Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I would just add, that was not what Senator Daines or anybody else on the Republican side said at the time. I was here at the time, and what was said at the time, particularly by Senator Daines is ``I don't think it's right to bring a nominee forward in an election year''--not when the party's control is split in one way or another. ``I don't think it's right to bring a nominee forward in an election year'' because the American people should have their voice ``reflected.'' That has not changed. This new emphasis on the party difference is fundamentally the rule of ``because we can.'' If that is going to be the rule, if that is the rule that Republicans are prepared to adopt here--that what matters around here isn't precedent, isn't principle, isn't what is right, but is just because we can--then please don't feign surprise in the months and years ahead if we on the Democratic side follow that same rule that you are saying is the way to proceed today. In the same way that it is at least ironic for Republicans to stand here complaining about dark money when it was the Republican Party that protected dark money here on the Senate floor, it will be equally ironic if the party should turn around later on and Democrats seek to use the measure of ``because we can,'' and you raise objections. You are basically here on the Senate floor forfeiting your right to make those objections in the way you are behaving on this nomination. With that, I will yield the floor to Senator Scott.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I had the chance to hear Chairman Inhofe's remarks. I speak for many of us when I offer my appreciation for his chairmanship of the Armed Services Committee, for his commitment to our troops, and, in my case, particularly, for the great way he works with my senior Senator, Jack Reed, who is the ranking member on that committee, in order to get all of this work done. While he may have bragging rights over airbases in Oklahoma, Rhode Island has bragging rights on submarine construction, and it is very important to us. So I offer my appreciation to the chairman for all of his support for the submarine program that has meant so much to our Nation's security and to Rhode Island. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I do want to say that we are here at a time when the Republican Party is jamming yet another nominee through bizarre procedural practices onto the Supreme Court. We have examined in the Judiciary Committee some of the ways in which the funding for that operation flows from big anonymous donors who use the Federalist Society as a conduit to buy a seat at the table where our Supreme Court Justices are selected, and then, with contributions as big as $17 million, pays for campaign ads for the nominee who has been selected and then sends an entire flotilla of front groups in an orchestrated chorus to go and argue together before the Supreme Court as if they were different. What I want to say today is that we have been looking at this captured court problem for a while, and we are releasing this ``What's at Stake'' report on what it means for climate and the environment because who is behind the scheme to capture the court are primarily the big polluters who want protection from courts that will be friendly to their interests. I will speak more about this and about why they are willing to spend what the Washington Post has calculated as $250 million in dark money to affect this court-capture operation. What is the payback for them? I am here for this episode of my ``Time to Wake Up'' series, which has an interesting overlay with what is happening in the Senate because we are considering the nomination of Judge Barrett to go on the Supreme Court. Her nomination completes a series of three nominations to the Supreme Court consecutively, each of which has been distinguished by extremely unusual procedural maneuvering and even rule-breaking within the Senate and the Judiciary Committee to get those nominations pushed through. So we have been looking for some time at what the motivation is behind all of that pressure and what the explanation is for all of those bizarre procedural anomalies that we see over and over and over again. As I described in the Judiciary hearing, what we see is an operation that has brought big, anonymous special interests to the table, where Justices are selected by virtue of their writing big checks. The vehicle for this has been the Federalist Society, which has a fine role on college campuses as a conservative discussion and student group and which has a relatively fine role in Washington as a think tank--as fine as think tanks are. Yet it also has this additional role of taking money from big special interests, not disclosing who they are, and giving them a seat at the table when the Federalist Society is selecting Justices, and that is wrong. There is just no doubt about that being wrong. Then, once the Justices are selected, guess what. Ad campaigns get launched in support of them, and checks get written as big as $17 million to support the ad campaigns. Again, the donors are anonymous. It is very weird. Then, finally, they get on the Court, and these little flotillas of amici curiae--friends of the court, people who file briefs--come into the Court by the dozen. They don't disclose it in their briefs, but if you dig back a little bit, you will find that many of them have common funding and that the amicus curiae performance before the Court is an orchestrated performance--again, anonymously funded. So what brings that to today is that Senator Merkley has led our effort with this report: ``What's at Stake: Climate and the Environment. How Captured Courts Rig the System for Corporate Polluters.'' I want to express my appreciation to Senator Merkley for his hard work on this report and to his staff for its report. He has been joined by me, Tom Udall, Debbie Stabenow, Ed Markey, Dick Blumenthal, Sherrod Brown, Brian Schatz, and Martin Heinrich. We are proud of this work. This is one of seven follow-on reports to our original Captured Courts report. One of the things that I pointed out when I was discussing this in the Judiciary Committee was that the Washington Post's investigation into this scheme, which was a fairly robust investigation; I have to give it good marks--tallied up the amount of anonymous money that it could connect to the network of groups that is performing this scheme at $250 million. This $250 million is a lot of money. A quarter of a billion dollars is a lot of money. I have people say: No. No. It couldn't possibly be true that they have spent $250 million on this effort to capture the Court. Who spends that kind of money? So I want to walk through an example of how this money gets paid back after it is spent, and I will use just one example, one case. Back in the Obama administration, in order to deal with climate change, the Environmental Protection Agency created a Clean Power Plan to allow different States to set targets for themselves and try to meet those emissions reductions targets. That was challenged in court. The case went to the Supreme Court, where 5 to 4, with what I call the Roberts Five--no Democrat but the Republican appointees who are actively engaged in this process--did something very unusual. They granted what is called an interlocutory stay. Interlocutory stays are virtually unheard of. In fact, I believe this was actually the first. So objecting States--primarily States with fossil fuel industries-- went to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. They objected to this and asked for a stay, and the DC Circuit said: No. You can appeal the rule, but go through the ordinary process. We are not going to stay it. They then went running up to the Supreme Court, where the five Republican appointees granted the stay. Again, I don't think that had ever happened before, an interlocutory stay. So let's do a little bit of math about just that one decision. Let's start with the International Monetary Fund, which is not a green organization by anybody's likes, I don't think, but it is pretty good at financial analysis, and it has come up with a number. In the United States alone--just in the United States--the fossil fuel industry enjoys an annual subsidy of $600 billion with a ``b.'' That is the IMF's calculation. It is actually a little bit north of that, but I have rounded it to 600 for these purposes, primarily because the industry gets away with not paying for what economists call its negative externalities. They get to pollute for free, and, basically, that is a violation of every rule of market economics. I do not care how conservative the economist is that you go to. The conservative heroes of economics from the Chicago school have said: Yes, when it is pollution, it should be charged to the polluter and should be baked into the price of the product; otherwise, the market is failing, and you have a subsidy. So a $600 billion subsidy every year, and the Clean Power Plan case was in 2016. It was in February of 2016. It is now October of 2020, so more than 4 years have passed. But, again, let me just round it down, and let's say that it has been 4 years. Four years at $600 billion a year is $2.4 trillion--$2.4 trillion. Let's assume that the Clean Power Plan, had it been implemented, would have reduced the $600 billion annual subsidy. Let's be really, really, really, really conservative, and let's assume that the effect the Clean Power Plan would have had on the fossil fuel industry would have been to reduce that by 1 percent--just 1 percent. So over those 4 years, that $2.4 trillion would have been reduced to one one-hundredth of that. One one-hundredth of $2.4 trillion is $24 billion. Now, I think the Clean Power Plan would have had a lot more of an effect on this calculation, as companies had to clean up their act, than 1 percent, but I am taking a really low number just to make the point. Six hundred billion is a little bit low, 4 years is a little bit low, and 1 percent is probably very low, but when you put it together, the mathematics gets you to $24 billion that the industry saved by being able to go to this court and have it do the unusual thing--the unprecedented thing--of putting a stay on the Environmental Protection Agency. So if you are comparing--remember where we started on this was how shocking it was that somebody might spend $250 million in dark money to produce a court that would do unprecedented things like stay the regulation? Well, you do $250 million into $24 billion, it is a 100-to- 1 return on your investment. Put in a penny, get back dollar. Put in a dollar, get back 100 bucks. Put in $250 million, get back $24 billion. That is assuming this is the only case in which this mattered. As I have pointed out from this desk over and over again, we are now up to 80 cases in which, on a 5-to-4 basis, with a partisan makeup to the 5- to-4 and with a big Republican donor interest at stake, the court has ruled for the big Republican donor interest 80 times. The score is 80 to 0, to be clear. So this is just one of those 80--a big one, mind you. A big one. These are big bucks that are involved but just 1 of those 80. So don't be surprised when the Washington Post reports that big, big, big corporate interests are willing to put $250 million into a scheme to pack the courts with judges who will make the ``right'' decision for the big corporate interests--not once, not twice, not 10 times, but 80 times--because just that one decision alone paid back the whole $250 million 99 times more. That is what we are up against, and that is why I am so determined to get to the bottom of what is going on, because everybody going into that Supreme Court has a right to an honest decision. Everybody has a right to a court that is deciding cases on their true merits and not because of ``conservative activists' behind-the-scenes campaign to remake the nation's courts in a way that makes people who give $250 million in dark money the big winners.'' Madam President, at this point, I yield to my wonderful colleague Senator Merkley, and thank him for his leadership on the ``What's at Stake: Climate and the Environment'' report that we are speaking about today.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Go ahead, Senator. I just wanted to see if we are going into the vote now, and, if so, whatever procedural steps you needed to take us into the vote, but I yield to the Senator from Maine.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, may I inquire if the Senators are concluded with their discussion?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am back again, thee and me once again together, to discuss climate change as unprecedented wildfires scorch the west coast and a deadly hurricane season turns in the Atlantic and Americans cry out for action. Powerful players outside this Chamber hear that cry, including, recently, over 200 CEOs of major American corporations who form the Business Roundtable. Here are some of the 200 companies represented by those CEOs. As I discussed last week, the Business Roundtable just earlier this month called for science-based climate policy to reduce carbon pollution, consistent with the Paris Agreement, and specifically endorsed carbon pricing--from Verizon, to Chevron, to Apple, to Wells Fargo, to McKinsey, to American Airlines, to Amazon, to Pfizer, to Ford. It is quite the who's-who of corporate America. So why, you might ask, did the Business Roundtable do this when normally business lobbyists are up here telling us to get out of their way? The answer is economics 101. Pollution is the textbook example of market failure. A factory dumps toxic pollution into a river, and anyone living downstream bears the costs of that pollution. They can't use their well, perhaps. Their property values decrease. They may even get sick. It is basic economic theory that polluters ought to bear those costs, called negative externalities--the downstream costs, if you will. Even Milton Friedman, the patron saint of free market economics, agreed that polluters should pay the costs associated with their pollution. For climate change, for the big carbon polluters, this is big bucks. The International Monetary Fund calculates that fossil fuel enjoys a $600 billion--not million but billion with a ``b''--subsidy in the United States every year--every year, $600 billion. It is mostly because the industry has managed to offload the costs of carbon pollution onto the general public. Why do you think they are so busy here in Congress all the time? They are trying to protect that subsidy. So if it is economics 101 that a product's price should reflect its true cost, and if, in the case of fossil fuels, they are cheating on that rule, then a price on carbon pollution, as the Business Roundtable recommends, is a correction to that market failure. The CEOs also read the same warnings as the rest of us. Dozens of central banks, economists, and other financial experts warn of massive economic risks caused by our failure to address climate change--risks one recent estimate put at triple the 2008 great recession; risks that are commonly called systemic, meaning they take down the whole financial system, not just fossil fuel. Business executives tend to take that kind of warning seriously. So this is a good-news story if you look at the business voice coming through the Business Roundtable. Here is the problem: The business voice doesn't just come through the Business Roundtable; it also comes through other groups--groups that are historic enemies of climate action, constantly up to climate mischief. The very same corporations whose CEOs sent that friendly message through the Business Roundtable send the opposite and even louder message through these enemy groups, which brings me to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, by far the largest lobbyist in town, a prolific litigator, a dark-money elections spender, and an inveterate opponent of serious climate action. In a recent study by InfluenceMap, the chamber was denominated one of the worst climate obstructers in America. In my view, it is not one of the worst; it is the worst because of the power that it brings behind its message. If you imagine the Business Roundtable as emitting a positive political squeak, the chamber can emit a negative political roar--and they have for a long time. This chart is a partial list of the companies that are members of both the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce. I say it is partial because the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, unlike local chambers of commerce, is very secretive. It doesn't disclose its funds. It doesn't disclose its membership. So the companies here either voluntarily disclosed their membership, or the press ferreted it out. So let's look at what some of these companies say about climate change and what they do through the chamber. Let's start here with Johnson & Johnson. Johnson & Johnson is a giant healthcare and consumer goods company. You probably have plenty of Johnson & Johnson products around your house. Through the Business Roundtable, Johnson & Johnson says that climate change is serious and that Congress should enact a carbon price. In its corporate materials, Johnson & Johnson says that climate change is impacting health and that ``risks resulting from a changing climate have the potential to negatively impact economies around the world.'' Johnson & Johnson recognizes the importance of government action, stating: While companies have a responsibility and ability to [mitigate climate change], the unilateral capabilities of businesses are limited. Addressing these issues requires the collaboration of companies with governments . . . to achieve systemic change at scale. So it sounds like the company gets it. But Johnson & Johnson also put at least $750,000 behind the chamber last year. What did the chamber just do on climate? It filed a brief supporting the Trump administration's effort to undo emissions standards for cars and trucks set by California but honored across the country. Well, the nonpartisan Rhodium Group estimates that revoking those fuel emissions standards would result in up to about 600 million metric tons of additional CO2 emissions through 2035. That is equal to the emissions in a year from 130 million cars or from the electricity needed to power 100 million homes. So which voice of Johnson & Johnson are we supposed to listen to--the Business Roundtable voice or the chamber voice? How about United Airlines. Here is United. United Airlines doesn't disclose its funding of the chamber, but it is on the chamber's board, so it is likely a major financial backer involved in chamber policy decisions. Same thing--through the Business Roundtable, United says that climate change is serious and Congress should enact a carbon price, and on United's website, you will find good language about climate change and the importance of reducing emissions. Indeed, United has pledged to cut emissions in half by 2050. Meanwhile, what is the chamber, on whose board United sits, doing? The watchdog group InfluenceMap has caught the chamber repeatedly lobbying the Trump administration to unravel carbon pollution limits. So you have to wonder: From its seat on the chamber board, did United know about this? Did they do anything to stop those activities? They sit on the board, after all. Look also at Coca-Cola, one of our most iconic American brands. Through the Business Roundtable, Coca-Cola says that climate change is serious and that Congress should enact a carbon price. Coca-Cola says in its own materials that ``[c]limate change is already having an impact on our business at multiple points in our value chain.'' It says that it is committed to reducing its emissions. But in 2019, Coca-Cola gave the chamber at least $34,000. It didn't disclose the total amount. What was the chamber up to on climate? It was in court litigating in favor of the Trump administration against efforts to reduce carbon pollution from powerplants. Now, Coca-Cola and the beverage industry also have a trade association of their own, which appears from public reporting to have made zero effort on this climate problem, notwithstanding those multiple impacts on Coca-Cola's value chain. That trade association knows how to lobby when it wants to. On climate, it just doesn't want to. Let's have a look at AT&T, another one here on the board. I am not seeing it right now, so I am going to keep looking as I talk. It is another iconic American brand like Coca-Cola, and, like United, AT&T sits on the chamber's board. Presumably sitting on the chamber's board, it is influential within the organization. In the first 6 months of 2019, AT&T reported giving the chamber at least $144,000. Now, AT&T wants Congress to adopt a very specific climate policy. First, of course, through the Business Roundtable, AT&T says that climate change is serious and that Congress should enact a carbon price. Also, AT&T is a founding member of the Climate Leadership Council, and AT&T supports the CLC's detailed carbon price proposal. Well, that is through their Business Roundtable and Climate Leadership Council voice. What do we hear through their chamber voice? Well, I could tell you something about where the chamber is on carbon pricing because, with Senators Schatz and Gillibrand and Heinrich, I have introduced carbon pricing litigation that is not all that different from the CLC proposal. Senators Coons and Feinstein have a carbon pricing bill. So does Senator Van Hollen. Senator Durbin, our deputy minority leader, just announced one. Over in the House, there are multiple carbon pricing bills, including one with over 80 cosponsors. Has the chamber supported any of these bills? Nope. Not a one. Has it even engaged on any of them? Not with me. Not on ours. Not that I can tell on any of the others. When election season rolls around, the chamber has spent millions supporting candidates who oppose comprehensive climate policies. So the Chamber message is pretty clear: Don't support a serious carbon price. So which voice of AT&T's are we to listen to--the CLC and Roundtable positive squeaks about carbon pricing or the chamber's negative roar against carbon pricing, the roar that says to members here: Don't you dare? These companies--all of them--which just said they support carbon pricing, are funding a group that is opposing climate action and specifically carbon pricing at every turn--in Congress, in court, in elections, in regulatory agencies. I have called out just a few. There is AT&T right here. I called out just a few companies today to make the point, but every one of these companies--every one of them--is in the same position. The climate policy they support through the Business Roundtable is opposed by the entity they support: the chamber. They have to straighten that out. Whether you are UPS, Home Depot, American Express, Marathon, MetLife, Northrop Grumman, Sales Force, Marriott, Abbott, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, Exelon, Sempra, Southern Company, GE, Intel, Citi, PepsiCo--you name it--Anthem, Pfizer, Johnson Controls, Lilly, Dow, ExxonMobil. You have to straighten this out because these are big and influential companies. In fact, this year, the market capitalization of the entire oil and gas sector dropped below the market capitalization of just Apple. Quartz reported in June that Apple could nearly buy ExxonMobil just with cash on hand. Yet these companies have been mostly silent while polluters called the shots around here in Congress and for a long time. They haven't asked hard questions about the chamber's fossil fuel funding, and they mostly stood by while the chamber--their own organization--became a worst climate obstructor. I think this is beginning to change. Last week, I spoke at a CERES, C-E-R-E-S, event on corporate climate lobbying during New York Climate Week. Over 100 people from scores of different companies participated. The interest among corporations and investors in getting a handle on anti-climate lobbying is surging. To all of them I said: Change the chamber. Get it to follow the Business Roundtable and support carbon pricing. Get it to come to Congress in favor of science-based climate policy. Get the truth out of the chamber about how much money it has been taking from the fossil fuel industry, particularly for these companies who are board members of the chamber. You guys have a due diligence duty to know that stuff. Changing that behemoth--the anti-climate chamber--would be a sea change indeed. That would help finally break the logjam that the fossil fuel industry has created here in Congress. Let me wrap up by pointing out the obvious, which is that time is running out. If we don't act soon, we will lock in the worst consequences of climate change for decades. So to these companies I ask: Why, if this is as important as you say it is, do you not speak with a clear voice? Why do you let corporate America's most powerful political mouthpiece oppose you? Look at these companies. Why do you tolerate that, and why do you fund it and sit on its board while it opposes you? Climate change is not an issue you want to be on both sides of, so why are you on both sides of it? Whom do you expect Congress to listen to? Which voice of yours are we to take as the real one? If you want us to listen to your Business Roundtable voice, you better make sure it is not drowned out by the massive business lobby that you fund that has been our worst enemy against climate action. You all need to wake up. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for up to 20 minutes.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, this is a ``Time to Wake Up'' good news-bad news speech. The good news from last week is on business community support for carbon pricing. What is carbon pricing? Well, remember that IMF--the International Monetary Fund--pegs the fossil fuel subsidy in the United States at more than $600 billion per year, so the energy market is dramatically tilted to favor fossil fuels. Carbon pricing helps set that right, helps make an even playing field. It is economics 101. And carbon pricing makes a lot of sense. What happened last week? The Business Roundtable, made up of all of these giant American corporations and more--these are the top 50 that I could fit on this chart, but there are 200 of them--came out in support of carbon pricing. Their report warned that the consequences of climate change for global prosperity and socioeconomic well-being are significant. The world simply cannot afford the costs of inaction. The Business Roundtable's report went on to urge companies to ``align policy goals and [greenhouse gas] emissions reduction targets with scientific evidence.'' Listen to the scientists. We could do more of that. The BRT said that a key component of science-based climate policy should be a price on carbon. Here is what they said: A price on carbon would provide an effective incentive to reduce [greenhouse gas] emissions and mitigate climate change, including through the development and deployment of breakthrough technologies. . . . Establishing a clear price signal is the most important-- The most important-- consideration for encouraging innovation, driving efficiency, and ensuring sustained environmental and economic effectiveness. So this is big news--these are big companies--and this is good news. These companies at the Business Roundtable employ more than 15 million people. They have more than $7.5 trillion in revenues. Their unified voice is a good thing and a big deal. With all of that good news from all of these big American corporations, what is the bad news? The bad news is that corporate America often shows one face to the world and a very different face to Congress, and the face they show to Congress is not at all aligned with this policy they just announced to the world. This discrepancy, this misalignment, is a persistent problem, and it needs to be fixed. The problem has three dimensions. One, even these companies don't pay much attention to climate change in their lobbying and election activities. For most, it is zero attention. By the way, that silence is deafening around here, and that silence by these companies is compounded by the trade associations through which they consolidate their lobbying work. Most trade associations do nothing on climate. Here is Coke and Pepsi's trade association. By the way, here are Pepsi and Coke on the list of companies that joined the Business Roundtable pro-climate, pro-carbon-price statement. But when they lobby, here is their American Beverage Association, the trade association. As you can see, they haven't been spending much money lately, and they haven't been spending anything on climate. In 2009 and in 2010, they spent a lot of money. Why? Because we were starting to work on ObamaCare and there was an idea that the companies that sold sugary beverages that created health issues should help pay the cost of the health issues that their sweetened beverages created. So off to battle went the American Beverage Association with millions and millions of dollars in spending. This, by the way, is just the number of lobbyists. This is their spending. So if they cared about climate change and wanted to put a little bit of lobby pressure on, this is what they are capable of doing. This is what they are doing. Here is a pitch, in my hands right here, entitled ``TechNet: Remaining Legislative Priorities for 2020.'' This is 13 pages of advocacy for all the things the tech sector wants from Congress through their trade association, TechNet--13 pages. The list goes on and on. ``Top priorities,'' and then page after page, in small print, of all the priorities, of all the things that they want Congress to do for them--and there is not a single mention of climate change, not a single mention of carbon price. What do you think Congress will respond to--general noise made to the world or your specific asks to Congress? Here is the list of companies whose CEOs signed that Business Roundtable report and came out for action on climate and a carbon price and who are also in TechNet, which, the week before, came here with 13 pages of legislative priorities that didn't include either climate change or carbon price. You have to line things up, you guys. These are big players. Look at them: Honeywell, Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco, Dell, Visa, GM, Apple, Comcast, Oracle, Accenture, Hewlett-Packard, and PayPal--all on both sides of the issue within the same week here in Congress. So those are the trade associations that do nothing on this issue. It gets worse because there are trade associations that are our worst enemies on climate action. In fact, InfluenceMap has done some research and tracked which groups and which corporations are the most climate friendly and which are the most climate hostile. If you look all the way over, right next to Marathon Petroleum in hostility is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. There was actually a tie. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers were statistically tied as the two worst climate obstructers in America. So they are out here, having worked hammer and tongs to stop climate legislation and prevent a carbon price, and you have the Business Roundtable statement supporting action on climate change and supporting a carbon price. So here are the companies that are members of the Business Roundtable and came out last week for action on climate change and supported a carbon price and that are also members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which relentlessly opposes all serious climate action and, specifically, a carbon price. Look at them all. Look at them all. I don't know if the camera can pan in on that, but these are some of America's biggest corporations. I would bet you that, if this group said, ``Hey, we have just made a new decision over in the Business Roundtable, wearing our Business Roundtable hat,'' and went to the Chamber and said, ``We are not going to do your opposition any longer; we are not going to support your opposition to climate action; we are actually serious about being for climate action and a carbon price''--if all of those companies actually said that to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and threatened to quit if they didn't clean up their act at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that would make a very big difference. And around here that would make a very big difference because the Chamber is the biggest kahuna of lobbying. It is electioneering all the time, usually against Democrats, almost inevitably for the worst candidate on climate, and they are over in courts and in regulatory agencies opposing climate action all the time. So why support that if what you really support is doing something on climate, including a carbon price? So the National Association of Manufacturers was the other group in a tie with the Chamber for America's worst climate obstructer. These are all the companies whose CEOs signed the Business Roundtable statement supporting climate action and supporting carbon pricing and are members of one of the two worst climate obstructers in America, at the same time. So that creates a little bit of a problem. Now, I should go back to the Chamber one just briefly and put a caveat in here. We don't know who all the Chamber members are. It is a very secretive organization. Many of its members report that they are members of the organization, and that is how we can assemble a list like this. But if the company doesn't report that they are members, we don't know. So this is not necessarily complete, but this is all that we can know out of this secretive, very oppositional, worst climate obstructer organization--the Chamber of Commerce. There are some other odd discordances among these Business Roundtable leaders. We go back to Business Roundtable membership who signed on this; that is, companies like Google, Amazon, AT&T, and Verizon, which are on the BRT list. There is Verizon right there. They are donors to something called the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The Competitive Enterprise Institute is the group that put that flagrant, some would say almost nutty, climate denier Myron Ebell onto the EPA transition team. The Competitive Enterprise Institute is a dramatic antagonist to either anything serious on climate or a price on carbon. Yet companies that signed this Business Roundtable statement support the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Many people will remember when we came to the floor in groups of Senators to talk about the web of denial and the web of front groups that the fossil fuel industry set up to hide their hands and do their dirty work and stop climate action in Congress. That is the Competitive Enterprise Institute right there--right there, right smack in the middle of the web of fossil-fuel-funded climate denial, and Google, Amazon, AT&T, and Verizon were all supporting that group while supporting the Business Roundtable. Now, none of this would matter much if Congress was just a sideshow and it was really up to corporations to do their own thing, but that is not the case. Action in Congress is actually the main event in succeeding on climate. That is why the fossil fuel industry has worked so hard to set up this web to deny climate science and to obstruct climate action here in Congress. So when these Business Roundtable companies come to Congress through their other groups and say, ``Don't bother on climate'' or ``Don't do a carbon price,'' it matters. And it makes it a little hard to really take action in Congress based on their statement that they support climate action and a carbon price when, through other groups, they are funding the opposition to the position that they claim to support. So, to the BRT, thank you for what you did. I don't want to under appreciate that. It is a big deal. It is a good, good thing. But now you have to make it real. You have to make it real in Congress. No more zero effort from you. No more zero effort from your trade associations. No more support for our biggest climate obstructers from you. If you want the results of what you asked for, you have to align your actions in Congress with your values. Align what you say in that statement with what you do through your groups here in Congress. That ought not to be much to ask--to align what you do in Congress with what you say you want to do to the outside world. I have a few suggestions, if you are interested. One, think about commissioning a lobbying and electioneering audit of your own company. If you are the CEO, commission an audit of your own company's lobbying and electioneering so you actually know what your company is doing on climate. I suspect a lot of the CEOs signed this in good faith. They don't know. So commission an audit. Learn what your company is really doing on climate. Do an audit of your trade associations. If you are a member of a trade association, get in there and see what they are up to. I bet that you will find that what I say is true. Three, demand that your trade associations declare where they get their money. It seems obvious that the reason that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers became the two worst climate obstructers in America is because they were paid to. If you, CEOs on the Business Roundtable, had known that, this might not have happened. We might not have been here by now. It is very likely that the Chamber and the NAM leaders snuck up on you, taking floods of fossil fuel money that they didn't tell you about and selling out their organizations to the fossil fuel industry, leaving you high and dry, having to explain why you are supporting the two worst climate obstructers in America. So do your audit, and then give those trade associations a deadline to align with your policy or you will quit--you will quit on the deadline if they haven't. Don't let them slow-walk you through endless discussion and process while they are still loading up on fossil fuel money and running fossil fuel errands in your names. Don't let them do that. Finally--finally--recommendation five, ask your lawyers. Ask your lawyers, particularly if you are on the board of climate obstructer groups: If these groups were trafficking in fraudulent information, what is the board's responsibility? That is a lawyer question. If they loaded up with fossil fuel money, how was your due diligence on the board of that organization in detecting that warning signal that your trade association had loaded up with fossil fuel money and was arguing against your position when it came to Congress, carrying the water for the fossil fuel industry? Your lawyers may have some advice about whether you have met due diligence. Final point, climate is not really a partisan issue. It wasn't in 2007 to 2009, when Senator Cardin and I got here and the Senate had multiple bipartisan climate bills. It wasn't in 2008, when Republican John McCain had climate on his party platform as the Republican nominee. It all started with Citizens United in 2010, when the fossil fuel industry was allowed to trade up its political weaponry from muskets, corporate PACs, to tactical nukes, unlimited spending, secret super PACs, phony front groups--the whole apparatus of climate obstruction. Today, as a result of that, the Republican Party has been so captured that on climate it is little more than the political wing of the fossil fuel industry. It doesn't have to be that way. To these big companies who signed this wonderful pledge: Fix your politics, push back on the fossil fuel obstruction, clean up your obstructor trade associations, wake up your sleepers, and make climate a real priority in Congress, and you will see what looks like magic begin to happen. For you all, it is less time to wake up to climate change than it is time to wake up to your own political indifference and presumably unknowing complicity in the political logjam on climate action that the fossil fuel industry has deliberately created here in Congress. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I stand in a distressing place of speaking after Senator Brown, of Ohio, and before Senator Blumenthal, of Connecticut, but I am delighted to be here tonight because the issues are so important. We are in a place in the Senate that is, frankly, weird, and I don't know if people around here have gotten used to this being weird, but it is weird. It is not normal. In the Senate, we have essentially eliminated legislation. We don't do that any longer. The House sends over legislation, and it piles up in stacks on Mitch McConnell's desk. We legislate, maybe, four or five things in an entire session of Congress. That is weird. We are a legislative body. We are supposed to legislate. Why the elimination of legislation? We have smashed through and destroyed norm after norm, tradition after tradition, rule after rule. Why is that? Do people get some perverse glee in smashing norms and traditions? Do people get some perverse glee in not passing legislation when they are sent here to legislate? It doesn't make any sense. Then you look at those on the other side and their 180 reversal. When they wanted to stop a Supreme Court Justice, we heard about how important it was that, before an election, the American people got to weigh in through their votes and that you shouldn't have a nominee appointed to the Court in the months before an election. Here we are, weeks before an election, and, suddenly--whoop--180. Why the hypocrisy? Did someone come and do one of those hypnosis parlor tricks on people so they would suddenly do the opposite thing from what they wanted to do? What is the explanation for the elimination of legislation? for the smashing of norms and traditions? for the reversal of the precedent on immediate preelection confirmations? We are even seeing intense support for a Supreme Court nominee when we don't even have a nominee. There is a phrase about a pig in a poke. You are not supposed to buy a pig in a poke. You are not supposed to buy a piglet in a bag when you haven't had a look at the piglet to see what is in there. We haven't seen the look at whatever--to use the analogy the piglet in the bag would be. Yet everybody is already lined up to support getting that person through quick, quick, quick. That is not normal. That is weird. People don't ordinarily express their support for nonexistent nominees. So what explains all this weirdness? What I think explains all this weirdness is that a very, very powerful group of very, very big special interests has glommed itself together and over years, over decades, has built up an apparatus specifically to control the Court--specifically. If you look at the Washington Post report on Leonard Leo and his Federalist Society perch and the bizarre little web of front groups that he has woven around that perch, you will see that they have documented more than $200 million flowing through that setup--more than $200 million. So here is how it works right now: When you have a Republican President, the President doesn't pick the nominee; a special interest group picks the nominee--the Federalist Society. Trump said so. That is where he got his list. His lawyer Don McGahn said so. He said he was in-sourced from the Federalist Society. Over and over again, people involved in the process say: We take our judicial selection picks from the Federalist Society. And when they say that, what do they mean? The Federalist Society is just a corporate screen. It is an entity. It does things on college campuses that have think tanks here. But what does it really mean? It means that the people who are putting tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars anonymously into that organization are getting a voice or a veto in the makeup of the Supreme Court. They are not even having to show who they are, and the Federalist Society does the screening for them. You don't put tens of millions of dollars into a group and not expect a result. If you give tens of millions of dollars to a university, not only do you expect your idiot kid to get into the university, but you also expect them to name a building after you. So if you are going to put that kind of money into the Federalist Society, you are going to want something for it. To say that is not rational makes no sense at all. It is inconsistent with human behavior. I will tell you that if you took the names off the players and asked people in this room ``Should anonymous special interests with tens of millions of dollars to spend be able to have a voice or a veto in who gets elected to be a Federal judge or a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, screened through a partisan, private organization?'' anybody in their right mind would say ``No. That is unacceptable. That is preposterous. Of course you wouldn't want that.'' If this were a liberal organization, my Republican colleagues would be running around here with their hair on fire about the scandal of secret donors deciding who is going to be on the Supreme Court and masking themselves behind a front group. It is not just Federalist Society money. It is not just the $100, $200 million that flow through that network. Look at the Judicial Crisis Network, which runs the ads for these nominees once the Federalist Society has selected them. It gets contributions to pay for the ads. Do you know who pays for it? One person gave a $17-plus million contribution in the Garland v. Gorsuch row, and somebody gave another $17 million to get the beleaguered Kavanaugh through, and somebody else just gave $15 million. Now, I say ``somebody else,'' but do we know it was somebody else, or is there a perfectly logical case to be made that the same person gave $17 million and $17 million and $15 million? That is $50 million. You don't think that in their secret back room, wherever they arrange that, they cut a deal that they would have a veto or a voice in who got on the Supreme Court? That is a ridiculous proposition. It doesn't end there. Once the Federalist Society has selected the nominee and once the Judicial Crisis Network has done its thing to support them with millions of dollars in TV ads and then they get confirmed, then comes the Pacific Legal Foundation or the Washington Legal Foundation or the Mountain States Legal Foundation or one of innumerable, phony-baloney legal foundations, all of which, guess what, are also supported by dark money--the anonymous money behind the Federalist Society, the anonymous money behind the Judicial Crisis Network, and then the anonymous money behind these groups, which then bring carefully strategized cases before the judges who have been selected and campaigned for by dark money. Then the dark money groups bring the case in. So far, the five Republicans on the Court have been very good about lowering the standing requirements so that those cases get right in and they can hear them. Then the case is before them, and what do you see? You see a dozen phony front groups with anonymous funding all show up as friends of the court--amici curiae they call it in court-speak. I did a brief recently on the Consumer Financial Protection Board case, and we showed the common funding of the other amici who showed up--a dozen of them, all funded by the same organizations. They are not separate. A group called the Center for Media Democracy took a look at our brief and took a look at that graph and said: You know, I bet you we can improve on that with a little bit of research. They put their scholars and their investigators and their researchers on it, and they did way better. They showed much deeper connections between the funders and the phony-baloney amicus groups. What if--what if it is the same small group of funders who are running money through the Federalist Society to select the judges, running money through the Judicial Crisis Network to campaign for them, running money through these legal foundations to tee up the right cases to bring before the judges, and then running anonymous money into the amici--what if it is the same big beast? It is less complicated than many corporate structures. They are perfectly capable of doing it. With that kind of money behind it, you can bet they will line people up in this building, and that explains the bizarre behavior. We are not seeing bizarre behavior because we have bizarre colleagues; we are seeing bizarre behavior because we have a bizarre force being applied in this whole judicial selection process. It is an apparatus, and the reason they want to do this is because if they control courts, they can make courts do things Congress would never do. Even Republicans in Congress would never do the things that these special interests can get courts to do. Do you think you could get a bill through the House and Senate--even controlled by Republicans--that allowed unlimited corporate special interest spending in elections? Of course you couldn't. It would be a ridiculous proposition. People would get laughed at when they went home. There would be town meetings. People would throw tomatoes at them. But you put five of the right Justices on the Supreme Court, and they will make it the law of the land for you. Unlimited special interest funding. Sure, we are for that. What a great idea. Getting rid of voting rights. Disabling the Voting Rights Act. We voted in enormous bipartisan numbers to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act. It took five unelected, lifetime-tenured Supreme Court Republican Justices to say: No, no, no. We know better. Racism is over. We know that racism is over because we are such brilliant people up in our little preserve in the Supreme Court. They found that racism was over. We didn't have to worry about it anymore. Pre-clearance didn't have to happen. It could never have passed. But get five on the Court, and they did it. And then, of course, terminating the Affordable Care Act. We know that can't be done by Republican-controlled bodies because this Republican-controlled body failed to do it. So where do you go? Oh, right--to the Court, where we can get a 5-to-4 decision that does things that legislators wouldn't do--wouldn't hold their nose and do. And sure enough, what is up? November 10, the argument on the case against the Affordable Care Act. This isn't just a theory; this is real people. I have 34,000 Rhode Islanders who have insurance through HealthSource RI, the market that got set up pursuant to the Affordable Care Act--34,000 who get their insurance there. I have 72,000 Rhode Islanders who get their insurance because we took the Medicaid expansion. They wouldn't have insurance except for the Medicaid expansion. I can fight in every way I can to try to protect their rights here in this building, but you go over to the Supreme Court, and five and now maybe six Republican Justices can decide: We know better. We are going to undo the Affordable Care Act and take away all their protections. This is going to hurt. We have all those Rhode Islanders. We have two of the best ACOs in the country in Rhode Island--accountable care organizations--set up under the Affordable Care Act. It is a whole new way to deliver primary care. They are lowering costs. They are improving care. They are driving down their numbers. Their patients are happier than ever. They are changing the way they are doing care. They are making their patients healthier at less cost, with more attention. It is a great experiment, and it is going to be undone by this--not because anybody voted for it but because we crammed--with this powerful special interest apparatus behind us-- people on the Court who will obediently do these things when you trot a dozen phony-baloney amicus curiae in front of the Court to, all in chorus, tell them what they are supposed to do. Nationally, we are a nation of, what, 330 million people? We are a nation of 156 million preexisting conditions. Of course we are not going to throw out preexisting conditions. Even the President, while he is litigating to throw out preexisting conditions, says: I don't want to throw out preexisting conditions. He knows he can't get away with it. We know that it is stupid, wrong, and cruel, but pack the Court with people who are listening to these big special interest types? Poof. There goes preexisting conditions. There are 11.8 million people on Medicare who have saved $26.8 billion on prescriptions thanks to the savings in the Affordable Care Act. You would have to be nuts to take that away from seniors, but put the right people on that Court over there, tell them what to do through this big donor apparatus, and suddenly--boom. Poof. Gone. Because they are accountable to nobody once they are over there. It is a lifetime appointment. Bridget in Tiverton is a Rhode Islander. She is in her twenties. She has a hip dysplasia that led to premature arthritis. She was in constant pain. In her twenties, she had to have a hip replacement. Well, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, because her dysplasia and arthritis were preexisting conditions, she was able to get her hip replaced. She is now, for the first time in her life, fully employed and pain-free. She is happy. She is an ObamaCare care success story. Why would you want to undo that? Because you are a huge special interest and you want things your way. Martha from Cranston was uninsured. She had to have gallbladder surgery. She ran up a $60,000 bill with no insurance and had to declare bankruptcy. That is going to haunt her for a while because we don't let her clean up after that even if it is a medical bankruptcy. But now she can get insurance for $283 a month, which she can afford, rather than over $500 a month, which she could not afford. So she is now an insured person and doesn't have to worry about that kind of unexpected bill and bankruptcy. These are real people. And what is happening with these special interests--I just don't get it. I just don't see how it is that people in this body can say that it is OK to have huge special interests that will spend $17 million at a lick, $50 million at a lick, $10 million at a lick secretly control who gets picked to be on the Supreme Court. In what world is that acceptable or even fair or an even decent way to do business? It just isn't. It is indefensible. Yet that is exactly what is happening. It is the same special interests that fund the Republican Party. It is the same special interests that are behind the big super PACs, and the big dark money PACs. That is why everybody has to hop around here because if we say no to them on their selected nominee, then they will say: Well, we are cutting you off then. You are all done. And when they spend tens of millions of dollars on politics, it is pretty hard to tell them: Well, we don't care. We will stand up to you anyway. We are not going to take your money any longer. And that is the pickle we are in right here. That is the mess that we are in, and we have to fix it. It is wrong to be in this position. It is wrong to be using this space on the Court to send somebody over who is going to attack basic healthcare that we fought for and that Congress could not undo because the American people want it. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I begin by asking that the Record reflect how much I am going to miss the Senator from Tennessee when he is gone at the end of this year. It is nice to be on the floor with him.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, the world today is in the clutches of a pandemic disease that touches directly or indirectly pretty much every human being on the face of the planet. It is costing us in lives, in money, and in immeasurable human pain. It didn't have to be this way. We could have been better prepared. President Trump was left a detailed playbook from his predecessor, but he ignored it. Trump did away with key safety systems like the National Security Council's pandemic response unit. Once the pandemic struck, Trump and his team assured us it would all go away in time--no urgency. It is a cautionary tale, it is a lesson, and it brings me today for the 270th time to call this Chamber to action on the issue of climate change. We cannot wait flat-footed for the next foreseeable crisis to engulf us. Climate change is a foreseeable crisis. It was indeed a foreseen crisis--indeed, even foreseen by Big Oil--and it is an actual crisis right now. It is a crisis we maybe can manage if we act swiftly and decisively, but if we fail to heed the warnings our natural world is screaming at us, we will be lost. The fossil fuel industry runs a massive dark-money influence campaign to foment fake uncertainty about climate change, but the evidence--the evidence--is overwhelming. We see climate effects in harsher wildfires, more frequent and intense storms, and more extreme heat waves. Mother Nature's warnings grow clearer and louder every day. It is the ocean-- the ocean--that signals some of the strongest warnings. The changes in our marine world are clear. Oceans are acidifying, oceans are warming, and oceans are rising against our shores. These changes are measured; they are not hypotheticals. They are measured with thermometers, with tide gauges, with simple pH tests. The tide gauges in Rhode Island don't lie about sea level rise. Sea levels are up nearly a foot over the last century. In other areas of the globe, sea levels have risen even higher, and the rate of sea level rise is accelerating. We just learned more about Greenland, whose melting ice sheet is an enormous contributor to global sea level rise. Over a fifth of global sea level rise since 2005 is Greenland ice melt. Last month, Greenland broke its previous record for ice loss. Again, the pace of the melting is accelerating. A team at Ohio State University just released a new study of the Greenland ice sheet based on 4 years of satellite data. The data showed that Greenland poured an average of 300 billion tons of melted glacier into our oceans every year across that period. But over the last two decades, that rate of melting--that glacial collapse, as the scientists put it--is up sevenfold from the earliest years they studied. The rate is accelerating. That means that Greenland's ice is now melting so quickly that winter snows that typically replenish these glaciers won't keep up. We are now on course for the entire Greenland ice sheet to disappear. ``Glacial retreat has knocked the dynamics of the whole ice sheet into a constant state of loss,'' said Ohio State's Ian Howat. Greenland's glacial collapse portends dramatic and destructive sea level rise. Scientists reckon Greenland holds enough water to raise sea levels by about 20 feet. That puts my capital city of Providence and Florida's major cities underwater. Antarctica holds enough ice to melt and raise sea water levels 60 feet. So it is not hard to see the problem--total coastal inundation. But well before total coastal inundation, coastal property values would plummet. Financial experts have been following the sea level economic threat for years because a coastal property values crash would radiate quickly through the rest of the economy. That crash creates what financial experts call systemic risk--a threat to the entire economic system. In 2016, the top economists for mortgage giant Freddie Mac--which is no liberal environmental group--warned that climate- driven flooding along U.S. coasts will lead to economic losses ``greater . . . than those experienced in the housing crisis and Great Recession.'' It is not just Rhode Island. Pulitzer Prize-winning outdoors reporter Bob Marshall has warned of losing essentially all of Louisiana south of I-10. He said: ``Voting for congressmen who oppose emissions regulations is a vote to drown this coast.'' It is not even just coasts. A new study out of the University of Arkansas shows sea level rise could push inland water tables higher, flooding communities many miles from the sea. We already see this phenomenon in inland Florida. Last, there is really no dispute about the data. A tide gauge is a simple and ancient measure. But we see this and do nothing. Another alarm bell is ringing in the ocean, and that is temperature. Oceans are warming, and the warming is accelerating. The rate of ocean warming has already doubled, and the ocean is projected to absorb up to five to seven times more heat by 2100. Why? Because the oceans regulate our planet's temperature by absorbing atmospheric heat. The oceans indeed have absorbed over 90 percent of the excess atmospheric heat fossil fuels have caused. If you think things are bad right now, we are actually only experiencing 10 percent of the global warming we have caused. The other 90 percent has been absorbed by the ocean. It is a lot of heat. By one example, our oceans are warming at the rate of multiple Hiroshima explosions worth of heat per second--per second. There is not a lot of dispute here either, unless you want to argue with a thermometer. Ocean warming displaces fisheries, disrupts ocean currents, destroys coral reefs, and depletes the oxygen levels and carrying capacity of the sea. These are the kinds of changes that usually transpire across geologic time. They are happening now. Ocean warming sends its dangers ashore because that ocean heat energy powers up storm systems. They power up into stronger storms, and they power up faster. We just watched Tropical Storm Laura spin up into category 4 Hurricane Laura in less than 24 hours. As Bob Marshall, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Louisiana writer put it: ``High water temperature [is] the crystal-meth of hurricane intensity.'' Warmer seas power up stronger storms, and they power up more storms. The Atlantic has already generated a typical full year's worth of storms, pumping out about 55 percent more energy than usual into tropical storms and hurricanes. This year delivered the earliest ever C-, E-, F-, G-, H-, I-, J-, K-, L-, and M-named storms--every single one, the earliest of its name. In 2019, 14 separate billion-dollar disasters struck the United States, and the majority of them were hurricanes. In 2018 and 2019, Dorian, Florence, and Michael slammed into our coasts. Year 2017 brought Harvey, the most significant tropical cyclone rainfall event ever recorded; and Irma, the strongest storm ever recorded outside of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, with sustained winds reaching 185 miles per hour; and Hurricane Maria, killing nearly 3,000 Americans in Puerto Rico and laying waste to the island. Ocean warming is altering basic operating systems of our planet. Physical systems are altered; biological systems are altered; basic features of the ocean are altered; and the change has just begun. Many of these changes are oceanic, but some come ashore. We need to buckle up. The third ocean alarm bell is acidification. Oceans absorb not just 90 percent of the excess heat; they absorb about 30 percent of the carbon pollution--the excess carbon dioxide from fossil fuel emissions, and they have sucked up a lot of excess carbon. Since the Industrial Revolution, oceans have absorbed about 525 billion tons of CO2--22 million tons per day. That added carbon dioxide chemically changes the ocean's pH, making oceans more acidic. It looks like the oceans are acidifying at their fastest rate in at least 50 million years. As with warming and sea level rise, the rate of acidification is accelerating. Again, there is no real dispute; pH testing is pretty reliable stuff. A new Texas A&M study shows carbon dioxide levels rising at alarming rates in the Gulf of Mexico--bad news for shrimp, coral, and other marine life that are highly sensitive to acidity. Texas A&M warns of the acidification threat to the gulf's commercial fisheries, worth roughly $1 billion per year. The Woods Hole Institute made startling findings about acidification of coral reefs triggering a kind of osteoporosis for coral, hampering the organism's ability to grow skeletons. Reefs, of course, are the nurseries of the sea. Without coral reefs, marine biodiversity plummets and our oceans become unrecognizable. The University of Alaska has an entire ocean acidification research center because of the dangers to Alaskan fisheries. The lowly pteropod is a base species along the northern Pacific coast. It is damaged in acidified seas, and no one quite knows what becomes of that ocean food chain when a foundation species like the pteropod collapses. We know it is not good. All of these warnings are stark. Our oceans are in crisis. Our natural world hurdles toward a point of no return. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry keeps deploying lies and political influence in a carefully orchestrated covert operation run against our own government. The fossil fuel industry's menacing climate denial apparatus has captured one of America's major political parties. In the wake of Citizens United, fossil fuel dark money has so thoroughly corrupted American politics that Congress has lost an entire decade--the lost decade--to industry mischief. Even today, we still fritter and dawdle. Eventually, we will see the full contours of the covert operation the fossil fuel industry has run against us as if we were an enemy nation. One day will come a full accounting of this industry's wanton deception of the American people. One day we will see just how much money this industry paid for its malign influence and who accepted that money and denied the science and ignored the problem. History will judge those involved harshly, and deservedly so. It is a crime in progress against our own children and the world they will inhabit. After the lost decade of Citizens United, time is short to heed the warnings of our oceans and end the fossil fuel pollution that threatens them. It is truly getting to be now or never. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am honored to join Senator Duckworth in supporting this proposal. It gives me great pride to serve in the Senate with her. She is the living embodiment of the kind of sacrifice that our President does not understand. There are two things here, though, that are very wrong. One is a President who thinks that the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines who have laid down their lives for this country are ``suckers'' and ``losers'' and that it is OK to say that about them. It is beyond disrespectful. It is beneath contempt, and it is totally in character for this man. Those soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines can't answer; they can't speak for themselves any longer. So when something like that is said, it is very important that people in the highest offices of the country stand up and push back. In graves in France and Belgium and Manila and around the world lie the mortal remains of men, boys, women who gave their lives and who cannot speak for themselves. It is heartbreaking for me to see that we cannot come together to agree on that in this body. I can promise you that if President Obama or President Clinton had said anything like this, the other side of this Chamber would have been in pandemonium. It would have been a scene of hysteria. Senators would have been lining up through the doors to come and condemn this foul and hateful speech. We would have been hearing a lot about the last full measure of devotion. Instead, we are seeing the last measure of devolution of a great party into what now resembles, as much as anything, a cult. I will be interested to see what my colleagues have in mind as they go through next year's Veterans Day and Memorial Day having been unable to say one word against this calumny of our troops today. It is, frankly, heartbreaking. I traveled a lot with John McCain, and one of our trips took us to the Philippines. I got up very early in the morning to go and have basically a dawn visit to the Manila American Cemetery. The particular reason I went there is to see a name on the wall of the memorial: George Bruen Whitehouse. George was 21 when he was killed. He was flying fighter planes as a Navy pilot off an aircraft carrier called the USS Cowpens. His body was never recovered. His plane was shot down and crashed into the wilderness, and that was the end of it, but his name is still there, carved high up in the marble as a last memorial of his sacrifice. A President who doesn't get that is a disgrace. I yield the floor. Particularly, I yield the floor to a colleague who is an American combat veteran from the Vietnam war, to which my father dedicated 5 years of his life. It is a remarkable honor for me to be able to speak in between Senator Duckworth and Senator Carper. I am cognizant of that honor. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am grateful to have the chance to follow my friend from Pennsylvania, who has shown such great leadership with respect to healthcare and particularly with respect to the nursing home population. I am delighted to join him to discuss what COVID is doing to the elder Americans who are in our nursing homes and long-term care facilities, because this illness has swept like a savage scythe through those facilities. In my small State of Rhode Island, 750 residents of long-term care facilities have died of COVID. We just crossed 1,000 deaths statewide, and 750 are at these facilities. If that doesn't attract the concern of this Senate, something is very wrong with this Senate. Across the country, the death toll in nursing homes and long-term care facilities, just as Senator Casey said, is 62,000 Americans. My dad served for 5 years in the Vietnam conflict. In the decades of the Vietnam conflict, we sustained over 58,000 American military casualties. That means the death toll in our nursing homes and long-term care facilities--just in COVID, just in these months--is greater than the death toll of our soldiers in Vietnam. And if that is not enough to attract the attention of the Senate, something is wrong with the Senate. In Rhode Island, there is a little nursing home--just by way of example--called Hallworth House. Hallworth House is a great little place. It has been operating for half a century. It opened in 1968. It has a five-star rating from CMS. They do a great job. It was announced that it will permanently close at the end of August due to COVID. It had 51 residents, and by June, 29 had been infected; 12 had died. Of its staff, 20 were infected and had to be quarantined. It couldn't survive that. It is closing. And the stories behind the institutions like Hallworth House are the stories of people like Therese in Lincoln. The Senator from Pennsylvania is amicably disposed to women named Therese. Therese's mom Germaine is 88 years old. She has Alzheimer's. She is a resident of a nursing home in nearby Manville, RI. That facility has not allowed visitation since March 11. Therese hasn't seen her mom since March 11. This is a woman with Alzheimer's, living in a facility. As a result, her mom's cognition has declined. The presence of her daughter was part of what kept her active, kept her moving. She used to take her for walks every day. Now, the best they can do is Skype, and her mom barely recognizes the little image on Skype. So behind 750 deaths, behind collapsing institutions that have served elderly people for 50 years are these personal stories of broken relationships. Barry in Narragansett has been married to his wife Dorothy for 46 years. Now he can only see her through Plexiglas and only twice. That is a real cost. Germaine, 88 years old, not being able to see her daughter; Barry and Dorothy, after 46 years of marriage, separated by Plexiglas, unable to see each other. Those are small concerns, but you can multiply them across the population of our nursing homes and of our long-term care facilities. And if that isn't something that the Senate will care about, then there is something wrong with the Senate. We have tried to give the Senate something to do, something we can be for. So we have the Nursing Home COVID-19 Protection and Prevention Act. It has $20 billion for staffing support, for testing--because there is not enough testing--for personal protective equipment, for the staff who serve, really heroically and tragically underpaid in these circumstances, in these facilities. It encourages successful practices like cohorting. It provides responses like surge teams. When a place becomes so hit with COVID that the staff are quarantined out, who is going to come in? We were talking about deploying the National Guard in nursing homes. No, we need trained surge teams that provide for those things and data so people learn fast and know what to do to take care of this. We have a solution, and I hope very much the Senate will care enough to consider our solution in whatever bill we end up beginning to negotiate on. I will close by talking about what has been called liability protection but is, in fact, corporate negligence amnesty. I have been around here a little while, and I have been through the immigration debate. And in this building, we heard people talk about children--children who were brought to this country who were innocent of any misconduct. In fact, they were minors. They were, by law, innocent, and they had done no one any harm. Children guilty of no misconduct, innocent who had done no one any harm. And what was the word we heard? ``Amnesty.'' We can't have amnesty. There are laws around here that have to be followed--for children who were innocent and had done no one any harm. What does the corporate negligence amnesty bill do? It gives corporations that are not innocent, that are negligent, that have caused harm, and that have even caused death, amnesty. If that is the standard, when you are small and innocent and a child and have done no harm, then we are going to be outraged at any amnesty for you, at any kindness, but if you are a big corporation and you actually are negligent and as a result of your negligence someone dies of this disease, what is the solution? Amnesty. That is what we will do. We will help our corporate friends. If that is where this Senate is going to stand, then there is something wrong with this Senate. Oh, and by the way, this is no small thing. This is no small thing, by the way. The right to a jury began, really, at about the time of Henry II, in the 12th century, and followed through English common law, through Blackstone's legendary commentaries, the book that informed the early creation of American law, through to the Declaration of Independence, where the jury was part of the casus belli of our country, and then into our Constitution. This is an important part of our Anglo-American rule of law tradition, and the fact that we are willing to throw it over the side because big corporations come and say: We can't bear the indignity of having to be treated equally and fairly in court with these people we are so used to pushing around in legislatures where we have lobbyists and money--that is why we are going to throw out eight centuries of tradition and learning? Do you want to know how long ago that was? There is a great movie called ``Lion in Winter,'' a wonderful movie about Henry II. That is when this tradition started, and we are going to throw it out here for corporations that have been so negligent as to cause death and injury? Something is wrong I yield the floor, and I thank the Senator from Connecticut, my friend, Senator Blumenthal, for his indulgence for that historical exercise.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here today for a different topic. I am here for the 269th time with my increasingly battered ``Time to Wake Up'' poster to try to alert this Chamber to the threat of climate change--something, obviously, Louisiana knows very well--and to the forces that are blocking action on climate. In these climate speeches, I have talked often about the insidious encroachment on American Government of special interest power, which is what is behind all this climate denial and obstruction. It didn't happen on its own. The fossil fuel industry's political forces used the cover of anonymous funding--what we call dark money-- and they used phony front groups and clever propaganda to accomplish their aims. In effect, these fossil fuel political forces have run a covert operation against our own government. We observe the disturbances; we hear the rustling in the leaves; we see strange sites, but many of us haven't connected the dots. Those who are familiar with some of the elements may not put the whole story together. Some are so accustomed to this sinister behavior that they think it is normal. Some folks are like a city dweller in the jungle, needing a field biologist to identify the behaviors going on around them. Let me give you this field biologist's overview. We understand pretty well the crew of bad actors lurking behind climate denial. Democrats in the Senate have repeatedly called out and reported on this web of denial funded by the fossil fuel industry. Investigative journalists like Jane Mayer and scholars like Naomi Oreskes have dug into this scheme. There is actually a robust academic subspecialty that analyzes this web of denial as a novel socioeconomic and political phenomenon. The covert special interest machinery behind that effort is not just dedicated to opposing climate legislation. Another covert operation it runs is chronicled in our recent Senate Democrats' report here that examines the bad actors behind the special interest Court capture operation. This operation has crept forward over years, even decades. The Republican Party is more the tool of this effort than its principal. Big donors are behind it. The goal here is to fashion for the donors a Supreme Court that will not just rule for but reset society's ground rules to favor the big donors behind the scheme. On yet another front, there has been recent public reporting revealing the bad actors rushing to stand up a new and improved Republican voter suppression apparatus as they start to panic about the November election. Earlier this year, longtime partisan court fixer Leonard Leo stepped down from his formal role as executive vice president of the Court capture command center at the Federalist Society. At the same time, a mysterious new project called the Honest Elections Project began voter suppression work in swing States like Florida, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan. It ran ads accusing Democrats of cheating with mail-in ballots; it sent threatening letters to election officials challenging voter rolls; and it filed legal proceedings--lots of legal proceedings--arguing for more voting restrictions ahead of November. But in their hurry, they did a weak job of covering their tracks. Reporters quickly uncovered that the Honest Elections Project is a rebrand of the Judicial Education Project--a key cog in that same Leonard Leo's machine. As the Guardian reporters who broke the story observed, ``By having a hand in both voting litigation and the judges on the Federal bench, [Leo's] network could create a system where conservative donors have an avenue to both oppose voting rights and appoint judges who would back at that effort.'' Last, we pretty well know who funds the massive and often anonymous political operation that props up the Republican Party. Take 2016, for instance, when the fossil fuel billionaire Koch brothers' political operation spent $2 million on ads targeting viable Democratic candidates in just two Senate races--Ohio and Wisconsin Over a year before the election, they were already at work bombing those candidates. They didn't use their names. They hid behind phony front groups. It took years to dig this out, but that is what happened. The anonymously funded U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent nearly $40 million in 2016 and 2018 supporting Republican House and Senate candidates. Dark waves of untraceable dark money pour everywhere into Republican elections. From slips and leaks and investigative reporting, we can see enough overlap across these four efforts to state the general proposition: It is the same crew. If you look at it as a covert operation run by special interests against their own country, it has at least these four programs, but it has one set of interests behind it: They run the climate denial covert op. They run the Court capture covert op. They rushed out the voter suppression op. And, with their money, they captured the Republican Party to use as their front. If this operation were not covert, if it were obvious, if the press and the public could readily connect the dots, it wouldn't work. People would know it was fossil fuel polluter money. They would get the joke. That is why it has to be a covert operation, and that means it needs dark money--anonymous, untraceable funds. A virulent little galaxy of 501(c)(4) groups, shell corporations, donor trusts, and other screening tools has been crafted to anonymize the donors and hide the connections. Why? Because the blood pumping through this beast that gives it life is dark money. If we expose that secret blood flow, the whole beast shrivels up: no dark money, no covert operations. That is why efforts to expose the dark money donors provoke such hysterical reactions from the front groups and from their operatives and from their mouthpieces like the Wall Street Journal editorial page. I have experienced these hysterical reactions over and over. Indeed, there was one in the news today. This speech might provoke even another. But at the end of the day, as Americans, I believe we share the proposition that nothing could be more corrupting than large flows of anonymous money in politics. That sort of money doesn't even have to be spent to be corrupting. The mere threat of a political attack can do the job, and the donor saves the money. Or it could be a private promise of unlimited support. Once a political weapon is permissible, private threats and promises to use or withhold that weapon are inevitable, and they are inevitably corrupting. But don't think the prospect of corruption daunts the schemers. A political regime that allows their corruption and helps cover up their covert operations is precisely what the dark money donors want. Why else would we do nothing about climate change when it is so obvious? Why else would we ignore every respectable scientist in the field? Why else ignore warnings of financial meltdown looming from bankers and economists across the country, even across the world? Why else ignore the fires that are burning up Siberia, for Pete's sake, and, closer to home, the flood warnings along our coasts and the droughts and the floods and the storms across our States? When astronomers see celestial bodies behave inexplicably, they look for the dark star, the black hole that influences the behavior of the visible bodies. Dark money is the dark star, the evil star influencing Congress's behavior--or I should say misbehavior--on climate change. So a preview of coming attractions here: The dark-money-funded race to capture the Court is also a race by the schemers to establish a new constitutional doctrine protecting their dark money schemes. Such a doctrine is already being grown in the dark-money-funded ideological hothouses, a theory that dark money anonymity is protected by the First Amendment rights of association and petition--a theory giving powerful interests the constitutional right to run covert operations against their own government, leaving regular citizens beguiled or bewildered. That theory may seem ludicrous, and, indeed, this notion got only the one vote from Justice Thomas in Citizens United, but remember that Thomas is the dark money crowd's leading indicator on the Court. Don't scoff. This argument is now popping up all over the corporate rightwing. Twice so far I have had corporate entities from whom I requested information about their dark money dealings ``plead the First'' in response to my questions. The game is on, whether we realize it or not, and one of the stakes in the game is climate action. We cannot be idle about this. Groups that run covert operations against our own country are not to be trusted with that country's welfare. What a foul convergence it would be if the dark money schemers used dark money to fund a Court capture operation that delivered a Court- created doctrine hatched in dark money hothouses, protecting that dark money from disclosure for eternity, permanently etching into our Constitution this pathway of corruption. As I have said over and over, take away the corrupting dark money weaponry from the fossil fuel industry, and we solve climate change. We have lost a decade to Citizens United, the decision that gave this industry the weaponry to kill climate bipartisanship. It is a decade we and our children will rue having lost. Let's lose no more time. Let's, once and for all, root out the corrupting dark money machinery, expose its nefarious and crooked covert operations, shut it down, and start running a real democracy around here again. If we can't do this now, then let's pray for an election that lets us do it soon. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I had the chance to at least hear the end of Senator Capito's speech. I thank her for the work she has done on the opioid issue that she was talking about. It is one of the very productive areas of bipartisanship going all the way back to CARA with Senator Portman and myself. I know West Virginia, like Rhode Island, had a terrible situation. I appreciate very much her comments.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I join my senior colleague to rise today in acknowledgement of the ending of an era in Rhode Island with the retirement of Johnston Police Chief Richard Tamburini next month. I want to thank Chief Tamburini for his five decades of service and community leadership. Prior to beginning a career in law enforcement, Chief Tamburini served honorably in the U.S. Army's 72nd Signal Battalion. The chief worked his way up the ranks of the Providence Police Department over nearly three decades, including a stint as part of a legendary organized crime investigative team along with then- detective and future fellow chief, Vincent Vespia. Tamburini would eventually become deputy chief of police in Providence prior to his retirement from the Department. Chief Tamburini has led the Johnston Police Department for 25 years. His tenure as chief has been marked by an increase in community engagement through bicycle patrols, and through the Walk With Cops and Johnston Police Explorers programs. The chief's leadership and community-minded efforts have earned him a place in the prestigious Rhode Island Criminal Justice Hall of Fame. As Chief Tamburini told the Johnston Sunrise last year, trust between a police department and the community it serves is the key to effective law enforcement. He said at the time: I really want to focus on that [trust], because as chief of police it's important to me that no matter what we do with the community, [we need] a strong relationship and a level of trust. I think that carries through to the rest the department, so they can be assured of that. Today, we pay tribute to a great Rhode Islander, my friend, Chief Richard Tamburini. I am grateful for his contributions to Rhode Island and wish him many years of well-deserved rest and relaxation with his family and friends. Godspeed.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am pleased to join my colleague from Delaware here to offer a Senate floor farewell to our friend Steve Susman. He was a very big personality, but unlike a lot of very big personalities, it was never all about him. He wasn't pushing people away with the size of his personality. He was enveloping them with the size of his personality, and I was one who was fortunate to be so enveloped. We became friends, and I will miss him. To Ellen and to their children, to his brother, Tom, who gave such beautiful remarks at the electronic service for Steve the other day, I want to say thank you. I just want to tell one story, but the story will not make sense if you don't understand what a big deal Steve Susman was. If you don't understand that he was the main partner of Susman Godfrey, which by many lights is the best and biggest litigation firm in the United States of America. His name is on that firm. His name is on thousands of pleadings filed by that firm in cases all around the country. He is a person who had gravitas as a lawyer and who lived before judges and needed to make sure he kept their good will and respect. Now, for a lot of people, that would have meant taking no chances-- not for Steve. I have a practice, from time to time, in the Senate, of writing Supreme Court amicus briefs as an amicus curiae--a friend of the court and not the party. The Court rules allow me both to express their views on the law and on the background facts in cases--those people are called friends of the court--and I have filed those briefs over and over again. They are not the usual friend-of-the-court brief. Let's just say that. I believe that as a U.S. Senator, I best show my respect for the Court and the Justices by being candid with them about where I think they have made grievous mistakes or where they have been led astray. So these are not your ordinary briefs. This one was about the Consumer Financial Protection Board, and I focused on the favor-seeking interests that caused the underlying 2008 meltdown and how those same favor-seeking interests were interested in undoing the Consumer Financial Protection Board so they could get back to the same mischief again. I talked about the dangers of corruption from those interests. Well, those are powerful interests. To talk about them in that way in an amicus brief is not nothing. Now, the brief talks about the fake notion of freedom that some espouse, which is, for instance, the freedom to pollute as opposed to the freedom to have a clean river free of the pollution. That freedom-- the freedom to harm consumers--that freedom is a fake and wrong freedom, and we said so quite clearly in this brief. We talked about the value of regulation that we have clean air and water, that we have safe pharmaceuticals, that we have an orderly economy, and that people are not cheated in stock swindles because we have a regulatory system that has knowledgeable people in it who devote their careers to looking out for the public against very clever and often wily special interests. We push back hard on the notion that deregulation is a great asset. In fact, we pointed out that the failures of regulation have almost always occurred when the regulated interest got too much control over the regulator and got into the mischief business through the regulator, but honest regulation has been almost always a virtue for our country. We went after this thing called the unitary executive theory and showed how it had been cooked up in corporate rightwing hothouses. This thing had come through like an assembly line of billionaire-funded rightwing phony front groups to propagate itself out into the world and tried to get some legitimacy as a legal theory, and we went through the whole history of that. That is pretty rough stuff because people put a lot of money into trying to cook up this unitary executive theory. Last week, we pointed out that the judicial selection process that is going on around here right now is directly related to the deregulation process. The judges are being picked by special interests so they will rule against regulation and give special interests a break and they can pollute and cheat and harm people to a greater degree than they would with strong regulators. That was a point that we made in this brief. And, by the way, I quoted Trump's legal counsel, Don McGahn, who actually said this. It is not like we were making it up. He called them two sides of the same coin--fill the court with judges who hate regulation and let the big industries deregulate and have more freedom to harm. And, finally, we did something that I have not done before in a brief, but because there is so much special interest money floating around in the Supreme Court and because there is so much mischief swirling around it, we actually put an appendix into the brief at the end that looked at some of the other amici who had showed up to show how often they were funded by the same secretive groups and how many of them were basically tentacles of the same creature, and we backed that up with research showing one by one how they had been funded and sourced thoroughly. This was not your usual Supreme Court brief. Why do I dwell on this brief? Because here is the name on it: Brief of Amici Curiae, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Richard Blumenthal, Mazie Hirono in Support of Court-Appointed Amicus Curiae, Stephen D. Susman, Counsel of Record. Like the thousands of pleadings that bear Steve Susman's name, so did this brief. He took a chance to sign on a brief that was written the way we wrote this one. He did not mind. He knew that what we were saying was right. He was willing to put his name behind that, even though it might have caused blowback because that is the kind of man he was, and I will miss that. We have too little of that in this country these days, and, Steve, God speed. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I rise today to recognize former Congressman Ron Machtley from Rhode Island on his last day as president of Bryant University. President Machtley has led Bryant for almost a quarter century. During that time, he shepherded Bryant's transition from a regionally focused business college to a university that prepares students to succeed in a global economy. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Ron began his career in Active Duty with the Navy and retired from the U.S. Naval Reserves in 1995 with the rank of captain. He practiced law for a time before winning election to the U.S. House of Representatives. After leaving Congress, Machtley stepped into the role of president at Bryant University, where he has served for the past 24 years. Bryant University was founded in Smithfield, RI, in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War. Bryant was originally intended to be a place Civil War veterans could learn the fundamentals of business and get a fresh start. When Ron Machtley moved into the president's office, Bryant College was still narrowly focused on business education. In 2004, President Machtley announced that Bryant would officially become a university with two distinct colleges: the College of Business and the College of Arts and Sciences. President Machtley has put Bryant on the map in many other ways-- increasing enrollment, revitalizing the campus, and joining competitive NCAA Division I athletics. Last year, an alltime high of more than 7,700 students from across the world applied for a spot in Bryant University's freshman class. To help prepare students to compete in a global economy, President Machtley established a new campus in Zhuhai, China, and expanded the university's study abroad options. Bryant has excelled at equipping students with the skills to earn success in business and many other fields. Employers clearly recognize the value of a degree from Bryant--99 percent of the class of 2019 was employed or pursuing an advanced degree within 6 months of graduation. I wish President Machtley an active and enjoyable retirement, and I thank him for his dedicated service to the Bryant community.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I come to the floor to talk about the problem for which Senator Casey asked unanimous consent, which is of the terrible plague of deaths in nursing homes across the country. We just heard the chairman say that he is not sure what the air traffic controllers have to do with his proposal on school safety. I am not sure what his proposal on school safety has to do with nursing homes. We came here to talk about nursing homes. There are over 30,000 residents of nursing homes in this country who have been killed by the COVID virus. If Senator Casey's numbers are accurate, that is another 20,000 of stats. It is one in four deaths from COVID-19 in the United States. Out of the 1.3 million Americans residing in nursing or intermediate care settings, 30,000-plus have passed away, and in some States, it is much worse. Senator Hassan is here from New Hampshire, and she will talk about her State. Senator Casey is here from Pennsylvania. In Rhode Island, 60 percent of our deaths have occurred in long-term care facilities. I know it is not just us but that it is going on around the country. One in five nursing homes nationwide has reported a COVID-related death, and as the disease explodes across parts of California, explodes across Florida, and explodes across Arizona, you know that this disease will have many more opportunities to attack many more Americans in many more nursing homes. So our bill is a really sensible one: resources to nursing homes for staffing, for testing, for personal protective equipment, to support the expense of doing sensible things like cohorting--putting the COVID patients together to help contain the spread of the illness--and having surge teams available for the really dread situation in which the COVID sweeps through a facility with such ferocity that you can't get people to come and work there because they all have to be isolated and quarantined. You need special measures, special equipment, specially trained people--folks beyond the ordinary employee base of the facility--to come in and deal with that explosion, with things like just best practices--identifying them, promulgating them--practices that will keep residents and staff safe. I am very disappointed that our Nursing Home COVID-19 Protection and Prevention Act has been objected to by the Senate majority. If the majority's notion is that we are doing so well that we can ignore this, that all we need to do is take a very close look at the funding that has already gone out, and that this is another victory we can declare-- mission accomplished; we are doing a wonderful job, Brownie; this is great--no, not with 30,000 fatalities and climbing. I yield the floor