Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, this is a very simple bubbler that anybody with an aquarium will recognize. All you simply do is you put the bubbler in. I produce carbon dioxide as I exhale. So I am exhaling one breath into this same glass. I will do one more. It was not even a full breath, but there it is. It used to match that color; do you remember? Now look at what color it matches. Just breathing carbon dioxide through the water has changed its pH and has made it more acidic. I can do that right here with a breath. It is happening on a global scale, as the interaction between the atmosphere and the oceans transports CO2 into the oceans. When that happens, the same chemical effect that we modeled here takes place, and the oceans become more acidic, and the effects continue to be damaging. The previous shell that I showed was the pteropod, a humble creature, but an important creature in the food chain. It is actually called the ocean butterfly by some because its snail foot has been transformed by God's law of evolution into an oceanic wing that allows it to fly in the seas. This is an oyster. The Senator's State of Louisiana does a lot of work with oysters, as does Rhode Island. Again, exposing oyster larvae to ocean water with heightened levels of acidity--day 1, day 2, day 4, and then we see exposure to acidity. Here is what a healthy larva looks like; here is what one exposed looks like. Here is what the healthy one looks like; here is what the exposed one looks like. Here is a healthy one; here is one exposed. You will see that the healthy larva is growing day after day. It is getting bigger. It is going to become an oyster. Somebody is going to have a great oyster stew some day with that oyster with any luck. This one is shrinking and deforming, and the reason is that the little creature is trying to take the carbon out of the ocean to make its shell--the calcium. And because of those ions that I pointed out, it is bound up, and they can't get it. So they deform this way. When you are at a point where more than 50 percent of ocean pteropods are experiencing severe shell damage, if you are not paying attention, you are going to take a big punch. Now I know around here we don't give a darn about God's creatures as being God's creatures. I probably sound funny to some people talking about a funny little creature in the ocean called a pteropod. The things we care about here are things that we can monetize because this is Mammon Hall. This is the temple where gold rules. These little creatures are a little bit away from the gold. But who cares about the pteropod? I will tell you who cares about the pteropod. Salmon care about the pteropod, and people care about the salmon, and Alaska has a pretty good salmon fishery. The Pacific Northwest has a pretty good salmon fishery. If you drop out the pteropod from the bottom of the oceanic food chain because it can't grow because the ocean has acidified, there is a big collapse to take place. As scientists would say, the upper trophic levels fall as the lower trophic levels collapse. So this is serious. As I went through all these different Republican Environment and Public Works Committee Senators' home State universities, maybe you could say that all those home State universities are part of the climate change hoax that our President is so pleased to tweet about. If so, my colleagues really ought to call their home State universities out about that. If they think their home State universities are in on a hoax, I think it wouldn't be right, and they ought to call out their home State universities. If the home State universities are part of a big old hoax, say so. Say so. But if all of my Republican colleagues' home State universities right down the line on the Environment and Public Works committee aren't in on a hoax, if what they are doing is good science, why not listen to them? Why not listen to them? What is the dark star in this firmament that causes the real science from the home State universities of these Senators to warp and twist around as it comes to this body? What is the power? What is the force that is causing every single one of these home State universities to be ignored by their home State Senators? Let me go back and review very briefly what they said. Home State universities of the Republican Senators on the Environment and Public Works Committee warn of ``pressing issues'' related to climate change. That is Wyoming--pressing issues. Assert that the science of climate change is ``unequivocal,'' ``without any question.'' That is from Oklahoma. Foresee ``immense'' implications related to climate change. That is West Virginia. Making anti-greenhouse gas ``climate commitments'' to fight climate change. That is the University of Arkansas. Warn that ``climate change is the greatest environmental threat facing global society.'' That is Mississippi. Find the ``significant risks'' from climate change to be ``of vital concern.'' That is Nebraska. That is the one that had the hit list of coming attractions from Nebraska of climate change Describe climate change as ``one of the grand challenges of the 21st century.'' That is Kansas. Call climate change ``the signature challenge of the 21st century.'' South Dakota. Predict ``aggravated and unpredictable risk'' from climate disruption. That is Iowa. Prepare for fisheries risk that could shake the State's seafood industry ``from top to bottom.'' That is Alaska. Right down the row of Republican Senators who voted for this climate denying nominee, you have home State universities that say the opposite, that say that it is real, that it is beyond scientific debate at this point, that its effects are here, that its effects are worsening, and that it is going to shake industries like the fishing industry from top to bottom and create significant risk and disturbances in agriculture. But not one of those Senators stood up against the nominee who is the shameless tool of the industry that is causing all that harm. So I have to ask, how does that end? If you listen to what all your home State universities are saying, this is a pressing and immense grand challenge. This greatest environmental threat--it doesn't go away. This is truth measured by science, God's and nature's truth, and truth always demands a reckoning. If we listen only to the fossil fuel industry as it lies and prevaricates and propagandizes and disassembles and does all its nonsense to protect its all-important right to pollute for free, how do we expect this turns out in the end? Do you think these acidifying shells give a red hot damn what a fossil fuel industry lobbyist says? They are responding to laws of chemistry and nature that we don't get to repeal or amend. Let me make one last point in closing, as I saw Senator Carper here, our distinguished ranking member, and I am sure he wants to speak. Our Republican friends claim to support market economics. They are big on how you have to trust the market. You shouldn't regulate. Markets are the way to go. Market economics is the most efficient tool for allocating resources. Market economics are how we create wealth. Actually, I agree. So let's look at market economics. What I believe and what economists say on all sides of the political spectrum is that it is market economics 101 that for the market to work, the harm of a product has to be built into the price of a product. The fossil fuel industry, the dark star of our politics, absorbing and bending all of this home State information, absorbs and bends even conservative market principles so that they disappear here in Congress, at least wherever those principles conflict with what appears to be our first principle: the well-being and the power of the fossil fuel industry. The fact that Senators do not hear or do not care about this science from their home State universities tells you all you need to know about the brute political force of the fossil fuel industry here in Congress. (Mrs. ERNST assumed the Chair.) Let me go back just a moment to something I said earlier, since we have been joined by the Senator from Iowa at this fine early hour in the morning. Just before she arrived, I was talking about Iowa State. Since she is here, I will go back to those remarks and to the Iowa State University professor who told a United Nations conference not long ago that climate change is already affecting Iowa farmers. ``This isn't just about the distant future,'' the Iowa State scientist said. I noted that Iowa State has published extensive research on, and I quote Iowa State University here, ``global warming, the impact of climate change on global agriculture.'' Iowa State has a center called the Leopold Center, which perhaps the Presiding Officer can confirm is a fairly prestigious institution within the University of Iowa. Iowa State's Leopold Center ``views climate change not merely as warming, but as a worsening destabilization of the planet's environmental system.'' I hope the distinguished Senator from Iowa will review Iowa State's view that this worsening destabilization of the planet's environmental system will create, and I quote Iowa State University again, ``aggravated and unpredictable risks that will challenge the security of our agricultural and biological systems'' and consider their conclusion: ``The scientific evidence is clear that the magnitude of the changes ahead are greater, the rate much faster, and the duration of the climatic destabilization will last much longer than once thought.'' Let me close, while we wait for Senator Carper, who is nearby, with my final exhibit. This is a page from the New York Times in 2009. It is a full-page ad that was taken out in the New York Times in 2009, and it reads: Dear President Obama and the United States Congress, tomorrow leaders from 192 countries will gather at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen to determine the fate of our planet. As business leaders, we are optimistic that President Obama is attending Copenhagen with emissions targets. Additionally, we urge you, our government, to strengthen and pass U.S. legislation and lead the world by example. We support your effort to ensure meaningful and effective measures to control climate change, an immediate challenge facing the United States and the world today. Please don't postpone the earth. If we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet. Please allow us, the United States of America, to serve in modeling the change necessary to protect humanity and our planet. That is the text of this advertisement in the New York Times in 2009. And guess who signed it. Donald J. Trump, chairman and president; Donald J. Trump, Jr., executive vice president; Eric F. Trump, executive vice president; Ivanka M. Trump, executive vice president; and the Trump Organization. I will close with the sentence from this New York Times advertisement, signed by Donald J. Trump, that ``the science of climate change is irrefutable and our failure to act will have consequences that are catastrophic and irreversible.'' President Trump's words, not mine. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. A question of Parliamentary order here. The time during the colloquy will continue to be charged to the Senator from Hawaii, correct?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. If I recall the facts of this correctly, not only did he shut down the environmental unit of the department of the attorney general, but in subsequent reporting you could not find a dollar allocated to environmental activities in the Oklahoma attorney general's budget. And he abandoned what his predecessor, Drew Edmondson, had been running, which was not just to have an environmental enforcement unit within the department of the attorney general, but also to have an environmental enforcement team that brought together Federal folks, State regulators, water officials, and put together the multiagency task force that prosecuted environmental cases--gone also. Finally, Drew Edmondson used to do an annual report, as I recall, on the successes of his environmental enforcement and his environmental task force, the multiagency group. That was gone too. In addition to all of those facts, what worries me a little bit--you know, one of the things we have to assess in this process is the credibility of the nominee. Are they going to tell you the truth in the nomination process? If they are not going to tell you the truth in the nomination process, you are probably going to get a lot of malarkey out of them down the road as well. He took the position that he actually had not gotten rid of the environmental unit. He said he had moved it into a new unit--the federalism unit--which, if you go to their own website and read about the federalism unit, it says it is an appellate. You don't do environmental enforcement at the appellate level; you do environmental enforcement at the trial level, and you do it at the investigative level. Further, if you read down, the word ``environment'' never appears in the general description of that unit. So it is not as if there is just one little wrinkle of the environmental unit kind of magically disappearing under this guy. Wherever there was any activity by the department of the attorney general with respect to the environment, he shut it down, zeroed it out, silenced it, finished it. I believe that is a pretty fair description of the status in Oklahoma.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, we are considering the nomination of Congressman Mulvaney to become the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. In the context of the review of this nomination, there has been a lot of talk about Congressman Mulvaney being a ``straight shooter.'' I do appreciate his courtesy meeting with me and his participation in our Budget Committee confirmation hearing last month, but I have to say that his 6-year record in the House of Representatives makes it completely impossible for me to vote for him as our Nation's chief budget officer. He may be a straight shooter, but he shoots straight at the wrong targets. One of them is the credit of the United States of America. In the House of Representatives, Congressman Mulvaney repeatedly put our economy in jeopardy by voting to let the Federal Government default on its obligations. He had an opportunity after his nomination, when he came before the Budget Committee, to pivot to a more mainstream and responsible position, but he refused. In an answer to a prehearing question he said: I do believe that defaulting on America's debts would have great worldwide consequences. I do not believe that breaching the debt ceiling will automatically or inevitably lead to that result. Well, if you breach the debt ceiling, and if you honor the debt ceiling law, that means that our government would not have the money to pay all of its bills. Something has to be defaulted on or the debt ceiling is a complete chimera. Mr. Mulvaney's completely unsupported faith that a default on some of our Nation's obligations might not have grave consequences ignores basic economics, and it ignores the guidance of liberal and conservative economists and experts alike, including Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Benjamin Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Janet Yellen, Jack Lew, and many, many others. In fact, many of my Republican colleagues in this room were gravely concerned about what happened if we blew through the debt ceiling, and that we perhaps had made a bet we would be unable to pay. To put it simply, lenders tend to charge more for riskier loans, and a borrower that won't pay all of its bills on time is riskier than one that does. Tom Donahue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is not someone that I ordinarily cite favorably here in the Senate. He is an inveterate enemy on doing anything on climate change. He and I disagree on a great number of issues, but even Tom Donahue noted that a small increase in treasury rates, which would happen as the result of a default, ``would translate into hundreds of thousands of jobs lost every year.'' A member of the self-styled ``shutdown caucus,'' Mr. Mulvaney chooses to ignore the fact that his fiscal brinkmanship has already cost the American people. Playing around with the debt ceiling and shutting down the government are not free exercises. According to the Wall Street firm Standard and Poor's, the 16-day government shutdown that the Congressman helped orchestrate in 2013 cost the American economy $24 billion. That is shooting straight at our economy just to prove a political point. That is not the kind of straight shooter that we need. Of course, that doesn't even mention the unnecessary stress that the shutdown caused for millions of government contractors who weren't sure they would be paid. There is pain and there is damage from the reckless decisions that Congressman Mulvaney seems to make so easily. Congressman Mulvaney's blind faith is not limited to economics. He disregards science too. In response to questions I asked him at the hearing, he said he is not convinced by the evidence presented that climate change is at least partly driven by human activity. Well, he ought to take a little look at what is going on at his home State university, the University of South Carolina, which has the School of the Earth, Ocean, and Environment. It actually teaches climate change. The University of South Carolina doesn't just believe climate change; it teaches it. It has a faculty who are involved in teaching the students about what is happening in our atmosphere and in our oceans as a result of climate change. This is not all that complicated stuff. We have known since President Lincoln was riding around Washington in his top hat that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would catch heat in the atmosphere and would warm the Earth. That was a scientist named Tyndall. This is not news; this is 150 years old. It is simple, elemental chemistry, what happens when you ramp up the level of CO2 in the atmosphere and how that works in the oceans. The CO2 gets absorbed by the oceans. The oceans, as a result of absorbing CO2, become more acidic. What we are seeing now is the acidification of the ocean in the experience of humankind--indeed, in probably like 100 times the experience of humankind. You have to go back 50 years to find a similar rate of acidification of the ocean. Well, Mr. Mulvaney represents South Carolina. South Carolina is a coastal State. It is an ocean State. The University of South Carolina studies its oceans. They know ocean acidification is happening. When the Congressman says that he is not convinced by the evidence presented, something other than being a straight shooter is going on. According to NASA, for instance, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration--which, by the way, right now is driving a rover around on the surface of the planet Mars. So can we perhaps stipulate that the scientists at NASA know what they are talking about? No other country in the world, no other society in human history has had the capacity to launch from Earth a rover, fly it through space to Mars, land it safely on that other planet, and drive it around. We can do that. NASA scientists did that. So when NASA scientists say that ``multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activity''--so essentially all the experts agree. His home State university, the University of South Carolina, teaches this. They don't just listen to it, they teach it. They understand what is going on. But Mulvaney says he is not convinced. What is it going to take to convince him? How can you be a straight shooter when you ignore this kind of certainty in science, particularly when around this building you see the circling menace of the fossil fuel industry always with its guns out, always trying to shoot down anybody who will disagree with them, always trying to pretend that climate change isn't real, always trying to defend a $700 billion-a-year subsidy that they get at the expense of the rest of America? And because, thanks to Citizens United, they have the capacity to spend enormous, unlimited amounts of money in politics, they can spend a great deal to protect that $700 billion in subsidies, and they do. So we do nothing about climate change here. You can't get a Republican to talk seriously about climate change here. The oceans are changing off of their States, and they won't talk about climate change here. Their universities are saying that climate change is real. Their universities are teaching that climate change is real. And they won't say one thing about climate change here. And this so-called straight shooter is going to go along with that racket rather than listen to his home State universities and to the scientists at NASA, who have put the rover on Mars? Give me a break. While this man claims to be a deficit hawk, I asked him if he was ready to take on the hundreds of billions of dollars that go out the back door of our economy in tax breaks, in wasteful tax loopholes, in tax benefits for special interests, and he wouldn't give me a straight answer to the question. From his record in the House, it appears pretty clear that Mr. Mulvaney would rather balance the budget by going after seniors, by going after Social Security, by going after Medicare, by going after the families who have children on Medicaid because their children have lifetime disabilities that require Medicaid support. Those are the targets. That is who this so-called straight shooter wants to shoot at. But as for, say, the tax benefit that lets billionaires depreciate their private jets faster than the airline can, oh, no, can't touch that. As for the tax loophole that lets carried interest Wall Street billionaires pay lower tax rates than their doormen, than their janitors, oh, no, can't possibly touch that. As for the subsidies we give through the Tax Code to the fossil fuel industry every year when they are the most lucrative corporations in the history of the planet, oh, no, we can't possibly do that. Let's go after the old folks. That is not being a straight shooter; that is shooting at the wrong people. Someone who is a straight shooter when it happens to agree with the politics that they like but is a flatout denier when it doesn't, that is not my idea of a straight shooter. Congressman Mulvaney is possessed by conservative ideology that I strongly believe is going to prevent him ever from working across party lines on the budget, on health care, or on other major issues that he will have to face at OMB. His counsel is likely to pull President Trump further out to the extremes, which already divide this country. And by the way, to all of those voters who voted for President Trump because he said that he was different from all the other Republican candidates; that he was different from the other 15 candidates because he wasn't going to hurt Social Security and he wasn't going to hurt Medicare; that he was different from all the others because he was going to protect Social Security and he was going to protect Medicare-- folks, I think you were sold a bill of goods because when you look at Congressman Price and when you look at Congressman Mulvaney and when you look at their records, you see the records of people who have targeted Social Security and targeted Medicare for years. They may be straight shooters, but they have Social Security and Medicare in the crosshairs. Those are not the right targets for us to be shooting at in a tax system that is riddled with special interest loopholes and in a country that is so divided and where the poor and the elderly are struggling compared to the people who are at the very top, who have basically gathered all of the economic benefit of our growth since the great recession. So, for all of those reasons, I will be completely unable to support this person's confirmation. I am sorry because I would like to have seen the President make the slightest gesture in the direction of bipartisanship, the slightest gesture in the direction of compromise, the slightest gesture in the direction of reasonableness, but out of this White House, on the civilian Cabinet, we have seen nothing like that. It is a Cabinet that is completely controlled by rightwing ideology and appalling special interests. Usually, the special interests are the most dangerous and worst special interests that the agency has to regulate. Instead of accepting that as the agency's responsibility, he has brought that special interest in, brought the fox into the henhouse. If there was ever a fox in the OMB henhouse to take our Social Security folks and our Medicare folks and hurt them, it is this Congressman. I cannot accept his nomination. I will vote against it. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I, too, will be voting no on the candidacy of Mr. Mnuchin to become Secretary of the Treasury. Rhode Island got hit so hard by the mortgage meltdown that Wall Street created. Frankly, I can never forget the Rhode Islanders who lost their homes in the course of that debacle. We were able to help some of them in my office. As the Presiding Officer knows, when you come to the Senate, you put together a constituent office, and your constituent people work on usual constituent business. In the ordinary course, constituent business is dealing with Federal agencies. It is making sure Social Security is fine, getting people replacement passports that they put into the laundry by accident, dealing with veterans issues and getting veterans their benefits, helping people with Medicare and Medicaid confusion. It is all generally involving people who have gotten somehow fouled up in the Federal programs of which they are beneficiaries. In our case, we had to open a constituent wing for dealing with the big banks because they were foreclosing so recklessly and in such a mercenary fashion on Rhode Islanders. It was such torture for Rhode Islanders, once the foreclosure process began, because they could never get the same person twice on the phone; there was always a mismatch between what they were being told on the phone and being told on paper. It was a nightmare of bad information and bad practice by these big banks. What we would often be able to do is to say: Look, at least give this person one person they can deal with, that they can call every time so it is not ``Hi, I am John'' on one phone call and ``Hi, I am Mary'' on the next phone call and ``Hi, I am Joseph'' on the third phone call and nobody ever remembers the other phone calls, nobody ever knew where they were in the process. You can't move the process forward if the person on the other end of the line can't keep track of the conversation. So we were able to get that done, and that actually was able to help Rhode Islanders come to a deal with these big banks and save their homes. But for all the ones we were able to help, there were many, many we were not. I simply cannot forgive somebody who took a look at that banking crisis, who took a look at the pain Wall Street sent in a wave across all of America, and thought: Oh, here is a great new way to make money--foreclosing on people. Done. I am out. Sorry, I can't vote for somebody like that. What I hope, though, is that he will at least show some common sense and some decency when it comes to other issues, and one of them is climate change. If you go to the financial sector, they are taking climate change pretty seriously. Frankly, the financial sector is probably about as big as the fossil fuel industry, so when the fossil fuel industry comes around bullying and shoving and lying and going through all of its usual climate denial nonsense, the financial guys really don't care. They just do their thing. You are not going to intimidate Goldman. You are not going to intimidate BlackRock. You are not going to intimidate Bank of America. It just doesn't make any sense. So when you look at what these guys are saying, they are being pretty straight up about it. As long ago as 2013, Goldman Sachs issued a report that said: ``The window for thermal coal investment is closing.'' That is the caption of the report. ``Thermal coal's current position atop the fuel mix for global power generation will be gradually eroded,'' it said. And sure enough, it has been. There was no grief for coal in there; they were just trying to predict the market. In 2015, Goldman Sachs did another report about the low-carbon economy. It was ``Goldman Sachs equity investor's guide to a low carbon world, 2015-25.'' So unless somebody is going to say that Goldman Sachs is in on the hoax, they are taking this pretty seriously. From 2015 to 2025, they expect a low-carbon world. And it is coming on fast and furious now. Just recently, a global task force was set up by the G20 companies--the 20 biggest economies in the world. They have a group called the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures. They have asked that companies begin to come clean on the climate risk they face. The news report about this says: Concerns among the financial community are growing that assets are being mispriced because the full extent of climate risk is not being factored in, threatening market stability. The story continues: According to Barclays-- Barclays is a significant international banking institution-- the fossil fuel industry could lose $34 trillion in revenues by 2040 as a global deal to limit temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius reduces demand for oil, coal, and gas, returning reserves into stranded assets. If, in fact, this is an industry that could lose $34 trillion in revenues by 2040, that explains a lot of their misbehavior around Congress. Obviously, for that kind of money, there is very little mischief these folks wouldn't get up to, and sure enough, they are getting up to all of that mischief, and more, around here. But the financial industry itself is pretty big, and it doesn't care. It is not going to be pushed around and bullied. This Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure is described as having 32 members from large banks, insurance companies, asset management companies, pension funds, credit rating agencies, and accounting and consulting firms--32 members representing the 20 biggest economies in the world, and they are saying: Here it comes. Let's get ready. So I hope colleagues will begin to listen to these folks in the financial services industry and these major market economies about what is going on and stop listening to the self-serving nonsense that the fossil fuel industry insists on trying to jam into our ears around here. It just is bogus. Bottom line: It is bogus. Most recently, at the end of last year, September 2016, BlackRock, which is one of the most significant investment firms in the world--I think it has more than $1 trillion in assets under management--issued this new report: ``Adapting Portfolios to Climate Change.'' OK. So BlackRock, one of the smartest and biggest companies in the world, is now talking about how we have to adapt to climate change and helping investors plan for it. In this building, can we have a sensible conversation about climate change? No, of course not, because the fossil fuel industry won't even let some of us mention the words, but in the real world, where real money and real decisions are being made by very smart people, they are all over this. Here is BlackRock: ``Adapting Portfolios to Climate Change.'' Sentence No. 1 in the report: ``Investors can no longer ignore climate change.'' Investors can no longer ignore climate change. No, it takes Congress to do that. Investors can no longer ignore climate change, but don't worry, we will, as long as we are following the lead of our fossil fuel industry friends, right over the climate cliff. The report continues that we can expect more frequent and severe weather events over the long term--something that actually we are seeing already, not only in the United States but around the world. They say that there is a market failure in this area--a market failure--as current fossil fuel prices arguably do not reflect the true costs of their extraction and use. That is what we are fighting about here. The fossil fuel industry has the best racket going in the world. They are able to pollute like crazy, do immense damage in the world--damage that coastal homeowners in Rhode Island, fishermen in Rhode Island, people who have breathing difficulties and are trying to breathe on a hot summer day in Rhode Island--they all have to pay the price. Under real market theory, the harm of the product has to be in the price of the product for the market to work. That is market 101. Well, they don't want to play by those rules. They want to have everybody else cover the harm in their product, and they just get to shove it out into the marketplace with the biggest subsidy in creation. The International Monetary Fund is not a bunch of stupid people, and the International Monetary Fund, as far as I can tell, has no conflict of interest with respect to fossil fuel, unlike the fossil fuel companies, which are one massive example of a conflict of interest. The International Monetary Fund says that the subsidy to the fossil fuel industry every year--just in the United States of America--is $700 billion--billion with a ``b.'' Like I said, how much mischief would they get up to for $700 billion? Oh, about $700 billion worth. Is there a fix to this? Yes, continues the BlackRock report. ``The most cost-effective way for governments to meet emissions reduction targets: Policy frameworks that result in realistic carbon pricing.'' Market 101. Of course, they don't want market 101, they want fossil fuels subsidies 101, and we go along with it because of the mischievous way they behave in politics. But we should not go along with it. It is not proper economics. It is not conservative. It is nothing except traditional, old-fashioned, special interests, special pleading. It is no different from any other polluter who wants to be able to dump their waste into the river or onto their neighbor's yard or wherever it is rather than having to pay for cleaning up the mess they made. We go on through the report: ``The world is rapidly using up its carbon budget,'' says BlackRock. ``The damage from climate change could shave 5 to 20 percent off global GDP annually by 2100.'' Up to a fifth of global GDP gone. That is a massive economic correction. That is massive economic pain. ``The economic impacts,'' it goes on to say, ``are not just in the distant future. More frequent and more intense extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, flooding, and droughts, are already affecting assets and economies.'' For anybody just tuning in, this is not me making this stuff up, this is BlackRock investments. They talk about global fossil fuel subsidies--four times as large, they say, as renewable energy support. Here is an interesting thing: ``Scrapping energy subsidies could save governments some $3 trillion a year, more than they collect from corporate taxes,'' according to BlackRock. So here we have the fossil fuel industry over there, and they are getting the biggest subsidy in the world--by IMF calculations, $700 billion a year--and the party that says it wants a more efficient government and that ordinarily would like to reduce corporate taxes is defending that subsidy, even though that is taking money out of government more than corporate taxes. It is quite astonishing. The BlackRock report gives such a window into Congress by comparison, frankly. They conclude here by giving some pretty dire warnings about where this goes if people aren't preparing for climate change. They say: Risk for the long-term investor . . . could lead to a permanent loss of capital. The effects of climate change need to be part of that equation, we believe. Yet even short-term investors would do well to integrate climate factors into their portfolio. So from Goldman Sachs on to BlackRock, some of the most powerful and intelligent financial firms in the world are telling their investors: Get ready for climate change. The last page of the BlackRock report says: [C]urrent market prices arguably do not yet reflect the social costs of burning fossil fuels. . . . This externality is at the core of the climate challenge. The externality, of course, being that you take the harm that you cause and instead of putting it in the price of your product, you make everybody else around you pay for it by being a polluter. Then they asked the question: What is the correct price of carbon? It is hard to say. A 2015 U.S. government study estimated $36 of economic damages for each metric ton of carbon emitted. Yet estimates are rising: A 2015 Stanford University study points to $220 per metric ton. I believe that our U.S. social cost of carbon is running at about $45 per metric ton right now. And, by the way, it has been upheld twice--at least twice--by Federal courts. In fact, one court rather insisted that the social cost of carbon had to be baked into the underlying rule; otherwise, the underlying rule couldn't pass the test of being logical and fair and not arbitrary and capricious. So there is the case from some of our leading financial institutions about climate change. They have real money at stake. They have real clients. They can't engage in the kind of nonsense that we engage in around here about climate change not being real or not being important or being something that there is still debate about or being something that if we try to fix it, it is going to cost too much money. All of that is total bunkum processed through all sorts of advertising-type public relations firms by the fossil fuel industry and sold to a gullible public as if it were true. A few folks who aren't so gullible--all Republicans--have just come out with a very interesting report. Three of them were Treasury Secretaries. Republican Presidents trusted these folks with the conduct of the U.S. economy: Jim Baker, Secretary of the Treasury under President Reagan; Hank Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury under President Bush; and George Shultz, Secretary of the Treasury under President Nixon. These men have some pretty impressive credentials. Not only was he Secretary of the Treasury, but James Baker was also the Secretary of State. And not only was George Shultz Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State, he was also Secretary of Labor. These three former Treasury Secretaries have led a group of other investors, including the former chairman of the board of Walmart, the world's largest retailer and employer; Tom Stephenson, a Republican who is a partner at Sequoia Capital, a very successful venture capital firm out in Silicon Valley; and Greg Mankiw, who was Chairman of George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, so this is a very Republican group. They have a lot of experience. None of them holds elective office now, so they don't have to worry about the fossil fuel industry threatening to crush them in a primary or spend millions of dollars through phony-baloney front groups against them or any of the usual stuff that politicians have to put up with from the fossil fuel industry as it fights to protect that massive subsidy that we have talked about already. Let's go through this report by these very senior Republican officials. The first sentence: Mounting evidence of climate change is growing too strong to ignore. . . . For too long, many Republicans have looked the other way. Indeed. They go on to propose a conservative climate solution--what they call a carbon dividends plan--which aligns actually fairly well with my American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act, which I have put forward in the past and am going to put forward in this Congress as well. I hope, given its alignment with this Republican leadership on climate, that we might actually begin to get some conversations going here. We may have to go hide out of State someplace so the fossil fuel folks don't find who is participating in the conversation and start punishing them for doing so, but we will see how that goes. The recommendation basically is for a carbon tax that collects revenue to offset the cost of pollution that is not in the price of the product and then return it all to the American people through a big dividend. The report says: ``A carbon tax would send a powerful market signal that encourages technological innovation and largescale substitution of existing energy and transportation infrastructures, thereby stimulating new investment.'' Furthermore, a well-designed carbon dividends plan, the second half, the tax, would stimulate new investment and ``a well-designed carbon dividends plan would further contribute to economic growth through its dynamic effects on consumption and investment.'' They definitely want to protect that one-to-one relationship so that all the money that comes in goes back out. That is the principle of my bill, as well, and I am more than willing to live with it. But the problems of failing to act also need attention. Since two of these gentlemen were Secretaries of State, we should take some interest when they say: ``Our reliance on fossil fuels contributes to a less stable world, empowers rogue petro-states and makes us vulnerable to a volatile world oil market.'' We have to address this issue for a lot of reasons, and I couldn't be more satisfied that these two Republican Secretaries of State have actually made the connection that Thomas Friedman has made and that the Department of Defense has repeatedly made in its ``Quadrennial Defense Review'' between our overreliance on carbon and between the harms of climate change and a less stable world--a world in which climate change is what the Defense Department has so often called a catalyst for conflict. They then reflect a little bit on what is going on with their party: ``The opposition of many Republicans to meaningfully address climate change reflects poor science and poor economics, and is at odds with the party's own noble tradition of stewardship.'' You would never know it nowadays, but the Republican Party was once the party of Teddy Roosevelt. They point out that ``64% of Americans worry a great deal or a fair amount about climate change, while a clear majority of Republicans acknowledge that climate change is occurring.'' They go on to point out ``that 67 percent of Americans''--two thirds of Americans--``support a carbon tax with proceeds returned directly to them.'' Two thirds ``of Americans support a carbon tax with proceeds returned directly to them, including 54% of conservative Republicans.'' So let's not pretend that this is a partisan issue. It is not a partisan issue. It is an issue in which a big special interest has thrown incredible weight around to try to crush one side of the debate. But clearly, if 67 percent of Americans supported anything and 54 percent of conservative Republicans supported that, we would probably be having a sensible conversation in the Senate about whatever that thing was. We just can't do it when that thing happens to be climate change because we have the fossil fuel industry out there--powered up by Citizens United, spending all that money--trying to protect that huge, huge subsidy that they enjoy. Finally, the report points out--and I see the pages lined up here along the side of the podium: ``Increasingly, climate change is becoming a defining issue for this next generation of Americans, which the GOP ignores at its own peril.'' If this party wants to write off the young generation as they follow the fossil fuel industry off the climate cliff, there will be a very grave price to be paid. The report concludes: ``With the privilege of controlling all branches of the government comes a responsibility to exercise wise leadership on the defining challenges of our era, including global climate change.'' I don't know where Mr. Mnuchin will lead on climate change at the Treasury Department. There are a number of ways in which the Treasury Department can be influential in this area. To my knowledge, he has never said anything about it yet. It was not too long ago--2009--that a full-page advertisement ran in the New York Times, a full page advertisement that pointed out that the science of climate change was already, by then, to use the word in the advertisement, ``irrefutable.'' The science of climate change was ``irrefutable,'' the advertisement said. Then the advertisement went on to say that the consequences of climate change would be ``catastrophic and irreversible.'' That is another quote from the advertisement: The consequences of climate change were to be ``catastrophic and irreversible.'' On the one hand, you have science that is irrefutable; on the other hand, you have consequences of ignoring it that are catastrophic and irreversible. Who signed that advertisement? None other than Donald J. Trump--not only he, but his children, Donald Trump, Eric Trump, and Ivanka Trump, also all signed it. The year 2009 was not that long ago. It is possible that the Trump family could refer to what they knew in 2009 and perhaps take advice from a Treasury Secretary. I hope they take advice from three Treasury Secretaries, but we will see how that goes. Perhaps Mr. Mnuchin can be a voice to try to get the GOP out of the fossil fuel hole it is in, aligned with the 67 percent of American voters who want to see a revenue-neutral carbon tax, aligned with the majority of Republican conservative voters who would support that, and aligned with the irrefutable nature of the science, and addressing the catastrophic and irreversible consequences in this strange new administration in which the new normal is abnormal. It is perhaps hard to expect much good to come, but let's hope and let's hope Mr. Mnuchin makes himself a part of the solution rather than just a part of the climate-denial problem that so infects us, particularly here in Congress. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, my distinguished friend, Senator Perdue, is actually right. There is something unprecedented going on around here with these nominations, but it is not the Democratic effort to try to make sure that those nominees get a fair hearing and some light on them before they get into office. What is unprecedented around here with these nominees is, first of all, what a hash the Trump administration made of getting them ready. They were not ready to go. They were not prepared for the ethics reviews. They were dead in the water, and they have a lot of responsibility just in terms of the simple incompetence of getting a Cabinet ready to go. That is not the Senate's fault. The Senate should not roll over in its advice and consent role because an executive branch can't prepare nominees. Then you get behind the incompetence of the executive branch in preparing nominees and you start looking at the nominees. What else is unprecedented about them is the huge array of conflicts of interest they bring. We have never seen anything like this. We call it the ``swamp cabinet'' because it is, in fact, swampy with conflicts of interest. Many of these candidates have such massive financial complexities--because it is billionaire after billionaire after billionaire--that they have had to do all sorts of business contortions to try to get ready for their appointment. That also is not our fault. That actually makes our responsibility greater so we can do our constitutional job in the Senate, as providing advice and consent, to look at potential conflicts of interest. It is part of why we have advice and consent, so we can screen for that. When we are not getting disclosure, we can't even do that. There are still disclosure gaps for a lot of these nominees. The controversy and special interest connections of some of them are, frankly, appalling. So there are, indeed, nominees whom we would love to stop. If we could stop them, we would do it because we think they are going to do damage to the American people; damage to Medicare, which seniors rely on; damage to Medicaid, which so many sick kids rely on; damage to clean air, which I think everybody tends to rely on if they breathe; damage to clean water, which fishermen and sailors and people count on across the country. It is not a question here of doing the people's business, it is a question of trying to prevent these people from giving the people business because this looks like the special interest Cabinet of all time. If you go down one by one through the civilian Cabinet, you can more or less pick who the most influenced special interest is, the one who is most harmful to the American people in that particular area, and bingo, there is your nominee. So we should not slow down the advice and consent process just for the sake of slowing down the advice and consent process, but we should slow down the advice and consent process when we are not getting the basic information necessary to do our jobs, and we should slow down the advice and consent process when we are handing over agencies of government to big special interests. Those are two very good reasons to have the Senate's noble tradition of advice and consent followed scrupulously. As to the nominee for HHS, Dr. Price, he is right in that list. He has conflicts of interest. He has real harm that he proposes to the American public. I think Medicare is one of the great things the United States has done. It is one of our signal achievements. It has lifted seniors out of poverty in a way that very few other countries can match and that the United States had never seen before we did Medicare. It is probably the most efficient health care delivery system in the United States of America, and our seniors count on it and love it. That is not good enough for the good Dr. Price, though. He wants to voucherize Medicare. What do you do if you are a Medicare patient who is elderly and infirm? How do you go shopping for health insurance? I can remember when I was quite capable as a fit lawyer, and I was given the H.R. forms by the U.S. attorney's office to make my choice. It is a complicated mess. And you expect some woman who may be in a hospital bed to sort through that? Great job giving her a voucher. It is just so unfair and so wrong. Medicaid. Children across Rhode Island depend on Medicaid. If you are a family and you have a child with a significant illness, you are very likely to have that support for that child come through the Medicaid Program. This is a man who wants to block-grant Medicare and projects trillion-dollar cuts--trillion-dollar cuts? Who is going to make up the trillion dollars if we are not taking care of these kids? Is it going to go back to the families or the care just isn't going to be there for the Medicaid children? That is just wrong. These are ideological candidates who want ideological victories that will hurt real people like Henry, from Warwick. A woman named Lisa wrote to me. She is a teacher and lifelong resident of Warwick, RI. She has a son, Henry. Henry was just born last year, and before he was even 1 month old, Henry was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. Cystic fibrosis, as I am sure we all know, is a genetic disorder. It affects more than 30,000 people in the United States, and it is one of the crueler diseases on the face of the planet. As cystic fibrosis progresses, it can cause infections, it causes difficulty breathing, and eventually it renders the child unable to breathe and respiratory failure results. There have been important advances and treatment for this disease, but there is no cure. So Henry needs regular tests and treatment. He will need them for the rest of his life as doctors fight to extend his life as long as they can in hopes that a cure will arise. His parents are extremely grateful for the wonderful work of our doctors at Hasbro Children's Hospital who take care of Henry. But Lisa and her husband are also worried about their health insurance, and Henry's, because Henry has a preexisting condition. If Secretary Price were to have his way, the Affordable Care Act would be repealed, and without it there would be no protection for people like Henry--a child like Henry with a preexisting condition. Either he would face outrageous health care premiums or be denied coverage altogether. Since then, having to face the scrutiny of confirmation, he has said: Oh, no, that part we are going to try to save. But when you go through the parts that my Republican friends are going to try to save, you end up with pretty much the whole bill. If you are going to try to save every part of the bill, why bother repealing it? Why not make it better and move on? How irresponsible it was to say, ``Repeal,'' when all these points were in it. When repeal was the great mantra, nobody said: ``Repeal. Oh, but not that.'' ``Repeal. Oh, but let's protect the seniors from the doughnut hole.'' No, it was just ``Repeal ObamaCare. Repeal ObamaCare.'' Frankly, chanting ``Repeal ObamaCare'' I think is about as disqualifying to lead Medicare and Medicaid as chanting ``Lock her up'' would be to be Attorney General of the United States. Catherine is a constituent of mine who lives in Cranston. She is a breast cancer survivor. She owns a small family business. Her family had health insurance before the Affordable Care Act, but their insurance company decided that their little company had too few employees to qualify as a small business, and it dropped them from their coverage. So it was thanks to the Affordable Care Act that Catherine and her husband could get affordable and quality health insurance through our exchange that we call HealthSourceRI. With this coverage, they go on about their business. They don't have to worry about whether their insurance company is going to change the rules and pitch them out again. Catherine and her husband tell me they don't understand how anyone could say they support small business and want to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Timothy wrote to me. He is a freelance writer in Rumford, RI. He has affordable health care for the first time in his life. There is no big company to help you if you are a freelance writer; you are on your own. But the Affordable Care Act has been there for Timothy. He has multiple chronic health conditions that require medication. Before he had coverage under the Affordable Care Act, Timothy was hospitalized for a heart problem. He couldn't afford the resulting hospital bills. Without health insurance, he couldn't pay for his prescriptions. Having health insurance, Timothy told me, has changed his life. He feels dignity, he feels peace, he feels assurance, and a lot of that is simply the reassurance that you can afford the medications you need to stay healthy. His chances of having to be hospitalized in the future are down. If the ACA is repealed, Timothy may be forced to forgo care that he needs, endangering his health, and potentially, by the way, costing the system a lot more. Martha, who lives in Cranston, RI, knows well the dangers of being uninsured. Before the Affordable Care Act, Martha went several years without health insurance, gambling that she could get away with it because she couldn't afford it. A gall bladder infection required emergency surgery. She was taken to the hospital, the surgery was performed. It went well, but she was left with a $60,000 hospital bill. Unable to pay the bill, she declared bankruptcy. Now she can have coverage, and by the way, when the hospital has to do the surgery, it gets paid with her insurance. That is why the American Hospital Association and the Hospital Association of Rhode Island are saying: Don't repeal ObamaCare. That would be reckless. Martha and her husband and her 24-year-old son have all been able to purchase insurance through the Rhode Island exchange. By the way, our exchange is doing great. People may complain about exchanges in other States. We are seeing costs steady; we are seeing costs going down. One of our major insurers, Neighborhood Health Plan of Rhode Island, is advertising on TV. Whoa. Our rates are going down, and their coverage is fine, and Rhode Island is a success story under the Affordable Care Act. The $283 per month that Martha and her family now pay in total for insurance certainly beats the $500 a month that she and her husband each faced for individual coverage before the ACA. Paula wrote to me from Cranston about how the Affordable Care Act has helped her and her husband bridge the gap until they get to the safe haven, finally, of Medicare. Paula is 63 years old. She works part time. Her husband who is 64 years old and retired has health insurance through our exchange, HealthSourceRI. Paula has beaten breast cancer once, but she is at high risk of recurrence. If the Affordable Care Act is repealed, Paula would be at risk to lose her health insurance and the ability to have tests that would help her catch a recurrence of cancer in time. Paula and her husband worked hard and saved well, but as Martha's story shows, one illness can wipe you out if you don't have health insurance, and they are so content and comforted knowing they have a good health insurance plan through our exchange. Travis is a social worker in Providence. He provides psychotherapy and counseling to recovering addicts who are receiving medication and assisted treatment. This is a particularly touching point in Rhode Island because we lost 239 Rhode Islanders to opioid-related overdoses last year. That is 239 fatalities in Rhode Island last year. The Affordable Care Act, Travis believes, is the reason that many of his patients are actually able to get care and stay away from the risk of overdose. He wrote of his patients, many of them never accessed methadone treatment prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, let alone sought treatment for their psychiatric conditions which may underlie the substance abuse disorders. By the way, a recent report came out that said if you repeal the Affordable Care Act and its coverage requirements for mental health and substance abuse, you pull about $5.5 billion worth of coverage out from American families. Is that really what this Congress wants to be responsible for doing? I certainly hope not, not after all the fine statements we heard about the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act and the funding for it. Let me make one last point because I see the Senator from Michigan here and I know she wants to add her thoughts. You can talk about the personal stories, and it shows how poignant and important having the Affordable Care Act around is in the lives of real actual people, but we also have to deal with budget issues in Washington, and I just want to show this chart. This chart shows the spending projections for Federal health care spending. The red line on the top was the projection in 2010 done by the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office. In 2010, they said: Here is how we think our spending is going to be in Federal health care. They predicted that. Then they came back and they did another prediction in 2017. One thing that happened is that after the passage of the Affordable Care Act back here, we came in well below predicted expense for Federal health care. We saved a lot of money in that period. Then when they rebooted the prediction in 2017, they started off actual and they did a new prediction right here. The difference in this 10-year period in Federal health care costs between what they expected to have happen in that 10-year period before the Affordable Care Act came along and what experience and the new projections show the savings are since the Affordable Care Act are $3.3 trillion--$3.3 trillion--and we have this person who wants to be the Secretary who wants to cut the program? We are saving money in the program under this. It doesn't make any sense fiscally, and it is cruel to the individuals and families who have found comfort and peace and security from the Affordable Care Act. So I will leave us with that, but if we are going to be responsible about doing something about our outyear health care costs, find me something else that shows $3.3 trillion in savings during the period of 2017 to 2027, over 10 years. For these costs, we sometimes look out 30 years, and that number would grow even greater. We have saved trillions of dollars as a result of the Affordable Care Act, and CBO shows it. Thank you very much. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I wish to add a few Rhode Island voices to the voice of the Senator from Minnesota. By the way, I am not cherry-picking my correspondence to find the rare letters in opposition to this nominee. We have had an unprecedented avalanche of opposition to this nominee. It is running well more than 100 to 1 against her, and it is people from all walks of life. Here is a letter from William, a 12th grader in Pawtucket, RI. William took the trouble to write to me. Let me start with the topic line: ``Concern over Betsy DeVos.'' Hello, Senator Whitehouse! My name is William and I am a senior at Blackstone Academy Charter School, a public charter school in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. I am contacting you today due to my concern about educational equality, specifically Betsy DeVos' ability to commit to practices that ensure that the children who need the most help aren't forgotten about and brushed under the rug. These children are our kids of color, as well as our low-income kids attending urban public schools with limited resources. Having attended a Pawtucket public school, I can confidently say that there are some genuinely brilliant minds here in this very city, in the areas where somebody like Mrs. DeVos would least expect. Yet it also cannot be denied that the students here begin their journey on ground that is unequal to that of other kids who are not people of color, or are not part of the public school system, etc. These bright young saplings are being crushed before they are given the chance to blossom, and that is a systemic problem that DeVos, given her various shortcomings, will only serve to perpetuate and make worse. DeVos, given her support of the privatization of public schools and her open disdain towards the LGBTQIA community, has established that she will not improve the experiences of marginalized communities. Her interest is not the betterment of education for people, but the monetization of education to put money in her pockets and the pockets of people like her. DeVos will never spearhead movements that promote equity in education and will continuously disappoint us all throughout her term which will not be defined by deviating from the status quo and creating a system that our troubled but gifted youth can thrive in. In fact, she will do the opposite. With this in mind I ask that you, Senator Whitehouse, openly speak out against Betsy DeVos, and do everything in your power to keep her out of the Secretary of Education office. I also ask that you continue to remember me and children like me; public school youth who could be incredible if they are just given the opportunity to thrive. Thank you for your time! William. Now let's hear from Da-naijah, a 10th grader from Central Falls, RI. Dear Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, My name is Da-naijah, and I am in 10th grade at Blackstone Academy School which is a public charter school. I live in Central Falls, RI. I'm writing today because I'm concerned about kids being able to afford college, regardless of background. I care about this because I have plenty of family members and friends who go to public school, and they either want or are trying to go to college. I know they will need help with paying for college because they don't come from a very wealthy background. Fair and equal education is so important to me because I think everyone should be treated fairly regardless of how they look because we are humans. I am concerned about Betsy DeVos being nominated for Secretary of Education because she doesn't have any experience with classrooms. Also because she basically doesn't like public schools since she is trying to make public school private and is trying to take resources away from public schools. With that being said, I hope that you do everything you can to help the kids in public school get equal education and fair education as much as private schools do. Please read my email when you can and I would like to thank you for your time.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. So a Senator of the United States has been accused of violating a rule of the Senate for restating to the Senate a phrase that has been a matter of record in the Senate--if, indeed, that is the case--for 30 years. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. But clearly the content of this letter has been a matter known to the Senate and, depending on what the facts may show, may actually have been a record of the Senate for more than 30 years.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask unanimous consent that the complete letter from which Senator Warren read be printed in the Congressional Record to confirm that she has in fact read from it.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. What was that occasion?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. And this letter was made a matter of record in that hearing?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. 1986. And is the Senator aware of the occasion that brought this letter to the Senate?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, may I ask the Senator, through the Chair, if the letter from which he just read has a date?

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. So the precedent going forward is that any Senator who discusses derogatory information that is a matter of public record, that may even include criminal behavior by a Senator who is a candidate for Executive appointment that requires advice and consent, is at risk of being sanctioned by this body by a simple partisan majority of this body under rule XIX if they raise those issues on the floor?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, the Attorney General of the United States holds a vital and also somewhat unique position in the Federal Government. The Attorney General of the United States is tasked with significant responsibilities that must be executed independently, sometimes even in defiance of the White House's wishes and interests. The Attorney General of the United States is tasked with enforcing our laws fairly, justly, and evenhandedly, as well as with protecting the civil and constitutional rights of all Americans of all persuasions, of all backgrounds. The Attorney General of the United States does not work for the President so much as for the people and does not serve the administration so much as the law. I have served in the U.S. Department of Justice. I have felt its esprit de corps, its pride. That pride is founded on a firm sense of the Department's willingness to stand on what is right, even against the wishes of the White House. One fine example of this was Attorney General Ashcroft challenging and refusing to accede to the wishes of the White House on the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping of Americans. The Department of Justice is well aware of the importance of its independence. A successful Attorney General must be stalwart in protecting the Department from political meddling by the administration or by Congress. We need only look back to Attorney General Gonzales's resignation to recall how badly things turn out when an Attorney General yields to political pressure. An Attorney General also makes policy decisions about where and how to direct the Department's $27 billion budget and when and how to advise Congress to recommend new laws and modify existing policies. These are policy choices an Attorney General makes. It is no answer to questions about those policy choices to say: I will follow the law. That doesn't apply in this arena of funding decisions and legislative recommendations that are policy choices not dictated by law. Those policy choices can have a profound effect on individuals, on communities, and on the fabric of our Nations. Americans should be able to trust that their Attorney General will not only enforce the laws with integrity and impartiality but stand up for Americans of all stripes and fight on behalf of their rights. That is the prism through which I evaluate Senator Sessions' nomination. I have known Senator Sessions for a decade and have enjoyed working with him on a number of pieces of legislation. However, the standard by which I evaluate an Attorney General nominee is whether Rhode Islanders will trust that in the tough clinches, he will always be independent and always fair. I have reviewed Senator Sessions' career as an attorney and as a Senator, as well as his testimony before the Judiciary Committee. I have reflected on my own duties and experience as my State's attorney general and as the U.S. attorney in Rhode Island. I have also served as an attorney in our State attorney general's office. By the way, the attorney general in Rhode Island has full prosecutive authority. Many States have a division in which the attorney general has a narrow ambit of authority and district attorneys do the bulk of the criminal prosecution--not so in Rhode Island. I have also had the occasion to listen closely to very strong and honest, serious concerns from Rhode Islanders who have made it plain to me that they fear what Senator Sessions would do as head of the Justice Department. For every constituent of mine who has expressed support of his nomination, 15 have expressed opposition. Senator Sessions has fought against fixing our immigration system, opposing as the leading opponent of bipartisan legislation which, had it passed, would have spared us much of the current debate over walls and immigration. Senator Sessions fought against our bipartisan criminal justice and sentencing reform bill. Senator Sessions opposed reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act--a bill which is vitally important to the Rhode Island Department of Attorney General and to the anti-domestic violence groups around Rhode Island. Senator Sessions' record on support of gay and lesbian Americans has alarmed many Rhode Islanders. Public statements and confirmation testimony by Senator Sessions suggest that he brings a religious preference to the Department and that what he calls secular attorneys would be, to him, suspect compared to Christian attorneys. That distinction between a secular attorney and a religious attorney is one that runs counter to very solid principles upon which my State was founded. Roger Williams brought to us freedom of conscience. Senator Sessions has called Breitbart News a bright spot. I must disagree. Breitbart News is not, to me, a bright spot. Breitbart has published baseless and inflammatory articles with titles like ``Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.'' In fairness, I should disclose that Senator Sessions' nomination carries an additional burden with me as the nominee of this President and this White House. The need for an independent Attorney General has rarely, if ever, been greater. On the campaign trail, the American people witnessed Donald Trump glorify sexual misconduct, mock a disabled reporter, and make disparaging remarks about immigrants and minorities. We all witnessed chants at Trump rallies of ``lock her up.'' At his confirmation hearings, Senator Sessions excused these as ``humorously done.'' In mass rallies that also featured people getting beaten and the press caged and vilified, this didn't seem very humorous to many Americans. I think Americans know that the good guys in the movie are not the ones in the mob; the good guy is the lawman who stands on the jailhouse porch and sends the mob home. To me, that ``lock her up'' chant was un- American. I believe that across the country it made honest prosecutors' stomachs turn. Not surprisingly, many Americans are fearful of what the Trump administration will mean for them, for their families, and for their country. The problems with this President did not end with the campaign. President Trump and his family have brought more conflicts of interest to the White House than all other modern Presidents and families combined. The proposed Trump domestic Cabinet is an unprecedented swamp of conflicts of interest, failures of disclosure and divestment, and dark money secrets. We have not even been permitted, in the course of our nomination advice-and-consent process, to explore the full depth of that unprecedented swamp because the dark money operations of nominees have been kept from us. In one case, thousands of emails are still covered up. The Trump White House traffics in alternative facts, operates vindictively, and is a haven for special interest influence. None of this is good. All of this suggests that there will be more or less constant occasion for investigation and even prosecution of this administration. Independence is at a premium. Nothing could have made this more clear than the first disagreement between the Trump White House and the Department of Justice, whose outcome was that the Acting Attorney General--a woman with 30 years' experience in the Department, a career prosecutor, former assistant U.S. attorney, former U.S. attorney, and someone recognized for her leadership throughout the Department--was summarily fired. This is also not a good sign. In recent history, Attorneys General Gonzales, Meese, and Mitchell were politically close to their Presidents, and the Gonzales, Meese, and Mitchell tenures did not end well. Attorney General Mitchell worked for President Nixon. They met when their New York law firms merged in the early 1970s, and they became law partners. John Mitchell was the campaign manager for Nixon's 1968 Presidential campaign. There were signs that things weren't quite right because when Nixon nominated Mitchell to be his Attorney General, he appealed directly to FBI Director Hoover not to conduct the usual background check. Mitchell ultimately resigned as Attorney General in order to run President Nixon's reelection campaign. So the political link between Mitchell and Nixon was very close, and sure enough, scandal ensued. Attorney General Mitchell turned out to be a central figure of the Watergate scandal. As the chairman of the reelection committee, the famous CREEP, Mitchell was responsible for appointing G. Gordon Liddy and approving the dirty tricks program while still Attorney General. That dirty tricks program ultimately included breaking into national Democratic headquarters in the Watergate. The upshot of this was that Mitchell was charged with conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and three counts of perjury. He was convicted on all counts, and he served 19 months in prison. Attorney General Edwin Meese was also very close to President Reagan. Meese joined the 1980 Reagan Presidential campaign as Chief of Staff. He ran the day-to-day campaign operations and was the senior issues adviser. After the election, Edwin Meese was given the job of leading the Reagan transition, and once in office, Reagan appointed Meese as Counselor to the President. According to press accounts at the time, Meese was known as someone who ``has known the President so long and so well, he has become almost an alter ego of Ronald Reagan.'' That was the political background between Meese and President Reagan. Again, it did not end well. Meese came under scrutiny for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. The congressional committee that reported on the Iran-Contra scandal in November 1987 determined that Meese had failed to take appropriate steps to prevent members of the administration from destroying critical evidence. An independent counsel named Lawrence Walsh finished a report in 1993 that stated that Meese had made a false statement when he said Reagan had not known about the 1985 Iran-Contra deal. Iran-Contra was not the only controversy that plagued Attorney General Meese. A company called Wedtech Corporation was seeking Department of Defense contracts in the early 1980s. The company hired Meese's former law school classmate and his personal attorney, a lawyer named E. Robert Wallach, to lobby the Reagan administration on its behalf. Attorney General Meese helped Wedtech at Wallach's urging get a special hearing on a $32 million Army engine contract, although the Army considered the company unqualified. Well, the contract was awarded to Wedtech, and then one of Meese's top deputies went to work for Wedtech. The Federal criminal investigation that resulted led to the conviction of E. Robert Wallach, the former law school classmate and personal attorney of Meese, for whom he had set up the meetings with the government. Independent counsel James McKay investigated the Wedtech contract, including investigating allegations of misconduct by Meese. While Meese was never convicted, he resigned following the issuance of the independent counsel's 800-page report. Third is Attorney General Gonzales. Attorney General Gonzales was close to then-Governor Bush in Texas. He was his general counsel. When Governor Bush became President Bush, Gonzales came to Washington to serve as White House Counsel. He was appointed Attorney General in 2005. During his tenure at the Department of Justice, there were multiple investigations, many of which played out before the Senate Judiciary Committee, involving the Warrantless Wiretapping Program, the U.S. attorney's scandal, and inquiries into the Department's management of the torture program legal opinions. Ultimately, Members of both Houses of Congress called for Attorney General Gonzales's resignation--or demanded that he be fired by the President--and Attorney General Gonzales resigned. There is a track record here of Attorneys General who are politically close to a President coming into harm's way and doing poorly in the Department. One particular office that is vulnerable to this kind of undue proximity, and failure of independence, is a body in the Department of Justice called the Office of Legal Counsel. Jack Goldsmith, a former head of the Office of Legal Counsel--and a Republican, by the way--testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that ``more than any other institution inside the executive branch, OLC is supposed to provide detached, apolitical legal advice.'' And it has an honorable tradition of providing such advice to a remarkable degree, but under the Bush administration, the OLC departed from that tradition. It came up in a number of ways. The first was during our investigation into President Bush's Warrantless Wiretapping Program. When Office of Legal Counsel memos supporting the program came to light, I plowed through a fat stack of those classified opinions that were held in secret over at the White House and pressed to have some of the statements declassified. Here are some of the statements that were declassified found in those OLC opinions: An Executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new Executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous Executive order. So this means a President could issue an Executive order, have it published in the Federal Register, put it forward as the policy of the administration--a direction to all the attorneys in the administration--and then secretly depart from it without ever changing what the public is told about the policy. A theory like this allows the Federal Register, where these Executive orders are assembled, to become a screen of falsehood, behind which illegal programs can operate in violation of the very Executive order that purports to control the executive branch. That was just one. Another one I will quote: ``The President exercising his constitutional authority under Article II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President's authority under Article II.'' If that sounds a little bit like pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, well, it sounds that way to me, too, and it runs contrary to a fairly basic constitutional principle announced in the famous case of Marbury v. Madison--which every law student knows--which says: ``It is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is.'' A third example--and this is another quote from an OLC opinion: ``The Department of Justice is bound by the President's legal [opinions.]'' Well, if that is true, what is the point of a President sending matters over to the Department of Justice for legal review? If the President did it, and it is therefore automatically legal, there would be no function to the Department of Justice accomplishing that legal review. So in this area of warrantless wiretapping, the Office of Legal Counsel within the Department of Justice came up with what seemed to be quite remarkable theories in the privacy and secrecy of that office, in those classified opinions that are really hard to justify in the broad light of day. That is why independence matters so much. Obviously, the White House wanted those opinions to say what they said, but in the clear light of day, they don't hold up. Let us move on from the warrantless wiretapping opinions of the Bush Department of Justice to the OLC opinions that the Bush administration used to authorize waterboarding of detainees. Again, I was one of the first Senators to review the OLC opinions, and when I read them, I will say I was quite surprised. I was surprised not just by what they said but by what they didn't say. One thing that was entirely omitted was the history of waterboarding. Waterboarding was used by the Spanish Inquisition, by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, by the French-suppressing revolts in Algeria, by the Japanese in World War II, and by military dictatorships in Latin America. The technique, as we know, ordinarily involves strapping a captive in a reclining position, heels overhead, putting a cloth over his face, and pouring water over the cloth to create the impression of drowning. Senator John McCain, held captive for more than 5 years by the North Vietnamese, said this of waterboarding: It is not a complicated procedure. It is torture. American prosecutors and American judges in military tribunals after World War II prosecuted Japanese soldiers for war crimes for torture on the evidence of their waterboarding American prisoners of war. None of that history appeared in the Office of Legal Counsel opinion. The other major thing the Office of Legal Counsel overlooked was a case involving a Texas sheriff who was prosecuted as a criminal for waterboarding prisoners in 1984. Let's start with the fact that this was a case that was brought by the Department of Justice. It was the U.S. attorney for that district who prosecuted the sheriff. The Department of Justice won the case at trial. The case went up on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the court one level below the U.S. Supreme Court. In its appellate decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit described the technique as ``water torture.'' All a legal researcher had to do was to type the words ``water'' and ``torture'' into the legal search engines Lexis or Westlaw, and this case would come up: United States v. Lee. You can find it at 744 F2d 1124. Over and over in that published appellate opinion by the second highest level of court in the Federal judiciary, they described the technique as torture. Yet the Office of Legal Counsel never mentioned this case in their decision. Ordinarily, what a proper lawyer is supposed to do, if they find adverse precedent--i.e., decisions that appear to come down a different way than the argument the lawyer is making--is they report the decision to the court, and then they try to distinguish it, they try to convince the judge they are before why that case was either wrongly decided or does not apply on the facts of their case. But the Office of Legal Counsel did not offer any effort to distinguish the Fifth Circuit decision; it simply pretended it did not exist or it never found it. It is hard to know which is worse. At sentencing in the Lee case, the district judge admonished the former sheriff who had been found guilty of waterboarding: ``The operation down there would embarrass the dictator of a country.'' Well, it is also pretty embarrassing when what is supposed to be the institution inside the executive branch that is supposed to provide detached, apolitical legal advice in an honorable tradition of providing such advice, to a remarkable degree, to quote Professor Goldsmith, misses a case so clearly on point. That was not the only OLC error. In addition to the warrantless wiretapping statements, in addition to the Office of Legal Counsel opinions on waterboarding, they undertook a review of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is something called an exclusivity provision. It says this: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ``shall be the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance and the interception of domestic wire, oral and electronic communications may be conducted.'' Shall be the exclusive means. Seems pretty clear. But the Office of Legal Counsel said about that language--I quote them here: Unless Congress made a clear statement in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that it sought to restrict Presidential authority to conduct wireless searches in the national security area, which it has not, then the statute must be construed to avoid such a reading--which it has not. Congress said that this shall be the exclusive means. If the OLC was not happy reading the language of the statute, they could go to a court where this language had already been construed. The decision was called United States v. Andonian, and the judge in that case ruled that this language, the exclusivity clause--I am quoting the court's decision-- ``reveals that Congress intended to sew up the perceived loopholes through which the President had been able to avoid the warrant requirement.'' The exclusivity clause makes it impossible for the President to opt out of the legislative scheme by retreating to his inherent executive sovereignty over foreign affairs. The exclusivity clause assures that the President cannot avoid Congress's limitations by resorting to inherent powers. In the face of that case law, the Office of Legal Counsel held that Congress had not said what it said and this was not exclusive language, even though a court had said so. The reason I share those three stories is because it really matters in important issues when the Department of Justice has the capability and the courage to stand up to the President. It really matters when they get it wrong. It really matters when they say things that simply are not correct or legally sound in order to support a warrantless wiretapping program. It really matters when they don't find the case on point to evaluate whether waterboarding is torture. It really matters when they go around a clear congressional statute which a judge has said closes the door to going around that statute by simply saying privately: Well, that door is not actually closed. It matters. I have insufficient confidence that as Attorney General, Senator Sessions will be able to stand up to the kind of pressure we can expect this White House to bring. We know that this White House operates vindictively and likes to push people around. We found out recently that Mr. Bannon went running over to see General Kelly to tell him to undo the green card waiver of the Muslim ban. Thankfully General Kelly refused and stuck by his duty. But this is the kind of White House we have, where they try to push people around to do the wrong thing. They are so contemptuous of authority outside their own that they are willing to attack a Federal judge who disagrees with them, calling him a ``so-called judge.'' They are willing to fire an Acting Attorney General who disagrees with them, firing her summarily and accusing her of betrayal. The pressure this White House can be expected to bring on the Department of Justice to conform itself not to the law but to the political demands of the President is going to be intense. Moreover, the conflicts of interest that crawl through this White House and that crawl over this swamp Cabinet offer every reasonable cause to believe that there will have to be investigations and prosecutions into this administration. That combination of a target-rich environment in this administration for investigation and prosecution with a vindictive White House that does not hesitate to try to bully officials into conformity calls for the highest degree of independence. I do not feel Senator Sessions makes that standard. He was too close to the President during the political race. He has not stood up against any of those excesses I have mentioned since then. It is with regret that I must say I will not be able to vote to confirm him. One of the reasons I became a lawyer was because of ``To Kill a Mocking Bird.'' As a kid, I just loved Atticus Finch. He is great in the movie. He is even better in the book. Some of the things that Atticus Finch says about the law and about human nature are so brave and so profound that from the first time I read that book, boy, I would love to have been Atticus Finch. I would love to have had the chance to stand in the breach when everyone was against you and stick up for doing something that was right. Gosh, that felt so great. Like the scene in many movies, the hero is not a part of the mob, not carrying a torch toward the jailhouse; the hero is the lonely lawman who sits on the porch and won't let the mob in. That is what I think we are going to need in our next Attorney General. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. The text of the letter as she read it, but not the complete letter.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, pursuing Senator Merkley's hypothetical, if it came before the Senate that a Member of the Senate who was a nominee seeking the advice and consent of the Senate to the position was, for example, in fact, a horse thief, and we found the fact that he was a horse thief to be relevant to whether or not he should be confirmed, say, to the Department of Interior, which has authority over lands, does the ruling of the Chair mean that it would not be in order for the Senate or for Senators to consider what in my hypothetical is the established fact that the Senator was a horse thief as we debate his nomination here on the floor?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I have a question. I guess it is in the nature of a parliamentary question, and that is, whether it would be in order to ask unanimous consent that the letter from which Senator Warren read be put into the Record as a confirmation that she was, in fact, accurately reading from the letter, that it be added as an exhibit in the Congressional Record.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I guess, Mr. President, what I don't understand is that we have fairly significant responsibilities under the Constitution to provide advice and consent. It appears that the ruling of the Chair has just been that when a Member of this body is the subject of that advice and consent, then derogatory information about that person is not in order and is a violation of rule XIX on the Senate floor. And with that being the ruling, I don't know how we go about doing our duties. Are we supposed to simply blind ourselves to derogatory information, discuss it privately in the cloak rooms, not bring it out onto the floor of the U.S. Senate, this supposedly great debating society that actually has a constitutional responsibility to discuss both the advantages and the deficits of a particular nominee?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, it is my understanding that the Senator will take us through the closing script, and as a part of that, I will be recognized in the order to make my remarks. With that understanding, I yield the floor. What if I suggest that I begin my remarks, that you give me the high sign whenever the closing script is prepared--it is. Never mind. I yield the floor.