years. Why are we looking forward 30 years in this? Because that is how long a mortgage is, in the life of a mortgage. So here, you see the maps look kind of alike. This one is happening quicker, so the response is quicker; the colors get darker quicker. There is more of the map that is darker. But this, this is where it really hits home. This is ``Change in Home Value Due to Insurance Costs'' over the 30-year life of the mortgage. And it goes from no change expected at all in all of these tan areas, all the way up to minus 100 percent change in home value. That is pretty easy math. Minus 100 percent change in home value means your home is worth nothing any longer, and that is popping up all over. So solving for this is a real and ``now'' problem because who is going to look forward 30 years to see where a home will have no value any longer? Banks that are issuing mortgages will. So this isn't a 30- years-from-now problem; this is a ``now'' problem as banks start to look at this information and wonder about putting a mortgage on a property whose collateral value to them at the end of the mortgage will be zero. That is not a good business proposition for them. And from a bank solvency point of view, it hits them at the heart of their loan-to- value ratio based on the value of their collateral. So it puts them in peril as a solvent institution as well. So banks are going to start looking at this stuff way ahead of 30 years. Indeed, they are starting to look at it already. So why does the fossil fuel industry need to spend so much money preventing Congress from taking proper action when the science has been so clear forever? The chickens are coming home to roost in the economy through the insurance industry. The insurance industry is not going to listen to fossil fuel lies about what the future looks like when it has trillions of dollars at stake. It is going to continue to get it right, and it is going to continue to back away from risk if we don't solve this. So this is all deadly real and coming now. Why does the fossil fuel industry spend so much money to block us in Congress from doing this? The reason is--well, there are several. One is the $700 billion subsidy they get every year for being able to pollute for free. But the other is the public is really concerned about this. The public actually really wants climate action. So they have to defeat public opinion. They have to make this body serve them and not the public. They have to make the Senate ignore the American people. And, of course, you do that with this massive campaign of dark money, political influence, fake science, phony front groups, the whole multibillion-dollar operation. Because, and I know--I apologize to viewers--you can't read this. So I will read aloud. This is a polling chart with a sample size of around 2,000 people. It is a pretty serious poll. I had the guy whom I know who is a pollster take a look at it, and he said: Yep, this is solid. This is the real deal. So let's look at what it shows. We will start with the second one down. The second one down right here reads: ``Penalties on high- pollution imports.'' Of the survey, 12 percent of Americans were opposed to penalties on high-pollution imports--12 percent opposed to penalties on high-pollution imports. Support, 74 percent, 74 percent of Americans would like to see our economy protected by penalties on high- pollution imports for, among other reasons, to make sure that our manufacturers have a fair chance when we are not high pollution to make sure that those high-polluting foreign companies pay a penalty in order to come into our market--12 percent to 74 percent. That is a huge margin. The American public is eager for us to take political action to solve this problem, which is why the fossil fuel industry has to come in here and spend so much money and use so much pressure and get so much influence and put $100 million into Trump's political coffers, plus whatever they did in dark money. They have to do all that because the public is on to what is going on. Here is another one: ``Reduce carbon pollution across industry,'' 9 percent oppose, 76 percent positive. If my math is right, that is a 67- percent swing between opposed and supported. That is massive public support for reducing carbon pollution. ``Putting carbon pollution limits on big companies,'' 12 percent opposed, 72 percent support--a differential of 60 percent. The American people are really, really leaning into carbon pollution limits on big companies. They would love to see that by a margin of 72 to 12. And then here is the one that relates to what we have just done today. ``Impose a fee on big polluters.'' ``Impose a fee on big polluters,'' 10 percent opposed--10 percent of Americans are opposed to imposing a fee on big polluters--74 percent of Americans support it. A 64-percent differential, 74 to 10, that is a rout. That is a mandate. But what did we do just today about that mandate? We just voted down a fee on big polluters, even though it was front-loaded with a $1.5 billion chunk of corporate welfare for them to spend to clean up their messes--shouldn't be the taxpayers' business to get a corporation to clean up its messes on its own, but this is the fossil fuel industry. So that is what we did. We gave them $1.5 billion to take care of their own equipment. And then we asked: Once that is done, when this fee goes into effect, you are going to have to pay if you are still polluting. You don't have to pay a nickel if you only meet your own industry trade associations' standards. But if you can't even meet your own industry trade associations' standard, there will be a fee. So 1.5 billion in free corporate welfare for the polluters to clean up their equipment and, in return, a fee on big polluters. You have got to be a big polluter. It is not the little guys we are going after here. And you have got to be worse than your own industry standards. That is the population we were dealing with here. And we just voted down a fee on big polluters--not all big polluters--in this case, the big polluters who don't even meet their own industry standards for leaks. We just voted that down, even though 74 percent of the public would like to see fees on big polluters and even though only 10 percent would oppose that. Why do we behave this way in this body? Why do we ignore 74 percent of the American people? Why do we follow the 10 percent who don't want this in a democracy where the majority is supposed to rule, and we have a 74-to-10 vote? Fossil fuel industry influence, plain and simple, because the public--oh, my Lord--they are so with it. Even something like get really rough here: ``Phase out the burning of fossil fuels,'' 26 percent opposed, 54 support--2 to 1 for something as strenuous as phasing out the burning of fossil fuels. ``Stop new fossil fuel projects,'' 25 percent oppose, 48 percent support--2-to-1 support for something as strenuous as ``Stop new fossil fuel projects.'' That is where the American public is. Everybody gets that you shouldn't pollute for free. I mean, for Pete's sake, if you go to somebody's house and you knock over your soda, you go get a napkin and you clean up your mess. This is basic stuff. When children make a mess, what do their parents tell them? No, you are not going to the movies. No, you are not doing whatever it is you want until you clean up your mess. Put your stuff away. You made that mess. Clean it up. It is basic responsibility that we apply to children, but will we apply it to the fossil fuel industry? No, because they come in here squirting money all over the place, making threats, and using this whole armada of climate denial front groups to pretend that what is true is actually false. And, again, if you think that is because some green people say that, no. The insurance industry is saying this because the insurance industry is saying: The risks of climate change are so real, we have to get out of certain markets. We have to quadruple our rates in certain areas. We have to have additional props from State government to stay in the State at all. Do we have an alternative? Boy, do we ever. We have got a great alternative. And that is why 74 percent of Americans versus 10 who oppose would like to see a fee on big polluters. It is fair; it is right; and there is a real alternative. You can go to wind and solar. This map is of various sections of the world, and it shows where there is good baseline wind energy to take advantage of. And here is the good old United States of America--best case situation. We are sitting on a free, renewable resource as the wind blows, and all we have to do is build the turbines to collect it. And if you like solar, here is how well we do on solar. Boy, you go through the Southwest, that is rich country for solar. We could be truly energy independent with wind and solar--free of OPEC and cartel pricing, free of all the pollution costs and all the trauma and drama in the insurance industry from those pollution costs. We could be free of all of that, and it would be less expensive. And it is there. It is there for us. It is there for the taking. With the $100 million that was given by the fossil fuel industry to the Trump administration, what does the Trump administration do? By the way, to clarify, $100 million reported. Dark money--$500 million? A billion? Who knows. Trump asked them for a billion dollars in that quid pro quo meeting down at Mar-a-Lago. He said: Give me a billion dollars; here is all the stuff I will do for you. And he went through the fossil fuel industry checklist. So we know he got $100 million for it. Who knows what else he got? But what he said in his recent fake energy emergency declaration--he said that all of this solar and all of this wind potential--he said it is not even energy. If you look at how he defines the word ``energy,'' it is every kind of fossil fuel and nuclear and hydro; no solar, no wind. It is not even considered energy, which is weird because there are a bunch of States in which solar and wind are really big. Once you get past California, the top three States for solar are all red States. The top States for wind are all red States. I have been to Iowa to look at the wind farms out there. Iowa has the highest concentration of wind power of any State. It has so much wind power that the grid operator in Iowa has figured out that it can treat the wind as baseload power. There is a common--forgive my term--knuckle head argument that, oh, what happens when the wind stops blowing? Well, the wind doesn't stop blowing, not everywhere. You may have a still day in one place, but there is enough wind blowing around Iowa that the grid operator--not a greenie but a technician who has the duty to keep the grid up and operating--has determined that they can dial in wind as baseload because somewhere it is going to be operating. We have enormous, enormous capacity here. Wind and solar are big contributors to the energy portfolio in major red States. There is no logic, there is no sense, there is no integrity to saying that wind and solar aren't even energy unless you are listening to the worst--worst-- voices in the fossil fuel industry, the ones who don't dare to compete with wind and solar because they know it is cheaper. It is not enough for them to sit on a $700 billion annual subsidy to suppress wind, to suppress solar, to move costs that should be theirs onto the general public. It is not enough to enjoy a $700 billion subsidy every single darn year. Now they have Trump to say that solar and wind aren't even energy--aren't even energy. It has gotten just wild. Here is an example of the cost. This is a residential area in Los Angeles, taken in the fires that just burned. It is a pretty serious tragedy for those individuals who lost their homes, lost all the treasured possessions they cared about. It is also a tragedy for pretty much everybody in California because there has already been a billion- dollar assessment from the California backup insurance plan, the State plan--the FAIR Plan, they call it--on insurers. Sorry, guys, need a billion from you to prop up our State plan. And by the way, half of that billion--collect it from your customers. So all customers are going to pay an extra half a billion dollars from this in California. California is only the most recent example of wildfire damage. In Oregon, you had entire towns destroyed by wildfires. Good luck getting insurance in those areas. So the pain is very real. The cost is very real. The damage to markets is very real. It is all to try to keep out the truly low-cost power. Here are electricity costs over time. It starts here back in 2009. Here we are in 2023. This, the lowest cost, is wind. The next one up, the yellow here, used to be expensive. It used to be the highest. Now it is just an inch above wind as the lowest cost electricity, and it is solar panels. Next up is natural gas. Next up is geothermal. In this race down here, wind and solar beat natural gas all the time. Again, that is why the fossil fuel industry has to come to Congress with its phony front groups and its super PACs and its dark money and its influence and throw its weight around, because even natural gas loses on price to solar and wind. Now their response is so crude as to get the guy who they put $100 million into the political pockets of to define energy as not even including solar and wind. Here are some of the threats we have heard. This is from the article I showed you earlier, the front page of The Economist magazine. It is not a green publication. This is about the danger to the world's real estate markets. It begins by saying, if I recall the article correctly, that what we are looking at is a shock to the largest asset class on the planet from climate damage. ``The impending bill is so huge, in fact, that it will have grim implications not just for personal prosperity''--not just the homeowners, not just the people who have to pay the high insurance cost, not just personal prosperity--``but also for the financial system,'' which aligns exactly with what the chief economist from Freddie Mac said. This cascades. The insurance market fails, mortgage markets fail, property values fall, and the financial system crashes. That is why the Financial Stability Board wrote this report warning of systemic--that is the magic word--dangers to the financial system. ``Systemic'' sounds like a superboring word, but in the context of economic dangers, it is the most terrifying word there is because it means that the economic danger has jumped the fence. It means that it is no longer the affected industry that is affected when things go wrong; it means that it is so bad that it cascades out across the economy, like 2008, when a bunch of crooked mortgages and a bunch of creepy ratings blew up the whole national economy. You didn't have to have a bad mortgage to be hurt in that; everybody was hurt in that. That is a systemic harm. Here is how it is going to work, they say. ``If the size of the risk''--this risk to property values from the insurance load and from direct destruction by hail and storms and everything else--``If the size of the risk suddenly sinks in, and borrowers and lenders alike realize the collateral underpinning so many transactions''--the collateral is not just behind an individual mortgage but behind the big tranches of mortgages that are bought and sold behind Fannie and Freddie, which buy huge numbers of mortgages that are all at risk-- ``the collateral underpinning so many transactions is not worth as much as they thought, a wave of repricing will reverberate through financial markets.'' This is what we are spinning towards. Conclusion from The Economist: Climate change, in short, could prompt the next global property crash. ``Climate change, in short, could prompt the next global property crash.'' I don't know how much more clear the warning could be. It is not just The Economist article; here is the corporate consultancy Deloitte. Again, The Economist is not a liberal paper. It is not an environmental paper. It is a very conservative, business-oriented paper. The Financial Stability Board is not a bunch of Green New Dealers. It is people whose job is to protect the international banking system. Deloitte is a corporate consultancy. If we allow climate change to go unchecked, it will ravage our global economy. ``If we allow climate change to go unchecked, it will ravage our global economy.'' How much clearer does the warning have to be? That talks about the global economy. They looked specifically at the United States: ``For the United States, the damages to 2070''--that is their window looking forward what would be 45 years--``are projected to reach $14.5 trillion''--$14.5 trillion in economic damage in the United States--``a lifetime loss of nearly $70,000 for each working American.'' How many working Americans even have $70,000 put away someplace? They do have $70,000 probably in the value of their home. If their home is in one of these regions where property values are going to fall because of the combination of insurance costs and insurance unavailability, including a change in home value straight to minus 100 percent or zeroing out of the home value, then good luck with that loss of nearly $70,000. It is going to be hard to stop, though, even with all the influence peddling that takes place around here, even with all the political pressure, even with all the dark money threats and all the dark money cajoling and all the dark money inducements, because solar and battery storage are kind of killing it. I mean, this is solar and battery storage in new U.S. generating capacity additions, the stuff that is being added to the grid. Solar is more than half. Solar alone is 52 percent of all the new additions. Look at how many people were employed in that new solar construction. And this administration wants to pretend that that is not even energy? That is how bad the pretense has to be to grovel before the fossil fuel interests, with their big checkbooks, to pretend that solar isn't even energy when it is 52 percent of what was put in last year. And 29 percent was battery storage. You put solar and battery storage together--80 percent. Eighty percent of the new electricity-generating installations in our country was solar and battery storage. By the way, they play really nicely together because, when the Sun ain't shining because it is nighttime, your batteries kick in. So solar and battery together move into baseload country. It is way cheaper than baseload coal or baseload nuclear or baseload natural gas. And here it comes. Here it comes. Wind is another 12 percent. So, if you add all this up, it is about 93 percent of the new power that came onto our grid or is coming onto our grid in 2025. Ninety-three percent is wind, solar, and battery. Seven percent is natural gas. So we are doubling down on 7 percent and taking the 93 percent and pretending it is not even energy? That doesn't even make sense, but it shows how ferocious and rapacious the fossil fuel industry is when it uses its political power and its super-PACs and its front groups and its dark money and all of that to demand that we stop defining wind and solar as energy. That violates the dictionary, but that is how their behavior is. That is why today was so aggravating and so wrong because, frankly, the fossil fuel industry should have had the decency to let this one go. Pick something else. But what they went forward with was a reasonable fee after a $1.5 billion government handout for leaks of methane--a deadly, dangerous climate gas--that they are just leaking. You could fix it with wrenches. Fix the pipes. Fix the valves. Fix the wells. Just do it. You should be doing it as a good citizen anyway, but then we gave you $1.5 billion in a free taxpayer handout to do what you should have been doing anyway. So now you are up $1.5 billion, and all we asked in return was that, if you are among the worst polluters in your industry, if you can't meet your own industry standards, well then, you have got to pay until you clean up your act. We give you an incentive to clean up your act. Your fee goes to zero if you only meet your own industry standards for leaks. What could be more reasonable? Yet this industry is so politically rapacious right now that it went after that, and that is what we saw today. That was so low. It makes me think of this cartoon. I don't know how well you can see it. There are a couple of MAGA folks standing out in front of Mar-a- Lago, saying: ``Boy, we showed those elites who is in charge.'' But who is behind the wall of Mar-a-Lago? All the big special interests, all the big special interests getting what they want--Big Oil right there, front and center; coal right there, front and center. That is what is happening. That is what is happening. Electric prices are going to go up. Why? Because fossil fuel is more expensive because, when you take the industry that is producing 93 percent of our new additions, there is a reason the market has chosen that 93 percent. They chose it because it is cheaper. It is a better business proposition. Take that out, and what do you have more of? You have more of the expensive fossil fuel plants. The way this works is that a whole bunch of plants are on the grid, standing by, ready to produce power as demand kicks in. And the way the grid operators do it is they start with the lowest cost providers, the lowest cost energy, and then, as demand grows, they work up the dispatch queue to bring on more and more and more expensive energy sources. So, if you strip out the less expensive stuff--if you strip out solar and wind--and pretend they are not even energy any longer, what happens? The more expensive plants are the ones that run more, and bills go up. If you look at the wealth of our country in wind capability and in solar capability, we are rich with wind and solar. But if we don't take advantage of those free domestic resources, then we are stuck behind the fossil fuel cartel, behind OPEC. We saw what happened after Russia invaded Ukraine and market prices spiked to feed the European market. We saw the American companies run up their prices even though their costs hadn't gone up--run up their prices to take advantage of that world market surge--and they made, as a result, the biggest profits in the history of the planet. They gouged the American consumer willfully. That is a risk that goes away, of price spikes happening in global fossil fuel markets. That is a risk that goes away when we are counting on God's own wind and solar that we have in such abundance. But when you have got all the special interests packed into Mar-a- Lago, wheeling and dealing--when it is the looters and polluters who are making the decisions--this is what you get. Costs are going to go up for Americans because of the malign influence of the fossil fuel industry in Congress. They just are. It is basic economics, and that doesn't even count the $700 billion worth of harm that the emissions are causing, which are already starting to come home to roost in the insurance market. Let me show you one more thing, and I ask unanimous consent to use an oversized slide here.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank the Presiding Officer. This is oversized because it is big. This was a full-page ad in the New York Times--Sunday, December 6, 2009. Barack Obama was President, and to be absolutely candid, he wasn't doing much on climate. The Obama administration went through a long period of not darned much on climate. So this full-page ad was taken out in the New York Times: Dear President Obama and the United States Congress: Tomorrow, leaders from 192 countries will gather at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen to determine the fate of our planet. As business leaders-- the advertisement continues-- we are optimistic that President Obama is attending Copenhagen emissions targets. Additionally, we urge you, our government, to strengthen and pass United States legislation, and lead the world by example. We support your effort to ensure meaningful and effective measures to control climate change, an immediate challenge facing the United States and the world today. Please don't postpone the earth. If we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet. We recognize the key role that American innovation and leadership play in stimulating the worldwide economy. Investing in a Clean Energy Economy will drive state-of-the- art technologies that will spur economic growth, create new energy jobs, and increase our energy security, all while reducing the harmful emissions that are putting our planet at risk. We have the ability and the know-how to lead the world in clean energy technology to thrive in a global market and economy. But we must embrace the challenge today to ensure that future generations are left with a safe planet and a strong economy. Please allow us, the United States of America, to serve in modeling the change necessary to protect humanity and our planet. Signed by Donald J. Trump, chairman and president; Donald J. Trump, Jr., executive vice president; Eric F. Trump, executive vice president; Ivanka M. Trump, executive vice president; and the Trump Organization. Fifteen years ago, the guy who now says that solar and wind aren't even energy, despite their prominence in the economies and the grids of so many red States, despite making up 93 percent of the new capacity added to the grid this year--that same guy: Please act now. ``It is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet.'' We will spur, with clean energy, economic growth. We will ``create new energy jobs.'' We will ``increase our energy security all while reducing the harmful emissions that are putting our planet at risk.'' Signed Donald J. Trump. This was before the fossil fuel industry was in the position to put $100 million into his campaign to help him get elected--assuming it is only $100 million. It could be $1 billion. I don't know. They use dark money so well you can't keep track. And $100 million is just what we could count. But there was Donald J. Trump before, telling Obama: Do a better job, President Obama. Get after this clean energy stuff. It is scientifically irrefutable that we are in deep trouble, and America can lead on clean energy. We can be the best there is. We can create jobs. We can develop the technologies of tomorrow. Do a better job, Obama. Get us there. That was what he said then. Now what he says is, solar and wind aren't even energy, and he supports this vote that knocked out a reasonable fee on methane leaks-- leaks, for God's sake--and only the leaks that were from the worst industry participants, the ones who didn't even meet their own crummy industry standards for leaks. These are like the bad outliers who won't even meet their own industry standard and got $1.5 billion in a corporate handout to clean up their own darned equipment, which they should take care of themselves. And then, after all that, they come in and undo the fee. Obviously, President Trump wanted it because Republicans wouldn't be doing that stuff here if he didn't. So we are back to the looters and polluters being in charge. We are back to immense harm to the American economy that has already started. Just look at the Florida insurance market. You see it coming. The warnings could not be clearer. When I ran the Budget Committee, I circulated this volume--which I will spare you reading right now--of all of the reports that have come out, peer-reviewed official reports about the economic risks of climate change: The exposure of UK investors, including insurance companies, to [stranded fossil fuel assets] is potentially huge. [C]limate change will threaten financial resilience and longer term prosperity. [I]nvestments in fossil fuels and related technologies . . . may take a huge hit. Estimates of losses . . . are large and range from $1 trillion to $4 trillion when considering the energy sector alone, or up to $20 trillion when looking at the economy more broadly. [A] third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves and over 80 percent of current coal reserves should remain unused . . . in order to meet the target of 2 degrees Celsius. When that happens, the carbon bubble bursts, and you get these massive losses. The losses from the carbon bubble could be a loss comparable to the 2008 financial crisis. That is the carbon bubble. The insurance risk from a coastal property values crash equivalent to the 2008 mortgage meltdown is another risk. They are separate risks. They could both take place. There is a third one, which is the wildfire risk, which wasn't part of the original coastal risk report. So the risks are piling up and piling up and piling up. It really is time that we take this seriously. The danger to the U.S. economy is deadly real. We are already seeing it landing in people's mail slots in the form of the quadrupling of insurance bills and in the form of nonrenewal notices. That doesn't even count the harm that is being done in the real world. I am talking about economic harms here, the things that will hit people in the pocketbook, the things that are going to make the bills harder to pay around the kitchen table, the stuff that is in people's financial lives. But before I close, I want to remind everybody here that the stuff going wrong goes wrong in the real world in a way that goes beyond economic measure. The insurance harm, the carbon bubble harm, the threat of another 2008-style financial meltdown across three separate fronts--wildfire, carbon bubble, and coastal--all of that just takes a piece of it. But in the meantime, we are also seeing our world turned upside down. We are also seeing changes that are deeply personal. How do you put a value on a grandfather not being able to take his granddaughter to the creek where he used to go fishing, where his grandfather taught him to fish, and now he can't do that with his granddaughter because it dried up because there is a drought, because the water is too warm for trout to live in it any longer? How do you put a value on that? You can't. When you are dealing with just the economics of climate change, you are already being fundamentally irresponsible because you are not giving due respect to God's creation. There are so many miracles that take place on this planet. I went to Delaware to see the arrival of the red knot. A red knot is a bird. It is not much bigger than this glass of water, and it does amazing things. It flies from the southern end of South America all the way up to Brazil, and then it flies from Brazil to Delaware Bay. There is no place to land, if you look at the map, between Brazil and Delaware Bay. This is a small bird flying all of those hundreds of miles, somehow knowing where Delaware Bay is and landing there, timed in God's and nature's beautiful way, timed to land in Delaware Bay when the horseshoe crabs are releasing their eggs. The horseshoe crabs were all over the beach, and these birds would come in because, in God's grace, somehow they knew to fly from Brazil to Delaware Bay then, and that food source would be there for them so they could fuel up and continue the rest of their journey up into the Arctic. This is a bird that migrates from the southern end of South America to Brazil, across the ocean to Delaware Bay, and then up to the Arctic every year. A tiny little bird can accomplish that. Hell, I would be tired in a plane flight from Brazil to Delaware, sitting in a seat and being given a soda. These little miracles fly that flight. If we screw this planet up the way we are doing, then the different life cycles, in this case, of the horseshoe crab and the red knot no longer line up, and when they land, the food source isn't there for them, and that species gets clobbered. What is the value in money of this heroic little species performing this amazing achievement year in and year out and suddenly finding out that it doesn't work any longer; that they will starve and die because we fouled up the timing of the natural systems that they need to have work for them? Can you put a price on that? No. It is worth zero. It is worth zero. What is the price of going down off a boat into the water, down towards a reef, and as you fall through the water toward the reef and as it becomes clear what is along the bottom below you, and for the first time going back to familiar spots, you see that the coral is bleaching white; you see that it is so distressed that it can't manage the relationship between the coral polyps and the algae and it bleaches white. It is an alarm signal that something has gone wrong in that coral reef. If you look at many coral reefs in the Caribbean, it is all white. It is all white, and then it begins to fall apart, and pretty soon, you have rubble. What used to be a vibrant, living coral reef with all the glorious colors and all the interacting ways in which nature makes her magic work--all of that is turned into what looks like rubble in a construction site because the water was too warm, the water was too acidic, the oxygen levels were too low, and all of that died. What is the value of that? The value of that is zero to us here in mammon, where we only care about things that can be assigned a dollar value. So it ain't just the economic harm that is coming at us. We are doing something that is so grievously disrespectful to this world that God gave us, to the natural order of it that sustains our livelihoods on this planet. Today was such an embarrassing, embarrassing example of our disrespect. If you had to pick the most unworthy segment of the fossil fuel industry, it is probably the companies that take such bad care of their own equipment that they are the worst leakers in their whole industry. That is the population that we served today after having given them a $1.5 billion handout. And the reciprocal for that was when you are in the worst half, when you are still leaking, even though we gave you $1.5 billion to fix your leaks, when that is you that is left, you have to pay a fee, an incentive, to just knock it off, just quit the pollution. If we can't do that, shame on us. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here to join my distinguished colleague from California in opposition to the nomination of Kash Patel and to make crystal clear to this body what he is going to do in that job. He has shown who he is. So when these things go wrong, I want to be absolutely clear that our Republican friends were warned. They will own the consequences of Kash Patel's misbehavior. Let's start with the fact that, unlike any FBI Director before, this guy is a vitriolic partisan. Those are the stripes he shows when he is left to his own devices, and those are the characteristics he will revert back to when he is running the FBI. Here are just a few simple examples. This is from his book called ``Government Gangsters,'' and this is a page of his enemies' list. Well, Attorney General Bondi said no one should come to a law enforcement job with an enemies' list, so then they had to pretend that this was not an enemies' list. Well, of course, it is an enemies' list. Here is what Kash Patel himself says about it: ``Names named. Roadmap unveiled. The man hunt starts tomorrow.'' If you are going to set up a manhunt against people, are they not your enemies by any logical definition of the term? He goes on to a video that shows himself chain-sawing off the heads of the people on his enemies' list, including the handsome junior Senator from California and the daughter of former Vice President Cheney. It is a pretty gross image to be cutting the heads off of people with a saw. He didn't put it up, but he retweeted it. He loved it so much that he put it up on his own media. Things like that are not appropriate for an FBI Director. They are bizarre for just a normally weird person, but for an abnormally weird person to be the Director of the FBI, things are going to go bad. Be warned. He is also a completely sycophantic suck-up when it comes to Donald Trump. He wrote children's books in which King Donald rules, and his loyal little functionary Kash brings justice to him by pursuing the slugs of the FBI. Really? When the FBI is asked to investigate corruption in Trump world, do you think Kash Patel will rise to the occasion or do you think he will participate in a coverup? All you have to do is look at his own conduct and his own history. This is not Democrats saying this. What we are doing is relating what he has said and what he has done. This is Kash Patel on Kash Patel. He spread the really abhorrent lie that Federal law enforcement was behind January 6. On one of the many podcasts and interview shows where he spewed so much disinformation and partisan vitriol, he was asked: ``It looks like you have a preponderance of evidence suggesting there may have been federal law enforcement involved in making [January 6] happen.'' Patel's response: ``I'll get you to beyond a reasonable doubt.'' ``[B]eyond a reasonable doubt.'' He believed and said Federal law enforcement Agencies were behind January 6. We know that is preposterous. We know that is false. We know that investigations have shown that none of that is even remotely true. That is completely false information. Yet here he is spouting it, and that is what he is going to look like as FBI Director too. The FBI is going to have to appear before judges and convince judges of the probity of the Agency, of the legitimacy of the Agency, of the propriety of the investigation and that the Department has done a fair job of marshaling the evidence. Here is what he says about judges: We have to start impeaching judges if they have ruled against Donald Trump. They were a political terrorist, in his view. In any case that Donald Trump has been charged in, almost every judge is handling this thing as if they were not a judge but a political terrorist. And, of course, he meant the Trump judge down in Florida as the only one excepted. When you start talking about judges that way, you can't then expect judges not to pay attention when you come before them in trying to do the work of the FBI. Then there is the question of what his former colleagues have said about him. These are things that he has said himself. What have his former colleagues said about him, every single one a Trump appointee? John Bolton, National Security Advisor: I didn't think he was qualified. I was forced to hire him. Political pressure jammed him into the job, and Bolton said: I didn't want any part of this guy. I was forced to hire him. With Attorney General Bill Barr, they tried to force him on Bill Barr as Deputy Director of the FBI, and he said that Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to lead the FBI. He said: ``Over my dead body'' does he get that job. These are the job recommendations of his own colleagues that show his unfitness. Over at the CIA, they tried to stuff him in someplace, and the Director of the CIA, Gina Haspel--I am no friend of Gina Haspel, but here is what she said about him: If he came over, she would resign before allowing Patel to assume a position as her Deputy. This is a guy who has a record of engagement with Trump appointees that shows that he is not qualified, not capable, and somebody over whom they would resign before they would let work for them. And now we are supposed to let him work for the American people? It is ridiculous. He testified once in State court on a Trump-related case, and his testimony was, to put it mildly, not convincing. Here is what the judge said: The court finds that Mr. Patel was not a credible witness. His testimony . . . is not only illogical . . . but completely devoid of any evidence in the record. OK. People come into court. They lie, and the court doesn't believe their nonsense. Statements like this happen all the time in court. But here is where they don't happen: They don't happen with Federal law enforcement agents. When I was the U.S. attorney in Rhode Island, if one of my FBI agents had gone over into the U.S. district court in Rhode Island and testified in a criminal case in such a way that one of the U.S. district judges said about that witness that he was not a credible witness and that his testimony was illogical and devoid of evidence in the record, we would be looking into that. This comes darned close to being what is called Giglio material-- material that the government is forced to disclose to future defendants when it bears on the credibility of a government witness, an agent who is a government witness. People lose their careers over Giglio material. This, if he were an FBI agent, would have caused a response at headquarters to say: What the hell is going on? How did one of our people get involved in such vagrantly fake testimony that he was called out by the judge in a case like this? This is the person they want to put in charge of the organization whose probity and whose professionalism and whose integrity are essential to the successful working of the organization? The guy was basically called out as a liar and a fraud in plain court. This guy is a hot mess. When you have a character like this who lies in court and who runs chain-saw memes about your opponents, about whom every person he tried to work with who was senior in the Trump administration said: Get this bum out of here; I don't want to be anywhere near him--that is a record. To you all, my Republican friends who are going to vote on this guy, when he gets there and he does what his character tells us he will do, don't think this isn't going to come back to haunt you. By the way, don't think that his ``Trumpservience'' as FBI Director won't turn on you. Just because he is a vitriolic partisan who despises Democrats doesn't mean that when Trump's ire moves someplace else--to Republican officeholders--he won't be there to deliver the FBI as an enforcer against you. So there is a lot to be concerned about. I will close with this: Never before in the history of American law enforcement has somebody sought to attain a high position in American law enforcement who has pled the Fifth Amendment. Not only did he plead the Fifth Amendment, but he refused to tell the committee what it was all about. You can't plead the Fifth unless you have a reasonable expectation that could put you in jeopardy of a crime. What crime? How in jeopardy? Explain that. You are not just a normal person; you are trying to be the head of the FBI. In a civil case, pleading the Fifth entitles the judge to instruct the jury to draw an adverse interest about your testimony that the jury can find against you because you took the Fifth. Why have we not had a straight answer yet from our Republican colleagues about why the guy who wants to be the head of the FBI pled the Fifth? It is an unprecedented, terrible situation. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here to speak in opposition to the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to serve as the Director of National Intelligence of the United States of America. Setting aside her lack of qualifications and setting aside her rotten judgment, her nomination strikes me as being part of a pattern of unilateral disarmament by the Trump administration against Russia. One can hazard as to why this is happening, but the fact that it is happening seems hard to deny. In November 2024, the Washington Post wrote this: Gabbard's planned appointment as the head of national intelligence elicited the most excitement in Russia because she has been long regarded as a darling of the propagandist Russian RT network, which amplified her sympathetic takes on Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and Putin. Russian state TV has called Ms. Gabbard ``our friend Tulsi.'' The Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda published an op-ed, and it was titled ``The CIA and FBI are trembling: Why Trump protege Tulsi Gabbard will support Russia as head of National Intelligence.'' So the Russians are telling us pretty plain and simple: She is with us. If you look at some of her behavior particularly relevant to the DNI position, she has constantly opposed section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is a key source of foreign intelligence for our national security and which--I guess I would have to say in this location--presumably is useful at getting intelligence on Russia. She is not alone. Over at the FBI, Trump's nominee for FBI Director, Kash Patel, we just found out was paid $25,000 by a Russian filmmaker with Kremlin ties to participate in a documentary attacking the FBI, which is an adversary of Russia's, which spends a great deal of time and effort keeping an eye on Russia's adverse intelligence activity in the United States. To make it worse, Kash Patel has said he wants to shut down what he calls the intel shops--the part of the FBI that would go after Russian intelligence operations and Russian criminal networks in the United States. He has even said he wants to shut down the FBI building and run everybody out into the field offices around the country. Well, guess what takes place at FBI Headquarters? Our intelligence and counterterrorism operations. If you empty that place out and you move everything out to the field where people are doing regular criminal work, it is another way of saying: We are going to shut down our intelligence operations. Just in the past week, since she has been in, Attorney General Bondi has pulled down the DOJ Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, which has recovered billions of dollars in ill- gotten gains from foreign kleptocrats--many Russian, many close to Vladimir Putin. She shut down DOJ's Task Force KleptoCapture, which is the entity that has been working to target the Russian oligarchs around Putin, seize their assets that have been used to support Putin in his illegal, brutal invasion of Ukraine, and take those assets and provide them to the Ukrainians for their rebuilding and defense. So a common theme here: Tulsi Gabbard wants to come in as ``our friend Tulsi,'' according to Russian state TV, to have the CIA and FBI trembling because she will support Russia. Kash Patel is coming into the FBI, who takes money from a Kremlin-associated filmmaker and promises to shut down or at least degrade our intelligence capabilities within the FBI. And Attorney General Bondi is busy over at the DOJ taking down the anti-kleptocracy initiatives that focus on Putin's little gang of oligarchs who prop him up. It is three for three in unilateral disarmament by the United States against Russia. There is a little history here that is worth going back to in evaluating all of this, and it includes that Russia interfered in the 2016 election through a Kremlin-linked internet research agency. There has been a good deal of reporting on that, but since that reporting, there has been a persistent, rightwing Trump narrative to pretend that never existed, that there was no Trump-Russia thing, that Trump-Russia was a hoax. In fact, it was not a hoax. Trump-Russia was a thing, as a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee pointed out. That bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report found that Russian President Putin had ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts that were affiliated with the Democratic Party and that were affiliated with the Democratic National Committee and that the purpose was to find and to leak information that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton in that election. Here is what the committee found. I quote the report, the bipartisan report: Moscow's intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the US democratic process. That was the finding of the U.S. intelligence community as well as the finding of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It went on. You remember that famous meeting where Trump took the Russian Ambassador and the Russian Foreign Minister right into the Oval Office and divulged to them highly classified information--highly- classified information--which caused U.S. officials to warn that Trump's revelations jeopardized a key source of intelligence in the Islamic State. They had to ping out to other intelligence Agencies and to our officers in the field: Look out. Classified information has just been given to these Putin officials to try to shore up and defend our sources and methods. The Mueller report went to exhaustive effort, with all of the support of grand jury and senior FBI and Department of Justice officials, and they concluded that the Trump campaign both knew of and welcomed the Russian interference and expected to benefit from it. It even talked about obstruction of justice by President Trump. But what they concluded in talking about obstruction of justice by President Trump is that he could not be indicted as a sitting President and therefore it would not be fair to lay out the conclusion that he had committed this crime because he wouldn't have a process by which to acquit himself and to clear the accusation. But they certainly laid out plenty of evidence that was suggestive that had he been an ordinary individual, he would have been indicted, charged, and convicted for obstruction of justice relating to this whole Trump-Russia saga. Later, when he was asked about all this in a conversation about Vladimir Putin, he said in November of 2017 about Putin--he said: Putin ``said he didn't meddle'' in the election. ``I asked him. . . . He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did.'' Everybody in the intelligence community knew that he did, in fact, do what they are saying he did, but Trump, for some reason, some connection, some Trump-Russia connection, went with Putin rather than the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence services. The next year in Helsinki, Trump met privately with Putin for 2 hours. We don't know what happened because they just met with their interpreters. Then they went out for a news conference, and there again, standing right next to Putin, he sided with him over our own intelligence Agencies. But the meddling was real, the meddling was documented, and the Mueller report helped document the meddling. If you go into the details, you see the subplots. Paul Manafort was Trump's 2016 campaign chairman. He was meeting regularly, communicating regularly with a Russian intelligence officer named Konstantin Kilimnik and with a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska through the campaign. The Senate Intelligence Committee's bipartisan report found that on numerous occasions, Manafort sought to secretly share internal campaign information with Kilimnik. This did not end well for Paul Manafort; he was indicted by a Federal grand jury for the crime of conspiracy against the United States, convicted, and sentenced to more than 7 years in prison--oh, except that Trump pardoned Manafort in late 2020. There was the infamous Trump Tower meeting in which Donald Trump, Jr., the same Paul Manafort, and son-in-law Jared Kushner met with Russian billionaire Emin Agalarov and a Russian lawyer connected to the Kremlin right in Trump Tower. The meeting came about because Donald Trump, Jr., had been told by a contact that the Russian Government wanted to offer--and I am quoting here--``official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary.'' Official documents and information from the Russian Government that would incriminate Hillary. The response: If it's what you say I love it. They went ahead to the meeting. Clearly, the Trump campaign's purpose for that meeting was to obtain from Russia incriminating information on Clinton to influence the election. The special counsel decided not to prosecute the attendees in part because it couldn't determine that that information would actually have been determinative because it related to orphans, and what didn't connect with the Trump attendees at that meeting was that the interruption of the orphans being delivered to the United States for parents who wanted to adopt them was the response to sanctions against oligarchs and people around Putin, and this was an effort to get the sanctions lifted. If you could crack the code, you would know that that is what the orphans conversation was about, because that is why the orphans blockade had been set up. Ultimately, Russia did, in fact, hack emails--both from the DNC and from the Clinton campaign chair. Russian intelligence got their hands on those documents. Here is what the Intelligence Committee wrote about that: Trump and senior Campaign officials sought to obtain advanced information about WikiLeaks' planned releases through Roger Stone. At their direction, Stone took action to gain inside knowledge for the Campaign and shared his purported knowledge directly with Trump and senior Campaign officials on multiple occasions. This wasn't just a one-off; this was information being channeled through Roger Stone to the Trump campaign. It didn't end well for Stone. He was indicted and convicted on charges of lying to Congress about what he and then-Candidate Donald Trump knew about Russian efforts to discredit Hillary Clinton's campaign and witness tampering and obstruction. On we go to Carter Page, also associated with the campaign, who traveled to Moscow in that timeframe--July 2016--to deliver a commencement speech while working for the campaign. Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich there expressed ``strong support for Mr. Trump''--``strong support for Mr. Trump and a desire to work together.'' Another campaign operative, George Papadopoulos--same year, May--was traveling and told the Greek Foreign Minister that the Russians have ``dirt'' on Hillary Clinton. So you have all these pieces coming together about the Russians seeking dirt on Hillary Clinton, getting it, leaking it through WikiLeaks, and constantly having a back channel through members of the Trump campaign. It didn't end well for Papadopoulos either. He was arrested for lying to FBI investigators and pleaded guilty. And, of course, Trump pardoned him too. Trying to cover up his traces. Michael Flynn in 2015 delivered remarks at a Moscow gala honoring Russia Today, RT, the same organization that Tulsi Gabbard was the darling of. He was seated at the gala next to Putin--next to Putin. He was paid $33,750 from RT--whose darling Tulsi Gabbard was--for this one speech. He didn't correctly report the payment. He ended up being paid more than $67,000 by Russian companies before the 2016 Presidential election. It didn't end well for him either. He lied to Vice President Pence and to the FBI about communications he was having with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about sanctions imposed by the Obama administration while President Obama was in office. Yes, the sanctions related to the orphans conversation at Trump Tower. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about that conversation, and, of course, Trump pardoned him days before Flynn was due to be sentenced. It is kind of an ongoing thing between Trump and Russia. A lot of us on both sides of the aisle are very concerned about what is going on in Ukraine--indeed, furious that Putin would launch his army into Ukraine and perform massive atrocities and war crimes: firing rockets into children's hospitals, having the soldiers murder through neighborhoods. It is a foul spectacle, and it started with Russia's invasion of Crimea, the so-called little green men. Trump thought that was all a pretty good thing. You will remember that the way they started it was to foment riots by Russian-speaking people in Crimea to provide a justification for coming over the border--sort of 1930s Europe style tactics coming back to us here. So that kicked it off. There were these demonstrations. Putin said ``Oh, my people, my people; they are being abused by those terrible Ukrainians,'' and in went the little green men. Here is how Trump praised Putin's invasion then of Crimea: When you see the riots in a country because they're hurting the Russians, OK, `we'll go and take it over.' And he really goes step by step, and you have to give him a lot of credit. And of course there is the famous comment to Russia publicly, saying: Russia, if you're listening-- This was during the campaign-- I hope you're able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Then there were the episodes that I mentioned earlier where he said ``No, Russia wasn't meddling in our elections'' despite the fact that everybody knew they were. But he took Putin's side in all of that. Most recently, he refused to condemn Putin for the death of Alexei Navalny, who had been such a brave fighter, standing up against the corrupt Putin regime, and died in a penal colony at the age of 47. For a long time, I have described the United States as being in a clash of civilizations with rule-of-law countries like ours on the one side and kleptocrats, autocrats, and governments run by criminal organizations like the narco-traffickers on the other side. Fairly simple clash--rule of law versus rule of thuggery. There ought to be bipartisan support for making sure that the United States does not become a safe haven for kleptocrats and criminals. We should not be giving aid and comfort to our enemies by allowing them to park their funds here in our country. We have made progress to combat the kleptocrats and the international criminals who are on the other side of this clash of civilizations. Ms. Gabbard is not on the right side of that clash, not when she is so chummy with Putin, not when she is so chummy with the murderer Bashar al-Assad, not when she is ``our darling Tulsi'' to Russian media channels, and not when she is lined up with Kash Patel, threatening to take down the FBI Offices that track Russia, taking money from a Russian filmmaker, and then stack that up with Attorney General Bondi taking down the kleptocracy and klepto-capture efforts at the DOJ that have been making the Russian oligarchs' lives miserable by going after their assets. One, two, three--all unilaterally disarming against Russia in the wake of all that time in which the Trump-Russia connection appeared over and over and over and over again. And as far as I can tell, still persists today. I see my colleague here on the Senate floor. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, well, we are in interesting times, and we are beginning to see the corporate and billionaire takeover of the U.S. Government. And in that corporate and billionaire takeover of the U.S. Government, the nominee Russ Vought to run OMB has a key role, and that key role--to do the work for the billionaires and the big corporations--is what makes him unfit and dangerous and what compels us to come to the floor tonight to warn the American people of what this guy will do and who he is. Let's start with a little history. This is the guy who violated the Impoundment Control Act by withholding 214 million appropriated dollars from the soldiers fighting and dying in the trenches of Ukraine against Putin's thug army. It was that stunt that led to the impeachment of President Trump. This is the guy who caused lives to be lost in those Ukrainian trenches by withholding funding they needed desperately, withholding the funding they desperately needed illegally, and withholding that desperately needed funding illegally in order to support a scheme by President Trump to put pressure on the Ukrainians to give him dirt on his political opponent. That is a little bit of history of where this guy will go. The OMB is the nerve center of the Federal Government, and to have someone there of that character is dangerous. Vought is also lawless. The Impoundment Control Act that he violated, the Government Accountability Office said this: Faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law. He violated that, and they specifically find: . . . therefore, we conclude that OMB violated the [Impoundment Control] Act. Is he repentant about that now that the Government Accountability Office has called it out as being illegal? Never mind the Ukrainian lives that he caused to be lost. No. He continues to say the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional, even though no court has ever said so. He was pressed on this question in the Budget Committee and answering the Appropriations Ranking Member Senator Murray's questions about this, he said: President Trump has stated that the [Impoundment Control Act] is unconstitutional . . . I agree with the President's position. Again, no court has said this. He said: If I am confirmed as the Director of OMB, I will follow the advice of legal counsel, and ultimately the President, with respect to the implementation of the [Impoundment Control Act]. Pay attention. I will follow the advice of legal counsel, and ultimately the President. Not ``I will follow the law,'' not ``I will follow court decisions that say what the law is.'' No. ``I will follow the advice of legal counsel, and ultimately the President.'' So let's just have a quick look at who his legal counsel is. People may remember this. This is a painting that was commissioned by this guy, the billionaire Harlan Crow. As you may remember, the billionaire Harlan Crow has been funding the lifestyle of the next person over-- Justice Clarence Thomas. Millions of dollars in secret gifts to the Thomas family. And the next guy over in the painting--by the way, if you saw Kristi Noem sworn in by Justice Thomas, he has a picture of this right behind them. He is so pleased with it that he has got his own version of it, him with his billionaire sugar daddy, and with Mark Paoletta. This is the guy who is going to be the legal counsel whose advice Vought is going to listen to. This guy is neck-deep in the billionaire court capture scheme; of course, his advice is going to be what the billionaires say. The next guy over is Leonard Leo, the court-fixer. This is basically a panorama of the corruption of the Supreme Court: the billionaire who funds it, the Justice who secretly accepts millions of dollars in billionaire gifts, the guy who cooks up the whole scheme and travels with Justices on these billionaire-funded trips and is here at the billionaire's estate in the Adirondacks with them, and, of course, Mark Paoletta. That is whose advice he is going to take. Again, he was careful to say: not the courts, not the law--the billionaire court-fixer guy who is now his counsel and the President, who has already said he thinks the law is unconstitutional. This guy, on this question of the Impoundment Control Act, he hasn't said he is going to follow the law either. In fact, he said the Impoundment Control Act is a stupid law, and he tweeted at Russell Vought: ``Impound, baby, impound.'' Yes, you are going to get sober legal advice from a guy who says, ``Impound, baby, impound,'' and hangs out with billionaires who fund the capture of the Supreme Court as part of Leonard Leo's scheme. This is an illustration of how this guy, Russell Vought, is a creature of the far-right, billionaire dark money world. Before he went to OMB the first time, he worked as vice president of Heritage Action. What is Heritage Action? Heritage Action is a billionaire-funded dark money group that advocates for the things that dark money billionaires want, and he, for years, worked for them. Then he went into OMB. And I submit, he still worked for them, although they weren't paying his paycheck at the time. He gets back out after Trump won, and he sets up something called the Center for Renewing America--again, a billionaire-funded, dark money enterprise whose purpose is to advocate for the things that the dark money billionaires want. It also, by the way, took care of the refugees from the first Trump administration--that creepy character Jeffrey Clark, who was in the Department of Justice and tried to wrangle his way into the Attorney Generalship by proposing that he would put the Department of Justice into the election fixing scheme that President Trump was running down in Georgia--that guy? Where did he land? Right, at the Center for Renewing America, courtesy of Russ Vought. Who else is a senior fellow there, funded by the billionaires? Oh, Mark Paoletta, the guy who is going to be his legal counsel and was chumming it up with the billionaire and the Justice. Who else? Kash Patel, the guy who has threatened publicly, over and over again, to turn the FBI into a political weapon for Donald Trump against his adversaries. He went so far as to repost a tweet of himself chainsawing the heads off members of his enemies list. Yes, this is the guy who published an enemies list of who he was going to get in what he called a manhunt. ``The manhunt begins now,'' he said, of his enemies list. And Trump wants to put him in charge of the FBI so it becomes his personal, political weapon. And Kash Patel has shown, time after time, instance after instance, that he is all too willing to do that. And where did he land? Yes, right, at Vought's Center for Renewing America. So this guy Vought is neck deep in the billionaire, dark money operation that is working right now to take over the U.S. Government and run it its own way. The way it wanted to do this is through a plan that it cooked up and paid for called Project 2025. And if you look at the first couple of weeks of the Trump administration, you see Project 2025 playing out again and again and again and again. And who was the central architect of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025? Oh, yes, Russell Vought. Paid for with $120 million--you know, in Rhode Island, that is still a pretty big number--$120 million from a couple of rightwing billionaire families to cook up a scheme to run the government. And Vought both writes it and now goes in to implement Project 2025. If you want to look at the guy's lawlessness from another angle, he doesn't believe in independent government Agencies. So the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, for instance, that is an independent government Agency because it adjudicates disputes in the energy sector and because it makes policy and has to do a number of things, but it has to be independent to have this adjudicative function, or the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Federal Reserve--he doesn't believe that any of them should be independent. He says: What we're trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them-- ``Seize them''--for the corporate and billionaire takeover, they want to seize the independent Agencies in government so that they are under the control of the big donors who put this administration in. He said specifically about the Federal Reserve: It's very hard to square the Fed's independence with the Constitution. Except that the Supreme Court of the United States has squared the Fed's independence with the Constitution for decades. The decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court supporting the existence of independent Agencies goes back to the Humphrey's Executor case in 1935. This has been a long run of Supreme Court precedent in which literally dozens of cases involving independent Agencies have come before the Court, and it has never said that it is hard to square the independence of Agencies Congress has deemed to be independent with the Constitution. This is an eccentric and illegal lawless view, and they intend to impose it, notwithstanding the law. There are--``Number one'' he says, ``is going after this whole notion of independence. There are no independent agencies. . . . [The] SEC, or the FCC, CFPB . . . that is not something that the Constitution understands.'' Oh, yes, except for those 90 years of Supreme Court precedent interpreting the Constitution to understand exactly that. In addition to the billionaire ``stoogery'' that he has been involved in for decades, in addition to his penchant for lawlessness where there is clear Supreme Court precedent, he is just a little bit strange. Here is what he has said about the men and women who work in the Federal Government. ``We want'' them, he said, ``to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains''--your postman, the villain; the meat inspector who makes your steak safe at the USDA, the villain; the health inspector; the people who do the tests on pharmaceutical drugs; the people who do brain cancer research--yes, we definitely want them to be viewed as the villains and to not want to go to work. He goes on. ``We want their funding to be shut down so that''--and, of course, he picks the EPA because we are dealing with mostly polluter billionaires--``so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.'' If you think that is normal, you might want to go have just a little look in the mirror. He wants mass firings, which we are already seeing threatened. He wants to eliminate the civil service, fire staffers so that they can be replaced with loyal partisans. So let's say you are a big polluter. Let's say you are a big oil company. Let's say you are not cleaning up your methane leaks. You are spewing waste methane into the atmosphere for everybody else to breathe, and the Environmental Protection Agency or perhaps the Department of the Interior, who may be your landlord, comes to you and says: You know, you have got to clean up your mess here. You are spilling methane into the atmosphere. It is poisoning people. You have got to knock it off. Nope. Out you go. Bring in the sycophants. Bring in the loyal partisans. Bring in people who will tell the corporate and billionaire takeover artists that are at work now: Never mind. We got your back here. You just keep leaking that methane. And here is one that kind of stunned me, a pretty simple question. I ask him: Did Joe Biden win the 2020 Presidential election? What was his answer? I believe that the 2020 election was rigged. No court has ever believed that. People got their bar ticket removed for telling courts falsehoods that the election was rigged. This was the first big lie of the Trump administration, and he is not over it, and he wants to go and run the nerve center of OMB. He even wants to invoke The Insurrection Act, bring in the U.S. military onto domestic soil, to break up people who are protesting the Trump administration. This is not a normal guy. This is not a guy who respects the law and the Constitution. This is a tool of a very small, rightwing billionaire elite, and he has proven himself with his participation in the Trump scheme to hold back urgently needed money from Ukrainian warriors trying to defend their country against Putin so that he could put pressure on Zelenskyy to develop dirt on Trump's political opponent. He was part of that scheme--what a guy. The last thing that I will mention is that he has described Joe Biden and his administration as having engaged in climate fanaticism--climate fanaticism--this from the slow, cautious, temperate, noncombative Biden administration. I wish they had been a little bit more fanatic, but they sure weren't. They were slow. They were cautious. They were temperate. They were noncombative. And he found that to be fanatic. Well, I will close with what is coming because what is coming from climate change is a beginning meltdown in property insurance markets all around the country, which is going to cascade into a problem in mortgage markets around the country because you can't get a mortgage if you can't get property insurance. And unless you are selling billionaire-to-billionaire Palm Beach estates, if you want to sell your home, you have got to find somebody who can get a mortgage. If your home can't get a mortgage because it can't get insurance, you can't find a buyer, and so your property values crash. And the chief economist for Freddie Mac has warned that this ``insurance to mortgage to property values'' crash is going to happen, and it is going to hit the U.S. economy as hard as the 2008 mortgage meltdown. So somebody who takes this not seriously at all is the wrong person to lead us as we head toward disaster. Here is some of the work that we have been doing on this out of the Budget Committee. Here is where we are seeing massive non-renewal rate increases. That is the insurance companies telling people who have paid their premiums for years: You are fired. We don't want you anymore; we are not going to insure your property any longer; you are done--or jacking up the rates. You can see where the high-percentage places are; they are in coastal and wildfire areas. Here is another one. This followed our Budget Committee report that I just referenced. This is where home insurance premiums are predicted to go because of climate change--up to a 300-percent increase. That is quadrupling. If you have a $6,000 home insurance policy, that is $24,000. It is all over. It is in the hot spots for wildfire, and it is in the hot spots for coastal property damage from storms and sea level rise. When you raise home insurance premiums by that much, what do you do? You knock down the value of the home because when you buy a home, if you are buying into a let's say $24,000 expense every year, the present value of $24,000 out of your pocket year after year after year comes off the value of the house. So it will knock down property values. Indeed, it is predicted that in many of these areas, homes are going to lose as much as 100 percent of their value. A home that people have invested in--purchased, loved, raised their children in--will lose its value in some places completely because you can't get insurance, you can't get a mortgage, and you can't find a buyer. The place is going to burn. The place is going to flood. It is not just me warning of these things. Here is an article from The Economist magazine--not exactly a liberal, green publication-- predicting globally that the next housing disaster is going to come from climate change. Severe weather brought about by greenhouse gas emissions is shaking the foundations of the world's most important asset class . . . real estate. The world is facing roughly a $25 trillion--trillion--hit. The impending bill is so huge, in fact, that it will have grim applications, not just for personal prosperity, but also for the financial system. Climate change [in short] could prompt the next global property crash. If you look back here to Florida, you see how acute the trouble is as that insurance market melts down. Home insurance in Florida--the average annual premium for a typical single-family home in the State is likely to hit nearly $12,000 this year, says The Economist magazine. Citizens Property Insurance Corporation has become Florida's largest home insurer. Its exposure is now $423 billion, much more than the state's public debt. This is a high-risk situation. The Financial Times report says that billion dollar-plus disasters occur once every 3 weeks now on average, compared with every 4 months for equivalent events in the eighties. As insuring high-risk homes becomes increasingly hard and costly, cracks in the U.S. housing market will widen. This danger of housing value collapse is already underway. Residential properties in the United States are overvalued by $121 billion to $237 billion for flood risks alone--not for wildfire risks out West, the flood risks alone. That is the Financial Times. The New York Times: Without insurance, [it is impossible] to get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can't buy a home. Headline: ``Insurers Are Deserting Homeowners as Climate Shocks Worsen.'' Bloomberg News: ``US Home Insurance, Real Estate markets Teeter on Financial Crisis.'' Here is what they say: It is hard to overstate the role that insurance plays in the modern economy. Banks won't make mortgage loans for uninsurable properties. Without those loans, the real estate market slows to a crawl, which in turn eats away household wealth and the tax revenue that State and local governments rely on. For insurers to play their part, they have to feel confident predicting how much damage they might have to cover. To do that, they build models of the future based on what has happened in the past. They don't have to be right all the time, just enough to win by more than they lose. Climate change has made that much harder. A warming world is more dangerous and unpredictable. In the eighties, the United States experienced roughly three disasters a year that did at least $1 billion in damage. Now the annual occurrence is closer to 18. It is not just news reports. Here is the Congressional Budget Office analysis: The Risks of Climate Change to the United States in the 21st Century. As emissions of greenhouse gases of human activities accumulate in the atmosphere and oceans, climate conditions are changing throughout the world. In the United States, those changes will have consequences for economic activity, real estate, and financial markets. Here is the Financial Stability Board. It is the global board that advises banks on how to stay sound. Climate-related vulnerabilities in the financial system, when triggered by climate shocks, could threaten financial stability. . . . Climate shocks can interact with existing [financial] vulnerabilities in the real economy or in the financial system . . . [and lead to financial losses]. Climate shocks could also affect the real economy through damage to real assets or the creation of stranded assets or disruption to economic activity that can feed back to the financial system. I will cut to one of the end points here: The projected physical risk impact from climate change could cause global GDP to decline versus the baseline by 5.3 percent by 2030 and by up to 15 percent by 2050. That is a global recession, folks, driven by climate change, pounding insurance markets, which pound mortgage markets. And this guy thinks that taking climate science seriously is fanaticism. Here is what the American people think about some of this stuff. Penalties on high-pollution imports--letting high-pollution Chinese products into our country, putting a penalty on that: 12 percent oppose, 74 percent support--a 62-percent positive swing. Carbon pollution limits on big companies: 12 percent disapprove, 72 percent support. Impose a fee on big polluters: 10 percent oppose, 74 percent support--a 64-percent swing. The American public wants to solve this climate problem, which is why the billionaires need to come in and take over the government from the inside with people like Russell Vought, so they can defeat the American people, continue to pollute, and let the economic mayhem ensue. I will close with this last image just because I really love it. Here are the MAGA guys standing outside the wall of Trump's Mar-a-Lago palace: We sure showed those elites who's in charge. Meantime, inside are the helicopters from Wall Street, Big Tech, Bezos, pharma, Big Ag, Musk, coal, Big Oil, crypto bros. This is what is happening. MAGA may have thought it won the election, but here is who really won the election: the looters and the polluters; the Musks, who are running into our information systems, looting data out of them for their own purposes; and the polluters, who want to pretend that this climate change threat is not real. Russ Vought is dangerous because he won't face the facts on these things because he belongs to the billionaire looters and polluters. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Against creepy billionaire influence, I vote no.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I sit on the Judiciary Committee and was present for the confirmation hearing of Pam Bondi in her quest to be Attorney General of the United States. I have to say that there is a lot to admire. She had been a competent prosecutor for many years. She was the twice-elected attorney general of a major State. And she said a lot of the right things about independence of the Department and rule of law. What I couldn't get over was how things changed when she got to a topic that would have been sensitive to Donald Trump--something that would have gotten Donald Trump all twitchy. When she hit those topics, it was like, watching the plane fly into the Bermuda Triangle and all the navs and coms go crazy. She couldn't say obvious things--things like: Did President Biden win the 2020 election? That is an easy answer: Yes, he did, sir--or ma'am. Super simple. When she can't say that, that is a sign. When she told us that there had been a peaceful transfer of power--a roomful of Senators who have had to flee this Chamber because of the violence of January 6 and go and shelter in a secret location, and she had to tell us that there had been a peaceful transfer of power. Again, haywire. No predication, she said. She couldn't say there was no predication to go after somebody like Liz Cheney or Jack Smith. Predication is the key to being able to opening a case like that. The predication is pretty apparent--or its lack is pretty apparent, and she could not agree that there was no predication to open a case. Last, she pretended that the candidate for FBI did not have an enemies list. He had an enemies list. He published his enemies list. He said that the people on his enemies list were criminals. He said that now it is time to go on the manhunt for the enemies that he identified on the enemies list. So when she can't state the obvious, it causes real concern. It causes real concern because of the lawlessness this administration has already demonstrated in the first 2 weeks. She got a lot of questions about pardons: Would she support violent offenders in the January 6 attack on the Capitol being pardoned? We were chastised for having asked such questions by our Republican colleagues who said: You know, you are asking her ridiculous hypotheticals. That will never happen. Jim Jordan: Oh, that wouldn't happen. The President would never do that. Over and over again, Republicans said: Oh, that would never happen. Well, what happened? He pardoned the violent offenders. In fact, some of them are already up to no good again. We have got some arrested for assaulting police officers. We had some shot in a violent confrontation with police officers. This is just in the 2 weeks since their pardons. And, here, soliciting a minor. That is the quality of people that the President was willing to pardon. So those pardons are another signal about a very strange and dangerous time that President Trump is taking us into. As my colleague from Vermont just mentioned, we have got these little characters--I call them the muskrats--running around in Treasury, running around over at USAID, getting into systems where they have no business, where apparently they are not just able to get into the payment systems for Social Security and things like that--tax refunds, whatever--but they can actually manipulate the systems and they can leave backdoors so that Elon Musk can continue to access that data even after this raid by his little muskrats is over. We don't know the details of what they have done, but there are probably a great number of laws, including privacy laws, that they are violating by running around without proper authorization through these enormous accounting databases. And of course the billionaires that helped bring Trump to office live off data. Now they have access to one of the biggest datasets in the world. Do you think they are going to be responsible about that? I sure don't. Right now in Rhode Island, funds are frozen, and people can't get straight answers about how they will ever get access to funding that has been duly appropriated, authorized, and obligated. The freeze of those funds by the President is now in violation of not one but two court orders. So the lawlessness is apparent, whether it is the muskrats running around in Treasury looking at everybody's files or whether it is court orders being patently violated or whether it is violent offenders being pardoned so they can go out and solicit minors again. I mean, the whole thing really calls for probity and good judgment and adherence to constitutional norms from an Attorney General, and when she can't answer as simple a question as ``Did President Biden win the 2020 election?'' my alarms go off. And they particularly go off when we get to her FBI Director, Kash Patel. She suggested she would be able to rein him in. I have my doubts. He made completely preposterous explanations of how his enemies list wasn't an enemies list, even though he had called those people ``criminals'' and that there would be a ``manhunt'' for them. He denied having a role with the J6 Choir, which was a singing group of violent attackers from January 6, and he had taken credit for producing their recording but pretended he didn't know that they were January 6 violent attackers. He assured us that FBI agents would be protected against political retribution, which was beginning as he testified and which is going on at the Department right now--massive, unprecedented political retribution. He won't tell us what he told a grand jury in proceedings in which he pled the Fifth Amendment. Well, if you plead the Fifth and then you go into a civil proceeding, your having pled the Fifth is something that the civil attorney can use against you. It is called the adverse inference. A jury can draw the conclusion that the testimony that you would have given had you not asserted your Fifth Amendment privilege would be harmful to your case. They are legally available to reach that conclusion. A judge will instruct them that they may reach that conclusion. Here we are in the Judiciary Committee, and we can't get an answer from this guy about his grand jury testimony. We know he pled the Fifth. And, what, are we not supposed to take the adverse inference that a regular jury would take from pleading the Fifth? It is a mess. This guy Patel went into a court in Colorado to testify for Trump. How did he do when he went in front of that court and testified? Well, the presiding judge said that he ``was not a credible witness,'' his testimony was ``illogical'' and was ``completely devoid of any evidence in the record.'' OK. So I used to be a U.S. attorney, and we used to take FBI agents and we would put them into court to make cases. If an FBI agent working for me had gotten that kind of a response from a Rhode Island district judge--that he was not credible, that he was giving testimony that was illogical, that he could not be believed--there would be repercussions. We would need to see if that was a Giglio disclosure problem for this person. We would need to understand why this FBI agent couldn't be trusted by a Federal judge. This isn't just an agent; this is the guy who wants to run the FBI. So to trust Pam Bondi to rein in a character like this who has ``virtually no experience that would qualify him'' to lead the FBI, says former Attorney General Bill Barr; who has ideas that are ludicrous--``absolutely unqualified for this job,'' ``untrustworthy,'' ``an absolute disgrace to . . . even consider him''; a guy who ran on his website, ``Kash Patel retruthed,'' imagery of him chain-sawing his enemies list people--this is actually a video clip. We can't play it here, but it is a video clip of him chain-sawing through his enemies list, and he thought that was cool to retruth. That is the kind of person we are dealing with. Pam Bondi is going to be able to restrain him? Not if she can't even say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. This was his last comment. He said I had misquoted him. To the press: We are going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. Like he didn't win it. We are going to come after you. Whether it's criminal or civilly, we will figure that out. But yeah, we are putting you all on notice. That is what is coming to the Department of Justice. The FBI is in danger of being turned into the political enforcement weapon of this President, who is already breaking the law over and over again in just the last 2 weeks. And a woman who cannot say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election I believe is not going to be able to restrain this kind of misbehavior, let alone the kind of misbehavior we are seeing out of the Oval Office. So regretfully--because there was a lot to like about Ms. Bondi-- regretfully, I cannot possibly vote to confirm her. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am a friend of the distinguished Senator from Wyoming, but on this matter, we disagree quite a lot. I think, clearly, everybody likes clean air and clean water. My opposition to Lee Zeldin is founded on where he is likely to be on a different issue--climate change. Climate change is coming at us, and the context for Lee Zeldin's nomination, I believe, is this: We went through a long period of science on climate change, starting with the early days of Dr. Hansen and NASA's work, work by Exxon and other Big Oil majors themselves, lots of work at universities and in U.S. and State government. And the science pretty well nailed it. They pretty much got it right. They warned what was going to happen, and it began to happen, and it has continued to happen. Based on those warnings, we moved into phase 2, which was the political era of climate, where it was our job here in this building to listen to those warnings and figure out what the best and smartest thing was to do about them. The problem was that the fossil fuel industry got involved with Citizens United climate money in the hundreds of millions behind it, and they squelched that conversation. As a result, Congress has failed to address the looming climate crisis purely from fossil fuel-funded Republican opposition. That takes us now into era 3, the era of the ``forewarned but not prevented'' consequences, and the place in which those consequences are most saliently making themselves felt is in the homeowners insurance industry. Homeowners insurance is in crisis in this country and is in near meltdown in various States and counties in this country because the risk that the insurers have to bear is now unpredictable to them. So what we are seeing is homeowners insurance prices skyrocketing. We are seeing homeowners insurance companies going bankrupt, leaving States, firing their long-time clients because they don't want to provide coverage in these danger areas, which include coastal areas--Florida, as a result, is kind of first and worst in the home insurance meltdown--and wildfire-adjacent areas second, which puts California and a lot of other Western States very much in harm's way. Now, the problem with that is it doesn't just end with an insurance crisis. When you get a sufficient number of properties that cannot get affordable home insurance or cannot get home insurance at all, those properties become unmortgageable. If you are a billionaire living in Palm Beach, you can find another billionaire to buy your property who can write a check, but if you are a real-life person--a plumber in Orlando, living in a development, who paid for their home with a mortgage--you are going to want to sell that home to somebody who can get a mortgage. When your home can't be mortgaged any longer, that will crash its property value. In fact, if your homeowners insurance goes from $4,000 to $16,000--a case we heard of--then that crashes your property value, too, because a $16,000 carrying cost on a piece of property knocks its value way down. So not from the ``greenies,'' not from the environmental community, but from Freddie Mac, the mortgage giant, we heard the warning that an insurance crash turns into a mortgage crash, turns into a coastal property values crash, which is serious enough that it redoes 2008: We have another national recession. It is in that context that we need to understand that we need an EPA Administrator who will take climate change seriously, treat the science honestly, and stand up where necessary to the political pressure that will be coming from the White House, where we have a President who actually thinks it is a hoax, and from the huge fossil fuel forces that propelled him into office with enormous amounts of political money and who now think they own the place. The fossil fuel industry has done nothing but lie about this and use their power for evil. President Trump is completely mistaken and under the thumb of the fossil fuel industry. And against that will stand the EPA Administrator who has to be truthful and factual and support and defend our environment and our safety from climate change. In that context, I have nothing against Lee Zeldin personally, but the likelihood of him standing against that fossil fuel bulldozer that is coming at him is, essentially, zero. And that fossil fuel bulldozer is also going to be bulldozing their way into American homes in the form of an insurance crisis that is looming. So this is going to become very real very fast. And in that context, this is very much the wrong guy. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, many of us who were here on January 6 have pretty indelible memories. I am looking at Senator Murray, who has particularly harrowing memories. One of mine is, I was one of the last people out of the Senate, and by the time we got to the room where we were sequestered for our own protection from the mob, colleagues were irate, and they had been frightened. There is footage of Republican Senators running through the halls to get away from the mob. I remember one of our colleagues shouting out that we should get back over here to vote even if it meant protesters would have to be shot--again, a Republican. There were 600 of the rioters here who committed violence on police officers, and nearly 200 of them used weapons. They were convicted of this after all proper, fair procedures in an American court of law. Then the notion of pardons started to come up, and we were basically shushed by our Republican colleagues. Oh, that will never happen. The Vice President said: If you committed violence on January 6, you shouldn't be pardoned. In fact, he said ``obviously''--``obviously you shouldn't be pardoned.'' Another colleague in the Judiciary Committee chastised Democrats for asking the Attorney General nominee what she would do with respect to the violent January 6 protesters. Would she recommend that the President pardon them? And we were chastised for the absurdity of that question. That is an ``absurd and unfair hypothetical to even ask.'' Over in the House, Jim Jordan said that he didn't think anybody violent was going to be pardoned. ``I think,'' he said, ``he is going to focus on . . . all the people who didn't commit any violence.'' Another colleague on the Judiciary Committee said he was against any such pardons ``for people who assaulted cops, threw stuff at cops, broke down doors, broke windows.'' We heard this cascade of denial from the other side about these pardons. It was unfathomable that he would do this. It was wrong that he would do this. It was absurd that he would do this. And then he did it. And what happened? Well, two things happened: One, over 1,000 people who have demonstrated their willingness to commit acts of political violence at the behest of Donald Trump were set loose on the streets. We haven't heard the last of them. There may be another call to arms. ``Will be wild!'' ``Be there.'' We haven't heard the last of them. But just the leading edge, in only the week since we have been there--one has already been arrested for a violent confrontation with police officers, another was killed in a shooting incident when he refused to be arrested and engaged police officers with a weapon, and a third is in Rhode Island in our ACI, our adult correctional institute, for having challenged police officers in an armed standoff. Now, he was in prison when he was pardoned. Nobody in this pardon operation thought to understand that this guy actually was convicted again of violence against police officers and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment in my State. So we know that there is going to be more violence from these people. We know that Trump now has an on-call assault team that he can use to launch political violence, just the way he did on January 6, and this is a dangerous situation. This ought to be the easiest vote in the world. How you can even walk through these halls and look our Capitol Police officers in the eye-- the ones who were there, the ones who took their lives in their hands to steer the mob away from vulnerable Senators--how you can look them in the eye if you haven't supported this, I don't know. There is a word in the English language, ``subservience.'' I think we need a word called ``Trump-servience'' in which things you know you shouldn't do you do anyway because you are either frightened of Trump or want to suck up to him. This is not a great moment. There is an effort, frankly, to erase that incident. For a long time: Oh, just peaceful protesters. This was all just, you know, happy people coming in to visit the Capitol, fun and games. Yeah, so fun that we had Senators running down the aisles to get away from them; so fun that, to get back into this building, we had armed SWAT officers with automatic weapons lining the entire pathway back from where we were secured into this Chamber. Just remember what our colleagues were saying in that time period, but the effort to erase this moment goes on. It occurred just recently in the Judiciary Committee when the Attorney General nominee said that there had been a peaceful transfer of power, like January 6 never happened. I asked a question for the record, asked her to explain that. She said: Well, on Inauguration Day, it was peaceful. Do you remember why it was peaceful on Inauguration Day? Because we had the Capitol of the United States surrounded by more soldiers, more police officers, more fencing, more snipers, more law enforcement and military safety people than had probably been the case since the Civil War. Yet now everything is peaceful. We cannot forget what happened here. It is wrong to forget what happened here. It is an insult to this Capitol to forget what happened here. It is an insult to the men and women of the Capitol Police Department and the DC Police Department and the others who came in to fill in when they were overwhelmed by these brutal rioters. So I am glad that Senator Murray did this. I appreciate very much the opportunity to speak on their behalf, both for the sake of those police officers and for the sake of the truth and for the sake of our history here. This deserves to be remembered. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I think this is my first time with you presiding, so it is good to see you. This power grab--this attempted power grab--that took place today in flagrant disregard for our separation of powers has a home not in the Constitution but in Project 2025. The American people hate Project 2025, so Donald Trump spent his campaign trying to distance himself from Project 2025, but then he put one of the authors of Project 2025 in charge of the Office of Management and Budget, who is, as we saw in the Budget hearing, out of one side of his mouth saying ``Oh, President Trump doesn't have anything to do with 2025; he disavowed it'' and, as President Trump's appointee to OMB, is merrily implementing Project 2025. This is exactly aligned with the Project 2025 playbook that Americans rejected so much that Trump had to lie and pretend he rejected it too, in addition to being unconstitutional. That is not just an allegation any longer; a court today here in the District of Columbia found it to be unconstitutional and has ordered a stop to this pause. That is a relief because for people in my State, today was a scary day. Medicaid was stopped. The portal to the Medicaid system that the State reaches into was closed. People say: What is Medicaid? Medicaid is how a great many American seniors pay for their nursing homes. If you are shutting down Medicaid for your jollies, what you are doing is threatening the security of elderly folks living in nursing homes for whom Medicaid pays the bill. We have in Rhode Island and in other States gone through very significant addiction crises. Addiction recovery is very often paid for through Medicaid. So when you shut down Medicaid and close the portal, you are threatening people who are bravely fighting their way through their addiction, trying to get well and better, and suddenly President Trump is cutting the legs out from under them by closing the Medicaid portal and threatening Medicaid. Mr. President, 300,000 Rhode Islanders get supported by the Medicaid system, so this sent a lot of fear through a lot of people. I know there are people in the Trump administration who enjoy that. They get their kicks out of creating fear and having people--you know, cruelty is their pastime. But this is getting a little carried away. Firefighters and police officers--I spoke this morning to the Major County Sheriffs' Association, and they immediately raised the concern: What about my HIDTA grants? Those of who have been in law enforcement know what a HIDTA grant is. For firefighters, it is the AFG grant--the assistance to firefighters grant--with which they buy safety equipment, breathing apparatus, and new fire engines and vehicles. So all of that panic because this rash and unconstitutional decision was made. Kids in school often are supported by Federal programs. Head Start is a particularly good one. We had a very well-loved mayor of our capital city, Providence, RI, who started in Head Start and became the mayor of our capital city. Head Start is a wonderful program. Why would you want to threaten all of those children? Sojourner House is a domestic violence support entity and shelter in Rhode Island that supports women when they come out of an abusive relationship and need a place to find immediate safety and try to put their lives together. It is supported by Federal grants that President Trump tried to shut down today. It is astonishing. There is $33 million in small business loans out in Rhode Island with a big question mark by them because of today's bad behavior. It is the community health centers. People had doctor's appointments and people were going in for minor procedures and treatments, and suddenly there is a cloud over the ability to fund the community health centers. This is just wild, extreme, and dangerous stuff. I will take my lawyer role for a minute. Talk about unconstitutional--the Constitution provides a method for the President to veto legislation he doesn't like. That veto method does not include not--being the President, coming in in a whole new administration, having missed completely the opportunity to do a proper veto or for Congress to override, and doing this unilateral thing, which is not only forbidden by the separation of powers and the veto rule but also by law Congress passed regarding so-called impoundments. So it is flagrantly, flagrantly illegal. I will close by saying that it is also a threat of corruption. Every time you look at the Trump administration, you have to lift up the hood and look for where the corruption thread is. We are going to see corruption like you have never seen before out of this administration. And the corruption thread here is that you close all these things down, and then you pick the ones you like for the people who are your big donors, for the companies that gave you big bucks, for the special interests who put you in office, for the political allies who serve you, and you let them have their money freed up while everybody else's is frozen. Do you think that is imaginary? It is exactly what the Trump administration did with the tariffs in his last term of office. You could go into a secret little line, and if you knew the right people, you could get a waiver. There is an absolute avenue to corruption in this. Thank God the courts shut it down. This was a bad moment. It is not over. I hope my Republican colleagues will rise to the occasion because this is a basic attack on our Constitution, and it is a basic attack on the legislative branch of government. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, it is nice to see you in the Chair.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I am here to add some thoughts regarding the vote we are going to have on Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense. Of course, as a Rhode Island junior Senator, I am very cognizant of the important role that my senior Senator Jack Reed has had on the committee of jurisdiction, the Senate Armed Services Committee. I want to give him credit for the way he has conducted himself. What I can bring to this conversation is a little bit about background investigations. I sit on the Judiciary Committee. The Judiciary Committee does more background investigation work than any other because we have so many people coming through--the judges, the U.S. attorneys, every marshal--all of it. So we are very busy on BIs. I took a deep dive into the Brett Kavanaugh background investigation and put out a report on the flaws and gaps and misdirections that transpired around that background investigation--specifically, that supplemental background investigation, a point I will clarify in a moment. Let's start with what we do know about the FBI background investigation into Mr. Hegseth. We know that only one Democrat has even seen it, and that is the ranking member on the committee, Senator Reed. And we do know that he has publicly said that that background investigation was--to use his word--``inadequate.'' So Republicans are going forward on the basis of an FBI investigation that a very respected Member of this body has publicly said was inadequate. What else do we know about it? Well, it has been reported in the press that the chairman has said that it took three briefings by the FBI to get through the background investigation. I don't know why that happened, but we do know that new material emerged in the press about various kinds of misconduct by this individual after the initial background investigation took place. So the likeliest scenario to explain why there were three background investigations in the light of the recurring release of further information about his repeated misconduct is that there were supplemental background investigations after the original full field FBI background investigation was completed. Let's presume that to be true. Again, we can't know this because this is all tied up in so much unnecessary secrecy, in my view. Let's presume that that is the case. What does that mean? Well, what we discovered during the Kavanaugh background investigation is that the regular FBI full field background investigation takes place under a set of longstanding rules and protocols and procedures. They have forms that they follow. It has been routinized to a fairly significant degree. It is different than a proper FBI investigation. A proper FBI investigation in the criminal law enforcement front has a whole different set of controls and protocols and supervisory roles over that. When you get into the full field background investigation, you are operating under a different set of rules, but you are still operating under rules. And you can ask the question to the FBI: Was this background investigation conducted fully within the rules and the protocols for background investigations--until you get to a supplemental background investigation. Now, one of the objections that I had to the way we were treated as we tried to get to the bottom of the Kavanaugh background investigation was that the then-head of the FBI kept repeatedly saying publicly--we were repeatedly told that the supplemental background investigation was done consistent with all of the FBI standard protocols and procedures. What was misleading about that, as we later discovered, is that for a supplemental background investigation, there are no operating procedures and protocols. Wray said that they comported with all of their procedures. Didn't disclose that, in fact, there are no procedures to comport with. What is the FBI doing in a supplemental background investigation? They are doing only and exactly what the White House has instructed them to do--period, no more, no less, no procedure, no protocol--which raises a huge question about the adequacy of this background investigation to the extent that, in its later stages, it was a supplemental background investigation. We know that, when the Kavanaugh investigation was going on, Republican Senators were told that there was no corroboration-- corroboration being kind of an important legal term here--no corroboration of the charges that had been brought by Dr. Blasey Ford of his attack on her those many years ago--no corroboration. What we found out, later on, is that the instructions from the White House to the FBI for that supplemental background investigation related to her charges were: Don't look for, don't find, and don't report to us any corroborating information. We also found out that they never interviewed either Dr. Blasey Ford about her allegations or Brett Kavanaugh about his conduct. So there is every reason to believe about this background investigation, as to the supplemental background investigation part of it, that it was woefully incomplete; that it was restricted by the White House to very, very narrow bounds; that we do not know what those narrow bounds are; and that, very likely, neither Hegseth nor the individuals making the charges were even interviewed by the FBI. And we can suspect that because that is precisely what happened in the Kavanaugh background investigation. So there is a major, major weakness in what is publicly described as an inadequate background investigation, to the extent that those latter two segments of it that caused the three briefings to have to take place were supplemental background investigations precisely and exactly controlled by the Trump White House. Another point that relates to all of this is that, when these witnesses came forward, the standard counterattack against them was that they were anonymous. Over and over again, Hegseth said in the committee: ``Anonymous smears''--``anonymous smears.'' These accusers were not anonymous. Not only were they not anonymous, they were willing and presented themselves as willing to be able to come over here and personally brief, in their offices, any Republican Senator. It is not anonymous when you are willing to show up in a Senator's office and give a personal briefing. What they weren't willing to do was to put their names out there publicly. Now, why would they want to steer away from that? Ask Christine Blasey Ford what her life was turned into by far-right and MAGA attacks on her after she came forward with her charges against Brett Kavanaugh. Ask the poll workers who were Rudy Giuliani's victims what their lives turned into after he called them out--conduct against them that gave rise to the massive, multimillion-dollar verdict that Rudy Giuliani is still struggling to pay. Evidently, some billionaire paid it off for him. We will see. But it is perfectly logical for a person to be willing to come forward, like many witnesses are, to identify themselves and to speak privately--the way people often do in a grand jury--to a prosecutor without yet putting your name out there. And, actually, some are not anonymous, but we should reject the notion that these witnesses were anonymous. They were not anonymous. They are real people with real faces who are willing to come in and tell their real stories, and Republican Senators simply refuse to hear them. That is a different thing than anonymity. They couldn't get through the doors of the offices. So either our Republican colleagues already know who these people are--so they are not anonymous--or they are perfectly able to find out by getting their names and inviting them in and hearing them out. It seems like a pretty simple ask. Now, in some cases, for instance, Mr. Hegseth's sister-in-law--ex- sister-in-law, I guess you would say--has actually put her name on her affidavit, describing his abusive and drunken misconduct. So she is not anonymous by any stretch of the imagination. And because the far-right counterattack team likes to attack people who are willing to come forward, they actually outed one of the other witnesses in a story. I won't mention her name because I do not want to make things even worse for her, but they did out her in a rightwing publication. So you have at least two names that are out there that are clearly not anonymous and, indeed, are public. What happens with them? What happens with them is that they are accused of having evil motive; that they had a motive to lie about Pete Hegseth, and that is what is driving what they have been saying. Well, guess who is really good at interviewing witnesses and looking at the surrounding circumstances and evaluating a motive--the FBI. The FBI is. So, if the FBI in this supplemental background investigation was instructed not to evaluate motive--just to let that be a political hand grenade to throw with no foundation--then we have an extra layer of problems with this background investigation. So there is every reason to believe that the background investigation was inadequate and specifically directed by the White House away from relevant evidence, the way the Kavanaugh investigation was directed away from corroborating evidence. Here, it would have been directed away from evidence of motive, and you have got a real problem on your hands. I urge my Republican colleagues--this is kind of the last call. If this guy gets in and starts to behave the way reasonable people can expect him to behave, you are going to own that. And when you say, ``Oh, the background investigation should have brought that up,'' not if you didn't ask about the background investigation, not if you didn't get a real one, not if you didn't bring the actual witnesses in to hear from them themselves. We have had another little event recently, which are the pardons of the violent January 6 rioters. Before those pardons took place, our Republican colleagues said over and over again that that will never happen; that this is a weird Democrat pipe dream. ``The very notion of pardoning these violent rioters who hurt police officers--who attacked and harmed police officers--is absurd,'' said one colleague. The Vice President said it wasn't going to happen; that it would be wrong. And after all of that talk and all of that reassurance, what happened? Donald Trump went right out and did it. So, if you think there are guardrails around this individual, it has already been proven that they are not there. The thing you thought was absurd, the thing you thought would never happen, the thing you said was wrong was done, and if that is not a lesson as we go forward into these other defective nominees, I can't help you; I can't make you vote any other way. But it ought to be clear that, with future misconduct by this guy, whether he is being drunk on duty or erratic or abusive or inappropriate with female staff and officers or even abusing the power of our military to accomplish political purposes for President Trump, there is really no sign of guardrails to prevent that, and an inadequate FBI report is something that should be cleared up before Republicans are forced to vote on this. It is in your power to look into these things and get it done. It is not in our power in the minority. We are doing the best we can. So I urge you to consider those dangers as we move forward toward this vote. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise now for the 296th time to direct our attention to what is coming at us through fossil fuel emissions causing our natural systems to be significantly disturbed. We are not yet all the way through the first week of the second Trump administration, and already Trump has made his priorities clear: Looters and polluters reign, and their feeding frenzy comes at the expense of the American people. I expect the looting and polluting have only just begun. So we have made a new chart that will surely see the Senate floor again. When President Trump needed cash for his campaign, he knew just whom to ask. He convened Big Oil CEOs at Mar-a-Lago. He requested that they pony up $1 billion for his campaign. And he promised them he would immediately reverse dozens of President Biden's environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted. Giving him $1 billion, he said, would be a ``deal'' because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him. Well, he is right about that being a superdeal for polluters. The industry benefits from more than $700 billion a year in subsidy in the United States alone--$1 billion to Trump to protect $700 billion to the industry. That is a pretty good return on investment for fossil fuel. Well, Trump won and the billionaires who funded Trump's campaign want their payback. Payback began this week with a big score for the leaders and polluters. On his first day, President Trump signed Executive orders to lay the groundwork for weakening vehicle emission standards, raising costs for families--raising costs for families--an average of $6,000 to $8,000, while also harming public health from the added emissions, and weakening our American automobile industry's global competitiveness, a major gift to Big Oil at the expense of regular Americans and consumers. Review EPA's 2009 finding that the greenhouse gases are a danger, even though that finding has been upheld by the Supreme Court. The winners? The polluters driving climate change: dramatically reduce or eliminate the social cost of carbon to protect the fossil fuel free-to- pollute business model, made subsidized fossil fuel winners over domestic clean energy losers. Do you remember when Republicans used to say government shouldn't pick winners and losers--until it is the fossil fuel industry. Withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, helping fossil fuel undermine global efforts to reduce their greenhouse gas pollution; stopping offshore wind development, a clean energy competitor to his fossil fuel funders, at the expense of American consumers, workers, and our own domestic manufacturing base. Rhode Island, by the way, is home to the Nation's first offshore wind farm and a growing number of good union jobs in the industry. Would President Trump say to the country that, on his first day in office, it was time to repay his Big Oil donors? Well, that wouldn't have gone over well so he had to pretend all these donor handouts would benefit the public. His first day Executive order on energy begins by stating: America is blessed with an abundance of energy and natural resources that have historically powered our Nation's economic prosperity. In recent years, burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations have impeded the development of these resources, limited the generation of reliable and affordable electricity, reduced job creation, and inflicted high energy costs upon our citizens. These high energy costs devastate consumers by driving up the cost of transportation, heating, utilities, farming, and manufacturing, while weakening our national security. Virtually none of that is true. So let's look at the claims one by one. First, yes, he got this right. America is, indeed, blessed with energy abundance. Where it is particularly abundant is in wind power. We have the third greatest offshore wind power potential of any country in the world. We have the fourth greatest onshore wind potential anywhere in the world. Indeed, wind resources in the Great Plains States alone could supply the United States with 16 times our electricity demand. That is energy abundance. Then, as this map from our national labs shows, we have amazing solar energy resource potential, particularly in the Southwest and through the Southeast. Now, Trump defines energy as ``crude oil, natural gas, lease condensates, natural gas liquids, refined petroleum products, uranium, coal, biofuels, geothermal heat, the kinetic movement of flowing water, and critical minerals.'' Notice anything missing? That is literally every possible iteration of fossil fuel, plus nuclear, geothermal, and hydro; everything except wind and solar, which produced more electricity than coal last year and could power the entire country. Trump next claims regulations have impeded the development of energy resources. And by that, as we just heard, he means fossil fuels. Well, as he would say, ``wrong.'' Under President Biden--and, actually, regrettably, from a climate point of view--the United States produced more oil than ever before in the Biden years, indeed, setting monthly records for oil production. So that wasn't true either. Well, it is foolish to abandon those enormous wind and solar assets-- not good for our country or our economy, good only for their fossil fuel competition. And there is an additional big economic danger if we stick with oil because the United States is a high-cost oil producer. The average cost to produce a barrel of U.S. crude ranges from $50 to $70. In Saudi Arabia, the marginal cost of production is around $10 a barrel--$50 to $70 for us, $10 for the Saudis. That means our industry will always be vulnerable to cheaper foreign producers. And by the way, it has happened before. In 2015, the Saudis decided they didn't like America producing so much, so they turned on their spigots, causing a big hit to American oil and gas companies. Once they had tanked American production, they reduced their own back to normal levels and the price of gasoline spiked for our consumers. They can do that again anytime they want. It is basic business and economic sense not to put all your eggs in an industry where you are the high-cost producer. We have a competitive advantage in wind and solar with those massive resources and continent-straddling range that spans multiple time zones, allowing wind and solar energy to be sent wherever the wind isn't then blowing or wherever the Sun isn't then shining. We have massive clean energy opportunities. Trump claims that existing energy policies have reduced job creation. Again, wrong. Oil patch jobs have been reduced, not by regulations but by automation. Where the country has seen a job boom is in the low- carbon energy sectors with more than 400,000 jobs created since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. Low-carbon energy now employs more people than fossil energy. It is where the jobs are--not that Big Oil cares about that for 1 minute. Trump claims that renewable energy is driving up energy costs for Americans. Wrong again. Solar and wind have, for some time, been the least expensive forms of energy that there are. Wind is the bottom blue line, solar panels are the bottom yellow line. They have been the cheapest since 2015 or, if you go back further, 2013. We have had a solid decade of wind and solar being the least expensive forms of energy for the American public. But Big Oil doesn't care. They just want to sell their dirty product. What does actually drive up energy costs for Americans? The greed of Big Oil. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, OPEC, the international cartel, jacked up prices and U.S. oil producers rode along to epic profits off of those events. You just have to look at their sworn financial statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission about what profits they earned. They earned the biggest profits in the history of the world. In a nutshell, they gouged. Electricity bills also rose when the price of natural gas spiked after that Russian invasion. Climate change means Americans are spending more to cool their homes because it is hotter than it has ever been. If you are living in Phoenix or Houston or Tampa, you are likely running your air-conditioner nonstop for months on end, and that is on your electricity bill. That is just going to get worse as Trump's looters and polluters have their way. Climate change-fueled wildfires are forcing utilities in the West to spend billions burying transmission and distribution lines to avoid sparking more fires. That increases electric bills--another climate cost to consumers. And, obviously, Trump's decision to let his big LNG donors export more LNG will drive up natural gas prices here at home. When there is less at home because more is going overseas, prices go up. That is supply and demand 101. Here, again, under Trump, fossil fuel wins, American families lose and Big Oil doesn't care. The wind and Sun and flowing water and the Earth's heat are all free fuels. Fossil fuels put us at the mercy of foreign petrodictators and predatory cartels. Just from a national security perspective, why not choose the free fuels that no outside actor controls? And then, of course, come the costs of climate change itself burdening American families with climateflation, from grocery staples to insurance prices, to shipping costs, all rising as the result of climate change, disrupting agriculture, weather, and transit--even all the gas price-gouging by the industry thrown in. That is just the climateflation. Then comes the danger to our entire economy. For a look into coming attractions, check out what is happening out in Los Angeles, where raging Santa Ana winds turbocharged wildfires tearing through American families' homes much because of climate change. Climate change is perhaps the biggest systemic financial risk to our economy and, thus, to families' personal finances. And where is this coming true first? In the insurance markets. Insurance markets are the leading edge of our time of consequences. The L.A. fires, with insured losses in the tens of billions of dollars and total economic losses likely in the hundreds of billions, on top of last fall's hurricanes--which resulted in hundreds of billions in economic losses in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia--are a dangerous blow to tottering insurance markets. In recent years, millions of Americans had insurance policies canceled due to rising climate risk. Millions more saw skyrocketing premiums, particularly in Florida, that forced families in some cases to drop coverage, leaving their families' most important financial assets--their homes--exposed. Insurers are pulling out of some markets altogether. Insurers are going bankrupt. Insurers are flooding mailboxes with price hikes and notices of cancelation and nonrenewals, and that all hits property values. So the concern here is cascading failures--cascading failures from the insurance market, to the mortgage market, to a property values collapse, and that ends in economy-wide catastrophe. Along the way, home ownership will move further out of reach for the middle class as homes are burdened with more risk and expense. Property owners will have homes that they aren't able to sell because they can't be insured, so a buyer can't get a mortgage to afford the house. There is a lot of pain before the collapse. We have been through a long period of climate lies, and now, unfortunately, we are entering the period of climate consequences. To stave off the worst consequences, we must eliminate the carbon pollution that is the root of it all. President Trump's Executive orders do exactly the opposite, exposing us to grave economic dangers, and for the worst of reasons: to reward wealthy special interests who donated to his campaign. The American people need to watch their wallets. When President Trump says he is fighting for you, think twice. He is actually fighting for the Big Oil donors--the fossil fuel billionaires--who got him elected. The looters and the polluters are looking to get ever richer, and they will loot working families, pollute Mother Nature, and damage our families' futures to do it. So we fight on. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Will the Senator yield for one more question?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Through the Chair, the Senator mentioned the Budget Committee. In the hearings that we have had in the Budget Committee, during which we have discussed tax cuts and their effect on revenues and their ability to pay for themselves, how many times have our Republican colleagues been able to produce a witness who, under oath, would say that these tax cuts would actually pay for themselves?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I would make the point to my friend from Massachusetts that when Democrats used reconciliation, we used the reconciliation process to do the Inflation Reduction Act and help everyone. The Inflation Reduction Act meant green jobs to red States, and it meant less pollution for everyone. The Republicans are teeing up to use reconciliation to help big CEOs, billionaires, and big corporations that are already doing amazingly well. If you feel you are being left behind by those folks, it is because you are. Look at what CEO pay has done, rocketing skyward, compared to the pay of the top 1 percent--other folks in the C-suite who may not be the CEO--compared to typical worker wages down here. Most Americans are right here, and most of the benefit of this tax reform will go to these folks. CEOs are taking a larger and larger share for themselves of the resources of American corporations, leaving less and less to pay their workers, and that is the difference: rocketing upward and more or less flat. They want to make this worse through their reconciliation. If you want to add another backdrop to what is going on here, this is the share of America's revenue that is contributed by corporations. A lot of people in this body seem to want to go back to the good old days of the 1950s when things were whatever they were then. Well, back in the 1950s, more than 30 percent of America's revenue came from our corporate community. Corporations were making a real and significant contribution to America's revenues and enjoying the significant growth that being an American corporation provides you. But politically they hacked and they hacked and they hacked away at their responsibilities, and now they are paying 6 percent of America's revenues. As wealthy as American corporations are, they add 6 percent now of America's revenues. And this, too, will be made worse by this Republican program. Half the benefits go to the top 5 percent. If you are making over a million bucks, it is a $78,000 tax cut; if you are making 50 grand, 273 bucks. Thanks a bunch. And the hit is going to come to regular Americans through Medicare, through Medicaid, and through support for their healthcare. They will even lower taxes for companies moving jobs and profits offshore. How about that for ``Make America Great Again.'' I tell you, when you actually take a look under the hood, what you see every time is that the benefits of these Republican tax cuts go to the biggest corporations, to the billionaires, and to corporate CEOs, and within those biggest corporations, the worst ones for moving jobs and profits offshore. It is as reliable as the sunrise, and it is as wrong as it can be. I yield to my friend Senator Rosen.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask that the vote begin at this moment.