Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand adjourned until 10 a.m. on Thursday, September 12; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and morning business be closed; that following the conclusion of morning business, the Senate proceed to executive session to resume consideration of the Provinzino nomination postcloture; further, that notwithstanding rule XXII, all time be considered expired at 11:30 a.m., and upon disposition of the Provinzino nomination, the Senate resume consideration of the Ritz nomination; further, that the Senate vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the Ritz nomination at 1:45 p.m.; finally, that if any nominations are confirmed during Thursday's session, the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I have five requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders. Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate:

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank the Senator for his inquiry and can confirm that H.R. 7032 is not intended to modify the application of section 6103 of the tax code in any way. H.R. 7032 will help the Congressional Budget Office provide more timely cost estimates and economic analyses that are essential to our work.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I am here for the 34th scheme speech on the right-wing billionaires' covert scheme to capture and control our Supreme Court. And I am here to report real progress in our work to restore the integrity of the Court, and wrest it from special-interest control. This Court, captured and corrupted by right-wing special interests, has imposed deeply unpopular and harmful policies on the American people. It needs reform. And--good news--commonsense reforms to take back the Supreme Court received a significant boost from the President and the Vice President this week. The right-wing ``Fed Soc'' Justices have done unprecedented damage to America's democratic institutions and to our government's ability to protect ordinary Americans' health, safety, and well-being. The right-wing Fed SOC Justices also took away women's right to an abortion, leaving millions of women unable to make basic decisions about their own reproductive health and endangering women experiencing troubled pregnancies. They overturned longstanding and overwhelmingly popular gun safety laws leaving our communities exposed to the epidemic of gun violence. They eviscerated the government's ability to fight climate change and to protect consumers from corporate profiteering, and they invented, out of thin air, the idea that former Presidents are absolutely immune from being held accountable for using their office to break the law, to commit crimes, even to commit treason. On top of all of this, the Court has done its best to prevent the American people from fighting back through the democratic process. It has made it harder for ordinary people to vote, while making it easier for billionaires and deep-pocketed special interests to impose their will on the American people with unlimited amounts of dark money. How did we get here? A decades-long scheme led by creepy billionaires and backed by a deluge of dark money captured the Court like some crooked 19th-century railroad commission. This Court-capture operation was not cheap. The latest estimate put it at more than $580 million, and that is a minimum. That money flowed in from creepy billionaires, laundered through rightwing front groups like the Federalist Society and Judicial Crisis Network, where the donors--the real donors--could hide their identities behind the front groups doing their dirty work. This dark money funded full-scale campaigns to stack the Supreme Court with Justices who would deliver for the billionaires. The scheme's major victory came when Senate Republicans blocked Merrick Garland's confirmation to the Supreme Court. That set the stage for Donald Trump to fill that seat through a process outsourced almost entirely to the billionaires' operative Leonard Leo and his array of rightwing, dark money front groups. Once these handpicked nominees landed on the Court, the dark money network tells them how to rule, supplying them with extremist legal arguments through so-called friend-of-the-court briefs designed to reach their desired results. The parallel between what the friend-of- the-court brief flotillas recommend and what the FedSoc Justices do is nearly perfect. Leo and his cronies also orchestrated a secret gifts program for their amenable Justices, keeping them happy with lavish gifts of luxury vacations and other high-value freebies. Despite a clear Federal ethics law requiring Supreme Court Justices to disclose even small gifts, these Justices kept hidden years of free private jet travel, free yacht trips, free tickets to sporting events, and even, for one Justice, $260,000 of loan forgiveness for a luxury motor coach. Justices have flouted the Federal law requiring recusal from cases where they have a conflict of interest. Justice Thomas sat on cases involving efforts to overturn the 2020 election despite his wife's involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Worst of all, the Court has refused to take any real steps to clean up this mess. After substantial public pressure, it first wrote a useless letter about ethics, and then it adopted a toothless ethics code with no mechanism for either investigation or determination or enforcement. The Supreme Court now stands alone in all of government free from any factfinding about ethical misconduct. As a result, the Court's legitimacy in the eyes of the American people is now at an alltime low and falling. Well, against all that mess, earlier this week, something big happened. On Monday, President Biden and Vice President Harris endorsed two commonsense proposals to help restore the Court's legitimacy. Happily, I have bills that perfectly align with both. First, the Supreme Court needs a binding, enforceable code of conduct. The Supreme Court should not violate one of the most basic principles of the law: ``Nemo iudex in causa sua''--``No one should be a judge in their own cause.'' Yes, that is a principle so old and so venerated that it is in Latin, and they violate it nonstop. The Justices of the Supreme Court should have ethics rules at least as strict as the other branches of government, with a real process for finding out what happened and holding miscreants accountable. Overwhelmingly, Americans agree. Last week, Justice Kagan suggested that a panel of experienced lower court judges could review ethics complaints, compile a report, and then make recommendations to the Supreme Court. That is exactly what my Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act would do. By the way, that is also what most all State supreme courts do. They all face the same problem of being the top supreme court in their sovereign entity, and they all face ethics review by other judges or panels. This is a solvable problem. My bill would also impose stricter disclosure of gifts Justices receive, enhance existing recusal laws, and require the flotillas of phony front groups who lobby the Court through friend-of-the-court briefs to disclose their actual funders and connections. My bill passed the Senate Judiciary Committee last summer, with the warm and welcome support of the Presiding Officer, and is now awaiting a vote on the Senate floor. Democrats stand ready and willing to deliver on President Biden's and Vice President Harris's goal of bringing real transparency and accountability to the Supreme Court. President Biden and Vice President Harris also announced their support for 18-year term limits for Supreme Court Justices, with new appointments to the Court occurring every 2 years. That would counter the Republican Supreme Court Justices' penchant for strategically timed retirements that tip the Court into Republican hands. Term limits are a commonsense proposal with long bipartisan support. Supreme Court Justices, including Chief Justice Roberts, have expressed support for term limits. Even some of our Republican colleagues have endorsed the idea. A Fox NEWS poll earlier this month showed that this idea had support from more than 75 percent of Americans. Fortunately, Democrats stand ready to deliver on this idea too. My Supreme Court Biennial Appointments and Term Limits Act, which the distinguished Presiding Officer is a cosponsor of, would make the Court more representative of the American people and lower the political stakes of Supreme Court nominations. Under our bill, the President would appoint a new Justice every 2 years. Justices would serve full time on the Court for 18 years, after which they would acquire a form of senior status--something familiar to anybody who knows Federal courts, where, in district courts and circuit courts of appeal, judges go on senior status regularly. These Justices on senior status would remain on the Court to hear the original jurisdiction cases that are required by the Constitution for the Supreme Court to entertain. The nine most recently appointed Justices would hear what the Constitution calls appellate jurisdiction cases, which the Constitution expressly gives Congress the power to regulate. So Congress can pass this long-overdue reform while preserving judicial independence and without a constitutional amendment. President Biden noted that he has overseen more Supreme Court nominations as Senator, Vice President, and President than anyone living today. Vice President Harris, a former member of the Senate Judiciary Committee herself, has echoed the President's calls for reform. Both the President and the Vice President have immense respect for our Supreme Court and for a strong and independent judiciary. They have demonstrated it through their lifetimes. That is exactly why we should listen to them when they tell us that the time has come for reform at the Supreme Court. This has been a long and often lonely fight in the Senate. The big- money, rightwing apparatus has tried over and over to shut me up. I think I may have a record for hostile Wall Street Journal editorials, and may I tell the Wall Street Journal editorial board: Thank you. That is a badge of honor. Realization of what is needed to save the Court from itself has spread--first through the Halls of Congress, then into the national consciousness, and now to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That is good reason for hope. So bravo, Mr. President and Madam Vice President. Now it is up to us in Congress to deliver and repair and redeem this captured Court. To be continued. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, first of all, let me congratulate Senator Brown and Senator Casey and all the work they put into this effort and Chairman Wyden for his negotiation to where we are right now. This is a big deal for Rhode Island. We actually tried the child tax credit during COVID. We know how it works. It helped 174,000 Rhode Island families through COVID, and what we saw is that it lifted many of them out of poverty, and what else we saw is that it enabled parents to get into the workforce. There is a phony narrative that if you give the child tax credit to families, they will just avoid work. Our experience was the opposite. Once you had child tax credit revenues and you could afford, for instance, childcare for your kid, then you could go to work. And, of course, we needed a workforce through COVID, so people were paying attention to this, and that was our experience. This is a pro-child and pro-work tax credit. Now, you think it would be an easy slam dunk over here because it came through the House with a big bipartisan vote and the corporate benefits included in this bill far exceed the family benefits included in this bill. So you would think our Republican friends who are all about corporate tax benefits would be saying, hey, 3 to 1, 4 to 1, whatever the ratio is, we won this one big, let's close the deal; I support this even though it is a little bit out of balance. The Budget Committee did the work that showed the imbalance problem. We can always go back and solve the balance problem later. Families can't wait for the child tax credit. This really matters. I support this deal, and I also support having a memory as we go forward and as we further decorrupt our Tax Code about how to bring that better into balance. It ain't forever. The child tax credit is the key here. I will only add that the low-income housing tax credit that is in here as well is extremely important. It is very important to Rhode Island. We have a housing crisis in Rhode Island. We have exactly zero of our municipalities left in which it is affordable for the average family to be able to own a home. And we have one--one--in which it is affordable to be able to rent a home. So we have a lot of work to do, and the low-income housing tax credit is a huge lift that allows our very experts and very able housing community to build more and revamp more and produce more housing to meet the needs and quell the crisis. So I will close by thanking Chairman Wyden for his leadership and his skilled negotiations that have gotten us to this point. And I hope that common sense, what is good for children, what is good for work, and what is good for the corporate sector can prevail here in the Senate. (Ms. CORTEZ MASTO assumed the Chair.)

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am back now for the 33rd time to keep shining a little light on the rightwing billionaires' covert scheme to capture and control our Supreme Court. As a result of that scheme, the Court's rightwing just took a wrecking ball to the government's ability to protect Americans from big polluters and corporate cheaters. This year's billionaire bonanza came through four decisions that gutted administrative Agencies' ability to do their job--perfect payback to the polluter billionaires who helped foot the bill to get these Justices onto the Court in the first place. The first decision is Ohio v. EPA, where the Supreme Court undermined the Environmental Protection Administration's ability to enforce the ``good neighbor'' provision of the Clean Air Act, the provision that defends the air quality of ``downwind'' States like mine, Rhode Island, from powerplants and industrial facilities in ``upwind'' States, where sometimes they build the smokestacks extra high so that the pollution doesn't hit the polluting State, but it floats over and comes down and hits us in Rhode Island. Without even full briefing on the merits, industry litigants succeeded in getting the Court to stall proposed clean air regulations and place a thumb on the scales in favor of polluters. At the hands of the Federalist Society Justices, the right of polluters to pollute beat the right of Rhode Islanders to breathe clean air. Then came SEC v. Jarkesy, where the rightwing Justices undercut the ability of Federal Agencies to hold fraudsters accountable through administrative enforcement proceedings. The Court held that civil penalties for securities fraud required a jury trial under the Seventh Amendment, undermining administrative adjudication in all sorts of civil enforcement proceedings across the Federal Government--protecting consumers from predatory financial institutions, workers from unsafe conditions, and the environment against polluters. I am angry that the Court picked this case to express concern about the right to a civil jury while it has been busily eroding that same civil jury right when doing so favored big corporations over regular people. If you are a fraudster on the losing end of a regulatory violation, they are all about the Seventh Amendment. If you are a consumer or employee injured by a big business, off you go to private, secret, mandatory arbitration. At the hands of the Federalist Society Justices, the right of fraudsters to commit fraud defeated the right of people to be protected from fraud. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Court overruled 40 years of precedent granting what is called Chevron deference to Federal Agencies when they are implementing laws that protect health, safety, and the environment. Chevron recognized that courts should defer to an executive Agency's reasonable interpretation of a statute it is charged with administering. Just reading that sentence tells you how eminently reasonable the rule was. Plus, Congress can't be expected to make fine- grained determinations in technical areas that are best left to experts with decades of training and experience. In Loper, the rightwing Justices removed that deference to expertise. The result? Look at this Washington Post headline: ``Corporate lobbyists eye new lawsuits after supreme court limits federal power''-- more ways for polluters to stall regulations with delays that could save polluters billions. Just to read this text: Mere hours after the Supreme Court sharply curbed the power of federal agencies, conservative and corporate lobbyists began plotting how to harness the favorable ruling in a redoubled quest to whittle down climate, finance, health, labor and technology regulations in Washington. These cases are a power grab by a captured Court, transferring regulatory authority from an elected Congress and an elected executive to an unaccountable judiciary ill-suited to make such technical determinations. Almost laughably, as they did this, Justice Gorsuch had to amend his opinion in that Ohio v. EPA case because he confused ``nitrous oxide''--laughing gas--with ``nitrogen oxides'' that were the subject of that case. So much for judges knowing technical stuff better than the experts. The right of Federalist Society judges to make up fake science for billionaires triumphed over the right of regular people to have real experts defend them. Finally, in Corner Post v. Federal Reserve, the Court held that the 6-year statute of limitations to challenge a Federal Agency's action begins when a person or entity challenging a rule is allegedly injured--maybe decades after the rule became law. Every regulation can now be litigated for eternity. Agencies will be perpetually vulnerable to litigation on every rulemaking stalled by deep-pocketed litigants armed with exotic legal theories and the backing of this captured Court. As Justice Jackson wrote in her dissent in Corner Post: The tsunami of lawsuits against agencies . . . has the potential to devastate the functioning of the Federal Government. Even more to the present point, that result simply cannot be what Congress intended when it enacted legislation that stood up and funded federal agencies and vested them with authority to set the ground rules for the individuals and entities that participate in our economy and our society. At the hands of the Federalist Society Justices, the power of special interests to tangle up regulatory Agencies has defeated the right of taxpayers to protection from those special interests. Here is how I explained that protection in my amicus brief in the Loper case: Over the last century, our society has advanced remarkably. As industries and corporations grew, their motive to maximize profits caused social harms and threatened consumer safety. Regulation responded. Heavy equipment and dangerous chemicals came to mines, factories, and construction sites; regulators implemented workplace safety standards. Meatpacking and mass production . . . ballooned; regulators implemented sanitation requirements in production facilities. Americans widely adopted automobiles; regulators required seat belts and air bags. The modern economy necessitated a modernization of the U.S. regulatory framework. Congress responded to the complexities of the modern world by ensuring that administrative agencies have the capacity, flexibility, and expertise to respond to new developments. Part of that project was delegating clear and broad authority to executive agencies and allowing those agencies to adopt and adapt regulations to respond to new hazards. As a result, daily life in the United States is safer. Workplace illnesses, injuries, and deaths declined. Children on average have lower levels of lead in their blood. Foodborne illnesses that used to kill thousands of people per year have been practically wiped out. Highways are no longer ``carnage,'' and air travel is even safer than highway travel. So why tear down what has worked so well for generations? Well, the billionaire-funded think tanks say it is to strip power from so-called ``unaccountable bureaucrats.'' They love to talk about unaccountable bureaucrats--except that Federal Agencies are not unaccountable. Indeed, they are way more accountable than judges. Again from my Loper brief: Agency experts report to politically appointed executive agency heads nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. Accountable. These agency heads serve at the pleasure of the president, who is accountable to the people. If the public is unhappy with how agencies are implementing Congress's policies, voters can make that known at the ballot box. Congress oversees agency actions through legislative committees dedicated to agency oversight, and regularly conducts oversight hearings where heads of agencies are called to account. Congress retains the power to enact legislation to limit or reverse agency rulemakings if it disagrees with the agency's actions, in some cases on an expedited calendar. Furthermore, Congress holds the power of the purse; every appropriations bill presents an opportunity to expand, correct, or contract agency authorities. If the public is unhappy with how Congress is holding agencies accountable, voters can make that known at the ballot box. Finally, agencies are accountable to the judiciary, which has the authority to review an agency's statutory interpretations and actions to ensure the agency's decisions are reasonable and follow appropriate processes and procedures. The myth of unaccountable administrative Agencies is a fake. The real objection is that career Agency employees are experts and can go toe- to-toe with industry trickery. And worse, for polluters, they can't put the fix in politically with a big campaign contribution or a couple of million dollars to a super PAC because Agencies are forbidden to take political considerations into account, and they are forbidden to self- deal. All of this wreckage of the longstanding protections of our administrative process was done by polluters who fund the Republican Party and paid to stack the Court that dark money built, and this is the polluters' payday. A whole smelly ecosystem of secretly fronted front groups is involved. Anti-regulation doctrines get cooked up in rightwing hothouses funded by polluters. The doctrines get amplified by rightwing front groups funded by polluters. They then get fed to the Court via little flotillas of rightwing amici funded by polluters. Secret, dark money funding from billionaire special interests underpins the entire operation. Much of this is the Koch Industries' political influence operation--a powerful, rightwing, dark money political polluter network. Look at that Loper case. The lawyers who represented the petitioners in that case worked for free--supposedly--for a public interest law firm supposedly called Cause of Action. Interesting law firm: It discloses no donors, and it does not report any employees. In fact, the New York Times discovered the group's lawyers who supposedly work for Cause of Action actually work for Americans for Prosperity, the main battleship of the Koch political front group armada--an operation that is so cozy with the far-right Justices it helped put on the Supreme Court that Justice Thomas has repeatedly flown out to join fundraisers for Koch political operations, including Americans for Prosperity. Here is the flotilla of front groups that appeared in Loper as amici curiae: the Buckeye Institute, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Landmark Legal Foundation, the Mountain States Legal Foundation, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, the Pacific Legal Foundation, and, of course, our dear friends the U.S. Chamber of Commerce--a proper murderers' row of polluter mischief. And who are they funded by? Oh, let's look. DonorsTrust, the Donors Capital Fund, Koch family foundations, the Bradley Foundation, and ExxonMobil itself. DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund are so-called donor-advised funds. They don't actually do anything. They don't actually produce anything, build anything. What they do is provide rightwing identity- laundering services. DonorsTrust has been described as the ``dark-money ATM of the right'' and, with Donors Capital, has laundered over a third of a trillion dollars into climate denial operations. If you are ExxonMobil or a billionaire polluter and you want to support climate denial but you don't want your name on the phony front group that is doing the climate denial work, you send your check to DonorsTrust, and they take it and they send the money where you tell them--to the other group--only it is disclosed by them as coming from DonorsTrust. It is an identity-laundering operation for dark money political influence. Some amici also were funded by front groups affiliated with Leonard Leo, whom we know as the billionaires' operative in the Court capture operation. The Loper amicus Advancing American Freedom received $1.5 million from Leonard Leo's Concord Fund between 2020 and 2021--$1.5 million. Leo's Concord Fund, which is this operation on this graphic, operates also under the fictitious name of the ``Judicial Crisis Network.'' When I say ``fictitious name,'' I mean that under Virginia corporate law, Concord Fund has filed ``Judicial Crisis Network'' as a fictitious name--term of art in the law--under which it is allowed to operate without disclosing that it is actually the Concord Fund. Through the Judicial Crisis Network, Leo and his confederates spent millions of dollars on the Court capture operation: TV ads, barrages of TV ads, huge checks in for $15 million and $17 million from undisclosed donors to pump the rightwing Justices that they had chosen through confirmation. So this same group that helped push the Justices from the Federalist Society lists onto the Supreme Court then files a brief through Advancing American Freedom--$1.5 million from Concord into Advancing American Freedom. This whole thing is a billionaire-backed shell game in which the Court willingly participates. The connection between Court capture and regulation destruction--that is not even in dispute. The Court capture operation and the anti- regulatory operation were admitted by Trump's White House Counsel, Don McGahn, to be--and I am quoting him here--``two sides of the same coin.'' You stack the Court to tear down the regulations so your polluters are happy and they fund your effort to stack the Court and support Republican power. And about this slate of recent decisions I have just discussed, he proudly told the New York Times--and I am quoting him again--``None of this was an accident.'' ``None of this was an accident.'' Indeed. It was bought and paid for. There is considerable literature about a phenomenon called regulatory capture, sometimes called Agency capture. It is the capture of regulatory Agencies by industry to corrupt government decisionmaking. You can imagine railroad barons taking over a railroad commission whose job it is to set the rates for their railroads. Well, the Supreme Court has been captured in the same way. This was no small or incidental undertaking. True North Research estimates that at least $580 million has been spent on the Court capture operation. These groups were a significant part of it, and these groups enjoy the benefit of it. Now, $580 million is a lot of money, but just these four decisions are payback for the polluters that makes that $580 million a cheap investment. And the public will pay the price, but that is a price that this captured Court is happy to have the public pay. I am going to conclude with Justice Kagan's dissent in the Loper case. She pointed out--because she saw this game play out right in front of her. She is over there on the Court watching this game play out. She pointed out that the polluters' Justices stopped applying the Chevron doctrine back in 2016 as part of a plan because, she said, they were--and I am quoting her here--``preparing to overrule Chevron since around that time''--an 8-year-long plot to take out a precedent that bothers polluters. Forget calling balls and strikes; these Justices were on a multiyear billionaire polluters' mission. It is not just Chevron; this is a pattern. As Justice Kagan went on to say: That kind of self-help on the way to reversing precedent has become almost routine at this Court. And here is how she describes it: ``Stop applying a decision where one should; throw some gratuitous criticisms into a couple of opinions; issue a few separate writings questioning the decision's premises; give the whole process a few years . . . and voila!--you have a justification for overruling the decision,'' something she called an ``overruling-through-enfeeblement technique [that] mock[s] stare decisis.'' As she described it, this captured Court, at the big donors' direction, stalks for years and then kills off precedent that the billionaires don't like, precedent that interferes with their polluting or interferes with their cheating. That stalking and killing plan may be a lot of things, Mr. President, but I will tell you what it is not: What it is not is judging. To be continued. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. That would be Senator Reed, Mr. President. Am I recognized?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 766, submitted earlier today.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to legislative session for a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 428, S. 4351.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I have seven requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders. Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate:

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 765, remembering the Honorable James Mountain Inhofe, which is at the desk.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I take a moment to offer my condolences to Senator Inhofe's family and friends.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration Calendar No. 246, H.R. 1105.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be discharged from further consideration of S. 159 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be discharged from further consideration of S. 3068 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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