Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, 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 on the table.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 72, S. 169.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 15 minutes.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it stand adjourned under the previous order following the remarks of Senator Gillibrand.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 10 a.m., Wednesday, July 14; that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and morning business be closed; further, that upon the conclusion of morning business, the Senate proceed to executive session to resume consideration of the Samuels nomination; further, that the cloture motions filed during yesterday's session of the Senate ripen at 11:30 a.m.; that if cloture is invoked on the Samuels nomination, the Senate immediately vote on cloture on the Nanda nomination; further, that the Senate recess following the cloture vote on the Nanda nomination until 2 p.m.; that if cloture is invoked on either of the nominations, all postcloture time expire at 2:35 p.m. and the Senate vote on confirmation of the nominations in the order in which cloture was invoked; finally, that if any of the nominations are confirmed, 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. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 26 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be discharged from further consideration of S. 534 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise today in appreciation of a lifelong Rhode Islander and a healthcare trailblazer, Dr. Al Puerini. We wish him well in the next chapter of life. Al Puerini was born, raised, and trained in Rhode Island. After graduating from his beloved Providence College and training in family medicine at Brown University, Al began his practice in Cranston, RI, in the early eighties. He excelled in his work. He soon began teaching family medicine at Brown's Warren Alpert School of Medicine and was elected a fellow at the American Academy of Family Physicians. But his revolutionary work began in the mid-1990s, when Al helped to found and then lead the Rhode Island Primary Care Physicians Corporation as it embarked on an important mission: to reimagine the way we deliver healthcare. Al and his RIPCPC colleagues combined the talents of over 150 primary care physicians and over 200 specialists and negotiated new contracts with local health insurers. Instead of following the fee-for-service treadmill that encourages doctors to shuffle as many people through their offices as possible, these new contracts rewarded providers for the health of their patients. They also aimed to increase collaboration and communication among specialists, providers, and hospitals to improve health outcomes. As these contracts proved effective, Al and his board decided to think bigger. In 2014, they joined with Care New England to help form Integra Community Care Network, the largest accountable care organization, ACO, in Rhode Island. The Affordable Care Act's accountable care organizations take the principle Al had pursued for years--paying providers based on the health of their patients--and put it to use in the Medicare Program. At Integra, primary care providers, hospitals, specialists, extended care providers, and others all work together to achieve more coordinated, accountable care. As someone who fought for ACOs in the ACA, I was thrilled to see Rhode Islanders step up to that challenge. Integra now serves more than 1 in 10 patients in Rhode Island. It has been a national success. Beyond Medicare patients, it works with major private insurers and Medicaid. It has earned a 95-percent quality rating from the Federal Government and saved over $20 million in healthcare costs since 2015. Integra now stands a model for ACOs across the country. Even as he built a new national model of care, Al never stopped serving his patients, his community, and his beloved alma mater, Providence College. He maintained his Cranston private practice for over three decades. He was recognized as Rhode Island's ``Top Doc'' twice over that span. He was named a Rhode Island Academy of Family Physicians Physician of the Year in 2017. And he sustained a passion for sports medicine, which he cultivated as the Friars' head team physician from 1988 on. He even earned a spot in the Providence College Hall of Fame 2 years ago. Dr. Puerini, congratulations on your well-deserved retirement. You have shown us how to change the way health care is delivered and proven to the Nation that the triple aim of better care, lower costs, and happier and healthier patients is achievable. Thank you for everything you did to improve the care of Rhode Islanders and for the care you personally provided to so patients through the years. You made a tremendous difference.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I won't speak long, but I wanted to echo the comments of our distinguished Judiciary chairman, because I have had a similar experience. As we were going through COVID, I was hearing from our domestic violence groups in Rhode Island that two things were happening at once. Instances were going up. People were trapped together. It was very difficult to find sanctuary houses to go to, and the experience of domestic violence was soaring. And while that was going on, the funding coming into these agencies through VOCA was declining. Now there is a pretty simple--well, first let me thank the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sojourner House, which provides sanctuary services, and Progreso Latino, which works in this space in our Latino community, for their great work. There are a lot of organizations in this space, and I want to start by appreciating them. The problem has nothing to do with domestic violence or domestic violence victims as to the money. The problem is that more and more of these cases are resolved by deferred prosecution and nonprosecution agreements, but the funding for VOCA comes out of criminal sentences, criminal prosecutions. So because of that change in the way these cases are treated--which is actually a good thing, generally--the money is diverted, and, as a result, the Crime Victims Fund has reached its lowest level in 10 years. The victim assistance grants in Rhode Island fell 50 percent--5-0 percent--cut in half from fiscal year 2016 to fiscal year 2021, from $7.6 million to $3.8 million, which means that many of these local organizations that put their heart and soul into protecting these victims at the worst time in their lives have to deal with 50-percent cuts. This is simple. It will allow monetary penalties in those deferred prosecutions and nonprosecution agreements to flow the same way they flow when traditional prosecutions take place. This is endorsed across the board. This is as noncontroversial as you get--56 State and Territorial attorneys general, more than 1,700 local, Tribal, State, regional, and national advocacy, government, and law enforcement organizations. Just this year, $545 million has been lost to the VOCA fund because we haven't corrected this. So I would echo my chairman's remarks and urge my friend, the Senator from Pennsylvania, to find another point of leverage, another fulcrum, for his efforts to solve unrelated problems, but let this problem be solved and let these victims be served. 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 delighted to follow the majority leader and his strong remarks about the beginning of the process of passing S. 1, not only to deal with the question of voting rights but to deal with the question of the dark money plague that is infesting our democracy and taking the power over decision making in this body and in this building away from regular people and putting it into the hands of not only special interests but of special interests who are happy to operate in secret. One of the ways in which this power has been deployed has been with respect to the judicial branch of government. And I am here now for my third speech in ``The Scheme'' series to draw attention to this problem. In the first two ``Scheme'' speeches, I described the corporate power game plan offered by lawyer Lewis Powell to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the subsequent effectuation of that game plan by Justice Lewis Powell, appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court 2 months--2 months-- after his secret corporate power game plan went to the chamber. The execution of the Powell plan was one of three converging threads that led to the scheme to capture the Court. The Powell plan, thread one, was a political response recommended for America's traditional corporate elite, which had been traumatized by the social upheaval of the 1960s. The second thread, thread two, was a separate strain of American ire that had been simmering on our society's fringe for many decades. The extremists on this simmering fringe were traumatized by things long accepted as mainstream by most Americans. The fringe resentments shifted with the varying tides of news and events but regularly boiled over against several targets. One was the role of Jewish people in finance, the press, Hollywood, and--after FDR--in government. Another was the improving economic and social condition of minorities. Another was the arrival of immigrants, particularly non-European immigrants; but backlash to immigration from Ireland and Italy had been profound, as my home State experienced back under the Know-Nothings. Other resentments sprang from imaginary events, conspiracy theory delusions, and crackpot ideas. This persistent strain along the American fringe was chronicled in Pulitzer Prize-winning Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay, ``The Paranoid Style in American Politics,'' later a popular book. This latent strain of paranoid extremism showed itself in groups like the John Birch Society, which never gained social or political acceptance. It was fed and nurtured by a handful of rightwing foundations set up by a few colossally rich and politically irate and frustrated families. It boiled up in the Presidential campaign of Senator Barry Goldwater, which ended in one of the worst landslide defeats in American history. It drove the occasional aspirations of the Libertarian Party, whose extremist platform suffered predictable but humiliating crushings at the polls. All of this defeat, over all of these decades, concentrated the strain, isolated its most persistent and determined elements, and added to it an emotional payload of resentment. One target of this fringe was the existence of government regulation. The Libertarian Party, in 1980, ran on a platform of ending Social Security, ending Medicare, closing the post office, undoing the American highway program, stopping public education, and eliminating all our public regulatory agencies--even the Federal Aviation Administration that keeps planes from bumping into each other. This platform barely attracted 1 percent of the vote, an unsurprising but humiliating crushing. That humiliating crushing was suffered by David Koch, Libertarian Party candidate for Vice President, and the party's major funder. The Koch family is spectacularly, unimaginably rich. Privately held Koch Industries pours hundreds of millions of dollars into their pockets every year. The family annual income exceeds most families' dreams of lifetime wealth. The Kochs have social ambition, putting their names on educational TV programs, art centers, and university buildings. They are not the sort of people who take humiliation well. They are also not stupid, and the family has long and sometimes dark international experience, including odious efforts in previous decades to build factories for evil regimes. Made confident by the arrogance of wealth, driven by extremist ideology, spurred by the resentment of humiliating political rejection, experienced in the devious ways of the international world, steeped in the corporate skills of long-term planning and patient execution, and with unlimited resources to indulge themselves, the Koch brothers, Charles and David, were uniquely positioned to take this longstanding, latent, extremist fringe and amplify it and direct it, by plan, in secret, and over decades if need be. If front groups needed to be set up, so be it; subsidiaries were a familiar concept. If identities needed to be laundered off money they gave, so be it; telling lawyers to find or design a way to do that was familiar. If fringe groups needed to be coordinated to work collectively with each other, so be it; organizing with others through trade associations and lobbying groups was familiar activity. And if money needed to be spent, well, so be it; money was no object, and getting people to do things for you for money is a familiar practice of the very rich. The nurture and guidance of the Kochs breathed new strength and life--and deregulatory purpose--into the nativist far-right fringe. Meanwhile, in the regulatory arena, waited the third of the three threads. Major corporate interests--from the railroads first to banks, chemical companies, and polluting industries--had assembled, over time, a quietly powerful presence to help them in administrative Agencies; to make sure that regulation was friendly to business, and, even more than that, under the right circumstances, with the right people and pressures, could be turned to advantage of the regulated industry. In administrative hearings and rulemakings, regulated industries regularly outgunned public interest groups. Law firms dedicated to this lucrative corporate regulatory practice sprouted. Gleaming stables were kept of well-tended professional witnesses who could reliably spout the corporate line in Agency proceedings. Companies played the long game in these regulatory Agencies, of accreting minor victories, step-by-step, inch-by-inch, but that together summed up to major gains. Many of these gains were deeply buried in the weeds of arcane policy and technical detail, inscrutable to the general media and so invisible to the general public. Revolving doors spun between regulatory Commissions and industry, so that Agency decision makers often reflected the values, priorities and interests of the regulated industry, not the general public. At the extreme, the regulatory Agency became servant to the industry master--a phenomenon well known and well documented as regulatory capture. I wrote a separate book on this, ``Captured,'' so I won't dwell on it at great length here. It is enough to note that regulatory capture is so common that it has been a robust field of academic research and writing now for decades, both in economics and in administrative law. So these three socioeconomic strands converged. America's regular corporate elite took up the Powell memo strategy of emboldened political engagement, seeking to reclaim their power and restrain the unwelcome changes roiling American society. The extremists of great wealth brought to the rightwing fringe and its motley array of extremist groups an unprecedented strategic discipline, unlimited resources, and the tactics of hard-edged corporate organization. The regulatory capture apparatus was there for the hiring, eager to pursue the new prospects offered by big industries and eccentric billionaires. Out of this slumgullion of immense wealth, extreme political ambition, and expertise at regulatory capture, how long would it take for people to start thinking about capturing not just regulatory Agencies but courts--indeed the U.S. Supreme Court? As it turned out, not long. The Court had made itself a target of the rightwing. Brown v. Board of Education provoked massive resistance across the South out to defend segregated public schools. Roe v. Wade provoked, as it still provokes, the religious right. So did Engel v. Vitale, restricting prayer in schools. Griswold v. Connecticut offended those upset by the sixties sexual revolution. Miranda v. Arizona, Mapp v. Ohio, and Gideon v. Wainwright offended the tough-on-crime crowd. To the far right, the Supreme Court offered a bounty of things to hate. Even without the Powell Memo's corporate plan of ``exploiting judicial action'' ``with an activist-minded Supreme Court,'' the Court would likely have been an irresistible target. But with that plan and that recommendation, it began to come together. And so the scheme was launched, fed by three political tributaries: one, the corporate plan in Lewis Powell's memo to the Chamber; two, the resurgent Koch-powered, far-right fringe; and three, the eager, available mercenaries of regulatory capture. The effort to capture the Court has likely been the most effectual deployment of rightwing and corporate resources into our common American political life, and America is now a very different place as a result of it. Much of it, like the proverbial frog in the proverbial pot, we have even gotten used to, and we accept it now as normal, when it isn't. To be continued. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I want to speak briefly this evening about S. 1, the Senate version of H.R. 1, the democracy reform bill that we are going to be considering moving to proceed to this week, and I hope we will be able to show a unified Democratic Caucus moving to proceed. It is often described as the voting rights bill, and it is described that way with good justification because there are some very, very important protections that are built into it to protect the voting rights of Americans which are under, I would say, a unique and historic threat now since the, perhaps, 1950s and 1960s, when the Voting Rights Act was passed and some of the levers that were pulled to keep certain people from voting had to be stopped and the vote and the ballot became available much more broadly and led to a much more just society. But that is not the only part of S. 1. In fact, in my view, it is not even the central part of S. 1. In my view, the central part of S. 1 is getting big, unlimited, anonymous money out of politics. Now, the two relate because the big, anonymous money schemers that are up to no good in politics are focusing on--guess what? Voter suppression. And, in fact, the same individual, the same person who was running the dark money scheme to control and capture the Supreme Court and the circuit courts has--after being somewhat blown up by a Washington Post expose about the $250 million he was running in dark money through this court-capture scheme--jumped from court-capture scheme, and where did he land? On something rather ironically called the Honest Elections Project, which immediately went to work to file lawsuits and harass election officials and try to make sure that voter suppression took place. If you think that is a coincidence, the Honest Elections Project is actually a rebrand of an entity that was called the Judicial Education Project--basically, just a name change through corporate hijinks. And that Judicial Education Project is the corporate sibling of something called the Judicial Crisis Network. And guess what the Judicial Crisis Network did? For this same guy, before he jumped to voter suppression, when he was still doing court capture, the Judicial Crisis Network took the big, fat checks that anonymous donors wrote to pay for the TV campaigns--the dark money TV campaigns--against Garland and for Gorsuch in the first appointment, for Kavanaugh through all of his troubles in the second appointment, and then for Judge Barrett on the eve of the election in the third appointment. So, you see, it is the same person and the same organizational connection between the court-captured dark money scheme and the voter suppression dark money scheme. It is actually happening in kind of plain light of day, except that we don't pay enough attention to the links. So this dark money business, getting the big, dark money out of politics, is a big, big deal. And I wanted to share how much of a deal it is to Americans. Dark money corruption polls at the top of all the issues in the last poll I saw. It is the No. 1 issue. If you ask people: If somebody says that they have dedicated themselves to fighting corruption, is that going to make you more likely to vote for them or more likely for you to vote for their opponent? Among all voters, it is 89 to 1 more likely to vote for the candidate dedicated to fighting corruption versus whoever this one is who said, no, not such a big deal to me. Among independent voters whom the two parties always fight for in elections, 82 to 2--82 percent of independent voters would be more likely to vote for somebody who they see as dedicated to fighting corruption, and only 2 would be more likely to vote for their opponent. So this is a strong public signal that we are sick of it. And you see it over and over again. This is one poll. You can go through poll after poll after poll, and you see people want the dark money out of politics. They think we are controlled by big special interests. They think much too much stuff gets done behind the scenes. And, by the way, we just got a little window into the private conversations about this that take place between the Koch brothers' political apparatus and our minority leader, Mitch McConnell's political apparatus. Jane Mayer wrote about this recently in the New Yorker. And the Koch political apparatus and the Mitch McConnell political apparatus were being briefed on this bill, on S. 1, and on these provisions. And what they were told by the pollster is: Do you know what? We are in big trouble because our conservative voters hate this damn dark money stuff just as badly as those liberals do, and we have tried all these different ways to reframe this, to make it look bad so they might be more against it--none of it worked. None of it worked. People want their government cleaned up. They are sick to death of big special interest money, and they are particularly sick to death of big special interest money that hides behind fake front groups. So it is not ExxonMobil or Marathon Petroleum that comes to Rhode Island and says, Sheldon Whitehouse is a bum, you should vote against him. No, it is under the phony group with a name like Rhode Islanders for Peace and Puppies in Prosperity. And all they are is a mail drop. Somebody is behind them, and the voters know in Rhode Island there is no Rhode Islanders for Peace and Puppies in Prosperity. They know they are being had, and they are sick of seeing the ads. And it is not fair to them, as citizens, to not know what is going on in the American governmental process, going on right in front of them. And it matters to them. It really matters to them. It is the single most important issue for 55 percent of all voters. And among the independent voters we are trying to attract to our separate parties, 58 percent of independent voters, this question of Big Money corruption and government not listening to them, it is the single most important issue--the single most important issue. Now, make it top three, expand the question. What are the top three most important issues that you care about? Eighty-nine percent of all voters have this in their top three. Eighty-eight percent of independent voters have this in their top three. So let's say you have a real concern about healthcare, or let's say you have a real concern about voting rights, or let's say you have a real concern about the economy--never mind, this is still there in that top three for pretty much 9 out of every 10 Americans. And what is the level of concern? Very concerned. Very concerned is 86 percent of all voters and 92 percent of all independent voters. About this issue of corruption and money in politics, how concerned are you? Eighty-six percent of all voters said very. Ninety-two percent of independent voters said very. And if you say: OK, let's, again, expand the aperture a little, very concerned or somewhat concerned? Are you very concerned or somewhat concerned about this dark money corruption, special interest pressure in government--98 percent of all voters, 100 percent of independent voters. I don't know about you all, but I have looked at a lot of polling in my life. Seeing a 100-percent number, that is rare. Every single independent voter polled is very or somewhat concerned about corruption in our democracy. So I can't wait to get onto S. 1. And if our Republican friends want to filibuster it and stop us from moving forward, I can't wait to see them explain to their voters back home why they made the choice to come here and, against 89 to 1 for all voters and 82 to 2 for independent voters, take that brave fan for dark money and more corruption and more special interest pressure in our politics. Good luck with that. I hope at some point we bring that fight to the floor and we spend weeks on it so that as we go into next year, every single American has seen this play out. They have seen that this issue that they are very concerned about, that for more than half of them is the single most important issue, that there is a party here in the Senate that is determined to protect the schemers, the special interests behind the dark money corruption. Good luck taking that to the voters in November. So to those who are listening and who are thinking: You know, I don't see how we get around a filibuster here. I love S. 1. This is a really important bill. We have to get there. We hope that the Democrats can unite on this, but even then, it is only 50 to 1 or 51 to 1, if the Vice President is allowed to vote, and that is not 60, so there is a filibuster--my answer is: Give it effort and give it time because once Americans--everybody from a Tea Partyer to a Bernie Bro--gets wind of which party in here is the party of special-interest dark money, who wants to protect that--like I said, single most important issue. People go into the voting booth, and they tend to remember the single most important issue, the issue that they are very concerned about, that 86 percent of all voters. So I hope we find a good way forward. I think it is important for our democracy that the rottenness of all of this come to an end. I don't want to see more of these academic studies that show that Congress listens to big special interests, provably, statistically, and Congress doesn't listen to regular voters, provably, statistically, because of this kind of dark money pressure. We have got to get beyond that. We have a country out there to put back on its feet not only economically, but we ought to be able to hold our own heads high about having an honest government that is an example to the rest of the world. Thank you. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I am here for one of my favorite days of the year on the Senate floor because today is the 249th anniversary of the Gaspee raid. I can only imagine what I am going to do next year when it is the 250th anniversary of the Gaspee raid. I may bring pyrotechnics onto the Senate floor, in violation of every rule. The Gaspee raid is what Rhode Island abolitionist and writer Frances Whipple McDougall called the ``first blood'' drawn in America's struggle for independence, and I come every year to mark this important but overlooked event in American history. Our typical history textbook tells us that the Boston Tea Party sparked the American Revolution in December of 1773. Remember that date: 1773, December. Massachusetts folks in Boston protested English taxation by pushing tea into Boston Harbor. It was a memorable protest. We ought to remember it. But we Rhode Islanders contend that a different spark 16 months earlier out on Narragansett Bay ignited the Revolution. The date was June 9, 1772, and the central players in this saga were two ships, one a little sloop, the Hannah, embarking from Newport for Providence, and the other a British customs schooner, the HMS Gaspee; hence the Gaspee raid. The Gaspee was under the command of Lieutenant William Dudingston of His Majesty's Royal Navy, patrolling Narragansett Bay. The meeting of the Hannah and the Gaspee and the act of defiance that followed would be explosive. Before I describe the encounter of the Hannah and the Gaspee, it is important to set the stage. England's King George had overextended his empire during the Seven Years War, especially in the war's American theater known as the French and Indian War. The conflict was expensive to win, and by its end, Britain had taken on vast new territory and the cost of governing that territory, and the British national debt soon doubled. Meanwhile, over the course of the 18th century, Rhode Island had become a prosperous, major distiller and distributor of rum and trader of goods. Now, the rum trade was a corrupt and immoral enterprise, a leg of which profited off the labor of enslaved Africans, but it was profitable, and the British were thirsty for customs duties. So the Crown tried to crack down on Rhode Island's trade, including its rum- running, to collect more customs revenue to pay down the King's debts. King George's zeal for tax collecting in Narragansett Bay got a little out of hand. British officers started seizing cargo without evidence, leaving the cargo's owners with no recourse. They commandeered Rhode Islanders' ships on flimsy grounds and then used those commandeered ships to collect more customs duties. British authorities even pressed Colonial sailors into service, essentially kidnapping them and forcing them to work on the ships of the Crown In one incident in July 1764, the customs ship HMS St. John seized cargo and a brig in Newport Harbor. Rhode Islanders deemed this outright theft. The Governor, Stephen Hopkins, later a signer of the Declaration of Independence, ordered the arming of a sloop to go out and take on the St. John in open battle on the bay. The British got wind of it, and they reinforced the St. John with the powerfully armed, if meekly named, HMS Squirrel. So the Rhode Islanders scrapped their plans for a naval battle and settled for firing on the St. John from fortifications on Goat Island with 13-pounder canons. When the HMS Maidstone impressed into servitude an entire crew of colonists, Rhode Islanders carried one of Maidstone's boats that they were able to seize from Newport Harbor to the city commons and burned it, with hundreds of onlookers cheering. The Royal Navy impounded prominent merchant John Hancock's sloop, the Liberty, in 1768. Even after the charges of illegal wine importation that had justified the seizure supposedly were dropped, the British Navy kept his ship and used it for themselves for more customs enforcement. The next year, colonists in Newport reclaimed the Liberty by force. These simmering maritime hostilities set the backdrop for the fateful meeting of the Hannah and the Gaspee in 1772. As the Hannah sailed north up the bay on June 9, the Gaspee intercepted her and ordered the crew to stop for a search. The Hannah's captain, Benjamin Lindsey, was having none of it, and he did not comply. He held his course and continued sailing north toward Providence. Warning shots were fired from the Gaspee. Despite them, Lindsey continued on. His smaller and more maneuverable vessel led the bigger Gaspee up north toward Namquid Point. Well, the waters off Namquid Point shoal, and there are shallows off Namquid Point. Lindsey, as an experienced navigator and sailor in Narragansett Bay, knew this, and he sailed his Hannah over the shallows and kept on up to Providence. Behind them, the angry Gaspee came surging in chase and ground into the sand and stuck. Aground off Pawtuxet Cove, the Gaspee would need to wait for the next high tide before it could float free. Night closed in on the Gaspee. There was no Moon. Lieutenant Dudingston and his crew were left to wait in darkness and exposed. Captain Lindsey sailed the Hannah on up to Providence, and up in Providence, he immediately arranged a meeting of local patriots in a tavern called Sabin's Tavern, which still exists under another name today, in what is now the East Side of Providence, just below Brown University. Together, and no doubt after refreshments, the group decided to end the career of the Gaspee once and for all. Several boatloads of Rhode Islanders, led by John Brown--later to have Brown University named for him--and Abraham Whipple--an ancestor, I believe, of Ms. Whipple McDougall--disguised themselves and boarded longboats in the night and rowed the 6 miles from Providence down the bay to the Gaspee. There, they surrounded the boat, and Brown called on Lieutenant Dudingston to surrender his ship. The lieutenant refused and ordered his men to fire on anyone who tried to board and warned the Rhode Islanders of that threat. Well, the Rhode Islanders were having none of that. They stormed the Gaspee in the dark, and a melee ensued. Shots were fired. Swords clashed. In the struggle, Dudingston was shot and wounded by a musket ball--the first blood there of conflict between the Colonies and the Crown; the first blood, one could say, of the American Revolution drawn right there off Pawtuxet Cove. The struggle ended with the Rhode Islanders in control of the vessel. Brown and Whipple's men ferried the British crew safely to shore, sought medical treatment for Lieutenant Dudingston, and then returned to the abandoned Gaspee to make sure it never carried a Rhode Islander again. To get rid of it for good, they set it on fire and retreated from the boat to watch it burn and burn until the fire reached the powder magazines and, when the fire reached the powder magazines, explode into the Narragansett Bay night, blowing the remainder of the Gaspee to smithereens and leaving it all to burn to the waterline. Today, we Rhode Islanders call the site of these events Gaspee Point. Every year in early June, we celebrate the spirit of Rhode Island defiance that blossomed that day in Narragansett Bay 249 years ago. We will walk a parade in honor of Gaspee Day this weekend, and we will always remember the Gaspee raid, how it preceded by over a year the Boston Tea Party, and how, while those noble Bostonians pushed tea bags off of British ships into Boston Harbor, we blew the boat up. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, in my opening speech about the rightwing scheme to capture the Court, the Supreme Court, I described the secret strategy memo that Lewis Powell wrote on the eve of his appointment to the Court about how to deploy corporate political power. As a Justice of the Supreme Court, Powell had the chance to prove to the corporate world his secret memo's theory of what could be achieved by ``exploiting judicial action''--his phrase--particularly with, as he called it, ``an activist-minded Supreme Court.'' Second, Powell had the chance on the Court to start laying the legal groundwork for precisely the sort of corporate political activity that his secret memo had recommended to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Powell did both. The first case that allowed Powell to implement recommendations from his secret report came in 1976, in a case about the Federal Election Campaign Act. The case was Buckley v. Valeo, and the decision was a beast--138 pages, with another 83 pages of dissent and concurrence cobbled together by the Court with what one observer called ``extraordinary speed.'' Five Justices in that case, including Powell, were described as First Amendment hawks who were wary of any portion of the Federal Election Campaign Act that could inhibit free speech and association. Now, you have to understand that free speech and association were buzz words for corporate political activity precisely of the sort championed in Powell's secret chamber memo. Free speech meant corporate America having the right to be heard, even to, as the secret report said, ``equal time.'' Freedom of association provided corporations the ``organization,'' ``careful long-range planning and implementation,'' and well-financed ``joint effort''--all those quotes--that Powell had recommended be done in his report ``through united action and national organizations.'' The Court's decision in Valeo did two noncontroversial things. It accepted that campaign contributions could be limited because unlimited campaign contributions could give rise to corruption or at least the appearance of corruption. Unlimited donations to candidates would even ``undermine representative democracy,'' the Court said. No big deal. The Court also decided that candidates may spend as much of their own money as they want on their own campaigns. It considered unlimited spending on one's own campaign protected by the First Amendment, as there was little danger of corruption from spending one's own campaign money on oneself. So both of those holdings are unremarkable. What was remarkable was where Powell and his hawks took the Court when other interests, like corporate interests, wanted to spend money on a candidate. Corporate political spending per se was not at issue in the case, but spending by special interests is precisely the kind of political influence which Powell had recommended in his secret report to the chamber. Powell and his hawks said special interest political spending, so long as it was not in the form of a campaign contribution, was protected by the same principle that protected a candidate spending his own money on his own campaign. Powell asserted that limiting these supposedly ``independent'' special interest expenditures ```perpetrates (the) grossest infringement' on First Amendment rights.'' He did acknowledge the interest in ```purity' of elections,'' but he used skeptical quotation marks around the word ``purity,'' just like he had used skeptical quotation marks in his report around the word ``environment.'' But Powell dismissed those purity concerns as likely ``illusory,'' to use his word. Powell's Bench memo for the case critiqued the election law's ``attempt to lower barriers to political competition to increase the range of voter choice.'' It read: ``[T]he attempt to open access for the many necessarily involves limiting the power of the few to exercise rights of speech and association protected by the Constitution.'' This interest in protecting the ``power of the few'' aligns exactly with Powell's secret chamber memo about corporate power and aligns with Powell's own notes, which have more of his disparaging quotation marks questioning some of the briefs filed in the Valeo case that ``identify one of the `evils' as the power of `the wealthy few' (undefined but obviously unworthy people) to influence elections unduly.'' In tone and import, that comes right out of Powell's secret chamber report, which counted on the power of the corporate few. Powell's Richmond history, his corporate law practice, his social position, his boardroom experience, and his anxiety about upheaval all align with a corporate worldview that society's decisions should be made by the sort of people in corporate boardrooms, so the power of those ``few'' had to be protected, to battle against what his report called the ``broad attack'' both on the ``American free enterprise system'' and the ``American political system of democracy under the rule of law.'' Particularly important it was to protect that power when, as he had written to the chamber, the trouble is ``deep'' and the ``hour is late.'' To accommodate that corporate perspective, the Court had to reach judgments about politics. It showed itself helpless. The amateurish political outlook of the Court in Valeo stood out in the late-added footnote 52, which, in the interest of drawing clear lines-- ``vagueness'' being a stated concern of the Justices--exempted from disclosure political advertisements that did not expressly advocate for the election or defeat of a candidate using magic words like ``vote for,'' ``vote against,'' ``elect,'' or ``defeat.'' In the Court's amateur opinion, a hostile bombardment of TV advertising challenging a candidate's morals, decency, or integrity, or attacking the candidate's alignment with the community's values, and dropped on the candidate in the heat of election season with the intention of defeating the candidate, was not deemed advocacy in the election--unless it used those magic words. The idiocy of that premise is obvious to anyone in politics. The Court's amateurish folly about political spending extended to presuming that spending by a powerful interest for a candidate would create no risk of corruption; that the spending and the resulting influence could be kept separate and independent. That is idiotic in real life. When a powerful political interest starts signaling that it will spend enormous sums to support candidates, guess what--candidates will find a way to take advantage, perhaps by attracting the spending to their own side by the positions they take or perhaps by avoiding taking positions that would send the spending to their opponent's side. The Court presumed that some etiquette would separate interest from candidate, but that was folly. It is blindingly naive to think that politics would produce no workarounds, that no coordination or signaling or intermediaries would violate whatever etiquette of independence the Court had in mind. As we know, information travels fast in politics, never mind the etiquette. Drop a rock in a stream, and the stream flows around it. Put eager candidates and enormous interested spenders together, and trouble will follow, as it has. Look no further than the corruption of American politics on climate change by the fossil fuel industry. Again, this was idiocy from amateurs. But the Valeo folly accomplished one thing: It opened the lane for unlimited special interest spending to come into elections to support or oppose candidates, just as Powell's secret memo had recommended. The next opportunity for Powell came 2 years later, and this, time it involved not just the type of political activity corporations would likely undertake but corporations directly. Massachusetts had banned corporate campaign contributions from statewide political referenda. A Massachusetts bank, the First National Bank of Boston, objected and sued. Frank Bellotti was then the Commonwealth's attorney general and defendant. First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti wound its way up to the Supreme Court. Here, the question was the very right of corporations to influence popular elections--in this case, a referendum election. In a 5-to-4 decision, Powell wrote for the Republican-appointed majority that corporations had a constitutional right to engage in that political activity. This outcome can't be found in the Constitution, which provides no political role whatsoever to corporations, but this outcome aligned precisely with the recommendations of Powell's secret report to the chamber. Indeed, it was the heart of his pitch to the chamber. His entire secret plan for corporate political power would fall apart if States could bar corporate influence from elections, even referendum elections. Powell had urged in his secret report that corporate interests not have ``the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas'' and that corporations should show no ``reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose [them].'' Corporations could never ``press vigorously'' or ``penalize politically'' if they could be kept out of elections, and so Bellotti was decided. Paired with Valeo, the Bellotti case established that corporations had a constitutional right to engage in elections--at least referendum elections--with as much money as they wanted, or at least as much money as they could raise, so long as the election spending was not in the form of campaign contributions. Ultimately, this laid the framework for the infamous Citizens United decision, another bare, 5-to-4 Republican majority that gave in this case corporate interests a full constitutional right to unlimited political spending and, as a practical matter, to unlimited anonymous political spending. How, in Bellotti, did they get around a Constitution that provides corporations no political rights? The trick used was to focus on the message, not the messenger--completely overlook that it was a corporation, not a person. The Court said that corporate political spending was actually speech, that influencing a popular referendum was the ``type of speech'' at the heart of representative democracy, and that the public had a right to hear it. The fact that corporations are not people and, indeed, that they have advantages over real people in electioneering and, indeed, that they might even come to dominate popular democracy because of those advantages was overlooked by directing attention to the speech, not the speaker. If the type of speech was relevant to the public debate, Powell said, it doesn't matter whether a corporation or a person says it--except every piece of this is wrong. Money is not speech. Corporations are not people. And looking at the message, not the messenger, would allow any entity's message into our politics, even foreign ones. Then add in anonymity, and the problem goes toxic, as we now see in our country today. ``We the People'' becomes ``We the Hidden Anything With Money.'' The last case for Powell was Federal Election Commission v. Massachusetts Citizens for Life in 1986. Here, the question was whether an advocacy group of precisely the kind Powell had in mind in the chamber memo was forbidden to spend its corporate treasury funds in a Federal election. Now, the situation was that Congress had blocked corporations from using their treasury funds in Federal elections. They had to raise money from voluntary donations; hence the corporate PACs that we have seen that had to raise and spend their own money. The Court accepted that corporate treasuries might give corporate voices ``an unfair advantage in the political marketplace'' given their vast corporate wealth and resources. But in the case before it, the Court decided that nonprofits were different. They were designed for advocacy, and they didn't have the same sort of treasury funds as business corporations. Again, remember the Powell memo. Powell didn't recommend that corporations undertake their political work directly. He had pressed for ``organization,'' for ``joint effort.'' He had urged corporate America to pursue ``the political power available only through united action and national organizations.'' And guess what. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the national organization to which Powell had delivered his secret recommendations, was a nonprofit corporation. In his years on the Court, Lewis Powell made good on the secret recommendations that he had made to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce 5 months before joining the Court. He showed that ``an activist-minded Supreme Court''--his words--could be that ``important instrument for social, economic and political change''--his words--that he had proposed. He opened a lane for unlimited money into politics, enabling what his secret report had called ``the scale of financing available only through joint effort.'' He bulldozed aside bars on corporate spending and politics so corporations could deploy, just as his report had urged, ``whatever degree of pressure--publicly and privately--may be necessary.'' And he allowed advocacy organizations to spend their treasuries in politics, opening the way for the ``organization,'' ``joint effort,'' and ``united action'' he had called for in his report through ``national organizations.'' All the key pieces were in place to unleash the corporate influence machine that he had recommended to the chamber, influence that dominates much of American politics today, influence that controls much of what we do in the Senate Chamber today, and in which, of all things, the chamber, which was his client for the secret report, is today the apex predator of corporate influence, red in tooth and claw. Everything was aligned for what Powell had recommended: corporate ``political power,'' ``assiduously cultivated,'' ``used aggressively and with determination,'' with ``no hesitation to attack,'' ``not the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas,'' and no ``reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose.'' It is a dark achievement, but it is quite an achievement. And, interestingly, Powell's official biography frames out his judicial career without mentioning his role as the early orchestrator of corporate political influence in American politics. It is actually likely his most significant and lasting legacy. To be continued. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, before I begin, let me just say a word of thanks to my two colleagues from Oklahoma for this moment that we have had on the Senate floor. I was privileged to be waiting to give my remarks to hear them speak, and I thought this was a wonderful moment. We have our challenges around here, but if we had more moments like this, we would get through our challenges better. I congratulate and thank both of my colleagues. U.S. Supreme Court Madam President, there is a scheme afoot, a scheme I will be talking about in weeks ahead--a long-running, rightwing scheme to capture the Supreme Court. Special interests are behind the scheme. They control it through dark money--hundreds of millions of dollars in anonymous hidden spending. We will dwell in later speeches on how the scheme operates. This first speech seeks its origins. The scheme is secret, and because of its secrecy, it is hard to know exactly where the story should begin. The one place you could begin is with a corporate lawyer--the Virginian Lewis Powell. An authorized biography of Lewis Powell by his fellow Virginian, renowned UVA law professor John Jeffries, reveals Powell to be a tough and incisive lawyer, willing and able to make sharp, even harsh, decisions, but a man of courtly and decent matters, well settled in the White male social and corporate elite of Richmond, VA. There he developed his legal and business career through the 1950s and 1960s. A successful corporate law practice often entailed joining corporate boards. Richmond was a home to Big Tobacco, and Powell's legal career led him on to Richmond's tobacco and other corporate boards. Richmond was Virginia's sibling rival to Charlottesville, which could boast of Thomas Jefferson's nearby Monticello, his renowned University of Virginia, and all the cultural and academic vibrancy bubbling around that great university. Richmond--Richmond was the working sibling, hosting the State's capitol and its political offices and serving as its corporate center. Powell was an ambitious Richmond corporate lawyer, and the turbulence of the 1960s was broadly distressing to America's corporate elite. The civil rights movement disrupted Jim Crow across the South, drawing out and exposing to the Nation the racist violence that had long enforced the social and legal norm of segregation and upsetting America's all- White corporate suites and boardrooms. Anti-war protesters derided Dow Chemical Company's manufacture of napalm and scorned the entire military-industrial complex. Women's rights protesters challenged all-male corporate management structures. The environmental movement protested chemical leaks, toxic products, and the poisons belching from corporate smokestacks. Public health groups began linking the tobacco industry to deadly illnesses, and lead paint companies to brain damage in children. Ralph Nader criticized America's car companies for making automobiles that were ``Unsafe at Any Speed'' and causing carnage on America's highways. America's anxious corporate elite saw Congress respond with new and unwelcome laws and saw courts respond with big and unwelcome verdicts. Something had to be done. Powell's prominence in Virginia's civic, legal, social, and corporate circles had brought him attention in Washington, DC. And a new client of his, the Washington, DC-based U.S. Chamber of Commerce, asked Powell for his help. The Chamber commissioned from Powell a secret report, a strategic plan for reasserting corporate authority over the political arena. The secret Powell report, titled ``Attack on American Free Enterprise System,'' was telling. It was telling, first, for the apocalyptic certainty of its tone. Powell's opening sentence was: ``No thoughtful person can question that the American system is under broad attack.'' By that, he meant the American economic system, but that assertion was footnoted with the parallel assertion that--and I am quoting him again--``The American political system of democracy under the rule of law is also under attack.'' This was, Powell asserted, ``quite new in [American history].'' ``Business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble,'' he wrote, ``and the hour is late.'' The secret Powell report was an alarm. The report is populated with liberal bogeymen: the bombastic lawyer William Kunstler; the popular author of ``The Greening of America,'' Charles Reich; the consumer advocate Ralph Nader, whom Powell said there should be, and I am quoting here, ``no hesitation to attack.'' Against them, Powell set establishment defenders like columnist Stewart Alsop and conservative economist Milton Friedman. Powell cloaked the concerns of corporate America as concerns of ``individual freedom,'' a rhetorical framework for corporate political power that persists to this day. The battle lines were drawn. Indeed, the language in the Powell report is the language of battle: ``attack,'' ``frontal assault,'' ``rifle shots,'' ``warfare.'' The recommendations are to end compromise and appeasement--his words: ``compromise'' and ``appeasement''--to understand that, as he said, ``the ultimate issue may be survival''-- and he underlined the word ``survival'' in his report--and to call for ``the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it.'' Well, for this, you had to have a plan, and the Powell plan was to go big. Here is what he said: ``Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.'' Powell recommended a propaganda effort staffed with scholars and speakers, a propaganda effort to which American business should devote ``10 percent of its total advertising budget,'' including an effort to review and critique textbooks, especially in economics, political science, and sociology. ``National television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance,'' he said. Corporate America should aggressively insist on the right to be heard, on ``equal time,'' and corporate America should be ready to deploy, and I am quoting him here, ``whatever degree of pressure--publicly and privately--may be necessary.'' This would be ``a long road,'' Powell warned, ``and not for the fainthearted.'' In his section entitled ``The Neglected Political Arena,'' Powell recommended using political influence to stem ``the stampedes by politicians to support any legislation related to `consumerism' or to the `environment.' '' And, yes, Powell put the word ``environment'' in derogatory quote marks in the original. ``Political power,'' Powell wrote, ``is necessary; . . . [it] must be assiduously cultivated; and . . . when necessary . . . must be used aggressively and with determination.'' He concluded that ``it is essential [to] be far more aggressive than in the past,'' with ``no hesitation to attack,'' ``not the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas,'' and no ``reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose'' the corporate effort. In a nutshell, no holds barred. And then came the section of the secret report that may have launched the scheme to capture the court. It is called ``Neglected Opportunity in the Courts.'' This section focused on what Powell called ``exploiting judicial action.'' He called it an ``area of vast opportunity.'' He wrote: ``Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court''--I will intervene to say, of course, we have today, as a result of the scheme, the most activist-minded Supreme Court in American history, but back to his quote--``especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.'' Powell urged that the Chamber of Commerce become the voice of American business in the courts, with a ``highly competent staff of lawyers,'' if ``business is willing to provide the funds.'' He concludes: ``The opportunity merits the necessary effort.'' The secret report may well have been the single most consequential piece of writing that Lewis Powell ever did in a long career of consequential writings. The tone and content of the report actually explain a lot of decisions in his future career. Yet this secret report received no attention--not even a passing mention--in Professor Jeffries' detailed, authoritative, and authorized Powell biography. The secret chamber report was not disclosed to the U.S. Senate in Senate confirmation proceedings when, shortly after delivering his secret report to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Lewis Powell was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon. The secret report was dated August 23, 1971. Two months later, on October 22, Nixon nominated Powell to the Supreme Court. Lewis Powell was sworn in as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court on January 7, 1972, less than 6 months after this secret report was delivered to the chamber. To be continued. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, here we go again. Just a few weeks ago, the Senate debated Vanita Gupta's nomination for Associate Attorney General, so let's review the bidding from that. Gupta was eminently qualified for her role. She had support from the foremost law enforcement leaders and groups in the country. She had proven herself handling high-level government responsibilities. But Republicans set their hair on fire trying to take Ms. Gupta down. They grasped for something, anything, to dent her prospects. Eventually they landed on contorting an 8-year-old op-ed, even calling her accurate responses to their questions about it lies. It wasn't pretty. Now we are back on the floor with Republican hair aflame again, this time over the nominee to run the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, Kristen Clarke. Like Ms. Gupta, Ms. Clarke is eminently qualified. She knows civil rights law inside and out. She has run one of the Nation's leading civil rights organizations. She is a superb, well-trained, experienced lawyer. Conservatives have endorsed her, like President George W. Bush's DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele. Law enforcement organizations like the Major Cities Chiefs Association and the International Association of Chiefs of Police support her. She ought to have flown through committee and been a quick vote here on the floor, but, no, it is hair-on-fire time again. Why all the coifs aflame? Look behind the smokescreens and remember that the No. 1 strategy of the Republican Party for 2022 is to keep voters from voting. And guess what. Ms. Clarke will run the voting rights section of the Department, and Ms. Gupta, who used to run that same Civil Rights Division, will supervise her as Assistant Attorney General. Behind the ruckus over Ms. Gupta and now Ms. Clarke is a dark money operation out to suppress the vote. It has the trade craft of a covert operation--cutouts, front groups, secret money--and that covert operation is now focused on preventing, as our colleague Senator Warnock says, ``some people'' from voting. And Ms. Clarke and Ms. Gupta will be the lawful, legal opposition to the dark money, voter- suppression apparatus. Here is what we know. When Trump was in power, this covert op ran a dark money-funded apparatus within the Federalist Society to select Federal judges. For 4 years, the Federalist Society's operation was the gatekeeper to the Federal bench. Virtually every judicial candidate who passed through this dark money-funded turnstile was approved by big, anonymous donors out to control the courts. Donors got to approve judges and Justices who would have their backs. That dark money turnstile was step 1. Step 2 was dark money-funded political campaigns for Senate confirmation of the nominees who got through the turnstile. For Trump's three Supreme Court nominees, this was done by the Judicial Crisis Network, headquartered literally down the hall from the Federalist Society--not just the same building, the same hallway, but they also share staff. In each Supreme Court confirmation, a $15 million or a $17 million check from a secret donor would fund the advertising campaign. Step 3 is dark money-funded front organizations appearing before the donor-selected Justices in orchestrated flotillas with common donors behind them, undisclosed to the Court. When Trump lost, of course, step 1 and step 2 lost their salience and closed up shop. But with Trump judges still on the court, these front groups are still at it. In one case before the Supreme Court right now, 50 organizations--50 organizations--that filed briefs received funding through rightwing groups involved in this operation. Dark money funding can't be traced back to its original donors, obviously, because it is dark money, but a 2019 Washington Post investigation revealed that one guy, Leonard Leo, while executive vice president of the Federalist Society, from 2014 to 2017 coordinated $250 million--a quarter of a billion dollars--across a network of the front groups engaged in this court capture operation. Recent testimony in my Courts Subcommittee raised that number to over $400 million--nearly half a billion dollars--through 2018. Four hundred million is a lot of money, but a captured court, that is a pearl beyond price. This Leo operation worked wonderfully during the Trump Presidency. Donors got their judges. Judicial Crisis Network and Leonard Leo got their dark money. But then that Post investigation came out, and Trump's polling started to tank. So, like a burned agent, Leonard Leo bugged out. Where did he bug out to? Well, Leo surfaced early last year with a group called the Honest Elections Project. These phony-baloney front groups love to have the name that is the exact opposite of what they are actually doing. So this one is called the Honest Elections Project, and it has been running voter suppression activities in key battleground States, sending threatening letters to local election officials, and filing lawsuits to restrict voting--and, of course, all dark money-funded. But poke a little further and you discover that the Honest Elections Project is a legal alias of something called the Judicial Education Project, which is--you guessed it--the sister group to Judicial Crisis Network--yep, Leo's judicial confirmation attack-ad organization. And, of course, behind this covert op was dark money, much of it run through DonorsTrust, the identity-laundering, dark money ATM established by the Kochs' donor network. Before it took on this Honest Elections Project alias, more than 99 percent of the Judicial Education Project's 2018 revenue was a single, anonymous $7.8 million donation that came through, of course, DonorsTrust. There is no way to know who cut that check What does all this dark money finagling and front group subterfuge tell us? As a reporter for the Guardian observed, the Honest Elections Project, so-called, melds two goals of the rightwing dark money operation: One, pack the Federal judiciary, and two, bring voting rights cases before the packed courts. Rigging elections by keeping ``some people'' from voting is now a Republican priority, and if Trump judges will help, so much the better. Just recently, we actually learned more about the covert voter suppression operation. The watchdog group Documented and the magazine Mother Jones uncovered a video of a presentation by the dark money group Heritage Action to its top donors. In the video, the presenter brags about getting what she called ``key provisions''--``key provisions''--into voter suppression legislation in dozens of capitals around the country. She tells the donors, and I am quoting here, ``In some cases, we actually draft them for them''--they actually draft the laws for the State legislatures--``or,'' she said, ``we have a sentinel''--a sentinel; what a creepy word--``we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom- up type of vibe.'' Big donors love that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe. There is lots of dark money that fuels this covert op. Heritage Action says it plans to spend $24 million in eight battleground States to ``create an echo chamber'' of relentless lobbying for voter suppression bills. They say they will be coordinating with known Koch network groups like the Susan B. Anthony List, Tea Party Patriots, and FreedomWorks. This operation is the kind of stuff that we might want our intelligence services to do in enemy countries to create disruption and discord and provide secret influence. The idea that creepy billionaires are running covert operations in and against our own country, that ought to make you cringe. Not only is this behavior morally corrupt, it may have broken rules. One State legislature has already floated an ethics probe into Heritage Action's sentinels jamming phony bills through their chamber. So back to Senate Republicans getting their hair on fire over Kristen Clarke and Vanita Gupta. These two women scare the daylights out of this dark money operation behind Republican voter suppression. Ms. Clarke knows the Voting Rights Act cold; she won voting rights cases against voter suppression laws all over the country. Put Jim Crow 2.0 up against a Department of Justice Civil Rights Division led by Kristen Clarke, and that dark money voter suppression operation has a problem. So the big dark money donors behind this covert operation will raise whatever ruckus they can--first, to try to stop Vanita Gupta, which didn't work, and now to stop Kristen Clarke, which won't work--all in an effort to protect their dark money scheme to prevent some people from voting. You have to look behind the smokescreen sometimes to understand what is going on. It is not pretty, but it is the truth. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I further ask that the Lee amendment to the committee-reported amendment to the resolution be considered and agreed to; the committee-reported amendment, as amended, be agreed to; the resolution, as amended, be agreed to; that the Lee amendment to the committee-reported amendment to the preamble be agreed to; the committee-reported amendment, as amended, be agreed to; that the preamble, as amended, 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 ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 20, S. Res. 117.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I have a request for one committee to meet during today's session of the Senate. It has the approval of the Majority and Minority leaders. Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committee is authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate: Committee on Foreign Relations The Committee on Foreign Relations is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Monday, May 17, 2021, at 6 p.m., to conduct a closed hearing.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read for a third time.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I know of no further debate on the bill.