Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am particularly glad to see the senior Senator from New Mexico presiding on what, for me, is a sentimental moment, because he has been such a terrific friend and colleague and advocate in the battle of climate change. I am here today because, at last, it is time to say farewell to my battered ``Time to Wake Up'' image board here and to a run of more than 275 weekly climate speeches. It has been one of the Senate's longer runs, I believe, but I think it is time to say farewell. This long run began in the dark days of 2012, after Speaker Pelosi had passed a serious climate bill and the Senate had refused to take up anything, not even a blank bill to go to conference with and see what could be done in conference. As some of us remember all too well, when Speaker Pelosi passed that bill in 2009 over on the House side, we had here in the Senate a filibuster-proof Democratic majority. This was climate change, and we just walked away. I was told then that it was because the Obama White House told Leader Reid to pull the plug, that after the ObamaCare wars, the White House was tired of conflict and didn't want another big battle. It was not going to take on any fights it wasn't sure it could win. Think about that. Think of history's great battles and contests, legislative or otherwise, and consider in how many of those battles either side was sure it would win. If you limit yourself to battles you are sure you can win, you are pretty much sure to miss the most important battles, and we lost this one for that most lamentable of reasons--the failure to try. The fossil fuel industry, sure enough, knew it won this one once it saw the Obama administration walk off the field, abandoning Speaker Pelosi's hard-fought victory. Then years went by in which you could scarcely get a Democratic administration to put the words ``climate'' and ``change'' into the same paragraph in which we fussed, idiotically, about whether to call it ``climate change'' or ``global warming''; in which the bully pulpit--the great Presidential megaphone in the hands of one of our most articulate Presidents--stood mute. We quavered about polling showing climate as issue 8 or issue 10, ignoring that we had a say in that outcome. When we wouldn't even use the phrase, let alone make the case, no wonder the public didn't see climate change as a priority. Those were, for me, dark, desolate days, so I made a commitment to speak about climate change every single week we were in session--no matter what. The kitchen was dark; the oven was cold, but maybe, somehow, one little pilot light's clicking on every week would help. Six years after the Waxman-Markey climate bill passed the House, the Obama EPA finalized its marquee climate regulation, which was quickly killed dead in the starting block by the five Republicans on the Supreme Court. The Clean Power Plan never even went into effect. It had no regulatory core or backstop that was indisputably within EPA's authority. So when the Clean Power Plan's novelties got smacked down, nothing was left. John Kerry, bless him, led us into the Paris Agreement, but it wasn't signed until the last year of 8 years of that administration. It being so late, the fossil fuel interests behind Trump hauled us right back out of it. So there we were, after 8 years in which Democrats sometimes controlled both Houses of Congress as well as the White House, and we had, at the end of the day, no law, no regulations, no treaty. I am hanging up the ``Time to Wake Up'' poster after more than 275 of these speeches because I am going to trust that we bring more spirit and determination to the climate crisis this time, as President Biden has promised that we will. His opening Executive orders are a fine start. I appreciate particularly the restoration of the social cost of carbon, but perhaps the most important signal is not any specific policy but the breadth of the scope of the emphasis on climate across the new Biden administration. Then we had to deal with the Trump years, when sins of omission became sins of commission, and questions of commitment became questions of corruption. I am personally confident that evidence will reveal that the Trump administration was, in fact, corrupt on climate issues--and not just corrupt in the meaning of the Founding Fathers but corrupt in the meaning of the U.S. Criminal Code, and I will do my level best to make sure we find out. Thank goodness, we can put that disgraceful period of our history behind us. What did I learn along the way? I traveled to many of my Republican colleagues' home States on climate trips to help me understand the climate change problem there. There is no State whose big State universities deny climate change. Most all of them teach it. So I knew it wasn't lack of knowledge that was blocking progress. I learned that oceans are at the heart of the climate threat. First, they bear incontrovertible testimony to the dangers. Try arguing with thermometers that measure ocean warming. Try arguing with tide gauges that measure sea level rise. Try arguing with pH tests that school children can do that measure the acidification of our oceans. I learned that the oceans are suffering extraordinary injury from warming at the rate of multiple nuclear explosions per second and acidification at rates unprecedented in human existence, and from the fossil fuel industry's plastics contaminating our oceans. In every State I went to, there were businesses alarmed by climate change, whether it was wildfire or flooding or the loss of iconic views and species, upheaval of fisheries and growing conditions of crops or business risk and recreation imperiled. I heard from western fishermen about warming trout streams and a Glacier National Park with no glacier, and saw ancient western forests dying by the square mile to the bark beetle. I heard from coastal States about new pests and poisonous algae and flooding risks and fisheries in upheaval. And the Great Lakes, I heard, face similar threats as the ocean coasts. I heard in the Presiding Officer's State of Nordic ski trails made mud because you can't do artificial snow like on ski slopes, and moose tours--moose tours--that visitors promised never to do again because once you made it down the mud trail, the moose were crawling with thousands of ticks, eating them alive. Things that winter used to clean up but did no longer. One day I wept in National Airport, sitting at one of those little round linoleum-topped food tables, reading Pope Francis's new encyclical, ``Laudato Si: On Care For Our Common Home.'' Climate effects were everywhere. That wasn't the problem. So I began looking at the fossil fuel industry and studying the dark money apparatus that it uses to spread climate denial and to obstruct climate progress. I recalled our bipartisanship here in the Senate before Citizens United, and I saw the death of bipartisanship after, when the fossil fuel industry upgraded its weaponry from political muskets to tactical nukes and set about subjugating the Republican Party. I came to like and admire Bob Inglis, a conservative the fossil fuel industry could not subjugate. So, instead, they made an example of him for his climate heresy and crushed him politically. I came with groups of Senators to the floor to identify and call out this corrupt and corrupting fossil fuel web of denial. I came to know and admire the tough band of investigators, writers, and academic researchers who examine and document this corrupt apparatus. I saw how this apparatus insinuated itself into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce an the National Association of Manufacturers and turned those two business groups into America's two worst climate obstructors. Thank you, InfluenceMap, for that research. I learned the ways the industry hid the money trail leading to its front groups through shell corporations, through Donors Trust, through 501(c)(4)s. And I finally came to the realization that this industry was running a massive, covert operation--probably the biggest covert disinformation and political intimidation op in history, and it was running this covert op in and against our own country. Another thing I learned was how little political effort America's corporations put into doing anything about climate change here in Congress. A lot of them put happy green talk on their websites. They had their consumer relations and public relations and investor relations people spread the happy green talk around. Many of them actually hired sustainability officers and, where it made them money, began changing their internal behavior to actually be more sustainable. Sometimes more attention was paid to heralding those sustainability programs than there actually was to sustaining anything, but sometimes it was sincere. Bravo to those companies that have really changed the way they operate within their corporate bounds. And a few took climate change seriously enough to start pushing sustainability out their supply chains. But none--none--took climate change seriously in Congress. This was a battlefield they avoided. Their trade associations were a nightmare. Every one of them--beverages, insurance, banking, chemical, agricultural--you name it, every one of them was silent or worse. Now at last--at last--that seems to be changing. Here is the 2020 lobbying pitch for Silicon Valley tech giants--the biggest corporations in America, many of the most successful corporations of America, hundreds of American corporations, almost all of which pride themselves on their greenness. They lobby us through a group called TechNet. Here is their pitch sheet--13 pages of bulleted priorities they wanted Congress to achieve, and not one mention--not one mention--of climate change. Not one, not even a mention of renewables from a trade association that has renewables companies in its membership--until now. Until now. I was just notified that TechNet has noticed this omission in its document and that it intends to rectify the error. Good. Change has even come to the biggest and most obstructive lobby group of them all--the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. I spent a lot of time chasing them with hashtag ``chamberofcarbon.'' I stood out in front of their headquarters and put up a sign that said ``Carbon'' blocking where it said ``Commerce,'' so their own building said ``U.S. Chamber of Carbon.'' They were my nemesis--hostile to climate action in the legislative branch, hostile to climate action in the executive branch and regulatory agencies, hostile to climate action in the judiciary in cases that were being brought about climate. They were the beast. Well, last week, the chamber announced a dramatic reversal--that it will now support a serious, market-based climate solution. That--that-- is a big shift. And if they fight for climate action anywhere near as forcefully as they fought against it, it could make a big difference. So TBD as to how this turns out over at the chamber, but a tentative big thumbs up. So as I close my run of Time to Wake Ups, where are we? Well, we again control the House, and the Senate, and the White House, and this time I hope we will be serious. Senator Markey has joined me, and I mentioned earlier in the speech Nancy Pelosi championing an actual serious climate bill through the House and lamented the Senate's failure to do one damn thing once we had the House bill over here to act on. That bill was called Waxman-Markey. It was the work of Congressman Waxman and Congressman, now-Senator, Markey. With Senator Markey over here, maybe this time we will be serious in the Senate with all of these departments of government control. The latent bipartisanship here in the Senate that the fossil fuel industry suppressed is still there. It has been there all along. Talking to some of my colleagues about climate change has been a little bit like talking to prisoners about escape, but the latent bipartisanship did not go away. With these other changes--with corporate America beginning to show up, with the big trade associations becoming less horrible, I am hopeful for a serious bipartisan bill. And if we can't get good-faith bipartisanship, well, we have got reconciliation. Senator McConnell can't block bipartisan climate bills from coming to the floor any longer. So there is a point to legislating. There is a point to advocates showing up. So maybe corporate America will show up and push back on fossil fuel's subjugation of the Republican Party. A good, hard look at the fossil fuel climate denial machinery can put that corrupt machine back on its heels. In my view, it would be dereliction and malpractice to ignore that apparatus and its treacherous role. In trade associations, revolts are already taking place, within the chamber and NAM, by members horrified to be outed as supporting America's worst climate obstructors. Want faster change there? Disclose the fossil fuel money that bought the climate obstruction. That will speed things along. The finance and agriculture sectors and our coastal economies all are looking down the barrel of multiple and serious economic crash warnings. Banks, insurance companies, Freddie Mac, sovereign banks, wherever you look in the world of finance, there are dramatic, dire warnings from sober, serious bean-counter people who are not there to be green. They are there to make green. So corporate climate concerns have moved from the communications shop to business operations and the C-suites. The famous author Mary Renault, who wrote wonderful historical novels, said: ``There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.'' There has never been a crisis or a catastrophe more warned about by more and more credible sources than the looming climate crisis, and it is going to clobber these businesses. Now they just need to align their political effort with their own stated policies. How hard is that? All of this can break the right way. The dark castle of denial can fall, and Congress can rise in bipartisan force to stop the harm and cure the damage. But that is not foreordained. We can still screw this up. No doubt about it. So let's not. Let's do our duty. The conditions are at last--at last--in place for a real solution. A new dawn is breaking, and when it is dawn, there is no need for my little candle against the darkness. My little ``Time to Wake Up'' pilot light can now go out. So instead of urging that it is time to wake up, I close this long run by saying now, it is time to get to work. Whitehouse ``Time to Wake Up'' run, farewell. Whitehouse at least on time to wake up--out. 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. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I would just close by suggesting that perhaps my friend, the Senator from Alaska, can sympathize, since he fears that the interests that he came to the floor here to defend will not be listened to. Perhaps he can sympathize with the fact that, for 4 years, an entire administration wouldn't give the time of day to the sea level rise concerns that are threatening my State. We are talking about Freddie Mac. We are talking about a property value crash across all of our coasts that is going to cause enormous harm to Rhode Island, and we just left an administration that wouldn't pay one iota of attention to that. It had fossil fuel industry climate deniers, and there is such a thing. Not everybody in the fossil fuel industry is that way, but they picked the bottom feeders to bring into government. I share the Senator's frustration, but let me say I have got it about 10,000 times over after having lived with the Trump administration for the past 4 years and gotten nothing and after having tried to bring serious climate debate to the floor, knowing that the Republican leader was going to block it. So, yes, I sympathize with his distress, and I hope he sympathizes with my, rather, greater, cumulative distress from the last 4 years. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I have hastened to the floor because I was upstairs, waiting for the House managers to bring the article over, and I heard my friend, the distinguished Senator from Alaska, talking about his concern about the fossil fuel part of the energy sector and his dissatisfaction with what the Secretary of the Treasury was able to assure him of in that regard. I just wanted to note that I missed a moment of the Senator's remarks when I came walking down here, but as best as I could tell, the Senator never mentioned the term ``climate change,'' and he never referenced ``carbon emissions.'' I have to say, if we are going to deal with our energy sector, we have to deal with it in a way that takes into account carbon emissions and climate change. You can't just whistle past those things and pretend that they are not real and act as if we can continue to go forward in the way we always have--releasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, poisoning our oceans with acidification, warming the planet, and putting coastal communities like mine at grave risk from sea level rise and storm surge. We have to address those things. As we go forward in this new Congress, I very much hope that my friend Senator Sullivan and I will be able to work together to address that exact problem to make sure that not only is our energy mix strong for our economy but to make absolutely sure that we are not sacrificing the safety of our planet, the economic security of our future generations, and the health of people all around the planet who have, really, no choice but to live close to the land and feel the pounding of climate change in their immediate lives every day. We have to address those things, and I hope we will. So, in having heard his side of the argument, I just wanted to come back to the floor and offer the other side. Somewhere between us there is a resolution because I know perfectly well that the State of Alaska is getting hit by the acidification and warming side and by the sea level rise and storm surge side of this problem, just as much as Rhode Island is. Perhaps, because, as my friend constantly reminds me, Alaska has a huge advantage of size over Rhode Island, one could even imagine that it is having more of an effect than Rhode Island. So with those comments and with affection and regard for my colleague from Alaska, I yield the floor

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I should add a few other thank-yous because this, obviously, took a lot of effort to get through all these different committees in the Senate and the House and to get it passed on the Senate and House floor. I want to start on the House side, with the equivalent of the Whitehouse-Sullivan show is the Young-Bonamici show on the other side; Representative Bonamici and Representative Young, whom Senator Sullivan mentioned, were the key people working this issue. I want to thank my delegation, Jim Langevin and David Cicilline, because, during key points when it looked like things were jamming up over there, they jumped up with their leadership and with their colleagues to help move things along, and I believe Representative Young did as well. I want to thank the majority leader, Steny Hoyer, who at a really critical moment, when this could have gone one way or another, made sure it went the right way and got us teed up to get the thing done in the House and back here where we could move it in the Senate. In the Senate, I have spoken about Senator Menendez's critical role, but, of course, as chairman, Senator Risch also had to support and permit this to go forward. It had to clear Commerce, where Senator Wicker and Senator Cantwell were supportive and helped move this along. Senator Wicker, indeed, has been a member of our Oceans Caucus from an early stage and has been very helpful on oceans issues. Then on our--Senator Sullivan's and my--Environment and Public Works Committee, Chairman Barrasso and our ranking member, Senator Carper, were all very supportive. Things like this don't get done without a lot of people pulling together, and I just wanted to make sure that I thanked all of them as I close out here on this subject. So thank you.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, today is a happy day for me to be joining my friends Senator Menendez and Senator Sullivan here on the Senate floor to celebrate the successful conclusion of a second chapter in a long effort to address the problem of ocean plastics pollution, which has been described so well by my friend Senator Sullivan. When we began, there was actually no program whatsoever on ocean plastics in the Senate. There had never been legislation in this area. With Senator Sullivan's support, we decided to see what the traffic would bear, see what the Senate and the House might tolerate in terms of legislating in a new area. For that, we undertook the Save Our Seas bill. And at the end of the day, after a certain amount of static, actually on both sides of the aisle, we were able to get Save Our Seas passed by unanimous consent. Every single Member of the Senate had to agree to it. To me, that was a really exciting test to the proposition that Senators actually care about this. One of my favorite moments in that whole episode was when a Senator, with whom I am often at war-- Senator Inhofe of landlocked Oklahoma--became an ally and a friend and a supporter of Save Our Seas, the original bill. And he did so because he had childhood experiences on the gulf coast with sea turtles that made him care about the plastic that was piling up in the oceans and strangling and drowning sea creatures. It has, this topic, a gift, I guess, for bringing people together. And based on that success and that unanimous consent--and it cleared the House the same way on what they call suspension over there--we undertook 2.0; 2.0 is going to be bigger, better than 1.0. And it sure is bigger, better. And the role of Senator Menendez in putting some real structure to the international component of this was essential. Senator Menendez is our ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee. In that role, he was essential in seeing to it that this bill, with such a big Foreign Relations Committee footprint, cleared that committee with momentum and good to go. We are now in the happy position that 2.0 has passed as well. It creates a new marine debris foundation. It creates a genius prize for innovation in trying to get rid of or reinvent or reimagine our plastic disposal system. It creates new research to tackle this issue. It focuses more, as I said, directly on our international relations because so much of the marine plastic waste comes out of foreign shores and down foreign rivers. It also focuses on our domestic waste management program. This is a good step. I have heard people say that 2.0 is not enough. Darn right it is not enough, but this is how you build momentum. You prove that you can do something and that the Senate is willing to act on it. Then, you stand on that platform and you build a bigger, better bill, and you get that passed. And now Senator Sullivan and I are already discussing what 3.0 might look like. I am not in a position to speak for Senator Sullivan, but I am interested in looking under the hood of the recycling industry. When you put your plastic waste into a blue bin to go off and get recycled, how much of it actually does get recycled? How can we make sure that there is, in fact, a circle in which plastic gets manufactured, put into use, brought back out of the system, and not left in the ocean, not left as waste on our lands? How can you develop what is called the circular economy for plastic? Plastic is a weird thing. Nature hasn't seen plastic before. It doesn't biodegrade the way things that were made by the Lord biodegrade. Nothing eats it. If something does eat it, it just piles up in its body or goes through it neutrally. It provides no nutrition or value to anything. It is just this new thing out there. We need to figure out how to deal with it, and we need to get it the heck out of our oceans. More to come on this. But let me take this moment to thank Senator Menendez for his leadership, particularly, on the foreign side of this, and Senator Sullivan for his leadership and for being such a terrific ally in this cause. With that, I yield back.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, while Senator Grassley is on the floor, I would thank him for his remarks about the First Step Act and let him know that on the Judiciary Committee, I look forward to working with him to continue to advance that. As the Senate knows, the Grassley-Durbin segment and the Cornyn- Whitehouse segment were the two key pieces of that bill, and it is terrific to hear the Senator and our chairman at the time chose support to continue that work. So I am grateful. What I would like to do now is to follow the conversation we had about oceans a minute ago in the context of my ``Time to Wake Up'' speeches. Obviously, the oceans are taking a colossal beating from climate change, from the warming, from the chemical acidification that it causes. It is warming at a rate of multiple detonations of Hiroshima- level nuclear weapons per second in the ocean. That is the amount of heat that is added, if you want to put an image to it. So we have done some good things on oceans in this Congress, and I would like to summarize some of those. One, obviously, is Save Our Seas 2.0 that Senator Sullivan, Senator Menendez, and I just discussed, but we also have a little package of enforcement provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act that focus on what is commonly called illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing--IUU fishing--which is a really boring and bureaucratic name for extremely bad behavior. Essentially, it is modern slavery at sea for the crew, who are miserably trapped on these illegal, pirate fishing vessels. They are also an avenue for trafficking of humans, of narcotics, of arms, or whatever. Once you are out in a boat outside, beyond the realm of the law, operating illegally and doing whatever you can for money, you will do pretty much anything there is. So in addition to ransacking our common seas, these pirate fishing fleets are really dangerous vectors for really dangerous criminal conduct. I am glad that we have put a little more heat on the Navy to up its game and report on its implementation of previously passed measures. I am glad that we have directed the Navy to work with the Coast Guard, which has the substantive jurisdiction over all of this, and to work with the private sector involved in solutions to this. There are such things as private sector satellites that track the wake and the signal of these illegal fishing vessels, and coordinating that with our intelligence and our research I think will really help in fighting that battle, so that we are sharing the information that we can and gathering the information that we can to be more effective. Finally, as I recall from my travels with the late Senator McCain, when you went to coastal countries near China, you always heard the same complaint. We went to the Philippines and heard it. We went to Vietnam and heard it. We went to Indonesia and heard it. There are probably others if I could remember more clearly that I could add to that list. But the complaint was that the Chinese fishing fleet is incredibly aggressive, it is trespassing into foreign sovereign waters, it is fishing illegally and outside of any respect for the domestic protections of these nations, and it is often violently protected by Chinese vessels, by navy or other vessels of the Chinese Government. So focusing on that as a place to push back and protect our oceans while at the same time diminishing this bad behavior by China is also a good thing. So that was our suite of progress on pirate fishing in the NDAA. In the omnibus, we expect at least $75 million to go, for the first time, into a new fund to tackle ocean plastics and for ocean plastic work in the administration. So those are bits of good news, and I am delighted that those things have happened. The less good news from this past year is that coasts remain sadly underfunded, and we have missed some real opportunities. Two of the accounts that demonstrate how badly funded coasts are facing these threats from the changing oceans are the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which should properly be called the inland and freshwater conservation fund, and the Army Corps Flood and Coastal Storm Damage Reduction Fund. If you go back and look at how this money actually gets spent, for every dollar that the Land and Water Conservation Fund spends in an inland State, in a landlocked State, per capita, it spends only 40 cents in a coastal State--a dollar per capita inland, 40 cents per capita coastal. And that actually understates the coastal discrepancy because it doesn't count the spending in coastal States that isn't on coasts. You have coastal States like New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas that have big, big upland inland areas in which most of the Land and Water Conservation Fund money goes. So what we really ought to do is call this what it is, which is an inland and freshwater conservation fund, and have a parallel coastal and saltwater preservation fund to make sure that coasts are treated fairly. I did not even get the chance to ask for some adjustments to treat coasts more fairly as an amendment when we reconsidered the Land and Water Conservation in the so-called Great American Outdoors Act, which was frustrating because everybody--at least on my side of the aisle-- talks a good game about how we need to have more amendments, we need to have more amendments. That deal got locked down before it got to the Senate floor. Nobody was allowed an amendment. So that was frustrating, but we will fight on because coasts need to be treated fairly, and with sea level rise and warming and fisheries moving about and storm surge worsening and more hurricanes, the dangers to coasts are greater than before, not less. On the Army Corps account, that is even more extreme. If you go back through the last 10 years, the best year the coasts had in the flood and coastal storm damage account was 1 coastal dollar for every 19 inland dollars--1 coastal dollar for every 19 inland dollars. Tell me how that is fair to coasts facing those same risks. And that is the best year. The worst year was 120 times more for inland projects than for coastal projects--less than a penny on the dollar. Less than a penny on the dollar for America's coasts. So we have a lot of work to do to make sure that we are doing what we need to do for our coasts. I am hoping that we can move the OFFSHORE Act--that there is even a faint chance of getting it done in the last few days. It had a successful hearing in Energy and Natural Resources. It has 19 bipartisan cosponsors, including Commerce Chairman Wicker, and it would treat wind energy offshore the same way for revenues that we treat oil drilling offshore--i.e., 37.5 percent to the nearby State, 12.5 percent to a dedicated fund. In this case, it would be the Oceans and Coastal Fund because it is oceans and coastal. It is one of the ironies that most of the money that comes off of coastal oil drilling-- offshore oil drilling--gets moved into the Land and Water Conservation Fund, where it goes out West and is spent on inland, not coastal, projects. So we continue to have real work to do. There is the BLUE GLOBE Act, which I have with Senator Murkowski, on data monitoring in the oceans and Great Lakes--we are going to continue to push forward--and our Blue Carbon bill, which will help us address the changes in the oceans that climate change is wreaking. With Blue Carbon, things like growing mangroves are incredibly powerful as a carbon sink, kelp and sea grass--to get that research done and do the work we need to to deacidify our oceans while we still have reefs that are alive. My ideal would be a ``big blue bill''--a big blue bill that combines BLUE GLOBE, Blue Carbon, and others and, for once, finally, finally, finally, finally, finally takes our oceans and coasts seriously. I get that we are terrestrial mammals, but a lot of us care for our coasts, a lot of us care for our seas, a lot of our economies are dependent on our oceans, and the health of the planet is dependent on the cooling and on the oxygen that oceans provide. So we mess around with our oceans at our peril. I hope that the Biden administration will take climate change as deadly serious as it needs to be taken and that it will step up a significant step from the degree of attention climate change got in the Obama administration. We have to recognize the danger to our future if we remain negligent--it is that simple. And we have to make sure we free ourselves from the thrall of the fossil fuel industry's climate denial machine because the fossil fuel industry does not want what is best for America, does not want what is best for people, does not want what is best for oceans and the environment; it wants what is best for its profits, period, and end of story. So we really, really, really, under the Biden administration, need a serious climate bill to safeguard the oceans on the only planet that we call home. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I mentioned recently in one of these speeches that an identity-laundering group called Donors Trust decided to do a letter to the editor of my home State paper asserting that they were just as innocent as newborn lambs. The Center for Media and Democracy has recently obtained the IRS form 990 for calendar 2019 for this little lamb, Donors Trust, and it has some fascinating findings. Donors Trust took in a total of $312 million in donations in 2019-- nearly a third of a billion dollars--up from $198 million in 2018. Of that, more than two-thirds came from two huge donations--two--one for $150 million and another for $69 million. Out of the $312 million they received, $219 million came in two donations, and both of the donations were anonymous. Now, who makes anonymous donations of that size? Most people making a donation that big want their name on the building at the university. What is going on? Who has that kind of money to give away and a desire to hide themselves? One wonders. Donors Trust gave out $162 million in anonymized grants in 2019-- mostly to rightwing groups. This is up from $142.3 million in 2018. I should actually probably not say that Donors Trust gave them out but, rather, that they transmitted the funds for the anonymous donors because a donor can tell Donors Trust where the money is to go. Donors Trust then provides the expedient service of hiding the donor's identity. So where did this anonymous money go? Well, grants of interest include $7 million to the Federalist Society--1 year, $7 million--up from last year's $5.9 million. Yes, this is the same Federalist Society that has selected judges and Justices for the Trump administration. Is it not obvious that big special interests might buy their way to the Federalist Society judicial selection table with big, anonymous donations? When you farm out to secretive private organizations the power to select Supreme Court Justices and the secretive organizations take big, anonymous donations, what else are you to expect? It would be interesting to know who paid for a voice in selecting Supreme Court Justices, and it would be interesting to know what business they may have before the Court. But all of that is shrouded in secrecy and anonymity. It would be logical to assume that $7 million bought a seat or two at that table; we just don't know for whom or what their interests were. Relatedly, Donors Trust transmitted $10.5 million to something called the 85 Fund, a Leonard Leo shell group formerly known as Judicial Education Project. Who is Leonard Leo? Leonard Leo ran the Justice- picking, Court-packing scheme for the Federalist Society for years until an expose by the Washington Post made it prudent for the operation to bring in a new face named Carrie Severino. It is a little bit like replacing a burned agent in a covert operation with a new agent. The logical conclusion is that this $10 million is also related to packing the courts with special interest-chosen judges and Justices, and if so, that brings the total for that project to over $17 million, counting the Federalist Society money--$17 million in 1 year just through Donors Trust. Of course, once you have packed the Court with agreeable Justices, you need to tee up agreeable cases for them. And guess what. Donors Trust also transmitted $2.7 million to advocacy groups that bring those cases, including the groups that presented to the Supreme Court Janus, the anti-labor case, and Shelby County, the anti-voting rights case. These are just two of the more infamous of the 80 5-to-4 partisan decisions giving big wins to Republican donor interests--just the kind of interests that have the money to push millions through Donors Trust and the motive to use Donors Trust to cover their tracks When this dark-money-funded enterprise is not busy at the task of packing the Court, it is busy propagating climate denial and obstruction. It has been at that particular scheme for years. Climate denial and related political obstruction, packing the courts, and electing Republicans are the three primary purposes of this dark-money enterprise. To keep climate denial cooking, Donors Trust transmitted nearly $19 million to rightwing local so-called think tanks, collectively called the State Policy Network--a group that propagates climate denial and obstruction at the State government level--and to ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which drafts up rightwing and climate denial and obstruction legislation for State legislators. This ALEC group is so reprehensible that even ExxonMobil withdrew its support for it--or maybe they just laundered their support through Donors Trust. We don't know. Not content with climate denial and obstruction at the State level, Donors Trust also transmitted $4.5 million in anonymous money to eight different national climate denial organizations. These include the Heartland Institute, notorious for comparing climate scientists to the Unabomber and sending 200,000 fake, climate-denying textbooks to school teachers around the country. On this graphic prepared by a researcher into the climate denial enterprise, Donors Trust is front and center, right here, right in the middle of the web, and that Heartland Institute is right here, part of the network. The other organization that it funded is the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which planted noted climate denier Myron Ebell to lead the Trump transition at EPA and usher in the disgraced Scott Pruitt as Administrator. On a personal note, I should thank Donors Trust for transmitting $769,000 from some anonymous donor or donors to a dark-money opposition research group called Capital Research Center, which has as one of its tasks to feed misinformation about me to rightwing media outlets. I think that is my reward for calling out this whole crooked dark-money operation. And wouldn't you know--they send out a dark-money group to defend their dark-money operation. I appreciate the attention and the irony. Others in the Donors Trust dark-money creep show include $4 million to Project Veritas, which cooked up deceptive sting videos in Minnesota and other States to feed the false election fraud narrative of Donald Trump and the far right, and also $1.5 million to a beauty called VDARE Foundation, whose website is a vector for anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and White nationalism. I can see why someone would want to hide giving a million dollars to that. Donors Trust has a tag-along entity that sends a lot of money into the same places--the Charles Koch Foundation. In fact, it is a little hard to tell where this Koch Foundation ends and where Donors Trust begins. Donors Trust has provided significant financial support to the Koch political operation's major front group through the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which is here on the graphic. It is like a reunion going through this research. And Donors Trust, in turn, has received financial support from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. So money out to the Koch political operation and in from the Koch Foundation. I don't know why the Koch Foundation couldn't just have given the money directly. It has been reported that the Koch network has provided Donors Trust with most of its backbone, even to the point of being described as part of the Koch network, and the Donors Trust employees have extensive histories within the Koch network of political front groups. The Center for Public Integrity reported this gem: ``At a private Koch fundraising meeting in the summer of 2010, Donors Trust hosted cocktails and dessert for . . . a `target-rich environment' of wealthy donors.'' Sweet indeed. So when we look at this Charles Koch Foundation, we are looking at something interlinked with Donors Trust, and sure enough, there is also overlap in where the money goes. In 2019, this Koch Foundation gave out $141 million, up from $127 million in 2018. For the State-level climate denial State Policy Network we talked about, it gave $2.5 million across 13 so-called think tanks, and it gave nearly half a million dollars to that same ALEC-- American Legislative Exchange Council--we talked about. Other Koch grants of note include over $22 million to George Mason University, whose role as a hothouse for developing deregulatory and climate denial theories is well documented in Nancy Maclean's terrific book, ``Democracy in Chains.'' This $22 million continues a relationship that helped put Koch operative Neomi Rao from George Mason into the Trump White House and then onto the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to do the Koch operation's business from behind robes. Remember those special interest front groups that tee up legal cases for the judges and Justices who have been ushered onto the courts? The Koch Foundation turns up there too. The Koch Foundation has spread $6.2 million around 10 separate amici curiae--friends of court, so-called-- that showed up in a case called Americans for Prosperity v. Becerra. And what do you know? Yes, Americans for Prosperity is that Koch political operation's main front group--such a small world. Why would Koch political interests want to fund amici in a case where a Koch front group is already the plaintiff? Well, let's look at that case. The ``Becerra'' in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Becerra is the California attorney general, a nominee for HHS Secretary now, I gather. The case is an abstruse technical challenge to how the IRS shares tax information with States. Why this gathering of the Koch-funded clan of front groups around this little technical case? Because the lifeblood of all this dirty operation is dark money. Indeed, today, our Supreme Court is the Court that dark money built. So the dark money operation sees a chance to enshrine dark money in the American Constitution. The dark money forces that built this Court want the Court to expand the First Amendment to protect anonymous, dark money political spending by secretive billionaires and corporate interests. This is the case where they intend to make their move. It is waiting in the Supreme Court right now. Who knows, maybe it has been waiting for Justice Barrett. Lined up as amici curiae in this otherwise nondescript case, in the order of their Koch Foundation funding, are: the Cato Institute--I can't read this well enough to point them out, but these are inhabitants of this graph as well--$2.4 million from the Koch Foundation; Texas Public Policy Foundation, $1.5 million; Pacific Legal Foundation, $1 million; New Civil Liberties Alliance, $1 million; Buckeye Institute, $104,200; Independent Women's Forum, $100,000; Pacific Research Institute, $100,000; Philanthropy Roundtable, $30,000; Institute for Justice, $12,584; and National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, $8,156. When you look at the kind of money that is being doled out, I think the Institute for Justice and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation have some cause to complain that they got treated so poorly with such small donations from such a big operation. The gathering of that clan is not the only clue that something is up. Big players in the dark money racket, like the fossil fuel titan Marathon Petroleum and the massive climate obstructer that calls itself the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are already objecting to requests for information about their dark money operations by asserting that such a right exists. They are already asserting that such a right exists, while the dark money schemers are lining up in this case to make that push to the Supreme Court. Wouldn't it be convenient if they helped build a Court willing to agree with them and establish this new right to dark money influence? This whole dark money mess smells to high heaven. Why big donors feel they have to hide? Why this complicated network to play Whac-A-Mole with different groups who can show up? Why the orchestration of Supreme Court briefs with groups that purport to be separate? Why the whole scheme? It is a recipe for corruption. It prevents citizens from understanding what is going on in their own democracy. It empowers the worst forces in politics. It is the mechanism through which climate denial has been effectuated, and it is wrapping its tentacles more and more tightly around our U.S. Supreme Court. And Donors Trust--that sweet little lamb--is at the center of the web dolling out hundreds of millions of dollars--some lamb. Donors Trust is a wolf in lamb's clothing or perhaps better to say Donors Trust provides the lamb's clothing that cloaks the wolves so that they can feed more voraciously and anonymously on America's body politic. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, we recently lost a great Rhode Islander, Ernie Baptista. Ernie was immensely successful in his professional life; his wise counsel was sought not just around the country but around the globe. Ernie was also a civic-minded community leader at home, with a passion for politics. He immersed himself in Rhode Island's political whirl, where he was well liked and well regarded by people of many different political perspectives. Ernie's keen insight and advice was relied upon by many candidates, including myself and Senator Reed. We both treasured Ernie's quick wit, sharp intellect, and great sense of humor. He was bright, insightful, and loyal and always provided wise counsel. Ernie enjoyed the good things in life: good friends, good meals, and good works. We will fondly remember Ernie with a trademark cigar in hand and a smile on his face and the way his presence filled every room he entered. We will remember his generous and kind spirit, which lifted us all. Our deepest condolences go to Ernie's beloved family, Sharon, Peter, and Jennifer. We mourn your great loss. To Ernie, rest in peace, dear friend.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I have had the pleasure of working with my chairman on the Budget Committee on budget reform initiatives, and I want to take this occasion to thank him for the wonderful way in which he worked with me on those issues and for all of his support. I want to make a pledge to him as well. The effort began with a lot of hearings in the Budget Committee to sort out how we could reform what we were doing. At the moment, the Budget Committee is, probably, the most dysfunctional piece of this dysfunctional institution, and Chairman Enzi was determined to remedy that. A lot of work went in at the committee level. Then a bicameral committee was created to look at budget reform, primarily out of the House, and I had the opportunity to serve on that bicameral committee. That was an opportunity that I owe to Chairman Enzi. He both advocated for me to his leader that I should be on that committee, and he gave up a spot on that committee to make sure there was a spot for me there. I hope and believe that I conducted myself in due accord with Chairman Enzi's wishes and principles in the course of that. We had the ability to use that bicameral committee process to do a test run of our budget reform, and I am pleased to report that, although the end product was never adopted between the two bodies, the product that came out of the committee included our budget reform as it was then constituted. We raised our aspiration from the budget reform as it was then constituted, which was entirely voluntary, to actually try to change the Budget Committee's rules to force the process of the Budget Committee into the mold of the voluntary structure. We did good work on that, and we came to an agreement. I am sorry to say that its failure to pass into law arose not from problems on the Republican side of the aisle but from problems on my side of the aisle that I have been unable to yet surmount. My pledge to you, Chairman Enzi, is that I will keep at it. Senator Blunt is here, and he is helpful in that regard. Senator Lankford and Senator Perdue are here, and we have a good team, along with Senator Kaine, Senator King, myself, and others on our side--another being Senator Shaheen. So I will continue the work. I vow to you that I will somehow find a way to get this done, and if I can find a way to call it the Enzi reform, I will find a way to call it the Enzi reform. I will long remember the relationship we had and the good work we did together. I will long remember your 80/20 rule. And maybe--because I have a similar proposal in Rules--maybe we will even be able to get your phones and electronics amendment passed. So thank you to you, sir, for doing what is right, doing your best, and treating others as they would want to be treated. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask unanimous consent that the scheduled votes commence.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, let me thank Senator Cotton for his work with me in getting this bill to this happy result. As the Presiding Officer knows, a bill can look like it was easy to get done when it passes 96 to 1, but that doesn't mean that the pathway was easy. This has been years and years of effort. Senator Cotton really helped make it possible, so I am very grateful to him. I also want to thank Senator Braun, who was the first Republican Member to join me in this and who has been a constant ally and source of support and encouragement. I would also like to extend my appreciation to Chairman Grassley of the Finance Committee. This is a Finance Committee jurisdiction bill. Chairman Grassley was willing to let it go forward as long as he got his amendment--without insisting on his amendment being part of the bill. He got his vote. We voted it down, and the bill has now gone forward, and that reflects a very high degree of forbearance and courtesy from Chairman Grassley, which I respect and appreciate. I also want to thank the ranking member on Finance, Senator Wyden, who has worked very hard to make sure that finance issues were resolved and that he was comfortable with it. He and Grassley were able to give it committee clearance to come to the floor with their support on these terms. I also want to thank Senator Lee--Mike Lee--for his forbearance. He has been interested in this bill in the past. We debated it on the Senate floor, and he has allowed it to proceed in this way also, so I am grateful to Senator Lee. Of course, that is all the gratitude here within the body for people who made the bill possible, but the people we really need to be grateful to and appreciative of are the ALS advocates who come to us to argue for support and for encouragement. They are filled with hope even though there is no cure. They continue to seek investment in the science to try to figure out a way to a cure. They show immense courage This is a devastating, uniquely bad diagnosis for somebody to get. It is very hard for the individual who receives the diagnosis and also terrible for their family as well. We have all had the experience in this body of seeing our constituents come to advocate on ALS and have the experience of seeing them the first time they come to us with a cane. When they come back the next year, they come back with a wheelchair and, the following year after that, come back with an electronic support mechanism with ventilator assistance and are still able to steer around, but it is an apparatus much more complex than a wheelchair. Then, in the next visit, it is their widow who comes alone. We have had the chance to do something good here. It made no sense to require people who have this diagnosis wait 5 months before they can begin to get Social Security Disability Insurance benefits. Actually, very often, that first 5 months is when the support makes the most difference in terms of the quality of life that remains during the course of the illness. We have been at this about 5 years now. Today is a good day in that sense. I want to call to mind, just as an example of how this strikes at home--our small, local, home State paper, the Providence Journal, has a long tradition of being a very distinguished newspaper. Very often people who worked for it went on to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and big and famous newspapers and made national names for themselves. The Providence Journal is a really significant newspaper. Just in the course of my time in politics, two of its writers have been stricken with ALS--struck down, in fact, with ALS: Brian Dickinson, first, and Bill Malinowski afterward. Each had to learn to write in very unusual ways, including with their eyeballs by blinking as letters went by on a screen or by directing a laser. It is a terrible disease, ALS. But one thing that it does is it displays the extraordinary human character of people who fight on through this increasingly disabling condition. The courage that they show and the way that they persist--in this case, to keep writing-- Brian Dickinson was writing columns really until the end of his life-- stand as an example to all of us of what courage in impossible circumstances looks like. That is a blessing they give to all of us. With many thanks and much appreciation to J.R. Pagliarini, the president of Rhode Island ALS society, and his president emeritus, Kenneth McGunagle, and to their executive director, Beth Flanagan, I am happy to get this done. Now we hope that in the final days of this Congress, our friends over in the House--with 300-plus cosponsors on the bill in the House--ought to be able to get out of each other's way and get this done before this Congress concludes. I yield the floor to my friend and colleague Senator Braun with great appreciation.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, today is my 276th climate speech, and my increasingly battered graphic is showing its wear, but for the first time in a really, really long time, there is real hope for climate action in America. The light of science will shine in a Biden administration. Our U.S. Government will heed actual data. Agencies will act on facts. The White House will care about the harm carbon pollution does right now across the country. President Biden will restore the EPA to its role of safeguarding our air and water and will task the State Department to surge climate policy abroad. Every Department--from Transportation to the USDA, to HUD, to the SEC--will have a role in turning this ship around before catastrophe. At last, the Biden administration will cleanse America's government of its grimy infestation of polluter lackeys, stooges, and hangers-on and will shut off the disastrous handouts to fossil fuel industry donors. A flood of cleansing executive actions will wash away the grime. The American Presidency, with its great power, will shake free of the polluters' grip, but the Presidency alone cannot spare us. Congress must pass a comprehensive climate bill, stop rewarding polluters from polluting, and clean up our energy market so it is not corrupted by or for the fossil fuel industry--for instance, putting a real price on carbon to pay for the fossil fuel damage. We have to invest in new, green infrastructure to create millions of jobs. We need to prepare communities along our coasts for rising seas, others for higher temperatures, and other climate dangers. We need to address the dangerous systemic financial risks fossil fuel presents to our economic system. There is work to be done, and it is overdue. So what has been stopping us? Four years ago, Senate Democrats came to the Senate floor and here exposed this web of denial and obstruction that had been built by the fossil fuel industry to prevent meaningful action on climate change. This evil web is a front for billionaire polluters like the Kochs and fossil fuel pushers like ExxonMobil and Marathon Petroleum. To hide its funders, this web uses creepy identity-scrubbing groups like Donors Trust and Donors Capital. They move money and people around in the web in a Whac-A-Mole array of disposable groups with misleadingly wholesome names like the Heartland Institute and the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. Benjamin Franklin would vomit at this abuse of his name. Following Big Tobacco's playbook, this web of denial kept the polluters' fingerprints off the dirty work of sowing doubt about climate science, just as the tobacco industry fraudulently stood up front groups to dispense denial of the harms of tobacco. This polluter web of denial also kept the Republican Party in line by spending stunning amounts of money in American politics Dr. Robert Brulle, now at Brown University, created this graphic off of his research, and it gives you a sense of how big and how complex this web of denial is that the fossil fuel industry stood up, and it is funded by huge amounts of dark money by anonymous funders. When we exposed this web back in 2016, fossil fuel giants like ExxonMobil said it was out of the climate denial and obstruction business. Exxon claimed it had not funded the Heartland Institutes of the world for a decade. Fossil fuel executives said they knew climate change was a threat, and they claimed to have turned the page on this nonsense. Well, that just ain't so. The network of phony front groups, identity-laundering outfits, and bogus PR campaigns is alive and well. Like any threatened crooked enterprise, it morphs to hide in its surroundings, but we just caught another glimpse of it through a New York Times expose of the corporate PR firm FTI Consulting. FTI started 40 years ago as a hired gun for parties in litigation and now offers virtually any nasty service a corporation could need. According to the Times, the fossil fuel industry employs FTI for a lot of dirty work. One thing FTI does is to stand up fake front groups. The New York Times chronicles how organizations like Citizens to Protect PA Jobs, New Mexicans for Economic Prosperity, and the Liberty Energy Project actually all trace back to FTI through common employees, internet domain registrations, and other ties. Each of these pop-up groups suggests that it is a broad coalition of regular Americans. Each sports a flashy website, like this one, with neighborly looking folk in scenic vistas, and, of course, they all make the fossil fuel case for cutting corporate taxes and slashing environmental protections. We call these fake environmental grassroots groups ``Astroturf''--a product manufactured by big, powerful special interests to look like grassroots support. This one is a classic--Texans for Natural Gas. The Times writes about this outfit: Acting as Texans for Natural Gas representatives, FTI employees have launched pro-industry petitions, produced videos and reports on the importance of the Permian Basin oil field, and written opinion pieces for local newspapers supporting fossil fuels. The site features testimonials from three women-- I am quoting still-- two of whom are represented with stock photos-- Let me interrupt the quote for a minute because you know you can go to the internet and find stock photos of people you can use. So these aren't real testimonials. These are fake FTI testimonials with stock photos to make it look like it is credible. OK, I will go back to the quote: and one with a photo used without permission from the Flickr page of a photographer in the Philippines. Classy, huh? This bag of polluter tricks is pretty familiar to those who have studied the web of denial here, but FTI is also pulling some new tricks. One new target is fossil fuel's own investors. A new challenge for oil and gas companies is their own shareholders--even their biggest institutional investors--calling on them to identify and address climate risks. For instance, last spring, BlackRock, the largest institutional investor in the world, voted at a shareholder meeting to remove two Exxon directors and install an independent Exxon chairman, all to improve this oil giant's ``insufficient progress'' in addressing its business risk from climate change. That kind of warning shot sends shivers down the spine of a big polluter. So there is FTI, which popped up a group in 2018 called Main Street Investors, which commissioned studies arguing that activist shareholders harm shareholder value, and it launched a website, divestmentfacts.com, to argue against big university endowments, pension funds, and other big investors divesting from fossil fuels. The Times notes about this scheme: ``At least six academic papers published on this website were by professors who, in addition to their university jobs, were also working for Compass Lexecon, [an] FTI subsidiary.'' Neat trick using shareholder money to fool shareholders. Who paid FTI to set up Main Street Investors? The National Association of Manufacturers, which the watchdog group Influence Map has called the worst climate obstructor in America. So it is no surprise that they are paying for this phony nonsense. The question is, Who paid the National Association of Manufacturers to set this up? They won't say. So we have to take a guess. There is more that FTI is up to. Don't like your news coverage? FTI can build you your own news site. The Times found FTI lurking behind Energy In Depth and Western Wire--two sites that churn out pro-fossil fuel articles and spread them around the internet. With mass extinction of real local newspapers underway, FTI is busy setting up polluter news pages to fill the void. It is clever, if repulsive. Of course, FTI does dirty work on social media. After New York City filed a climate lawsuit against Exxon, FTI launched a social media attack on New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. In a pantomime twofer, FTI used content from its phony Energy In Depth news site in its paid-for social media attack. Who paid? They won't say. Take a guess. Another FTI campaign bought social media ads to steer people to another FTI front group, the Arctic Energy Center, which promotes-- guess what--drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and off the Alaskan coast. In yet another campaign, FTI's shadowy special strategic communications unit set up a phony Facebook profile to secretly track environmental protesters. It did this for Apache Energy, which wanted to drill for fossil fuel next to a State park in Texas. See the pattern? But wait. It gets even creepier than this, if you can believe it. FTI has a menu that it offers to its clients of fake personas. These fake personas use fake social media and message board accounts to interfere in internet debate--say by harassing local citizens who are concerned about pollution and who may be criticizing FTI's clients, so they will bomb into the internet debate around that, offering fake personas as the phony voice to disrupt that debate. This is actually their menu. You have what they call ``the Derailleur.'' ``The Derailleur seizes on a seemingly innocuous section of the otherwise negative narrative and attempts to pull the comment thread into a discursive discussion around that detailed non-issue.'' They offer next the ``Drunken Conspiracy Theorist Uncle.'' ``The Drunken Conspiracy Theorist Uncle agrees with the negative commenter but conflates other unrelated and offensive issues into it, lumping it all together into an unpalatable whole.'' They also offer the ``Semantic Nitpicker,'' who ``asks an endless series of questions seeking clarification or pointing out minor flaws in the way the argument is constructed. This can be played both friendly and oppositionally, but by different stacks of kids.'' On it goes through the ``Skeptical Capitalist,'' the ``Patronizing Voice of Reason,'' the ``Confused Time Traveler,'' the ``Concerned Hipster,'' and believe it or not, here is a real beauty--the ``Dog Typing on a Keyboard.'' You can pay FTI to send somebody real behind a fake persona to go interfere anonymously in somebody else's conversation--in this case, claiming a dog typing on a keyboard. ``The dog typing on a keyboard chimes in with very poor grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and posts frequently to clutter up the thread and make it very hard to read''--basically packing the debate with so much nonsense that everybody has to tune out. These are actually services offered to the fossil fuel industry clients that they pay for. They pay to disrupt legitimate internet debate using phony, paid-for personas that come in occupying these characteristics, I guess you would call them. It is unbelievably disgusting behavior for any corporation to engage in, which is probably why they hide the money. You may ask, why? Why on Earth would fossil fuel companies spend big money on all this fancy, fake activity--from phony Astroturf groups to fake attack campaigns, to the dog typing on the keyboard? Why would the fossil fuel industry go through all these complex, phony schemes? Won't they ultimately get caught? Well, the answer is simple, and it is a number--$650 billion. Six hundred and fifty billion dollars is the subsidy for fossil fuel in the United States of America every year. Every year, $650 billion. Another year, another $650 billion, according to the International Monetary Fund, which is kind of a technical bean counter organization that is not an environmental group by any stretch. So let's say you are getting that $650 billion subsidy every year. Even if all this fakery ends up exposed, if in the meantime you have disrupted the opposition and kept your business scheme going, you have reaped another year of multi-hundred-billion-dollar subsidies. I mention in this web of denial the identity-laundering group called Donors Trust, and I will come back to them right now because I have called them out over and over. Donors Trust just put a letter to the editor into my home State newspaper to assure its readers that Donors Trust is just as pure as the driven snow. Of all the newspapers in the world, Donors Trust just happened to pick mine. I appreciate the attention. But let's get the facts straight because here is Donors Trust, right in the middle of the web of denial. It has been called ``the dark-money ATM of the right,'' behind ``the right's assault on labor unions, climate scientists, public schools, [and] economic regulations.'' It has been called ``the Right's favorite dark-money conduit, [which] allows the identities of wealthy conservative donors to stay hidden.'' It has been called ``Donors Trust, the Right-Wing Secret Money Machine.'' And it is smack in the middle of this dirty, dark fossil fuel web that has propagated and funded the lie--the lie of climate denial. From FTI and all of its schemes and its typing dogs to Donors Trust, the sleaze and the scale of the fossil fuel scheming is itself a signal of the mischief afoot. You don't put up a phony-baloney operation of this magnitude unless you have some real nasty stuff that you are trying to defend and mislead people about. Well, for $650 billion a year, you can crank up a lot of sleazy mischief. Here in Congress, we can't keep dancing to the tune of this crowd. We still don't know which party will control this Chamber next year, but we do know that the Senate is out of excuses on climate change. It is time for a strong climate bill that can be signed into law by a new President, swept into office with the most votes in history on a strong commitment to climate action. It is on us. It is on us whether this web of denial will hold us back or whether we will break free at last of its corrupting influence and do, for once--for once--our duty instead of its bidding. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I rise today to honor Mr. Elmer, one of Rhode Island's leading advocates for humanitarian and environmental causes. Mr. Elmer is set to retire after a long and successful career, most recently with the Conservation Law Foundation. After graduating from Rhode Island College and Harvard Law School, Mr. Elmer devoted the first part of his career to humanitarian, peace, and security issues. He was codirector of Rhode Island's American Friends Service Committee, where he focused on nuclear disarmament and human rights. He also traveled extensively in South and Southeast Asia to research the status of human rights and the effect of Western military and economic aid programs in the region. Mr. Elmer's work yielded important, lasting change. He authored a key referendum to freeze the production and deployment of nuclear weapons, which appeared as a ballot question in Rhode Island in 1982. He then led the successful statewide campaign for that referendum. The 1982 nuclear freeze measure was, at that time, the largest nationally coordinated voter referendum in U.S. history. Later in his career, Mr. Elmer turned to the fight for climate action for renewable power in Rhode Island's energy market. At the Conservation Law Foundation, Mr. Elmer appeared before Federal and State courts and the Public Utilities Commission to enforce Rhode Island's renewable energy laws. He was the principal author of several of Rhode Island's major renewable energy statutes. Notably, he drafted the long-term contracting statue, which gave rise to the Nation's first offshore wind project, the Block Island Wind Farm, and helped to write the distributed generation standard contracts law, to create a comprehensive framework to spur development of small, local renewable energy projects across the State. In recent years, Mr. Elmer led successful opposition to the siting of a fossil fuel power plant in Burrillville, RI, and has been one of Rhode Island's great environmental litigators. Mr. Elmer is a staunch advocate for human rights, peace, and action on climate. His tireless efforts on behalf of the Conservation Law Foundation and Rhode Island echo far beyond our State. I am proud to recognize his service and thank him for such an impressive career in battle for great causes.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, it is timely that I should be giving my ``Time to Wake Up'' speech with the distinguished Senator from Louisiana presiding because I am going to be talking about sea level rise, and seeing him in the chair reminds me of a recent report on what sea level rise is doing to the great State of Louisiana, ``the sportsman's paradise,'' in which a scientist from Tulane University--a Tulane University geologist--was asked about the report about what the State had to look forward to from sea level rise, and he said: ``What it says is we're screwed.'' NOLA, the news website in New Orleans, in Louisiana, ran that headline. So I know the Senator is sympathetic to it. But today, all eyes are on Georgia, which for the first time in generations voted for a Democratic Presidential candidate, and the two Senate races are headed for runoff elections, which will decide the balance of power in this body. Georgians of every race and background turned out to reject the politics of fear and division that came from the White House for the last 4 years and to reject the disdain for facts and science that has cost Americans so much in battles like COVID and climate change. Perhaps buried in the election outcome in Georgia was Georgia's knowing the threat of climate change. For people along Georgia's coast, climate change is no Chinese hoax; it is a clear and present danger. In the spring of 2014, I took a climate trip along the coast of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. I met with scientists and students, outdoorsmen, faith leaders, and State and local officials, who cherish their coastal communities, as Louisianans do and as Rhode Islanders do. They saw the seas rising and acidifying due to carbon pollution. Georgians told me how deeply they care about their coast. That caring has powered them through some tough battles. They fought hard against fossil fuel development off Georgia's shores, and they won. It is not hard to understand why Georgians fight for their coasts against fossil fuel pollution. Near Savannah, I visited Fort Pulaski and Tybee Island. NOAA has a tide gauge at Fort Pulaski. It has been measuring sea level since 1935. The tide gauge takes straightforward measurements--clear, irrefutable facts. That tide gauge showed sea levels up over 8 inches since it was installed. For low-lying areas, those 8 inches of sea level rise are a problem already, but it is going to get worse. Climate change worsens coastal flooding in two ways. First, it raises the level of the sea as glaciers and ice sheets melt into the sea and as warmer oceans expand. Second, climate change powers up stronger and more frequent hurricanes, which send those higher seas as higher storm surges farther inland. So it is important to look at how far and how often sea level rise and storm surges will flood coastal areas. This is the map of Georgia's coastal area around Savannah. Here is Savannah. Here is the coastline. Here is the ocean. Here is Tybee Island. This dot here is Fort Pulaski, where the tide gauge is. That is what it looks like now, but ``now'' is not going to stay because here is what Georgia has coming at it. Based on NOAA information, this is the risk of flooding along the Georgia coast. It takes NOAA's intermediate prediction of sea level rise--``intermediate'' meaning it is not the most extreme scenario; it is the midrange prediction--and it shows the risk in any year of a 4- foot-deep flood. So here we are in 2020, and the risk is negligible. It is about 3 percent, meaning in present circumstances, you get a 4-foot flood through that area every 33 years. But by 2040, the risk is over 40 percent, which means that a 4-foot flood in that area is now not happening every 33 years, it is happening virtually every other year. By 2060, you hit 100 percent. You are getting a 4-foot flood in coastal Georgia every year. Of course this tops out at one flood per year based on the percentages, but if you look at this trajectory, clearly we are headed for multiple 4-foot floods per year in the outyears. When I was on Tybee Island, I met city councilman Paul Wolff, who showed me the city of Tybee's new stormwater tide gate, which they just installed to protect the island from sea level rise. He explained that the road out to Tybee Island, which is here, running along that edge, flooded already 45 times per year with just 1 foot of sea level rise. The city had already put in place a short-term plan for 14 to 20 inches of sea level rise by 2060. They were already thinking what the community would need to do as seas rise and acting on the best science back at that time. But now consider this: Consider sea level rise and storm surges combining to produce a 4-foot flood every year, at least once a year. Here is what that map looks like when you put 4 feet of water there. This is the Savannah area, and here is Tybee Island. This is all land in gray, and now all of this is underwater. Tybee Island has turned into just a tiny little atoll, basically, out in the ocean. The road that I was talking about is now not just occasionally washed over with water; for 5 miles, that road is underwater. Now, 4 feet of flooding happening every year is obviously bad, but remember, that wasn't the worst-case scenario; that was the intermediate NOAA scenario. Here is an extreme case--10 feet of sea level rise. That was Tybee Island. There is nothing left. Do you want an island now? Your island is Savannah--Savannah Island, surrounded by water. Well before the physical disaster of sea level rise and storm surge and flooding happens, something else comes first: an economic disaster, because we are not the only people looking at these projections of 4 feet and 10 feet of flooding. So do insurance companies. So do banks selling mortgages In these populated areas that are now land, how do you insure against a 4-foot flood that will happen every year? You can't buy a flood insurance policy for an event that happens every year. How do you get a 30-year mortgage for a property that will have flooded at least 30 times by the end of the mortgage? That economic punch--when you can't get insurance and when you can't get a mortgage on the property, that punch lands long before the floods come. Take Chatham County and Glynn County. According to a report by Climate Central, over $2 billion in property value would be lost in those two counties with 3 feet of sea level rise. Up the flooding to 8 feet, and it is over $7 billion in property value destroyed--people's homes, people's businesses. When a buyer can't get insurance and when a buyer can't get a mortgage, sellers face plummeting property values. The market unbalances rapidly because all of a sudden, you don't have many eligible buyers. The only buyers you have are people who can afford the property without having to borrow and who can afford to take the hit of an annual flood without insurance. That is not a big crowd. So the bottom falls out of the coastal property market. That collapse in the coastal property market is what financial experts call a systemic risk. ``Systemic risk'' is the mildest and blandest term for a catastrophe that I know. It means that the whole economy is threatened by the economic collapse of coastal property values. It is not just me saying it. In 2016, the top economists for U.S. mortgage giant Freddie Mac projected that climate-driven flooding along U.S. coasts will cause a property value collapse, leading to economy- wide losses ``greater . . . than those experienced in the housing crisis and the Great Recession.'' For those of us who remember 2008 and the pain and the difficulty and the harm and the fear that was caused by that mortgage meltdown-- greater than that, is what Freddie Mac says. That is not an environmental group, by the way; that is Freddie Mac. It has already begun. Lenders are already requiring bigger and bigger downpayments in coastal areas, sometimes as much as 40 percent of a home's value before they will insure the remainder. Flood insurance premiums continue to rise, and coverage limits leave many seaside property owners exposed to huge losses. The people who own this flooded property are going to want to know why Congress paid more attention to fossil fuel polluters than we paid to coastal property owners; why we would only listen to the people causing this problem and not listen to the innocent property owners who are going to suffer billions and, if you multiply it out, trillions of dollars in losses. When I was in Georgia in 2014, a local clammer named Charlie Phillips took me out over the marshes on his airboat. It was a boat he built himself. He is a member of the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council, which runs the regional fishery, so Charlie knows his stuff. He has been an outdoorsman his whole life, and he needs fresh, clean water for his Georgia clams. Charlie told me that changes in the climate are hurting the ecosystem that supports his and his employees' livelihoods. Six years ago, Charlie was worried about a perilous future, one that looks even more perilous now and one to which we have not responded for 6 long years. Well, one hopeful change is that we have a President-elect now--a President-elect who understands what is happening to our climate and who understands what is happening to our coastal communities. He is from Delaware. He gets it. The question is, How will Congress respond? Will Republicans allow a strong, comprehensive climate bill? So far, there is no sign of that, not in this building. At some point, we will--mark my words--we will finally cast off the grim and malign grip of the fossil fuel polluters and their massive political influence machines. At some point, we will finally listen to the people now on dry land whose homes and businesses are going to be predictably flooded out because we did nothing. I will tell you that it had better be soon because time is not on our side. As these coasts flood--not just the Georgia coast but the New Jersey coast, the Rhode Island coast--as these coasts flood, coastal property owners will demand answers, and the Georgia voters who live near the Georgia coast are entitled to an explanation of why nothing is being done. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, as I begin my remarks, let me thank my friend Senator Lankford for his eloquent comments about our veterans and those who have served and given their lives for us. I am here with my trusty and battered ``Time to Wake up'' graphic because, after 4 dark years on climate, there is at last a glimmer of light on the horizon. President-Elect Biden has promised to redirect the executive branch to address climate change in the clear light of real science, out of the dark swamp of fossil fuel denial and obstruction, trying--trying-- to head off a climate catastrophe while there is still time, if there is still time. There is a lot the executive branch can do. The President can lead diplomatic and international trade initiatives. The environmental regulatory agencies of government can be freed from corrupting influence to do their duty with vigor based on science and the law. Securities regulators can put climate risk to the economy at the forefront, as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has just done. Purchasing decisions can be directed toward a clean energy future. Permitting decisions can be made with the social cost of carbon pollution in mind, as courts have already begun to demand even in the corrupt Trump era. On the investigative side, the administration can begin a hard look at the forces of corruption that have blockaded action on climate change: Who did this and how? Did their political spending violate campaign finance, conflict of interest, or other laws? Did their toxic propaganda violate laws against fraud, as the tobacco industry's did? Was their occupation of regulatory agencies a rolling conspiracy to violate the Administrative Procedures Act, and if so, how and for whom was it organized? Has their interference in the judiciary compromised the rights of parties or the integrity of courts? American citizens deserve a full and fearless exposition of why Congress has thwarted the public will to do something--anything-- meaningful to address this climate crisis and at whose behest. What were the forces of corruption, and how did they accomplish their nefarious purpose? There is a lesson in democracy here for the citizens of this great Republic--a lesson that is now hidden behind phony front groups and subterranean rivers of anonymous money. There is every reason to believe that the biggest covert op in history has been run in and against our own government. That is no way for a ``city on a hill'' to be governed. But with all the executive branch policy work and all the investigations that are due and overdue, there is no pathway to climate safety that does not go through Congress. Action by Congress is a necessity, not a luxury. I have seen no study showing any pathway to safety without action by Congress. To make that pathway to safety possible, we will have to change a few things. One is, as I said, to investigate the denial and obstruction campaign run by the fossil fuel industry, how it used its dark weaponry of political spending--much of it anonymous--and political propaganda. The executive branch can do this, but so can the House. Sadly, here in the Senate, the power of the fossil fuel industry assures no such investigation will happen in our committees if Republicans keep control of the Senate. But the House or a high-level Presidential commission or our Department of Justice all have tools to bring the light of transparency into these dark and slimy corners. Separately, we can display to the American people what corporate America says about climate change versus what it does in Congress. It may even surprise some CEOs what their corporate lobbying posture actually is. If you are a CEO who is sincere about this, you ought to commission an audit of your corporate lobbying and electioneering on climate. Here is what you will find, unless you are maybe Patagonia or Ben & Jerry's: Most every major American corporation does nothing in Congress on climate--zip, zero, nada. TechNet lobbies for the supposedly climate-friendly Silicon Valley giants like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. It even represents green energy companies. Yet this year its glossy, 13-page menu of priorities for Congress never even mentioned climate change or green energy. Coke and Pepsi lobby Congress through an American Beverage Association that doesn't lift a finger on climate. That corporate behemoth, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce--three times the lobbying muscle of its next nearest rival, sometimes the biggest dark-money spender in elections, a persistent voice in our courts and regulatory agencies-- that chamber is in a statistical tie for America's worst climate obstructer--worst. Representing Ford and GM, Abbott Labs and Johnson & Johnson, Citibank and Bank of America, Delta and United, Target and Home Depot, Intel and AT&T, and dozens of other big businesses is a worst climate obstructer in America. That deserves some explaining. Don't just blame Congress. By doing nothing, Congress is exactly following what corporate America actually asks of Congress: Do nothing. Do nothing. We don't care. Want to open a pathway for a safe climate through Congress? Republicans in Congress are going to have to hear that their corporate benefactors demand climate action. They aren't hearing that now. They are hearing the opposite. They are hearing: We don't care. Democrats are ready. We have been ready for a decade. Republicans, at least since Citizens United--it was quite bipartisan before that decision--won't touch the issue, and by an amazing coincidence, that party is almost entirely funded by the unlimited and often anonymous donations of the fossil fuel industry. The money is often hidden, of course, behind donor trusts and shell corporations and 501(c)(4) tax organizations, but it is there, and it is billions. The rest of corporate America has not pushed back. They have their own tax breaks to protect and their own industry priorities to pursue, and climate change just doesn't make it into their corporate political agenda. Getting the so-called good guys off the bench and onto the field could make a big difference, but they are not there now--not yet. If corporations are going to fail this moral test so catastrophically, it is fair to ask what good it does to give corporations any role in our politics, let alone the commanding role they now assert in the U.S. Congress. The Founding Fathers, for one, would be astonished to see these monsters loose in our politics at all, let alone so large and in charge. But that is for another day. Right now, there is a lot President- Elect Biden can do to break the political logjam fossil fuel money has built: Investigate it, expose it, and then overwhelm it. Recruit allies to help push back hard. Give no audience or corner to corporations funding climate obstruction. Make lobbying groups disclose who their big donors are so the American citizen isn't played for a chump--the mark in a giant con game. If you don't think big American industries are capable of committing massive fraud, read the decision of the Federal judge in the fraud case the United States won against Big Tobacco for that scheme of lies or read the decision of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholding her verdict. It took investigation to get to the truth, not politics. Indeed, investigation had to pierce through a fog of industry politics and lies. But at the end of the day and, more specifically, at the end of the investigation, the truth was out, and the truth was massive industry fraud I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, good morning to you. You stand watches everywhere. We are here, in part, because of a Supreme Court nomination, but we are here also because of a Supreme Court process that has turned foul in a considerable number of ways. I would like to spend the time that I have with you this morning walking through some of the history that got us there. With respect to the now-standard Republican talking points that the only reason that we are here today in this partisan wrangle is because of Harry Reid, I would submit that the spectacle of procedural wreckage that surrounds all three of the last Supreme Court nominees completely belies any suggestion that Senator McConnell would have respected the filibuster of a Supreme Court Justice. They have broken essentially every rule that got in their way--it didn't matter what it was--over and over again. And the idea that they would break every rule but that one simply makes no sense. So I can see that it is sort of a cute and clever argument to go back and point out that Harry Reid broke the effort to stonewall all of President Obama's appointees to the DC Circuit Court, which was what was going on at the time, but the rest of the wreckage belies that this would have been protected by Leader McConnell in the mad, headlong rush to load up the Supreme Court with nominees who have been through this very, very peculiar Supreme Court process. To those who wonder why it is that we talk a lot about healthcare in the context of this nominee, look no further than the Republican Party platform that my colleagues supported, which says that Republican Presidents will appoint judges to reverse the ObamaCare cases. That is the language from their own party platform. So expect some skepticism about the sincerity of Republican expressions that they are shocked-- shocked--that we would try to tie the fate of the Affordable Care Act to this nominee when they have put that in their party platform. One of the unpleasant aspects of the process that I am about to describe has been that the handoff to special interests of control over who gets appointed to the Supreme Court means that there is an audience for auditioning. Over and over again, we have seen judges audition to that audience in order to get onto that all-important Federalist Society list or, in the case of Judge Kavanaugh, to get escorted by Leonard Leo, the operative of that operation, right around the list and onto its very top. Nobody auditioned like Brett Kavanaugh. But Judge Barrett made her own effort, and that was to make it very publicly clear that she disagreed with Justice Roberts, the swing vote who protected ObamaCare. That mattered because the outrage in the rightwing that their Supreme Court they thought they had claimed actually made one decision against their political interests--a sense of betrayal by Justice Roberts. That was very acute. It was into that environment that Judge Barrett added her unsolicited opinion--just threw it out there--that Roberts was wrong; that the dissent had it right. Obviously that allows us--in fact, requires us-- to draw the logical conclusion that when she is the swing vote, she is going to go with the minority. So she telegraphed how she would rule in this matter. She became the nominee. It was on the Republican Party platform that she should reverse the ObamaCare cases. How are we not supposed to notice this when you say this in all caps? So, please, let's not pretend that we are making up a connection between this appointment and the persistent Republican attack on our present healthcare system. The first thing you have to understand in looking at the Republican judicial selection process is that we are now looking at three--we are now looking at three nominees who have come through this process. It began when I was in Munich on a trip with Senator McCain and Judiciary Chairman Graham. He wasn't the chairman then, I don't believe. But we had gone to the Munich Security Conference together, and word came--in fact, I believe Senator Barrasso was there as well, who is now presiding. Word came that Justice Scalia had died on a hunting vacation and that there was a vacancy. It became quickly evident that Merrick Garland, the chief judge of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals--a very widely respected judge, someone about whom Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee had said very good things in the past, presumably a consensus nominee--was likely to be the nominee of President Obama, a man who very often tried for consensus and very often was spurned. In this case, it did not take long for someone to decide that was not going to happen and, indeed, that no Obama nominee was going to be brought forward. It happened quickly but not so quickly that a few Members of the Senate said that they would, of course, meet with the nominee. That would be standard practice; of course, they would. In any event, my recollection is that no one did--no Republican Senator did. That was a very sudden pivot by an entire body of people to go from a normal process to something very new and abnormal. In my experience, when a whole lot of people all pivot together to go from what is normal to something that is new and abnormal, you look for a reason. If you see all the branches blowing in one direction on a tree, you may be indoors. You may not actually be able to feel the wind blowing. But when you see all the branches lean, you can draw the reasonable conclusion--in fact, you can draw perhaps the only reasonable conclusion--that there is a wind blowing those branches, which begs the question: What was the wind blowing all those branches to so immediately step out of the norms of the Senate--not just 1 or 2 or 10 but as an entire caucus--and pivot to this new abnormal response to a Presidential nominee? To me, that is a sign. That is a sign that political force is being applied, that a strong wind is blowing, and that all the branches have to lean in the same direction. On we went through that process with very, very strong statements being made by judges about this newly found principle that, during an election year, you don't confirm Supreme Court Justices. They invented that new principle--highly convenient to that moment, but they described it as a principle. Here is Senator Daines in 2016: ``I don't think it's right to bring a nominee forward in an election year.'' He put it in about the strongest moral terms that one could use. He used terms of principle. He used the distinction between right and wrong. ``I don't think it's right to bring a nominee forward in an election year.'' Why? So that the people's voice--the people who have already begun voting had their voice reflected. So that was probably--I don't know--maybe 8 months before the election. Here we are closer to 8 days before the election, and we are going through this process, and there has been this extraordinarily abrupt reversal of that supposed principle from 2016. ``I don't think it's right.'' If it is not right, why are we doing it right now? Suddenly, it is right in 2020. Senator Daines wasn't alone. Mitch McConnell was the Senate floor orchestrator of all of this. He said: ``Of course, of course, the American people should have a say in the court's direction.'' That is why we can't take up Judge Garland now--because the American people should have their say months before the election. Here we are days before the election--flips-o, change-o. What could that mean? Senator Grassley: ``The American people shouldn't be denied a voice.'' That was then; this is now. Lindsey Graham: ``Hold the tape.'' ``Hold my words against me,'' the chairman said. If an opening--here was his rule: ``If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump's term, we'll wait till the next election.'' Could you get clearer than that? ``If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump's term, we'll wait till the next election.'' ``Hold the tape.'' Ted Cruz: ``You don't do this in an election year.'' So what does it signal when people take a stand assertively on principle that it wouldn't be right--Steve Daines; that ``you don't do this''--Ted Cruz; that ``of course, of course, the American people should have their say''--Mitch McConnell and Chuck Grassley--what does it say when people take a stand on principle on one occasion and then on the very next occasion, in the very next election, at the first opportunity, they completely reverse themselves on their supposed principle? Well, one possibility is that there has been a minipandemic in the Senate of hypocrisy; that somehow there is a little germ here, and somebody brought hypocrisy into the Republican caucus, and everybody caught it, and they feel an unhealthy desire to go out and violate principles that they espoused on the previous occasion. That doesn't seem very credible to me. What seems more credible is that something is blowing in the branches; that there is a force--a political force--at work that causes Republican Senators to take a firm stand on principle, albeit a novel one, a peculiar one, an unprecedented one, but in their words, a firm stand on principle in the 2016 election, and exactly in the very next case, in the 2020 election, completely reverse that supposed principle. My experience in politics is that when you see people forced to engage in hypocrisy in broad daylight, look for power in the shadows. So we began with the Garland-Gorsuch switcheroo based on this ``you don't do this in an election year'' principle. Then we went on to Judge Kavanaugh, and the narrative has developed on the Republican side that Judge Kavanaugh was treated very unfairly, as if no witness came forward to testify in the Senate Judiciary Committee that she had been assaulted by a young Brett Kavanaugh. I don't know what we were supposed to do with that information. Were we supposed to tell the good professor: Go away. We don't want to hear from you. Sorry, it is a little late. The chance that a person headed for the Supreme Court might have committed sexual assault is something we don't take at all seriously. We don't want to get to the bottom of it. We don't want to know. This was a woman who was willing to come and testify in front of all of America, subject herself to the hostile questioning of a professional prosecutor hired by the Republicans just for that occasion. She stuck to her guns and, in my view, was credible. To this day, I still believe her. The nature of her testimony was very consistent with the testimony of sexual assault victims who have been through that kind of an ordeal. Do I know what happened? No. But she was a credible witness. She was willing to come into the Senate Judiciary Committee and claim that Brett Kavanaugh assaulted her. Of course, we had to hear from her. Republicans want to blame Democrats for that, but seriously, would you not have let her testify? Really? That does not seem very credible. So she came. She testified. She was credible. Despite the rightwing having launched their flying monkeys at her in such vehemence, she had to leave her house, hire private security, go into hiding, she nevertheless came; she nevertheless was credible. All we asked for was an investigation to find out what had happened, to do our best to get to the bottom of it. It was going to be difficult because it happened years ago, but it would seem to me that we owed this institution and the Supreme Court our best effort. Did we get a best effort? No, we got a slipshod, truncated decision that, to this day, the FBI refuses to answer questions about. Why? Why not give Dr. Blasey Ford, why not give the American people, why not give the Supreme Court a best effort from the FBI to get to the bottom of whatever happened? There is every indication that the tip line the FBI set up was never reviewed and followed up on. I have been a prosecutor. I have run the attorney general's office in Rhode Island, which is the lead prosecutorial office for the State. I have been the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island, running Federal prosecutions. The whole purpose of a tip line is to bring in evidence from the public and sort through it because every tip line has bonkers evidence in it. But you sort through the chaff to see if there is any wheat there, if there is anything that needs to be looked into. It does not appear that the FBI looked into anything that came in through the tip line. It looks like the tip line--if you could imagine the comments box, it looks like they attached the comments box directly to the dumpster so that the tips went straight into the waste bin. I know of no ``tip'' that got followed up on. Once again, why? Why would the FBI allow itself to be associated with a truncated, incomplete investigation? Well, they said why. They said it was because they are not operating like an FBI when they do this. They are operating as an agent of the White House. They are operating at the White House's bidding when they are doing these confirmation investigations. They don't behave like the FBI then and follow their procedures. They do as they are told. That is a pretty strong clue and, once again, a signal of powerful political forces at work to try to cram nominees, even very troubled ones, onto the Supreme Court. Then we come to Judge Barrett, who had to be the subject of this massive flips-o, change-o of what was right for our traditional nominees in an election year and enumerable minor broken rules along the way. As I said, in all three of these recent nominations, there is a trail of procedural wreckage through the Senate. I don't think my colleagues hate Senate procedure. I don't think they get a form of malicious glee out of smashing Senate procedure. When you see a lot of procedural wreckage in the Senate, look for a motive. Look for a force. Look for a force. Three for three, we have seen powerful signals of a motive force at work. Sure enough, when you look at the process itself, you see some real peculiarities. First of all, when these judges got selected, they had something in common. They all went through a process hosted at the Federalist Society and run by a person named Leonard Leo. The Wall Street Journal editorial page editor described this relationship as a subcontractor. The judicial selection got subcontracted out to this private organization and its operative--subcontracted out. The White House counsel said this organization was insourced to the White House. Leonard Leo was put on temporary leave from the Federalist Society-- like that is a big deal--to supervise the process. Can we just stop for a minute and accept that it is weird that any private organization would be made the subcontractor for the selection of Supreme Court Justices? I don't care if it is the Girl Scouts of America. It is weird and it is wrong that a private organization should be the subcontractor for selecting judges. And it gets weirder and wronger when you see the big anonymous money pouring into that organization. The Washington Post took a pretty good, thorough look into this scheme, and they said that the whole scheme was $250 million worth of dark money--$250 million. They described it as ``a conservative activist's behind-the-scenes campaign to remake the Nation's courts.'' On whose behalf, one wonders. But you don't know because of the $250 million, most of it is anonymous money, what we call around here ``dark money.'' You have the last three nominees selected by a private organization, secretively, which is also taking huge donations from anonymous donors. The whole scheme runs up to $250 million, according to the Washington Post. That is a pretty big deal. If you can't see that that is a recipe for corruption, you are wearing blinders, because the idea that a private organization becomes designated to pick who is on the Supreme Court and then takes big anonymous donations is a prescription for disaster. But it does produce nominees. At the end, you get your selection-- one, two, three. Then, those nominees get TV campaigns run for them. There is a big PR effort, a political effort, and that is run by something called the Judicial Crisis Network, which has as its operative Carrie Severino. Judicial Crisis Network gets boatloads of anonymous money also. You have the same problem--a private organization, a secret organization that takes boatloads of anonymous money having a central role in campaigning for these nominees. That is also abnormal. This is new, this is peculiar, and this is wrong, in my view. By the way, when that Washington Post article came out, Leonard Leo got blown like an agent in a covert operation. And to protect the Federalist Society, he had to jump out, go do something else. So he went out to go do dark money-funded voter suppression. Guess who jumped into his role for Judge Barrett? Well, well, well, none other than Ms. Severino. The Judicial Crisis Network offices are next to the Federal Society's offices--same building, same floor. How big is the money? Well, here is a little filing from the Judicial Crisis Network. This is from IRS Form 990. Look at this, a contribution for $17.9 million--$17.9 million. Do we know who gave them $17.9 million to put on TV ads for a judicial nominee who had been selected by the dark money group behind the Federalist Society? We do not. We do not. But somebody wrote a $17 million check to support a PR campaign for a Supreme Court nominee. How do we know they didn't have business before the Supreme Court? How do we know that when they are anonymous? By the way, they did it again. Somebody gave $17 million to push off Garland and help Gorsuch. And then another 17-plus million dollars came in for the troubled Kavanaugh nomination. Do we know that it is not the same donor? No, we don't. It could be the same donor, in which case somebody gave $35 million anonymously to influence the makeup of our U.S. Supreme Court. And they may have business before the Court. There is a case called the Caperton case in which the Supreme Court said you had a due process right not to have Judges who had big money spent on their behalf to get the office rule in your case. This looks like a Caperton problem--$35 million spent by conceivably one donor who may very well have business before the Court. Why would you do this? Why would you do this? Why would you ever allow judicial nominees to be selected this way, funded by dark money, anonymously, controlled by private, secretive organizations? Why would you do that? Why is that acceptable at all? I submit that were the shoe on the other foot, the other side would have its hair on fire about such a performance. The fact that this seems OK is yet another indication of the branches blowing in the wind here because it is not OK by any objective or reasonable standard. The only thing that makes this OK is if that political force makes this OK in the same way they made it OK to reverse the 2016 principle on the very next occasion in 2020. When you see hypocrisy in the daylight, look for power in the shadows. It doesn't end once their judges are selected and once the judges have their campaigns paid for by $17-million check writers. When they are on the Court, guess who shows up in orchestrated choruses. Groups funded by dark money. In some cases, they are the litigating lawyer group. In some cases, they come on afterward as what are called friends of the court, amici curiae--friends of the court. We had one case that I looked at about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where it turned out that a whole bunch of amici curiae showed up--friends of the court, a whole bunch of them. So I did this graphic in the brief that I filed. It showed 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 briefs filed in that case by nominally separate groups, all funded by the same organization, Donors Trust, 8 out of 11 funded by the Bradley Foundation, and more overlapping donors throughout. This was just my work. The Center for Media and Democracy went back and did an even more thorough drill down and came to even more astonishing conclusions about the overlap between the funding of these groups showing up in these orchestrated choruses. By the way, they don't tell the Court that they are all funded by the same groups. They don't tell the other parties that they are all funded by the same groups. There is actually a disclosure in the briefing rule that says you are supposed to disclose who paid for your briefing. They use that to mean who paid for the printing of the brief. So you can take a million-dollar contribution from somebody or, who knows, a $17-million contribution from somebody, and then pay a couple of thousand bucks yourself to have the brief published and disclose nothing to the Court, nothing to the parties about who is really behind these phony-baloney, trumped-up, front-group friends of the court. But they do provide an educating chorus for the judges and tell them how to rule. By the way, the Center for Media and Democracy showed that not only is the funding going to these groups, but the same funding is going over there to the Federalist Society to support this judicial selection operation. And from Judicial Crisis Network, you have the interchangeable Leonard Leo and Carrie Severino. This looks like a single scheme--a single scheme through which a small group of very secretive, big money donors, donors capable of writing a $17-million check to help influence who is on the Supreme Court, get together and control the selection of Supreme Court Justices, fund the PR campaigns and the TV advertisements for those Supreme Court Justices, and then show up through front groups to pitch the Justices on what they want from them. That is about as unhealthy a situation for a Court as one could have. Again, we are like the frog--the alleged frog in the pot. It has gotten worse and worse. It has stunk more and more, but it happened kind of gradually and we, for some reason, acted as if this is somehow normal. There is nothing normal about this. As a lawyer, I spent a good deal of my life in appellate courts. I have argued in the U.S. Supreme Court. I have argued in several circuit courts of appeals. I argued over and over before our State supreme court. To the extent I had a specialty, it was appellate law. As the Governor's legal counsel in Rhode Island, I was involved in picking judges for the State courts on the Judiciary Committee. I have been involved in picking judges for the Federal courts. Folks, this is weird. This is not right. Nobody behaves this way. Nobody farms out the selection of judges to private interest groups that don't disclose their donors and take up to $250 million into the scheme, which is according to the Washington Post. It is weird enough that people feel the need to run TV ads for judicial nominees, but when they are taking a check for $17 million or two checks for $17 million from an anonymous donor or, maybe, two anonymous donors, if you think that is weird, it is because it is. That shouldn't happen anywhere around a court. There are a lot of high-minded speeches about the importance of the judiciary and its independence and all of that. The most important standard that a court must meet is that it is not a pantomime court, a pantomime court in which the rituals of adjudication get acted out. People come to the bench, wearing their robes. They hear the arguments, render decisions, read the briefs, but at the end of the day, the decision is cooked by big special interest influence that has insinuated its way into the Court by controlling the selection of judges, by funding the PR campaigns for those judges, and by being the orchestrating force behind the amicus curiae. You might think that I am being a little aggressive in suggesting that they are orchestrated. Well, do you remember this group, the Bradley Foundation, that I showed you from my Supreme Court checklist that funded 8 out of the 11 groups in that case? Here is a memo of a grant it is giving to something called the Judicial Education Project, which is a sister organization to that same Judicial Crisis Network. This is a little bit of a pea in a shell game, so forgive me, but they are directly related groups. The staff recommendation says that, at this highest of legal levels, it is a request for funding for amicus curiae in a case--in several cases--at the Supreme Court. It is very important to orchestrate high-caliber amicus efforts--orchestrate. For Pete's sake, the secret funders themselves use the word ``orchestrate.'' So something is up. Something is not right. Something is rotten in Denmark. If the American people are good enough to entrust us with the ability to answer their questions about this mess, we will answer their questions about this mess. I will tell you that I cannot get my questions answered, not without gavels, not in this Senate, not in these committees. Yet I think it matters if an individual wrote $35 million worth of checks to influence the makeup of our U.S. Supreme Court to know whether they have business before the Court, to know who they were, and to be able to even do the Caperton analysis of whether somebody's due process rights have been infringed by influence. So, in some respects, this is the end of things. This is the third of three nominees who have all had the same characteristics. They have been selected through this scheme. They have been campaigned for through this scheme. They have generated bizarre procedural behavior in this Senate--all three, three for three. It is like the triple trifecta--three judges, three characteristics: selected, campaigned for, bizarre procedural anomalies. When you see that kind of behavior, that means there are a lot of branches leaning the same way, and if that doesn't mean the wind is blowing, then give me a better explanation. I think there is a foul wind blowing, and we need to find out who is behind it, and we need to find out what it means for our treasured Supreme Court. I will close by saying that the results are already coming in. Even before Judge Barrett gets to the Court, the results have already been coming in from this effort. I did an article some time ago that we had pretty thoroughly fact- checked, red-teamed, and reviewed that at the time said there were 72 decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Roberts, that had the following characteristics: One, they were 5-to-4 decisions--the narrowest, barest majority. Ordinarily, a Supreme Court likes to see bigger majorities than that because it is conducive to the integrity and strength and credibility of the Court. There were 72 5-to-4 decisions. They had an additional characteristic in that they were not just 5 to 4 but a partisan 5 to 4. No Democratic appointee joined the 5. So, again, if you are an institutionalist, you look at that, and you think, hmm, maybe that is not the Court putting its best foot forward. That is an awful lot of partisan 5-to-4 decisions. Then the third characteristic is that you can identify quite readily in those cases a big Republican donor's interest--something that one would want by way of an outcome. What we calculated at the time in that article is that the score in those 72 5-to-4 partisan decisions with a big Republican donor's interest implicated was 72 to 0--some pitching balls and calling balls and strikes. It was 72 to 0. That is a route, and we have been tracking it since then. I put the number now to 80 to 0 because the article was written some time ago. So now we are at 80 partisan 5-to-4 cases in which a big Republican donor's interest was implicated and in which, by 80 to 0, the Big Interests won. Now, some of these are pretty flagrant. I think Citizens United is going to go down in history as a disgraceful decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, sort of the political equivalent of Lochner. Shelby County, in which the Court made up facts in order to strip a section out of the Voting Rights Act, in turn, unleashed voter suppression laws across the States that had been held back by the preclearance provisions that the Court summarily decided 5 to 4 that it didn't like any longer. Janus, which is the case that took down a 40-year-old precedent involving labor law in which legal groups had an astonishing role, actually went through four cases along the way. It is a long saga, and I won't burden this speech with that now. At the end of the day, the lawyers for the labor movement, while walking up to the Supreme Court for argument that day, knew perfectly well how the Court was going to rule. That is not how courts should operate Heller, the gun case, was 5 to 4. A former Supreme Court Justice had described the theory that Heller had adopted as a fraud on the public, but Heller turned a fraud on the public into the law of the land. Guess what--the NRA is very active as a donor in these fights. The NRA was all over the Kavanaugh nomination in particular. So you had these flagrant decisions, and I just mentioned those 4, but there are 80. That leaves 76 others. They are usually--often, I should say--about power. They are often about moving power into corporations, expanding corporate power, allowing unlimited money into elections--allowing dark, anonymous, unlimited money to operate in elections. Who benefits from that? Entities with unlimited money and a motive to spend it like, say, the fossil fuel industry. As for intervening in elections and allowing bulk gerrymandering to proceed, multiple courts have figured out how to stop that nefarious practice. It is, actually, not complicated when you are dealing with bulk gerrymandering and how to stop it and, over and over again, the bulk gerrymandering efforts to take an entire delegation and try to cook it so that it doesn't represent the popular vote in that State. Over and over again, courts have seen through that. They figured out how to respond to it until it got to the Supreme Court. Then, with 5 to 4, sorry, folks, we are not going to take an interest in that. Keep at it. Voter suppression will tear down the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act. All of this election mischief that leans heavily to supporting the Republican side has been supported. With deregulation, if you are a big polluter and if you are a big donor, you probably don't like regulatory agencies. You probably would like to have some more freedom from regulatory agencies. Over and over again, these decisions try to hurt the independence and strength of regulatory agencies--over and over. Then the last is the civil jury. My God, the civil jury is in the Constitution, for Pete's sake. We fought so hard over the civil jury that people didn't want to adopt the Constitution until there was a Seventh Amendment that protected it in the Bill of Rights. Protecting the civil jury was in the Declaration of Independence. Interference of the civil jury by the Crown was a cause of war in the Revolutionary Era. The civil jury is an institution of governance in this country. It is a big deal. Yet these supposed originalists on the Court keep tearing down, whittling away, diminishing, and degrading the civil jury because--guess what--if you are a big, powerful, well-funded lobbyist, greased corporation, or interest group, you can march around this place like a King, throwing your money around, getting everybody to bow and scrape for you, with lobbyists smoothing the path for you. You can wander into the executive branch if you have the right control and get your stooges appointed to the regulatory agencies. You can be powerful. You can get your way. Then you have to suffer the indignity of showing up in a courtroom where you have to be treated equally before the law, where what you say has to be put to the test of perjury, where you have to turn over your real documents and not phonied-up position papers, where, if you tamper with the jury, it is a crime. No wonder big special interests don't like civil juries, and no wonder this Court, 5 to 4, over and over again, chops away at the institution of the civil jury, but don't tell me that you are being an institutionalist or an originalist when you are attacking an institution in the Constitution--in the Seventh Amendment, the Bill of Rights. That is the work that these 80 5-to-4 partisan decisions have been doing. It has been to turn this Court, more and more, into the servant of big corporations. Guess what. Americans are paying attention. There was a poll a little while ago that asked whether the Supreme Court favors corporations more than people or people more than corporations. The poll showed, 49 to 7, that 7 times as many Americans think the Supreme Court views corporations more favorably than people than say the Court views people more favorably than corporations. So something is out. Something is up. A foul wind is blowing. There is way too much anonymous money in and around this Court process. It is, by the way, at the same time, the only Court that does not have a code of ethics in the Federal system. When Judge Barrett is elevated from her circuit court to the Supreme Court, she will go from a court that has a judicial code of conduct to a Court that does not. She will go from a court that requires the transparent disclosure of gifts, travel, and hospitality to a Court that requires less disclosure not only than circuit courts but less disclosure than Cabinet officials and less disclosure than Members of Congress. The highest Court has the lowest standards for ethics and transparency. So, to all of my colleagues who have given speeches about the integrity and value of the Supreme Court and our judicial branch, I hope you will help us as we try to look at what on Earth is exactly going on over there--why amici curiae show up in Court without disclosing who they are really there for; why $17-plus million checks are being written by anonymous individuals, what the relationship is between the $250 million that poured into Leonard Leo's effort and who got chosen, and what the expectations were of the people who spent $250 million to influence the makeup of the Supreme Court; and why the highest Court has the lowest standards for ethics and for transparency. We are not in a good place right now with this Court. The things that are happening are truly bizarre, unprecedented. It is bad enough that there should be dark money in elections--but dark money in judicial selections? Please defend that if you think that is right. If you think that big special interests should be able to write big, anonymous checks and, thereby, gain a voice in the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court, please come and defend that proposition, because I don't think you can. It has never been the case in the Supreme Court before. It has never been the case in the circuit courts of appeal before. It has never been the case in State supreme courts, in my experience. The dark-money influence in and around the Court is unprecedented, and it is wrong, and the American people are entitled to the truth about it. I see I have gone into my next speaker's time a bit. So I will yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, reserving the right to object.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Reserving the right to object, I would open with the observation that--well, let me start by saying that in one of the great plays in our language, the opening began with the observation that ``something is rotten in the state of Denmark.'' There is increasing evidence that something is rotten across that lawn and across First Street at the U.S. Supreme Court. What is the evidence of that? Well, the first thing I would suggest is the amount of anonymous dark money influencers swirling around the Court. I have spent a good deal of my professional life around appellate courts. I have never seen--nor does the history of the Supreme Court evidence--anything like what is taking place right now with dark money influencers swirling like eels around that Court. How do they do it? Well, they are involved in the selection process through a group called the Federalist Society, which takes large, anonymous, dark-money contributions and controls the selection of judges. How do we know it controls the selection of judges? Donald Trump has said so. The Wall Street Journal has said this was a subcontracting operation--a subcontracting operation--and it worked. It is not a good thing when the selection of our Supreme Court is subcontracted out to a private group that then takes multimillion-dollar anonymous donations. It shouldn't be hard for Members to understand that is a dangerous set of facts. Then you go on to the campaigns for those selected nominees, and you see more anonymous donors writing checks for as much as $17 million. I can't write a check for $17 million. I don't know anybody here who can. The number of donors who can write a check for $17 million is very small, and the number who would want to is even smaller. That is another avenue of influence. Last, you have law groups appearing before the U.S. Supreme Court, also anonymously funded. Some have gone out to find a plaintiff of convenience to bring strategic litigation before the Court. Some appear as what they call amici curiae, friends of the Court. Some swap back and forth in the same series of cases; they exchange positions as the litigant group and a friend of the Court. But what they share is that they are funded by the same groups, and they don't disclose that to the Court in their filings. So it raises the proposition that this isn't just dark-money eels swirling around the Court, but these are, in fact, tentacles of a common operation. It is particularly surprising that the Senator from Montana would not have concern about this because the State of Montana has been so strongly concerned about dark-money influence for so long. Indeed, it was a State of Montana case that went to the Supreme Court under, I guess, Attorney General Bullock at the time, where Senator McCain and I wrote a bipartisan brief warning of the dangers of all of this money. So that is the first thing--dark-money influencers swirling around the Court in a way that is unprecedented, in my view, in judicial history. The second is a pattern of decisions that has emerged out of that Court. Under Chief Justice Roberts, there have been 80 decisions that had these characteristics: One, they were decided 5 to 4--a bare majority. Courts usually strive to build stronger majorities because that strengthens the institution. Eighty cases, bare 5-to-4 majorities--by the way, bare partisan 5-to-4 majorities--and in every case, an identifiable Republican donor interest at stake that won--a pattern of 80 to 0. Last, you have the behavior taking place politically around these nominations and how peculiar that behavior is. Here is Senator Daines talking about the effort to appoint Judge Garland to the Supreme Court. He said, ``I don't think it's right.'' The Senator put it in terms of right and wrong. And he said, ``I don't think it's right to bring a nominee forward in an election year.'' He said, ``The American people have already begun voting . . . and their voice should be reflected in what we do going forward.'' The very next occasion, the very next election in which the same set of circumstances presented itself, he and virtually everyone on the Republican side completely reversed their position about what is right in this matter. When you see reversals of position like that, that is a signal to me that there is something more going on. So whether it is all the dark money, whether it is the peculiar pattern of decisions, or whether it is the unexplainable behavior of Members, it sends a pretty strong signal that something is, in fact, rotten in and around that Court. I believe that every one of us should agree that we are entitled as Americans to a court that is not a pantomime court that goes through the routine, the ritual of adjudication, while making sure that a small group of special interests actually wins the case at the end of the day. Nobody should be interested in a court that operates that way. We don't know how bad the situation is because it is dark money, because it is still hidden, and until we figure it out, under the rule that it is premature to rule out remedies until you have a complete diagnosis, I will object.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I just want to make sure that the record of the Senate is clear here. Democrats don't just decry dark money spending; Democrats have, over and over again, sought to end it. I know this because I was the floor leader on the DISCLOSE Act when we brought it right here in the Senate, and we came within one vote of getting rid of dark money. Every Democrat voted for that measure. Every Democrat voted to get rid of this scourge of dark money. Every Republican voted to protect it. So, yes, do Democrats use dark money? We are playing by your rules. We are playing by Republican rules. We could have brought up the DISCLOSE Act again because it was the first order of business the House passed in H.R. 1, but the Senate majority leader didn't want that bill to get a vote. So it is a little bit rich to hear a litany of woes about dark money from the party that is responsible for dark money happening. We could have gotten rid of it if we had passed my DISCLOSE Act. We could have gotten rid of it if we had passed H.R. 1. We did none of the above. So if I may, I would like to ask that a resolution be passed.