Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, the last week we were here, I gave my weekly ``Time To Wake Up'' speech, as usual. It is a speech I wrote well earlier. In a truly and, unfortunately, almost eerie coincidence, in my speech last week I spoke about a variety of natural disasters, including--and I will quote my own speech--``cyclones in Oklahoma.'' I said that in the same hour the cyclone touched down in Moore, OK. When people are suffering in the wake of a calamity such as that, they need to hear one thing from Washington; that is, how can we help. That is all they need to hear. No one likes to be chided when what they need is help and comfort. J.E. Reynolds of the Daily Oklahoman wrote: ``Victims and survivors need help, not a sermon in the first hours following a storm.'' I agree. I agree very much. My thoughts are with the victims of those Oklahoma storms and with everyone who is working to pick up the pieces. Far from seeking to exploit their tragedy, I had no idea of the weather in Oklahoma that was happening virtually at the time I gave the speech, mentioning Oklahoma cyclones among other examples of extreme weather. But the eerie timing was what it was, and it did not send that single simple message: How can we help? So I am sorry. I have apologized to my Oklahoma colleagues for the unfortunate coincidence of timing of my earlier remarks, and I, of course, stand ready to help them speed relief to their State. It is, of course, impossible to say that any single weather event is caused by climate change, and that is not something I have ever said. What is true is that climate change is altering weather patterns. Scientists have studied these changes in weather patterns, and they have modeled what is to come. Most are convinced that increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather will be a result of the megatons of carbon pollution we continue to emit. The way I have described it is that climate change ``loads the dice'' for extreme weather. We might not know which roll is caused by the loaded dice. We are going to get a 6 or a 7 or a 12 or a 2 sooner or later anyway, but the extreme weather will come more often because of this. We cannot pretend this isn't happening. We just hit 400 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere, measured at the NOAA observatory on Mauna Loa in Hawaii. What does 400 parts per million mean? Well, look at it this way: For at least 800,000 years, and perhaps millions, we have been in a range on Earth between 170 and 300 parts per million of carbon in our atmosphere--800,000 years, minimum. Homo sapiens as a species have only been around for about 200,000 years, but just since the industrial revolution and the ``Great Carbon Dump'' began, we have blown out of the 170- to 300-parts-per-million range and have now hit 400. This is very serious. We already see the effects. In Alaska, permafrost is melting and native villages once protected by winter ice are being eroded into the sea. In the Carolinas, roads to the Outer Banks have to be raised as seas rise and storms worsen. Coral reefs are fading off in Florida and in the Caribbean. In Rhode Island, we have measured almost 10 inches of sea level rise since the 1930s. Rhode Island fishermen going out to sea from Point Judith are reporting ``real anomalies . . . things just aren't making sense.'' All of these effects from climate change hit our farmers too. Since before the founding of this Republic, our farmers have relied on the Sun, the rain, and the land to provide us their bounty. In 2011, farming and the industries that rely directly on agriculture accounted for almost 5 percent of the entire U.S. economy. But growing conditions in the United States are changing. More and more of our rainfall is coming in heavy downpours. Since 1991, the amount of rain falling in what scientists call ``extreme precipitation events''--the amount of rain falling in extreme precipitation events has been above the 1901- to-1960 average in every region of the country. In the Northeast where I am from extreme precipitation has increased 74 percent just between 1958 and 2010. That matters to our farmers. The very seasons are shifting. During the last two decades, the average frost-free season was about 10 days longer than during that period between 1901 and 1960. In the Southwest it is an astonishing 3 weeks longer. That matters to our farmers. Average temperature in the contiguous United States has increased by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since records began in 1895. Most of that increase occurred since the 1980s, and 2012 was the warmest year ever. That matters to our farmers. This chart shows the extent of the U.S. drought in August of 2012. The red and the dark areas indicate extreme and exceptional drought. These conditions lasted most of the year. That matters to our farmers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture Chief Economist Joseph Glauber testified before the Agriculture Committee that ``the heat and rainfall deficit conditions that characterized the summer of 2012 were well outside the range of normal weather variation.'' That is precisely what scientists mean when they say climate change ``loads the dice'' for extreme weather. Climate change doesn't cause specific heat waves but the average temperature shifts to warmer weather and the extremes move with it. The New York Botanical Garden has seen apricot trees blossom in February. The Audubon Society of Rhode Island has reported cherry trees in Providence blooming as early as December. This could affect farmers too. Jeff Send, a Michigan cherry farmer, explained to the Agriculture Committee that the record warm March temperatures brought his region's cherry trees out of dormancy early and exposed them to later freezes. In Michigan he said: We have the capacity to produce 275 million pounds of tart cherries. In 2012, our total was 11.6 million pounds. A potential of 275 million pounds; actual crop, 11.6 million pounds, less than one-twentieth, all because of that early warming and that early bloom and the freezes that then killed them. These changes I keep speaking about will continue if we go on polluting our atmosphere with greenhouse gases. As the harmful effects of climate change become more prevalent, our agricultural policies should reflect the threat posed to farming and food production by these changes. Yet in the farm bill climate change and extreme weather are not mentioned once. Well, let me correct myself. They are mentioned once. The bill makes reference to an earlier law from 1990, and in the title of that 1990 law the words ``climate change'' appear. So by referring to the 1990 law, the farm bill once mentions climate change. But with all of this going on, that is the only reference. And the reason is that our Republican colleagues will oppose legislation if it even mentions the words ``climate change.'' We can't get around using the name of a statute that passed 20-plus years ago, if ``climate change'' is in the name, so that one had to go in. But, otherwise, climate change is not mentioned in the farm bill, despite all of this activity and effect on farming. It is not that there aren't things we could do. The Bicameral Task Force on Climate Change, which I cochair with Representative Waxman, Senator Cardin, and Representative Markey, asked stakeholders in the agriculture economy about carbon pollution and our resiliency to climate change. The National Farmers Union, which represents more than 200,000 family farmers, ranchers, and rural members, responded--this is the National Farmers Union: Mitigating and adapting to climate change is of significant concern to our membership and will be a defining trend that shapes the world. That is the National Farmers Union on climate change. It will be ``a defining trend that shapes the world.'' Cap-and-trade legislation, the Farmers Union said, would provide a boon to farming and forest lands that take the lead on reducing greenhouse gases. The National Sustainable Agricultural Coalition encouraged a comprehensive approach. An effective policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, wrote the group, ``should have as its cornerstone the support and promotion of sustainable organic cultural systems throughout USDA's programs and initiatives.'' Even the American Farm Bureau Federation, which has at times opposed climate change legislation, expressed clear support for farming practices that keep carbon out of the atmosphere and for investments in biofuels and in renewable energy. We are grateful to all of the scientific and industry leaders who have shared their ideas with the Bicameral Task Force on Climate Change. We need active and willing partners in the effort to ensure our farms can meet the needs of a strong nation. They are not alone. Responsible people across the spectrum want us to act on carbon and climate. Responsible people such as the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States of America, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and dozens of major scientific societies--virtually every major one--and the folks in the corporate sector who run Apple and Ford and Nike and Coca Cola--get it. Republicans such as Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State George Schultz, former House Science Committee chair Sherry Boehlert, former Utah Governor and GOP Presidential candidate John Huntsman--responsible people across the spectrum get it. The scientists at NASA get it, and they are telling us to get serious. They are the ones who took a robot the size of an SUV and sent it millions of miles to Mars where they landed it safely on the surface of Mars and now they are driving it around. Do we think they might know what they are talking about? They get it. All across the spectrum, people get it. They are on one side getting something done about climate change. On the other side are the polluters with their familiar retinue of cranks, extremists, and front organizations. That is basically it. And for some reason, the Republican Party--the great American Republican Party--has chosen to hitch its wagon to the polluters. I do not get it. I do not see how that works out for them. Every day the pollution gets worse, and every day the evidence that this is serious gets stronger. I do not know why the Republican Party of Theodore Roosevelt wants to paint itself as the party that went with the polluters and not the scientists; that went with the fringe extreme against the responsible center. It has to be a bad bet. It is a crazy bet. To make that bet you have to believe God will intervene and perform some magic, in violation of His own laws of physics and chemistry. Is that a bet you want to take? You have to believe that the market will work, even though the market is flagrantly skewed. Is that a bet you want to make? And you have to believe the people who have a vested interest to lie and disbelieve the people who have no conflict of interest, unless you are prepared to think that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Catholic bishops and all the major scientific organizations all have a conflict of interest. Does that sound very sensible? Does that sound like where you want to hitch the wagon of one of America's great political parties? Let me close, as we talk about climate change in the context of the farm bill, by quoting our friend Senator Tester, who recently spelled out the crisis facing our farmers in an op-ed in USA Today. I ask unanimous consent that op-ed be printed at the conclusion of my remarks. Senator Tester and his wife Sharla have been farming for almost 40 years--the same land that his grandparents homesteaded. This is how our friend from Montana described the changes he sees: When I was younger, frequent bone-chilling winds whipped snow off the Rocky Mountain Front and brought bitterly cold days that reached -30 degrees. Today, we have only a handful of days that even reach 0 degrees. Changes in the weather are forcing Sharla and I to change how we operate our farm. It's now more difficult to know when to plant to take advantage of the rains. Some might say the end of bitter winters will be a boon for Montana's economy. But with milder winters, we've seen the sawfly come out earlier to destroy our crops before they can be harvested. Montana's deep freezes also used to kill off the pine bark beetle, which today kills millions of acres of trees across the American West. He writes: Montanans already understand that climate change is affecting our daily lives. The argument isn't whether the world is changing, it's how to respond. I will say, once again, it is time--it is well past time--for us in Congress to wake up to the urgent challenge of our time. There is a lot at stake. There is a lot at stake for all of us. There is a lot at stake for every State, and there is a lot at stake for every generation, particularly for the generations that are to follow. So often I hear my Republican colleagues expressing concern about what our debt will do to future generations. Fine. What will a ruined climate do to future generations? What will acidified seas do to future generations? What will worse extreme weather and rising seas do to future generations? There is indeed a lot at stake, and it is time to wake up. It is time to take action. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank the majority leader. Cloture Motion

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I would like to yield 5 minutes to my friend Senator Blunt and then reclaim the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, American summertime is when we celebrate and commemorate the patriots who fought to establish and protect this great Republic. From Memorial Day through Independence Day and on to Veterans Day, communities across this country turn out star- spangled bunting and gather for parades, cookouts, and wreath layings to reflect on the heroes and events that embody our Nation's great spirit. June in Rhode Island is marked by the annual celebration of Gaspee Days, when we recognize and celebrate one of the earliest acts of defiance against the British Crown in our American struggle for independence. Most Americans remember and I know the Presiding Senator from Massachusetts certainly is well aware of the Boston Tea Party when, in fact, literally spirited Bostonians clamored onto the decks of the East India Company's ships and dumped tea bags into Boston Harbor to protest British taxation without representation. I am sure throwing tea bags into the harbor is a very big deal, but there was another milestone in the path to the Revolutionary War that is too often overlooked. It is the story of 60 brave Rhode Islanders who, more than a year before the Tea Party in Boston, risked their lives in defiance of oppression more than 240 years ago and drew the first blood in what became the revolutionary conflict. In the years before the Revolutionary War, one of the most notorious of the armed customs vessels patrolling Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay, imposing the authority of the British Crown, was Her Majesty's ship Gaspee. The ship and its captain, Lieutenant William Dudingston, were known for destroying fishing vessels, seizing cargo, and flagging down ships only to harass, humiliate, and interrogate the colonials. A 100-year-old report says: This unprincipled ruffian had ruthlessly ravaged the Rhode Island coast for several months, destroying unoffending fishing vessels, and confiscating everything he could lay hands on. The attack on the ``Gaspe' '' caused the first bloodshed in the struggle for American independence, and was the first resistance to the British navy. How did it come about? Well, on June 9, 1772, Rhode Island ship captain Benjamin Lindsey was en route to Providence from Newport, sailing in his packet sloop the Hannah, when he was accosted and ordered to yield for inspection by the Gaspee. Captain Lindsey had had enough of the Gaspee. He ignored the command and raced up Narragansett Bay, ignoring warning shots fired at him by the Gaspee. As the Gaspee gave chase, Captain Lindsey--who was a wily Rhode Island ship captain-- realized that his ship was lighter and drew less water than the Gaspee, so he sped north toward Pawtuxet Cove, toward the shallows off of Namquid Point. The Hannah shot over these shallows, but the heavier Gaspee grounded and stuck firm. The British ship and her crew were caught stranded in a falling tide and would need to wait many hours for a rising tide to free the hulking Gaspee. Captain Lindsey continued on his way to Providence and rallied a group of Rhode Island patriots at Sabin's Tavern. Together, the group resolved to put an end to the Gaspee's menace to Rhode Island waters. They may have shared one thing with their Boston compatriots: They may have been spirited themselves. That night the men embarked down Narragansett Bay in eight longboats with muffled oars. They encircled the stranded Gaspee and called on Lieutenant Dudingston to surrender his ship. Dudingston refused and ordered his men to fire on anyone who tried to board. The Rhode Islanders forced their way onto the Gaspee's deck, and in the struggle Lieutenant Dudingston was wounded, shot with a musket ball. Right there in the waters off Warwick, RI, the very first blood in the conflict that was to become the American Revolution thus was drawn. The brave patriots took the captive Englishmen ashore and returned to the Gaspee to rid Narragansett Bay of her noxious presence once and for all. Near daylight on June 10, they set her afire. The blaze spread to the ship's powder magazine, and the resulting blast echoed across Narragansett Bay as airborne fragments of this former ship splashed down into the water. The incident prompted a special commission instructed by King George III to deliver any persons indicted in the burning of the Gaspee to the Royal Navy for transport to England for trial and execution. Samuel Adams, in a letter published in the Newport Mercury on December 21, 1772, and reprinted in the Providence Gazette on December 26, called it ``a court of inquisition, more horrid than that of Spain or Portugal. The persons who are the commissioners of this new-fangled court are vested with most exorbitant and unconstitutional power.'' A few days later he wrote that ``an Attack upon the Liberties of one Colony is an Attack upon the Liberties of all; and therefore in this Instance all should be ready to yield Assistance to Rhode Island.'' In a letter to a friend in Rhode Island, John Adams, the future President, summed up the tension felt across the Colonies: ``We are all in a fury here about . . . the Commission for trying the Rhode Islanders for Burning the Gaspee. I wonder how your Colony happens to sleep so securely in a whole skin, when her sisters are so worried and tormented.'' King George III offered a handsome reward for information leading to the arrest of those responsible for the burning and destruction of his revenue cutter. But Rhode Islanders are a loyal bunch--the reward went unclaimed. The site of Rhode Island's opening salvo in the American Revolution is now named Gaspee Point. The annual Gaspee Days celebration has grown to span several weeks each June and includes an arts and crafts festival, a walking tour with students playing the roles of Colonialists, an encampment of local militia, a parade down Narragansett Parkway in Warwick, and, of course, a mock burning of the HMS Gaspee. My friend, State Representative Joe McNamara, and the Gaspee Days Committee work each year to make these events the best they can be and to remind our State and Nation of the bravery of those few dozen souls. Indeed, this year another Rhode Islander Mark Tracy, a pediatric neurologist at Hasbro Children's Hospital, was able to acquire original news stories from 1772 that related this incident and gave them to the Gaspee Committee. I will note that he was able to get them rather inexpensively because ``the auction house concentrated on describing the batches of newspapers--from the estate of an unnamed Providence collector--in terms of the coming Boston Tea Party and other events,'' paying no attention to the fact that Rhode Island's greater act and prior act was actually enclosed and described in these newspapers. This summer will also mark another historic anniversary for Rhode Island because it was in July of 1663--350 years ago this summer--that King Charles II granted a royal charter establishing the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. ``To hold forth a lively experiment,'' it declared ``that a most flourishing civil state may stand and best be maintained . . . with a full liberty in religious concernments.'' This charter provided in Rhode Island the world's first formal establishment of freedom of religion, distinguishing us from the rigid theocracy of Massachusetts, I am sorry to say, where ideological conformity was enforced by the gallows and the lash. This charter has been called America's Magna Carta, for it is the first formal document in all of history granting the separation of church and state, along with extraordinary freedoms of speech, to a political entity. This ``lively experiment'' in Rhode Island blazed a path for American freedom of religion, one of our greatest national blessings. And, more practically, this liberty also allowed trading networks of Quakers and Baptists and Jews to connect in Newport and created their abundant wealth and commerce. That freedom of religion, that freedom of conscience was the great legacy of Rhode Island's founder Roger Williams, who had been banished from Massachusetts for his beliefs about religious tolerance. Williams established his new colony as ``a shelter for persons,'' as he said, ``distressed for conscience.'' His battle for freedom of conscience, won and reflected in the King Charles Charter, is the reason his statue stands right out there, outside the Chamber of the Senate. I know these events and the patriots whose efforts allowed for their success are not forgotten in my home State. This summer we will gather in these ways to celebrate Rhode Island's independent streak. We will recall the courage and zeal of these men and women who embodied those most American values--freedom of conscience and freedom from tyranny, values that ignited a revolution in the summer of 1776. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Yes.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Let me thank the chairman for allowing me to join him today. He has shown great leadership in this area, and I am privileged to be here with him today. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Charitable deductions.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. It can.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. They do.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Yes.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. That is a guarantee of total gridlock and failure. That is why it is so important that no one in this body try to use that kind of hostage-taking extremist tactic, rather than allowing the regular order to continue.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, let me first thank Chairman Levin for the immense amount of work and passion and good thought he has put into trying to accelerate the day when we can say good riddance to the sequester. He sees firsthand, as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, how much damage the sequester is doing to the military, to the soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines who honor us by their service, to the talented and loyal civilians who support their efforts. But families all across the country also are feeling the painful consequences of this sequester. Just in my small State, Rhode Island, 8,100 folks have already seen their weekly unemployment checks reduced by $50. For a family struggling to get by, losing $50 can hurt. Federal rental assistance has been eliminated for 500 low-income Rhode Island families, which may cause some even to lose their homes. Economy-wide, our nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the $85 billion in sequester cuts this year will cost us 750,000 jobs nationwide. We have 12 million Americans out of work already. Why on Earth would we want to cut 750,000 more jobs? As Chairman Levin said, it does not have to be this way. In fact, Leader Reid tried twice to bring up measures that would get rid of the sequester, but twice Republicans filibustered. Now they refuse even to allow the process to go forward that would negotiate a solution through the regular legislative process. They will not even let us appoint Senators to negotiate a compromise between the Senate and the House budgets. It has been 61 days since we passed our budget, and each time we try to move the process along, Republicans object. If their rule is: I have to have it my way before I am willing to enter into negotiations and I need a guarantee, I would like some of that deal too. I have some things I feel pretty passionately about, and if they want to play by those rules, then we should all be playing by those rules. If not, then let's follow the regular order and let the process of democracy work. From government shutdowns to Federal default, the other party has a strategy: to manufacture one crisis after another, each time holding our economy hostage to demands for radical policies that the vast majority of the American people reject. They demand the end to Medicare as we know it. The American people want no part of that. They demand cuts to Social Security. The American people want no part of that. They refuse to close a single--not one, not a single--corporate tax loophole. Well, huge majorities of Americans want that to happen. But our friends do not care. They are extremists. It is not just the American public, by the way, that rejects the extremist tea party agenda. So do economists. What economists say has been confirmed in practice by the experiences of other nations that followed the Republican austerity strategy. Republicans say budget cuts are necessary to reduce the deficit, but their fervor ignores the established economic effect that has during a recovery. Right now, for every $1 we cut, the economy shrinks by more than $1. Their theory is when you cut $1 in government spending, that releases the economy to grow more rapidly. Well, the fact is, during a recovery the exact opposite is true. The way this is measured is through an economic phenomenon called the fiscal multiplier. There have been a number of recent studies that try to identify what the fiscal multiplier is right now, and they range from 1.4 to 3.7, which means that for every $1 you cut, the economy takes a $1.40 hit. There is an extra 40-cent harm for each $1 cut to our national economy. If this one is right, 3.7, then every $1 cut is $3.70 worth of harm to our economy. It is a multiplier of damage from government cuts. So shrink the GDP, which we do if we have a fiscal multiplier of 1, and collect less taxes. Less taxes means less of the deficit reduction that is supposedly achieved by the budget cuts. It is a vicious cycle that could keep our economy weak and our deficits high. We can go backward, and Europe proves it from Spain to Portugal to Greece. Countries slashed their budgets and things got worse, double-digit unemployment and negative growth. We have a U.S. unemployment rate of about 7.5 percent. That is way too high, but it is way better than 27 percent in Spain, 27 percent in Greece, and 16 percent in Portugal. We had 2.3 percent growth last year. They had negative growth rates. Negative growth rates. Their economies contracted. The evidence from the austerity experiment is in countries that cut the deepest hurt themselves the worst. As we can see, employment in the eurozone is worse by about 20 percent since the major austerity programs kicked in. Over that same time period unemployment in the United States is better by about 25 percent. Their policies, unemployment worse by 20 percent; our policies, employment better by 25 percent. A lot of these Republican calls for harmful U.S. austerity cited a 2010 paper called ``Growth in a Time of Debt'' by Harvard economists Reinhart and Rogoff. Republicans loved Reinhart and Rogoff. They cited them at least five dozen times on the House and Senate floors to justify their demands for budget cuts. They cannot get enough of Reinhart and Rogoff. It turns out there is a big problem. There were numerous errors in Reinhart and Rogoff's computations; math errors, programming errors, dropping a column of data. Oh, oops. With the fiscal multiplier over 1, the best thing we can do to accelerate our recovery is to lift the harmful European-style sequester cuts. The Job Preservation and Sequester Replacement Act of 2013 would do just that, through September 30, giving us time to negotiate a broader compromise. Cosponsored by Chairman Levin, Chairman Harkin, Senator Lautenberg, Senator Merkley, Senator Schatz, and Senator Warren, it would replace the sequester from the Buffet rule and from closing corporate tax loopholes, sensible tax changes that on their own we should do because they make the Tax Code fairer. The Buffet rule would ensure that multimillion-dollar earners pay at least a 30-percent effective Federal tax rate. Last year we debated whether the top income tax rate should be 35 percent or 39.6 percent. But the fact is that many at the top, people making hundreds of millions of dollars in a single year, will not pay anything close to that rate. Why? Because the Tax Code is riddled with special provisions that favor ultra-high-income earners. For example, investment income is taxed at the special rate of 20 percent. The so-called carried interest loophole allows billionaire private equity fund managers to pay this low rate. So many of them pay the same tax rate or even less than a hard-working average firefighter or brick mason in Rhode Island making $50,000 a year. So at $200 million a year, they are paying the same tax rate as folks making $50,000 a year. The Buffet rule follows the common sense that people earning millions of dollars a year, even hundreds of millions of dollars a year, should pay higher tax rates than middle-class families. It would also cut the deficit by $71 billion. Another loophole, the so-called Edwards-Gingrich loophole, lets high- earning professionals dodge paying payroll taxes by calling themselves corporations. We close that too, saving another $9 billion. We save another $3 billion by going after a deduction that allows private jet owners to depreciate their planes faster than commercial aircraft are allowed to be depreciated, another commonsense change. The fourth part of the proposal would contribute $24 billion to lifting the sequester by ending tax breaks for Big Oil. Over the past decade, the five largest oil companies have reaped over $1 trillion in profits. That is trillion with a ``t''--$1 trillion in profits. While they are making that massive profit, they nevertheless pull strings in Congress to keep billions of dollars a year that regular taxpayers have to cough up for them in tax giveaways. As with all of the elements in this bill, repealing Big Oil giveaways is something we should be doing anyway, just because it is the right thing to do. Finally, we end a tax break for companies that ship jobs overseas. Believe it or not, the Tax Code allows manufacturers to indefinitely delay paying taxes on profits in overseas operations. Ending this unfair and un-American advantage would lower the deficit by another $20 billion. Each one of those five reforms would make the Tax Code fairer for all Americans. They are each worth passing for that reason alone. They are embarrassments in our Tax Code. Getting rid of them could stop the sequester while Democrats and Republicans work together on a balanced deficit reduction package; that is, of course, if we could get Republicans to actually work with us and negotiate and go through the regular order they have claimed for so long to seek, to get to a balanced and negotiated deficit reduction package. But as Chairman Levin pointed out, at the moment they refuse to even appoint conferees to begin the process. They want to be assured they will have it their way before they even begin to negotiate. As I said earlier in the speech, if that is the way they are going to behave, I want some of that action myself. I have many things I feel very strongly about. I could be in a position to say I will not allow us to go to conference either until we are clear that we are never going to do chained CPI and put that burden on our Social Security-receiving seniors. I could do that and say we are never going to go to conference unless I get a guarantee that we are going to get a carbon fee so the big polluters are paying their share and we are not having to subsidize what they are doing to our atmosphere and oceans. I could say those things. Any one of us could say those things.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Nobody has spent more time and more energy and put more effort into the way in which American income gets hidden offshore so people can avoid paying taxes and corporations can avoid paying taxes than Chairman Levin. He is our expert. There are indeed other loopholes that are exploited, primarily by corporations but also by very high-income taxpayers, hiding money in the Cayman islands, putting assets into Ireland and other tax havens, and refusing to treat them as American, even though it is nominally an American company. There are enumerable tricks. I will close by making one point. Very often people look at what we are trying to accomplish, and even actually pretty honest reporters will say the Democrats actually want to raise taxes. That is the fight. Republicans want to cut spending; Democrats want to raise taxes. No. We raised taxes once already. We raised the rates for people over $450,000 thousand a year in the last big agreement. What we want to do now is to go into the Tax Code and close down the loopholes. That is all we are looking for. What most Americans do not understand is that if we look at how much money goes out the backdoor of the Tax Code through loopholes, through special rates, through exemptions and so forth, it is very nearly the same amount of money that is actually collected through the Tax Code and becomes the revenue of the United States of America. We let almost as much money out the backdoor of the Tax Code as we collect through the Tax Code. If we take a look at the areas where Chairman Levin has done so much good research, that money actually never gets into the Tax Code to go out the backdoor. If we were to count that, in addition to the money that is allowed out the backdoor of the Tax Code, there is actually more that goes out the backdoor of the Tax Code and is avoided coming through the Tax Code than is actually collected as the revenues of the United States of America. So it is a big number. The refusal of the Republicans to let us attack one single loophole, not one loophole--every loophole is sacred right now to them--I think is unjustified. I hope the people of America understand we are not looking at more tax rate increases; we are looking only at closing these loopholes. It is a rich field to pursue because more money goes through that than actually gets collected. You can bet, if you are an average American, that when those loopholes were being carved into the Tax Code, you were not in the room. The special interests were in the room. That is why a lot of people want to defend them. But it is also a very good reason for making a more honest Tax Code that gets rid of these loopholes. But our friends want to crisis manufacture. They want to do crisis manufacture so they can force-feed on all of us bad economic ideas that Americans do not want. I think we need to resist that. I yield to the chairman.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, every week that we are here, I try to remind the body of the damage carbon pollution is doing to our atmosphere and oceans, try to awaken us to our duty. I have done it more than 30 times now. I have tried to kick out the underpinnings of any argument that the deniers could stand on. I have kicked out the scientific so-called denial argument, which actually properly belongs in the category of falsehood, not argument. I have kicked out the economic denial argument, pointing out that in a proper market, the costs of carbon must be in the price of carbon. I even tried to kick out the religious denial argument, showing that the belief that God will just tidy up after us, however stupidly we behave, runs counter to history and counter to Biblical text. So today let's take a crack at the political argument. How wise is it for the Republican Party to wed itself to the deniers and proclaim that climate change is a hoax? Make no mistake, that is the Republican position. The consensus Republican position and the default Republican position is that climate change is a hoax. It has been said right on this floor and in committees and, as far as I know, not one Republican Senator has stood afterwards in this Chamber to say: Wait a minute. Not so fast. That is actually not the case. Any Republican Senator who disagrees, please, come to the floor and articulate a Republican position other than that climate change is a hoax. This Chamber looks relatively empty, but on C-SPAN lots of people are watching, and lots of Republicans are watching. Yet not one Republican, over all 30 speeches, has ever gotten back to me, even quietly on the side, to say: You know what. This is really getting serious. Let's see if we can work on this together. An iron curtain of denial has fallen around the Republican Party. So let me respectfully ask my Republican colleagues: What are you thinking? How do you imagine this ends? More than 95 percent of climate scientists are convinced that human carbon pollution is causing massive and unprecedented changes to our atmosphere and oceans. You want to go with the 5 percent, and you think that is going to be a winning strategy? Moreover, it turns out that a lot of those 5 percenters are on the payroll of the polluters. You know that. It is public knowledge. Some of those payroll scientists are the same people who denied acid rain, who denied the dangers of tobacco. You still like those odds? Those are the folks to whom you really want to hitch your Republican wagons? You have to know they are not telling the truth. So where does this go? What is the endgame? Our planet has had a run of at least 800,000 years, with levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere between 170 and 300 parts per million. That is measurement not theory--800,000 years. Homo sapiens have only been around for about 200,000 years, so that 800,000 years--8,000 centuries--takes us back a ways. Madam President, 800,000 years, between 170 and 300 parts per million, and in just the last 50 years, we have blown out of that range and have now hit 400 parts per million and climbing. You really want to be on the side of ``nothing is going on here''? Really? Have you noticed the floods and wildfires and droughts and superstorms and tornadoes and blizzards and temperature records? Have you noticed those warming, rising seas? Have you noticed species invading new territories and miles of dead pine forests in the Rockies and Arctic sea ice disappearing? Do you understand that carbon in the atmosphere gets absorbed by the sea and that is a law of science and is not debatable? Do you understand that because they are absorbing the carbon, the oceans are getting more acidic--30 percent more acidic already and climbing? Do you understand that is a measurement, not a theory? It is one thing to be the party that stands against science. Are you really also going to be the party that stands against measurement? Do you know the measurement is showing the oceans are not just becoming more acidic, they are becoming more acidic at the fastest rate recorded in a geologic record of 50 million years? Have you not heard about the coral reefs, those incubators of our oceans, bleaching out and dying off, with almost 20 percent gone already worldwide? If you are a denier, look around. Do you think the news is getting better for you? Let me ask my Republican friends, what is your best bet on whether this climate and oceans problem gets better or worse in the next 20 or 40 years? Seriously. Your party's reputation is on the line here. All the chips. Tell me how you are going to bet. Do you want to bet the reputation of the Republican Party that suddenly this is all going to magically start getting better? Because that is what you are doing right now. Let me ask you this: What are the young people of today going to think when they are 37 or 57 and it is worse, maybe a lot worse? What are they going to think about the Republican Party then, that you took the 5-percent bet with their futures; that you went with the polluters over the scientists? Young people are already out there asking their universities to divest from coal, as they divested from the evils of apartheid and the dangers of tobacco. Good luck with the youth vote when you lock in with the coal merchants. By the way, the youth vote grows. It grows up and it sticks around. How is it going to look for the Republican Party when the historical records show, because facts have a funny way of coming out, that the campaign to fool the public on climate change was as phony and dishonest as the campaign to fool the public on acid rain and the campaign to fool the public on tobacco, when the historical record discloses that 5 percent wasn't even real, and was actually a scam paid for by the polluters? You, your great party, with young American's futures in the balance, took sides with the scam. If that is the state of play for young voters as they come of age, why would those young people ever trust the Republican Party on anything else ever again? Speaking of taking sides, have you noticed who is left on your side? The Koch brothers, billionaire polluters; the big oil companies, the biggest polluters in the world; the coal barons with their legacy of pollution, strip mining, mountaintop removal, and safety violations that kill their miners. That is a fine cast to be surrounded by. But wait, you say, there is more. There is the Heartland Institute, and the Institute for Energy Research, and the American Enterprise Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the Heritage Foundation. There are many organizations. Right. Like the heads of Hydra, they may look like many, but, as you know, in reality, it is all the same beast. It is all the same scheme. It is all the same money behind the scheme. You can name those front organizations and many more, but none of it is real. They are all part of the same cheesy vaudeville show put on by the big polluters. Do you, I ask my Republican friends, want to lash yourself to that operation, to go down with that ship? The great Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, branding itself as the one that gave it all to protect a gang of scheming polluters? That is where you are headed. Look who is on the other side on record against you seeing through that nonsense. How about the Joint Chiefs of Staff, our military leaders? How about the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops? How about NASA? NASA is driving a vehicle as big as an SUV around on the surface of Mars right now. They sent it there. To Mars. They landed it there safely. Now they are driving it around on Mars. Do you think those scientists might know what they are talking about? How about every legitimate American scientific professional society, about 30 strong? How about major American corporations such as Walmart, Ford, Apple, Coca-Cola? How about global insurance and reinsurance businesses such as Lloyds of London and Munich Re, whose businesses depend on accurate risk models? Indeed, today, Frank Nutter, the president of the Reinsurance Association of America, is reported as saying: Insurance is heavily dependent on scientific thought. It is not as amenable to politicized scientific thought. So I ask my Republican friends, whose side do you like in this? In this corner, the Joint Chiefs, the bishops, Walmart, Ford, Apple, Coke, NASA, 30 top scientific organizations, the top insurers and reinsurers, and, by the way, several thousand legitimate others. In that corner, the polluting industry and a screen of sketchy organizations they fund. Let's be serious. Do you want to bet the reputation of the Republican Party that the polluters are the ones we should count on here? Because that is what you are doing. For what? To protect market share for the polluters. That is your upside. The reputation of the party hangs in the balance and your upside is market share for polluters. Look, I am willing to do a carbon pollution fee that sets the market in balance and returns every single dollar to the American people. No new agencies; no new taxes; no bigger government; every dollar back; a balanced market with the costs included in the price the way they are supposed to be, which will make better energy choices, increase jobs, and prevent pollution. Yes, that does mean less market share for the polluters as new technologies emerge--that is actually the point--but every single dollar back in Americans' pockets. By the way, three-quarters of the American people believe climate change is real and that we need to do something about it. You may have a question for me: Why do you care? Why do you, Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, care if we Republicans run off the climate cliff like a bunch of proverbial lemmings and disgrace ourselves? I will tell you why. We are stuck in this together. We are stuck in this together. When cyclones tear up Oklahoma, hurricanes swamp Alabama, and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. The damage your polluters and deniers are doing doesn't just hit Oklahoma, Alabama, and Texas; it hits Rhode Island with floods and storms, it hits Oregon with acidified seas, and it hits Montana with dying forests. Like it or not, we are in this together. You drag America with you to your fate. I want this future: I want a Republican Party that has returned to its senses, is strong, and is a worthy adversary in a strong America that has done right by its people and the world. That is what I want. I don't want this future. I don't want a Republican Party disgraced, that lets its extremists run it off the cliff. I don't want America suffering from grave, economic, environmental, and diplomatic damage because we failed, because we didn't wake up and do our duty for our people, and because we didn't lead the world. I do not want that future, but that is where we are headed. I will keep reaching out and calling out, ever hopeful you will wake up before it is too late, both for you and for the rest of us. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I further ask unanimous consent to speak for perhaps as long as but probably shorter than 20 minutes as in morning business.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am back again to remind this body and the American people for what I think is perhaps the 32nd speech on this subject that I have been giving weekly, that it is time, indeed it is well past time, for Congress to wake up to the disastrous effects of global climate change. The famous Mauna Loa Observatory has for the first time ever hit 400 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere. That is an alarming benchmark to have hit. What is happening? Over on the House side today they are repealing ObamaCare for the 37th time. That is the level of seriousness in Washington right now. In particular, our oceans--the Presiding Officer represents the Bay State, I represent the Ocean State--our oceans face an unprecedented set of challenges that come from climate change as well as from pollution and energy exploration and more. We just have to look around to see it. We can look up to the far north and see that the Arctic ice is melting. Indeed, last summer sea ice extant in the Arctic Ocean hit a record low. If we go south to the tropic seas, we will see that live coral coverage on Caribbean reefs is plummeting. It is down to less than 10 percent today. If we go to the top of the food chain, we will see marine mammals so laden with PCBs, flame retardants, mercury, and other bioaccumulative pollutants that many of them are swimming toxic waste-- living, swimming toxic waste. If we go to the very bottom of the food chain, we will see that the population of phytoplankton--some of our smallest ocean inhabitants and the basic building block for the oceanic food chain--has dropped 40 percent during the 20th century. If we go far away from where we are, we will reach the great Pacific garbage patch, which is growing and swirling about the northern Pacific Ocean. Close to my home--and near the Presiding Officer's home--is Narragansett Bay, which is 4 degrees warmer in the winter than it was a few decades ago. Globally, the most threatening challenge, and the force behind many others, is ocean acidification. Our oceans have absorbed more than 550 billion tons of our carbon pollution. Try to wrap your head around a number that big. That is the carbon the ocean has absorbed from the excess we have pumped into the atmosphere. The result is pretty clear, and it is a matter of basic chemistry. The oceans have become more acidic. Indeed, they have become 30 percent more acidic. By the way, that is a measurement, not a theory. By the end of this century, the increase could be as much as 160 percent more acidic. That makes life a lot harder for species such as oysters, crabs, lobsters, corals, and even those plankton that comprise the base of the food web. Ocean temperatures are changing dramatically--also driven by carbon pollution. Sea surface temperatures in 2012, from the Gulf of Maine to Cape Hatteras, were the highest ever recorded in 150 years. By the way, that is another measurement. Fish stocks are shifting northward with some disappearing from U.S. waters as they move farther offshore. As we know, when the temperature rises, water expands in volume. On top of that, fresh water pours out of Arctic snowpacks and ice sheets that are melting, and as a result sea levels are rising. Tide gauges in Newport, RI, show an increase in average sea level of 10 inches since 1930. That is a big deal when we in Rhode Island think of how devastating the great hurricane of 1938 was to our shores and what more would now befall us with 10 more inches of sea for such a storm to throw at our shores. At these tide gauges, measurements show not only the sea level rising but the rate of sea level rise is increasing. This matches reports that since 1990, the sea level has been rising faster than the rate predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I have said before: We will continue to take advantage of the ocean's bounty, as we should. We will trade, we will fish, and we will sail. We will extract fuel and harness the wind. We will work our oceans. Navies and cruise ships, sailboats and supertankers will plow their surface. We cannot undo this part of our relationship with the sea. What we can change is what we do in return. For the first time we can become not just takers but caretakers of our oceans. We are beginning to take some baby steps. Last week, the Senate voted 67 to 32 to authorize a national endowment for the oceans, coasts, and Great Lakes, which is a funding stream for research, restoration, and protection of our marine and coastal resources. I hope that before long we can find a way to fund it by working with all of my colleagues. The famous ocean explorer Bob Ballard has described as ``a major problem . . . the disconnect between the importance of oceans and the meager funds we as a nation invest to not only understand their complexity, but become responsible stewards of the bounty they represent.'' This endowment--if we can get it over the remaining legislative hurdles and get it funded--will help us become more responsible stewards of that bounty. It will help us better respond to oilspills, it will help coastal States protect or relocate coastal infrastructure, and it will help our fisheries and marine industries take part in economically important conservation efforts. I sincerely appreciate the support shown for this amendment by colleagues from every region of the country and both sides of the aisle. Protecting the oceans upon which our communities and our economy depend is neither a Democratic nor a Republican objective, and there ought to be a great deal of agreement on the need to meet these challenges. We also see that agreement in the bipartisan Senate Oceans Caucus, which works to increase awareness of and find common ground on issues facing the oceans and coasts. My fellow cochair Senator Murkowski, honorary cochair Senator Mark Begich, Senator Mark Wicker, and all of our partners are working to stop illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing. We are working to clean up marine debris and collect baseline scientific data so we can make policy-informed decisions. This is important work. It demonstrates the good both parties can accomplish when we come together. I look forward to getting it done, but it is not enough. Until we address what is causing our oceans to change so drastically, until we protect our planet from carbon pollution unprecedented in human history, we are doing little more than putting Band-Aids on a gaping and growing wound. I want to push back on the idea that so many of us seem to have accepted, that we cannot do anything serious on carbon pollution. In fact, we can. The tools to do it lie right around us, if only we would pick them up and go to work. Very simply, here is my case: Pricing carbon is necessary. Make big carbon polluters pay a fee to the American people to cover the cost of dumping their waste into our atmosphere and oceans--a cost they now push off on to the rest of us--and return that fee to the American people. At present, however, political conditions in Congress do not allow us to price carbon. It is necessary. Political conditions do not allow us to do it, so we must change those political conditions. Changing the political conditions will require three actions: No. 1, there has to be a regulatory threat to the polluters. No. 2, there must be a political threat to the deniers here in the Senate and in Congress. No. 3, those of us who wish to limit carbon pollution must gather the armies that are on our side. Let me go through those steps. First, as long as the polluters and their allies control Congress, legislative action is unlikely. That means we have to rely on the executive branch for regulatory action-- very strong regulatory action that will change the equation for the polluters. That is the test. Will it change the equation for the polluters? The status quo is a win for the polluters. They pollute for free. Change that balance, and it will not take them long to come to Congress. Why? Because regulatory action puts costs directly on the polluters but creates no revenues for them. A carbon pollution fee, now that creates revenues. A portion of that could offset their costs of transitioning to a green economy. If that is the choice they have--regulation with no revenues or a fee they can get revenues from--it becomes in their interest to strike a deal in Congress. This regulatory step in the executive branch will, however, require an awakening at the White House. Second, to create a meaningful political threat, the advocates out there for our climate and our oceans will need to employ all of the sophisticated political tools the polluters use--all the political artillery of the post-Citizens United world. There is an expression that you should not bring a knife to a gunfight. Right now climate advocates bring not even a knife but a feather to this gunfight. It is no wonder we lose. When deniers in Congress see real artillery coming on the political field against them, some will rethink. Third, and last, is gathering the armies. There is astonishingly wide support for action on climate. Obviously environmental groups support this, as well as the green energy and investment industry, our national security officials, property casualty insurers and reinsurers, young people-- such as the growing college movement for coal divestment--faith groups, many utilities, celebrities, hunting, fishing, outdoor, conservation groups, retailers, such as Apple, Coca-Cola and Nike, labor groups, mayors, local officials, and the public. The public is with us, and the polls show that. The problem: Most of this support is latent and unorganized. None of these groups feel they can carry this battle on their own; yet if they choose to unite, create an allied command, assemble these various divisions and join in on a strategy that deploys them all effectively into action, that latent strength becomes potent strength, and that is a game changer. When the polluting industry is looking down the barrel of a regulatory gun, when their political allies are fearful of a strongly backed political operation--backed also by the American people--when mobilized and motivated forces from a wide swath of the economy and multiple sectors are all active, the political landscape then shifts dramatically and a price on carbon is achievable. I propose to the American people, to those who believe it is time to wake up and take action, to fend off devastating changes to our oceans and our climate: Let us be not faint of heart. Let us have the strength of our convictions and get to work and get this done. We can do it. The tools to do it already lie all around us. This can all take place quite rapidly. Let's get it done. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I am here to speak today because Washington, DC, and the rightwing outrage machine are all abuzz about the scandal that the IRS appears to have targeted organizations for inquiry based on tea party affiliation. Obviously, that is wrong, but let's not forget that is not the only IRS scandal--that is not the only scandal in town. There are two IRS scandals. The other is the IRS allowing big, shadowy forces to meddle in elections anonymously through front groups that file false statements with the IRS. Let's go through this. Let's begin with the principle that it is pretty clear that Americans have a strong democratic interest in knowing who is trying to influence their vote in elections. That is kind of democracy 101. Even the Supreme Court, which can hardly agree 8 to 1 on what time it is, agreed 8 to 1 that knowing who is trying to influence our votes is really important. Here is what they said: ``Effective disclosure'' would ``provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters.'' That is very much a part of the democratic process. Some folks don't want us to know who they are when they meddle in our politics, such as big companies taking positions that would annoy their shareholders or their customers and secretive billionaires who want influence without accountability. They want to pull the strings behind the scenes. It also includes polluters, Wall Street, Big Oil, and other folks the public is fed up with. They all have lots of reasons for wanting to stay secret. The law in America requires lots of disclosure, and the Supreme Court has emphasized the importance of lots of disclosure. What is a company or a billionaire trying to hide their influence- seeking going to do? How does the secret money get in? Well, it is easy. They create a front organization, usually with a phony-baloney happy name, and hide behind that--except it is not quite that easy. There are not that many types of organizations that can hide their donors that way. The most commonly used is called a 501(c)(4), which is a tax-exempt, nonprofit form of corporation that is regulated by--guess who--the IRS. There is one big problem for people wanting that secret influence in politics; that is, that kind of organization, the 501(c)(4), needs to be set up under the law ``for the promotion of social welfare''-- indeed, the law says ``exclusively'' for the promotion of social welfare. According to the IRS's own regulations, ``The promotion of social welfare does not include direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office.'' So that is a problem. Well, the first kind of miniscandal is that the IRS has decided that an organization is organized exclusively for the promotion of social welfare if it is primarily engaged in social welfare activities. By ``primarily,'' they mean 51 percent, so the other 49 percent can be purely political. So ``does not include direct or indirect participation in political activity'' has been turned into ``actually does include but up to 49 percent,'' which is nonsensical. As I said, that is a miniscandal of its own. Let's go on. The IRS allowing a bunch of political operatives to form nonprofit groups that don't disclose their donors and then collect millions of dollars and spend them on elections in contravention of a clear statute and seemingly in violation of their own rules also requires that they usually make some false statements. That is where the scandal really worsens. There is a form called the 1024 form that is the application form for 501(c)(4) status. If we go to that form, we will see question 15. Question 15 asks: Has the organization spent or does it plan to spend any money attempting to influence the selection, nomination, election or appointment of any person to any Federal, state, or local public office or to an office in a political organization? That is the question on the form, and it has to be answered under oath. A considerable number of groups appear to have lied on their applications for nonprofit status as well as on their returns, and they have lied with absolutely no consequences. There is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, nonpartisan investigative group called ProPublica. ProPublica has investigated these 501(c)(4) filings. As part of their investigation, they looked at 104 different organizations that had reported to the Federal Election Commission or to the State equivalent Federal elective bodies--104 organizations that reported electioneering activity, that they were involved in trying to elect candidates. In those filings to the Federal and State election boards, they said: Here is what we spent on influencing those elections. ProPublica cross-checked those 104 that had filed statements saying how much they had spent to influence elections and 32 of them--32 of them--told the IRS they spent no money to influence elections, either directly or indirectly. Both statements cannot be true. An organization cannot tell one Federal agency how much they spent to influence elections and tell another Federal agency they spent no money to influence elections and have both statements be true. Then we look at these organizations' behavior and the false statements look even worse. One organization said it would spend 50 percent of its effort on a Web site and 30 percent on conferences. The investigation showed its Web site consisted of one photograph and one paragraph; no sign of any conference. The same group declared it would take contributions ``from individuals only'' and then took $2 million from PhRMA, the pharmaceutical lobby. Another declared to the IRS it had spent $5 million on political activities, but it told the Federal Election Commission it had spent $19 million on political advertisements. Another pledged its political spending would be ``limited in amount and will not constitute the organization's primary purpose.'' Then that organization went out and spent $70 million on ads and robocalls in one election season. It is almost funny it is so bad. But there is nothing funny about making a material false statement to a Federal agency. That is not just bad behavior, it is a crime. It is a statutory offense under 18 U.S. Code section 1001. The Department of Justice indicts and prosecutes violations of this statute all the time, but they never do for this. Never. Why? It appears there is a bad agreement between the Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service that the Department of Justice will not prosecute false statements if they are made on this form unless the case has been referred to them by the IRS. So that is really scandal two right there. No matter how flagrant the false statement, no matter how great the discrepancy between the statements filed with the IRS under oath and the statements also filed with the Federal and State election agencies, no matter how baldly the organization in practice contradicts how it answered IRS questions about political activity, the IRS never makes a referral to the Department of Justice. Thirty-two flagrantly false statements and, as far as anyone knows, not one referral to the Department of Justice as a false statement. It is a mockery of the law and it is a mockery of the truth. There is an easy solution. The Department of Justice prosecutes these false statements in lots of other instances. Prosecute these. Juries are good at sorting out what is a lie and what is not. Investigations, interviews, statements, and subpoenas can look behind what appears to be a false statement, and prosecutors can get a full sense of the case, in a grand jury, before any charges are finalized. But they can't if they don't even look. Right now, multiple organizations lie with impunity and in large numbers. It is indeed a scandal that the IRS will not even make a referral. Frankly, it is no great credit to the Department of Justice that the Department will not act on its own with all of this so public and so plain. Hiding behind their agreement with the IRS, on these facts, is not that great Department's finest hour. So it is very wrong. It is very wrong that the IRS required additional information from a number of organizations--mostly small organizations--based on a screen that incorporates those organizations' tea party orientation. But it is also very wrong that the IRS goes AWOL when wealthy and powerful forces want to break the law in order to hide their wrongful efforts at secret political influence. Picking on the little guy is a pretty lousy thing to do; rolling over for the powerful and letting them file false statements is pretty lousy too. Two scandals. Let's not let one drown out the other. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I wish to thank the distinguished Senator from Illinois for his statement. We serve together on the Judiciary Committee. I hope that in that committee as well we can work on ways to improve the prosecution--particularly of rape offenses-- within the military by the Department of Justice. We need to break through the agreement that now prevents the Department of Justice from prosecuting those crimes for the crimes they are simply because they take place in the military.

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I rise today to speak in support of the Water Resources Development Act, the main vehicle for authorizing vital water projects developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and for setting Army Corps water resource policies. Water resource and flood control projects spur economic growth and create jobs. They fortify communities against storms and floods. They maintain our water and waste water systems. They help maintain our favorite outdoor recreational destinations. And they can protect America's cherished and economically important--fish and wildlife. Unfortunately, in Rhode Island and across the country, aging water infrastructure is rapidly approaching the end of its useful life, and funding available for upgrades is far outpaced by the need. This bill will increase the Army Corps' capacity to address the dismal state of our water infrastructure while improving the agency's operations. I want to express my gratitude to our chairman on the Environment and Public Works Committee, Senator Boxer, as well as our ranking member, Senator Vitter, for their hard work in drafting a bill that addresses a number of national and regional priorities in a bipartisan fashion. I particularly appreciate the inclusion of several provisions designed to clean up the process at the Army Corps, to clear the backlog of construction and maintenance projects, to improve transparency in developing and carrying out civil works projects, and to give local communities a better chance to understand what to expect. According the Office of Management and Budget, ``The Corps' enormous backlog of ongoing civil works construction represents a significant source of unrealized economic and environmental benefits. . . . This growth trend in the construction backlog unfairly penalizes both taxpayers and project sponsors.'' The bill before us establishes an independent commission to work through an estimated $62 billion backlog of projects and sets a timetable for downsizing the corps' burdensome to-do list. My colleagues on both sides of the aisle should appreciate the responsible use of corps resources and of taxpayer dollars. This bill also makes the corps more responsive to communities and businesses, requiring the corps to make more information available to the public about projects under its Continuing Authorities Program, including available funding, cost estimates, and the criteria used to prioritize projects. States like mine and our communities and companies can't plan around water resource projects because they are so often left in the dark. For example, Hope Global has manufactured textiles in Rhode Island since 1883. Today it makes fabrics that are used in everything from cars to parachutes to construction. During the historic 2010 floods in our State that clobbered Hope Global, I literally entered the building through the shipping bay in a boat. Hope Global survived, thanks to the dedication and quick thinking of its CEO and employees, but the risk of future flooding along the Blackstone River looms over this business and many others in the area. The corps has partnered with the State of Rhode Island to conduct a feasibility study for flooding mitigation on the Blackstone River. The State used its limited resources to fund the study, hoping to solve the flooding problems once and for all. Three years later, due to lack of transparency in the corps budget, we still don't know where this project stands. This bill will change that, so communities like those in my State can make informed decisions about their future. Episodes like the 2010 floods and, more recently, Superstorm Sandy underscore the need to keep communities safe in the face of a changing climate. The Army Corps of Engineers helps communities prepare for extreme weather events and addresses flood control hazards. In many places, these twin objectives can be pursued through the restoration of natural ecosystems. This reauthorization places greater emphasis on natural defenses like the wetlands and dunes that have protected our coastlines for millennia. Coastal and freshwater wetlands act like sponges during floods, absorbing water and dissipating the impact of wave energy and storm surge. Shoreline vegetation, natural dune formations, and barrier islands do the same. This draft recognizes the benefits of natural resiliency. This bill also reauthorizes the National Dam Safety Program, which is vitally important to my small State. Rhode Island has about 700 dams, some dating back to the colonial era. One hundred seventy-nine are rated a ``high'' or ``significant risk.'' Nationally, America's dams received a grade of ``D'' on the American Society of Civil Engineers 2013 Report Card. The Society cited more than 4,000 deficient dams, including more than 2,000 that would result in loss of life if they failed. The Dam Safety Program helps States monitor for deteriorating dam conditions that put communities in danger. This legislation is not without its detractors, but I think it is important to recognize that both sides have had to make compromises to get this bill to where it is today. That is the hallmark of our legislative process. For example, this reauthorization contains new measures to ensure the timely completion of environmental impact studies and reviews required under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. While this has raised concerns from some, ensuring prompt environmental review of projects does not mean we are disregarding these reviews entirely. Comprehensive environmental review of federal projects remains critical to protecting the environment and public health from harm, and this bill includes provisions that will prevent harmful projects from being expedited. WRDA supports projects that protect communities and their water resources. I would have preferred to leave NEPA requirements unaltered; however, I believe the compromise the chair and ranking member negotiated on this issue was worth the price of being able to implement long-overdue improvements to our nation's water resources infrastructure. As we grapple with the mounting effects of a changing climate, our towns, our rivers and ports, our beaches and bays rely on the safety and efficiency of modern and resilient water infrastructure. The Water Resources Development Act of 2013 gives the Army Corps of Engineers and its public and private sector partners the tools to provide and maintain that infrastructure. I urge my colleagues to support this important, bipartisan legislation.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask consent to follow Senator Moran at the conclusion of his remarks.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. As I am sure the Presiding Officer suspects, I am back on the floor again to urge that we awaken to what carbon pollution is doing to our planet, to our oceans, to our seasons, and to our storms. I wonder why is it that we are so comfortably asleep when the warnings are so many and so real. What could beguile us away from wakefulness and duty? I was recently at a Senate meeting when I heard a Member of our Senate community say: ``God won't allow us to ruin our planet.'' Maybe that is why we do nothing. We are comfortable that God somehow will not allow us to ruin our planet. That seems like such an extraordinary notion, I thought I would reflect on it in my remarks this week. First of all, the statement refers to God and is couched in religious terms, but is it truly an expression of religious inquiry? I think not. It is less an expression of religious thinking than it is of magical thinking. The statement that God will not allow us to ruin our planet sweeps aside ethics, responsibilities, consequences, duties, even awareness. It comforts us with the anodyne assumption that no matter what we do, some undefined presence will--through some undefined measure--make things right and clean up our mess. That is seeking magical deliverance from our troubles, not divine guidance through our troubles. Is God truly here just to tidy up after our sins and follies, to immunize us from their consequence? If that is true, why does the Bible say in Galatians 6:7, ``Do not be deceived . . . whatever one sows, that will he also reap.'' If God is just a tidy-up-after-us God, why does the book of Job 4:8 warn that ``those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same.'' If God is not a God of consequences, why does Luke 6:38 tell us, ``For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.'' Proverbs 22:8 tells us, ``Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity.'' Jeremiah 17:10 says, ``I the Lord search the heart and test the mind to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.'' So it seems we should not walk in the counsel of the wicked or sit in the seat of the scoffers and then expect there will be no bitter fruit of our deeds, no consequence. We are warned in the Bible not to plow iniquity, not to eat the fruit of lies. Where in the Bible are we assured of safety if we do? I see no assurances of that. The Bible says in 1 Samuel 2:3 that ``the Lord is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed.'' At Thessalonians 1:6, ``God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict.'' Those who ``sow the wind,'' the Bible says, ``they shall reap the whirlwind.'' Look at our own American history. If God is just here to tidy up after our sins and follies, how could Abraham Lincoln say this about our bloody Civil War to free and redeem us from the sin of slavery? Here is what Lincoln said about that war: Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said: ``The judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous judgment altogether.'' That was Abraham Lincoln. Blood drawn by the sword in equal measure to that drawn by the lash as the true and righteous judgment of the Lord--that doesn't sound like a God of amnesty. Go to the very beginning. If we live in a state of God-given general amnesty from consequences, why were Adam and Eve expelled from Eden for their sin? Why was Cain sent into the wilderness, condemned to wander for the crime against his brother? If it is your assertion that God's love has no measure of tough love, wander a bit through the Old Testament before getting too married to that idea. If the Old Testament is too bloodthirsty for you, look at Revelations 11:18: And thy wrath is come, and the time . . . that thou . . . shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth. If we believe in an all-powerful God, we must then believe that God gave us this Earth, and we must in turn believe God gave us its laws of gravity, chemistry, and physics. We must also believe that God gave us our human powers of intellect and reason. He gives us these powers so we, his children, can learn and understand Earth's natural laws, which he also gave us, so that as his children we can use that understanding of Earth's natural laws to build and create and prosper on his Earth. Hasn't that, in fact, been the path of human progress? We learn these natural laws, and we apply them to build and create and we prosper. Why then when we ignore his plain, natural laws, when we ignore the obvious conclusions to be drawn by our God-given intellect and reason would God--the tidy-up God--drop in and spare us? Why would he allow an innocent child to burn its hand when it touches the hot stove but protect us from this lesson? Why would he allow a badly engineered bridge or building to fall, killing innocent people, but protect us from this mistake? Why would he allow cholera to kill in epidemics until we figure out that the well water is contaminated? The Earth's natural laws and our capacity to divine them are God's great gift to us, allowing us to learn and build great things and cure disease. But God's gift to us of a planet with natural laws and natural order has as an integral part of that gift consequences--consequences when we get that law and order wrong. The child's hand burns, the bridge falls, the disease spreads. If it didn't matter whether we got it right or wrong, there would be no value to God's creation of that natural law and order in the first place. So is that then to be our answer to polluting our atmosphere with carbon by the megaton and changing our climate and changing our seas? Is it to be our answer to that, that God would not allow us to ruin our planet? We are to continue to pollute our Earth with literally megatons each year of carbon, heating up our atmosphere, acidifying our seas, knowing full well by His natural laws what the consequences are? Instead of correcting our own behavior, we are going to bet on a miracle? That is the plan? Excuse me, but that is not the American way. President Kennedy described the American way as he ended his inaugural address connecting our work to God's: . . . let us go forth, to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own. That is the order of things. We are here to do God's work. He is not here to do ours. How arrogant. How very far from humility would be the self-satisfied smug assurance that God--a tidy-up-after-us God--will come and clean up our mess; that on this Earth, God's work need not be our own. Remember the story of the man trapped in his house during a huge flood. A faithful man, he trusted God to save him. As the waters began to rise in his house, his neighbor came by and offered him a ride to safety, and he said: I am waiting for God to save me. So the neighbor got in his pickup truck and drove away. As the water rose, the man climbed to the second floor of his house, and a boat came by his window with people who were headed for safe ground. They threw a rope and they yelled at the man to climb out and come with them, but he told them: No, I trust in God to save me. They shook their heads, and they moved on. The flood waters kept rising, and the man clambered up onto his roof. A helicopter flew by, and a voice came over the loud speaker offering to lower a ladder to the man, let him climb up and fly to safety. The man waved the helicopter away, shouting back that he counted on God to save him, so the helicopter left. Well, eventually the floodwaters swept over the roof, and the man was drowned. When the man reached Heaven, he had some questions for God: God, he asked, didn't I trust in You to save me? Why did You let me drown? God answered: I sent you a pickup truck, I sent you a boat, I sent you a helicopter. You refused my help. Just as God sent the pickup truck, the boat, and the helicopter to the drowning man, he has sent us everything we need to solve this carbon pollution problem. We just refuse. We just refuse. Some of us even deny that the floodwaters are rising. As I have indicated in previous speeches, climate denial is bad science. Indeed, it is such bad science it falls into the category of falsehood. Climate denial is bad economics, ignoring that in a proper marketplace the costs of carbon pollution should be factored into the price of carbon. Climate denial is bad policy in any number of areas-- bad national security policy, bad environmental policy, bad foreign policy, bad economic policy. Although I am a Senator, not a preacher, from everything I have learned and believe, it seems to me that climate denial is also bad religion and bad morals. Hopes for a nanny God who will, with a miracle, grant us amnesty from our folly is not aligned with history or text of the Bible. We need to face the fact that there is only one leg on which climate denial stands: money. The polluters give and spend money to create false doubt. The polluters give and spend money to buy political influence. The polluters give and spend money to keep polluting. That is it--not truth, not science, not economics, not safety, not policy, and certainly not religion, nor morality. Nothing supports climate denial--nothing except money. But in Congress, in this temple, money rules. So here I stand in one of the last places on Earth that is still a haven to climate denial. In our arrogance, we here in Congress think we can somehow ignore or trump Earth's natural laws--laws of chemistry, laws of physics, laws of science--with our own political lawmaking, with our own political influence. But we are fools to think that. The laws of chemistry and the laws of physics neither know nor care what we say or do here. So we need to wake up. We need to walk not in the counsel of the wicked, nor sit in the seat of scoffers, but with due humility awaken to our duty and get to work because here on Earth God's work must truly be our own. Thank you very much. I yield the floor.