Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, this bill is the product of the most secretive and partisan process I have seen in my 10 years in the Senate. Who did the magicians who came up with this listen to? They obviously didn't listen to the doctors. The American Medical Association is opposed to this. The American Pediatric Society is opposed to this. The American Academy of Family Physicians is opposed to this. Certainly the doctors didn't get a chance to get heard in this process. How about the hospitals? The American Hospital Association is opposed to this. Catholic hospitals are opposed to this. Rural hospitals are warning that this could end their very existence. Let's have a process that gives the hospitals a chance to be listened to. The nurses in Rhode Island are opposed to this. I think nurses around the country are opposed to this. Why not have an open process that gives the nurses a chance to be heard? Our community health centers are opposed to this. They have been to Washington to say: Please don't do this. You will be hurting real people whom we care for. Illness advocacy groups--the people they are fighting for are stuck in this healthcare system with serious illnesses. Did we listen to the American Cancer Society? No. Did we listen to the American Lung Association? No. We didn't even listen to the hemophilia group, for Pete's sake. Addiction treatment groups are against this. We have listened to nobody. We didn't even listen to the Republican Governors, let alone the Democratic Governors, like my Governor, who is telling me: We are working fine. We having people on Medicaid. Our exchanges are working. Why fire this torpedo into perfectly working exchanges when we can be working on fixing the few where it is not working? Why are we here? Who is behind this? Who was telling the little group of magicians in their secretive back room what to do? This is what happens when a party becomes beholden to a small handful of creepy billionaires and stops listening to the people. They are conducting a freakish social experiment on other people's health coverage, because you can bet those billionaires have all the coverage they need, but they have this ideology about taking coverage away from people by the millions. And our Republican friends are standing up in lockstep to march the billionaire march on a bill that everybody hates and that will cause damage in everybody's home State. And it doesn't matter because the billionaires have the dark money, the dark money floods our politics, and everybody marches to the tune of the anonymous billionaires. We could be doing great things. We could be solving the known problem of end-of-life care and making sure people get their wishes honored at that precious time. We could be dealing with opioid and behavioral health issues that are bedeviling communities across this country. We could be helping doctors with payment reform that lets them treat people in a way that keeps them healthier, rather than having to wait to be paid until they do stuff to people--running up the cost of healthcare. We could be dealing with hospital-acquired infections. How many people know someone who had a hospital-acquired infection, which brings enormous costs into the system as you have to treat it? Do we address that? No, because we didn't bother to listen to the hospitals. We could do something about pharmaceutical prices. People in America are irate about jacked-up pharmaceutical prices, driven up by people who aren't even in the drug manufacturing industry but are just speculating on their ability to use monopoly pricing to drive up prices. But they put money into the system, so they get what they want. This bill is a nightmare in and of its own, and it is a colossal missed opportunity to do something good for the American people that will actually help them. So let's support Senator Murray's motion to recommit and just try the regular order that the majority leader has proclaimed he was a champion of for year after year, until the creepy billionaires said to him: We are giving you the money; this is the bill we want. We don't care about those people or those hospitals. Shove it through because it suits our ideology. This is no way to govern. Give the people, the hospitals, the doctors, the nurses, the community health centers, and the people suffering from illnesses at least a chance to be heard in some kind of open environment. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I intend to file the following motion to H.R. 1628 and I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the Record. The motion is supported by Senators Brown, Franken, Van Hollen, Cardin, and Feinstein.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I appreciate the remarks of my friend. I would simply note that nothing he has said explains why you would want to strip hundreds of millions of dollars out of Medicaid or why you want to deny coverage to elderly folks who get Medicaid support for their nursing homes, people who are in the throes of addiction getting medical support for opioid treatment, children are often born on Medicaid--why you want to do all that. Nor does it explain why you would want to give big tax breaks to the most well-off people in the country. Fine, let's fix the markets, if that is the problem, but this isn't really about that. This is stripping money out of Medicaid to give it to very wealthy people who are doing quite well already, in my view. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, something else happened this afternoon in Washington that I wish to relate today on the floor, which is that the American Enterprise Institute hosted the launch of Senator Schatz's and my American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act. I am delighted the American Enterprise Institute did that. Their conservative credentials are rock solid, but they do not fear debate, and they were extraordinarily helpful and open-minded in allowing us to make the announcement and in hosting a discussion on the bill that followed. Virtually every person on the Republican side who has thought the climate change problem through to a solution has come to the same place--a revenue-neutral, border-adjustable price on carbon. That means that all of the revenues are returned to the American people. Former Treasury Secretaries Baker, Shultz, and Paulson--all Republicans--former EPA Administrators Ruckelshaus, Thomas, Reilly, and Whitman--all Republicans--and leading economists and former Presidential economic advisers Arthur Laffer, Gregory Mankiw, and Douglas Holtz-Eakin--all Republicans--along with many others, support a revenue-neutral, border-adjustable carbon fee. Well, that is what we do. You all know the phrase ``offering an olive branch.'' Former Republican Congressman Bob Inglis described our proposal as an olive limb, not a branch, when pairing a carbon tax with corporate tax reduction. He said it provides what he called ``an opportunity for conservatives to show how free enterprise can solve climate change.'' When I first came to the Senate in 2007, this place was humming with bipartisan action on climate change for years--but, in 2010, a dead stop. The Republican Party disappeared from the field after the fossil fuel industry secured from five Justices on the Supreme Court the infamous Citizens United decision. The fossil fuel industry, as if it saw the decision coming, immediately launched a veritable Soviet May Day parade of political artillery and rocketry. No special interest had that kind of political muscle before Citizens United. The combination of this industry political weaponry, plus the proliferation of dark money, plus the shady science simulacrum of climate denial has been formidable. Despite this, there is room for optimism. There are Republicans who are willing to work with us. They just need some prospect of safe passage through the political kill zone that the fossil fuel industry has created. Over 1,000 American companies have voiced their support for the Paris climate agreement, including corporate powerhouses like Walmart, Goldman Sachs, PepsiCo, and Google. If American companies were to mobilize in Congress just like they did for the Paris Agreement, that would be a game-changer. But notwithstanding all of that corporate support, the big business trade associations and lobbying groups have lined up against action on climate change. The so-called U.S. Chamber of Commerce--probably more accurately described as the U.S. chamber of carbon--is one of climate action's most implacable enemies, despite the good climate policies of so many of its member companies. How is it representing its members? It is incredible. The American Petroleum Institute represents Shell, BP, Total, and Exxon--companies that claim to support the Paris Agreement and the Climate Leadership Council's carbon fee proposal--but API opposes anything getting done. We all know here that corporate America commands extraordinary attention in our political system. If American corporations aligned their political engagement on climate change with their actual position on climate change, which should not be asking too much of them, we could get going. So, in a spirit of hopefulness, Senator Schatz and I reintroduced at the American Enterprise Institute our American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act, a framework that I hope both Republicans and Democrats can embrace. The bill would establish an economy-wide carbon fee on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. The fee would be assessed where it is easiest to administer, minimizing the compliance burden. Other greenhouse gases would be tied to their carbon dioxide equivalency with a bumper for fluorocarbons to account for their high greenhouse gas potency. Sequestering, utilizing, or encapsulating carbon dioxide emissions would earn you a credit. The market would begin to work in this space. Our bill sets the 2018 fee per ton of carbon emitted at $49--the central range of the social cost of carbon last estimated by the Office of Management and Budget. That fee would increase each year at a real 2 percent until emissions fall 80 percent below 2005 levels, and then it would follow inflation. Border adjustments for energy-intensive goods traded with countries that have weaker or no carbon pricing will make sure that we protect our industries at home. We took care to design the border adjustments in harmony with World Trade Organization rules. This carbon fee would produce meaningful reductions in carbon emissions. The nonpartisan Resources for the Future projects a 36- percent drop by 2025, compared to the benchmark year of 2005, exceeding the U.S.-Paris Agreement commitment significantly. In addition to the environmental value, of course, a carbon fee also generates revenue--in this case, nearly $2.1 trillion in revenue over 10 years. Our plan would return every dime of that to the American people. Here is how. First, the bill lowers the top corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 29 percent--a longstanding goal of Republicans. This would cut American corporate taxes by almost $600 billion over the first decade. Second, it provides workers with a $550 refundable tax credit--$1,100 for a couple--against payroll taxes. The tax credits, which would grow with inflation, would return almost $900 billion to the pocketbooks of American households over the first 10 years. Third, it would provide a matching benefit to Social Security beneficiaries, veterans program beneficiaries, and certain other retirees. These benefits would total nearly $500 billion over 10 years. Finally, the bill would establish a block grant program, delivering the remaining funds to our States--over $100 billion to help workers in coal country, for instance, or provide coastal protection for seaside States facing terrible threats of sea level rise, at the discretion of the State, to meet local needs and concerns. I understand the suffering in coal country. Coal country will continue to decline as natural gas drives coal out of the energy market. There is now no mechanism to remedy that inevitability. Remember Huey Long's old slogan, ``Every Man a King''? With a carbon fee, we could make every miner a king--a solid pension, retirement at any time, full health benefits for life, a cash bonus based on years worked, a voucher for a new vehicle, a college plan for their kids. These things become doable with carbon fee revenues. It is not the miners' fault that the coal industry has collapsed. They worked hard. They did dangerous work. It is a rigorous occupation to be a coal miner, and they are entitled to respect. Give them their dignity. Make them kings. With a small fraction of the revenue from a carbon fee, we could assure every single coal miner a lifetime of comfort, security, and financial stability. Senator Schatz and I extend an open hand, an olive branch. Give Senator Schatz and me a Republican to negotiate with. That shouldn't be too much to ask. Then let's talk about the economics. Let's talk about where the revenue should go. And because I know it is a part of the Baker-Schultz-Paulson proposal, let's talk about where we can get fact- based, scientifically rigorous analytics of which regulations might become unnecessary or duplicative of a carbon fee's emission reductions. Let's restart the bipartisan conversation we had going until 2010. Let me close with an appeal to our patriotic sense. America holds herself out as an exemplary nation, a ``City on a Hill.'' The tactics of climate denial and political menace the fossil fuel industry has deployed around here have degraded our city. There is a remorseless functioning of the laws of physics, of chemistry, and of biology. Deny them all you want, but time will tell. And even now, everyone, from our Secretary of Defense to every single Senator's home State, State university, understands that climate change is real and urgent, is teaching the science of climate change in those universities, and is warning of the dire consequences. When the Presiding Officer left the Environment and Public Works Committee the other day, I was talking about the Leopold Center at Iowa State University and the powerful language in which they describe the present effects on agriculture of climate change and the danger of disruption to the fundamental systems of the planet. That is the home State universities telling us what the facts are. So one day there will be a reckoning, and the longer our American democracy lies incapacitated at the hands of the fossil fuel industry, the worse the outcome will be, and the worse the outcome, the greater the harm to the country we love that holds its example up to the world. We are all extremely fond of John McCain. John McCain returned to the Senate yesterday and called our country ``the strong, inspiring, inspirational beacon of liberty and defender of dignity of all human beings.'' Some beacon, if we continue to get this wrong because of what one industry did to our politics, using political menace, dark money, and fake science. America deserves better than what we are doing in this Chamber on this issue. I thank the Presiding Officer. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, let me open my remarks by saying that from the very beginning of this ill-starred healthcare misadventure the Republicans have been on, Democrats have over and over again offered to help and to participate. Over and over again, we have spoken to, for instance, Chairman Alexander on the HELP Committee, saying: Give us a shot. Try something. We can do this. You have talked all these years about regular order. How many times have we heard the majority leader say that regular order is the way to go and talk about how important the Senate is because it follows regular order? It looks as though all of that was nothing but a lot of bunkum because when he had the chance to come here and actually trust the Senate to work through regular order, what did he do? The very first day, he jammed through reconciliation to open a purely partisan pathway to undoing ObamaCare. Well, people have discovered that a lot of what they thought was their good healthcare is ObamaCare. So people on Medicaid, people whose private policies now don't have preexisting condition limits, caps on how much can be spent in a year or in a lifetime, folks who will get their money through the exchange, suddenly they have all discovered ``Oh my gosh, that was ObamaCare. Don't take that away from me.'' That is one of the reasons we see all of the groups who come here concerned about healthcare lined up against this bill. This bill, other than the creepy cabal of billionaires who are behind it, doesn't have a friend. And it just shows how narrow the Republican Party has now become that they will follow the creepy billionaires off the cliff against the advice of so many respected American organizations. How about the American Cancer Society? The American Cancer Society says that the Republican bill would leave patients and those with preexisting conditions paying more for less coverage. They have come out against the bill. I have a constituent home in Rhode Island, and her name is Patricia. She and her daughters live in a beautiful place in Rhode Island, Wakefield, RI. Like a lot of people I have heard from, Patricia is afraid. She is afraid that what this Congress is going to do is to repeal the Affordable Care Act and let health insurers go back to discriminating against people with preexisting conditions. What is hers? Well, Patricia and her daughters have a genetic mutation, and that genetic mutation increases their risk of cancer. They would ordinarily be counting on the American Cancer Society to argue for them, and sure enough, the American Cancer Society has come out against the Republican health legislation. Well, it got real for Patricia last year when her 34-year-old daughter was battling breast cancer. Fortunately, her health insurance covered her treatment, and it worked. She is now cancer-free. But because of their genetic mutation, Patricia and her daughters will need to be screened frequently for the rest of their lives. Under the Affordable Care Act, these potentially lifesaving screenings are covered, and Patricia and her daughters are not penalized for having a preexisting condition. Why on Earth would you want to go back to a world in which those two things weren't true? Patricia wrote: A genetic mutation is not caused by an unhealthy or careless lifestyle, as some members of Congress seem to think. You can do everything ``right'' and still end up with cancer or another debilitating disease. So she urged me to consider all the people who would be affected by the new healthcare bill, not just looking out for the rich and the healthy. Another group who came out against this was the American Association of Retired Persons, the AARP. This bill may have changed, but the results are the same. The results are higher costs and less coverage for older Americans. Why would you want to do that? And this isn't just language from the AARP; it comes home again. Lisa from Pascoag, up in northern Rhode Island--a bucolic, rural part of Rhode Island--wrote to share her experience with the Affordable Care Act. This is her and her husband's third year on their ACA plan. Like many Rhode Islanders, they qualify for financial assistance to help them afford their health insurance. You would think that would be a good thing. Lisa thinks it is a good thing. She wrote to me that she thanks God every day that they have quality health insurance they can afford. Her husband is a welder fabricator--a job that takes a toll. He has had several blood tests this year and recently began seeing a hematologist. Lisa knows that this type of specialty care would have been out of reach for their family without their current coverage, and so she is worried. She is frightened by the Republican health plan. She and her husband are 56 and 62 years old. They are within AARP's interests. And she understands that because of their age, under the Republican plan, their premiums could go up five to eight times what they are paying today--five to eight times what they are paying today-- and the tax credits that have been proposed, in Lisa's words, ``won't cut it.'' Doctors know a little bit about healthcare, and the American College of Physicians has come out in opposition. ``The BCRA . . . will not preserve and improve essential coverage, benefits and consumer protections, and access to care'' is their concern. Of course, why would you want to listen to the doctors about healthcare when you have a little pack of creepy billionaires who are telling you what to do? Never bother to listen to the doctors. Well, Judith from Riverside, RI, is a doctor. She is a physician who works at a community mental health center in Providence. Judy told me that she sees the benefits of the Affordable Care Act every single day. She treats patients with serious mental illnesses, and they have what she called ``tremendous'' healthcare and social service needs. Prior to the Affordable Care Act, almost all of her patients were uninsured, and she spent her days scrambling to try to find different avenues to get them free care, to get them whatever they could scrounge. Since the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, she said, almost all of her patients have health insurance and they are able to get the medical care they need. As Judy put it, with all of their life challenges, at least they don't have to worry that they can't afford care. Planned Parenthood is a favorite target of our Republican friends, and Planned Parenthood is strongly opposed to these measures. Women get a lot of their healthcare from Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood said: ``With this latest version of TrumpCare, women will pay the biggest price of all.'' Olive is a young woman living in Providence who shared her experience with me about how Planned Parenthood has been a reliable source of healthcare for her throughout her life. As a college student, Olive went to Planned Parenthood for birth control and well-woman care. She had a routine exam, and a doctor at Planned Parenthood found a lump in her breast. Twenty years old and far from her family, Olive said she was worried but never felt alone. Planned Parenthood connected her with the followup care and testing that she needed. She was treated by their doctors. Fortunately, the mass turned out to be benign, but Olive says she is forever grateful to Planned Parenthood for their help to her during a scary situation for a young woman. Olive is still a patient at Planned Parenthood, and she even volunteers at their health clinic in Providence. She knows firsthand how important Planned Parenthood is for healthcare for millions of men and women across the country--particularly women--and, like the other people who have written to me, she is afraid of what will happen if Republicans succeed in defunding Planned Parenthood. Small business folks have spoken to me about this. There is a lot of talk about how you need more freedom not to have insurance and freedom to be told you can't have insurance if you are sick. That is not the kind of freedom I think we really want to support around here. The freedom we want to support is for somebody to be able to follow their dreams, and over and over again, I hear from people who are able to get free of being linked to their employer healthcare plan and go out on their own because of the Affordable Care Act. Laura is a small business owner in our capital city, Providence. She and her husband own an architectural design and construction firm that builds homes around Rhode Island. Construction is not a line of work you want to be in without health insurance. Well, because of the Affordable Care Act, Laura and her husband have affordable health insurance and dental coverage, and they have it for the first time. They can see the doctors they want to see, and their out-of-pocket costs are reasonable. The Affordable Care Act has allowed small business owners like Laura and her husband to pursue their professional dreams, boosting our local economy and creating jobs for others without having to risk their livelihoods and life savings if an illness or an injury befalls them. Just last night, I was in Narragansett, RI, and a woman came up to me to say: When you get back down there, please fight for us on the Affordable Care Act. She said: The Affordable Care Act has given me two things. One, it has given me my freedom. Because of the Affordable Care Act, I was able to leave my employer-supported program and have the confidence to go out on my own and become an illustrator. Her business is so successful that she has actually started hiring people to support her business. She said: That freedom to be an entrepreneur, to succeed, would never ever have happened if I had been chain-locked to my employer program and did not have an affordable option like the Affordable Care Act provides. Second, she said: Once I did this, once I started my business, I then went for checkups. I was able to get tests that I could not have gotten before, and what they found was a tumor behind my eye. Luckily, it was not cancerous, but had they not caught it, she said, I would have lost my sight. If you are an illustrator, being blind is a very tough proposition. She said: I have my freedom, and I have my sight because of this law. Sheldon, fight for me. Janice from Cranston is the last person I will mention tonight. She wrote in to share how important the Affordable Care Act has been to her and her husband and how important our Rhode Island marketplace has been for her. She said: There may be marketplaces that aren't working in different places around the country. Fine, go fix those. Don't mess with mine. It is working in Rhode Island, and Janice is one of the beneficiaries of it. She is now retired. She lives with her husband Bob in Cranston. Before the Affordable Care Act, she tried to buy health insurance in the individual market, and it was quoted to her at $800 per month--not affordable to her, not with limited income like that. So Janice and Bob have quality affordable insurance through Rhode Island's health insurance exchange, and they are happy about it. Don't disrupt their lives. Janice actually told me that her health insurance premium actually went down this year, and so she splurged with the savings and bought dental insurance as well. That was a success. She wrote to me: ``I wouldn't have been able to afford healthcare if it wasn't for ObamaCare.'' Like so many of these other people who have written in, Janice says that she and Bob are scared to death that they will lose their insurance if the Affordable Care Act is repealed. She doesn't understand how some Members of Congress can claim to care about their constituents and still try to repeal their healthcare coverage. Janice said: ``They have money and they have good insurance, and they must not know what it is like for people like us.'' Well, we need to remember those real people out there who are getting the Medicaid benefit, who are getting affordable insurance through the exchanges and getting help with the premiums and the people who are on private insurance but no longer have to face lifetime caps or annual caps or preexisting conditions. Even people who are still on Blue Cross have gotten a benefit from this. Why would we want to take that all away? The last thing I want to mention is this. Those are all personal stories, and it is really important to remember that behind this creepy billionaire effort to perform some kind of ideological experiment on people by taking away their healthcare, there are actually real people who are really going to suffer in their real lives, and it will have been deliberately done to them by people here who simply couldn't say no to the creepy billionaires. There is another piece of this. It is a little more complicated, but I will close on this. I love to use this graph. I use it all the time. This axis of the graph shows how long people live in different countries. The range is from 72 to 86. This part of the graph shows how much people pay in different countries for healthcare per year. Virtually everybody that we compete with is right in here--Japan, Greece, United Kingdom, Germany, and France. They are right in here. They do pretty well on life expectancy, and here they are in this cross of the $2,000 to $6,000 per year range. The most expensive other country in the world is Switzerland, at $6,000 per year. Look at where the United States is. We spend $8,500 per year--way more, double more than what the average is of the other countries we compete against. For that we get super killer life expectancy. I guess killer life expectancy isn't the right phrase to use. But do you get great life expectancy on that vast expenditure of healthcare? No. We compete with the Czech Republic. We compete with Croatia. Part of what the Affordable Care Act did was to try to focus on this. Here is the punch line. One of the things we do in the Budget Committee is that we look at things in 10-year chunks. If you look at the 10-year chunk from 2018, which is this year right here, to 2027, here is a 10-year period. What this graph shows is that, back here in 2010, the Congressional Budget Office did a prediction of what the healthcare costs for the country was going to be in this 10-year period. They said this is how much we are going to have to spend on Federal healthcare. What happened is that we passed the Affordable Care Act and costs started to go down. They came in below expectations. Around here, they rebooted the test, and they did a new projection based on the new information for this same 10-year period. As you will notice, the costs that we have projected for that 10-year period from 2018 to 2027, inclusive, have fallen. They have fallen by $3.3 trillion. If you want to talk about savings on our debt and deficit, if you want to talk about savings in healthcare, this red line was projected before the Affordable Care Act, and the green line--the difference--was the projection after the Affordable Care Act was law and after the results began to come in. I can't promise you that every single one of those $3.3 trillion in savings was a direct result of a provision in the Affordable Care Act, but when we have delivered $3.3 trillion in savings, why would we never want to talk about that? Why would we want to put any of that at risk? Why would we want to go back to the preexisting condition of this prediction and pile $3.3 trillion back into that out-year period? It makes no sense. So whether you are a person who has constituents who are real and who are going to suffer, who are going to suffer in real life as a result of the decision and the vote that you cast tomorrow, or whether you are a propeller-headed budget hawk who just wants to figure out how you can reduce America's costs, why would you vote for a bill and put any of this at risk? Why the fear of your constituents? Why the $3.3 trillion in savings? It makes no sense. I will end where I began. If people will come to their senses and want to do this in a bipartisan fashion, during regular order--boy, did we hear a lot about regular order until regular order wasn't wanted any longer--we are here. We want to work with you. There are tons of ideas out there. We can work to improve the healthcare system for the real people in the real world, and not just do what we are told by a cabal of creepy billionaires who are yanking the chain of the Republican Party. With that, 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. I ask unanimous consent to be allowed to speak as in morning business for up to 15 minutes.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, to the disappointment of the American public, the world scientific community, and even to corporate giants like Goldman Sachs and Cargill, President Trump recently decided to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement. He cited as justification a slew of alternative facts. Some of the most egregious of these alternative facts came from a National Economic Resource Associates--a group we will call NERA in this speech--report that was commissioned and promoted by a group that calls itself the U.S. Chamber of Commerce but fronts for the fossil fuel industry. ``U.S. Chamber of Carbon'' might be a better and more accurate name for it. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, so-called, is a heavy hitter in Washington. It was the second largest spender of anonymous outside money, or dark money, in the 2016 Federal elections, second only to the National Rifle Association. In addition to all that political election spending, it wields the largest lobbying force on Capitol Hill. In 2015, the chamber dropped over $100 million on lobbying. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is one of climate action's most implacable enemies, as everybody here knows, despite the good climate policies of so many companies on its board. Along with Senators Warren, Sanders, and others, I examined this inconsistency between the positions of the chamber and of its board members in our recent report, ``The U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Out of Step with the American People and its Members.'' Mr. President. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record excerpts from the report, ``The U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Out of Step with the American People and its Members.''

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. When President Trump announced his withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, he used these alternative facts from that chamber- commissioned NERA report. Here is what Trump said: Compliance with the terms of the Paris Accord and the onerous energy restrictions it has placed on the United States could cost America as much as 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025. . . . This includes 440,000 fewer manufacturing jobs. End of alternative facts quote. This was another assertion: By 2040, compliance with the commitments put into place by the previous administration would cut production for the following sectors: paper down 12 percent; cement down 23 percent; iron and steel down 38 percent; coal--and I happen to love the coal miners--down 86 percent; natural gas down 31 percent. The cost to the economy at this time would be close to $3 trillion in lost GDP and 6.5 million industrial jobs, while households would have $7,000 less income and, in many cases, much worse than that. End quote of his alternative facts. Countless reviewers, including PolitiFact, Scientific American--that known crazy, phony, liberal publication, Scientific American--CNBC, and Fortune magazine, fact-checked the President's speech. It did not fare well. PolitiFact warned us to ``take these statistics with a grain of salt.'' An analysis of the underlying report was done by Kenneth Gillingham, an economics professor at Yale University. He pointed out that the NERA study made up a hypothetical set of policy actions to reach those goals. Those policy actions may well never have been taken by anyone to comply with the Paris Agreement, but that was what they used. Second, NERA only modeled the cost side. You have heard the phrase ``cost-benefit equation.'' They only looked at the costs. They didn't ever look at the benefit side. This is phony accounting when you only look at one side of the ledger. NERA, of course, has a history of producing misleading reports for its industry sponsors. In 2015, it released a report for the National Association of Manufacturers on the proposed ozone standard, claiming it would cost as much as $140 billion per year. On the cost side, EPA estimated it would cost a fraction of what NERA estimated, less than 12 percent. The economic consulting firm Synapse analyzed the NAM report and found it ``grossly overstates compliance costs, due to major flaws, math errors, and unfounded assumptions . . . these assumptions and other flaws led NERA to overstate compliance costs by more than 700 percent.'' That is just on the cost side. Once again, they didn't even bother to look at the benefits. It is a one-side-of-the-ledger-phony analysis. Of course, the chamber commissioned NERA to do the same thing for it on climate: overestimate the costs and ignore the benefits. In this world of climate denial, this is a classic maneuver. Senator Ted Cruz cited the NERA report in his CNN op-ed urging President Trump to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement a day before President Trump cited these stats in his withdrawal speech. Cruz, Trump, and the chamber ignored more than 1,000 companies that supported the United States remaining in the Paris Agreement, including several chamber member companies. Some of these have publicly distanced themselves from the chamber as a result of the President's decision. A recent Bloomberg news article was headlined, ``Paris Pullout Pits Chamber Against Some of Its Biggest Members.'' Citigroup said: ``We have been outspoken in our support for the Paris agreement and have had a dialogue with the Chamber about how its views and advocacy on climate policy are inconsistent with Citi's position.'' Similar distancing came from Dow and Ford. Over the weekend, the Washington Post ran a piece, ``Is the most powerful lobbyist in Washington''--that is the so-called U.S. Chamber of Commerce--``losing its grip,'' exploring this tension around climate in more detail. The article said: ``[P]erhaps the most nettlesome issue for the Chamber has been climate change.'' It calls out the chamber's claims to be neutral on the Paris Agreement, while actually providing ``ammunition for foes of the agreement.'' The article highlights the chamber's climate denial efforts, including its 2009 proposal to hold a public trial on climate science-- what it dubbed ``the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century.'' New Mexico-based utility PNM Resources actually quit the chamber because that idea was so preposterous. The Washington Post identified 8 of the 25 companies that signed an ad in the New York Times supporting the Paris Agreement as chamber members, including GE, Microsoft, and Walt Disney. The CEOs of these companies publicly criticized President Trump's decision. Microsoft's Brad Smith said: We're disappointed with the decision to exit the Paris Agreement. Microsoft remains committed to doing our part to achieve its goals. GE's Jeff Immelt said: Disappointed with today's decision on the Paris Agreement. Climate change is real. Industry must now lead and not depend on government. Walt Disney's Bob Iger said: As a matter of principle, I've resigned from the President's Council over the #Paris Agreement withdrawal. The chamber is out of step with its own members on climate change, maintaining a scientifically untenable position as every one of our State universities knows. Who is pulling the chamber's chain? It is hard to tell since the chamber hides from the public who its donors are, but I suspect the answer is the same as to why the Republicans continue to revive the hated, zombie healthcare bill despite huge public distaste for it. Mr. President, that brings me to the nomination of John Bush to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. The chamber's rigid anti- climate stance is part of a fossil fuel political program that holds this Chamber in a state of intimidation and inaction on climate change. As Congress cowers before this fossil fuel political presence, we are now advancing the nomination of a climate denier to the Federal bench. John Bush was not nominated because of any track record of distinguished performance or demonstrated commitment to public service. To the contrary, his most notable achievements seem to be a series of wildly offensive blog postings and public statements, denying that climate change is real and mocking it, comparing a woman's right to choose to the evil of slavery, casually using vile slurs against gay people. On and on goes the list. Bush has written a number of posts dealing with environmental issues in which he insists on placing the terms ``global warming'' and ``climate change'' in quotation marks, insinuating that they do not really exist. Tell that to your home State universities. With this appalling track record, why was he nominated? It is not hard to figure that out. He is here because through those offensive blog posts and by flagging himself as a loyal climate denier, he signals himself as a willing foot soldier of the big special interests. These big special interests are intent on capturing our courts, just as they have captured so much of Congress. Judicial nominees like Mr. Bush are exactly what these special interests want, to make sure they can, first, maintain their dark money influence. That is their most particular key. That is the mother ship off of which all the other special interest mischief they perform comes from and of course to see to it that these big interests are never held accountable to the American people. That is the signal he sends. Bush has flagged that he will rule the right way for the big special interests that fund the Republican Party, and the special interests' big reward is his nomination and confirmation. He has shown that he is familiar with the recipes when it comes time to cook the decisions. My Democratic colleagues and I respect any President's desire and prerogative to fill the vacancies in the executive and judicial branches. Even though I understand we will not see eye to eye with our colleagues across the aisle on every nominee, Senate Democrats have given the President's nominees a very fair shake. This is no normal nominee. This is a freak who lowers the bar on judicial nominees forever. If Mr. Bush wants to exercise his First Amendment right to spout offensive, ignorant, and hateful nonsense as some kind of nutty Breitbart blogger, he is free to do so, but that is not the measure--or has not until today been the measure of a Federal judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals. Mr. Bush is patently unqualified for this position, well outside any version of the mainstream, and his appointment can reasonably be predicted to bring dishonor and preordained partiality to the judiciary. I regret we are at this point. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, it is a great pleasure for me to be here with Senator Heitkamp. We knew each other as attorneys general so I have admired the Senator from North Dakota for a long time. From my time in West Virginia, I remember Senator Capito's father who is a very formidable and renowned political personality in West Virginia. To be here with the two of them is a personal pleasure. Senator Manchin is also joining us, so I am very happy to be here. I thank Senator Heitkamp, Senator Capito, Chairman Barrasso, and my friend Senator Graham for leading this bipartisan effort, and I thank Senator Manchin for joining us on the floor. We have more than 20 other cosponsors so this is a bill that has broad bipartisan support and has a great coalition behind it. It has everything from my great friends at the Natural Resources Defense Council, many of our friends in the AFL-CIO, to nonprofits like the Clean Air Task Force, to moderating groups like Third Way and the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, which are trying to pick their way through the divide, industry groups like Wyoming's Cloud Peak Energy coal company and West Virginia's Peabody, a coal company, and the ethanol industry. So we have really good, broad support. It is an unusual coalition, and I am excited by it. There are ways to remove carbon dioxide from the air and from emissions, and we are seeing a lot of it. I went with Lindsey Graham up to Saskatchewan to see the Boundary Dam facility, where they basically put the output of the coal-burning powerplant through a cloud of amino droplets that strip out the carbon dioxide and pump it to a nearby oilfield where they can use the carbon dioxide to pressurize the oilfield and facilitate the extraction of oil. That is made possible because they have an oilfield nearby that will pay for that carbon dioxide to use in order to extract the oil. If I remember correctly, they were getting close to $30 per ton. That is a pretty real revenue stream, but a lot of our American coal facilities do not have the luxury of being next to an oilfield that will pay for the carbon so you have to look elsewhere for revenues to make it worth your while. What we have in America is a market failure in which there is nobody who will pay you for removing carbon pollution. The way our market is structured it just does not work. The simplest approach, of course, would be to put a proper price on carbon and let the whole economy go to work in solving the problem of carbon pollution. Short of that, this bill takes an important step by putting a value on reducing carbon emissions by paying facilities with a tax credit for every ton of carbon emissions they can keep out of the atmosphere. If we can get this passed and if we can get this into the Tax Code so it is lasting, then investors can look at it and say: Hey, we can finally put some money behind these technologies, and we can get them going, not just in the power sector. This reaches into industrial carbon capture, into technologies like carbon utilization, and into really exciting new technologies like direct air capture. Now, most of these are happening elsewhere. To look for the models, you have to go to Saskatchewan, like I did and like Senator Heitkamp has done, or you have to go to Iceland, where they are pumping carbon dioxide down into geological structures where it reacts and becomes stone, or you have to go to Switzerland, where they are taking direct air carbon capture technologies, because, there, their market is not broken so there actually is a return on this. We are seeing good work at our National Labs, I will say, which is funded by Congress and people like Dr. Julio Friedmann, whom Senator Heitkamp and I know and work with. We are doing exciting stuff. Yet to take it to a marketable level, there has to be a business strategy. You have to be able to make a business case to investors if you are going to put money behind building what could be a multi-hundred-million- dollar carbon capture plant. This will begin to do that, and it makes me very excited. In particular, I thank my cosponsors for making sure we are not talking about CCS any longer and that we are talking about CCUS. It is not carbon capture and storage. It is carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration. I have also been to Shenandoah, IA. Shenandoah, IA, has a big ethanol plant, and there is a company, called bioprocessH2O, that is in the exhaust stream of that ethanol plant. They pipe out their waste heat, their waste energy, their waste CO2, their wastewater all into a plant that grows algae, and the algae eats up the CO2. They take about 15 percent of it out of the stream, and it turns it into a product. They use it for feed, for cattle, for fish. They use it for makeup and other products. They use it for a whole variety of purposes. It is a new form of agriculture that is going to be very valuable, and the fact that you can make it efficient to strip carbon dioxide out of a plant's exhaust is a great thing. This is a good way we can work together. It may be the first time I can think of that Senator McConnell and I have ever been on a bill together. He is not on it now in this particular iteration because neither he nor the Speaker want to get onto a bill that is a tax bill while they are looking at tax reform. Yet, clearly, we know where their hearts are from the fact that they were on it the last time. So there is a lot of welcomed political news around this, and I think it has the chance of really revving up American industry so it is not the Canadians and the Icelanders and the Swiss who are cleaning our clocks because we have not bothered to get our economic structure in order to make this a profitable undertaking. It is a great first step, and I am proud to be a part of it. I yield to my friend, the Senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Does the Senator know that, in Cumberland, RI, there used to be coal mining? In fact, there are still coal mines underground in New Cumberland, WV. Every once in a while, one collapses, so we have been there.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, there was an interesting press conference earlier today in which I joined with Senator Heitkamp, Senator Capito, and Senator Barrasso on a common piece of legislation that will help address climate change. That does not happen often, so it was a good sign. This is not a comprehensive solution. It may not even make much of a measurable difference, but it will make some difference. It will help drive America's technological edge, and it will help, as it gets implemented, reduce our carbon emissions. It was very good to be working with those Senators. The fundamental problem we face with carbon capture and utilization and the reason so little of it now happens is economics. There is a flaw in the market economics related to carbon capture utilization and sequestration. Here is the flaw: There is no business proposition for stripping out the carbon dioxide, and in a market economy, if no one will pay for something, you don't get very much of it. Lindsey Graham and I flew up to Saskatchewan to see Boundary Dam, a carbon capture plant at a coal-powered electric generating facility where they are removing the carbon dioxide by running the exhaust from the plant through, essentially, a cloud of aminos. They are able to sequester closing on 80 percent of the carbon, and they use it to pump out and into nearby oil fields to pressurize the oil to facilitate extraction. Up in Saskatchewan at Boundary Dam, they have proved that the technology works, and where they are, with a little financing help from the Province, the economics work also. Unfortunately, not every coal-burning plant is on an oil field where the carbon dioxide can be used for extraction. Other than the facility in Saskatchewan, there is not a lot going on, on this continent. The Illinois facility collapsed, the facility in the South just collapsed, and there is one in Texas that is going on. But the bill the four of us got together on--which would be to create a tax credit paid for each ton of carbon that is captured and utilized or sequestered--could really make a difference. Knowing those credits are out there is the kind of reliance industry needs in order to invest in the technologies to make this happen. Of course, a real market for carbon reduction technologies ultimately requires putting a price on carbon emissions. We can fiddle around with payments for reduced carbon, but ultimately a price on carbon is the sensible economic solution. I think that is pretty much universally agreed by economists. Everyone agrees that carbon dioxide emissions are not a good thing. Everyone also agrees that carbon dioxide emissions are free to emitters now, so we get a lot of them. A harmful thing that is free to the emitter is called, in economic terms, an externality. It is an externality because the cost of the harm is external to the price of the product. A basic tenet of market economics is that the cost of a harm should be built into the price of the product that causes the harm. It is basically an economic version of being polite. If you throw your trash over into your neighbor's yard instead of paying for your trash collection, well, your neighbor has to clean up your mess and you are being really rude--a bad neighbor. In essence, that is what the fossil fuel industry has been doing with their carbon dioxide emissions for years--not paying to clean them up, dumping them all into our common atmosphere and our common oceans, making their neighbors pay because they don't want to pay for their own waste. Like that bad neighbor, they have come up with various excuses: Oh, it would be too expensive for us to pay for our trash collection. Or, our trash is actually good for your yard; it kind of composts it a bit. You will love it. It is better for you to clean it up. Then there is my personal favorite: If you make us take care of our own waste, we will beat you up--politically, at least, which is why the fossil fuel industry spends so much money on politics, just to be able to make that threat credible. And around here, boy, is it credible. It explains virtually fully our failure as an institution to address this patently obvious problem that our own home State universities are telling us is real. From Utah to Rhode Island, the universities we support and root for know and teach climate science. Anyway, I have a carbon price bill that would cause a technological boom in carbon capture and carbon utilization because, at last, there would be a reason to pay for it, and the free market could get to work. American ingenuity could get to work. With that market signal and with funding from revenues that the fee would generate, we could actually extend the life of existing coal plants being shuttered by competition from natural gas, by stripping their carbon dioxide emissions so that they actually didn't do the damage that they are doing now, they stopped throwing their trash into their neighbors' yard, and they paid for trash collection. The technology needs to be there and the economics need to be there, and then it can be done. We really ought to pass the carbon fee bill. I would add that the carbon fee bill also creates a lot of revenue. We, I think, have agreed that revenue ought not go to fund the government--not to make Big Government--but there are other things we can do with it that would be very helpful. One would be to make coal country whole for the economic losses coal country has sustained. Remember Huey Long's old slogan: ``Every man a king.'' We could make every miner a king--with a solid pension, retirement at any time, full health benefits for life for the family, a cash account based on years worked, a voucher for a new vehicle, a college plan for their kids. It all becomes doable if we pass a carbon fee and use the revenues to help coal country. Otherwise, nothing will change. Coal country will just keep suffering as natural gas keeps driving coal out of the energy market. There is no mechanism now to remedy that inevitability. People will suffer. There is a remedy right there--a carbon fee--that can help fund and encourage the development of the technologies so that we can strip the carbon dioxide out of the emitting powerplants and so that we can go into these coal countries where pensions and benefits have been stripped by bankruptcy, by the collapse of this industry, and make those folks whole again. Give them their dignity. Let them retire now. It is not their fault that the coal industry has collapsed. They worked hard. They did dangerous work. They went down in the mines. They worked big equipment. It is a dangerous occupation to be a coal miner, and it is entitled to respect. Retire any time, full health benefits for you and the family, a cash account to help, a new vehicle voucher, a college plan for the kids, to make sure they are well-educated--you could do a lot of those things. You could help those people pass a carbon fee and make every coal miner a king. In the meantime, I am willing to find funding to flip the social cost of carbon--the way we did in our bill, announced today--and create a positive fee, a tax credit for carbon capture and carbon utilization. I am willing to work with Republican colleagues to find a way to pay our nuclear fleet for the carbon-free nature of its nuclear power. It is crazy to be closing safely operating nuclear power facilities just because they get zero economic value for the carbon-free nature of their power. The carbon-free nature of their power has value. The carbon-free nature of power has significant value. That is why we are offering in our legislation a tax credit of $30 to $50 per avoided ton of carbon dioxide emissions. That implies that an avoided ton of carbon dioxide emissions is worth $30 to $50. If nuclear power avoids that, I am willing to work with my Republican colleagues to figure out a way so that our nuclear fleet can enjoy the actual economic advantage of the carbon-free power they produce. We close a nuclear plant so we can open a natural gas plant which pollutes more than the nuclear plant because the economics are so fouled up that the nuclear plant gets no value for carbon-free power and the natural gas plant pays no costs for the harm of its carbon emissions. It is economic madness. We know that carbon-free nature has value. We know that the carbon- free nature of nuclear power has value. We just will not pay for it, and plants close due to that market failure, and jobs are lost, and power is lost, and new investments have to be stood up in polluting plants to make the difference. It is crazy. In closing, the Heitkamp-Whitehouse-Capito-Barrasso bill, the FUTURE bill, to provide a tax credit for carbon capture utilization and sequestration in powerplants, in factories, and in a variety of applications, is small. It is in some respects a gesture, but everything begins with small steps and small gestures. I am proud to be a part of it, but I want to remind my colleagues that there are also big win-win ways that we can solve the larger problem. I look forward to working together to accomplish just that. 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 10 minutes as in morning business.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am back for my weekly ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, which, given the theme of the week in Washington, it is going to focus on the health consequences of what is going on in climate change. It is timely to do so because just recently the National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning for the Southwestern United States. In California, San Diego County set a record at--hang on--124 degrees. As a result of this heat, the National Weather Service warned of ``a major increase in the potential for heat-related illness and even death.'' In Phoenix, AZ, it got up to around 120 degrees. It got so hot that flights had to be grounded at the Phoenix airport because the hot air was too thin for the jet engines to get enough bite on the air for the planes to fly safely. The emergency rooms saw patients coming in with burns caused by walking barefoot on hot pavement or touching their cars that had gotten so hot in the sun that they were burned. There were several heat-related deaths reported in the Las Vegas area and in California. This heat wave problem is not going away. ``Heat waves like the one we are seeing in the Southwest are becoming much more frequent,'' said Robert E. Kopp, director of the Coastal Climate Risk and Resilience Initiative at Rutgers University. He went on to say: ``Looking forward, we expect the amount of extreme heat on the planet to continue increasing even more'' with obvious health effects. It has gotten deadly serious in many places. In the 2003 European heat wave, there were more than 30,000 deaths across the continent, and the 3-day 1995 Chicago heat wave killed more than 700 people. We need to pay attention. As Mr. Kopp concluded, ``that calls for a major rethink of the systems that we rely upon.'' This is not normal any longer. This week also saw the publication in the Providence Business News of an article by Nitin Damle called ``Climate Change's Dire Health Consequences.'' Nitin Damle is a physician in Rhode Island. He is a leader of our medical profession in Rhode Island, and he just recently was the President nationwide of the American College of Physicians. In the Providence Business News, he writes: The medical community is witness to the health effects of climate change now and not in some distant future. There are five categories of health effects that will affect not thousands but millions of people in America and around the world. First, as we just talked about what we saw in Arizona and in Southern California, he goes on to say: An increase in global temperature and frequency of heat waves will expose people to a risk of heat exhaustion (dehydration, headaches, weakness, nausea and vomiting) and/ or heat stroke (high fever, stroke, confusion and coma). The most vulnerable will include the elderly, with multiple heart, lung and kidney conditions, multiple medications and a poorer ability to regulate their body temperature. But Dr. Damle went on to say: Children will be at risk due to their inability to thermo regulate, as will laborers who work outdoors and the homeless. History tells us that there have been 7,400 annual deaths between 1999-2010 in the United States, 15,000 deaths in France in 2009, 70,000 deaths in Europe in 2003 and 15,000 deaths in Russia in 2010 from heat waves. Respiratory effects are another health consequence that Dr. Damle elucidates here. Respiratory effects from particulate matter and ozone result in exacerbation of asthma and other chronic lung conditions. He continues: Fifty-five percent of the U.S. population tests positive for allergens and 34 million people have asthma. The increased length of the pollen season and growth of allergen- producing weeds, grasses, mold and fungus will lead to more exacerbations of asthma and chronic lung conditions at an annual cost of $56 billion per year with visits to the emergency room and hospital admissions. I was at a conference recently and saw a presentation by Dr. Kari Nadeau, who is the director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy & Asthma Research at Stanford University and the Naddisy Foundation Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics. I am going to borrow a few of her slides that relate to the asthma and allergen concerns. Let me start with this graph, which shows asthma prevalence nationwide and asthma prevalence in Rhode Island. In Rhode Island, we run a little bit higher for the experience of asthma than nationwide, and this is an issue that is important to us. It comes home to roost. Dr. Nadeau used this slide. This was exposure to extreme heat and precipitation events associated with increased risk of hospitalization for asthma. This was a study that was done in Maryland. As the temperature went up, and there was extreme heat or precipitation, and asthma hospitalizations went up as well. She showed a graph from another study in New York that of the ED visits, or emergency department visits, related to ozone or related to smog, which is a well-known asthma trigger and the estimated increase in ozone-related emergency department visits for children in New York from the 1990s to 2020s resulting from climate-change-related increases in ozone concentrations. As the ozone concentrations went up, up went the ozone-related emergency department visits. The dark blue shows places where the emergency department visits went up 10 percent; the lighter blue, 7.8 to 9 percent; the even lighter blue, 6.6 to 7.7 percent; and in these counties, up 5.2 to 6.5 percent. Globally, we see that pollen counts go up in conjunction with increasing carbon dioxide. In 1900, there were about 280 parts per million of pollen production, and we hit 370 parts per million in 2000. I take it back. At 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide, there were 5 grams per plant of pollen production. At 370 parts per million of carbon dioxide, pollen production increased to over 10 grams per plant. We are over 400 now. We are headed for 720 parts per million. At that point, we have more than quadrupled the pollen output. We are seeing this happen not only in terms of the amount of pollen output that can trigger asthma but also the length of the pollen season. The months in which people who have asthma are vulnerable are extending themselves. Here, it is nearly 27 extra days. Here it is 24 extra days, 17 extra days, 19 extra days, 14 extra days, 13 extra days. We went through the middle of the country and saw over and over that the ragweed pollen season is getting long, and it is worse for asthma sufferers. Another thing we have associated with climate change and with the dry drought spells has been wildfires. Wildfires, for obvious reasons, put a lot of stuff--ash and things--up into the air. In this monitoring map of California, when the wildfires were going on, you could see these spikes in asthma activity. Here is before the fire. Here is during the fire activity, and here it falls back down afterward. The risks for asthma climbed dramatically during that period. The wildfires present yet another climate-related risk for people who have asthma. And here are the wildfires in California, shown to increase asthma, as determined by the emergency department visits. The emergency department visits climbed based on various risk factors. So when you are seeing folks having to go to the emergency department for asthma, that has gotten pretty serious. There is a lot of support for Dr. Damle's assertion that this is a concern we should pay attention to. He goes on to list another category of concern: exposure to infectious disease from vectors such as mosquitos and ticks. He says it has and will continue to escalate. There is a documented increase in cases of dengue, chikungunya, West Nile virus and Zika. He goes on to say: We will likely see a resurgence of malaria in certain areas of North America. Other illnesses come from other consequences of climate change. He goes on to report: An increase in heavy downpours and flooding in America and the world will lead to an increase in waterborne diseases such as E. Coli and other bacteria (salmonella, typhoid and cholera), parasites (Giardia) and viruses (Hepatitis A and Norwalk) with an impact on millions of people around the world. He goes on to cite extreme weather events, which create stress, anxiety, and depression. Hurricane Katrina, he reports, led to 32 percent of people affected by the hurricane suffering from post- traumatic stress. He continues: We know that there will need to be a global effort to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and the developed countries need to take a leading role developing/ implementing and moderating the success of those mitigating measures. He concludes: We need to reenter the Paris agreement and move forward at the local and State levels for the benefit of our patients. He is a respected doctor in Rhode Island. He is a clinical assistant professor of medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Also, he was recently the president of the American College of Physicians. I know my colleagues don't want to listen to any of this stuff about climate change because the fossil fuel industry controls them so much that they cannot even say the words, in many cases, ``climate change'' on the floor of the Senate, but for crying out loud, you have the former president of the American College of Physicians talking about the health effects; you have a prominent researcher at Stanford University talking about the health effects; and you have the National Weather Service warning about dangerous health effects from climate- related heat in the Southwest. When are we going to finally get around to having a serious discussion about this? It is great that we had a little pause on this wretched healthcare bill. I couldn't be happier to be rid of it for a while, and I am hoping we can be rid of it for good, but it is probably going to come back. We will have to hammer a few more stakes into the heart of this zombie before we are rid of it, and then we can move on to a serious bipartisan healthcare bill. There is good work to be done on healthcare. There is good work to be done on climate change. But we have to take the wretched special interest politics out so we can get to serious business. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I come weekly to the Senate whenever we are in session to give my ``Time to Wake Up'' speech, talking about climate change and, quite often, talking about the climate denial campaign that prevents us from taking action and, quite often, talking about the campaign finance problems in our country that make climate denial effective. Here, in Congress, it is not hard to connect the dots from campaign finance to climate denial. The Supreme Court's Republican majority's disastrous Citizens United decision was requested by the fossil fuel industry, and the fossil fuel industry took instant advantage of it--almost like they saw it coming. The industry and its front groups instantly used their new power conferred by Citizens United to come after politicians--Republicans in particular. Ask Bob Inglis, who backed responsible climate policies. Citizens United created new American dark-money emperors, and--no surprise--the new emperors love their new political power. Their first payoff was that Republicans in Congress fled from any legislative action on climate change. Before Citizens United, there were multiple bipartisan climate bills. Year after year--when I was here in 2007, 2008, 2009--there were bipartisan climate bills to the left of you, bipartisan climate bills to the right of you, bipartisan climate bills cropping up all over. Today, we watch our Republican President trying to undo curbs on carbon emissions and, to the cheers of Republicans in Congress, withdrawing the United States from the historic Paris Agreement. We join Syria and Nicaragua as the only nations to reject this common cause. That, my friends, is the heavy hand of fossil fuel influence, driving us into isolation and abdication of American leadership. Of course, right now, no Republican can safely sponsor any bill to limit carbon dioxide emissions, and so none do. Very different than before the Citizens United decision in January of 2010. That changed everything. When those five Republican justices opened up unlimited political spending to the big Republican special interests, that unlimited political spending was inevitably going to find dark-money channels. Dark-money channels hide the identity of the political donor, so that big special interests can pollute our politics with their money with seemingly clean hands. The climate denial scheme of the fossil fuel cartel is powered politically by dark money. Whether through the lure of dark money coming in for you in a political race or the threat of dark money coming in against you in a political race, dark money powers climate denial. Well, we have just learned something new about dark money. Chairman Graham and I held hearings in our Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism to look at Russian interference in the recent 2016 election and what it portends for elections to come. Our witnesses warned us that Russia has strategically manipulated politics in Europe for decades. They started working in the former Soviet Union countries, and they expanded to where they are manipulating politics in France, Germany, Holland, England, and all over Europe. The witnesses warned us that we in America must be prepared for that. They jumped the Atlantic to manipulate the 2016 elections, and they are not going away. One identified weakness of the United States against Russian influence was this dark money in our politics. Why is that? Well, it is obvious. Once you allow dark money in, dark is dark. Cash from Vladimir Putin is no more traceable than cash from Charles and David Koch. One witness, a former Republican national security official, told us: ``It is critical that we effectively enforce the campaign finance laws that would prevent this type of financial influence by foreign actors.'' ``It is critical that we effectively enforce the campaign finance laws'' against foreign influence by foreign actors. The two best studies of Russian influence in Western Europe in their elections and in their politics are ``The Kremlin Playbook,'' by CSIS, or the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and ``The Kremlin's Trojan Horses,'' by the Atlantic Council. Both of them report that Russia takes advantage of nontransparency in campaign financing to build its shadowy webs of influence and control. If you leave dark- money channels lying around, it is likely that Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs will find them. The ``Trojan Horses'' report warns this: ``The Kremlin's blatant attempts to influence and disrupt the U.S. presidential election should serve as an inspiration for a democratic push back.'' That is a lower case ``d'' for ``democratic push back,'' and it points to one key way we need to push back. I will quote them again. Electoral rules should be amended, so that publically funded political groups, primarily political parties, should at the very least be required to report their sources of funding. That is, end dark money. Likewise, the ``Kremlin Playbook'' report warns: Enhancing transparency and the effectiveness of the Western democratic tools, instruments, and institutions is critical to resilience against Russian influence. Enhancing transparency means ending dark money. Our hearing and these reports reveal another political influence tool used by the Kremlin: fake news. As we shore up our democracy to defend against Russia's fake news information warfare, we must remember this: Climate denial was the original fake news. To give an example, here is a story that may sound familiar. An unknown hacker illegally breaks into and steals an organization's emails. The organization's emails are held until they can be released at a politically strategic moment. At the strategic moment, emails are leaked to a website with shady ties. The leaks are then amplified and spun by fake news, driven into the regular media, and have their desired political effect. Does any of that sound familiar? Of course, it is the methodology of the Russians' hack of the Democratic National Committee, right? Unknown hacker, stolen emails, strategic release, caching them until they can be used, shady website, fake news spin-up, regular media takes the bait, political damage. If you step back and look at just the methodology, we have seen this pattern before--so-called climategate, the fake scandal years ago cooked up by the climate denial machine. It was 2009, not 2017. The organization hacked was not the DNC but the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. The release was timed to the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, not the Presidential election. The documents went to climate skeptic blogs--with, interestingly, the first upload in Russia--instead of to WikiLeaks, but the mainstream media took the bait, and the political damage was done. At the time, the New York Times wrote: The[se] revelations are bound to inflame the public debate as hundreds of negotiators prepare to negotiate an international climate accord at meetings in Copenhagen next month. This climategate scheme worked so well that in November 2011, the climategate operation did it again just before the U.N. climate conference in Durban in what was dubbed climategate 2.0. Of course, the whipped-up climategate hysteria was all fake news. As the Guardian wrote in February 2010: Almost all the media and political discussion about the hacked climate emails has been based on soundbites publicised by professional [climate] sceptics and their blogs. In many cases, these have been taken out of context and twisted to mean something they were never intended to. Eight times, everyone from the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Commerce, to the National Science Foundation, to the British Parliament found no evidence of any misconduct by the scientists, but for the climate denier groups, the truth was never the point. This climategate stunt was the product of a fake news infrastructure built by the fossil fuel industry to attack and undermine real climate science--disinformation campaigns, false-front organizations, stables of paid-for scientists, and propaganda honed by public relations experts. This denial operation aspires to mimic and rival real science, and it is an industrial-strength adversary with big advantages. It does not need to win its disputes with real science; it just needs to create the public illusion of a real dispute. It doesn't have to waste time in peer review, and it doesn't have to be true; it just has to sound like it might be. This industrial fake news operation isn't going anywhere. It is too valuable to the big polluters. As we prepare to face down Russia's campaign of election interference, we will have to face up to these two hard facts: If the Kremlin wants to deploy fake news information warfare in our country, the climate denial fake news infrastructure already exists. Remember, climate denial was the original fake news. If the Kremlin wants to deploy a surreptitious financial influence campaign, the dark money infrastructure already exists. The fossil fuel industry's dark money election manipulation machinery is ready to go. Putin doesn't have to build a thing. The fossil fuel dark money and fake news infrastructure stands ready to go. Unfortunately, we know it works because it has worked for years for the fossil fuel cartel, particularly since Citizens United allowed the fossil fuel industry to enforce silence on the Republican Party. The dangers of fake news, dark money, climate denial, and foreign interference in our elections are all intermixed. They have brought us to the point where the President of the United States will leave the Paris Agreement, betraying the country's interests, in the service of the fossil fuel industry, the Koch brothers' climate denial operation, and Breitbart fake news. This calls for an American response. Dark money and fake news are a sinister combination, whoever is behind them. America must address the twin threats of fake news and dark money. It is bad enough when these are the tools of the fossil fuel industry's climate denial operation, but we are on notice now. We are on notice from these reports and from multiple witnesses that the Kremlin can borrow these tools too. I will close by asking that we clean up this mess. It may take citizen action, given the stranglehold dark money and fake news have on Congress, but this is a fight worth having. There is no good that comes out of dark money and fake news, whoever is behind them. We should rid ourselves of this sinister combination. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am pleased to follow the Senator from Minnesota, as because of him I had the chance to be on the HELP Committee during all of those hearings--all of those dozens and dozens of Republican amendments that took place during the vibrant, robust, bipartisan process in the HELP Committee. Senator Franken was still in litigation over his election so his seat on the HELP Committee was vacant, and Harry Reid asked if I would take that seat. My senior Senator Jack Reed and I, both of Rhode Island, were there in the room day after day, week after week, while this exhaustive, public, bipartisan process went forward. I can even remember working with Senator Isakson, of Georgia, and supporting his amendment that would allow a doctor to be paid for having a conversation with a very ill patient about what his desires were if his condition did not get better. What type of end-of-life care did he want? Did he want every possible intervention or did he want dignified time at home with his family? What were his desires? That is a conversation that is important for doctors to have with those patients. In the environment of the time, that became the death panel phony story. So I was there. I saw it happen. Thanks to Senator Franken's delay in getting here, Jack Reed and I were in the room. Why does this matter? This matters because, like the story of Leanna and Henry, there are people on the other side of what is--apparently, for our Republican colleagues--a purely political piece of parliamentary chicanery. I have a constituent, a woman named Pamela, who lives in Jamestown, RI. She works with people and nonprofit organizations that advocate for people who have very rare diseases so, in her work, she has seen the before and after of the Affordable Care Act. ``Before the Affordable Care Act,'' she wrote to me, ``I saw many patients and families distraught by medical bankruptcy.'' Then it came even closer to home for Pamela when she was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. If there were an annual or a lifetime limit on health benefits, she would be in deep trouble. If the protection for people with preexisting conditions were undone, that would imperil her ability to get insurance in the future. She wrote to me: As a patient myself, with a chronic, costly medical condition, I am very worried that [these] protections will be taken away, making my life-sustaining care unaffordable. Pamela deserves to be heard, but nobody can speak up for her with a bill that nobody can see. From Cumberland, Marilyn wrote to me. Marilyn is a family physician. She knows the healthcare system. She also has severe asthma. She has had asthma since she was a little child, and she manages her severe asthma with very expensive medication. Her husband is retired, and Marilyn purchased her health insurance through HealthSource RI--our ObamaCare health insurance marketplace--which, by the way, is working very well. There is no need to undo what is going on in Rhode Island. It gives her peace of mind, and she wrote to me to say she was terrified by the possibility that the preexisting condition clause will be allowed back in. She wrote: I am not a specialist but a family medicine physician, doing the best I can to pay my student loans and daily expenses. I could not afford the lifesaving treatment I require to function. . . . I do not know how I would survive financially if the current legislation the House has approved is allowed to become law. Gina wrote to me from Lincoln, RI. Gina's daughter, Sofia, is 6. Sofia has cerebral palsy. We think we have problems here. I tell you, whatever the political problems we have over the Affordable Care Act, have a 6-year-old with cerebral palsy, and then come back and tell me you have a problem not liking ObamaCare. Sofia needs round-the-clock care and she gets it because of Medicaid. Gina wrote to me: ``From her home nursing care to her wheelchair, we could not live without [Medicaid].'' Before Sofia came along, Gina and her husband never imagined they would need Medicaid; it never crossed their minds. But now, the welfare of their little daughter is entirely dependent on Medicaid. Depending on what we do here, Gina wrote: Will there even be a Medicaid then? This administration is stripping benefits from the most vulnerable in our society. How will they survive? The last story I will share is from Tony and his family, who live in North Kingstown, RI. Tony has a son whose name is Michael. Michael, right after he was born, was diagnosed with something called mitochondrial disorder. It is a severely, catastrophically debilitating illness. It left Michael severely disabled. Michael is 10 years old now, but developmentally he is more like a 3-month-old. He can't walk, he can't talk, he can't feed himself, but he is happy, and he is sweet, and he is a source of joy for his parents and his four siblings. Through Medicaid, Michael can receive up to 30 hours per week of care from a certified nursing assistant. It is this program--it is Medicaid--supporting the certified nursing assistant those 30 hours per week that lets Michael live at home with his parents and those four siblings. Otherwise, he would have to be institutionalized. Somebody explain to me why a political victory shoved through this body after secret proceedings is worth explaining to Michael's parents that he is at risk of losing that coverage. When President Trump said that the House bill was mean, he was not kidding around. It is mean, mean, mean--dirty, rotten mean. And if you think the one on the Senate side is going to be any better, there is one little phrase I would like to bring to your attention: ``We're not stupid.'' ``We're not stupid'' is what a Republican staffer said when he was asked, Why aren't you guys having a public process? Why are you trying to jam this through in secret? His answer: ``We're not stupid.'' Well, what can you logically deduce from that? What kind of bill would be stupid to show the American public? If this was a bill that was going to be greeted with great applause and joy and relief and satisfaction by the American public, would you hide it? No. If it were terrible, if it would threaten people all across this country, then you wouldn't want them to see it. That would be stupid. So that is what they are up to. They know perfectly well that this bill is not good for America. That is why showing it to the American people would be, by their own words, stupid. Let me switch to my geek point before I go, because this is something I talk about a lot, and it bothers the heck out of me. This is a graph that shows healthcare in most of the countries that compete with us-- the OECD nations. This chart shows life expectancy in years. At the bottom is 72, at the top is 86, so where you fall in this shows where your life expectancy is in the different countries, and life expectancy is a pretty good measure of how good the healthcare system is. Here is the cost of healthcare per capita, averaged across the population. And as you will notice, most everybody is right up in here--Japan, Switzerland, Netherlands, United Kingdom. Most of our competitors, including France and Germany--they are up in here. Where are we? Out here. The most expensive other country in the world is Switzerland, which doesn't break $6,000 per person; we are over $8,000. The average in here, where Japan comes in, above where the United Kingdom comes in, is $4,000 per person; we are above $8,000. We are 100 percent more expensive than the average and more than 50 percent more expensive than the least efficient other country in the world. So there is progress to be made at bringing costs down, if we would pay attention to this real problem instead of the imaginary problem of Americans having too much healthcare. And over here--look at the life expectancy in years. Look where we come in. We match the Czech Republic. So there is progress to be made on cost and on outcomes in this country. And, believe it or not, we are actually starting to make a little progress. Let me take my colleagues through this graph, and then I will leave you be. This top line was drawn by the Congressional Budget Office back in 2010. They project forward into the future where they think healthcare costs are going to go. These are all Federal healthcare costs; the whole Federal healthcare costs, all of them piled up--Medicare, Medicaid, veterans--all of it. So here is what they projected it would be, this top line, in 2010. Then, they got to 2016, and they did another projection because they realized that as of 2014, things were coming in below their expectations. After the Affordable Care Act, things started to change. So they did another projection in 2016, and they projected this line right here. Those of us who serve on the Budget Committee know that we think in 10-year increments. So here is a 10-year increment from 2017 to 2027. And if you look just at the difference between what CBO predicted in 2010, before the Affordable Care Act, and what they predicted in 2016, after the Affordable Care Act: $3.3 trillion in savings--$3.3 trillion in savings. Think of what a difference that makes for our country if you can save $3.3 trillion in our healthcare costs. Healthcare costs are what is driving most of our debt and our deficit, so $3.3 trillion in savings? I tell you what, I want to see this bill because I want to know what CBO thinks about what happens to that $3.3 trillion in savings. If the cost of this Republican parliamentary chicanery is going to be losing $3.3 trillion in savings, the American people ought to know about that. So I call on my Republican colleagues to have a process. I don't know if the Presiding Officer has seen the bill yet. It is so close hold, I don't think all of the Republicans have even seen it. But for gosh sake, when you have these stories from Rhode Island and from all the other States around the country, when you have real fellow Americans counting on the healthcare that the Affordable Care Act made possible, the idea that you throw that out to score political points and to give super rich people a tax break is disgraceful. It is a disgrace. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I understand Senator McCain has come to the floor. I will yield to him as the chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I appreciate my colleague's sense of humor. Transparency in Business Ownership Madam President, the United States of America has suffered an unprecedented intrusion into our American Presidential elections. In January, our intelligence agencies disclosed that agents of Russia, on the orders of President Vladimir Putin, engaged in a massive election influence campaign throughout 2016. This effort strikes at the very heart of our representative democracy. All Americans should take this attack deadly seriously. Congress had to act against such interference decisively. By strengthening economic sanctions against the Russian gangster state, we hit them where it hurts, right in the oligarch. I am glad to see that Republican and Democratic Senators came together to do this. Now the question will shift to the White House. Last July, as evidence of Russian election meddling began to emerge, then-candidate for Vice President Mike Pence said: ``If it is Russia and they are interfering in our elections, I can assure you both parties in the United States government will ensure there are serious consequences.'' Well, it is Russia, and they were interfering, but there has been little sign of consequences so far from the Trump White House. Michael Flynn, as adviser to the President-elect, had illicit communications with the Russian Ambassador, about which he then lied. Trump appointees at the State Department alarmed career officials with their rush to craft a pro-Russia program. President Trump held an unprecedented, cozy meeting with Russian envoys--all smiles in the Oval Office--a meeting for which Putin says he has a transcript. In Europe, Trump, dropping the assurances about article 5 protections from his NATO speech, gave the Russians joy. The Trump administration has been reportedly trying to return two compounds used by Russian intelligence to Russian control--compounds here in the United States. Former FBI Director James Comey told the Senate last week that President Trump never spoke to him, not even once, about defending against Russia's acts of aggression. Well, the threat from Russia is severe. Chairman Graham and I held hearings in our Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, exploring the Russian toolbox for interference in democracies across the globe--how Russia exploits the dark shadows of other countries' political and economic systems. One tool is campaign money. Russia is reported to have funneled money to French far-right party Presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, for instance, as part of a reward for her support of Russia's actions in Crimea. Ken Wainstein, Homeland Security Advisor to George W. Bush, cited Russia as a threat of that kind of foreign financial infiltration here in the United States. ``It is critical that we effectively enforce the campaign finance laws that would prevent this type of financial influence by foreign actors,'' Wainstein told our subcommittee. But that task proves difficult in a system like ours that permits the free flow of dark money. Since the Citizens United decision, we have seen unprecedented dark money flow into our elections from anonymous dark money organizations, groups that we allow to hide the identities of their big donors. We don't know who is behind that dark money or what they are demanding in return. Despite this risk, Congress has been unwilling to push back against the tide of dark money. Too many are too in tow to the big American dark money emperors, like the Koch brothers, but once you permit big money to flow through dark money channels, cash from Vladimir Putin is no more traceable than cash from Charles and David Koch. ``The Kremlin's Trojan Horses'' is a study of Russian influence in Western Europe done by the Atlantic Council. Russia takes advantage of nontransparency in campaign financing and financial transactions, the report says, to build political alliances with ideologically friendly political groups and individuals, as well as to establish pro-Russian organizations in civil society, creating a shadowy web of political networks which help to propagate the regime's point of view. Corruption is the grid on which the electrons of Russian influence flow. In the foreword to the ``Kremlin's Trojan Horses'' report, Radoslaw Sikorski, former Foreign Minister of Poland, who has seen a lot of this up close, described what he called ``the financial networks that allow authoritarian regimes to export corruption to the West.'' He warns: Electoral rules should be amended, so that publically funded political groups, primarily political parties, should at the very least be required to report the sources of their funding. He continues: The Kremlin's blatant attempts to influence and disrupt the U.S. Presidential election should serve as an inspiration for a democratic push back. Well, we should certainly push back by requiring political entities in this country to report their sources of funding. Another of our witnesses, Heather Conley at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote about ``The Kremlin Playbook.'' The CSIS report, ``The Kremlin Playbook,'' calls corruption ``the common thread'' among these various drivers of Russian influence. It is, the authors write, ``the lubricant on which this system operates.'' She testified just today in the Helsinki Commission that ``corruption is a systemic weakness within a country that is exploited and influenced by adversaries and from which no country is immune, including the United States.'' Where Russia can work in darkness, Russian agents systemically exploit democratic institutions to acquire influence over politicians and political systems using corruption. Russia has done this in the former Soviet Union and in Europe for decades, and we should be prepared in the United States, Ms. Conley says, for them to keep doing it here. ``The Kremlin Playbook'' warns that to fight the corruption that gives Russia this channel of influence, ``enhancing transparency and the effectiveness of the Western democratic tools, instruments, and institutions is critical to resilience against Russian influence.'' Ms. Conley echoed the widespread warnings that the United States is particularly susceptible to Russian influence via dark money channels in our politics. That is widely agreed. She and others have warned of a second vulnerability: lax incorporation laws that hide the true owners of shell corporations. In the same way that dark money channels can hide the hand of foreign influence, so can shell corporations, which obscure the hand of the entity behind the corporate screen. Interestingly, USA TODAY just reported: ``Since President Trump won the Republican nomination, the majority of his companies' real estate sales are to secretive shell companies that obscure the buyers' identities.'' Our lax incorporation laws have made the United States a destination for drug traffickers, terrorists, corrupt foreign officials, tax cheats, and other criminals from around the world. Former FBI Director Comey testified before the Judiciary Committee that the United States is becoming the last big haven for shell corporations--sickening but true. These crooks come here to America to form shell companies to hide assets and obscure illegal activities. For added safety, a foreign gangster or a crooked despot or an agent of Putin could put a shell corporation behind a shell corporation with another shell corporation behind that. There are few safeguards in place to prevent foreign actors from funneling money into our elections through faceless shell companies. We actually already see shell companies used to hide the identities behind big political spending. This is not a potential. This is happening now. We just don't know whether foreign influence is behind it. Nothing prevents agents of Putin from being behind those hidden entities. Part of the Kremlin's playbook is to use shell corporations and other devices to establish illicit financial relationships with prominent local figures. The shell entities allow Russian money to flow anonymously into crooked deals. The crooked deals give rise to corrupt relationships, and these corrupt relationships give Russia leverage, either through the carrot of continued bribery of the prominent local figure or the stick of threatened disclosure of the crooked deal imperiling the prominent local figure. The prominent local figure in the crooked deal is well and truly on the Russian hook. For what it is worth, Donald Trump is the very model of the Russian mark in this sort of scheme. To close this avenue of foreign political influence, Ms. Conley told us: ``Building and strengthening financial transparency requirements and beneficial ownership will go an extraordinary way to prevent these corrupt practices to further Russia's influence.'' We really ought to be able to agree that we need to prevent these corrupt practices to further Russia's influence. The answer to the problem of shell corporations is simple: Have each state track the actual owners of companies they charter and make that information available to Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies through proper process. That is what Ms. Conley means by that phrase she used, ``beneficial ownership.'' It is the term of art for a simple concept, knowing who the real owner is. The True Incorporation Transparency for Law Enforcement, or TITLE, Act, which Chairman Grassley and I will reintroduce soon, would require States to identify the actual human beings who own the company they incorporate. The bill would provide funding to support the maintenance and retrieval of this information, which would be available to law enforcement officers who present valid, court-ordered subpoenas or search warrants. The bill has bipartisan support and has received strong endorsement from the law enforcement community, banks, and anti- trafficking organizations. Transparency in business ownership is ever more vital around the world. The European Union understands very well the shadow of Russian influence that has been cast over it, and every member of the European Union has committed to ensuring incorporation transparency. The United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Italy, and France have already enacted incorporation transparency laws. The light of corporate transparency is about to shine throughout Europe to help defend them from Russian influence. This means that money from those shell companies and schemes committed through those shell companies will be looking for new, dark homes, likely in American shell corporations. Again, we are supposed to be an example to the world. We are supposed to be the ``City upon a Hill,'' not the place where the world's most corrupt and criminal evildoers come to hide their cash and their assets. We know the Russian playbook for election interference exploits opaque incorporation laws. We know criminals and even terrorists view the United States as a haven to hide illegal activity and its proceeds. We even know, weirdly, that lax incorporation laws are affecting our real estate market. Some American cities are so loaded with real estate held by shell corporations that it is actually driving up the prices for real American home buyers. Of course, there are not a lot of people in the corner store when the property is held for a foreign owner as the safeguard for his illicit gains. We must take commonsense steps to stop these activities and bring wrongdoers into the light. The measures that we will take against Russia are welcome and, as Senator McCain has said, even overdue, but we must remember that this is an ongoing battle and we have systemic weaknesses that have already been clearly identified to us over and over by bipartisan experts in this field and renowned think tanks and study groups here in Washington. To quote Ms. Conley again, ``the battle of Western democracies to defeat corruption'' must be seen as ``a matter of national security.'' Testifying before our Crime and Terrorism Subcommittee, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper agreed and urged Congress to act. He said: I believe [the Russians] are now emboldened to continue such activities in the future both here and around the world, and to do so even more intensely. If there has ever been a clarion call for vigilance and action against a threat to the very foundation of our democratic political system, this episode is it. I hope the American people recognize the severity of this threat and that we collectively counter it before it further erodes the fabric of our democracy. This week the Senate takes strong steps to punish Russia for its disruptive meddling in the past, but we must do more. Dark money and the shell corporations that allow Russian influence are identified known vulnerabilities in the future. Every warning is that the Russians are not going away and that future elections will be marked by Russian mischief. We have to close both avenues of foreign influence and corruption: dark money and shell corporations. They are no good in any event. They are no good in any event, and now they bring the added contamination of Russian election manipulation. I hope we can work together to remedy that contamination. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for up to 10 minutes.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, however loud, persistent, and powerful the climate denial operation has been, we have to remember that it has always been built on lies. It is a huge fortress of lies stacked upon lies--lies about the science, lies about the scientists, lies about doubt, lies about costs, lies through phony front groups, and lies about where the money comes from and who is pulling the strings. This fortress of lies protects a subsidy to the fossil fuel industry that the International Monetary Fund puts at $700 billion per year. For big, big money, you can do big, big lies, and they do. These have been the biggest lies of our generation. But to paraphrase the great reggae singer Jimmy Cliff: ``The bigger you lie, the harder you fall.'' To paraphrase the ``Game of Thrones,'' ``The fall is coming.'' In the last few weeks, there has been news that has shaken this fortress of lies and moves us toward that fall. Shareholders are rising up. For as long as there have been shareholder resolutions to fossil fuel companies about climate change, there has been resolute opposition from management to every vote. Hundreds of shareholder resolutions went down to defeat until now. Occidental Petroleum shareholders last month won the first victory against management, and a week later mighty ExxonMobil was defeated by its shareholders. This new reporting that shareholders have demanded will help clear away the lies. The fall is coming. There are even lies within the lies. To fend off this latest shareholder resolution to try to make the company look less irresponsible, ExxonMobil's CEO repeated the company's claim that it knows climate change is real and supports a carbon fee--but it doesn't. As everyone in this building knows, ExxonMobil maintains a massive lobbying apparatus in Washington, and that massive apparatus is and always has been resolutely opposed to any such thing as a carbon fee or any serious climate action whatsoever, for that matter, unless maybe ExxonMobil doesn't know what its own vast lobbying apparatus is doing. Maybe ExxonMobil spends that enormous amount of money to exert its influence in Washington to stop any climate action, and the CEO is unaware of that going on. I doubt that. You be the judge of whether that is credible. It is not just shareholders rising up; attorneys general are starting to win. The attorney general of New York has just filed pleadings in State court in New York asserting that ExxonMobil's climate reporting has been a ``sham''--to use the word from his filing; that, in the oldest of accounting tricks, ExxonMobil kept two sets of books assessing carbon pollution risk. After fierce opposition by ExxonMobil lawyers using every trick in the book to delay and snarl the New York attorney general, it looks now as if ExxonMobil may have lied to its investors and its shareholders. If ExxonMobil has lied to its shareholders, that is a violation of law, and that fall comes hard indeed. Secretary of State Tillerson evidently knew of and approved the two sets of carbon pollution books when he was CEO of ExxonMobil. We will see where this goes, but of all the people around Trump who might be indicted, now we might add the Secretary of State. The Attorney General of Massachusetts is also pursuing ExxonMobil against equally fierce tactics by ExxonMobil lawyers. To try to get away from the Massachusetts attorney general, the lawyers even went so far as to claim--get this--that ExxonMobil was not doing business in Massachusetts; that it didn't have the minimum contacts with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts necessary for the State even to assert jurisdiction. Well, the judge virtually laughed that argument out of court, but it shows how desperate ExxonMobil must be feeling as it tries to wriggle away from having to answer questions under oath. Nothing turns a big lie into a hard fall better than having to put that right hand up and give truthful testimony and face cross- examination under penalty of perjury. Will the Securities and Exchange Commission take a look at this sham reporting, too, or has the Federal government, under Trump, degenerated into such a fossil fuel banana republic that no Federal agency will do its job against that industry or might it even chime in on the side of industry Pruitt-style? Do you remember the question of whether the fossil fuel climate denial operation merits investigation under Federal civil racketeering laws? The tobacco industry was sued under Federal civil racketeering laws by the U.S. Department of Justice so there is a model. You may remember that the question as to the fossil fuel climate denial operation was referred by Attorney General Lynch to the FBI--or so she testified. One wonders, did the FBI ever take an honest look? What was the outcome? Was there ever a report? Are they still looking at it? Remember that the Department of Justice won its civil racketeering case against the tobacco industry, they won it at trial, and they won again on appeal. The woman who won that case for the Department of Justice, the lead trial attorney for the Department, has said publicly that this climate denial operation also merits investigation as fraud. That would seem to be a knowledgeable opinion from the woman who won the last case, an opinion perhaps worth heeding, but did anything happen? Will anything happen? Forget too big to fail or too big to jail. Is the power of the fossil fuel industry now so great that it is too big even to investigate, even by the Department of Justice? Does it now take State attorneys general to do the job because the Federal government is so owned now by the fossil fuel industry? Think about it. What if the FBI reported to the Attorney General that there was a meritorious fraud case arising out of all the lies propping up climate denial? Who believes Attorney General Sessions would allow that case to go forward against his party's biggest backer? Well, the bigger the lie, ultimately, the harder the fall. One way or the other, this fact remains constant and true. There always will come a day of reckoning. With these shareholder victories and with these attorneys general victories, that day of reckoning is closing in--the day when they have to put that right hand up and testify truthfully and under oath, not just send out spin through front groups and operatives but testify truthfully under penalty of perjury. It is long overdue for truth to have its day. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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