Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 15 minutes as in morning business.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, Rhode Island has lost a tireless champion in the fight against breast cancer, Marlene McCarthy. Marlene's dedication to this cause was well known throughout Rhode Island and across Capitol Hill. Marlene cofounded the Rhode Island Breast Cancer Coalition in 1992 and represented Rhode Island on the National Breast Cancer Coalition's board of directors and executive committee. Under her leadership, the Rhode Island Breast Cancer Coalition established a helpline for breast cancer patients and a Breast Cancer Resource Center and provided countless support services to Rhode Islanders facing this terrible disease. Her advocacy was not limited to Rhode Island. Marlene regularly visited me in Washington, DC, advocating for stronger Federal funding for breast cancer research and broader access to the best possible breast cancer care. At Marlene's urging, I introduced the Accelerating the End of Breast Cancer Act, legislation to set a goal of eradicating breast cancer by 2020. The driving force behind Marlene's hard work and boundless persistence was her dream of a future free from the scourge of breast cancer for her granddaughters. It is in Marlene's memory that I pledge to continue to fight for policies that will make her dream a reality. I offer my condolences to Marlene's family and to the breast cancer community. Marlene's legacy will live on through the family and loved ones she has left behind, the continuing work of the Rhode Island Breast Cancer Coalition, and the countless people she inspired through her advocacy and compassion. She will be missed.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am grateful today to be joined by Senator King, from the great State of Maine, to speak about the troubling changes that we are seeing in the oceans and how climate change is reshaping our States' fisheries. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations recognizes that ``climate change imperils the structure and function of already stressed coastal aquatic ecosystems.'' For the record, Maine and Rhode Island are indeed aquatic. The oceans have absorbed approximately 30 percent of the excess carbon dioxide that we have pumped into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution began. That is changing the ocean's chemistry. The oceans have also absorbed roughly 90 percent of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by those greenhouse gases. As a result of that excess carbon dioxide and that excess heat, our oceans are warming, and they are rising. They are losing oxygen, and they are growing more acidic. This puts marine life, coastal communities, and the global ocean economy all in jeopardy. Commercial fishing is an important economy in the United States, and both Maine and Rhode Island celebrate our longstanding fishing traditions. According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, over 9.6 billion pounds of wild seafood, valued at $5.3 billion, was commercially landed in the United States in 2016. Across New England, American lobster was our most valuable fishery. We had lobstermen bringing around $663 million--two-thirds of $1 billion--worth of lobster to shore. Sadly, Rhode Island's lobster fishery is badly knocked down by warming ocean waters. NOAA notes: ``The lobster industry in New York and southern New England has nearly collapsed.'' Maine dominated the catch, bringing in nearly 85 percent of the lobster landed in the region. According to NOAA, from ``1994 to 2014, Maine's landings surged 219 percent to more than 124 million pounds.'' The lobster population is shifting north, away from Rhode Island, New York, and Connecticut, as waters warm, leaving Rhode Island and other southern New England lobster traps empty. But Mainers are taking notice, too, as warming waters are driving lobster even farther north along their rocky coast. A recent study of 700 North American marine species predicted that lobster populations could move 200 miles northward by the end of the century as waters continue to warm. Senator King can report what 200 miles does to the coast of Maine. Lobster is not the only fishery feeling the heat in New England. A 2017 study of global warming found that the greater Northeast region is anticipated to warm faster than other regions of the world. According to the ``Climate Science Special Report,'' a Federal report that will form the scientific basis of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, ``the Northeast has warmed faster than 99% of the global ocean since 2004.'' We have a global ocean hotspot off our coast. The Northeast is also expected to see higher than global average sea level rise, putting our ports, fishing docks, and coastal infrastructure all at risk. Fishermen have noticed. They are keenly aware of the myriad ways climate change is altering the waters that generations of their families have fished, and they see the difference. Fishermen in Rhode Island have told me: ``Sheldon, things are getting weird out there.'' ``Sheldon, it's not my grandfather's ocean.'' They share anecdotes of catching increasing numbers of tropical fish early in the summer season and seeing fish that rarely frequented Rhode Island waters until recent years. As new fish move in and traditional fish move out, fishermen are left with more questions than answers. In Southern New England, black sea bass has become the poster fish for shifting stocks. As we can see in this graphic, the 1970s had a hub of black sea bass here, with this as the center and then a slight reach upward but basically off the mid-Atlantic coast. This is 2014. The center of activity has moved up closer to Rhode Island. We are right here. Of course, black sea bass populations in our region have increased concomitantly. This commercially valuable fish, the black sea bass, can help Rhode Island fishermen replace traditional species that are growing more scarce, like winter flounder--the fish my wife studied for her graduate work--which has crashed as winters warm. The current fisheries' management structure, however, forces Rhode Island fishermen to toss the increasingly abundant and valuable black sea bass overboard. NOAA scientists saw this northward transit of the sea bass coming years ago, but regulatory catch limits did not keep up. They are generally based on historical catches. And States are hesitant to give up quota even after the fish have moved northward and left their shores, so State-specific quotas badly lag the changing distribution of the fish. A former Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council scientist acknowledged that fish like summer flounder are moving north and told NPR that ``some of the Southern states are having trouble catching their quota, and states to the north have more availability of fish.'' Dave Monti is a friend who is a charter boat captain out of Wickford Harbor in North Kingstown, RI. Dave said: There's no doubt the waters have warmed and black sea bass have moved in. The quotas haven't done a good enough job at figuring in climate change yet. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an article from the Providence Journal describing the changes that Captain Monti sees and our local efforts to deal with these changes.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, we have to fix this. To use the black sea bass example, the species is comanaged by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. Rhode Island only has a seat on the Atlantic States Commission; it does not have a vote on the Mid-Atlantic Council. That means that my State is not fully represented in the decision-making process, and perfectly good black sea bass keeps being thrown into the sea by fishermen who ought to be able to bring that catch home. In 2016, NOAA scientists assessed the vulnerability to the effects of climate change of over 80 commercially valuable species in the Northeast. So this is not just a story about black sea bass or about lobsters; this Northeast climate vulnerability assessment ranked species based on climate risk and sensitivities to changing ocean conditions. Here is the climate risk factor graph. As we see, all 80 species scored in the high or very high risk of climate exposure categories. All 80 commercially valuable species they studied faced high or very high risk. This is a red flag for our fisheries. Maine is the place for lobster. In Rhode Island, squid is king. In 2016, 56 percent of the longfin squid caught on the east coast was landed in Rhode Island. According to NOAA, this catch was valued at over $28 million, accounting for nearly 30 percent of our landings value in 2016. But climate change is putting our calamari at risk. Warm waters may actually open more habitat for the species, but its carbon cousin, ocean acidification, is the hazard. Like its shellfish brethren, squid require calcium carbonate--for squid, it is to grow the hard beaks they use to feed. Acidic waters decrease the availability of this necessary compound in the seawater and can even dissolve calcium carbonate organisms' shells under extremely acidic conditions. On the west coast, shellfish farmers have been dealing with ocean acidification since the mid-2000s. Dr. Richard Feely is the researcher who first identified ocean acidification as the cause for oyster spat failures in the Northwest back in 2005. He noted in a recent NPR article that the acidification problem is only going to get worse. ``The acidification water welling up from the ocean floor now contains carbon dioxide gas emitted 50 years ago.'' Carbon emissions are worse since then. Some hatcheries in the Northwest are already moving operations to less acidic waters off Hawaii, and others are looking to buffer the water with seagrasses to absorb carbon and lower acidity. Shellfish farmers in Rhode Island are facing the challenge of acidifying waters as well. At the same time, marine species are also facing deoxygenation, increased harmful algae, and other consequences of a warming and acidifying ocean. The symptoms of climate change in the ocean are everywhere. A recent study in Global Change Biology warned that reduced oxygen availability could limit the growth of fish and other species. Fishermen can't make a living off sick and tiny fish. California's lucrative Dungeness and rock crab season was cut short in 2015 to 2016 due to a harmful algae bloom. Our Great Lakes have been hit too. I went out on Lake Erie after the horrible algae event there, and the fishermen who took me out sounded like Rhode Islanders. One of them said: ``Everything I've learned from fishing a lifetime on this lake is worth nothing now, because it's all changing so fast.'' If we have an opportunity to have an open, bipartisan debate on a strong Magnuson-Stevens Act reauthorization, I urge my colleagues not to overlook the toll climate change is taking on our fishing industry. The changes that are happening in our oceans do not care whether you believe they exist. The physics, chemistry, and biology driving these changes will happen anyway, and our fishermen are depending on us to give the scientists and the managers the tools and resources they need to meet the challenges climate change is bringing to our shores. I now yield to my friend from Maine to give the perspective from his rocky shores.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, Senator King and I yield the floor. First, let me thank him for joining us. Second, with Senators present here from landlocked States, let me make the requests to both of you that, when we come before this body with concerns about what is happening to our ocean economies, which I think are shared by every coastal Senator who is seeing these changes, that you view our pleas with the same courtesy and respect that we show you when wildfires burn through Utah and we come to make sure that there is adequate emergency response or when Oklahoma faces hurricanes or cyclones and tornadoes and the Federal Government and the Senate rally to the response of those who are experiencing the pain of that in your States. Our fishing communities and our coastal communities have a very different distress, but I hope you will see it as an equal distress and pay us the courtesy of your due consideration. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, to follow up on the remarks of our distinguished Democratic ranking member on the Environment and Public Works Committee, Senator Carper, who spoke about the environmental prospects of Trump's nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, should he reach the Supreme Court, I come at this from a very particular angle. Let me start by kind of laying the predicate, if you will, for my comments. A long, long time ago, when the Founding Fathers were setting up our country, they brought over from England the tradition of an independent judiciary and of the common jury. It was extremely important to the founding generation. The Declaration of Independence made reference to efforts to interfere with the right to trial by jury. The efforts by British agents of influence to interfere with American juries was a constant thorn. The feeling was that the independence of courts and, particularly, the independence of jurors was a very significant check and balance in the constitutional system that the Founders were setting up. These were experienced politicians. These were thoughtful people who had read and debated a lot about governance. They understood that there were times when very powerful interests were able to dominate a legislative body, there were times when very powerful interests were able to dominate a Governor or other chief executive and, indeed, there were times when that same very powerful interest could not only dominate the legislative branch but also the executive branch at the same time. Therefore, you needed to have a third branch of government-- an independent branch of government--to which you could go to be sure that you were being treated with justice. They designed it all fairly carefully. The jury has a lot of advantages to it. You don't get repeat jurors. Every jury veneer, every jury pool, is a new group. The reason for that is to make it hard for big interests to be able to go to people who might be jurors and try to fix the jurors in their favor in the same way they go to legislatures and try to fix legislators in their favor. You do not know who your jury is going to be until it is called up. So you can't apply influence to a jury. If you try, it is actually a crime. It is called tampering with a jury. We very carefully set up independent judges and pools of regular citizens who were to come in, virtually at random, to do one jury service and then to go back to their lives, and we did it for a reason. Blackstone described that reason as to provide a safeguard for regular citizens against other more wealthy and powerful citizens, more wealthy and powerful interests. It is an interesting piece of our constitutional analysis because, in most places, what has been set up is a structure that has been designed to protect the common citizen against the excesses of government. The checks and balances have been generally set up to protect the ordinary man and woman against excessive use of government power against them. With the juries, Blackstone said, it is a little bit different. It is not just abuse of power by government; it is abuse of power by the more wealthy and powerful interests, because the Founders knew that it would be the more powerful and wealthy interests who would come in and try to fix the legislature, who would try to fix the Governor or, at the Federal level, the President, and that, therefore, the jury would stand as the guardian and the bulwark of regular Americans against influence from the more powerful and wealthy interests. Look around at who the more powerful and wealthy interests are in our country right now. Collectively, the biggest is probably the fossil fuel industry. If you add up the whole Koch brothers' Koch Industries' apparatus, if you add up ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and the whole American Petroleum Institute population, if you look at the extent to which they have seized control of the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and if you put that whole array together, it is very likely not only the most powerful political influence effort now, but it may very well be the most powerful political effort in American history. Those wealthy and powerful interests are hard at work at making sure that their interests come first and that the interests of ordinary Americans come at a very distant second. The way in which Mr. Kavanaugh comes to this nomination smells of all of that influence already. For starters, he was selected through a very private process--from all of the information we have about it--that is moderated by a group called the Federalist Society but which checks in with all of the big Republican funding special interests to make sure that they are all OK with the nominee. There is a preclearance by special interests that takes place for these judicial nominees. Obviously, the most powerful and wealthy special interest--the biggest political force, perhaps ever--is going to be a part of that checklist. There can be no doubt that if the fossil fuel industry were not checked off on Brett Kavanaugh, he would not be the nominee. There is no doubt in my mind that they and other special interests--the gun lobby, the anti-choice crowd, the Wall Street folks--all had the chance to say: No, not that guy. Find me somebody who will be good to us. So Kavanaugh has already cleared that process. Now you see the confirmation process underway, and you see big special interests' dark money already out, campaigning for him. The last time we had one of these contests, it was this: Is it going to be Merrick Garland? No, we are going to stop him dead and not even give him a hearing. We are going to bring on this character, Gorsuch, and he is going to come in. Somebody spent nearly $18 million in political ads to support that switch. Somebody felt it was worth $18 million to have Gorsuch and not Garland on the Supreme Court. We don't know who that person was because of the dark money protections that are such a scourge in our democracy right now. That individual donor's hand is hidden behind all of this dark money machinery, but we do know that there is a person--an entity--who spent $18 million to have it be Gorsuch, not Garland. So that is the track record for this. Here comes Kavanaugh, and the same machinery is now up for him. He was precleared by the special interests, and big dark money interests are already spending money for him. Who in his right mind would believe that this guy is not predisposed in the direction of those big special interests? It is almost impossible to imagine under these political circumstances. When you look at his record on the DC Circuit, this is a guy who has been on the warpath against environmental protection. This is a guy who is Scott Pruitt in robes. This guy is really something. Now, he was not on the original Trump list, as I understand it. So maybe he has been spending his time auditioning on the DC Circuit for this incredibly dominant special interest--the fossil fuel industry-- and exhibiting his ability and his willingness to make anti-environment decisions, to make pro-corporate decisions, and to make pro-polluter decisions so that he can inch his way, maybe, onto the Trump list for the Supreme Court. Sure enough, not only is he on the list, but he is now the nominee. His record is absolutely abysmal. You would have to call him an environmental extremist. It is truly, truly exceptional to think of all of the different cases in which he has been involved. My colleague from Hawaii is here. So I am not going to go through them all, but as this goes forward, I will have plenty of time to explore these issues with him. It is going to be very, very important to the big polluters to have Kavanaugh instead of Kennedy because, when you look at the record in the Supreme Court, there has been a considerable array of decisions on environmental matters in which Justice Kennedy has been the swing vote. So extract Justice Kennedy with his retirement and put in Kavanaugh with his record from the DC Circuit, his preclearance by the polluting interests, and the fact that big-money folks are already out there pushing for him. They are going to want something. I suspect what they are going to want is a reversal of Justice Kennedy's position in favor of the environment and all of the issues on which he was the 5-to-4 tiebreaker in favor of the environment. Now all of those cases will go back the other way, and polluters will rule. Polluters already rule here. We are incapable of doing anything serious about climate change. Polluters completely dominate over in the House. They have written this ridiculous letter and have told the House that it shouldn't even do a carbon price. They have put all of their polluter front-group names on this letterhead. Of course, Trump still thinks that climate change is a hoax. You have a situation that the Founding Fathers were concerned about. You have an enormous special interest with extraordinary power that dominates the Senate and the House and that has completely gotten this administration by the choke chain. Now what it wants to do is to extend its power to the one part of the government the Founding Fathers set up to be able to tell the special interest no, to require it to follow the truth, to require it to look at real evidence, to subject witnesses to cross-examination, to provide discovery so that you know what is really going on, and for there to be penalties if you try to tamper and for there to be penalties if you lie. This is not the environment that the big polluters like. So they want to control it. I see the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh as an effort, basically, at agency capture at the Supreme Court level. We have to be very careful about this. I yield to my distinguished colleague from Hawaii.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I wish to join my distinguished colleague from Connecticut in commenting on the qualifications and prospects of these two nominees whom we are facing now on the Senate floor. I thank him for his comments. I would like to take my time to bring to the attention of this body some of the concerns that--what I think are in the nature of concerns that if we do this now, we will learn to rue the day we made these mistakes. Let me begin, as I did in my comments about Judge Kavanaugh, with just a quick overview of how our Founding Fathers felt about the judicial branch of government and about the jury and what it was there for. The Founders were experienced politicians. They were adept at history. They read widely. They prided themselves on the expertise they had developed in how you design a government, and they were very conscious about doing something that was unprecedented and that they wanted very desperately to have work right. So they put their hearts and souls into trying to get it right, this American experiment of ours. From sad experience in the Colonies, they knew big special interests could come in and could completely dominate a legislative body; that the legislative body would be at the beck and call of big, private special interests. They had also seen Governors in the Colonies become corrupted by influence. So they were very concerned that it was not enough that you separated the legislative and executive branches and created some degree of rivalry between the two because that left the prospect still that the big special interests that commanded the legislature could also command the executive branch. Then, where would the ordinary citizen go? Where would you go for relief when some big and powerful interest controlled those two branches of government? You would go to the courts. That is why they made the judiciary independent. That is why they insisted and fought so hard to make sure the institution of the jury made it over from England, made it to the Colonies. It was part of our battle with England that the King had tried to interfere with our juries. We took the power of the jury and the independence of the court seriously, not just as a matter of providing justice to an individual person but as part of the architecture of our Constitution, as part of the architecture of freedom that our Constitution represents. There is something that is interesting about the jury and the courts, but the jury, in particular, that makes it a little bit different than a lot of the rest of what went on in that Constitution because, clearly, the Founding Fathers were concerned that the power of government would be co-opted by powerful interests and then evil work would be done with that power against ordinary people. So a lot of our constitutional structure is designed to protect all of us regular Americans against the power of government, but in the courts, and specifically in the jury, there is a different power that was at issue. Blackstone was the predominant legal figure in the Colonies at the time. The reference that lawyers of the Revolutionary era used was ``Blackstone's Commentaries.'' Blackstone described how, within the larger context of the judicial branch, the jury was a defense for regular people not against the government, interestingly--possibly against the government--but also, and perhaps more importantly, against the more wealthy and powerful citizens. It was set up so the courts would provide equality between an ordinary American citizen who was being run over by a big, powerful, wealthy American citizen, and they would be treated fairly. It would be the chance where you could stand up against wealth, where you could stand up against power, and even if they controlled the legislature, even if they controlled the Governor, you still had your shot before that jury of your peers and in those courts. So that is the context for looking at these judges who are being put forward by a special interest apparatus of perhaps unprecedented power in our country's history--certainly unprecedented power in our country's history since Teddy Roosevelt broke the back of the big trusts and the Big Business interests that had dominated in his era. Here, we have these two characters coming through, and one is Mr. Bounds. Mr. Bounds has a considerable problem with himself, which is that he is filling a seat on the Ninth Circuit that is designated to the State of Oregon. It has, until this moment, always been the tradition of the Senate that the home State Senators associated with that seat have the ability to say no. It is part of our checks and balances. The people from that State who are likely to know him the best--the Senators who are here--have the chance to say no. Both of the Oregon Senators have said no. Has that mattered one whit to the Trump administration? No, they have broken this tradition. Regrettably, our Republican colleagues are complicit in letting this happen. They are complicit in letting this happen. It is a sad day for the Senate because the blue-slip process--the process by which home State Senators are allowed to say no--is also the only process that defends that this is an Oregon seat in the first instance. There is no other check on the President's power to appoint. So there are a lot of reasons why Bounds is disqualified, but the most compelling one to me is because the two home State Senators have both said no to this person. Things do turn about. I have been in the majority here, and I have been in the minority. I have been here with Republican Presidents, and I have been here with Democratic Presidents. Things do turn about. When the day comes that we have a Democratic President making these appointees and when we have Democratic control so we can confirm these appointees, Republican Senators are going to regret that they threw their own blue- slip rights away today on this nomination, and throwing their blue slips away doesn't just mean they lose their vote as to the Oregon Senator for this seat, it means they lose their vote that defends that this needs to be an Oregon judge in this seat. There is nothing, after the blue slip is gone, that would allow our colleagues from Texas to prevent a Democratic President from appointing a New York City judge to Texas seats on the circuit court of appeals. So if that starts to happen, don't come crying back to us now about this. Today is your chance to stop that--to stop all of that--and to put the Senate back to respect for our colleagues' judgment, a mutual and bipartisan respect for our colleagues' judgment that has been the standard of the Senate for a century now. It is going today, and it is going today under what pressure? Why would we want to turn to other colleagues and say: For the first time ever, your views don't count about the judge from your home State, Senator. The only reason for that is the power of the political pressure behind these appointees, and that is the big special interests that are putting these nominees forward, that have precleared them through this mysterious, dark process that the Federalist Society runs, that have pushed forward these political campaigns to support them through this mysterious, dark process that is funded through the Judicial Crisis Network, and they are going to be telling them what to do through a mysterious, dark process of funded so-called friends of the court--amici--who are going to be there in the court all day long telling them what to do. That is the process that is breaking the blue slip, and it oughtn't to. It is not right on its own, and it certainly isn't right to break the blue slip. The last thing I will say is about this character Oldham, who is coming in. Among the leading Republican special interests are the great polluters. They got Scott Pruitt in. What more proof do you need that the polluters are in control than to put Scott Pruitt in charge of the EPA? The man was a joke, and yet in he went, confirmed by the Senate. Now comes Oldham, who has said that the entire administrative state is enraging to him--enraging to him. It is the illegitimacy of it, he says. ``It is the entire existence of this edifice of administrative law that's constitutionally suspect.'' No, it is not. We have an entire body of law, the delegation doctrine, that controls what is appropriate for Congress to delegate to an administrative agency. It has been that way for decades. This is fanciful stuff, but it is a wonderful red flag waved for the big polluters, saying: Whenever you disagree with a regulatory agency that tries to keep you cleaning up your act, I am going to be with you. That is what the Oldham nomination is all about. It is all about telling the big polluters that we have a friend for you on the courts now. If there is one thing that ought not to happen in this country, it is that somebody walks up the steps of the courthouse, and before the argument is even made, they know they are going to lose the case, not from the arguments in the brief but from the identity of the party on the front page of the brief. That is why Oldham is going on the court, so that the big polluters can know they will win their cases in front of him without him even having to read the brief. All he will need to do is look at the cover, see that the big polluters are on the cover, and know he is there to attack the administrative state making them keep the water clean, making them keep the air clean, or making them keep their carbon emissions under control. That is what this is about. This is not right. It is not right that the blue slip is being torn apart today on the Senate floor. It is not right that somebody who doesn't think that the EPA ought to even exist is being put forward as a judge. But the connections come back to that same initial point, which is that the big special interests who like to control legislatures and who like to control executive branches would also love to control the courts, because that is the place where they can still be held to account. So it is with real regret that I face this day in the Senate. I yield my remaining time.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. They would either be giving up the one defense they have to make sure that the seats on the court that are allocated to their State are in fact filled with judges from their State, or they would be suggesting that there should be two different sets of rules that apply--that there be one blue-slip rule for a Democratic President and that there would be a different blue-slip rule for a Republican President. I don't think that is credible. I think that once the blue slip is torn down, reestablishing it is virtually impossible. I think the day will come when Senators come to regret that they are trying to get a home-State person appointed from Idaho or Colorado or New Mexico or Texas, and they have given up their ability to see to it that happens, and that a lawyer from San Francisco or from New York City or from Florida or from anyplace else can be dropped into their circuit court seat, and they have nothing left to do about it, because the one tool they have to stop that and to enforce that prerogative is the blue slip, and it dies today.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. That is absolutely correct. There is not a law that assigns within the Ninth Circuit which judges will be treated as Oregon judges and which judges will be treated as California judges. Within Rhode Island, we are part of the First Circuit Court of Appeals. There is one seat on that court that, by tradition, is designated to Rhode Island.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Of course.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. It would mean that the Senators from that State would have no defense against that change. It would mean that the next Democratic President could appoint Rhode Islanders to Texas. It would mean that the next Republican President could appoint Texans to Rhode Island, and neither the Senator from Texas nor the Senators from Rhode Island would have any defense left against that without the honoring of the blue slip.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I spoke before the Fourth of July recess about two financial risks that are coming our way thanks to not getting anything done on climate change. One, of course, is the risk to coastal properties--not something the Presiding Officer has to worry too much about given his home State but something that Rhode Island, the Ocean State, has to care a lot about and that the distinguished Senator from Florida and his constituents have to care a lot about. There is a point where rising sea levels intrude on the saleability, the mortgageability, and the insurability of houses. None other than Freddie Mac, the huge Federal housing corporation, is predicting that there will be a coastal property meltdown. The other risk is that of a carbon bubble. There is a lot of talk in the economic literature about a carbon bubble. One recent financial study reports that ``the potential effects of a carbon bubble on financial stability have been recently discussed in the academic literature and are increasingly on the agenda of [bank] regulators and supervisors.'' Indeed, in an official statement, the Bank of England has warned that ``investments in fossil fuels and related technologies . . . may take a huge hit.'' That huge hit is the other side of a carbon bubble: It pops, and you have a crash. So let's look at the prospects for not just a carbon bubble but a carbon crash. There are several elements in the runup to a crash. Some of these we witnessed in the crash of the housing bubble back in 2008. When these conditions exist, we should take warning. One condition is whether you can trust the players. In the housing crash, the rating agencies were in bed with the banks, and you couldn't trust their risk evaluations. The whole thing was cooked. The big fees the rating agencies were taking also took their eye off the ball, and they gave wildly erroneous ratings to high-risk investments. So at the heart of the 2018 housing crash was a failure of trustworthiness. Can we trust the fossil fuel industry any better than those rating agencies? There is no reason to think so, and there is plenty of reason to think not. This is an industry that has been lying about fossil fuel's effect on our climate for decades, and once you get used to lying about one thing, it is hard to contain the spread of the rot. Exxon even once gave its CEO the infamous, phony Oregon Petition, which urged the United States to reject the Kyoto Protocol, to cite to shareholders at an annual meeting. I have spoken before about what I consider to be the untrustworthiness of Exxon's response to the BlackRock shareholder resolution, which required Exxon to report the predicted effect of climate policies on Exxon's business model. As fossil fuels are priced out of the market by renewable energy and as nations enact carbon emissions restrictions, fossil fuel reserves now claimed as assets by energy companies may become undevelopable stranded assets. In a nutshell, Exxon seems to have wildly--indeed, so wildly, you can only conclude deliberately--overestimated the adoption of carbon capture utilization and storage, wildly underestimated the adoption of electric vehicles, and wildly underestimated renewable energy growth, all to reach its rosy conclusions that its assets were more or less secure. On the subject of trustworthiness, right now big oil companies are still being untrustworthy, telling the world they want a price on carbon, while at the same time telling their political fixers in Congress to kill any such thing. Who knows how much they push around their analysts and others who are curious about a carbon bubble. What we know is that trusting this industry is asking a lot. That is condition one for a bubble in a crash--untrustworthy actors. Condition two is market failure. Markets usually correct and have a smoothing effect. If there is market failure, markets can go off course until the correction comes, and then the correction is so immediate and so big that it amounts to a crash. There is market failure in fossil fuel that props up this bubble. Indeed, there are several. The biggest is that the fossil fuel industry rides on what the IMF calculates is a global multitrillion-dollar annual subsidy: $700 billion in subsidy every year in the United States alone, says the International Monetary Fund. That subsidy massively warps the operation of the market. There is also what appears to be a methodological issue. The oil industry is ordinarily measured financially by net asset value analysis. As one paper noted, this is an ``industry valuation methodology [that] assumes full extraction of fossil fuel reserves.'' A methodology that assumes full extraction of fossil fuel reserves becomes a problem when the question is whether extraction of those reserves is even possible. There is also what I would call a ``massiveness factor'' at work here. Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns were so massive that it was hard to imagine them vanishing, but they did. The market value of fossil fuel reserves that can't be burned is around $20 trillion, according to the World Bank. That is such a big wipeout that it is hard to comprehend, let alone anticipate. People wait until tomorrow. Then, the tomorrows pile up into a bubble, and then the crash comes when the first person panics and everybody runs. One other market failure is actually how the crooked political pressure of this industry is causing us not to focus on the 2-degree Celsius ceiling that scientists warn us about for global warming, or, actually, safer yet is the 1.5-degree Celsius ceiling, which burning existing reserves will blow us through. We cannot have both a safe planet and full extraction, and the fossil fuel industry is choosing extraction. That political castle of climate denial will fall sooner or later. It is false. Not only is condition one met--untrustworthy players--but condition two is met: There is a massive, multiple market failure in fossil fuel awaiting correction, which brings us to condition three: The energy market is undermining fossil fuels as a technology. We are reaching a tipping point. Here is Lazard's cost curve for onshore wind energy. It shows, over 8 years, a 67-percent decrease in cost. This line shows the cost of wind energy steadily declining from 2009 until 2017. At the same time these wind costs were dramatically declining, utility-scale solar costs and rooftop solar costs also declined dramatically. This line represents rooftop solar costs. This line below it represents utility-scale solar costs. Again, there was a percentage decrease of 86 percent. New solar and wind energy projects are already becoming more economical than existing coal plants, as we just saw in Colorado. New solar and wind projects now compete on price with new natural gas plants, as a recent auction in Arizona showed. The cost trajectory for renewables continues steeply downward. When you compare U.S. wind and solar to other energy sources, you see the trend is clear, and here is the result. On cost, the lowest cost providers are onshore wind and utility-scale solar. More expensive than them is natural gas. More expensive is coal. More expensive still is nuclear. That is not counting the subsidy. That is apparent price. This same trend is also happening globally. This graphic is prepared by the World Economic Forum, and it shows the same thing for renewables. In particular, here is the rapidly declining cost of solar photovoltaic. Here is the cost of coal, and here, right now, they cross over. We are at the tipping point, where it is cheaper worldwide to develop solar and wind than it is to burn coal. Stanford economist Tony Seba studies economic disruptions, and he likes to see these two photographs. It will be hard to see from where you are. This is Fifth Avenue in New York City in 1900. If you look at the photograph, you can see that every vehicle there is drawn by a horse. In 1900, every vehicle was drawn by a horse. If you look very closely, it appears there is one leading-edge, non-horse-drawn vehicle. The whole street is filled with horse-drawn carriages and wagons in 1900. Thirteen years later, on Fifth Avenue in New York City, every single vehicle in that street is now an automobile. In only 13 years, there was a complete transition in transportation. If you were a harness maker, this was a tough transition for you. In just 13 years, the world changed, illustrating the point that major economic disruptions can take place fast. Think land lines and cell phones, if you want a modern example. People still ride horses, and they probably always will, but our transportation sector shifted rapidly from horse-drawn conveyance to automobiles because horse-drawn conveyance was an antiquated technology that got left behind. People still have landlines. I have one at home. We hardly ever use it. The communications industry shifted rapidly, as antiquated landline technology got left behind. As the energy market shifts to cleaner, cheaper, more efficient renewable technologies, fossil fuels soon will not compete in the marketplace. There is our third condition: not just untrustworthy players, not just market distortion, but also a technological tipping point making the fossil fuel technology obsolete. There is a fourth condition. This fourth condition basically puts an accelerator on condition three in certain sectors of the energy market. Condition four is based on the fact that the marginal cost of production of a unit of fossil fuel energy varies considerably. Some fuels are low cost and high cost to produce. Some geographical locations are low cost and high cost locations. In this variance, coal is pretty much dead already at the hands of oil and gas, purely because of cost. We can set coal aside for a moment. In the world's oil markets, much of this cost of production variant is masked right now by energy cartels that prop up the price of oil. Cartel behavior to prop up the price of your product makes economic sense if you can maintain monopoly pressure to prop up the price, but it also only makes sense for the cartel participants if you can anticipate that you can sell your product out into the future. You hold back your output to drive up price and to maximize your return in the hopes that in the future you will be able to keep doing the same thing and you will be able to sell your product. If you are not sure that there will be another day to sell your product at the propped-up price, you start to get anxious about your product becoming stranded and about your product becoming valueless. At that point, it doesn't make sense to engage in cartel behavior. What makes sense is to maximize your output and to sell as much as you can while your commodity still has value--basically, to have a fire sale. Low-cost fossil fuel energy producers would be rational to drop their prices and maximize their market-share, fire-sale pricing while their fossil fuel still has value. Get the dammed stuff out the door while you still can. That behavior--dropping the cost, pricing at your marginal cost of production, and selling as much of your product as you can--will fend off the inevitable for low-cost producers for a while. However, for those producers that can't match that fire-sale price, the downward trajectory of their crash steepens catastrophically. As soon as you can't produce not at the cartel price but at the lowered fire- sale price--as soon as you cannot meet that price--you are out of business. There still is a fossil fuel market. You are just not in it. The bad news for the United States is that this is where much of our market is. Economists looking at this carbon bubble mess warn that high-cost regions like the United States could ``lose almost their entire oil and gas industry.'' Let me quote that again: ``lose almost their entire oil and gas industry.'' To recap about a fossil fuel ``carbon bubble,'' the players aren't trustworthy; the fossil fuel markets aren't efficient in the economic sense; fossil fuels as a technology are now tipping into being obsolete, priced out by renewables; and our U.S. industry is particularly vulnerable to an accelerated market meltdown when the tide shifts. Those four conditions don't make a great scenario. That is a warning we need to start considering. What should we do? Everyone seems to agree on two safety measures. First, there is one sensible hedge: Don't invest all in fossil fuel. Invest more in renewables. Be on the winning side of the shift. Start making carburetors, not just a mule harness. There is also one important, sensible economic strategy; that is, to manage the transition. As one paper on this subject concluded, ``The issue of concern is the lack of any transitional strategy. . . . Inadequate, conflicting or slow responses to climate change in investment and finance can entail risks that could be avoided under a more orderly transition.'' You could equate it to jumping out of an airplane. You are going to end up on the ground anyway. Wouldn't you like a parachute to make it a gentler and more survivable voyage? What is the parachute but a transition plan for managing this shift? The best one is a price on carbon. This takes us back to the discreditable conduct of the fossil fuel industry, which, far from leading through this transition, far from trying to build itself a parachute, is busily still trying to deny that there is any such transition, including, in my view, their falsely reporting to shareholders that this is all going to be OK, and we are going to be able to extract and sell all of our reserves. This is an industry that is still fighting like a wounded bear to prevent anyone from organizing the orderly transition they need. At some point, there has to be a grownup in the room. The fossil fuel industry has shown no capacity for that role, which makes it up to us in Congress to help America prepare for both the predicted crash in coastal property values, as sea level begins to enter the mortgage and insurance horizon for those properties, and the predicted carbon bubble we see coming and that economists write about coming that we can manage our way through if we are responsible. In that regard, it is time for us to wake up. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 15 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, this past year and half of the Trump administration has been a constant, daily barrage of scandal, corruption, and chaotic incompetence. In this environment, the Senate now considers the President's controversial nomination of Brian Benczkowski to lead the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. It has been over a year since Benczkowski was first nominated, and there have been repeated calls for his nomination to be withdrawn. Why this man, for this job, at this time? There is a very good chance that something fishy is happening here. The warning signals of something fishy should be evident to Democratic and Republican Senators alike. The obvious question is whether President Trump and his political or legal team are using this appointment to sneak a fast one by the American people and put themselves in a position to interfere, from the inside, with the Department of Justice investigation into the dealings between Russia and the Trump campaign--the so-called Mueller investigation, though it has expanded beyond Bob Mueller into several other parts of the Department of Justice. How would this fast one work exactly? We will be voting tomorrow to install a Trump ally and nominee--a longtime political operative with ties to a Russian bank and to the recused Attorney General Jeff Sessions--into one of the most powerful posts at the Department of Justice, a position that just so happens to have significant supervisory control over Special Counsel Mueller's investigation and the criminal investigation of the Southern District of New York into Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. What could possibly go wrong? Remember, we are dealing with a President who remains the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation by the Department of Justice. We are dealing with a President who repeatedly violates longstanding rules and norms in his continuing effort to interfere with that investigation. We are dealing with a President who has told the press he believes he has ``absolute control'' over the Department of Justice and who repeatedly criticizes Attorney General Sessions' recusal from the Russian interference investigation as insufficiently ``loyal.'' We are dealing with a President who appears to have actively interfered in the Department's investigations into Michael Flynn, who insisted on ``loyalty'' from his FBI Director, and who admitted that firing that FBI Director was to ease pressure over what he called ``the Russia thing.'' We know all of this in the Senate, often from this President's own mouth and his own tweets. With that backdrop from the Oval Office for this nomination, extra caution is warranted to be sure we are not being led into trouble. Worse still, it is not just the President who is up to no good with respect to the ongoing criminal investigation. Republicans in the House--I suspect hand in hand with the White House and legal team--are pressing their smear campaign against Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, seeming to want to kneecap the independence of the Mueller investigation and get access to its confidential investigative files. As a former U.S. attorney, I recoil from the notion that a legislative body wants to peek over the shoulders of prosecutors in an ongoing investigation, particularly when those legislators are so closely allied with the subject of that investigation. Against that added backdrop of House interference, the Senate is being asked to install a Trump loyalist into a key position of authority and control over the Russia-Trump collusion investigation. Even more caution is warranted for this nomination, given the behavior of the House. Why this man, for this job, at this time? Why Benczkowski? Let's review. He is nominated to be the Chief of the Criminal Division, a critically important office within the Department of Justice. He will oversee nearly 700 career prosecutors who are some of the most talented and experienced lawyers in the country. Criminal Division lawyers prosecute nationally significant cases, from high-profile public corruption to child exploitation, to complicated money laundering and international organized crime cases. One thing that is obvious--that is obvious--is that Mr. Benczkowski brings astoundingly weak qualifications to that task. Given the stakes and the complexity of the Criminal Division's work, you would expect someone leading the Division who had years of experience as a prosecutor, who had tried cases to a verdict--someone who knew the ins and outs of the Division's work and knew his way around Federal courtrooms. To say that Benczkowski lacks this experience is putting it mildly. He may be the weakest candidate ever put forward in the history of the Department to oversee the Criminal Division. He is probably not hirable into the career positions he will oversee. The man has less courtroom time than the average citizen who has sat on a jury. He has never tried a case of any sort, criminal or civil, State or Federal. He has never argued a motion--something most litigators have done in their first years out of law school. He has never worked as a prosecutor. His stints at the Department of Justice were never as a practicing lawyer but always on the political side. In his whole career, he told the Senate, he could only come up with one or two times he ever entered a courtroom on what he called ``routine scheduling or other matters.'' So it is not Benczkowski's experience or qualifications that are the reasons for his appointment. If qualifications and experience are not the reasons for his appointment, why put this prosecutorial neophyte into one of the most powerful, important prosecutorial positions at the Department of Justice? What, one might ask, is the motive? What do we know? Although serious questions remain unanswered by the Department of Justice and by Mr. Benczkowski, we know from our correspondence with the Department that the Russia-Trump collusion investigation is being run under Department of Justice procedures that require approvals by the Criminal Division for a wide array of investigative and prosecutorial steps. As the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island, I used to have to work with the Department of Justice and go through those approvals and those steps. The Mueller investigation and the Cohen investigation in the Southern District of New York are both subject to those same rules. That gives Mr. Benczkowski, if he is confirmed, not just a window into the Russia-Trump collusion investigation but the ability to actually interfere. What else we know about Mr. Benczkowski is that he was a longtime political operative here in the Senate, on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he worked as staff director for none other than Senator Jeff Sessions. Well, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself from the Russia-Trump collusion investigation. It is therefore an obvious question, if this person brings no experience as a prosecutor but plenty of experience as a close political operative for Jeff Sessions, whether that close political relationship is the reason. That, in turn, presents the obvious question: Since Benczkowski is not there for his experience or for his qualifications, is he being installed as some kind of back channel, either as a trusted intermediary to get information to Attorney General Sessions around his recusal from this investigation perhaps or perhaps, in a worst-case scenario, to be a pipeline to Trump and his lawyers of confidential investigative information--the kind of information that House Republicans are trying to get their hands on? Maybe it is simply to jam the bureaucratic gears whenever Robert Mueller seeks approvals from the Criminal Division. These are not easy questions, but there is an easy answer to these questions, and that easy answer is, don't worry, Mr. Benczkowski will be fully recused from that investigation. But the Department and Mr. Benczkowski won't say that. There have been no meaningful answers to these questions. Why won't they just say he will be recused? That should be easy. It gets weirder. Benczkowski has his own Russia-Trump angle. After the election, with his old boss Sessions tapped to become Attorney General, Benczkowski volunteered for the Trump transition team, leading the so-called landing team at DOJ. It was on his way out the door from that role, heading back to his law firm, that Benczkowski told Sessions he was interested in securing a political appointment in the Department of Justice. Scroll forward 2 months to March of 2017, when Benczkowski got a call from one of his law partners. The firm was representing the Russian Alfa Bank against allegations that Alfa Bank was serving as a back channel to the Trump organization. Alfa Bank is one of Russia's largest banks, and its owners reportedly have longstanding ties to Vladimir Putin. The partner wanted to know whether Benczkowski--fresh off the Trump Department of Justice transition team--could help the Russian bank. Benczkowski joined the firm's Alfa Bank legal team. The next month, in April of 2017, Benczkowski was contacted by the Attorney General's office to ask whether he would like this job to head up the Department's Criminal Division. Press reports as early as May 4 indicated that Benczkowski was likely to be tapped for this Criminal Division job. Surely a person of sound judgment at this point would have stopped representing a Russian bank that might be under DOJ investigation for secret ties to the President. Surely. But no. Rather than withdraw from his representation, Benczkowski expanded his portfolio with Alfa Bank to review the now famous and widely verified Steele dossier. The Steele dossier has been a feature not only in the Russia-Trump collusion investigation, it has also been a feature of Republican political efforts to discredit and besmirch the collusion investigation. Benczkowski's new portfolio was to advise whether Alfa Bank, the Russian bank, should file a defamation suit against publisher BuzzFeed for disclosing the Steele dossier, which Alfa Bank subsequently did in New York State court. There is more. Benczkowski's nomination to this position triggered confirmation obligations to disclose information to the Senate Judiciary Committee about his background, publications, and clients. This client was a Putin-tied Russian bank, and Benczkowski's work related to the red-hot Steele dossier. So obviously he disclosed this client relationship--actually, not. Benczkowski's Senate Judiciary questionnaire included no mention whatsoever of the Russian bank. Only when Democratic Senators reviewed Benczkowski's confidential FBI background report did questions arise about his relationship with Alfa Bank and his review of the Steele dossier for this Russian client. Benczkowski explained the troubling omission, telling us that he had been forbidden by his firm's confidentiality agreement from disclosing his work for Alfa Bank. Some people would have thought his obligations of disclosure to the Senate mattered more than obligations of nondisclosure to such a client. These disclosure issues are customarily waived by clients in these circumstances or the nominee can withdraw. You don't just fail to list such a client, but that is what he did. Mr. Benczkowski was voted out of the Judiciary Committee on a party- line vote a year ago. Now, with the Russia-Trump investigation heating up, with significant new potential cooperating witnesses, and with millions of pages of new documents available to the Department of Justice from Michael Cohen, now Republicans bring this nomination forward. Particularly this week, when the country has turned its focus to the Supreme Court announcement--an announcement obviously likely to dominate the news cycle--this bizarre nomination gets called up for a vote. It is almost as if they don't want people watching while this happens. This is a nomination that should fail on qualifications alone. In the long history of the Department of Justice, there has never been so unqualified a nominee, in my view. In the name of the 700 career prosecutors in the Criminal Division who deserve an experienced and capable leader at their helm, in the name of the crime victims our criminal laws and their enforcement are intended to protect, I urge my colleagues to vote no just on qualifications. But this goes beyond an unqualified nominee; this is a nominee exhibiting a flashing array of warnings that there may be mischief afoot here. No Senator should take this vote unaware of these obvious warnings. Why somebody so unqualified? Why somebody so politically connected to the Attorney General? Why right now, right in the middle of constant interference by President Trump and his legal team and constant interference by House Republicans with this investigation? Now we put someone in who won't say he will recuse himself, who will have a window into this investigation, who will have the power to interfere with this investigation? That seems like a lot to let pass. In the name of the integrity and independence of the Department of Justice, Senators should vote no because of the contamination risk Mr. Benczkowski poses even if he were qualified for the post. This combination of lack of qualification--a flagrant, flat-out unqualified nominee--and the risk of contamination in an environment in which there are abundant political efforts to interfere with this investigation-- that is a combination no Senator ought to accept--not for this man, not for this job, not at this time. If mischief is afoot and if these dark prospects should come to pass, Senators, we will have been warned. We will have been warned. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise today to honor the career of one of Rhode Island's most respected ocean and coastal experts, my friend Dennis Nixon. Throughout his career, he has demonstrated a deep commitment to Rhode Island and ocean and coastal issues more broadly. Mr. Nixon first arrived at the University of Rhode Island in 1975 to pursue his master's in marine affairs. Thankfully for us, he received his degree and then decided to stay in the Ocean State as a professor at the university. Since then he has been a mainstay on the University of Rhode Island's campus, teaching courses in maritime and coastal law and publishing over 50 articles and a casebook on the topic. He served as associate dean of academic Affairs for the College of Environment and Life Sciences and then for 4 years as associate dean for research and administration at the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography. In that position, Mr. Nixon managed the school's beautiful Narragansett Bay campus and the 185-foot National Science Foundation research vessel Endeavor. Mr. Nixon also serves as the risk manager and legal advisor to the University National Oceanographic Laboratory System, based at URI's Graduate School of Oceanography, which coordinates among oceanographic universities for research time on vessels like Endeavor. His influence does not stop at URI; he has lectured on 6 continents and in more than 25 States. Mr. Nixon was instrumental in the creation of the unique dual degree program in marine affairs and law between the University of Rhode Island's Department of Marine Affairs and Roger Williams University Law School. Outside academics, he cofounded Point Club, an insurance cooperative for fishing vessels. I first encountered Mr. Nixon when the tanker World Prodigy crashed into Brenton Reef, causing an oilspill. I was a young staffer in the Rhode Island attorney general's office, and Mr. Nixon joined the team as our maritime law expert. Later, I was U.S. attorney when the tug- and-barge Scandia/North Cape caused another massive oilspill, and I turned again to Mr. Nixon's professional advice. We worked well together and became friends. In 2013, Mr. Nixon was appointed director of Rhode Island Sea Grant. His deep connections to Rhode Island and expertise in ocean and coastal issues have helped Rhode Island Sea Grant further its reach into the State's coastal communities and raise its profile nationwide. Among its priorities, the State's Sea Grant Program is currently supporting research into the causes and consequences of harmful algal blooms and the effects of the Block Island Wind Farm on fishing interests and home values. Mr. Nixon's regard in the State was on display when he was tapped to moderate the marine debris symposia put on in conjunction with the Volvo Ocean Race's stopovers in Newport in 2015 and 2018. His drive to ensure Rhode Island maintains its leadership in marine scholarship, development, and conservation is evident throughout his career. Mr. Nixon obviously cares deeply about ocean and coastal resources and the fishermen, businesses, and communities that rely on these resources. He is even a fairly presentable sailor himself. For over 40 years, the Ocean State has benefited from Mr. Nixon's passion and leadership, and for this sincere dedication to Rhode Island and coastal communities around the world, I stand today to recognize and salute him. Fair winds and following seas, my friend.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, as I rise for my 209th ``Time to Wake Up'' climate change speech, I return to a familiar subject: disgraced Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt. Not that long ago, I was here discussing the baker's dozen of ethical scandals swirling around Pruitt. From his $43,000 ``cone of silence'' phone booth to the millions he spent on a 20- person security detail, to his lights-and-sirens escapades, to fancy DC restaurant Le Diplomate, Pruitt has come to personify the swamp President Trump promised to drain. And he just keeps on getting swampier. In just the few weeks since my last speech on Pruitt, we have learned that he used one of his closest aides to plan his vacations, hunt for a Washington apartment, and, most bizarrely, solicit a used hotel mattress from the Trump Hotel. The aide did many of these tasks on government time when she was supposed to be working for taxpayers. That is a clear violation of Federal employment rules. Federal rules also bar officials such as Pruitt from accepting gifts from their subordinates, including these kinds of personal services even on personal time. So one way or the other, this was pretty swampy. We also learned, in a scene worthy of the finest banana republic, that Pruitt had his staffer approach the founder of the fast food chain Chick-fil-A about securing a franchise for Pruitt's wife. As the New York Times recently wrote, ``Grifters Gonna Grift.'' But with all deference to the editorial writers at the Times, I would add that Pruitt's actions aren't just matters of grift; they also reveal his servility to the interests of his fossil fuel backers over the interests of the American public. My Republican colleague, Senator Ernst of Iowa, recently said that Pruitt's efforts to undermine the renewable fuel standard, including the abundance of waivers for refiners, amount to broken promises to American farmers. ``He is about as swampy as you get here in Washington, DC,'' she said. Amen. You would think that someone so corrupt would not be long for a President's Cabinet. You would be wrong. Just last week, in the face of all of Pruitt's latest scandals, President Trump reaffirmed his support for his EPA Administrator, saying that the Agency is doing really, really well under Pruitt. The President doesn't see anything wrong with having someone as scandal-plagued as Pruitt in his Cabinet. What he can see is that the fossil fuel industry is solidly lined up behind its servant, Pruitt. He has oil company interests and the front groups they fund telling him to keep Pruitt on the job because Pruitt is rolling back regulations polluters don't like. Let's look at how well Pruitt is really doing for the polluters. Let's start with Pruitt's record in the courts. A number of EPA's regulatory actions or its failures to regulate have been challenged in court. Republicans continue to rubberstamp Trump's activist, extreme- rightwing, and polluter-friendly judicial nominees, but American courts nevertheless remain a forum in which outright lies are not countenanced and in which regulatory agencies such as EPA have to demonstrate the scientific, technical, economic, and legal basis of their regulatory decisions. An agency whose political leadership dissembles or doesn't do its homework won't do well in court. So how has Scott Pruitt's EPA fared in the courts? In two words, not well. Our Environment and Public Works Committee ranking member, Tom Carper, recently released a report analyzing Pruitt's record in court. As you can see from this chart, 66 cases have been filed against Pruitt's EPA in relation to ethics and transparency. I know this comes as little shock, given Pruitt's numerous and continuing ethical shortcomings. Of the 14 of these ethics cases that have already been decided by a judge, EPA lost 13 of them. That is a 7-percent success rate for Pruitt. The other 79 cases challenge EPA's regulatory actions or inactions. This is what Pruitt is supposed to be there for--rolling back rules protecting public health and the environment to make his fossil fuel patrons happy. This is why he still has industry support. This is why he is still running EPA despite all the scandals. You can be corrupt in this administration as long as you are corrupt for the right people. Of the six of these cases that have been fully reviewed by the courts, Pruitt's EPA lost four of them, succeeded in delaying arguments on one, and got another dismissed on mootness grounds after withdrawing the challenged rule. In other words, Pruitt is zero for six before the courts when it comes to defending his regulatory rollbacks. Pruitt is a former baseball player, so he will understand it when I say that he is batting way below the Mendoza line. The courts have blocked Pruitt's attempt to delay the implementation of a rule curbing methane emissions from new oil and gas wells. Methane, of course, is a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. The courts also blocked Pruitt's effort to slow-walk EPA's revision of lead paint standards. Pruitt wanted another 6 years to revise the standards, and the courts gave him 90 days. Many of Pruitt's biggest deregulatory actions, after a splashy announcement, have yet to even be finalized, so they aren't yet ripe for judicial review. But even on these half-baked rollbacks, Pruitt is making mistakes that will provide ample ammunition in court for those who will sue him. Take Pruitt's rulemaking to rescind the Clean Power Plan--President Obama's blueprint to reduce carbon emissions from the power sector. As Oklahoma attorney general, Pruitt sued three times to block the Clean Power Plan. He has a long record against the Clean Power Plan in the press, at industry conferences, and on social media. Many of the same fossil fuel industry donors who have bankrolled Pruitt's political career are on the other side, suing to block the Clean Power Plan. Pruitt has not even revealed the full depth of his fiscal engagement with the fossil fuel industry because he has never fessed up to who gave money to his dark money political operation, so it is actually probably worse than we know. Well, here is where America's rule of law kicks in. America's rule of law provides that those who are interested in an agency rulemaking ``have a right to a fair and open proceeding; that right includes access to an impartial decision maker.'' Here, given Pruitt's strident opposition to the Clean Power Plan as attorney general, combined with his sickeningly close financial and political ties with the industry opposing it, can there be any doubt that Pruitt possesses what under law one would call an unalterably closed mind when it comes to the Clean Power Plan? Courts will take notice of that sort of thing. Then there is Pruitt's effort to exclude certain scientific studies from consideration in rulemaking. Pruitt claims it is to boost transparency. That couldn't be phonier. It is an effort to boost two industries that are big donors to his political operations--fossil fuel and tobacco. For decades, fossil fuel and tobacco have pushed to prevent regulatory agencies from considering scientific studies that rely on people's medical records. They have figured out that because people like their medical records to be private and because public health studies rely on private medical records, if they can cook up the notion that that is somehow a transparency problem, they can take the entire corpus of public health science based on medical records and put it in the bin. Blocking that public health evidence is a way for these industries to screen out the most damning evidence in actual Americans' actual health records of the effects of tobacco smoke and air pollution on human health. Pruitt's own Science Advisory Board isn't buying that one. He rebuffed the Board's request for information about this proposed rule and issued it without the Board's input. When he claimed that his proposed rule was consistent with the position of various scientific journals and groups, those journals and groups stood up and said: Oh, no. They were quick to correct the record. And EPA's Science Advisory Board just voted unanimously to examine the policy anyway. You might think that such a rule may also exclude some industry- funded studies, but never fear--internal emails obtained by the Union of Concerned Scientists show that Pruitt's lackeys, themselves former industry lobbyists, knew they had to make sure industry studies could still be considered by EPA. It would be great to take all of the real public health studies that rely on real healthcare information, pretend that is a transparency problem, shove them off to the side, and then have industry-funded studies left to rely upon. Well, the Pruitt lackeys pulled a little trick and put in the proposed rule that the Administrator can include any study he likes, regardless of what the rule may require, opening up a nice, safe harbor for his industry sponsors' industry-funded studies. All of this sounds pretty arbitrary and capricious to me. And ``arbitrary and capricious'' by the way, is the legal standard courts will use to evaluate challenges to this phony baloney rule. Pruitt's drive to weaken fuel economy standards also looks to be on shaky legal ground. They cobbled together a 38-page document in April announcing Pruitt's intention to roll back the 2012 auto fuel efficiency standards. That cobbled-together report is devoid of the type of serious, detailed analysis that courts typically look for in such a rulemaking. Half of that little document is just quotes from car companies objecting to the rule. By comparison, the Obama administration assembled a 1,217-page document justifying those standards, chockful of real scientific, technical, and economic analysis--all of the stuff the Pruitt EPA is allergic to. Once again, Pruitt's work product looks pretty arbitrary and capricious--short on facts, short on analysis, long on giveaways to industries that fund him. It is entirely understandable that the interests to which Pruitt is beholden would be fighting for him to keep his job. They love this. For them, Pruitt running this public health agency into the ground is a feature, not a bug, of the Pruitt tenure. They are just in it for the regulatory rollbacks. I hope they recognize a lot of Pruitt's work is so sloppy that, ultimately, it will likely not stand up in court. I hope President Trump understands the guy he thinks of as his great deregulator isn't very good at deregulating. Only time will tell how long Scott Pruitt can survive the mounting, swirling, ethical ordeals of his own making. We will also see how his industry friendly regulatory record fares under the scrutiny of honest courts. Something tells me I will be back here in the not-too-distant future with more to say about the troubled and disgraceful tenure of Scott Pruitt. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, first, let me say what a pleasure it has been to work with Senator Crapo on these issues. Our situation is pretty simple. We have a U.S. Navy that generates spent nuclear fuel through its operations; we have a U.S. industry of next-generation nuclear technology that needs that spent fuel in order to test those innovative technologies; and we have extraordinary National Labs with world-class expertise in handling that nuclear material and supporting that innovation. This amendment brings those three together. It allows the U.S. Navy's spent fuel to be delivered to National Labs so that pursuant to a law we just passed in the Senate recently, the cooperation between the National Labs and the nuclear innovation community can move forward. We have already passed that bill. I hope we will pass this bill. I will close by saying there is something else in this that I think is worth our consideration. We have an enormous national liability with respect to our existing stockpiles of nuclear waste. Presently, we have no realistic plan for dealing with that. There is a prospect--it is definitely a maybe; I don't want to overpromise anything--there is definitely a prospect and it is the intention of some of these next- generation technologies that we will be able to develop nuclear technologies that will go through our nuclear waste stockpile and turn that into productive electricity generation. If we can get there, that would be a terrific Holy Grail. In the meantime, this is a smart and efficient way to support American innovation in these technologies. I urge all of my colleagues to vote yes. I, again, appreciate Senator Crapo's leadership on this and the extraordinary National Lab that he has in his home State.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Thank you, Mr. President. Climate Change Mr. President, as 2010 dawned, in what now seems like another era of political time, the U.S. Congress was poised to tackle the problem of climate change. The House of Representatives had just passed a cap-and- trade bill, and there was bipartisan support for climate action in the Senate. Then, on January 21--a date that ought to live in judicial infamy--five Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court--all Republican appointees--delivered Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and unleashed unlimited special interest money into America's political system. The fossil fuel industry was looking for a way to stop climate legislation; it got Citizens United. Fossil fuel interests asked those Justices for, anticipated, and immediately seized on the political opportunity Citizens United provided them. Citizens United instantly changed the game in Congress for big political interests, such as the fossil fuel industry. Before that fateful day, Congress had held regular, bipartisan hearings and even votes on legislation to limit the carbon emissions causing climate change, but Citizens United allowed the fossil fuel industry to strike at this bipartisan progress, and it struck hard. The fossil fuel industry set its political forces instantly to work, targeting pro- climate-action candidates, particularly Republicans. Outside spending in 2010's congressional races increased 75 percent--75 percent--by more than $200 million over the previous midterm's levels. Citizens United gave the fossil fuel political forces another power-- not just the power to spend but the power to threaten. As powerful a cudgel as actual election spending is to wield, it is also powerful to threaten to wield that cudgel. Threats are not only powerful, they are less expensive than actual spending--you get to keep the money, and the threats are likely to be secret. The sudden barrage of unlimited money, dark money, and political threat had its desired effect: The political hit men of the fossil fuel industry stopped bipartisan climate action in its tracks. Pro-climate Republicans had a choice: either stop advocating for climate action or become a casualty. The clear before-and-after point is 2010's Citizens United decision and the immediate weaponization of that new power by the fossil fuel industry to protect its polluting status quo--a status quo, by the way, that the International Monetary Fund estimates provides fossil fuel a subsidy of $700 billion--billion with a ``b''--every year, just in the United States. The Republican appointees who delivered the Citizens United decision claimed that there would be a regime of ``effective disclosure'' that would, as they said, ``provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters.'' Of course, this has not happened. Instead, we have witnessed billionaires and corporate interests spending unlimited secret money in elections. Outside groups have already spent $140 million in the 2018 election cycle, nearly half of which is from groups with no or only partial disclosure. The head of the Koch brothers' dark money group, Americans for Prosperity, announced that the Kochs' political network plans to spend $400 million in the 2018 cycle--60 percent more than it spent in 2016. Just last month, a single anonymous donor contributed $26.4 million to the American Action Network, a dark-money organization with close ties to Speaker Paul Ryan. Secrecy is the key to the fossil fuel polluters' toxic control of our democracy. Light will drive them back. As a Foreign Service officer's son living overseas in impoverished tropical countries, I remember that the cockroaches would come out at night. When you would go into the kitchen to get a drink, you would hit the light switch, the lights would flicker on, and you would see and hear the cockroaches scuttling for the protection of the shadows, fleeing the light. Well, we need a little bit of that light in our democracy. So, with my Democratic colleagues, I am reintroducing my legislation to bring about the so-called ``effective disclosure,'' which even the Supreme Court that decided Citizens United acknowledged is necessary for the American people to have full faith in our political system. The DISCLOSE Act of 2018 offers a commonsense solution to restore transparency and accountability in our political system. The DISCLOSE Act would rein in what has been called a ``tsunami of slime'' by requiring organizations spending money in American elections--including super PACs, unions, tax-exempt 501(c)(4) groups, all of them--to promptly disclose donors who give $10,000 or more during an election cycle. Big, sneaky donors will try to hide behind shell corporations that disguise who they are, so the bill includes robust transfer provisions to prevent dark-money operatives from using complex webs of phony front groups to hide real donor identities. The DISCLOSE Act also strengthens the ban forbidding election spending by foreign nationals. One of the problems of our present dark- money infestation is that foreign actors can hide their political influence activities in the exact same dark-money channels used by the big special interests. Once you tolerate dark-money channels of influence in American elections, you can't police who uses those dark- money channels. Anonymity is anonymity; anyone could be hiding in the dark. Vladimir Putin could be hiding in the dark. We don't know until we turn on the lights. Last, the bill requires people spending money on election advertising to ``stand by your ad'' so that the ad itself identifies who is behind the advertising. Can we get this done? The public certainly wants us to, and it wasn't too long ago that Republicans supported disclosure. They were right back then, but now Republicans, who once extolled the principles of openness and accountability in our elections, have changed their tune. Gone is their distaste for secretive election spending; indeed, a new appetite for secret spending has emerged. This is how the special interest rot of our democracy occurs: The big special interests not only want to win in Congress, they want to change the rules of democracy to make it so they can always win in Congress, and they use those changed rules to make sure their party goes along with it. Back in 2014, the Rules Committee actually held a hearing on DISCLOSE. I hope we can get another hearing because since that time, the problem of dark money has only gotten worse. President Trump promised to drain the swamp and then turned his administration over to the biggest dark-money swamp monsters that exist. For example, nearly two dozen dark-money organizations fronting for God knows who--but one can guess--backed the nomination of Scott Pruitt to be the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator. Indeed, Administrator Pruitt himself raised millions of dollars in dark money while serving as Oklahoma's attorney general, and he has never disclosed what business those interests that funded him now have before the EPA. Americans correctly feel that the tsunami of anonymous dark money drowns out their voices in Washington and washes them to the margins of our political arena. The DISCLOSE Act of 2018 offers a commonsense solution to restore transparency and accountability into our political system. With the Senate now in session through most of the summer, there is ample time for this body to examine the merits of clearing dark money out of our political system. The problem of dark-money spending and threats is too big to ignore. This is why we are failing at addressing climate change. The corruption and fear Citizens United set loose in our politics in 2010 sickeningly empowered big special interests, and to the lasting shame of our Nation, it allowed the fossil fuel industry to purchase veto power over our national policymaking on climate change. We have allowed the biggest interest with the biggest conflict of interest to acquire veto power over what the Congress of the United States does on this vital issue. This has been a double evil: It has been poisonous to the American democracy we cherish, and by preventing action to address climate change, it is poisonous to our entire planet. By introducing this legislation, we are giving our Republican colleagues a chance to show the American people where they stand--with the individual voters we were all sent here to represent, who massively want there to be climate action, or with the billionaires and corporate interests pursuing a quiet, hostile takeover of American democracy using dark money and threats. The cockroaches are everywhere. I say, let's turn on the lights. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 15 minutes as in morning business.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. First, let me thank Chairman Alexander for his support and assistance in getting us to this point. He has also, until I rotated off the HELP Committee and onto the Finance Committee, been my chairman on the HELP Committee. Both in his work as the appropriations subcommittee chair here managing this bill, I thank him, and for all of his leadership on the HELP Committee when I was a member of that committee, I thank him. As the Senate looks at this measure, I want to try to explain it in as simple terms as possible because I think this is a complete slam- dunk, win-win amendment. A next generation of nuclear power capability is being developed, and a great deal of the design of that next- generation nuclear capability is being done here in the United States. For a variety of reasons, those American designs are now moving to approval and construction in other countries, particularly including China. I don't think it is a good idea for us to be designing new technologies but have them deployed in other countries. We are trying to address some of the hiccups that prevent this from going forward in the United States. Our U.S. Navy uses nuclear fuel all the time. I think it is widely known that our aircraft carriers and submarines operate with nuclear engines. They do so very safely. They do so with the expert support of our U.S. Navy. Then, at the end of the day, they generate spent fuel that gets taken off of the aircraft carrier or the submarine when the engine is refueled. The question is, What becomes of that spent fuel? What this bill would do is to allow the Navy to give access to that spent fuel to our National Labs. America's National Labs are a science gem of global proportions. The scientists who work in our National Labs are brilliant. They are extraordinary. They are at the cutting edge of a great number of issues and developments. One of them is--guess what-- next-generation nuclear power. What access to the Navy's fuel would do is to allow them, under the strict controls that are protecting our National Labs, to begin to work through testing how some of these next- generation nuclear plants might work. Why is it a big deal for us to look at developing in the United States this next generation of nuclear power? One obvious reason is that it is carbon-free power, and we have already blown through 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That is way out of the range that we have been in the entire history of humankind on this planet, and it will have all sorts of cascading effects on our climate, our atmosphere, and our oceans. Nuclear power avoids all of those ancillary risks of fossil fuel power. The other problem is that we have been operating with old-school nuclear power for quite a long time in this country, and we have built up a very substantial reserve of nuclear waste, of spent fuel. At the moment, the Senate and the Congress and, indeed, the U.S. Government have no plan for getting rid of that nuclear waste. There have been fights over sticking it in caves in Nevada. There have been all sorts of ideas, but we do not currently have an operating plan. A great deal of that nuclear waste is, simply, stored at the powerplant at which the power was generated. That is a big liability, I believe. I think that if we were to act as if we were a corporation and book as a liability the liability of the cost of having to safely dispose of all of that nuclear waste, it would get the companies' accountants' attention, and they would invest some effort into figuring out what the solution is to dealing with all of those stockpiles of nuclear waste for which we currently have no plan. Here is where the two lines converge, because the next-generation nuclear technologies carry the promise of being able to take our nuclear waste stockpile and repurpose it as fuel--to turn toxic, dangerous, multi-10,000-year waste, with a huge liability attached to it, into an asset, a power-producing asset. To me, this is a very small investment in a potential solution to a very big problem. I think we can have considerable confidence that the U.S. Navy knows what it is doing in handling these nuclear fuels and that our National Labs know what they are doing in handling nuclear materials. The trust of the Navy and the trust of the National Labs and the expertise of the National Labs, in their giving us the ability to actually create a potential solution to at least a significant part of our nuclear waste problem, is worth the small investment that, I hope, my colleagues will be willing to make today. I particularly thank Senator Crapo, who has worked with me very closely on this whole nuclear innovation side. He is a real leader in this area. I am happy to be his Democratic colleague working on this. I hope that with that explanation, we can come to a measure of agreement that this is actually a good, ``no losers'' idea and be able to vote on it tomorrow. I hope we will have a very strong and successful vote. With all of that, I yield the floor to the floor manager from the Republican side.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Of course. I am finished, until I go to my business related to your bill.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, first, let me thank the senior Senator from New Jersey for those remarks. It was a privilege and a pleasure to be here to hear them delivered. We had a hearing in the Judiciary Committee this morning with a representative of Homeland Security who was virtually incapable of explaining any of what they were trying to do here. I think we now have five or six different explanations from the Trump administration. One is, the Bible made me do it--the Attorney General; the other is, the Democrats made me do it; the third is, we are actually not doing it; the fourth is, we are doing it to build legislative leverage; and the fifth is, we are doing it in order to deter people from coming to our shores. I doubt any of those are true, but, for sure, they can't all be true. It is a mess, but it is nothing like the mess of the images the Senator from New Jersey called to the conscience of the country today.